January 2006

What kinda name is Tift, anyway?

Tift Merritt and the Carbines, Opal Divine's Freehouse, 12:05 a.m.

A day earlier, I'd been crowded down front at the Austin Music Hall when a miniature blonde asked to bum a smoke. She introduced herself: Tift Merritt, down from Raleigh to support her hometown pals in Whiskeytown. At Opal's tonight, Merritt is as tiny as I remembered--the guitar over her shoulder is at least as big as she is.

But her voice is bigger. She's wedged with her band, the Carbines, at one end of the bar's open front porch, but even the traffic humming by a few feet away can't mask her swooping cry. The songs are average at best, but Merritt's pipes and charm are rare. If we're trading country futures, you can keep your Shelby Lynne. (Smith-Lindall)

From a dualing banjos journal Anders and I did during the SXSW Music Festival, Saturday, March 18th, 2000

It was only a few days later when Anders Smith-Lindall said in an email to me, "that was you?" See, we never really met face to face, even though we enjoyed and "covered" basically the same kinds of music. You can almost say the man inspired me to do what I've done to this point, no matter how small that accomplishment is.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself, like an asynchronous plot from a bad Tarantino movie.

I was in on the whole Tift Merritt bit back then. I'd seen the pictures in No Depression, read the stories, bought the Two Dollar Pistols EP...in many ways, I was at SXSW 2000 to see Tift Merritt.

This is what I wrote on the deck at Opal's, in beer soaked hillbilly shorthand:

Sunday, 1am
My whole week has been focused on seeing some new things, but, ultimately making it to Opal Divine's Freehouse tonight for Tift Merritt & the Carbines and the Ex-Husbands (Tarhut). My friends know the Ex-Husbands pretty well and have had various discussions about setting up a backyard show with them in May in the Bay Area of San Francisco, a blossoming pasttime out there. The crowd is bigger at Opal's this time, maybe a hundred people, and cigarettes are blazing and Lone Stars are disappearing as the boys tear through their honkytonk repertoire while people find places to dance inside the band's limited space on the deck. They finish their set with their second beer hall anthem in as many albums, "I'm Just a Honky" off of All Gussied Up. This ends up being a perfect final chapter to a hard driving week of rock, pop, and twang in the live music capital of the world.

For those of you in the know, The Ex-Husbands were the best country band never to make it big. Hell, one night down at Lee's Liquor Lounge, their van got ransacked and robbed and they barely made it out of Minneapolis. In fact, the next night was Trailer Trash night at the joint, and Nate and Dan and the boys let the Ex-Husbands get up on stage, play 3 or 4 songs and pass a bucket for gas money to get it rolling again.

I swear this is a story about Tift Merritt...

So on Thursday, two days before the Ex-Husbands/Tift Merritt gig, this happens:

Thursday afternoon
I am at the now infamous 5th Annual Postcard2 (newsgroup) SXSW BBQ, thrown by Cheri Lyn, the bassist of the Meat Purveyors. The hostess throws this in her front yard every year as an informal and unofficial little get together for her friends with an eclectic little list of acts. Jeneane Garaofalo is supposedly here. I don't see her. Clouds are moving in and apparently tornadoes and hail are threatening the official festival events. One of the highlights-besides a little girl handing out heart stickers to everyone-is a band from Arizona called Calexico. Calexico is basically a two man group that plays a kind of Tejano brass, arguably surf guitar, twang. If that sounds weird, their practice of going from town to town and gig to gig and enlisting their friends to accompany them on various instruments strikes me as even more odd. For this set, the guy cooking the brisket for the barbecue plays trumpet, the hostess accompanies on upright bass, and one of the Waco Brothers sits in on pedal steel.

Actually, what really happened there that day was that another Anders, the lead singer of the Ex-Husbands ran me down (we'd been introduced by Todd and Edna, the Bay Area couple who actually did have the Ex-Hubs play in their backyard some months later), and we compared cowboy hats as we shared a bottle of tequila. It was HERE that I expressed my desire to see Tift a few nights later at Opal's. "I hear she's purty," said Anders.

Anyway, that night at Opal's, when we finally showed up, we immediately sought out the Ex-Hubs who were stumbling around the crowd in good spirits (I'm telling you, it was a big fucking loss that these guys broke up folks), and I ran into Anders. "Tift's here," he said. Understand, I'd been stumbling around Austin all day listening to music, and those two words were definitely music to my ears. He dragged me over to the table where she was sitting in a really high chair around a really high table. Angels are 5 feet tall folks, that's all I have to say.

Anyway, back to the beginning of the story. I'm never one to dawdle around famous girls I find pretty, they actually are the one species of primate that make me nervous. So Anders and I stumbled off toward the poison.

Later that night, as the waifish North Carolingian warbled through her wonderful little set, in an extended pause between songs, in what can only be described as possibly the most brilliant thing to ever cross my lips, down front, not 6 feet from her, I shouted, "I FUCKING LOVE YOU TIFT."

The crowd nervously laughed, and in the firmest manifestation of her tiny southern honeydew voice, she replied, "Don't curse at me." To which the audience roared.

And yes, Mr. Smith-Lindall, that was me.

Tift just put out a live record called Home is Loud, which features live renditions of songs from Bramble Rose and Tambourine, recorded at the North Carolina Museum of Art on June 4th, 2005.

If you've seen her more than once, her voice has really grown up and become more forceful as she has grown more confident in her own performance skills and songwriting. Few I know who have seen her for the first time come away without being stunned that such a seemingly small person creates such a big wall of word, scene, and music. She's like one of those flyweight boxers with a big punch that you can hear through Jim Lampley, the crowd at Caesar's, and your television's low octane sound system. Boom. It rocks your brain and twists your gut.

These aren't scripted, nervous, true to the CD versions of the songs either. She funks it up and drags it out when she has to live, and all of that is captured beautifully. Folks like Jeff Linker, Lee Spears, Bill McElroy, Brian Paulson, and Dave Harris never get enough credit for making stuff like this, but you get the whole nine yards here, and they should be applauded, too.

Posted by Jack Sparks at January 31, 2006 10:55 PM | Comments (3)

Taking aim at the greedheads...

...I picked up the phone. It was my friend Bruce Innes, calling from the Circus-Circus. He had located the man who wanted to sell the ape I'd been inquiring about. The price was $750.

"What kind of greedhead are we dealing with?" I said. "Last night it was four hundred."

"He claims he just found out it was housebroken," said Bruce. "He let it sleep in the trailer last night, and the thing actually shit in the shower stall."

"That doesn't mean anything," I said. "Apes are attracted to water. Next time it'll shit in the sink."

"Maybe you should come down and argue with the guy," said Bruce. "He's here in the bar with me. I told him you really wanted the ape and that you could give it a fine home. I think he'll negotiate. He's really attached to the stinking thing. It's here in the bar with us, sitting up on a goddamn stool, slobbering into a beer schooner."

"Okay," I said. "I'll be there in ten minutes. Don't let the bastard get drunk. I want to meet him under natural conditions."

--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Actually Jack, in those days Circus Circus was the real thing. I was singing in the Show Lounge, but the Flying Wallendas were featured in the Big Top Circus area. There were also big cats, monkeys, and their various handlers. Hunter's idea to take one of the Chimps back to Aspen on the plane as his child was really funny - especially after a Jack or two. Really didn't get much farther than that. I did talk to the Chimp handler guy and he quickly told me to get lost. HST was a great writer and a really funny man. Miss him.

Very best,

Bruce Innes (in an email to yours truly on January 16th, 2006)

Question History:
Patron: I'm going to write a short essay on why I think a certain book ought to be reclassified as a novel instead of the way it currently is, as a piece of journalism. Is there some process where a member of the public can appeal to the library of congress to change the call number of the book too? Just curious, thanks.

Library Question - Answer [Question #1275950]
Hello Jack K. Sparks

Generally not, unless it is just too obviously wrong. Subject cataloging, and thus the classification, is "subjective" and varies from person to person. In the grand scheme of things, how important is the difference? Is the item searchable, retrievable?

David Williamson
Cataloging Automation Specialist
Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20540

It's a good day when, out of the blue, you get an email from a literary and cultural figure of note. When something like that happens, you have to soak in the moment, then ask the right question. Somehow, despite all of my mental handicaps, I did.

Men like Thompson and Innes were both ahead and outside of their times. They understood that they were witness to the almost violently ever-changing American psyche, and that presenting it as is wasn't necessarily the most accurate portrayal. Trying to pry a feral ape off of an opportunistic trainer and fly it back to "the real world" posed as your offspring is the brainchild of a man thinking outside the box on his daily work assignment. The story wasn't all of the minutae scribbled into a long diatribe on how cool it is walk around Vegas jacked up on every kind of pill, booze or powder; the story was the fantastic possibilities of what could happen under those circumstances, and what it really meant, both with respect the real setting of the event, and in the greater timeline American existence.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a novel, and if you aren't hip to that little bit of trivia, you're not reading the book properly. It's an allegory about what happened to that generation and the ones who have followed, when personal entertainment and satisfaction became the Great God in our desert. Everyone in this book believes in something, and there are massive clashes of destruction, foul language, and misery when those beliefs crash into each other. Even Thompson, in his own way, recognizes that his finger pointing is hypocritical in the end.

