Month: July 2023

Cormac McCarthy and American Music

The No Country for Old Men author, who died last month at 89, lit a fire in the belly of some of the greatest American songwriters

Rolling Stone. July 3, 2023.

For a writer who spent most of his career outside the limelight, the outpouring of public admiration in the wake of Cormac McCarthy’s death on June 13 at 89 testified to the power of his work. An obscure figure with a cultish following for much of his writing life, McCarthy had long been esteemed by members of the literati. The late literary scholar Harold Bloom placed him on his very short list of American authors in the 20th century who had in their writing achieved the sublime, naming him alone as “the true heir to Melville and Faulkner.”  

Nearly three decades into his career, McCarthy found mainstream success with the publication in 1992 of his Western epic All the Pretty Horses. Later, he would achieve greater renown when the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2008. But it was his 2005 parable about a father and son navigating a post-apocalyptic world, The Road, that first catapulted him to household-name status, winning him a Pulitzer and landing him on Oprah’s Book Club list. More recently, in 2022, McCarthy released two companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, a suite of stirring swan songs that stand as a fitting coda to his challenging and brilliant body of work. On the day of McCarthy’s death, Stephen King said that he was “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time.”  

But for all the merits of his art, it was the “American language,” as historian Shelby Foote once put it, that was perhaps the true star of his novels. McCarthy wrote in cadences that many likened to the King James Bible (though much of his late work was marked by a more stripped-down prose style approaching that of Beckett). McCarthy’s imagery is strikingly visual and the rhythm of his prose has a sonority to it that, when read aloud, flows like music and puts most capital P poets to shame.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that among the hosannas following the news of his death, something interesting began to emerge: The prose-poet of Homeric proportions had left his mark on songwriters and musicians too. Social media was dotted with tributes from those in the music world who felt compelled to acknowledge McCarthy’s influence. Songwriter Jason Isbell, who’s talked before about his reverence for the Tennessee-bred author, might have said it best: “How many of us did he influence? Immeasurable. I could go onstage and say ‘this next one was influenced by Cormac McCarthy’ and literally sing any song I’ve ever written.”

Bruce Springsteen has checked McCarthy among his favorite writers, telling the New York Times in 2014 that Blood Meridianwas a “watermark” in his reading. The Road, he added, was the last book to make him cry. And McCarthy is also a darling of Tom Waits, who apparently was hipped to the writer long before the author’s mainstream arrival. Nick Cave, who helped compose the score for the 2009 film adaptation of The Road, also counts himself as an admirer. “It’s clever, that book,” Cave told Radical Reads in 2018, “because the environment that they’re living in is so unremittingly pessimistic that he’s able to weave this extraordinarily sentimental story about the love between father and son and completely get away with it.”

Hataałii, a 20-year-old Navajo singer-songwriter from Window Rock, Arizona, whose new album Singing into the Darkness came out last month on Dangerbird Records, tells Rolling Stone that his worldview had been shaped by the novelist.

“Because of McCarthy I figured out that the desert was more than just a void, but rather it was filled with spirit and that the people who truly live in the desert see things differently,” Hataałii says. “There was a sudden appreciation and immense respect that I now held for the history of the area and even the landscape formations, which saw me and every other generation that came before me, and that I was simply in line with my ancestry and that me and my ancestry were the same thing.”

Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen is something of a Cormac super-fan and collects first editions of his novels. He once had designs on purchasing McCarthy’s Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which the novelist had used to write all his novels, when it went up for auction at Christie’s in 2009. Keen was prepared to spend $50,000 but bowed out after the bidding hit that figure in no time. “It shot through 50 like butter, man, like boom!” Keen tells Rolling Stone. It ended up going for nearly a quarter-million to “some guy in a blue raincoat, like in the Leonard Cohen song,” he says with a laugh.

McCarthy’s influence found its way directly into Keen’s songwriting. His 1998 album Walking Distance contains a five-song concept piece that loosely tracks the trails of The Kid in Blood Meridian, from the eastern United States into Texas and then down into Mexico. He wrote the songs in the first-person and set them in the present day, as opposed to the mid-nineteenth century when the novel takes place.

