Blue Ribbon Radio: And Now For Something Completely Different

Folks, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, this episode is going to get fucking weird. I reached deep into my musical tastes to pull out a little bit of everything. It's not the usual episode, that's for certain. Feel free to send your hate mail directly to us.

In Fighting: Why it's happening and where we stand.

Like all groups of "like-minded" people, the outlaw(?)/underground/roots- country scene has it's fair share of fractures and offshoots based on differences in opinion or taste.  Hell, we here at BRR hold no pretenses about our loathing of the pickled cunt Trigger-Man, and have few qualms about expressing disdain for any of the other asshats who find themselves in possession of just enough influence to over-inflate their egos and begin considering themselves more important than the music.

The newest and most popular trend in intra-scene bashing has been to root out the "posers" or "johnny-come-latelies" that are just now discovering our beloved scene or genre or lifestyle or whatever you want to call it.  My friend J.B. Beverly went off on a day long meme-centered diatribe the other day on this group.  The central argument was that those that are trickling into our ranks are basically lifestyle-hopping based on an ill-informed perception of what the newest and most original counter-culture is.  I understand JB's point of view, and can definitely see where he's coming from.  If anyone has traversed the landscape of musical influences that have created this mutant-almagamation of a country music scene, it's JB fucking Beverly, and for that reason, I'll excuse his prejudice and write it off as simply reacting to the symptoms rather than the underlying causes.

The reality, as I alluded to above, is that this "scene," or whatever the fuck it is, has exactly one thing that holds it together, and it's not music anymore.  It was in the early days of the Hank III renaissance that took place around 2005-2008, but that's over.  Now, people are more important.  Artists with similar INTERESTS became emboldened by Sheldon's success and his support of other unknowns showed a lot of us that he wasn't out there by himself.  There were a lot of musicians with the same spirit as Hank III, even if the music was dramatically different, and not only brought the artists into a more or less unified camp, but produced the phenomenon of fans who claim to be a part of a scene that embraces both Those Poor Bastards and Jimmy Martin.  We (the fans) finally felt like there was something to which we could belong.  There are plenty of people out there who have been fans of Wayne Hancock and the Dead Kennedys, but the last five years are the first time we felt like that was right and it fit somewhere in a larger set of influences and interests.  Many of us have forged friendships that will last our lifetimes, and at the very least have a web-based society that we can feel a part of.  For our own reasons and because of our own experiences, we identify with this "lifestyle" and are proud to be a part of it.

When others stumble across us and our music, then, it's no surprise that they find in it a community of fellowship and shared interest that they want to be a part of.  What we must remember is that more often than not, these newcomers discover the scene in the exact same way many of us (yours truly included) did.  One flagship artist (be it Hank III, Shooter Jennings, or a love for more vintage country like Cash and Nelson) sparks an interest or further exploration.  Before you know it, someone has discovered something that they can identify with.  Sure, maybe a year ago they were bobbing their heads to Shaggy 2-Dope and chugging Faygo, but people change.  The first CD I ever owned as a kid was the Space Jam soundtrack, and I'm from fucking SOUTHern Alabama.  Who are we to judge someone's past interests and assert that it invalidates their present ideas?  No-fucking-body, that's who.  Here's a newsflash, I can name more ARTISTS (with label affiliations and strong connections in the scene) for whom I have exceedingly more disdain than any reformed juggalo in Ariats.

What Mr. Beverly seems to not understand (or simply not care about) is that his success as a musician is based SOLELY on his ability to attract new fans.  Without them (us), his endeavours are doomed.  It doesn't matter where those new fans come from.  If it were really "all about the music" for him, he'd see that it's the power of his lyrics and the allure of the images they create... in a word, his fucking talent... that have won over the unlikely listener.  I'm not saying that we're sitting on something that ever has any hope of going mainstream, or becoming huge, but if we become so exclusionary that one of the best in the business is actively demeaning the possibility of a growth in the fan-base, then we're doomed.  We'll be listening to Straight to Hell and Deguello Motel long into our fifties because the scene will die.

