OPENER

OPENER

I was struggling to find my way into this intro to CREEM’s country issue when a startling bit of news came to my attention:

SiriusXM program director Jeremy Tepper, perhaps the greatest expert on outlaw country music I’ve ever come across—and just the nicest guy you could run into at a Dwight Yoakam concert—had died suddenly at 60 of a heart attack.

I mention Jeremy here not just in tribute, but because he was one of a few influential music lovers who set me on the bottle-strewn path to the artistic love of my life: country music. Around the turn of the millennium, when I was fumbling to assemble a country four-piece of my own called the Sharky Favorite Band and he was DJ’ing a Country Night on Mondays in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as DJ RigRocker, we shared a bond as a couple of urban cowpokes living in a Strokes world. Sure, people dug what we were doing, but because of the NYC post-punk revival lapping up all the oxygen, we were never at the front of the line.

We were basically a country section in America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine.

I, however, had fallen in with a crew of libertine media rascals (they were everywhere back then), so it was easy for me to throw on cowboy boots, a Western shirt, and a big stupid belt buckle and still hold court at hipster mecca Max Fish without anyone batting an eye. The Julian Casablancas clones didn’t consider me a threat, and the Chloe Sevigny types even saw me as an appealing departure every now and then. Everybody won. And best of all, I never had to put on skinny jeans. I wore boot-cuts, much more comfortable and cooler-looking in retrospect. I was enjoying active alcoholism and drug addiction with the most interesting people in New York City, and I didn’t have to worry about fitting in because I already didn’t—I was the cowboy guy.

Okay, that covers the style. But where did my love for the music come from? I guess it sprang from being an Elvis fanatic in high school, then letting that pebble ripple through the waters of the other cool cats of the 1950s. As I reached college age—probably as much through peer exposure as from expanding tastes— I got into headier, heavier modern material, stuff that was a lot angrier and more of its time. It was an odd blend coming out of my speakers, the wide-eyed faux rebellion of the ’50s and the raunchy-guitar nihilism of the ’90s. Jumping between Eddie Cochran and the Pixies made for some great parties in my dorm room, but I admit, it left me feeling like I was stuck between two very different worlds.

So there I was a few years later in New York City, still stumbling along, clutching my Little Richard tapes and my Ritual de lo Habitual CD. But now I was careening headlong into my 80s, and I could no longer ignore the gaping spiritual hole in my record collection. I was getting older, and I needed to hear more about consequences, real-life loss, the truth of it all, delivered in plain English. Oh, I still craved music that was stripped down to its barest essence, popping with those primeval hillbilly-cat beats and chords. But I also wanted my day-to-day experiences reflected back at me: friends pushing it too far and dying from self-abuse, relationships going south, people dealing with isolation. Fuck teen angst, I needed some adult angst music. It was time to get countrified. Thanks to guides like the RigRocker, I was a quick study.

And what a time to take the plunge. In the early 2000s there was just enough of a resurgence to bring in the big acts to NYC, but you could still see them in some ridiculously intimate ways. I got to watch Willie Nelson and Family play from 10 feet away at a little joint called Tramps, then go take a piss, and then still get to watch them from 10 feet away. Every other week B.B. King’s club in midtown rolled out a big name—Marty Stuart, Jerry Jeff Walker—and you could usually grab a beer with them after the show. I had an impromptu booze-fueled moment on stage with guitar legend Sleepy LaBeef at the Rodeo Bar where we ripped through Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” (an easy choice, it has two chords). I was flown out to Austin to perform at the SXSW premiere of Alexandra Pelosi’s poli-doc Journeys With George, for which I had provided the soundtrack. Imagine that, a sloppy guitar-slinger like me pressing the flesh with future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I even got on my hero George Jones’ tour bus after a show at a casino in Connecticut. This would be my crowning anecdote if George had actually been on the bus, as opposed to his wife sitting next to a large box of autographed mouse pads, her hands stuffed with suckers’ cash.

So why am I using a bunch of 2O-year-old stories to break the seal on CREEM’s country issue? Because it’s more fun than pontificating on where country sits within the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll (it’s fucking everywhere) and how country really is rock ’n’ roll and how there’s this T-shirt of Johnny Cash flipping the bird and what’s more rock ’n’ roll than that and on and on and who the fuck cares. No amount of pontificating will get you closer to understanding country music than putting on “The Door” by George Jones and having a good cry.

(Incidentally, for the first several years after I got sober in 2010,1 had three rules: Go to AA meetings, do my Step work, and never, euer listen to George Jones. Over the past quarter century, his music has gone from being the soundtrack to my boozing, to an undeniable trigger in early sobriety, to, these days, a bittersweet reminder of how bad it got and how much better life is now, especially with oF George solidly back in the rotation. Time heals all associations, and country songs are still my reference points, the ones I fall back on when life goes pear-shaped.)

I could go on and on about those days: Doc Holliday’s in the East Village with its unimpeachable jukebox; Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn giving EVERY local country band a gig, almost to a fault. But let me just end with this last joint: Among the handful of country-centric venues at the time, the Village Idiot on the West Side was the ultimate shit-kickin’, peanut shells on the floor, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”-on-repeat venue. There were always two girls working the bar with nothing on top but straw hats and black masking tape across their nipples, and there was never once a shot ordered that these 5-foot-3 honky-tonk angels wouldn’t themselves slam back with fearless aplomb.

A couple evenings after Sept. 11, 2001, a band of soot-covered zombie heroes stumbled into the Idiot from Ground Zero and commandeered a large table in the center of the room. Pitcher after pitcher followed, then shots. The whiskey bottles were actually out on the table, I’d never seen that before or since. The girls even took off the masking tape. I asked one of these gentlemen why he chose the Village Idiot to end his nightmare of a day, sifting through rubble for God-knows-what, and I’ll never forget what he said:

“I’ve seen a lot of unspeakable things today, and I’m numb from it. This is the music that really makes me /ee/ something."

It’s still the best description of country music I’ve ever heard.

DAN MORRISSEY