Wednesday, August 31, 2005

When the levee breaks...

A few of my internet friends find themselves without a home for the foreseeable future after Katrina flooded New Orleans. With the likelihood that all they have is gone, they seem to be putting forward a courageous outlook -- thankful their families are safe and they are not caught in the city, which is looking more and more like a deathtrap every hour.

I can't imagine losing everything I own.

I'm not sure how Nikki and I will help out, yet, but I do know that money will help right now -- I'm waiting to find out what my friends need. whoever is out there readign this, if you can, please do what you can for those poor souls in NOLA and Mississippi.

I bet there is a song/lament in this disaster -- in the old days, somebody would compose music to tell of the story. Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks" (the more well-known version is on Led Zeppelin IV) seems to capture this tragedy.

I wrote the following a couple years ago for my TWANG! column...

TWANG!
The end of topical music
By David Rey

While sitting in a city council meeting today, I wondered why nobody had written a song about sitting in a city council meeting.

That got me thinking about what people actually do write songs about. Just like literature, music has time-honored themes and tendencies – some go back all the way to the origin of song, like love, and some go back to the origin of the Nike Air Force One basketball shoe.

Everybody knows about love songs, but few stop and think about the popularity of songs about shoes.

Blue suede shoes. My Adidas. Boots made for walkin’.

Each generation paying veneration to the “manly footware,” that can be found adorning their feet.

Surprisingly, the shoe song has not gone out of style yet. Unlike other song genres, like the disaster song.

Back when old-timey music roamed the Earth, people loved disaster songs. Life was one disaster after another for most of the first part of the last century – and the songsters chronicled the miseries or sinking ships, financial ruination, natural disasters and cruel war.

The 1912 Titanic disaster alone spawned dozens of popular songs – including the sublime “When That Great Ship Went Down,” recorded in 1927 by William and Versy Smith. Blind Willie Johnson, though he could not visualize the scene, memorialized the sorrow in his haunting, “God Moves On the Water.”

Clearly taking a cue from Johnson, Gillian Welch rang in with a disaster classic of her own on her “Revelator” album. Her tune ruminates on April 14 – which she calls “Ruination Day,” as it was the day the Titanic sank and the day Lincoln was assassinated.

The since disbanded group Uncle Tupelo reveled in disaster songs, sending up a spirited version of the Carter Family’s “No Depression” and adding some whimsy to the legend of the giant New Madrid earthquake in “New Madrid.”

People used to also write songs about notorious folks – like Stackalee, John Wesley Harding, Jesse James, Charles Giteau and more recently Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.

Rap music has co-opted this theme and twisted it into a celebration of the notoriousness of the dude doing the rhyming. Notorious B.I.G. even took it as a title – though The Diabolical Biz Markie beat him to the punch.

One of the themes that nobody ever seems to tire of is the place song. I’m pretty sure every major city in the United States has found its way into song. Heck, even my hometown of Grand Coulee Dam is memorialized – by Bob Dylan himself, even.

Sadly, there still is no song referencing Cheney, Medical Lake or Airway Heights that I know of – but then again, I don’t know every song. There are a couple referencing Spokane, my favorite being Tom T. Hall’s mocking “Spokane Motel Blues.”

“Willie Nelson's picking out in Austin, and Waylon's hanging out in Mexico. I'm stuck in Spokane in a motel room and Kris is making movin' picture shows…”

Even with all these topical areas mined already, there isn’t any song written about writing about songs that have been written. I think I’ll work on that one right after I finish the city council song.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Life in a construction zone

When the way is marred by chipped concrete and raggedy strips of turf strung out like a sun-dried garden hose, there is nothing left but for to weep.

Lament for the earth.

Rickety steel fence, smushed upended orange cones and little metal bits broken off the teethy bucket of the backhoe impede progress.

Progress is essential.

Only one real way out of this administration building without a roundtrip circuit of the bushy periphery. The demolishers in their hardhats look up at my window and make their plans to put the jet-powered generator under my lookout.

Am I not a minion of The Man? Do I not deserve favorable preferential undocumented rediculous treatment?

The rain will come today and add one more day to unheaval. The hardhat men will cower in their utility truck, drink coffee, eat pork rinds, wear their flip-flops and listen to Dokken to pass the time -- wondering all the while whether they will get overtime for all this.

All for a visitor center.