Experiments: Letters to my Father - Sidewalks of the City

Letters to my Father.

Part 1. Sidewalks of the City

Someday if you go, I wont’ be able to hear this song. Not in the same way. I came to love her all on my own, Lucinda Williams, at a different time and place from you. In 1997, we had that thin black radio with half an antenna broken off and the battery tray long missing. You’d come home at lunch and make a hotdog in beans or drowned in Spaghetti-O’s and go for a run. You’d only eat your oatmeal with hot milk, which you’d boil in a small saucepan, and leave it out on the counter the rest of the day, a soft white glaze on the surface of the metal. You’d listen to KBCO on the radio, and that was where I first heard her, at the time that Car Wheels On A Gravel Road became famous. I didn’t like it. I thought “Can’t Let Go,” the single that played on the progressive, KBCO-like hippie rock stations sounded like Bonnie Raitt, it was too “country” for me, at the time, who loved the trends of the day, ska and electronica (remember that one? Of course you don’t). And you agreed that you didn’t like the song – you liked her when she was more country. When you and mom would play “Passionate Kisses” by her and by Mary Chapin Carpenter, but it was her song. Even after I fell in love with Lucinda Williams, I didn’t start loving that song until now. What I’ve fallen in love with on Lucinda’s first two records, over time, is how happy she sounds, how in love with the world, how excited by life. Her records of aging have been extraordinary, but I’m so happy she had that excitement recorded.

Like this, I’m not talking about you, or maybe I am tangentially. Did we share an understanding over that time? We’ve had arguments since then, about Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which I’d eventually believe was one of the greatest records of the 90’s, after I liked country a little more, and admired Williams for her conceptual wonder. I loved World Without Tears just as much, and that was actually my first record of hers. Still, Sweet Old World won’t leave me. I love it too much. Maybe from an artistic perspective, I can still argue that Car Wheels and World Without Tears are better albums, but what’s the point? Sweet Old World is like a great friend that I’ve had now for 7 or 8 years. Longer for you. You knew her when it came out, in 1992. You’d already made “Passionate Kisses” overplayed in the house. You could tell me that “Side of the Road” is the stuff of great songwriting, that it made her career.

It did, you’re right. You’re wrong, like you have been so many times, that it stopped when she moved away from country. The truth is you’re a purist, and not just in music, or in movies, or in art, or in writing, and I don’t even mean it as a compliment, although, perhaps I’ll tell you someday, that gave me taste. I have taste, Dad, I have the ability to parse through details, to have opinions, and it’s because of that, you’re purism, you’re ridiculous ridiculous purism. No, Essence and World Without Tears aren’t country, but they’re wonderful. They’re not as happy, but they are about something else we experience, loneliness and desire. The feeling that other people lift us into life and then push us away, because of a coldness in our souls. I love this theme, I love it expressed because people don’t say these things to each other. World Without Tears has a great song called “Atonement” that I’m sure you’d hate if you knew what it was. It’s all loud guitars and atonal singing, a yell, a fight. I love music that’s loud and atonal as much as I love the country that’s sweet and melodious that she used to sing. The truth is, I learned to appreciate, to find the good.

And you stayed pure. You wore it like your religion, the pure. Dylan you were willing to grow with, Van Morrison too, to let them get away with whatever they were working on at the time. You even defended Planet Waves and Infidels. Not anyone else. Not anything else. I wanted to explain to you after the surgery, after the last bout of radiation that left you so miserable, to love what you had, because that could leave you too. You wanted to run faster and longer. You wanted to feel like you felt before the cancer, before the last year put you so constantly at sanity’s back door. I cannot say that I would not be faced with the same grimness, I did not lose the things you lost, felt the way you felt. I would be miserable too, I know, and I also know that when you were at your worst, I couldn’t help thinking that I would not react the same way. I have forced myself, my whole life, to find the positive, to fixate on it. Some – Josh, you – would say I was being deluded. I do not think so.

Another thing I got from you: Taoism. Sorta. At least, I know that through you I got supported to look into it. Taoism, I’m sad to find, has so much of its thoughts locked up in detachment and dismissal of all that is great in the world. I took it as the opposite – to find love and warmth in the worst of moments. To see what great sadness can offer us, to find the hope when all is bleak. I do not think this is a bad thing. I want kids so I can teach them to see the world like this. But perhaps they’d need a consciousness that’s as haunted as yours to get to the place I got. Because yours in the consciousness that formed in me.

Sidewalks of the city. You’d look back on that record, on Sweet Old World, and it would be the song you’d remember, though you remembered that she’d written a song, “Little Angel, Little Brother,” about her brother’s suicide. You remembered he was a poet. So was her father. You remembered she did a beautiful cover of Nick Drake’s “Which Will” that she recorded in one take at 2 in the morning. You thought “He Never Got Enough Love” was a pretty great song for a defense attorney, maybe you’d break it out in trial.

“Sidewalks of the City” is a song that should evoke my viewpoint on life. It’s a song of sad, uncertain observations – a man with hunger in his face, crumbling buildings and graffiti. Women sleeping in doorways. “Somehow you just don’t feel right,” she says compendiously. Yet is this a song of fear, of uncertainty? Not really. What a grand chorus – “Hold me, baby, give me some faith. Let me know you’re there, let me touch your face. Give me love, give me grace. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.” The fiddles swell, the guitar cascades in scales, the drums come in. Dr. John plays bass. I’m amazed you never told me that – he was, after all, a friend of The Band’s, and you love to point out any friends of the Band, anyone who’s ever mentioned The Band, anyone who ever held a Band album in their hand, even for a second. Some day, actually, Lucinda Williams would write for Rolling Stone’s issue on the greatest rock artists a tribute to The Band. Still, you don’t give her a ton of credit past 1992. Purist.

This song is so pure. That fiddle is so beautiful. This is not lyrically a warm song, it’s the grandeur of the chorus, the sweet rise of her voice, that high, wise fiddle that makes the song warm. I may have never been willing to acknowledge it, but it’s one of Williams’ most perfect songs. Like “Side of the Road” and “Jackson” and “I Lost It.” I played one for you from World Without Tears you actually liked – “Fruits of My Labor,” another one of great, wounding simplicity that breaks hearts. Actually we saw her perform it, at the Boulder Theater. You leaned over to me and said, “She’s got a great voice, doesn’t she?” It makes sense you’d love this song, it’s a pure soul number. I love it when Lucinda gets experimental, but you only like the experiments that wind up in determined genres. At least you’re consistent.

Your taste is what made me. In the same way it limits you to not see the greatness in the world, it allowed me to pick it out when I saw it, to be a man of taste, to discern. You talked to me in college when I was reading The Sun Also Rises about Jake’s rituals – the way he shaved, the order and exactitude with which he admired bullfighters. This was what it meant to be lost, you said, to take comfort in the patterns and rituals that help you organize the world, to admire the things that made exact sense. I suppose I sought the opposite, disorder, and acknowledged disorder was best when it went down with a spoonful of order. Like Sonic Youth or “Atonement” or Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, there are elements of pop, of structure, of wisdom there, and I learned to love what took me a while to get to know. You, I think, sought beauty and expression, but needed to see it right away. You found hope in Before Night Falls, which you made me see a second time – this poor, persecuted, gay Cuban writer, whose life was one big kick in the pants, as life is for many, but he found his soul through writing, through expression. It’s the same reason you loved Look Homeward, Angel and Go Tell It On The Mountain. This was your pet theme, people who learned to express through the indignities of life. Beauty that rose from ugliness.

The purist, always. “Sidewalks of the City” is the rose that grows out of the concrete where it lies. Tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe.