Month: September 2013

Different Days

Editor’s note for Sept/Oct 2013 issue of American Songwriter.

Three years ago I saw Jason Isbell perform aboard the deck of a Carnival cruise ship. He played one muggy evening just as our ship made the turn around the northwest tip of Cuba, on its way to Grand Cayman island. The turnout for that night’s show was weak. Maybe five or six people on deck. I watched with two American Songwriter colleagues and a central Florida version of Snooki from Jersey Shore.

 Isbell did not seem to be enjoying himself. At one point during his set, he clamored for a drink, so we brought him a double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. He then launched into “Goddamn Lonely Love” from his Drive-By Trucker days and said the song was about his ex-wife. He followed that with the amped-up “Go It Alone” from Here We Rest.  If you said “lonesome” was a theme that night, you would not be wrong.

 Isbell and his band the 400 Unit were one of a dozen or so acts playing the “Sailing Southern Ground cruise,” a four-day floating music festival put together by the Zac Brown Band. This quixotic, maritime voyage took us from Tampa to Grand Cayman and back over Labor Day weekend in 2010. American Songwriter pulled duty as the media sponsor.

 By day three AS had come to know the pangs of sea life. Snookies multiplied like Gremlins in the oversized hot tubs. Midnight buffet raids lost their magic. Guitar solos began to sound like caterwauls. One night we lost all grip on reality and conducted a series of on-camera interviews with hapless cruise-goers that we called “Experiments In Journalism.” Those videos have since been deleted from all recording devices.

 Isbell’s performances that week on the ship – I think we caught three or four – proved to be our only relief, and they would have been enough had we only heard “Decoration Day” and “Outfit.”

 The former Drive-By Trucker’s career has come far since that week on the Inspiration. His new album, Southeastern, has been met with near-universal acclaim. As a friend put it, “it just makes all other records look bad.” And as this issue goes to press, Isbell is about to play a sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of country music.

By Isbell’s account, his personal life seems to be at an all-time high, thanks in large part to a recent marriage and newfound sobriety. Southeastern documents – with a poet’s eye and without a trace of maudlin sap – his comeback story. It is not a confessional album per se. Themes of loss and redemption are woven into a larger tale, featuring a mosaic of characters that include killers on the run and cancer victims. There is a multi-dimensional quality to the writing that other songwriting “legends” would stumble in vain to capture.

I met the album’s producer, Dave Cobb, at a party recently and said closing track “Relatively Easy” was my personal favorite. He was surprised. “Really? That was the first song we cut. And those usually don’t make the album.”

The speaker in “Relatively Easy” recounts the suicide of a close friend, his own personal breakdown, and then curiously ponders the life of a stranger he passes in the street, wondering whether this man is alone or in love. He punctuates all this by telling his girl that “…  compared to people on a global scale / Our kind has had it relatively easy / Here with you, there’s always something to look forward to / My angry heart beats relatively easy.”

It’s a sentiment worth remembering.

Dale Murphy, Chief Knockahoma, and The Trail of Tears

I learned to lose early in life.

I have the Atlanta Braves to thank for that. 

I grew up in the 1980s in the wilds of south Alabama. The Braves were the only professional team anywhere near there. They were my team, and my devotion to them was unconditional. Their games were broadcast on TBS everyday during the baseball season, usually at 6:05 p.m. CST, right after the combo-punch of the Brady Bunch and the Andy Griffith show. You could say I pledged allegiance to Chief Knockahoma, the Braves mascot who lived in a teepee out in the right field bleachers.

I watched most of the games on TV from 1985 through 1990. During those years they either finished in last or second-to-last place in the National League West. They stunk like Bourbon Street on a Sunday morning in August. All these years later I wonder about the psychic toll of those beatings, which came day after day, year after year, from April ‘til September.

My hero was Dale Murphy, the Mormon golden boy from Portland. He played left-field when I first became a fan and they switched him to right-field a few years later. He’d won the MVP in 1982 and 1983. The numbers started falling a little bit after that but he still managed to hit 30 or more home runs on average for the next couple years.

I wore his jersey around the house – he was No. 3 – with my own last name stitched across the top. I had all his baseball cards, including his rookie card from 1978, when he was drafted in the first round as a catcher.

I tried to emulate Murphy’s style of play on the diamonds of the YMCA during the formidable coach-pitch years. Murph had a habit of slinging the bat frequently after a strike out. I used to let the bat fly myself in this fashion and one day walloped my brother in the head while I was making him retrieve balls in the backyard. My mom was watching through the window that afternoon as she did the dishes and saw the incident unfold. I recall that she came running out of the house, screaming, “What have you done?” as my poor brother just lay there, half-conscious and sprawled on the St. Augustine grass.

If Murphy was the Braves captain during those years, then Bob Horner was the first mate. He was a slightly chubby first baseman with blonde jerry curl locks who eventually ended his career in Japan. As my middle brother had blond hair he adopted the character of Horner during our battles on the sandlot. I still remember the time Horner hit four home runs in one game against the Expos, becoming the fourth player in MLB history to accomplish such a feat. I got to meet Bob at an autograph session at JC Penney’s one summer day in Panama City Beach, Florida, and he signed my Bob Horner special edition Sports Illustrated poster. It was rad.

My littlest brother was too small to wear a regular jersey so we dressed him in Braves pajamas for a few years. We assigned him the persona of Chris Chambliss, a used-up overweight bench warmer with a somewhat creepy mustache. Sorry about that. You deserved better.

Every summer, usually in August, our family made its pilgrimage to mecca, or should I say Atlanta Fulton County stadium, an uninspiring edifice built in the ‘60s that sat right off the interstate. We always sat in the left field bleachers. Attendance was dismal during those years so we basically had the entire section to ourselves. We wore our Braves jerseys, made signs in hopes of getting on TV, and took our gloves with the dream of catching a home run ball.

I probably went to eight or ten games during those five years and I doubt if the Braves won two of those. Shortstop Raphael Ramiriez would invariably make two or three errors, catcher Bruce Benedict would strike out four or five times, and bearded hurler Gene Garber would usually cough up three or four home runs. But I always believed the Bravos would come out on top, and that Murph would homer, if only because I was there.