Category: MISC

The Secret Gardens Of Music Row

Todd Snider is only a few minutes late for his American Songwriter recording session. He walks in sporting dark sunglasses and an old pair of Chuck Taylors, his hat cocked at a rakish tilt. It’s just after 11 a.m., but we’re impressed the man is even awake, given his reputation as a late-night bard of the gonzo variety.

“You know Elvis once stayed in this room,” Snider says matter-of-factly of his manager’s office, located in the old Spence Manor Hotel, at the tail end of Music Row. It’s an interesting bit of Nashville lore, and a bit surprising, due to the utter drabness of the building itself. From the street, it looks more like a place where Nashville Metro might run a sting operation through Craigslist.

But Elvis did in fact stay here (as did The Beatles), according to numerous historical accounts, when he’d come to record at RCA Studio B, just a block away.

Today, the old hotel now functions as a condominium and office complex. Beside it sits a swimming pool in the shape of an acoustic guitar – a curious bit of Nashville kitsch from the late ‘70s, when the Country Music Hall of Fame ran its operation across the street. The pool was a popular tourist attraction back then, modeled after the pool at the Belle Meade mansion of Webb Pierce, a country singer from the ‘50s with a serious flair for pomp and excess.

Snider tunes up his classical guitar (“a gift from a friend,” he says) and sound checks with Dylan’s “You’re A Big Girl Now.” He says he lived in this building in the early ‘90s, when he first moved to town. This singer of “agnostic hymns” seems like he’d be a fish out of water living on Music Row. Today, Snider could be dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of East Nashville, a weird province of Music City popular among artists and made up of working-class neighborhoods and housing projects. He can often be found holding court at Drifters, a local bar in the Five Points area of East Nashville, chatting it up and collecting song ideas.

Sitting in on this session with Snider (which you can watch on our website), learning about the room’s Elvis connection and seeing the guitar-shaped pool for the first time, you realize there are still some secret gardens on Music Row, and a few lost tales lurking in the shadows, despite the “office” feel of the whole area.

For instance, down the road from Spence Manor is the old Hall Of Fame motel, where Tim McGraw first lived (and drank) when he came to town. In that hotel bar he first met Craig Wiseman, who would go on to pen many of the singer’s greatest hits. In our cover story, McGraw also discusses palling around with Tracy Lawrence and Kenny Chesney during his early days in Music City, noting that Chesney at the time was trying to make it as a songwriter (and never talked about becoming a recording artist).

Dierks Bentley, another artist profiled in our country issue, says he rediscovered country music by catching bluegrass shows at The Station Inn. Located a half-mile from Music Row in an area called The Gulch, The Station Inn is one of Nashville’s musical treasures, a sure bet to witness great musicianship any night of the week. It was here that Bentley became a fan of The Del McCoury Band, who appear on his last album, Up On The Ridge, a string-band effort that features original songs as well as cuts by Dylan and U2.

We also look at the legacy of Gram Parsons, who to this day in still not in the Country Music Hall Of Fame. A Georgia boy who never had his sights set on Nashville, Gram’s influence reaches far and wide, beyond the scope of country music. He’s inspired more than one generation of artists with his mythic poetry, sense of style, and deep, blue-eyed soul. We hope he inspires you as well.

The Boss at South-By

Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old this year, and his ghost seemed to hover closely over the week’s events, especially where matters of Bruce Springsteen were concerned.

Springsteen and the E Street band played a near three-hour “intimate show” Thursday night at the Austin City Limits Moody Theater to a crowd of about 2,500. It was only their second show in connection with the Wrecking Ball tour, and the lucky entrants on this night were badge-holders who gained access to the show through a lottery system, and a who’s who of younger guns  at SXSW like Todd Snider and Glen Hansard.

Just after 9 p.m., Springsteen and his 15-piece ensemble strode onto the stage and broke into “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the Guthrie standard that gels nicely with the themes of loss and alienation that permeate so much of the Boss’s new album.

The show was heavy on tracks from Wrecking Ball, along with classics like “Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “The E Street Shuffle” and “The Promised Land.” It was also notable for showcasing the saxophone work of Jake Clemons, nephew of recently departed “big man” Clarence Clemons, a long-time pillar of the E Street sound.

At one point in the show, Springsteen kept repeating the refrain, “If you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here,” a gripping salute to his fallen comrade and presumably to Danny Federeci, the longtime E Steet keyboard player who died back in 2008.

The night’s most explosive moment occurred when Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine, The Nightwatchman) joined Springsteen onstage for “The Ghost Of Tom Joad,” another variation on the Guthrie theme.  Springsteen’s live version came off as an exceedingly angry and apocalyptic update to Woody’s “Tom Joad” ballad, a song Woody wrote after watching John Ford’s film adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. Morello, equipped with a guitar that bore the inscription “Arm The Homeless,” took the song to new chaotic heights with that progressive metal wail.

We had heard Morello play that very song with his band The Nightwatchmen just a few hours before at the New West Records party, and he introduced the tune by calling Springsteen a “link in the long chain of musical freedom fighters.”

Thursday night’s show was an encore of sorts for the Boss. Earlier that afternoon, he delivered the keynote address at SXSW, where he took a giddy and attentive crowd through the history of rock and roll, and his personal relationship with it. In his speech, he sought to unravel the interconnected relationship of his own musical fathers, from Woody to Hank to Bob Dylan and a bunch of others in between.

He said Hank Williams represented the “grim recognition of the chips laid down against you,” a sentiment that he said heavily influenced the writing of Darkness On The Edge Of Town. But, within Hank’s body of work, and country music in general,  he detected a toxicity that he found fatal. Woody’s music, in his mind, sought to answer Hank’s question of “why his bucket had a hole in it.”

The speech was also something of a personal manifesto, complete with a bevy of zingers, and it articulated the grand hopes and ambitions that Springsteen has for his own art. He challenged Lester Bangs’s famous declaration that Elvis Presley marked the last time that we, as a people, would know a shared musical identity.

Thursday night’s show was consistent with the keynote theme of a shared musical past, with several guest performers taking the stage. Reggae icon Jimmy Cliff played three songs, including “The Harder They Come.” Eric Burdon of The Animals showed up for “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.” Springsteen paid homage to Burdon in his speech, saying that the above-mentioned tune was the first time he’d heard “full-blown class consciousness” represented in song form. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” he said, informed every song he’d ever written. The Animals were also important, he said, because they proved that a rock musicians could be ugly, adding that Burdon looked like “your shrunken daddy with a wig on.”

The night closed with a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” with Morello, Arcade Fire, The Low Anthem, Alejandro Escovedo and others joining the E Street Band onstage. It was the third time we’d heard the song performed that day. During the keynote, Springsteen talked about playing it on the steps of the Capitol with Pete Seeger during the Obama inauguration. He realized then, at that very moment, that Elvis was not the last time we’d all agree. Thursday night’s show affirmed that.

Alabama Pines

I’ve been stuck here in this town
If you could call it that, a year or two
I never do what I’m supposed to do
I don’t even need a name anymore
No one calls it out, kind of vanishes away.
– Jason Isbell, “Alabama Pines”

North Alabama is hardly considered a breeding ground for cutting-edge music. It’s not often that you hear of a band making waves there, and the only reason a touring musician might stop in the area is to fill up the tank or grab a steak and beer at Logan’s Roadhouse.

All of which makes the story of the Alabama Shakes, our cover subjects for this issue, all the more exciting. The band springs from Athens, Alabama, a small, rural town of about 20,000 just off of I-65, about 20 miles south of the Tennessee line. Like most of small-town America, there isn’t much to do there when you’re growing up, except “drink, set things on fire and have pre-marital sex,” as lead singer Brittany Howard would put it. 

But despite its limitations in the world of entertainment, the region boasts a rich and profound musical legacy that has shaped the course of rock and roll. The Muscle Shoals area near Florence – which is about an hour’s drive west of Athens – is renowned for the records cut at F.A.M.E. recording studio, and later Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. F.A.M.E. alumni include acts like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, while the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio has housed sessions by The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon and, more recently, The Black Keys.

 

For the Alabama Shakes, it’s clear that the region’s musical past is not dead – in fact, it’s not even past. Ben Tanner, a former recording engineer at F.A.M.E., now plays keys for the band, and he talks about the Muscle Shoals legacy in our cover story.

