John Hiatt is not Snap-Chatting. I didn’t need to drive to Tucson to know that. I knew that from here. But I did need to drive to Tucson to see him play a solo acoustic show because that’s what you do when you’re worried it’s all going to shit. When you’re scared the good’s gone, everybody’s on RAYA, that that one reliable purity of sadness just ends in apathy - that everything ends in apathy -, that it’s all moving in a blind, drunk direction of tech-savvy, ADD addled dip-shittery. When the unequivocally timeless last passage of “Underworld” gets neglected, dated in a card catalogue. When the whole goddamned point becomes so hollow that it threatens to fold in on itself, devouring you ass to mouth like a Ouroboros black-hole. When you’re underemployed and maybe you fucked up for one many too many times…well, that’s when you drive to Tucson to see a John Hiatt show. Duh.
No, John Hiatt is most certainly not Snap-Chatting. And you’re not listening to enough John Hiatt. Nor should you be, necessarily. I’m not here to look down my nose at how people choose to consume or occupy their time here. If all the good parts got their due, there’d be no super hero movies and I could afford to live in Bushwick, and where’s the fun in that? “Ars longa vita brevis” somebody once told me in an email. It’s not like Bernie was ever gonna win, shitheads.
There’s so much going on, and I really have no clue – and that’s not the affectation of the grumpy, the misanthrope’s safety net. I want to know. Some Norwegian kid named Kygo (Kygo is most certainly Snap-Chatting) has accrued over seven hundred billion hits or plays across the various platforms (the Spotifys, the Soundclouds). That means that I had to have clicked on a Kygo click, give or take, 100 times, and I’m pretty sure I never clicked on a Kygo click (there’s 7 billion people in the world?!? Stop having kids, you Ninnies!). And good for him! Take dead aim at the rich boys, Kygo! All I’m saying is that I don’t get it. Read those not-even-THAT-made-up numbers again. 700,000,000,000. Sidenote/afternote: Kygo’s first studio album is due out in May. Of 2016. So, Kygo (I’m gonna keep calling him “Kygo”) has had everybody on earth listen to one of his songs 100 times (okay, maybe some people don’t have the internet, so some kids have listened to his songs 200, 300 times…and I’m certain both my Mom and Dad have never listened to a Kygo song, so there are another 200 hits unaccounted for. I haven’t either. 300. My third grade teacher, Miss Havricka…she may have listened 25 times, so another 75…this is a b-word – I can’t run the fucking metrics right now!). Seven-hundred billion listens from less than twenty tracks, most of which are just motherfucking re-mixes. Other people’s songs souped up on the same machine he jerks-off with. Honest, I’m not trying to be crass, I’m just saying: You’re not listening to enough John Hiatt.
This isn’t a history lesson on J-Hi here. It’s not a tongue-in-cheek retrograde fuck-off to prove that I’ve been doing my semi-obscure under-the-radar-crime troubadourial homework. I just want to talk about something other than myself for a second and how it’s been affecting me. John Hiatt’s been making me feel. So here are three John Hiatt songs that make me feel. Really feel.
REAL FINE LOVE (Stolen Moments, 1990)
No song in the history of songs has been able to contain all the contradictions quite like this one. And somehow, he captures it in the opening drop-D lick. “Me against the World, let me smother the earth in kisses.” That’s not the lyric, but that’s how the sound feels. “It doesn’t matter if I still think I’m better than everyone with no proof. I wanna run up that Mountain and through these wall studs I’m tired take everything I have. Baby Girl.” It’s all right there in that lick.
I thought I had a line on somethin’, baby, no one else could say
They couldn’t find it in their hearts to just get outta my way
But outta nowhere and from nothin’, you came into my life
I’ve seen an angel or two before, but I’ve never asked one to be my wife…
Hope can drive a man insane. And hope in rock n’ roll, well, tread lightly or next thing you know you’re clad in Chris Martin’s day-glo patch pants singing with Beyoncè at the half-time…shit – maybe hope is the answer. Nah. But there is a hope with which J-Hi sings that’s rooted in the loamy dim of knowing. And the wash of cool cadence with which he punctuates even his self-deprecative lyrics (see: those first two lines above), mark that of a Man who’s never said “Well, I wanna kill myself” for a laugh. Hope is okay. But never act like you’re better than the knucklehead you’ve been.
