But damn, Mike Cooley can write some lyrics. This one’s on the towering The Dirty South.
Life ain’t nothing but a blending up of all the ups and downs
Dammit Elvis, don’t you know
You made your Mama so proud
Before you ever made that record, before there ever was a Sun
Before you ever lost that Cadillac that Carl Perkins won
Mr. Phillips found old Johnny Cash and he was high
High before he ever took those pills and he’s still too proud to die
Mr. Phillips never said anything behind nobody’s back
Like “Dammit Elvis, don’t he know, he ain’t no Johnny Cash”
If Mr. Phillips was the only man that Jerry Lee still would call sir
Then I guess Mr. Phillips did all of Y'all about as good as you deserve
He did just what he said he was gonna do and the money came in sacks
New contracts and Carl Perkins’ Cadillac
I got friends in Nashville, or at least they’re folks I know
Nashville is where you go to see if what they said is so
Carl drove his brand new Cadillac to Nashville and he went downtown
This time they promised him a Grammy
He turned his Cadillac around
Mr. Phillips never blew enough hot air to need a little gold plated paperweight
He promised him a Cadillac and put the wind in Carl’s face
He did just what he said he was gonna do and the money came in sacks
New contracts and Carl Perkins’ Cadillac
Dammit Elvis, I swear son I think it’s time you came around
Making money you can’t spend ain’t what being dead’s about
You gave me all but one good reason not to do all the things you did
Now Cadillacs are fiberglass, if you were me you’d call it quits
The Drive-by Truckers: Carl Perkins' Cadillac
Three chairs in the shade.
Combine harvesting during suppertime.
Canary grass.
“I hear nature calling,” Dode was now excusing himself. He headed off not toward the timber, though, but to a rock outcropping about forty yards away, roughly as big as a one-story house. When Dode climbed up onto that I figured I had misunderstood his mission; he evidently was clambering up there to look along the mountain and check on Pat’s progress with the sheep.
But no, he proceeded to do that and the other too, gazing off up the mountain slope as he unbuttoned and peed.
Do you know, even as I say this again I see Dode in every particular. His left hand resting on his hip and the arm and elbow kinked out like the handle on a coffee cup. His hat tilted back at an inquiring angle. He looked composed as a statue up there, if you can imagine stone straddled out in commemoration of that particular human function.
My father and I grinned until our faces almost split. “There is only one Dode,” he said. Then he cupped his hands and called out in a concerned tone: “Dode, I hope you’ve got a good foothold up there. Because you sure don’t have all that much of a handhold.”
“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
This song distills everything I remember from growing up with New York rock radio playing in the background—Dylan, The Boss, Tom Petty, a hundred other bands I never learned the names of. It’s from the upcoming—and really effin' terrific—Slave Ambient. You can nab this song here (and another SA track, “Come to the City”, here).
So, Richard Buckner once duetted with Neko Case on a Howe Gelb side project called “The Band of Blacky Ranchette”. Thanks to the Richard Buckner Preservation Society, I now know about this.
Northbound Union Pacific general freight, Cheney, Washington.
Union Pacific coal train, Cozad, Nebraska.
David Plowden, Doremus Avenue.
“…but as Becker says, “Food isn’t just a pile of stuff to be measured by weight and volume, and there’s a reason industrially produced meat is just a little more expensive than garbage.””
Tractor at rest at Rheingans Farms during unseasonable weather in July, Latah County, Idaho.
“The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.”
Cover photo for my pastoral death-metal record.