It’s worth noting that North Alabama’s other great band, Drive-By Truckers, also came out of the Shoals area, with frontman Patterson Hood’s father David Hood having been an original member of The Swampers, the house band for F.A.M.E. during the ‘60s and later at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. DBT brilliantly assessed the region and its complex history – musical, political and racial – with the 2001 album Southern Rock Opera.

 

And Jason Isbell, a former Trucker and now an esteemed solo artist in his own right, still resides in the Shoals area. His song “Alabama Pines,” off of last year’s Here We Rest, is a haunting portrait of personal dislocation in a small town.

For our annual business issue, writer Adam Gold interviews a host of artists and industry insiders about how to succeed in today’s topsy-turvy music biz. It’s a grim picture, to be sure, and one that is littered with broken dreams and broken hearts. The upside, Gold writes, is that if you do in fact succeed, it will likely be on your own terms.

 

Some of the lessons to take away are to tour constantly, and build a dedicated fan base through a steady marketing effort. “Your music itself is a marketing tool. Before figuring out how to monetize it, work on figuring out how to get it heard,” he writes. “Then let the market decide what your worth is as a live draw, what your catchiest tune is worth to an advertiser, or how much self esteem a fan can get from wearing your T-shirt.”

The recent explosion of the Alabama Shakes seems to defy the conventional wisdom of the music business. They have not tried to fashion any kind of rock star image, or fit into anyone’s mold of what a rock band should look and sound like. As this issue hits newsstands, the band will likely be taking South by Southwest by storm, having been asked to play every showcase under the sun in Austin. So far, they have handled the buzz well, having just delivered a riveting performance on Conan in what was their national television debut. They are one of the few recent bands that actually live up to the “hype.”

 

One Of Us Must Know

I’ve seen one Dylan concert in my life. It was at Bonnaroo, back in 2004. The day was a scorcher. Bob wore a white cowboy shirt, dark sunglasses, and played organ most of the show, serving up covers of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho And Lefty” and Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” – two of my personal favorites in the American songbook.

Maybe he played these songs because he was in Tennessee and then again maybe not. I remember getting vaguely emotional during the performance of these tunes: my endorphins and ketone bodies were kicking hard that day, as I was undernourished, dehydrated and had been imbibing for what seemed like a month of Sundays at the time.

In that fevered dream I stood by myself and took in the show. I tried to attach weighty significance to the experience. I half-convinced myself that I was in the presence of a quasi-religious figure and that the show transcended mere entertainment … Of course this sounds ridiculous now, but it was my first Bonnaroo.

A friend marred the sanctity of my experience later that day when he said: “God that Bob Dylan show sucked! You couldn’t understand a thing. I didn’t even know what songs he was singing.” My face colored but I held my tongue. I felt like he’d just insulted my granddad or something.

Looking back on that show, the fact that I remember cover songs and not Dylan originals is a bit ironic, given that Dylan’s generally regarded as the cream of the crop when it comes to songwriting. But in a way it’s fitting.

In this issue, Ruth Gerson tells a great story about a private jam session she had with the maestro. “Don’t let them call you that [a songwriter],” he says, pointing to a critic’s blurb on the back of her album. “You’re a song performer, not a songwriter. You don’t write the song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.”

An interesting take by a man responsible for elevating songwriting to the level of high art. Most of the songwriters that have been featured in these pages throughout the years are indebted to him, if only for the fact that he created the pathway, as it were. Other artists interviewed in the issue, like Joan Baez and T Bone Burnett, have a long, intertwined history with the man. The Avett Brothers and a host of other young artists weigh in on Dylan’s influence and stature. The White Buffalo, an ascendant California singer-songwriter, says that “Dylan set the possibilities of songwriting free. To an utterly limitless level. He dissolved the notion of song structure even before it was discussed.”

Tracking Dylan down for an interview is no easy task. But Senior Editor Paul Zollo managed to do it back in the early ‘90s, when he was working for SongTalk magazine. The circumstances surrounding the talk were as cryptic as one might expect. Zollo was told the interview would happen sometime in the middle of the week, at a hotel somewhere in the wilds of Los Angeles.