Fear and Loathing is the ultimate treatise of moral and social relativism written in the 20th Century. It's blindingly brilliant in a way that I've really only begun to recognize in recent months. Up to this point, I enjoyed reading it and quoting it just because it was so farcical and crazy. But there's a weird sort of irony about it given the recent election in Palestine. In Fear and Loathing, they're whacked out of their minds on drugs during the District Attorneys' Conference on Dangerous Drugs, holding court with various folks as official attendees of the meeting, and exposing the fact that the "powers that be" have no idea where and what the drugs are, and who's doing them. In our own time, the "powers that be" having been throwing around the "terrorist" label, but funny, 750,000 some people just told them that terrorists are what they want. That's sad in its own way, but my point...before some jingoist fucker shoots me an email with some diatribe about "what, do you WANT the terrorists to win?"...is that no matter who you are and where you are on the ladder of morality and authority, you throw around a lot of labels so you can identify, and at least feel comfortable about, who and where your nemeses are; and it's all bullshit.

So, the next time you're at the circus or the zoo, barter with the fuckers and see if you can take an ape home...tell him his name is Junior in the car, and let him wear your favorite ballcap. And, the next time you're in the library, take Fear and Loathing out of its section at PN4874.T444 A3 1971, and put it somewhere closer to PS3521.E735 O5 1957 (On the Road, by Jack Kerouac).

(Tomorrow, rants on music, new and old...)

Posted by Jack Sparks at January 30, 2006 4:17 PM | Comments (2)

Whom...object of the action or preposition

Dear Bill,

The year of our lord, 2006, won't be a kind year, but it won't necessarily be cruel, either. It took me some time to get my qwerty chops back, but, as I arrived at my new home last night, things were hewn into Rodin-like detail for me, and since then, all of the old half-baked, paranoid rants have echoed around the chambers of my skull once again. The Intelligent Design crowd doesn't get much traction in Minnesota during the month of January, because, as you can tell, we're used to the meat hook realities of a woebegone hare wandering into the "personal space" of an extremely reactionary Malamute mutt, and coming face to face with the shining fact that he has devoured his last homegrown cherry tomato. After Adam ate the apple and the heavenly choruses of "Zip-a-dee-do-dah" stopped, the Malamutes took over Fagelson, and the hand stamped owner name in multi-colored, bone-shaped steel hanging from their necks read, "D-A-R-W-I-N."

But this is all jibberish to a man who cradles a mop-haired shit factory named Nathaniel. He's roughly one year old, but the lights in his eyes reflect the sagacity of his father, who told me in more than one moment of crisis, "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."

You really do have to sit on a bucket over 20 inches of ice, over 20 feet of water before the idea of rebirth sinks in. Christmas is a holiday in many parts of the world, but, truth be told, it might as well just be a fucking Tuesday, or Wednesday, or whatever, because there's no transition. In many places, the weather is only slightly altered from what it was like nearly 3 months previously; and, the animals aren't acting out the food chain drama in blood-soaked snow during rush hour on a Tuesday night. The curtain on these lives never goes down for a set change...there's no costume adjustment, the scenery stagnates, and the play is an endless loop, the existential equivalent of moving sidewalks in big city airports.

Adhering to the Gregorian Calendar, God or the Great Magnet, like the IRS, gives us a reboot in Minnesota each year. After we brush our teeth in the morning, the cold air licks at our lips until we apply generous portions of Car-Mex. Fishing in the functional, sustenance sense, is pure folly. No Friedman, this dance of drill, insulation, and stubborness is pure allegory. A frozen lake amidst baren trees, buffeted by a 20mph wind from any direction, might as well be a desert. And, in the desert, you're left pondering your promised land, as the sun sinks below the trees, and your breath freezes into vapor ghosts offered to the Moon God for your hubris.

Guillaume, we weren't put on this earth to "hold out." We're here to act out. All the world's a stage, and we are on it, merely players. Having the key to a Nirvanic environment of irresponsibility is a gold mine for the right person; but at some point, it becomes a job. If we're lucky in this world, we lead many lives, we pursue many paths, and the world offers us many challenges. Sometimes, it's best to reinvent yourself, or, less absolute, to forget some of the trappings of your childhood, even if your childhood lasted until you were approximately 37 1/4 years old. Rabbits die, dark holes on frozen lakes are barren, and keys lose their ability to unlock things. If you're really lucky, when all 3 of these things come crashing down around you, you have a base of fact and reality that points you in a new and promising direction.

Things are going to get hot here at the Other Side of Country, Papa Zero. Prisoners are for suckers. As my old high school history teacher once said, "It's okay to go to a John Birch for President rally and collect some buttons, bumper stickers, and fliers. Just don't sign anything, and don't tell anybody your real name."

Tuck the chute and stomp on the gas...

Eternally yours,
SGT. Renee Platano Blanco
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (ret'd)

Posted by Jack Sparks at January 19, 2006 1:13 AM | Comments (0)

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