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Ghost Harmonies
February 21, 2007    File under:

It would be hard, perhaps even impossible, to fully explain all the reasons why the Louvin Brother's Tragic Songs of Life is one of my favorite albums of all time, but for some it will be obvious that the song's presentation of, at the very least, "Knoxville Girl" feeds my obsessive consumption of murder ballads, and for some obvious that my desire to have proofs that my home town and first place in Alabama is not without cultural accomplishment will have led me at some point to the gospel duo from Henegar, less than 60 miles away. The close harmony provides a stronger, purer strain of country music I wish we heard more of in contemporary music, yet it seems to me that "country" music gets further away from that all the time.

Glad to see, then, the article on Charlie Louvin in the latest Paste and to see that Charlie Louvin is coming to Denver (thanks LRC). Glad I'll get a chance to meet him. And, as terrifying as the prospect is, I'm going to try to give him a copy of my own Murder Ballads, hoping he'll read my poem about the Louvins recording "Knoxville Girl." It's a bit of fantasy, and it's about the song itself more than about them, but still, and even though I read everything I could about them at one point, I worry I will have gotten something important wrong. I want to get it right.

*

The same Paste's sampler CD was unusually satisfying. Lots of goodies. But I was especially taken with The Dexateen's "Niel Armstrong," which sent me immediately to download their Hardwire Healing and Red Dust Rising, both of which satisfy a terrible vacancy I've felt since Verbena began falling to bits after the recording of Into the Pink.

Since I was in Tucson back in October, I've been trying to write about why I loved and why I missed Verbena so much, about why their music captured for me so much about Alabama in the late 90s, and about my experience of Alabama growing up in the 80s and 90s there.

I haven't gotten as far as I wanted, but let me offer this to begin...

*


I remember it clearly. It was the end of the summer, 1998. I'd just moved back to Alabama after four years in upstate New York. I was on fellowship, ready to buckle down and complete my dissertation in the more temperate climes of Auburn, where I'd completed my BA four years earlier. And after a late dinner with my wife and a good friend, who'd also returned to Auburn after completing his graduate work elsewhere, I broke from the cold-cloth air conditioning of a local wing spot into the ease of a late-August 8pm. We were all happy to be together, to be back in conversations we'd left open years before, and we weren't ready for our summit to end. Really, though, there was nowhere else to go. There were few bars in Auburn, most dedicated to chain-smoking or pool or both, and we weren't into any of that. So, we just drifted back across Magnolia, toward our homes, and ducked through the crepe myrtles to the one independent record store (long since gone) that carried good music.

This store, whatever its name (Silver Rocket?), carried not necessarily what was popular, but certainly what was good. It was here I saw realized the dream implicit in my own collection: bins where alternative rock, real jazz, and good country, cavorted as if somehow they were the same music, really.

That night, I strolled leisurely to the end of the alphabet, hoping perhaps to find some treasure neglected each time I filled my hands before I could wind into the back of the store. I began near the end of the S section, passing quickly over discs that had served me years before — Slayer, Soundgarden, Tribe Called Quest — hoping for something new. And then I found it. Verbena. Souls for Sale.

I'd never heard of the band before. I'd never heard the disc and had no idea what to expect. The package was simple: just the names of the songs. I couldn't tell a thing. But Verbena was the name of a town not far away, just north of Montgomery on I-65, and something in the night's easy warmth, something so typically Alabaman, so reminiscent of both my time in college and my growing up, a swaddle of moisture combined with pavement's heat, spoke to or from the concrete-sidewalk texture of the back cover, suggesting late-night drives to Gadsden or shuttles to Montgomery for movies or museums, excursions that could have led me to Verbena, Alabama. Or to this Verbena. And I had a sawbuck and this was but $9, so I bit.

Back at my rented house, sound of crickets and cicadas cycling through the screen-door, the windows, I unwrapped the disc, slid it into the player my father had bought me just five years before, eased up the sound and heard the summer night like never before.

For me, this disc was the sound of summer, a perfect translation of heat and steam and sweat and the angry lethargy—or lethargic anger—with which I spent almost every summer since I was 16, driving around, hoping for something to happen, for there, suddenly, to be somewhere else to go. The windows down, I'd cruise along the river back in Gadsden, burn hidden tar-and-gravel roads between common points, or get lost so I'd have to find new ways home. I'd drive till the night condensed and breathing was like eating and I could feel my scalp tightening in the cool, and then I'd drive faster, lucky perhaps for a freshet's vapors ragging the blacktop.

Here the weaving harmonies, the keening of Scott Bondy and Anna Marie Griffin carried a little bit of the old country tunes that might have bled into emerging grunge that cracked the speakers in my high-school car, something recalled as well by the crunching rhythm guitars, straining, it seemed, to keep their tune.

At the summer's end, at the summer's end… At the summer's end, at the summer's end… At the summer's end, at the summer's end… At the summer's end, at the summer's end…

So ended their "Hot Blood," recalling, and perhaps ending, my own.