We publish the interview here in its entirety for the first time, in honor of Dylan’s 70th birthday. In the wide-ranging discussion, we hear Dylan expound on a multitude of subjects. He declares that Hank Williams is the best songwriter that ever lived, and speculates that Jim Morrison may still be alive, riding piggyback on a donkey in the Andes. Some classic lines for sure. And his thoughts on songwriting are priceless.

And don’t miss Stephen Deusner’s thought-provoking essay on the modern Dylan albums, “The Reawakening Of Bob Dylan,” in which he argues that Dylan has redefined “how a legendary figure can age and grow and become more human without sacrificing quality or mystery.”

It’s that mystery which still keeps us listening – and guessing. How he’s managed to maintain it for fifty years is beyond me.

Buy the issue.

That Old Time Feeling

Guy Clark rolls another cigarette, fires it up, and then proceeds to spread his poison across the room. We’re sitting in his workshop at his Nashville home, where he’s agreed to play a few songs for us on camera.

For the last decade or so, the workshop has served as his sanctuary, so to speak, the place where he writes songs, builds guitars (which he marks with his own blood thumbprint), and gets down to the business of being Guy Clark.

It’s a surprisingly small space, given all that he does in it, but it’s not unlike the way he dreamed it, he says. A library of cassettes blankets one wall, with numerous offerings by Rodney Crowell, Tom Waits, and Mance Lipscomb, among others. At the other end sits his guitar work-station, where his tools are arranged neatly on the wall and in coffee cans. There’s also a poster that details the specs of a flamenco guitar. The first guitar Clark ever built, back in the mid-60s, was modeled after a flamenco model designed by esteemed Spanish luthier Domingo Esteso, and he’s made several like it since.

During our visit, the West Texas native plays three new songs, because “ya’ll need to hear them and I need the practice,” he says. He talks and smokes between tunes, tamping his cigarette into an ashtray decorated with skulls, a gift given to him by his friend Emmylou Harris.

One of the songs, “My Favorite Picture Of You,” is based on an old Polaroid of his wife Susanna. He pulls the picture out to show us. “Me and Townes were in that house drunk on our ass, being totally obnoxious,” he says, pointing to the pic. “And Susanna had finally had enough, and said ‘I’m leaving.’ I think John Lomax was outside and he took that picture. And for some reason, that has always been my favorite picture of her.”

The fact that Townes was complicit in this episode is not surprising. A long-time compadre of Clark’s and a fellow outlaw spirit, Van Zandt is a constant theme this afternoon, constantly cropping up in conversation. A black-and-white photo of the late Texas songwriter, taken in the early ‘90s, hangs high on the wall and looks out on the whole scene. “Townes always said he wanted to die here in this house,” Clark says. (Rodney Crowell is also referenced constantly. An oil painting of Crowell that Clark did hangs next to his own self-portrait in another room.)

Sitting here, listening to the songs and stories amid the heavy smoke and old photographs, you can’t help but feel the magic –especially if you’re steeped in the mythos of the Texas songwriting canon. We’re still smack in the suburbs of Nashville, to be sure, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. The plasticity of Music Row feels worlds away.

Clark turns 70 this month, a milestone that has birthed a double-disc tribute album, with guest turns from Crowell, John Prine, Hayes Carll, and many others. Willie Nelson serves up a great rendition of “Desperados Waiting For A Train,” a tune Clark wrote in his 30s about an old-timer of 70 years with a tobacco-stained chin. Talk about full circle.

It’s already been a pretty good year for the songwriter. On this day in late summer his new live album, Songs And Stories, recorded at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, is the number one seller in Amazon’s mp3 store. But he doesn’t seem to be too impressed by it. “My record label called to tell me that … I said, ‘Great, send me the check.’”

In his later years, Clark says he’s turned to co-writing more, due to the fact that “he got stuck and ran out of shit to say.” He says the last song he wrote completely by himself was “Dublin Blues,” back in the mid-90s. Instead, he now collaborates with whatever young gun he can.

Even at 70, Clark refuses to quit. He’s still lighting out after inspiration.

Buy the issue.