Now, I know this has been a fairly liberal interpretation of the acceptance of all newcomers to the scene.  It's an inflated ideal of the best possible scenario, if you will.  I hold no illusions that next month at MR12, there will be those in attendance that I see as misplaced and, for lack of a better term, uncool. They won't get it.  They were dragged along by someone else, or worse, they came with a gross misinterpretation of what the festival is all about.  There are those that are unwelcome, for sure, but it's not because of where they came from, per se.  It's because they do not fit.  They are misinterpreting the message and the spirit of the underground that we hold dear.  Here's the thing, though, if they realize that they don't fit in with us, they'll stop coming.  There are no doubt thousands of people out there with Johnny Cash CD's in the sun visors of their Z71s that would be so grossly put off by our little counter-culture that we'd never see them again.  That's not to say they aren't at home listening to the same music, but their interpretation and expression of that interest is different from our own.  It doesn't take a genius to see that we're all straddling a line of interest and insanity.  Anyone who's met Scott Biram can attest to that.  The atmosphere isn't for everyone, even if they like the music, but attacking them hurts the artists by putting album sales in jeopardy.  I may own several Wu Tang albums, but you'll sure as fuck never see me at a show.  Guess what, though?  Wu Tang still has my money, regardless.  They're still benefitting rom me, even if their body guards would beat me with a pipe for asking to get backstage.

The sad thing is, there already exists such a pervasive attitude of "we're better than you" in this scene, that we're most likely already over the edge and heading toward further fracturing and bad blood.  There's plenty of it in the Southeast already, and it'll spread and grow as shitty artists continue to get breaks, and people begin to feel excluded or alienated in what they thought was their social safe haven.   To me, the only way to stop it is try to remember back just a few years ago and see how close knit everyone was.  The solidarity seen at Muddy Roots last year was a fine example of it, but it faded away as the hangovers subsided and the mud-stains washed out.  If that spirit's gone in the scene writ large, then what's the fucking point of it?   As a military man, I've seen first hand the power that across-the-board equality has and the strength and solidarity that it creates.  If people from all over the country and world, with completely different cultures, experiences, backgrounds, interests, and personalities can overcome their bullshit and not just tolerate, but truly care for one another, then what the fuck is wrong with us, a group of people so closely linked by interests that it borders on the cultish, when we can't pull our shit together?  Who can say who belongs more than anyone else?  Certainly not me, and if any motherfucker thinks he's in a position to posit any sort of opinion on my own inclusion, I've got a brand new pipe wrench just itching for some teeth marks.

Andrew is sick of your bullshit.

Be a Better Citizen

            Recently my wife brought home a study guide for the U.S. citizenship test. I had always heard that it was an incredibly tough test, one that most “regular” American citizens couldn't pass. I took the test hoping for a good challenge, but instead I walked away feeling kind of gipped. It was actually a fairly simple test, or so I thought, right up until I quizzed a couple of recent high school graduates. This was just another in a long line of shameful experiences that  showed me just how much our culture looks down on intelligence and knowledge, especially here in the South. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but the Tea Party is a nationwide thing so we are obviously idiots all over.

            What struck me more than their complete lack of knowledge was their apparent glee in their ignorance. They actually thought it funny and cool that they couldn't tell me either the day or the year when the Declaration of Independence was signed. There was no shame on their part, nor was there any interest in learning or voting. This is worrisome on many levels, as voting is one of the few things that I will go out of my way to do. Especially disconcerting is the fact that I realized these are the exact type of people who hear professional paranoiac Wayne LaPierre rant about President Obama coming for your guns and believe it to be true, and I say this as a card-carrying NRA member.

            This has brought me to the conclusion that we should have voter ID laws, but not in the way that Republicans or anybody has suggested. Before you gain the right to vote, you should have to take the U.S. citizenship test. You shouldn't be allowed to pick the people who run this country if you know nothing about it. If you can't tell me who succeeds the President and Vice President if they can't serve, I don't want you to be able to pick either. Upon completion of your citizenship test, you get a nifty little card which certifies you as a person worthy of the responsibility of voting.

            I understand that not everyone has either the time or inclination to become a history buff or policy wonk, but it's not hard to remember how many Senators we have. Sure, this idea would alienate plenty of voters, and I'm not saying the plan couldn't use some tweaking. However, the majority of America is terrible, awful and incredibly stupid, and I shudder to think of what this country would look like if we had 100% voter turnout. I'm all for higher turnout, but there should be some sort of competency test to make sure you aren't some ridiculously under-informed fucktard who thinks that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim.

