Farm Report 3

By Crispin Sartwell, Ph.D.

Glen Rock, Pa.-- Anyway, the other day I was down there harvesting the feed corn on the south 40 in my overalls and John Deere cap when, bizarrely, a thought struck me. The wife was up at the house. Maybe she was listening to music. But what music? Something with synthesizers? Something recorded by lesbians or black people? These damn CDs can sow subversion into your very home, like genetically engineered soybeans broadcast into rich bottomland.

So, leaving the combine running, I sneaked back toward the house and put my ear to the wall. Wanda was shonuff listening to something, but, shit, it sounded like classic country! She kept playing the same song over and over again, some kind of duet:

She don't like her eggs all runny

She thinks crossing her legs is funny

She looks down her nose at money

She gets it on like the Easter Bunny

She's my baby, I'm her honey

Never gonna let her go.

He ain't got laid in a month of Sundays

I caught him once and he was sniffin my undies

He ain't real sharp but he gets things done

Drinks his beer like it's oxygen

He's my baby, I'm his honey

I'm never gonna let him go.

Apparently Wanda thought this thing was about us, because when I came in to ask her what the hell and why wasn't she listening to Depeche Mode like usual, she jumped my bones. Manacled me to the wall and fucked my brains out, actually.

Well it's true that those lyrics resemble our lives uncannily. But what was getting to me was this fucking-to-country-music thing. This was progress. Wanda was really beginning to see things my way. Then it slowly dawned on me. My big box had arrived from amazon.com, containing the entire John Prine catalogue. This must be that new album of duets. Before Wanda wandered off from Texas to NYC, Bowie, disco, synth-pop, heroin, and promiscuity, she had, like everyone else I knew, gone through a serious Prine phase. And later, as I listened to those perfect, moving first three albums I remembered why: the man is the greatest songwriter ever.

Recently this girl named Alice gave me a John Prine tape. As I listened to "Sam Stone" and "Christmas in Prison" for the first time in twenty years, I realized that I still had them memorized. That's when I made my investment, using Wanda's credit card. So the new thing is called In Spite of Ourselves (Oh Boy), a collection of duets with the likes of Melba Montgomery (George Jones's duet partner before Tammy), Connie Smith, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, and Lucinda Williams. Unfortunately only the title cut, which turned out to be the song that sent Wanda into her C&W/S&M frenzy, was written by Prine. But nevertheless there's a mess of great stuff on this deal, most of it classic country from the sixties: "When Two Worlds Collide," "We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds," "It's a Cheating Situation" etc. With his wife Fiona, he even revives the gorgeous Lorrie Morgan/Keith Whitley duet "Til a Tear Becomes a Rose."

Singing duets with Prine can't be all that damn easy because his pitch tends to wander. So even with masterful singers like Trisha Yearwood and Emmylou in the house, the harmonies sound a bit skewed. But that just gives the album a rough-hewn feel that makes it funnier or more moving, depending on the lyric. The best cuts on this album are the title cut and the other three songs with the astonishing Iris Dement, who has one of the funkiest voices in history: way up high, old-timey (think Carter Family), with her own iffy pitch. Dement and Prine were meant to sing together: he sounds a bit tense with Trisha, but the Dement duets are perfect.

The next day I figured I might be able to achieve the same extreme sports effect with the twanging sounds of the latest Gary Allan disk: Smoke Rings in the Dark (MCA). Seems like someone at MCA finally figured out how to make country kind of hip: dress the rough-looking singer in vintage suits, back him up with Duane Eddy reverbed guitars and write him a shitload of songs that are so trad that they nudge over into kitsch. Show you what I mean. The basic plot of "Don't Tell Mama" is that Gary, driving down a country road, sees a pickup truck flip over in front of him. He comes up to the poor sap in time for his last words: "Don't tell Mama I was drinking./Lord knows her soul would never rest./I can't leave this world with Mama thinking/I met the Lord with whiskey on my breath." Now that is country music. So is the rest.

Allan doesn't sound like a little boy, unlike, say, Bryan White or Shane Minor. His voice seems burdened by the weight of the world. I know how he feels. If I wanted to listen to chirping, I'd buy a parakeet. Gary's a man after my own heart: king, asshole, supermodel. Wanda got it on, but seemed, unaccountably, less crazed than she had the night before.

On Tuesday I tried the latest Sammy Kershaw album. I remembered Sammy from the early nineties as a kind of George-Jones-sounding traditionalist who recorded such nuggets as "Cadillac Style." But as Maybe Not Tonight (Mercury) groped its way through a gauntlet of idiotic schlock, my cock went soft and her pussy dried up. It's hard to say what the worst song on this gutless album really is, but I guess the first single, "When You Love Someone," will do as well as any: "When you love someone/Really love someone/You'd walk through fire to see her smile/To be the father of her child/What you wouldn't do."

Whatever. This flaccid dick is everything that's wrong with country music. Or rather he's an excellent demonstration that a lot of what's on the country charts has nothing whatever to do with country music. What you Nashville producers have got to realize is that even though you might sell a million records this year, soon there will be no such thing as country music anymore. Then you won't be able to sell squat.

The same thing happened in 1979, when the biggest country hits were also the biggest pop hits: chirpy idiocies like Dolly's "9 to 5" and Eddie Rabbitt's "I Love a Rainy Night." Soon the country charts were infested by the likes of "Islands in the Stream." Country took a commercial nosedive after that because it was just pop music and obviously Eurythmics, say, were doing it much, much better. The situation was saved by "new traditionalism," which actually brought us Garth and the current commercial boom. But if country generally, like Garth, mutates completely into second-rate pop, it's in for an historic collapse.

So I hit the disc skip and booted up some bluegrass. Wanda calls it "nerve-jangling music." She had some bad experiences in her youth at bluegrass festivals: these turned her against the banjo forever. So I figured that IIIrd Tyme Out's John and Mary (Rounder) would be a useful segment of her re-education program. IIIrd Tyme Out, despite its irritating typographical eccentricities, is as good as it gets in current bluegrass: comparable to the Johnson Mountain Boys or Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. In fact they sound a lot like the latter, which is not a coincidence because three members of IIIrd Tyme Out formerly played for Doyle.

Personally, I find that this music soothes rather than jangles the nerves. There are excruciatingly beautiful songs on John and Mary, such as "Snow Angel," a slow, mandolin-dominated thing that is one of the loveliest songs I've ever heard. The group has letter-perfect vocal harmonies and basic but sweet instrumentalists. The Zoloft kicked in and the music put me in such a good mood that I got all cuddly. This time I got nothing, not even a direct look in the eyes.

Pretty soon she was back to the Thompson Twins and I, I was back to sniffing her undies.

That night I had a dream. I was Barry Goldwater. I'd just lost the '64 election, so I didn't give a shit how things looked in the media; I was conducting a very public affair with Isabella Rosselini. God that woman can kiss.