I don't know how old the folks in Verbena were, but I thought we couldn't have been that far apart. I loved the music, though one of my best friends, my same age, once replied to my statements of adoration You like them? They're LOUD! I had just turned 27 and wasn't quite ready to quiet down, though I guess I was already quieting. Or we were quieting, getting older. I'd thought the country harmony mixed with the grunge drive that would later make Verbena the darling of Dave Grohl, was another form of what I wanted to live: serious, voluminous drive with the easy small-town swagger and heat-slowed amble that were, for me, some of the best aspects of Southern life.

None of it, however, would last long. In less than two years, I would leave Auburn, feeling exiled, and Verbena would have made the moves that would, in my opinion, undo them.

Verbena came quickly to the attention of Dave Grohl, of Nirvana and then the Foo Fighters, who signed on to produce Verbena's second album, Into the Pink, for Columbia, their major-label debut. The production on that second album was better, cleaner, and some of the guitar's edge was rougher—like teeth on a new saw chain, cutting more quickly—and some of the sweetness of Anna Marie Griffin's voice was clearer, but some of the desperation I'd loved was gone….

*

Honestly, sometimes I still listen to Souls for Sale and Into the Pink and become inconsolable, impossibly hungry, incapable of satisfaction. If that band could have made more music, what would it have been like?

I imagine it would have sounded like the Birmingham that could have happened. Or even the Gadsden, the Alabama I tried to find the dozen times I tried to find some kind of decent job that would take me back.

*

I found, in Denver a few months back, a disk entitled, simply, Etowah, which is the county that contains my home town. The word's not isolated to Alabama, but it has a fairly circumscribed circle of intelligibility, so I picked up the disk, by one Duquette Johnston, without bothering to sample it. Turns out, Johnson, under the name Daniel, was the bassist for Verbena, in the early days. He got nicked for drug possession in Gadsden and waited there just off Forrest Avenue, probably just able to see the river's cut about a mile south.

The disk is more country than I wanted it to be when I bought it—no aggression—but, then, the album's about leaving aggression, and its chemicals, behind. "Don't go back to Etowah," the title track's chorus counsels. So sweet, it seems like good advice.

And there's the harmony and the accent and drawl and twang, the slow, easy mellifluence of the central Alabama accent and the harmonies I love in the Louvins' work and the harmonies I loved in the vocal braiding of Bondy and Griffin, harmonies I'm now also hearing in The Dexateens' albums.

But in The Dexateens, as in Johnston's album, there's a remove. Things are tick-thick, hickery, clay-crusted, and deep-South, but there's no simple geography in Red Dust Rising's "Take Me To The Speedway," which manages to dog old-school demagoguery and find uneasy enjoyment in NASCAR's Talladega Speedway and Mobile Bay. Damn, I love this album.

I think I'm going to send The Dexateens a copy of Murder Ballads as well, hoping that the harmonies I hear are not just ghost harmonies, but are instead the sounds of real voices twining together, the sound of my fellow Alabamians, talking the same language.

###

Thanks to all who've written in congratulations. I appreciate it, and soon I'll be able to say the name of the press, once they make the public announcement.

Thanks, too, to Ked and Gina for their photographs. Truly amazing.

Thank you.

See you all in Atlanta.

Posted by Jake Adam York at February 21, 2007 9:09 PM



COMMENTS

I love Verbana. Saw them in 2000 or 01, I can't remember. Amazing stuff.

Posted by: Adam at February 22, 2007 8:53 AM




Jake,

Are you into Will Oldham? You may already know about this, but there's a version of "Knoxville Girl" feat. Oldham here in mp3 form:

http://www.stereogum.com/archives/004331.html

Congrats on the book.

Jack Boettcher

Posted by: Jack Boettcher at February 23, 2007 4:23 PM




No, thank you, Jake. Easy travels,
K

Posted by: ked at February 26, 2007 7:55 PM




Jake,
May I bring you another memory of Etowah? Your mom was my teacher...my mom was your teacher. Albeit, not the same year. I'm so glad to have happened onto your site and to discover that some your writings and poetry are online. It's interesting that in searching for an article on my husband (DA of Etowah), I find your blog that refers to a CD my neighbor brought by just a few days ago. The neighbor was Mr. Johnson's attorney and is credited on the disc cover (for what, I'm unsure). I suppose the prosecutor could be credited as well???
Behind the "On Alabama" link, I read your July 2006 post on lacking reciprocation from readers. This compelled me to comment, not only to reveal one reader's identity, but to also note that psychotherapy feels much the same in an unbalanced, vulnerable kind of way.
-Cassie

Posted by: Cassie at March 2, 2007 2:29 PM




How can I get a copy of Murder Ballads?
Would love to be in touch.
Shot me an email.

Posted by: duquette Johnston at March 5, 2007 7:23 PM




hello very inspired to search out murder ballads. best to you. elliott

Posted by: elliott mcpherson at March 22, 2007 7:18 PM