            We should all strive to be a better citizen. Learn something about who you are voting for, and for chrissake if you must watch Fox News don't let them fool you into thinking that they are anything other than the Cartoon Network of news, or that they are “Fair and Balanced.” Try and get at least a few different and reliable sources, from both sides of the aisle, before you pull the lever. That's how we keep people like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum out of office.

Frank Nichols

Why We Write.

Frank wrote last week on the undeniable influence that drinking has not only on our creative abilities as writers, but as artists writ large.  I'd first like to commend him on a fine article, and having been made privy to his particular approach to writing now for somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade, I can attest to the effectiveness of his methods and their ability to produce quality prose, regardless of subject matter or motivation for putting pen to paper.  It's a process that I myself clung to throughout my high school days, and into the early semesters of college.  Writing things out on paper to give myself the sense of creation and ownership of the work I was producing was a crucial part of the process.  Sadly, the demand for quantity over quality that so pervades the early years of academia, coupled with my increasing penchant for laziness, insomnia, and substance abuse rendered this critical part of the process too inefficient to cling to.   When it comes down to it, it's a quicker, simpler, process to punch your disconnected streams of consciousness into a keyboard now, and cut, paste, rearrange, and edit later using the miracles(?) of modern technology.  This article itself is being composed right in the browser-based blog editor, and I will no doubt be employing all of the electronic gadgets at my fingertips to render it as legible and coherent as can be expected of this type of endeavour (not to mention a man who's working his way through the bottom sixth of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire tonight).  What's the point of all of this?  Why am I giving you a lesson on the writing habits of two friends brought up under identical tutelage during the formative years of our writing evolution?  The answer to that question is as elusive to me as it is to you.

You see, for at least a week or more I've been scouring the news, absorbing all of the information I could on everything from Pakistani/American relations to solar storms to why Iran should be allowed to develop the bomb to the world's fattest woman dropping one hundred pounds by having marathon fuck-sessions with her ex-husband.  If it's been put into print or oozed onto the net by the waterheads that sell their souls for internet publication, I've at least scanned it in the last few weeks, and what I have found is that I have no idea what to even write about anymore.  This blog, and my first few contributions to it, were guided by the principles of Blue Ribbon Radio:  Substance abuse and behavioral deviance.  How long, though, can we beat these into the ground?  How many articles can I write about getting drunk and finding prostitutes or avoiding the mafia in European cities before they start to sound exactly the same?  It would seem that the number is smaller than I would have liked to admit.

I ponder why this is, and I look at my approach to writing writ large.  I'm no longer a product of my own drive and creativity... at least not completely.  I cling to the habits I picked up in college and inevitably find myself punching out a page or two of text, reading halfway through it, hitting [command]+a and deleting every last fucking letter of it.  These aren't just quick ramblings, either.  They're thought out, hard fought paragraphs that I struggle through, and then at the first sign of displeasure, I trash it all to start over again.  I've done it three times in the last ten hours, and am roundly convinced that the only way I'll get through this and actually publish it is to drink enough to enjoy the process and not care about the product.

I keep at it, in the face of the tedium and drudgery I often feel when composing, though, because deep down a part of me still wants to believe in my own creativity.  As I've noted before, I came up, much like Frank, with a predisposition for academic excellence.  He and I spent many years internalizing the same processes and experiences, and there was no doubt a point in our early years that either of us could have chosen to focus on writing and turned it into a career as adults.  I chose the singular focus of music, however, during those years, and that led me to where I am today.  That didn't pan out, as it were, and so I'm here in Bavaria furiously rapping these keys trying to get all of these thoughts out before I appreciate how mundane they may seem to anyone unfortunate enough to come across them.

That spirit, however... that small but nonetheless present spark of faith in our own ideas and artistic processes is what lies behind this seemingly (and very probably) fruitless enterprise we have undertaken here at the Blue Ribbon Radio Blog of Awful.  It is unquestionable that the greatest literary minds of the last 200 years have been unapologetic drunks, misfits, ramblers, transients, and misanthropes.  We don't entertain dreams of ever joining the Faulkners or Hemingways or Conrads of this Earth, but we do take a very personal delight in the fact that we share their experience regardless of the quality of our work.  We know how and why they wrote, and we are enchanted by the same muses these greats worshipped.  Modernity is an evil motherfucker in this sort of exercise, but we embrace it where we must and try to honor and respect the past for what it has inspired us to be.   For good or ill, in us beat artistic hearts, and there's nothing quite as pleasurable as having the opportunity to express and share our inspired ramblings.  As Frank pointed out, the booze is simply a relaxant to allow the creative process to flow freely, while drawing from the inspiration that music, love, sex, death, violence, and Batman (just to name a few most prominent sources) provide.  We are not, and likely never will be, masters of this craft, but it is a privilege nonetheless to ply it for your consideration, and maybe even entertainment.  As Chris and I have stated on air before, our ramblings, both verbal and written, are largely for our own cathartic entertainment... perhaps even more so than for our readers and listeners... but knowing that in spite of that, many of you enjoy what we do here, provides just a little bit more buoyancy for our ever-plunging souls.

Yours in sullen desperation,

Andrew.

Alcohol and Art

For as long as we have had booze, we have had poor drunk fools who think themselves an artist. I mean this in a very broad sense of art as a whole: literature, music, painting etc. Alcohol has played a crucial role in the arts, as it has been directly responsible for the likes of Hemingway, jazz, van Gogh and countless other luminaries of art.

           

            I think that everyone fancies themselves a writer at some point, and there are few who are worth a damn. It is interesting to note that many of the greats were unrepentant drunks. Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and Bukowski were all great drinkers and their work reflects it. One thing that so many people, especially high school kids, get wrong about them is that they see their drinking as the ends rather than the means. Rather than abusing alcohol solely for the state of being drunk, they used it for their craft.

            Hemingway saw it as one of those wonderful things about being alive and wrote often about how it made the world a finer place to live in. Robert Jordan from For Whom The Bell Tolls says that absinthe “takes the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes...of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten.” This does not jive with an amateur's assumption that we drink solely to blackout and throw up all over ourselves. In fact, Robert Jordan would likely frown upon such an act.

            On the other end of the drinking spectrum, we have the venerable Dr. Thompson. More so than any other, his substance abuse is far more misunderstood. Too many teenagers have seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and completely missed the fact that Raoul Duke and his attorney were searching for the American Dream. They see the flash and hilarity that came with the drug use (some of which were fictional) and incessant drinking and cannot grasp that it was essential to their mission. I don't want to go into too much detail now, as I want to save material for a Lords of Awful installment on Hunter S. Thompson. He used alcohol as a coping mechanism in order to deal with the grim realities of the brutal politics that he covered so well. Unfortunately our society has made reading uncool, especially for the young kids, so the vast majority of them will know nothing about the brilliant Gonzo Papers, and will wrongly remember him as a guy who was only famous for doing a bunch of drugs in Las Vegas.

            It has been my experience with writing that what alcohol does best is not necessarily providing inspiration, (apart from directly writing about it) as much as relaxes you and allows you to write about whatever you want, taking a small seed of an idea and then writing it into oblivion. Papa Hemingway once said to “write drunk, and edit sober.” I'm a big fan of this theory for many reasons, not least of which is a terrible affliction that I'm plagued with. My problem is that while I'm writing, I tend to edit as I go along. Until I get a few drinks in me and loosen up a bit I spend five minutes on every sentence, trying to make sure that it fits perfectly and sounds profound and grand before I actually put pen to paper.

            I have often found that the writing that I'm most proud of is the stuff where I was able to just write and write, editing be damned. My work generally goes through about four stages: First I write it out on paper, then read it to my darling wife, and come back a few days later with a red pen to do some proofreading and minor editing. After that I type it up as what is generally the final draft and do some last minute editing. One of my favorite pieces, “Death in America,” looked like someone literally died on it. There was so much red ink that I wondered if I severed an artery. When I was writing that I had reached that perfect drunk where I was still lucid, but riding an incredible buzz. The Wild Turkey had loosened me enough to plumb the depths of my soul and pour all my feelings onto the page, and I think it shows.

            Music is an area where I have considerably less experience, but still hold a great deal of knowledge. I have not seriously played music in at least five years, but when I did alcohol was integral in helping me learn new songs on guitar. I never did many original tunes, but I could play a cover so well you'd think it was an original recording. I could begin learning a song drunk, and after I sobered up and started again things would just kind of fall into place.

            One difference between the drunks of music and literature is that many times the drinking was the ends rather than the means. The most egregious examples are those awful hair bands of the 80's, Mötley Crüe in particularly. If you ever have the chance to read The Dirt, do it. It is a vile tale of an utterly hedonistic band who focused more on debauchery than making good music. While these are the types of drunks who give us a bad name, it is important to note that alcohol is a key factor in who they were.

