For a couple of years in the late ’60s, the brilliant fantasist and raving egomaniac Harlan Ellison - excuse me, Harlan Ellison (TM) - wrote a frequently wonderful television column for the L.A. Free Press called “The Glass Teat” (collected and repackaged a couple of times in book form) in which he’d venture all over the pop-culture landscape, lambasting Nixon, plugging his various causes, name-dropping mercilessly, and occasionally writing about TV. When called on the fact that he’d devoted several column feet to such non-cathode-ray-related topics as the heavy-handed regime of Police Chief William Parker, the defense of Bobby Seale, or the new Three Dog Night tour, Ellison (TM) would just shrug and write, “Well, it appeared in a TV column, didn’t it?”

---

In Other Words: When a newspaper gives you a page to yourself every two weeks and doesn’t mind if you cuss in print, the temptation is there to veer off into areas only marginally associated with the topic you’re supposed to be covering. As a journalist, however, I understand the value of discipline, of economic prose, and of steady focus, so while I sometimes feel the pull of the wild tangent, I remain Your Faithful Book Columnist and vow not to get my Ellison (TM) on.

So, as I was at the 40 Watt the other night, after thoroughly enjoying the powerpop tsunami that is Casper & the Cookies and thinking about how more people should go out and see them and buy their stuff, my thoughts turned to the book I had just recently finished, an amazing piece of musicology and memoir called Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) by Dana Jennings.

The primal connection that every one of us has with music has been well-documented and is irrefutable. Music is as much a building block of our psyches as birth, tragedy, and the smell of Mom’s cooking, and whether we’re the sort who burns extensive mix tapes to soundtrack our lives or not, the music that surrounds us infuses us on a cellular level like oxygen. There is never any music greater than what was on the radio when we had our first kiss, no music sadder than what was playing when we encountered our first death, and everything that came after is to some degree, well, crap.

In his book, Jennings, an editor with the New York Times, memorializes the music of his boyhood spent in the deep-rural nether regions of New Hampshire in the 1950s and ’60s, a place where the Great Depression never quite got around to picking up and shoving off. With a journalist’s eye for detail and the nostalgic mixture of love and hate that comes from growing up hard, Jennings tells of his clan - his hard-working, hot-rodding, hell-raising old man; the uncles who vacillated between slaving for nickels and petty crime; and the aunts who went through men looking for just one they could count on. Days of dirt and smoke, nights of beer and ’shine, all against the backdrop of country music during its most fertile period, the jukebox years before Nashville took the genre over and homogenized it beyond recognition.

Throughout his memoir Jennings rhapsodizes about country music between (roughly) 1950 and 1970, from the wailing Hank Williams and the yodeling of Jimmie Rodgers through the rockabilly anarchy of Johnny and Carl and Jerry Lee and the other one with the funny upper lip to Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and Charlie Rich. Jennings punctuates his chapters with short remembrances about individual songs, why they were important, and what they meant to people who had nothing else, and it’s hard to argue with his conclusions: that you can’t hear Patsy’s “Crazy” or Faron Young’s “Hello Walls” and dispute that Willie Nelson was a genius from the start for writing them both. That Chuck Berry was more country than Tim McGraw. That Buck Owens should have his own constellation in the firmament. That God did in fact make honky-tonk angels.

Sing Me Back Home is far from perfect, of course. Jennings seems awfully intent upon hammering home the fact that he came from white trash, as if he’s spent a great deal of time refuting the notion that there are no rednecks up north, until you want to tell him we get it already. And like all good country fans, he’s an unapologetic sentimentalist, so be prepared to have it laid on thick at times. But the recollections Jennings spins are honest and unflinching and vivid, and his insights into the music are dead-on. Even if you wouldn’t brake for Brooks and Dunn if they crossed in front of your car, the book is a solid reminder of that time when country music was much, much more than just disposable pop with big hats.

---

More on Music: While Athens is no longer the town it was when I first got here, back when Pete Buck was still slinging records at Wuxtry, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a boy in a granny dress with a guitar on his back, and on any given night you had to puzzle out how to get to Hillbilly Frankenstein and Oh-OK and the Ratstabbers in the same night, this place still has an embarrassment of riches. The impeccably tight and infectiously funky HEAP Project. The infrequent but incandescent Supercluster. Captain #1 and The Brothers Gore and The Mudflapjacks and Bob Hay and the Jolly Beggars. So many great bands, so little time.

Reminds me of a book.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a book called Santa vs. Satan, which celebrated our fundamental need to invent imaginary battles between real and fictional people just to stroke our competitive lobes. While that book had just about every conceivable pairing, it was light in that area of dispute where so many of us have wasted our precious hours and brain cells: music. Hendrix vs. Clapton. Beatles vs. Stones. Springsteen vs. Seger (oh, please). Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam. Who rocks more definitively? Who was more prog, more punk, more crunk?

Music journalist Sean Manning has compiled a crack team of contributors to settle many of these burning (and not-so-burning) questions in Rock and Roll Cage Match: Music’s Greatest Rivalries, Decided (Random House, 2008). While many of the essays contained in this collection cover the perennial arguments - Led Zeppelin vs. Black Sabbath, Lennon vs. McCartney, Michael Jackson vs. Prince - the interesting arguments are the ones you never saw coming. The Stones vs. Velvet Underground? Hard to imagine, given the wild disparity between them on virtually every level, but from postpunk legend Richard Hell’s perspective, there’s a comparison to be made, which he does with great thoughtfulness and insight. Devo vs. Kraftwerk? I honestly thought I couldn’t possibly care until I read Tom (Touch Me, I'm Sick) Reynolds’ piece.

Some of the views are based purely on their own merits (Van Halen vs. Van Hagar - a no-brainer) while many of the decisions are deeply personal (Marc Spitz on The Smiths vs. The Cure, Dan Kois on R.E.M. vs. U2). Some are just balls-on funny, like Whitney Pastorek deciding Whitney Houston vs. Mariah Carey, based on whose public psychosis was more entertaining, and Katy St. Clair’s nigh-operatic tale of the seething bitterness and thirst for vengeance that fuels Abba vs. The Bee Gees.

Like Santa vs. Satan, Rock and Roll Cage Match is as ephemeral as the arguments in it (though Bernard Herrmann vs. Ennio Morricone is fascinating, even if they’re not rock and roll - or are they?), but it can’t be denied that these kinds of arguments matter to us. As I stated earlier, our music, whatever it may be, is as vital to us as food and shelter and every bit as worth fighting for. Manning’s collection is a veritable hoard of ammunition.

Which reminds me of something I was pondering the last time I went to see Effie’s Club Follies… actually it doesn’t. I just wanted to plug Effie’s, our hometown burlesque troupe that combines the time-honored traditions of cheesy jokes and G-strings and pasties with an edgy punk sensibility and wry social commentary. And boobies. I’ve seen them several times and they just get better every time.

How good are the Effie’s girls? Well, they appeared in a book column, didn’t they?

John G. Nettles