Brian Kennedy - vocals, guitar
Andrew Hunt - fiddle, backing vocals
Jonathan Hunt - upright bass, backing vocals
From the album Mighty Deeds, recorded Nov. 2021/Jan. 2022 at the Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, Oklahoma
When we were kids — rummaging in the moral debris of late twentieth-century America — my older brother took it upon himself to unveil for me all manner of forbidden delight, high priest to my acolyte in the cargo cult of vice and dissipation inherited from our forebears. Blue words and bags of weed. LSD and skin magazines. Even once, while visiting an uncle in New York City, riding in the back seat of the family station wagon, an elegantly worded primer detailing Manhattan’s oldest profession:
“There’s women down those streets,” my brother whispered, gesturing in an indeterminate direction and smiling with teenaged glee, “if you give them money, they’ll show you their—,” at which point, penniless but wanting to avoid even the near occasion of wickedness, I took off my seatbelt and got down on the floor of the car, huddling there with my arms over my head, desperate to keep from seeing whatever it was those women were eager to sell.
So in finding a place to begin this tangled paean to America and her music — to famous men, their song, their deeds of glory and sin — instead of scouring my notes for some outlandish tale of long ago (of Mick Jagger fixing an emerald in his tooth, but later swapping it out for a diamond, as everyone thought the emerald a piece of spinach; or bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, late in his career, making the news by beating up his girlfriend with a well-worn family Bible), instead I’ll begin with the personal, with memory, of once again sitting in the back seat of a family car alongside my older brother.
It was my grandparent’s car this time, a fourth-generation Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, long as a battleship and almost as powerful, that same car in which, while once visiting relatives in the Midwest, my grandfather took the wrong exit off the highway and ended up in inner city Cleveland, tooling down the boulevard, my fat little face poking up from the back seat, my grandmother riding shotgun in Jackie O sunglasses and that strange white-lady Afro she always wore, a frizz of hair through which you could see straight down eight inches to her scalp (something like an electron cloud, an Afro of probabilities rather than determined position), and my grandfather driving, grim-faced, eyes scanning the black folk scattered up and down the street — “I remember when they used to bring you lemonade,” he growled — with every single person in that neighborhood stopped and staring in our direction, stunned by this impossible apparition, no less surprised than had the Reverend Al Green himself rolled down their street in a chariot of Pentecostal fire, his hair atwirl with snakes.
But having survived our Cleveland sojourn, we found ourselves again at some point back at grandma and grandpa’s house in Springfield, Massachusetts, or rather leaving their house and getting into the Oldsmobile, headed out for a Saturday Vigil Mass or maybe to the Ivanhoe for dinner, prime rib and potatoes. As we settled into the back seat, my brother pulled a cassette tape out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me — on the cover of the case, four figures in a swirl of steam and flame, lipsticked, mascaraed, in metal-studded leather and torn fishnet, and each of them crowned with a mane of perfectly teased shoulder-length hair.
MÖTLEY CRÜE, the cover read, SHOUT AT THE DEVIL.
I had no earthly idea what I was looking at.
“Who are those girls?” I asked him.
“They’re not girls,” my brother answered, “They’re guys.”
Saul on his way to Damascus. Augustine in the garden. A fat kid on his way to the Ivanhoe. In such moments the bounds of possibility itself are breached, and tumbling in comes not another choice among choices, but an entirety of otherness. I had never seen men with long hair before, much less men dolled up like Thunderdome queens. My grandfather was a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war, with snapshots in his souvenir albums of General Douglas MacArthur touring the Philippines, and dead Japanese piled outside the mouth of a cave. My father was a New Hampshire State Trooper, who spent Sunday afternoons polishing the belts and buttons of his uniform to a perfect shine, and who had a standing appointment for a haircut every other week. In short, a milieu in which four hedonistic good-for-nothings, in a Bacchic frenzy of sex, drugs and rock and roll bankrolled by Elektra Records, were entirely out of place.
Yet four decades later, what strikes me is not the revelation itself — there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy — but that this revelation should generate in my young heart such instant and enthusiastic emotional response. Given my background and upbringing, I might have met my brother’s back seat disclosure with revulsion, or polite disinterest, but instead responded with what I can only describe as stunned fascination, with danger and shame, desire and confusion, all mingled into one — like driving past a bad car accident and imagining the thrill of oneself in the wreckage. Captured by the spectacle, I knew that whoever were these deviant glam-queens, and whatever they’d done to end up in my brother’s pocket, their path was also somehow my own. And I hadn’t even heard the music yet.
Strange, yes — but this was the 1980s, a time when bored young men drew pentagrams on their blue jeans, and Truly Tasteless Jokes was a New York Times Best Seller. In retrospect, I might have misjudged that milieu of early childhood entirely, overestimating the influence of dad and grandpa and sensible, short-haired, working class men. For kids like us, my brother and me — survivors of what I’d later learn was the most aborted generation in American history — there was no hope of normalcy. Through no fault of our own, the world had come undone. Deviance was now the ultimate bourgeois value, available to all, and “God Bless America” had given way to — of all irredeemable things — “Shout at the Devil” and worse.
Consider the infamous punk darling G.G. Allin, who grew up in northern New England just as we did, but made a name for himself as a musician by brutalizing his audiences, defecating onstage, rending his flesh in concert, and who once told talk-show host Geraldo Rivera “my body is the rock and roll temple, and my flesh, blood, and body fluids are a communion to the people, whether they like it or not.”
A few years after discovering Mötley Crüe, my brother happened to sit next to G.G. Allin on a Greyhound bus from New Hampshire to New York City. They talked extensively throughout the trip, G.G. regaling my brother with tales of his onstage antics, how the crowds adored and applauded the purity of his transgressions. At the end of the ride, he gave my brother a signed promo photograph, the same black and white photo used for the cover of his compilation album Hated in the Nation, showing G.G. with a padlocked dog collar around his neck, and with a suite of amateur tattoos on his chest and arms that looked as though needled there by a nine-year old. “He smelled really bad,” my brother recalled, “and was one sick fucker.”
So perhaps I overstate my position when I claim that, as a child, I realized the path of these wild and awful men was also somehow my own. I certainly didn’t think or hope I would end up like G.G. Allin, dead of an overdose, aged 36. G.G. idolized country legend Hank Williams, who also died young — but who himself, it must be pointed out, scrupulously avoided ever taking a dump onstage. Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. What happens in American music is clearly no trifling matter. But even if I can’t describe precisely why my brother’s impartation moved me so, or toward what end, I can say with absolute certainty I’ve spent much of my life since trying to get as close to that music as possible. I can also say I’ve spent an equal amount of time trying to disentangle myself from its lies.
Lies about my grandfather, for instance. Growing up we saw our grandparents often, but as I matured, taking up my generational cudgel of deviance and disobedience, these visits grew to bother me, especially the time spent with my grandfather, whom I considered — to say the least — a bit of a throwback, and insufficiently open-minded. The eldest son of Irish immigrants, he carried with him throughout his life that casual racism and ethnic animosity de rigueur for the tribal neighborhoods of the Depression, but now déclassé on the Sesame Streets of multicultural America.
For my grandfather, the ultimate sin was not intolerance but ingratitude, and so if we ever seemed less than perfectly grateful for something we’d been given — whether a Christmas present or a twenty-dollar bill — he would threaten to take it back and give it instead to “the Puerto Rican kid down the block,” a little Luis or Carlos we later recognized as entirely mythical, but whom at first we accepted unquestioningly, with deep resentment, imagining him at play with our secondhand baseball gloves, or a box of newly purchased G.I. Joes. My grandfather died my first semester in college, and when at graveside my brother and I noticed the old man’s plot bordered on all sides, o irony of ironies, by graves with Puerto Rican surnames, we had to stifle hysterical laughter so as not to upset our relatives. Grandpa’s just deserts, we thought — appropriate and well-earned.
I never noticed the real irony, though, not until much later — that those adjoining graves were a rebuke to us, not him. We really were ungrateful. We never truly appreciated anything he’d given us. For if I did, how then could I consider him as backward or intolerant, that same man who bought for me my first William Burroughs novel — and how much love a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war must have for his grandson to buy the kid a copy of a novel called Queer? To buy his other grandson a record called Shout at the Devil? To choose to spoil us both even in the face of such obvious decline — of beatniks, glam rock, and pentagrams on our blue jeans?
Truly, no country for old men. He was better off among the Puerto Ricans.
I still have a mix tape my grandfather made for me when I was a boy, of the greatest hits of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The first song, “Moonlight Serenade,” is perhaps the saddest song ever cut on wax, and when I listen I imagine my grandparents out on the dance floor with their friends while the war was still on, some of the men only months or weeks away from violent death, their women destined for grief and broken hearts, but even those who lived to celebrate war’s end still set to see the world they fought for come undone, slip into idleness and neglect, the grave itself a rebuke to all of us, to all our folly — until all I can think to do to hold back the shame, remembering, is fast-forward grandpa’s tape to “In the Mood” and play it loud, call in the children, push back the kitchen chairs so everyone can dance, and wait for when the saxophones are done trading solos and Clyde Hurley from Fort Worth comes in on trumpet, blaring, set way back from the microphone and high up, like he’s blowing his horn from atop the very throne of God, and in the joy of that moment feel that somehow it might all be worth it after all.
Which is to say, God writes straight with crooked lines. He makes a path in the wilderness. He gives a home to the lonely. This is the real story of American music.
Rosie