            Jazz is another genre heavily influenced by alcohol, and in fact owes its entire existence to it and the gin joints where it developed. While I completely disagree, there are those who claim that jazz is the only truly original American form of music, but it is undeniable that the seedy bars of the Prohibition era provided the perfect incubator for this music. After we aborted the failed social experiment of Prohibition, legends like John Coltrane and Miles Davis honed their craft in hazy, smoke-filled barrooms across America. While it is true that Coltrane preferred heroin to hooch, it was the audience at the bar that shaped jazz. Without a liquored-up audience to listen to him, Miles Davis couldn't have reinvented jazz time and again.

            I would be remiss if I didn't mention country music in an article for Blue Ribbon Radio. Throughout country's history alcohol, especially whiskey, has played a major role. Countless songs have been written about it, because of it, and sound great under the influence of it. There is no need to discuss the legends of George Jones and his lawnmower, or the myriad other stars and their stories; we know them all. I feel that I must join the legion of detractors of the modern country scene, fashionable though it may be, but I come at it from a drinking standpoint. As I have stated before, there are different approaches to drinking as either an end or a means. At some point in country music drinking became the ends rather than the means. Somehow we went from Merle Haggard singing about “Memories and Gin” and ended up with Toby Keith blathering on about a red Solo cup. To address a pet peeve of mine, men drink from glass. Inbred hillbilly swine drink from plastic. I cannot imagine Johnny Cash leering at high school girls at some silly field party drinking Bud Light out of a red Solo cup. He was a God, and he drank from glass.

            Apart from knowing the van Gogh liked absinthe and cut his ear off, I don't know much about “art” art. I think I read somewhere that a lot of architects are drunks. The fact remains that alcohol is a shining beacon for the artistic set. Even if you don't have natural talent, booze can help you fake it. A drunken, vehement rant is usually entertaining to read, always fun to write, and you  may have the luck of writing something good, and all thanks to your pal alcohol. So the next time you find yourself at home with nothing to do, start drinking and writing. Pick whatever topic comes to mind, and write the hell out of it. Then submit it to us, because we need content.

Frank Nichols is a deep drinking heavy thinker. 

Ramblings From a Lazy Drunken Hillbilly

It's almost two in the morning here in Alabama, and I really have little clue as to where I want to take this post. I do know that this will be my weekly blog update about all the awful, strange, and pointless thoughts that fill my head on a nearly constant basis, but the point of it? That I do not know. I may not even have a point, and none of this really matters anyway.

After a year of depression along the western side of the this once great country, I have finally returned to my adopted homeland of the South. I left the South after Muddy Roots of last year and headed for California, and since then I have spent time in Nevada, Washington, and finally another return to California. This, to say the least, worked out miserably for my mental psyche. Not that my mind was ever in great shape, but it got severely worse over the last twelve months travelling the west in search of some fictional idea of being alright. I tried it drunk, I tried it high, I tried stone cold fucking sober, then I tried it even fucking drunker. Nothing mattered. It's just life, and it is what it is.

Now, I've been what my mother lovingly refers to as "the family's rolling stone" since I was eighteen, and I've never really let up on my rambling. It may sound cliche, but I really have been everywhere you can go on a Greyhound bus in this country. I've lived in New York, Alabama, North Carolina, Idaho, Washington, Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Nevada, and probably some other places I was too blacked out to remember over the last seven years. That's a fuckload of displacement, all in search of some idea that maybe I'll find someplace somewhere that will make my personal issues melt away. This, of course, is fairy tale bullshit. No matter where you go you're still you. I will still be the lovesick drunk I am, no matter what shit hole I'm resting my head in, and I'm alright with that.

You have to make life work for you. It's never going to be great, just know that right now. It's life, and it's a real motherfucker on it's best days. In order to survive this life sentence you must learn to get by on the little things. Happiness is being under southern skies, smoking a hand rolled cigarette, and drinking a glass of Irish while sharing stories of your fucked up past with a good friend. I've searched this country high and low, and I've yet to find something that tops that, my friends.

Slainte

Chris Miller is back in South to terrify the believers. 

Blue Ribbon Radio: Kind of Live with T.Junior

Blue Ribbon Radio returns to Alabama and the living room of T.Junior for a drunken episode the likes of which can be only be pulled off by such a skilled radio program. Cheers, folks.