It’s the imagery in McCarthy’s prose, Keen says, that’s inspired him most. He mentions McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), as an example. “He’ll talk about some steps going up to the porch, and how the moss is a certain color and it’s still sort of moist and it gives you that feeling that you’re really back there in the shadows in eastern Tennessee, and how cold it is and wet it is, at the same time without ever really saying it’s cold and wet — he’s just talking about the moss. He taught me that it’s about the importance of the imagery within a piece of writing, or even a song, and does the imagery mean anything in and of itself, no matter if it seems off-track.”

As a devoted reader of McCarthy, Keen is also in awe of his “narrative [gifts] and that ability he has to make a story that doesn’t have a real obvious trajectory,” he says. “And the stories never really wrap up. Time just sort of continues … I have to say he’s really spoiled me as a reader, so I just keep re-reading his books. Other than Henry Miller or even Emerson maybe, I never found writing like his that really grabs me and makes sense to me.”

McCarthy’s most pronounced influence on the American songbook comes in the form of The Last Pale Light in the West, a 2009 album inspired by Blood Meridian that was written and recorded by Ben Nichols, best known as the frontman for Memphis rock band Lucero. The album features seven story-songs based on different characters from the novel (“The Kid”, “Toadvine”, “Chambers,” et al.), set to acoustic guitar, pedal steel, accordion, and piano. 

“If I had set down to write a concept album about a Cormac McCarthy novel, well, that just sounds terrifying,” Nichols tells Rolling Stone when asked about the chutzpah it must have taken to translate a novel like Blood Meridian into song form. “Just doing it piece by piece by accident, just for the love of the words [is how it happened] … I wanted my dad to hear it. He’s a big Western fan. And so I put together these little short stories to songs, taking snippets out of the book and putting them to music. It just started as a little project to amuse myself. If I had known what I was actually pursuing, I might not have done it.”

Read the rest of the essay at Rolling Stone.

Point Clear in the ’80s: A Remembrance

Point Clear was a special place in the 1980s. It was a kids’ paradise. It’s where you learned to ski, pop a wheelie, and fight without really hurting your opponent. It is where you learned to operate a Stauter. You wore Jams shorts and carried Throwing Stars in your pocket and you knew for a stone-cold certainty that the Soviets were your enemy. 

I remember the unmistakable scents of honeysuckle and wisteria, Capri-Suns and Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil. The town dripped with atmosphere, and the damp air wrapped around you like a blanket. The live oaks that lined the Bay — writhing, ancient grotesques with arms that twisted and dipped over the boardwalk, nearly touching the sand — we scrambled barefoot over, like spider monkeys crazed on sugar. They are the best trees in the world for climbing and the Bay opened up to the sky with its promise of a never-ending day. 

In those long, amphibious summers we spent as much time in the water as on land. No one would have been surprised if one of us had sprouted fins. On some instinctive level the water represented freedom and a sense of possibility that you did not have in Mobile. Even as kids of six or seven, we understood the significance of what we had. 

The Bay was still the color of chocolate milk along the boardwalk in Point Clear. I don’t remember any talk from the parents about the Bay being unhealthy. Swimming with cuts on your knee — a near constant — was never cause for concern. But I do recall the dads wearing T-shirts that read “Mobile Bay: Together We Can Keep It Alive.” And the Bay was alive. That it could be otherwise was an ominous impossibility, edged far on the periphery, along with the sense that something precious could be lost. 

Hit It 

Learning to ski was a rite of passage that dominated the agenda in the early days of summer. Ski school started early and the moms were the instructors. They ran a tight ship. Every kid had to learn to ski and there was no such thing as a pass. Tubing had not yet entered the picture and though hydro-sliding was popular it was very much on the side stage. When it came to skiing, there was definitely a sense of competition over who could get up first. 

We learned on four-foot, yellow Cypress Garden trainer skis that were fastened together with a rope. One of the moms, the one not on boat duty, was positioned in the water to hold you steady and give you an extra shove. When you gave her the go-ahead she’d yell “hit it” and the driver would floor the Stauter. 

Once you got up on trainers, it was difficult to dart in and out of the wake, and there was not a lot of opportunity for showing off.  You mostly just glided along with your thoughts and waved to idlers on their wharves until your arms got tired and you finally quit. Once we learned on real skis, we were certain it would be a different story. 

Catfish Pond 

Fishing off the wharf was a daily enterprise. For bait we used mussels we’d managed to dig out from beneath the surface of the Bay, cracking them open with a hammer to get to the meat. We fished with brightly colored Zebcos purchased at the mini-mart down the road. Spinning rods and reels were reserved for the dads. We dared not use those and risk getting the lines all tangled and cattywampus, which would have incurred their wrath. 

