True to the Roots (17 page)

Speaking of America, I ask Russell about the growing trend toward consolidation of the music and radio industries, comparing it to a system of legalized payola.

"The American public has allowed itself to be fucked in the ass for at least twenty years," Russell replies. "Country music is dead, offensive. Wal-Mart mentality has taken over. The whole country looks the same as you drive through it. The same repetition of chain outlets. Yeah, it's depressing. It's way beyond depressing. Things like wars in the Middle East are a distraction from the cancer here at home that has eaten this country alive. A spiritual cancer—a giving in to the inevitability of three or four corporations telling us where to eat and shit and what to listen to.

"I want to write about it. It's my only way out. That will be the fear portion of the next record. Available wherever independent darkness is sold. Not available in shops.

"All my friends say they don't eat at McDonald's or shop at Wal-Marts or listen to modern country music, but someone is buying all this crap. Aliens. We have to be able to identify them and close down their golf courses because that's where they breed, like mutant sociopathic lemmings.

"They kicked the living legends off the radio fifteen years ago—Cash, Haggard, and Jones—and proceeded to turn the scene into the Night of the Living Dead. I did pick up a CD from a great writer, though, Gretchen Peters.
Halcyon
. It's commercial, but it's great. Maybe there's a slight ray of hope.

"I'm tired of trashing Nashville; it's neither here nor there in my life. If you want to get an impression of what happened, go find the top ten Billboard country songs for the last forty years. You'll find you might recognize all of them from 1955 to '75. Then, after that, it goes rotten. Then nothing. Death. People down there walk around in dead people's clothes. They smell of fear. It's a spiritual golf course. Miniature golf. Austin is getting to be the same way. South by Southwest [an annual music festival held in Austin] was conjured up by motel owners. Young writers ought to stay home and get a job in a bar, learn twenty Hank Williams songs, and get their hearts broken raw a few dozen times. Bleed a little then write with the blood. Yeah, that sounds very colorful, but there's truth there. Dylan knew two thousand old folk songs before he wrote his own and then rode into Greenwich Village on a donkey, exploding American music. There are good people camped out in Nashville: Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Gretchen Peters . . . but they have nothing to do with the industry, the Death Factory. Most current songwriters have nothing to say, but that doesn't hold them back. They buy a rhyming dictionary and start lying."

I broach the subject of something Russell had said to the audience in Berkeley: "Keep away from Tom. You'll wind up in a song."

"I'm tired of being a journalist or a novelist in song," he replies. "There are Gnostic principles operative: 'Everything you bring forth will save you; everything you do not bring forth will destroy you.' That's from the Gospel of St. Thomas, the one they tore out of the edited Bible and buried in a cave. Dig it."

I ask if it disappoints him that so much modern music, like everything else, is as concerned about political correctness as it seems to be.

"Hell, yes," Russell replies. "From both the Right and the Left and the middle. I had a writer from the
Telegraph-Tribune
in England at my house a few months ago. He said America is turning into a boring shithole because of political correctness. Of course, this guy smoked and drank and liked to fuck stray women. Or pretend he did. That stuff went out fifteen years ago. It's more conservative now than it was when they hung Lenny Bruce. Catholics and Jews and all of us whining about morality, while people are destroying each other in the Middle East and the Catholic Church is spending millions of dollars to settle beefs with their pedophile priests . . . and the fcc is coming down hard on words like piss and shit. We're all going to be living in caves, duct-taped to chairs, [and] force-fed Christian rock music. Go back and read George Orwell. The dead walk among us, and their taste in art is all fucked-up."

My last question for Russell is: "One man's team player is another's ass-kissing weasel—where do you draw the line?"

"That's one question too many," he writes back. "You draw the line . . . I know where I stand. Adios and good luck with your book. Good questions. I applaud you and was glad to meet up."

Ain't No Place for No Poor Boy like Me

Las Vegas, Nevada I December 2004

Under normal circumstances Vegas would be the last place I'd go to work on a book about country music or, for that matter, even just to see the place. This, however, isn't a normal circumstance.

For ten days each December the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctions the National Finals Rodeo at Thomas & Mack Arena. The rodeo brings hundreds of cowboys and thousands of their fans to Sin City. They take over the city. The streets and casinos are full of people wearing cowboy boots and Stetsons. Where rodeo fans migrate, country music acts follow. I fly to Vegas to observe the whole scene, but the specific goal in mind is Brad Paisley, about whom I harbor profoundly mixed feelings.

When country becomes cool, it also becomes insipid, at least to its discerning fans. The brief wave of popularity that followed the movie
Urban Cowboy
sent the music reeling in the early 1980s. The specter of John Travolta, of
Saturday Night Fever
fame, getting caught up in "hardhat days and honky tonk nights" fueled a depressing trendiness that made mechanical bulls popular and Johnny Cash passé. Thankfully, what followed was a rise of the so-called New Traditional sound of singers like Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis.

Garth Brooks and the feeding frenzy that followed his fame sent the music down the drain again. Brooks won over millions of fans by crafting a sound that was more intricate than traditional country and a performance style that borrowed liberally from what had been associated with rock 'n' roll. It wasn't that Brooks harmed the music so much. What robbed it of its message, not to mention its integrity and soulfulness, were the imitators who followed Brooks and the formula for success that the recording industry implemented in his name.

Once again, country music is in need of emotional rescue. The common theme of most songs these days seems to be "Hey, baby, let's party." Take away Alan Jackson's remakes of revered country classics and George Strait's agreeable cowboy persona, and there's not much country left. The music has become bereft of the populism embodied in Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and dozens of others.