You’ve got a real fine love…
You’ve got a real fine love…
One I am unworthy of…
You’ve got a real fine love, Baby…
1:3. 1:3…1:3? 1:3!!! That’s it! (Sorry, I just figured this out on the fly, and, it being a b-word…) That’s all it is. One part self-effacing, three parts resilient. You gotta be shitting me. I had the recipe backwards this whole cock-sucking time.
John Hiatt digs Women. Not like, like, Blake Shelton or T-Pain digs women. J-Hi knows, as a Man, that there’s nothing better than tapping into the strength in vulnerability. Because there’s nothing more freeing or arresting, more fun or fucked…nothing more more than being at the love and mercy of a Dame. J-Hi never leans on the martyr meter (alright, maybe sometimes, but he’s a fucking songwriter), and he knows when he’s lucky to feel again. Because maybe the other shoe jumped over the moon, but that thing could drop-n-kick you tomorrow while you’re swimming in the bi-polarity of the mystified tides of...fuck. I don’t know:
Maybe it’s just a little thing, the way I feel tonight:
A little joy, a little peace and a whole lotta light…
This is all objective sonic and lyrical assessment – as close to facts as I can get. Also, at 3:40 of this tune, he lets out a scream that translates to (to the best of my knowledge): ‘Just shut up, Thompson. It’s pretty fuckin’ great.’
Buffalo River Home (Perfectly Good Guitar, 1993)
Before he played this tune in Tucson, he peeled off an anecdote about the summer of love (’67) and how many hits of acid he and his knucklehead buddies ate in the Indiana sticks. I guess that was the entirety of the story (they ate a lot), but he followed it with an assessment of his brain: “I used to say, after that summer, my brain was runnin’ on, you know, 80/20 – 80 percent brain to swiss cheese. 20 percent swiss cheese…holes.” Then he tuned a few strings. “Then it got to, you know, 70/30.” Tuned the other few. “60/40.” Grabbed a capo. “Now, probably 50/50.” Looked out at the crowd, at me, started the song…“40/60.”
Obviously, I was giggling at the story. His delivery made me want to hang out (with him) mostly because I’m crazy enough to think that he stole the bit from me (we both get the steady laugh --> cricket decrescendo). But when I contextualized that bit and song pairing, when I connected the dots between the two and me in the speckled blotter of time, it made vaguely clear the question I’ve never been able to answer and always ask: What the fuck have I done?
Let it be known that this tune (and more so the record cover of “Perfectly Good Guitar” – J-Hi in the tall grass, 40 years old, baggy khaki shirt unbuttoned, shades, guitar under a casual arm) bled uncool to me when I was growing up. It seemed (to my idiot self) the whitest shit in the world – and I was listening to Lyle Lovett and Traci Chapman, for shitssake. It was the unbuttoned shirt. And I didn’t like the phrase “Buffalo River Home” for whatever bratty fuck-head reason. But I’m glad, in a sense, because at the suicidal age of thirty-suckit, this song and I have had a nice dalliance in understanding absolutely nothing about ourselves. And being kinda cool with it.
I’ve been takin’ off and landing, but this airport’s closed…
How much thicker this fog is gonna get, God only knows…
My Man doesn’t strike me as the kinda guy who ever had a Plan B. And, as a guy who would suck dick for a Plan B right now (ea-sy – I didn’t say “suck dick AS a Plan B”), I can tell you…nothing. I can tell you to listen to this song. And I can say that there is a special place in my heart for “Oh My Sweet Carolina”’s self-serious reflection and confrontation of the lonely desperation we encounter out there, wherever you are, Kid, when you’re in your mid/latter 20’s. But you get older and it gets tired dressing the lonely in serious.
To get sad at the sad – that’s where you run into trouble. Believe you me. Or Believe Me me. What makes this song perfect is that, sonically, it bops a sunny-day shuffle groove behind the lyrical sentiment of “Everything led to here. And here is pretty fucking similar to back there, you elder-Sot.”