We mostly caught catfish in those summers. There was a section near the end of the wharf — the wharves were rickety and weathered then and not like the showpieces you see today — which we named Catfish Pond. You would catch one there every time. One night my granddad stepped on one and got an infection in his foot from where it finned him. Naturally, we vowed revenge. From then on any catfish we caught was summarily bludgeoned and used as bait for the crab-traps. Beaver, the family golden retriever, looked on with bemusement. Our methods were wantonly cruel, but it seemed right at the time, convinced as we were of the collective guilt of catfish. 

I don’t recall any redfish being caught. Occasionally one of the kids would snag a speckled trout, and once someone caught a flounder with a grape. The incident bloomed into a folk legend that continues to this day. 

The Bells 

I remember hearing the bells at dawn, heralding a jubilee, something I’d long heard about. A few hours later the Igloos were running over with crabs and flounder. What the hell did we do with all that food, I wonder? The anticipation of the bells was like listening for the sound of reindeer hooves the night before Christmas. 

Keys to the Boardwalk 

When we were not on the water, we were on our bikes. Our turf stretched along the boardwalk from the Grand Hotel all the way to the Punta Clara Kitchen candy-store (where, we were convinced, there lived a witch). I don’t remember ever having to check in except for lunch and dinner. These were not the days of helicopter parents. I don’t think anyone ever got hurt or lost, and the ice-cream man was not someone to be feared. 

The movie Rad had done for kid bike-culture what Karate Kid had done for the martial arts. I rode a candy-red Mongoose, my prized possession. Not the fastest ride on the street but it got the job done. It was decked out with pegs and wheel-spokes the color of Skittles. I rode it proudly, without a helmet of course. 

We rode to the gas station next to the Grand Hotel to buy baseball cards, the coin of the realm back then. At the time a pack of cards (15 cards, 55 cents) came with a stick of pink gum that tasted like cardboard. You traded cards constantly, carefully weighing each negotiation and never entering into a trade without anxiety. There were a few instances of alleged theft, including one involving the then-coveted 1987 Topps rookie card of Andre Thomas, a now-forgotten Braves shortstop. 

May the Best One Win 

It was not all about the kids. The parents had their share of fun, to be sure. And the fun was not always rated PG. At some point in every summer, a group of moms, sporting short hair and the oversized, tinted sunglasses that were fashionable at the time, took part in a competition known as “The Boob Contest.”

This atavistic ritual involved the contestants standing up and performing gyrations while balancing on a black inner tube, Miller Lites and cigarettes in hand, topless as Woodstock in the pagan days of yore. This was not something we kids witnessed, but being kids, we had caught wind of it. Although it may have been hidden from our sight it did take place in the bright light of day under the watchful eye of God. Not sure if there was a single presiding judge or if a committee was appointed, but the winner was awarded a plastic gold trophy of a single, naked boob. 

Adventures in Babysitting 

The teenage baby-sitter was an important personae in this drama. Casting usually involved a girl of 12 or 13 — cheap labor for the parents. The babysitters, for the most part, were generally cool and not strict disciplinarians. They taught us jokes above our reading-level and gave us lessons on gender-bending by way of Boy George’s music. There was one bad apple in the mix, however. He was a guy of about 15 who drank Budweiser longnecks in tandem on the wharf while we slurped Kool-Aid and cannonballed into the water throughout the hot afternoon. We were quite disturbed by his prodigious beer consumption. When we asked him how old he was he just replied “old enough.” He was fired but no charges were pressed. 

The Fry House 

One summer my family stayed at the Fry House. I’ve been told that it served as an ad-hoc hospital for soldiers during the Civil War. It stood on the boardwalk about 13 houses down from the Grand Hotel and at the time it was one of the more decrepit edifices facing the Bay — a planter’s version of the Boo Radley dwelling. There was no air-conditioning that summer. I recall the whir of enormous ceiling fans, endless PB and Js, the flare of heat lightning over the Bay, and a black-and-white television playing Braves games and the videos of George Michael and Crowded House on constant rotation. 

Epilogue 

Summers die, but the memories don’t. I’m grateful for my child- hood summers spent in Point Clear. To this day they come back in the Technicolor of my imagination, clear as the jubilee bells at dawn.

— from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS.