Author: Caine O'Rear

Caine O'Rear is a writer and editor based in Mobile, Alabama. He is the former editor in chief of American Songwriter Magazine. Follow him at www.instagram.com/caineorear.

A Blessing after the Curse

Before the Drive-By Truckers took the stage Thursday night at Plan 9’s Carytown location, Jay Leavitt , who manages the store, told the crowd of 200 or so that he had checked the concert listings for all of the great rock ‘n’ roll cities in the world that night. And he said, in all earnestness, that there was no better place for any music fan to be than at 3012 W. Cary St.

“This is the center of the music universe tonight,” said an emotional Leavitt, who has known DBT’s Patterson Hood since their boyhood days in Florence, Ala. “Blender [magazine] called them America’s greatest rock band. I call them the world’s greatest rock band.”

Judging by the intensity of Thursday night’s crowd — Mike Cooley also called them the best in the world towards the end of the show — it’s safe to assume that most of the fans in the store that night would agree with Leavitt’s remarks.

And the show was special for other reasons. For one, it marked the 25th anniversary of Plan 9, the independent music retailer that started in Carytown and has expanded throughout the state. But most importantly, it was a benefit for the Bryan and Kathryn Harvey Memorial Endowment Fund.

During the middle of the show, Leavitt, also a close friend of the Harveys, said that every cent of the proceeds would go towards the fund. He then thanked the Truckers, whose compensation included a case of beer and a fifth of Jack Daniels, for playing the show. Leavitt spoke touchingly about the Harveys, and told DBT how much their song “World of Hurt” had meant to him this past year. “That song is a song of hope for me,” said Leavitt, who concluded his remarks by saying, “It’s great to be alive.”

And it wasn’t just another show for the band, which has a long, loving history with the River City, dating back to the days of the Capital City Barn Dance. After taking the stage for the encore, Hood said, “From the bottom of my heart, this is the most important show, for me, our band will play this year.”

It was also one of the more impassioned shows they’ve played. Recently, DBT has been opening for The Black Crowes, which means they have to play 40-minute sets. As an opening act, Hood said their audience usually entails a sober crowd that is just walking through the door. So, for this show, they were like a beast that had just been let out of its cage. “We’ve been looking forward to Richmond where we can turn it up and play what we want,” Hood said.

And turn it up they did. Some of the highpoints of the night included “My Sweet Annette,” a countrified sh–about cheating on your old lady with her best friend. “This song’s about our first tour,” Hood said in his raspy north Alabama drawl. “Some of the names have changed, but the facts are the same.”

Another highlight was Jason Isbell’s rendition of “Moonlight Mile,” the closing track on the The Rolling Stones’s “Sticky Fingers” album, which, to these ears, strongly influenced DBT’s latest, “A Blessing and A Curse.”

To close out their first set, the band played “Let There Be Rock,” from their album, “Southern Rock Opera.” “This song’s about how rock ‘n’ roll saved my life as a teenager,” Hood proclaimed over that crunchy opening guitar riff and solitary drum-kick. And then the beautiful scene of the whole crowd pumping their fists in unison, singing along to these words:

Dropped acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert, 14 years old

And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me


On my way home got pulled over, in Rogersville, Alabama


With a half-ounce of weed, and a case of Sterling BigMouth


My buddy Jim was driving, he’d just barely turned 16.

All in all, a magical night.

Old Business

Prostitution is not a new enterprise in the City of Richmond, or anywhere else in Christendom for that matter.

But, according to many Richmonders, more people are practicing the world’s oldest profession in River City than ever before. At the City Council meeting on Sept. 26, a number of people from a civic association in Battery Park , which is located on the citys North Side, testified to the severity of the problem in their district, citing instances of prostitutes “flashing” innocent bystanders, as well as non-camouflaged sexual activity between prostitutes and johns occurring in the clear light of day. The association’s members said they loved Richmond, but they did not love what the non-stop trafficking of sex was doing to their property value, and their children’s worldview.

After listening to the litany of complaints from the residents of Battery Park at the meeting, Councilman Chris A. Hilbert (3rd) vowed to introduce legislation in the near future that would help stem the tide of prostitution in Richmond.

Hilbert had already introduced one initiative to help combat the issue, recently hosting a Town Hall-style meeting with the Richmond Police Department in which local officials and the public discussed ways in which to address the problem. During the meeting, Police Chief Rodney Monroe presented a slide show of prostitutes that had been known to work the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor. One slide featured a transvestite prostitute, whom an audience member knew was camped out at the Red Roof Inn. The police chief made one call, and the prostitute was arrested there minutes later.

This year, the RPD also launched “Johns TV” on the citys public-access station, a controversial program that airs the faces of all those who have been convicted recently of soliciting a prostitute in Richmond.

On Sept. 30, this writer had the opportunity to witness one of the police departments undercover sting operations, which on this day happened to target johns.

From 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., I sat in an unmarked car with an RPD lieutenant in a parking lot across the street from a motel on Chamberlayne Avenue, where a rotating cast of female undercover officers from the RPD posed as prostitutes. The operation began at noon. By the time I joined the lieutenant, the department had already arrested four johns.

“Believe it or not, there is a demand for sex during the day,” the lieutenant told me, tongue-in-cheek. It is well known, even among non-shoppers, that the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor has long been a hotbed of prostitution in the city. Other popular spots include parts of Jefferson Davis Highway, First Street and West Grace Street.

The lieutenant, who shall remain nameless, had been working the prostitution beat for seven years. He said the volume of sex traffic had been relatively constant during that span, although he said there seemed to be a slight upsurge this year, at least on Chamberlayne Avenue.

“They seemed to have all migrated here,” he said.

The undercover officers who may or may not be armed, it’s their choice – were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, standard garb for female prostitutes in the city, the lieutenant said.

“They don’t look like they do on TV here, like they did on that HBO special,” the lieutenant said. “If theyre dressed up, theyre going to be a man, and those only come out at night. And some of the transvestites look rather attractive from a distance.”

Here’s a how a deal would go down during the sting: The johns would drive by and see the undercover pacing up and down the sidewalk, often twitching so as to imitate some kind of drug withdrawal. The john would pull over to the side of the road and talk to the officer, who would dictate the terms of the agreement. The officer would then “make the case,” which means that the john would agree to offer “something of value,” i.e. money or drugs, for some type of sexual activity ($20- $25 for oral sex and $30-$35 for intercourse are the standard rates, the lieutenant said).

The undercover officer would lead the john to the motel room, where two uniformed officers would be waiting to make the arrest. Once the arrest – a Class 1 misdemeanor – had been made, the RPD would issue a summons for the john to appear in court. The lieutenant said they did not have a problem with the johns appearing for their court date. A “SWAT” team was also camped out in the area, in the unlikely event that the operation went haywire.


During the hour that I was with the lieutenant, two arrests were made.
The johns run the gamut of the social order, from blue-collar workers to teachers to doctors and lawyers, the lieutenant said. “I’ve even some johns who were prominent members of a church,” he added. But no pastors. Just some deacons or such.

He said they dont see many johns that are repeat offenders, but he said they do arrest many of the prostitutes multiple times.

The lieutenant estimated that 99 percent of the prostitutes were addicted to some kind of drug crack, cocaine and heroin being the most popular.

Asked where prostitution sat on the department’s priority list, the lieutenant said near the top because prostitution went “hand-in-hand” with violent crime. “There’s more to it than sex,” he said. “Some of the girls rob the johns. And some of the prostitutes have been murdered.”

(Richmond.com, October 2005)

Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now (Q&A)

How does this album exactly define the word “revolution”?
 
The Revolution starts now in that it starts as soon as you wake up and realize that it’s been going on with or without you, and that your input is needed. I’m not a believer in violent revolution, but only because a lot of people learned that for me, that came before me. I don’t blame the shape the country’s in on them –I blame it on us. I blame it on people that think like I do that went to sleep, that became less involved. And I think the part of it that people have a hard time getting through their heads is there’s never going to be a time that we can coast. Our brand of democracy just doesn’t –and I’m not sure any brand of democracy- lends itself to that. Ours definitely doesn’t. I don’t really have a problem with conservatives –I don’t agree with them. But these guys that are in power right now aren’t conservatives, you know, they’re neocons, which aren’t conservatives. What scares me more than anything else right now is we’ve got liberals that are afraid to call themselves liberals, and conservatives who won’t say out loud that this guy isn’t a conservative and he’s running the country into the ground, because he’s not [a conservative]. These are not conservative policies. I voted for Bill Clinton twice, the only Republican that I ever voted for. And he was a lot more conservative than Bush ever thought about being, with most of the thing conservatives are normally worried about.
 