I been circling the wagons down at time square…
Tryin’ to fill up this hole in my soul, but nothin’ fits there…
But the music lacks even an iota of self-pity. It’s not like it’s trying to cancel out the desperation or break even in sentiment. Simply: Why kick yourself while you’re down? I can’t help but picture the Scarecrow heel-clicking down the Yellow-Brick Road – “I would not just be a nuffin’ with my head all full of stuffin’, my heart all fulla pain // I would dance and be merry, life would be a ding-a-derry…if I only had a brain.” (That hits way too close to home. I regret making that connection.)
Just when you think you can let it rip,
you’re pounding the pavement in your Daddy’s wing-tips…
as if you had someplace else to go, or a better way to get there…
As odd as it sounds, (with the above exception) I’m not huge on regret. The only times I regret are the times I have allowed myself to think that good things were gonna happen (there He is). The benefit of growing up is the past, and the past is just a pile of forked roads and a billion beers. Should you have gotten a job-job? For sure. Is it gonna work out? Probably not. Does it matter? A little. Am I happy? Pass. Am I a more attentive lover and do I marvel at a cold Heineken every now and again? Physically, probably not but hopefully. Spiritually, I really think so. And, yes – I do.
The answers to questions don’t matter: this is where you were gonna be the whole time. Just don’t get cocky because the comedown is a cunt.
Before I Go (Crossing Muddy Waters, 2000)
This tune may actually have more to do with me than I had hoped at the onset – but, I mean, as completely objective and forthright in my journalistic merit as I have been, let’s allow some leniency here.
I graduated high school in 2001, and that spring was asked to speak at a ceremony (not the ceremony – some sort of tented picnic thing. Somebody probably had a feeling I’d be a fledgling fuck-wad screenwriter someday) to garner a few yuks from the graduating class. For whatever reason (the psychedelic sentimental is my best guess – but when is it ever not the psychedelic sentimental?), I opted out of giving a speech that would make the faculty blanche and decided to play this tune. I’m an adequately crap guitar player and I know I think I have a better voice than I do because it’s not very good and I think it’s decent. So I had to have been pretty spun to take option .) Sing a John Hiatt Song. I wasn’t such a shithead, I guess.
Before I Go. He counts the song in, boot-stomp strums the verse phrase for ten seconds, cue the mandolin, repeat the phrase, and by the twenty second mark if you haven’t completely given yourself over to the song, well, Partner, I wish you all the best. Sincerely.
I’ve been sleepin’ for some hours / just woke up and you were there…
Like the morning, like the flowers / sunlight whisperin’ in my ears…
Oh, right – and then he starts singing. It’s gospel, it’s country, it’s blues, it’s rock n’ roll…it’s J-Hi. He sings about Love in a way that makes you wanna line up the Brothers Doobie and penalty kick them each in the giblets.
Psychedelic isn’t “His hands and feet are Mangos,” and I’m guessing that’s what I had discovered back in 2001. There is no more psychedelic music than post “Bring the Family” Hiatt. Reflecting, accepting and questioning, wagging a laughing finger at the eternally unknowable. Put it all in a blender before it rots and drink it down. Therapy is for the birds because it’s all right there – but let the birds be. Be wary of love until you’re not – be everything till you’re not. And you can be alone, Man…but you’re not alone. “Hope is okay.” Did I say that? Switchboard Susan, all you are is Hope. Hope and some science.
I will try, I will stumble, I will fly – He told me so…
Proud & High or Low & Humble – many miles before I go…
Many Miles Before I Go.
John Hiatt walked out onto the stage in Tucson, blazer baggy and jean-fit relaxed as the day is long. He was 1:3 – 3 parts humble, 1 part grumpy. The crowd was median aged 61, Tommy Bahama clad. We didn’t meet, J-Hi and I, but I know what he would have said had we stolen a moment – “You drove from L.A. to see this show?” And I would have shrugged: “Life would be a ding-a-derry…as if I had someplace else to go or a better way to get there…”