I have him to thank for any inkling I gained thereafter of who was, and who was not, and who only seemed to be, and of how in the last case I was bound to be disappointed but in the first case I might just be surprised. (Or was it the other way around?) I have him to thank also for my knowledge of how the Goochland fags reached out to one another with their fast hallway doubletalk, and their obvious (to anyone looking) signals at the football games, and their late-night flashes of headlight (not in every case seen or returned) meant to make for themselves, as Mr. Jefferson’s heteros all tried and failed to do, a commonality of instinct and vim.
Although I did not shine my own headlights into those woods, and blew no more than the trumpet at football games, and never learned enough of their language to say more than hi in an unlit parking lot, I did gain a respect for these people that was wholly unbegrudged and neither demanded nor proscribed by any personal politics of mine. (I had none then and only pretend to have some now.) Nor was my respect for their kind a mere novice respect, such as one might have for those who had ventured into town before one, alone or with like-minded others, to meet strangers at the roller rink, or on rides at the wanting state fair, or to seek a momentary solace at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so that in time I might follow in a carload of my own sort, and grope a punkish tomboy forced by our number to sit too close to me, and be stopped at the Henrico County line by a trooper turned evil by the roads out there, who charged us with having too many in the car, which law we neither knew of nor agreed with but which nonetheless saw us headed back the opposite way, in chastened silence, toward those parched fields and those judgmental stands of pine.
Better, then, to have been a true country queen, for there were fewer of them, and hence fewer who were likely to be turned back before they could reach town and inseminate, or else be inseminated by, what paltry notions obtained there. Better to have had cause to study the southern laws with more thoroughness than my associates and I ever did, and so forgo a grand waste of expectation and gasoline, and so avoid a surrender to the truth that town welcomes not those who approach it head-on, in desperate and silly numbers, with colored hair and a conceit that they are different, but rather those who come forward quietly and obliquely, in smaller units, bearing with them an old and unassailable difference, to offer their openings to what suburban monsters await and to what corporations will, out of need and avarice on both ends, eventually agree to grant them employment.
1 Mostly we were only listening to the radio up there, and I insist that we were well within our rights to seek out some idea of music beyond what Flatt and Scruggs had to offer, or the Carter Family, or the New Lost City Ramblers, blers, one of whose whooping bluegrass numbers actually inspired in me, while we still lived in town, a vivid and not wholly unprophetic nightmare. To be fair, my parents also played Buffy Sainte-Marie on the old town stereo they guarded jealously in their room, so that such phrases as “the love of a good man” and “I’m going to be a country girl again” acquired for the rest of us a hideous connotation. They gave Woody Guthrie a whirl too, and Arlo, and the young (that is, the rural) Bob Dylan, and Judy Collins (singing rural Bob Dylan), and the interchangeable Ian and Sylvia, and all those unctuous Weavers, and Odetta (who I admit was real fun when we were little), and Josh white (who I bet gives every kid the creeps), and the arthritic and comically slow Lightnin’ Hopkins, and later on some John Prine, and Ry Cooder, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, each song bearing with it, somewhere, in lyric or in intonation, an implication that the naturalistic choice was clearly the adult choice here, when in fact it was patently childish; the modest choice, when it seemed to inspire only a great arrogance; the human choice, when in fact it succored animal distrust and, given time, the political prerequisites of an organized death.
So what if Cat Stevens reverberates against the walls of a dilapidated farmhouse now and again? If it is forever the sun-drunk “Morning Has Broken” and never the more apt and suburban “Father and Son” it cannot count for much; it will hardly drown out the other, more horrible sounds heard there.1a What we got from the radio in my room was not exactly an antidote to this bucolic sickness, for Richmond and Charlottesville alike beamed out at us no end of field- and stream-themed rock, yet for every assault on our souls by Poco or the Little River Band there was at least a palliative in some effort by an odder outfit to agitate and console us.
Should I therefore proceed to list the thirty or so bands that “meant the most” to me during my adolescence, ceding for the duration of that list all music of mine to chance and addled namers? should I pay special attention to what is claimed now, by bespectacled and aging salarymen, to have been the proper choices then? should I bend my memories to suggest that an ignorant pseudo-farmboy might actually have cared about, and managed somehow to predict, what the conventional wisdom1b would be decades beyond his own childhood? Should I bravely claim that the bespectacled salarymen might have been off by a significant band or two, which half-honest stance would only legitimize the remainder of their lies and so work to confirm the slick orthodoxy that has risen up during the course of my lifetime to maximize record sales, which goal has always required the tempting of taste down the American death chute?
Perhaps, because it would seem “counterintuitive” and therefore especially brave, I might champion a band the salarymen have not shunned at all but rather too easily anointed (those sales figures cannot be ignored: they represent a generation listening, and a generation listened to: they are a generation listening to itself1c), which the spectacle wearers deprived of salaries (interns in this equation) have all agreed, in open and easy rebellion against their more sold-out peers, to call crap, by which everyone else, from the salaryman to the “hip” listener unable anymore to trust his or her own ear, comes in time to understand is indeed crap.
Why not, then, go against salaryman and intern and listener alike? why not argue, with one’s own money derived from a hardly more subtle form of corporate entertainment (and one’s reputation from a peer group only slightly less impressed with, if no less annoyed by, the actual number of units shifted), that everyone is wrong here: the salaryman on account of a shallow cynicism, the intern on account of a shallow skepticism, and the listener on account of a fickle buoyancy in the wake of this silly debate, which cannot help but result in a compromise among the already compromised? Why not simply explain, with a couched concern for what face is thereby risked (which pose one imagines to be “refreshing”1d), why this bit of craft with a guitar, or that bit of cleverness with a console, is worth far more, to anyone who with a pure heart hears it, than the backlist sales will ever show or deny? Why not claim that the open state of my hormonal template when I first heard those sounds could not possibly impeach the regard in which I hold them now? Why not confuse subjectivity with sentimentality, as so many have agreed to, and why not apply both idiocies to a commonplace end? Why not assume the mask of earnestness as if it were the same thing as honesty, and why not present this “honesty” as if it were the same thing as truth? That is (and I ask this with the utmost sensitivity, and honesty, and a heartfelt desire to be objective), why not lie?1e