In the liner notes, you used the word “immediate” to describe the atmosphere surrounding the recording of the new album. Is this an album just for these times, or is it meant to reverberate beyond that?
 
Some of it is just for this second, but some of it is not. I think “The Revolution Starts Now” is for all times. And I think Rich Man’s War could be about any war. It’s about three wars that are going on right now.
 
It takes an interesting turn with that last verse.
 
Yeah, well the deal is the people who sit around and decide it’s time for us to go to war very rarely get shot at, and I think that’s part of the problem.
 
Is it harder for artists to speak out and be heard now than it was, say, during the Vietnam era?
 
Well, we’re just living through this weird little pocket of time we’re somebody came up with this bizarre idea that it wasn’t appropriate for artists to comment on the society that they live in. That’s a new idea.
 
Mark Twain said the artists are the true patriots.
 
That’s it. That’s what Kerry meant when he was speaking before all those artists and said, “you are the heart and soul of America.” It probably wasn’t his best way to phrase it, but that’s what he meant. We’re people, you know, and a lot of us come from pretty humble backgrounds. And I come from a moderately humble background. My dad was an air-traffic controller and a GS-13 when he retired. We were comfortable but there were five kids.
 
You’ve started to write poetry and prose over the last few years, as well as paint and act. Has working in these mediums had any effect on your development as songwriter?
 
Oh yeah, I think “Warrior” would have been completely impossible without my involvement in theater. It would never have occurred to me to write a spoken-word piece in iambic pentameter if I had not been heavily involved in theater for the last five years.
 
Who are you trying to reach with the new album? I think it’s pretty safe to say that the people who have bought your other albums will buy this one as well.
 
Yeah, they will. I’m trying to reach the people that have been quiet and aren’t O.K. with what’s going on. They know something’s wrong, but haven’t been comfortable with saying something about it. I think that’s happening and that people are starting to look for something. The reaction to this record so far has been so overwhelmingly positive. It’s very early but it’s much different than when Jerusalem came out. I had the usual squawkers [with Jerusalem]–the people I was trying to piss off, and they responded the way that they normally do.
 
And that was mostly just because of John Walker’s Blues.
 
Yeah, and with this one I even got a four-star review in the New York Post, which kind of concerns me. My one-star review for Jerusalem [in the N.Y. Post] is one of my prouder moments. It’s been much easier to get [this album] on radio so far. It’s the second day out, we’re number five at Amazon, and that’s a pretty good indicator for me. I’m an adult artist, so I sell records at Barnes & Nobles and Amazon and Borders –those are my biggest retail outlets. I think I’m hoping to reach people that are not necessarily hard-core progressives but are starting to realize they got lied to. It’s regular people that will go and die if we keep pursuing this policy we’re pursuing. And it won’t end in Iraq. It’s not designed to end in Iraq. It’s really insane. They’re talking about us never not having troops in harm’s way. That’s what they want, and it’s not their kids.
 
Truman said Korea was going to be a police action over the weekend.
 
Yeah, and we’re still there.
 
You’ve helped a lot of young bands and artists get their start with E-squared. I’m thinking specifically of Marah and the V-Roys. Was that a way of doing the same kind of thing Townes and Guy did for you?
 
Yeah, producing records and signing bands like that was a teaching process. I like to teach – I do sometimes. But I try to approach that [producing] as a teacher. And some people are more teachable than others, and sometimes it’s a better experience than others.
 
Any advice for aspiring young songwriters?
 
It’s tough nowadays. Always be willing to do the work, but always be suspicious of anything anytime anybody asks you to change the art itself, because probably the people that are asking you have never made art before. Especially if someone who has never made any art before tells you how to make art, you should definitely process that information very, very carefully.
 
Would this album have come out differently had you spent more time writing songs and recording in the studio, or do you like the sense of urgency it has?

It would have been different and it probably wouldn’t have been as urgent. I think it was made exactly the way it needed to be made and I’m pretty proud of it.

(American Songwriter, 2004)