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Faking
It
Some
time ago, a guitarist friend of mine called me in a fit of
mild despair. He had decided to begin writing his own material
and couldn’t find the artistic confidence to write songs of
the sort he was most interested in. This was in the middle
’90s, when the alt-country, No Depression thing was really
in full swing, and inspired by Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks
and the like, he was acoustifying in an Americana vein—and
completely unconvincingly, to his own ears.
“I
drive a Saab,” he complained. “I work in advertising. I live
in the Berkshires, for God’s sake. What am I doing writing
about the Kansan sunset?”
Authenticity’s often a thorny issue for art consumers. For
example, in the pages of No Depression magazine, the
bible of my friend’s favorite genre, there was a nasty little
correspondence war being waged over whether or not Palace’s
Will Oldham was the real deal or a precious faker, whether
his version of the music of hill country and coal mine was
permissible given his career as a TV and film actor. I think
it was the dB’s Peter Holsapple who wrote in to suggest that
Oldham would be “hoist on his own petard.”
So, to comfort my earnest and insecure pal, I cited a mutual
favorite album, asking, “And what’s Springsteen doing writing
about killing convenience-store night clerks?”
I suggested, “Just lie, man. Then put it to music.” To prove
my confidence in my advice I suggested that we both write
songs about Kansas, a state I’ve never even visited.
>From
my shelves I pulled an atlas; wherein I learned that Kansas
has rust- reddish soil and an aquifer named the Ogallala,
which is critical to the agriculture of the southwestern portion
of the state. I also picked up a couple of place names—Dodge,
Great Bend, Wichita—and their geographic positions relative
to one another. And I found out that Wichita was a big meatpacking
city.
Research done, I used the four chords I knew to write a song
called “Wichita Slaughterhouse,” which told of a rural Kansan
boy who leaves his hardscrabble farm for greener pastures,
only to wind up depressed and lonely as a Wichita boarding-house
resident, spending his days working in the bloody slop of
an abattoir and his nights missing the stony fields of home.
OK, so here’s a short list of things I know absolutely nothing
about: Kansas (excepting the aforementioned tidbits, and the
fact that my dad was born there); farming (from husbandry
to hours of operation, the whole thing’s mysterious and frightening
to me); aquifers (I don’t even know enough for parenthetical
wise-assery); and slaughterhouses (I’m pretty sure I was supposed
to read The Jungle in 10th grade, but after the first
couple of chapters of My Antonia, I was done with assigned
reading for that year). Oh, also tuning a guitar by ear and
writing useful bridges, but that’s a talent issue—different
problem.
To test the success of the song, I decided to play it live
at a local bar that, at the time, was a favorite Sunday night
haunt of musicians and songwriters. Inevitably, these very
late nights broke out into very informal and sloppy open mic/jam
sessions. It was a perfect place for a critique. Since most
of the folks gathered were friends, I decided to fib about
attribution, too, telling the audience that I learned the
song from my grandfather, who in his youth had worked a Kansan
rail line. Also a lie. In point of fact, my grandfather was
himself in marketing and advertising; he represented a giant
poultry concern. (Hey, is that sorta like farming?)
One of the audience members, a guy I grew up with, asked archly,
“What railroad was that again?”
“Um,
it was the M&M . . . the S&M . . . the Texas A&M,
something like that. You know, the big one.”
The song went off without a hitch (with four chords, there’s
only so much room for error), and fit in well with the tone
of the evening. One guy did a song by Gillian Welch, another
turned in a cover of an Uncle Tupelo cover of a Depression-era
Louvin Brothers song.
Now, some of the people in the room may have been to Kansas;
I don’t know, maybe someone in the room had farming experience.
But I’m pretty sure that not one of them had survived the
Depression (though a couple of the guys in the room were from
western New York, and might’ve had a pretty good sense of
it.) But in a roomful of Northeastern, mostly college-educated,
mostly middle-class musicians not one of the rootsy, anachronistic
songs suffered from inauthenticity. It’s just not a pertinent
concept. My song made as much sense as any other and, I thought,
wrested the metaphorical petard out of the hands of the sanctimonious
gatekeepers, the self-appointed Granters of Permission.
I’m not saying that it was a good song (again, that
talent thing), and it certainly wasn’t an honest song.
It was as inauthentic as could be—and purposely. But whatever
its problems and shortcomings, the song didn’t suck because
it was fake.
The whole process, from challenge to performance, took a couple
of months; in which time, my friend moved out of the Berkshires
further north. So, it was some time before we could catch
up again. I told him, with a note of minor triumph, I’m sure,
of the experience. I was curious how his own writing was coming,
if he had managed to complete his phony Midwestern ode. His
tastes had shifted some, though. He was listening less to
alt-country and more to—sheesh—Alabama.
And, he noted with pride, he had successfully completed some
songs he thought were really solid—songs about fishing. He
knew a lot about fishing.
—John
Rodat
jrodat@metroland.net
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