Oxford American's 10th Southern Music Issue

Yesterday I opened the mail and found this image of a grinning Jerry Lee Lewis standing there, donning a baby blue plaid suit, spectacularly white shoes against vivid red shag carpet and drapes. I grinned back. I was holding my copy of the new Oxford American magazine. I generally don't get too excited these days, much less over a magazine. But as I pulled the new OA out of its plastic wrapper I felt like a kid opening a pogo stick shaped birthday present. (I always wanted a pogo stick but never got one.) At that moment, I truly felt truth in the hackneyed saying: "it's the little things that matter."

Now, any issue of the Oxford American magazine is a treat for me, but this one particular issue each year is my very favourite. It is the MUSIC ISSUE. If you are already familiar with the past OA sampler discs, you know what I'm talking about. If not, lemme let you in on a treat.

The annual OA music issue is the best mix-tape you'll get all year. Especially if you have more than a passing interest in Southern and Southern-inspired music. Even in these internet days of it being easy to find just about anything you can name, when you don't have to dig through dusty record bins and endure cooler-than-you store clerks, you'd likely still not come up with this comprehensive a collection of tunes. Many of the tunes are cooler than one might expect at first glance. Some of them might not even like at first, but many of them grow on you and get down in the recesses of your brain, maybe evoking something you might've heard, or maybe just dreamed. The songs span from 1928 to 2008. From Blind Willie McTell to Richard Hell, The Residents and the Hampton Grease Band, Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Big Star and Jerry Lee Lewis. And, as they say, so much more.

This issue, being their 10th anniversary, the folks at Oxford American have treated us to a double CD with 28 songs on each, and there's not a dud among them. I'm sure of this because I've just listened through it twice even though it's been less than a day since I peeled the cellophane off. Some of the songs, naturally, you'll like more than others, but all are worth a listen. Some of the stuff I can near to guarantee that you've not heard before. Not even on the coolest Radio 1190 show or whatever nifty little indie radio station you happen to have within your airwaves. Then, mixed in with the obscure is the relief of some familiar favourites like Lucinda Williams, Neko Case and R.E.M.

And, as if the discs weren't enough, there's the magazine! Some of the best music writers around (and I say that in true sincerity as I really don't like much music writing anymore) treat us to some genuine, smart and funny writing on the artists. I forget it's music writing. I've just started Jack Pendarvis' article on Neko Case and maybe it's not that funny, but I've already laughed my stomach muscles sore.

Just when I was falling into a numb, music-saturated, oh so sick of all the peripheral static of keeping up with a music scene and all its neurotic stuff phase, just when all I craved was silence, the Oxford American leaned over the muddy waters with a steady hand to pull me out.

The Future is Unwritten

I heard a little snippet of the new Joe Strummer documentary on Radio 1190 a couple weeks ago and upon hearing the sound of Joe Strummer’s confident and sharply honest voice I set the movie near the top of my Netflix queue. To tell the truth, lately I haven't wanted to listen to anything. The deadening of music has been creeping up on me little by little for months and it is a truly terrible loss. Always, at my lowest times, I’ve been able to turn my ear to music and feel alive again. Not so lately. I haven’t felt alive at all. And music has been no help. Even music I love and have turned to before sounds drowned by the imitations that followed them. When I listen, it sounds wrung out and tired and I have to turn it off. Nothing new fires up my senses either. It’s all deadening. With no input that can make me feel confident I am really alive, I've had no fuel for output. Writing has been out of the question.

So, last night, with only half the heart I would’ve had in the past, I sat down to watch The Future is Unwritten. And I almost remembered how it felt when I first discovered the Clash. For me it’s a very fuzzy deal pulling memory from over twenty years ago. I forget things. But I should remember this. The Clash, and especially Joe Strummer made my life feel livable at a time when I didn’t think that could ever happen. Better than that, listening to The Clash, following along lyrics written on album sleeves, I felt that some things mattered, and mattered a whole lot. I knew I existed because I could feel it and was unshakably confident in that. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever held that sort of confidence. That confidence may have been a bit borrowed from how I perceived Joe Strummer, and how I tried to imitate him at that time, (wish I still had a picture from those days) but somehow it felt more real than mere copying. It felt like recognition of something I knew was true, and how I wanted to be. I wasn’t looking up to Strummer because he was cool (he was but that was not the common sentiment at Christ the King or Tates Creek, places where I went to school at that time—I assure you quite the contrary.) Joe Strummer was cool to me because he was the real deal. Things he said resonated with a vital-ness and truthfulness that registered in every sense I had.

Now I know, obviously, I was hardly the only kid being inspired by the Clash. Books and reissued discs with copious essays in the liner notes abound. The people they've inspired could populate a large metropolis. Even people who don't care too much one way or the other about the Clash recognize "the only band that matters." But back when London Calling came out and I was playing it over and over, I was unaware of so many other listeners and was astounded when I met someone who had even heard of the Clash (this is what it was like growing up in Kentucky.) The few times I did meet a fellow Clash fan it was an instant recognition of a like-minded friend. I guess Combat Rock changed that. Not that it was the band's fault but after that record The Clash, the band began to be lost to The Clash, the product. I guess both exist, but the documentary I can't help but at least partially see as just another way to profit off a bit of history that's bound to sell. Watching it didn’t change and recharge my life, but it did stir a memory and remind me that, yes, those things can happen. Life can be shaken and you can really feel alive. Especially if you weather the downs and keep listening, and reading, and paying attention. Don’t shut off the input, and eventually something will fire.