For three days I couldn’t put down the Gram Parsons bio, Twenty Thousand Roads, and now I can’t keep my hands from yanking country sounds from the stacks, beginning with GP’s two solo albums (my faves) through Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the International Submarine Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Even watched that documentary, Fallen Angel, again, just to put some names with faces. I then felt compelled to wade through the piles to see how much country I actually had tucked away between all those punk sides. Let’s see, way too much Kristofferson, a couple from Willie Nelson, fifteen Charlie Rich records, five George Jones slabs, three from Porter Wagoner (get on The Bottom of the Bottle, lush), three more from Dwight Yoakam (underrated, man, these records hold up), some Johnny Paycheck, a couple of Johnny Cash records next to The Carpenters, a Waylon Jennings comp, several from Merle Haggard, one Charlie Louvin (have they reissued Satan is Real on vinyl lately?), some John Prine, several Hank collections, one Jimmy Rodgers, Bob Wills, and a bunch more I’m sure I’m forgetting as I sit here at lunch marveling at my poor judgment in food choices. I resisted Gram Parsons forever, but the solo records finally gelled and now I look at yesterday’s ears with contempt. If his whole shtick (Nudie suits, Keef love, band whore, etc.) turned you off, give GP or Grievous Angel another listen. The music emotes without telegraphing every feeling through roller coaster voice theatrics. Apparently, you can deliver genuine emotion without looking like you have to take a crap.
I’ve lost my faith in the National Book Award, but this year’s winner deserves a prize that hasn’t lost all credibility. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is a modern novel that takes seriously the social world as context for individual lives, and his backdrop is New York when that French tightrope walker pulled his miracle between the Towers. McCann goes polyphonic, introducing and then revisiting a host of characters as they struggle to find meaning and love on or around the day heads turned skyward. Streetwalkers and their Irish patron saint-monk, rich cokehead artistes and their return to the past, moms who make tea and try to share the pain of losing sons to Vietnam, California computer hackers and an incipient Silicon Valley, and taggers and the origins of urban art collide in quiet and explosive ways, with that blip of a figure dancing above and reminding us how that remarkable act of creation would bookend a generation later with the creative act of destruction that would help destroy a decade. The novel does the big canvas and still touches the heart, which may not be as extraordinary as prancing across a wire in the clouds, but it’s worth an appreciative nod and maybe fourteen bucks.