50 Ways To Write A Song

I discovered Paul Simon on MTV when I was in third grade, back when the video for “You Can Call Me Al” was on constant rotation. It featured Chevy Chase lip-synching the words to the song while a dour-looking Simon traded off on a variety of instruments. As I was unfamiliar with the work of Chevy Chase at the time, I assumed that this tall, tan, hysterical guy was Paul Simon. I now had a new musical hero. He was cool, funny, and made great music to boot.

This illusion lasted for about a month. I told my parents about my newfound discovery, which prompted my dad to pull out a dusty old Simon & Garfunkel vinyl from his record collection. The short one was there, with much longer hair, mind you, but the other guy was clearly not my Paul Simon. My mind had been officially blown.

I got over the hang-up, and the Graceland cassette entered into my possession not long afterward. For Simon, it was a watershed album that re-energized his career and earned him a whole new subset of fans. It now stands as one of the best albums of that decade.

As a songwriter, Simon is an American titan, one of the few that can be mentioned in the same breath as Bob Dylan. The writer Cormac McCarthy once quipped, “Simon told us what was happening [in the ‘60s], Dylan told us what was going to happen.” Indeed.

And why they haven’t awarded Simon – or Dylan, for that matter – a Presidential Medal Of Freedom is beyond me. So, Obama, if you’re reading this ….

In our exclusive interview, Simon comes off as modest and unassuming. He says he doesn’t write with any grand themes in mind, and is not trying to make a major philosophical statement.

For his new album, So Beautiful Or So What, Simon says he’s mainly just interested to see where the road takes him, given that the commercial landscape for music has changed so dramatically. He seems buoyant about prospect of continuing to write and play music, even at age 70, proving that age is only the province of a defeated spirit.

There has always been an elusive spirit to Simon’s music, and his songs, more often than not, are tinged with melancholy. The movie Almost Famous has a great scene when Zooey Deschanel’s character Anita plays Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” to explain to her mother her reason for leaving home. Today, in the age of Twitter and Best Buy, that song sounds like an elegy for a lost time, when running away from home was still a romantic pursuit.

Stevie Nicks is another seasoned artist who refuses to give up the ghost. Her latest album, In Your Dreams, her first solo effort in nearly a decade, features what she considers to be some of her finest work. The ‘70s icon discusses her unique approach to writing, and relates a funny episode with ex-beau Don Henley about writing “Dreams.”

Another great American writer, Brian Wilson, offers a lesson in synesthesia, explaining what colors he associates with the different keys of the musical scale. He also makes the case that pop music began to descend in quality after reaching its climax in the ‘60s. The reason: he says songwriters went out of business. To call Wilson self-effacing would be a grand understatement. The genius behind Pet Sounds – quite sadly – says he’s unsure if his music has brought any joy into the world. Well, we’re pretty sure it has.
And we certainly don’t think the quality of music has declined since the ‘60s. There’s as much good music being made now as ever before. It’s just a little harder to find sometimes, that’s all.

But if you’re looking for some great new artists, check out Nikki Lane, a live-wire from South Carolina whose debut album Walk Of Shame marries the twang of Loretta with classic punk swagger. Another standout is Beirut, the lo-fi orchestral folk project from Zach Condon. His new album The Rip Tide is definitely one of the year’s best.

Myth, Legend, Dust: The 2011 Bonnaroo Documentary

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=25831001&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0
Myth, Legend, Dust: The 2011 Bonnaroo Documentary from American Songwriter on Vimeo.

Editor’s Note: American Songwriter, July/August 2011

It’s late May in Nashville, and Justin Townes Earle is back in his hometown amid a short break from touring. For the first time in a long while, he finds himself walking the streets of Music Row – ground zero for a type of music he certainly doesn’t consider “country.”

Earle’s own songs possess a strong sense of location, and he appears to be an artist inspired by the spirit of a place. Music Row clearly isn’t one of them. “Should have waited to take my shower ‘cause now I just feel dirty!” he posts on his Twitter feed.

Justin’s father, Steve, developed his own allergy to Music Row in the mid-70s, where he moved in and out of a series of publishing deals, before finally releasing the critically-acclaimed Guitar Town in 1986. The elder Earle never considered Music Row to be a nurturing place for a songwriter. “Me and everybody like me … we have to take what we’re given,” he told American Songwriter in 2007. “Songwriters, especially the kind of songwriter I came to be, have to live in the margin.”

And live in the margin he did. In the late ‘80s, Earle released a handful of albums on MCA Records that moved from country to heartland rock to a sound he termed “heavy-metal bluegrass.” Today, Earle considers himself to be a folk singer more than anything else, a songwriter with the chops to make a living busking in the subway if push came to shove.

New York currently serves as the adopted home of both Earles. Steve pulled up stakes in Nashville several years ago and settled in Greenwich Village, paying tribute to the neighborhood’s folk music heritage on the album Washington Square Serenade.

For this issue’s photo shoot, Nashville’s Joshua Black Wilkins caught up with father and son on the boardwalk of Coney Island, that carny section of Brooklyn that was home to Woody Guthrie in the decade after World War II. Woody even wrote about the boardwalk, describing it as a place where “the prettiest of the maidulas, leave their leg prints in that sand/ Just beneath our love-soaked boardwalk, with the bravest of our lads.”

It was a fitting locale for our cover shoot, given that Woody is a guiding light for both songwriters. Steve paid direct homage to the legendary singer in the song “Christmas In Washington,” at once a prayer and call to arms for left-wing activism that also summons the ghost of Joe Hill, the songwriter and labor-activist for the Wobblies. “The Gulf Of Mexico,” off of Steve’s new album I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, also invokes Woody’s spirit. A modern day folk-ballad with a strong Irish lilt, the song traces the lives of three generations of workers who made their living on the water. The song’s denouement comes in the form of the oil spill, and we’ve seen a Gulf that has turned from blue to green to blood red.

Guthrie served as one of the touchstones for Justin’s album Harlem River Blues, an impressive song-cycle that imagines a cross-section of southern music through the prism of big city life in the 21st century.

“When Woody Guthrie was around, he wrote about what was around him,” the younger Earle tells AS. “He wrote about all these amazing new inventions, like the Grand Coulee Dam. He was taking an old form of music that he had learned in Pampa, Texas, and was translating it to a modern time.”

Earle’s most Guthrie-esque tune on Harlem River is “Wanderin,’” a roustabout tale that casts the protagonist as a sort of latter-day Huck Finn.

Now, my father was a traveler and my mama stayed at home
And she cried the day that he walked out and left us on our own
But now I’m older than he was when I was born and I don’t know
Which way is home so I’m wanderin’

In our story, the younger Earle says he’ll always consider himself “white trash from Middle Tennessee.” Buried beneath the wanderlust of his songs is the search for a home. Here’s hoping he keeps searching, at least for the sake of his songs.

Buy the issue.

Editor’s Note: November/December

It’s early October, and Nashville is still reeling from the moveable feast of music and madness that was Next BIG Nashville. For two days, the city hosted a music industry conference that attracted some of the best minds in the business. Top that off with four nights of music at venues throughout the city, with more than 150 bands from across the country that ranged in style from country to indie rock to hip-hop and electronic music.

It was a success on all fronts.

Music City, of course, has always been about more than twin fiddles and steel guitar. Anyone who lives here knows that. But, thanks to events like Next BIG Nashville, the city is emerging on the national stage as a hotbed of talent, for music and entrepreneurs of all stripes.

Kings of Leon, our cover subject and one of the biggest rock bands in the world, just happen to call Nashville home. Though they spent much of their youth traveling the byways of the South with their dad, an itinerant preacher, the band cut its musical teeth here, recording its first EP in Nashville, in 2003, when bassist Jared Followill was a stripling of 16. Buy the issue to read more.

Bull in the Ring

The Crimson Tide rolled over Virginia Tech Saturday night, grinding them into Conecuh County sausage. I had trouble focusing on the game. My concentration problems stemmed from a severe concussion I suffered during my freshman year of high school football, in a drill called “Bull in the Ring.”

“Bull in the Ring” was popular in the ’80s and ’90s, and is now verboten in the state of Alabama. Here’s how it works: one player — the bull — stands in the middle of a circle that is made up of the entire team. When a player’s jersey number is called, he sprints into the middle of the circle and locks horns with the bull, delivering the harshest blow he can.

