July 13th – I feel there’s something…inherently creepy…about
the majority of American country music.
Cripes, there’s an opening statement that’s guaranteed to
lose friends and isolate people. You all know by now that I’m not a huge fan. I
mean, there are certain acts I do have time for, the Dixie Chicks for three.
And, no, it has nothing to do with anything else other than my admiration in
their ability to put over a song, their harmonies and lyrics; really…no, really.
I admire their political conviction too, even though some backtracking was at
first done to appease the record company… scumbags with an eye only on the
dollar the lot of ‘em…and the fact that, after the Natalie Maines witch-hunt
and subsequent mainstream country music backlash, they can really be classed as
rock-bluegrass performers only makes them more appealing to me…doesn’t bruise
my delicate musical sensibilities, arrogant tosser that I am.
OK, I generalise, I know (not about the arrogant tosser bit, that’s
a given, I mean about the country music thing) but with much country music it’s
the squeaky-clean, holier than thou thread that permeates much of the work that
gets me, mainly because you know they are, in the main, neither; just like the
rest of us, and just so’s you know I’m not singling them out for special
consideration, I think that’s true in any branch of the music industry. How can
this be? Well, for a start we’re dealing with just ordinary human beings, no
matter what trappings and god-like status we like to adorn them with…and we do.
They’re just like us, really. They only achieve their position in life because we put them there and give it them, and
dress them in a costume consisting of all our expectations as to how they
should live their life and our suppositions of their life-stance that we
foolishly take from their lyrics and stage persona. That they happen to be able
to express some things that we can’t, or can express them in a way that connects
to us doesn’t make them seers and prophets, it just means they have the
intellect and the time to consider these things, an ability to write them down
in a littoral way and a certain skill with a musical instrument; that’s it. In
the words of Gene Hackman in that excellent film, Runaway Jury;
“Everything else is just coloured bubbles.”
They work in a business that, on many levels, thrives on sex
and drugs, is run by shysters and gangsters and is fuelled by the eager handing
over of squillions of pounds/dollars/yens by us, their grateful public. Not surprising
then that levels of hypocrisy and double standards are rife, like I say, how
can they not be? They’re just human…and as they fail, so do we; as they fall
from grace, so do we…
Rightly or wrongly, the country music scene has a connotation
hung on it that its stars, in the words of their songs, can profess to always be
on the right side of God and their country and are also warm and caring human
beings, which leaves them free to shag, sniff, blow and badly treat their way
through much of their life. As long as they’re open to confessing their sins should
they be caught with 30grams in one hand and someone’s cock in the other then
all’s well. It’s just that, in the rock business this kind of, for want of a
better word, behaviour, is sort of
expected; the wild side of things where excess is flaunted, celebrated even.
How many of you, when you heard about the car
in a swimming pool or the TV out of a
hotel window incident thought;
“Goodness me, how very wasteful. There’s a family somewhere
that could really do with that Cadillac/56-inch flat screener.”
Or did you just smile and shake your head in that, ‘Kids,
huh’ way? Honestly now; how many? It happened; the band laughed it off, the
manager paid the bill, they mounted a plane to fly out of there and the tour
rolled on. If that had been in the country music side of the business nothing
less than a full apology and a forty-channel display of contrition would have
done…and then they’d mount a plane to fly out of there and the tour would roll
on…well, not John Denver, but everyone else mounted a plane to fly out of there
and the tour would roll on.
Mr. Denver, IMHO, wrote some classic songs (Hi, Calypso not being amongst them) and
some of his lyrics I can still recall as being terribly prescient when I first
heard them…and, to be fair, still are; Poems,
Prayers and Promises has a naïveté that is both charming and deep at the
same time, and This Old Guitar is an
almost perfect short story. Here was a country singer marketed on his sweet,
adorable, caring persona with his boyish looks that every woman wanted to mother,
and yet… Maybe it was his intensity for love and life that made him fall into
the trap that alcohol lays for the unwary…and speaking of alcohol, have you
seen those tubes of alcohol…Mwhaaa I
think they’re called? FM, the world’s gone mad… Sorry, sidetracked; John
Denver, right.
Here was a guy (John Denver) who wrote love songs of a deep
and personal nature, laid his compassion and humanity open to inspection by his
fans and once said
“I’ll tell you the best thing about me. I’m some guy’s dad;
I’m some little gal’s dad. When I die, I’m still Zachary John and Anna Kate’s
father…boy, that’s enough for me to be remembered by. That’s more than enough.”
You can spot the seeming, sugar-coated intensity even in that
everyday statement, but it would seem that was the mindset he had. He really was
of that mindset too when his first marriage collapsed and his partner, who he’d
written one of his best songs for, Annie’s
Song, left him, but only after he’d tried to choke her to death and had
taken a chainsaw to their marital bed; intense or what?
The demon drink took its toll and Mr. Denver had a number of
violations for drunk driving, culminating in the removal of his pilot’s licence;
even though he had 2,700 hours of flight experience he was deemed as a risk
because he couldn’t kick the habit…but that didn’t stop him from continuing to
fly single-seater stuff.
On this day in 1997 his last drunk-driving trail resulted in
a hung jury as there was a suspicion his thyroid treatment had contaminated his
alcohol tests…pity they couldn’t have been more specific, have got him on a
course or something. Three months later (October 1997 to be precise) Mr. Denver
was killed when his single seater aircraft plunged into the sea. No, he wasn’t
drunk at the time; the major cause was;
1) a difficult to reach, difficult to operate fuel tank
switch
2) a refusal by 
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