Which is why Paisley seems so important to me, and when I contacted his management, exchanged some e-mails, and received word that the artist could spare me fifteen minutes or so if I'd meet him in Vegas, where he and Pat Green were playing back-to-back, late-night shows at the Hilton, I booked a flight the next morning.

All I needed to do, it seems, was schedule an appropriate time with Brent Long, Paisley's road manager. My first telephone conversation was promising because Long and I had a mutual friend, he seemed to be familiar with my name and reputation, and my explanation of why I wanted to interview Paisley seemed to satisfy him. What I didn't know when I left South Carolina was that the rodeo, not Paisley, would be the most insightful aspect of the trip.

For four days I'm on call. I might as well be a general practitioner with emergency room duty. Long tells me to call him. When I do, he exhaustively confronts me with all the demands on the artist's time, tells me he's working hard to "work me in," and gives me another time to call him. I tell him any time will do. The only discouraging aspect of our conversations—mainly they're a few mild assertions by me and breathless recitations by Long—is the road manager's concern that I'm going to get Paisley in trouble with radio stations. He tells me that Paisley had participated in a call-in show on a radio station—in Michigan, as I recall—in which a questioner complained about the lack of a mechanism to make call-in requests of favorite songs. Paisley had mildly expressed his view that listeners should be able to request tunes on country stations, and this had been enough to make a station manager, one who apparently considered himself to be some sort of visionary leader in the field of centrally devised playlists, to, in Long's words, go berserk.

I tell Long that my chief motivation in interviewing Paisley is to depict his career positively, but that little exchange marks the first time I get a sinking feeling. The fact that I've traveled almost all the way across the continental United States for this interview does not seem to impress him much, although I mention it in passing several times.

Returning another message, Long tells me that he's got me on the pass list for the Friday night show, but he doesn't think I'm going to be able to talk to Paisley, what with all the "meet-and-greets" and the litany of short interviews scheduled with various radio stations. I remind him that I'm writing a book, not a five-paragraph profile for
My Weekly Reader
, but I try to be patient and ask him if Saturday night will be better. He says he thinks he can get me fifteen minutes "tops" on Saturday, so I say great, how about leaving the pass for the Saturday night show. Super.

So, I go off to the rodeo, which ends up impressing the hell out of me. Little had I realized that rodeo is the most adroitly presented professional sport, at least for the live audience in the arena. That's because I hadn't seen it anywhere except on TV, and then just in bits and snatches, since childhood.

I attend the second of ten consecutive sessions, and it's a more enlightening experience than any of the stock-car races I've written about over the previous twelve years. The reason I get in at all is that the rodeo writer of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, Jeff Wolf, is also the motor sports writer, and when I'd seen him several weeks earlier, he'd told me, "You've got to see this," and been so adamant about it that he took it upon himself personally to get me a press pass. All the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) sessions are sold out and have been for twenty years.

I grew up on a farm where my family raised horses and cattle. As a kid, I attended my fair share of rodeos and even participated—not with any great degree of success—in a few wild-cow milking contests. They don't have those at the national finals. As far as modern rodeos are concerned, my previous knowledge consisted of the fact that rodeos are usually described on TV by rustic cowboys named Shorty and that there seems to be an inordinately high number of young men named Cody who grow up to ride Brahma bulls and wrestle steers to the ground.

Ah, the sights and sounds. The scent and feel reminds me of a very pungent dirt track, but in Vegas suffice it to say that this is not your father's rodeo. When country singer Tracy Lawrence performs before the start, purple smoke wafts into the arena from the wings. Next is a green laser light show that would have caused Superman to writhe in agony. Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" blares into the arena, providing the unlikely spectacle of thousands of fans wearing cowboy hats doing their little boot-scootin' boogies to the sounds of a gay English rock star.

The rodeo starts at 5:45 p.m. and races along at a pace I can only describe as dizzying. It's really difficult to keep up with recording all the times and scores as one competitor after another roars out of the chutes. Every little break in the action—bulls being rounded up, transitions from one event to the next—is punctuated immediately by all sorts of stunts and gimmicks.

For instance, they unleash a distinguished and retired old bucking bronco into the arena for a victory lap of sorts. Old cowhands—and people who wish they were old cowhands—stand with tears welling up in their eyes to pay homage to a horse named Khadafy Skoal. The pa announcer blurts out, "Praise God for Khadafy!"

Excuse me. If the bull is named Khadafy, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say, "Praise Allah"? Sometimes my thoughts are kind of weird, I know.

At another break they park a red Chrysler Sebring convertible right out in the sod, and I watch in disbelief as one cowboy riding two horses—that's right, one boot on each back—appears from the wings to leap over the shiny car.

Within thirty seconds it's time for the team calf roping to begin.

By the way, these guys are
good
. It's pretty incredible to see Blaine Linaweaver of Leavenworth, Kansas, team up with Benton City, Washington's B. J. Campbell to rope a calf—one around the neck and the other around the back legs—in four seconds flat.

If you're interested in bareback bronc riding, you need to watch Brighton, Colorado's Cimmaron Gerke perform. He's an exuberant lad, this Cimmaron (pronounced sim-uh-ron) fellow. Reminds me of the kind of guy Chris Ledoux, himself an ex-rodeo star, might have sung about. And, oh, by the way, his name is Cimmaron, even though the version of that word used in an old TV western is spelled "Cimarron" (as in "Cimarron Strip").

You've heard the cliché "hit the ground running"? No one ever hit the ground running like a cowboy who just got bucked off a huge bull's back. Those cowboy boots start spinning before the first grunt escapes. At the Las Vegas rodeo one cowboy gets a roar of applause because he has the presence of mind to reach up and keep his hat on his head while flying through mid-air. Broken bones will mend in time, but how does a man overcome the loss of a quality Resistol?