“Football is not a contact sport!” our coach would yell into his megaphone, his voice crazed with rage. “Ballet is a contact sport. Football is a COLLISION sport!”

That fateful afternoon I was appointed to the position of “bull.” I had received a grade of “C+” on a Geometry test that afternoon, having failed to grasp the finer points of Pythagoras’s theorem. I was seething. I hit each player as hard as I could. I went balls-to-the wall.

I knocked the starting right guard on his ass and took the wind out of the place-kicker — he keeled over and began making sucking noises like a pig. The drill usually lasted two or three hits, but the brigade kept charging, like the bayonet assault at Little Round Top. And I kept laying licks.

Two hits later coach called 57, the number of Sage Arnold, the pillar of our defensive line. Arnold was a hulking brute of a nose guard. He’d come up in Mims Park’s vaunted football league, where for years he’d swapped blows with some of the biggest hicks in town.

Sage stood less than 5’6,” and his facemask extended below his neck, giving him extra protection. I can still see him charging at me. He came at you low and hard, with a bit of a waddle reminiscent of the Penguin from Batman.When we collided his facemask hit the underside of my jaw, jolting my brain into the base of the skull ….

I got my start playing Little League football for the Cottage Hill Rams. We won two games that season. We got our butt waxed (twice) by the inimical Municipal Raiders, then the juggernaut of the Mobile park league. The Raiders were coached by an arch-villain named Lamar Waters. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds and sported mirrored aviators on the sidelines. He was a badass.

He once commanded his biggest linebacker to dive over the line of scrimmage and spear our quarterback before the ball was snapped. It knocked our star player out of the game, and the Raiders were penalized 15 yards. But it was worth it to Lamar. His point had been made.

The Raiders had it all, back then. The bedrooms of each player were lined with trophies of plastic little football men, and cheerleaders accompanied them arm-in-arm when they snuck off in the woods for cigarettes. The future was not as bright. Most of those players are either washing cars and/or selling Oxycontin. Their brains were damaged by one too many sessions of “Bull in the Ring.”

That season I was forced to take ballroom dancing lessons on Monday nights. The rest of the team snickered when the three preppies had to leave practice early for the dance floor. In three short weeks I mastered the Fox Trot and the Cha-Cha-Cha. Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” was played so many times I still hear it in my sleep. Afterwards the dancers rolled over to Colonel Dixie, a fast-food restaurant off Old Shell Road with the best chili dog in town.

Years later, high school football provided more fireworks. Friday afternoons were marked by pep rallies and all manner of fanfare. We wore our jerseys to school and laid off the Mello Yello. We ate pre-game meals at Shoney’s, where we were limited to two yeast rolls and one serving of ice-cream.

During my sophomore year we got our butts kicked by Grand Bay, after the entire offensive line overdosed on caffeine pills. The hogs looked great in warm-ups, bursting with energy and bravado. By the second quarter the pills had begun to wear off. I can recall our right tackle lumbering around the field after missing a critical block. His legs had turned to jelly, and he was moving like he’d just come down with a dose of the clap.

Grand Bay was one of the worst teams in the region. The combined IQ of their starting defense did not break 1000. “You got out discliplined by Grand Bay,” our coach said after the game, amid the sweat, tears and lunatic ravings of our senior fullback.

The bus ride home after a loss was always a dreary affair. Talking was not allowed. Just sit quietly and think about how you let the school down. Maybe bum a dip of Copenhagen from Tolbert.

We rebounded from that loss. The next year we reached the state finals, where we battled Colbert County at Legion Field. We lost a heartbreaker, in overtime. But that is a story for another time.

We always partied after games, usually at Staple’s Lot, a deserted piece of acreage off Dauphin Island Parkway. The parkway, all aglow with the lights of the petro-chemical factories, seemed worlds away from the cool, blue lawns of Springhill. The Lot saw the occasional fight, as well as a lot of fondling in the backseats of Ford Broncos.

We bought beer on the Parkway (if not there, then from a Vietnamese man in Toulminville), with fake IDs that were meant to replicate those issued by the state of Florida. This was back in the days before the Patriot Law, when holograms were not required on licenses. Any fool with a Commodore 64 and a roll of Scotch tape could make one in hours. It was a great time to be a teenager.