FINAL POINT:
True values of America
My 2004 Christmas came early, though not a minute too soon, with the publication of the revelatory Chronicles: Volume One by the inscrutable Bob Dylan and the launch by New West of a terrific series of concerts, on both DVD and CD, from the vaults of the venerable Austin City Limits. Both appeared toward the end of an embittered, dispiriting presidential campaign, one that would be decided largely (and narrowly) on the basis of values.
A year that so relentlessly invokes values forces each of us to re-examine our own. As a patriotic American who is considerably further to the left of John Kerry than Kerry is of George Bush, my value-forming stage was more powerfully influenced by popular music than anything else. It was the music that showed me what this country could be, what I could be, and just what it means to be an American.
My America was Chuck Berry’s, and Chuck Berry’s America was Muddy Waters’ and Hank Williams’. Their Americas became Bob Dylan’s. And Bob Dylan’s vision of an America where country, blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll crossed wires and sparked a manifest destiny of creative possibility begat Austin City Limits.
This America remains a land of the free, at least in its heart and its dreams. Over the last twelve months, if not the last three decades, that freedom has found itself increasingly assailed within a culture that feels it has more to fear from gays than guns, and from breasts (at least one of Janet Jackson’s) than bombs. It is a culture where a country conceived in revolution has turned rigidly reactionary, and a vision as wide as the Texas skies has narrowed its focus into a Dick Cheney squint.
“I was into the rural blues as well; it was a counterpart of myself,” writes Dylan in Chronicles, a memoir so elliptically and idiosyncratically compelling that it extends his legacy while interpreting it. “It was connected to early rock and roll and I liked it because it was older than Muddy and Wolf. Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about there I come from…Duluth to be exact.”
And it extends, though not on any road map, through the heart of Austin City Limits, where the first four releases from the archives — featuring Steve Earle, the Flatlanders, Robert Earl Keen, even Susan Tedeschi — would be inconceivable without the expansive influence of Bob Dylan. They’re all part of a continuum, within a country where the lip-service platitudes that currently pass for values barely register a blip.
This country isn’t George Bush’s. It isn’t John Kerry’s. This land is your land. This land was made for you and me.
— Don MCLEESE
POST-SCRIPT
Where do we go from here?
So much shouting.
So much division, so much anger, so much sadness. Such a desperate, needful quest for a balm. We have hurt ourselves so badly that even a whispered apology seems strident, and unforgivable. We have painted ourselves into brightly lit corners from which there seems no escape, until the bell rings and we come out swinging. Blinded.
Enough.
I love to fight. I am a pacifist who loves boxing and pro wrestling and the rough and tumble of ideas tossed across the table like great hunks of good bread.
“I love my church and country, and they could use some mercy now,” Mary Gauthier sings.
Yeah.
My colleagues have largely taken the hard stances of professional critics, but just now I am weary of all that, for it is all too much performance art, and gets us nowhere.
This is what I know, then. Otis Taylor and Elizabeth Cook and Buddy Miller and Jon Dee Graham made music this year which touched me deeply. Norah Jones sounded damn good over the baby monitor, and any album that can survive being played in that context for six months has to be pretty durable, no matter how many people bought it. Nathaniel Mayer and the Drive-By Truckers and Bare Jr. proved rock ain’t dead yet. Geraint Watkins and Jill Sobule made smart, careful pop records with well-tended roots. Hell, Iris DeMent made a record, and they say John Prine’s got some new songs.
That ain’t all bad.
It saddens me, of course, that so few of my colleagues share some of these enthusiasms, and saddens me more that (at least based on what sales figures I’m able to see) so few of our readers found many of them as well.
I wish you could all come to dinner, and I could play these songs for you — and you could spin some in turn — and we could argue about music and politics and try not to spill the wine on the cats, or the baby.
Well, you can’t. There are too many of you and not enough seats (much less beds). So this will have to do.
David Cantwell, with whom I often agree, argues that Buddy Miller’s record was preaching to the converted. I think he misses the point, that Buddy made a gospel album for an audience composed largely (we would presume) of secular humanists, and they bought it because he made it and because it was good. Because it touched even our stony hearts. Geoffrey Himes, with whom I often disagree, is exactly right that Buddy Miller’s rendition of “With God On Our Side” at the AMA was a spectacular, even transcendent moment.
But what nobody made, what nobody could make, was a record that unified us — because we no longer know who we are. I mean that for the red and the blue, who find each other’s logic impenetrable and inflexible and unacceptable. And I mean that for we as a people, all the people, in the United States and reading elsewhere.
No. That was poorly said. Let me refill the glass and start again: We never knew who we were. But we thought we did, and we’ve lost that, I think; and, worse, we’ve lost the habit of thinking about it.
In these moments we find it difficult to live out personal and national dreams, for in the rush of technology and CNN and a lousy job market and the looming sense that something big is about to go wrong, we have largely stopped looking to see who we might be, who we might become.
But the records I most liked and listened to this year were beginning to poke carefully at that question again. It is dangerous to place too much faith in musicians, but great songwriters often get to where we’re going long before we realize there’s a journey to take.
We’ll be all right. This is a rough patch, but we’ll be all right. Besides, I always did like the blues.
— GRANT ALDEN
