Tony Peyser's "Blue State Jukebox"
December 15, 2005
Donal Hinely's Giants
Tony Peyser's "Blue State Jukebox" Review -- December, 2005 Edition
Before I get to the review, I have a little Christmas stocking stuffer to pass along. In case you haven't seen it up on BuzzFlash already, Eric Westbury (Blue State Jukebox, February, 2005) has posted an MP3 of "We Three Kings (Of America Are.)" This appropriately curdled song for the holidays is a progressive's dark delight that delivers a cynical lump of coal to all things evil and corporate. You will love hearing this on your computer but the White House will make sure the president never hears it on his iPod as it would result in yet another bicycle mishap and embarrassing photos all over the "internets." Here's where to find the song: http://www.westburyroad.com/news.html.
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Oddly enough, the wry Westbury from Canada has a sensibility that reminds
me of a sly Texan who now calls Nashville home: Donal Hinely. Conveniently,
Hinely has a new album called Giants and it's one you don't want to miss.
I was a fan of Hinely's 2002 release, We Built A Fire, especially
a track called "Hey Paul Revere." He entered the mind of a G. Gordon
Liddy listening, Charlton Heston worshipping and NRA loving militia member
in such a subtle
way that some right wingers might not have known they were, as the Brits
so eloquently say, having the piss taken out of them. It was the kind
of song that made me want to see what Hinely did next.
The breezy second track on Giants feels sort of like "American Pie" -- the song, not the movie. In the chorus, Hinely pines for a time "before music was a product/when everybody sang and everybody danced." (He didn't go too far a field from this thought as the song is called "Before Music Was A Product.") These lines vividly paint a picture of the birth of the blues: "Glass on steel cutting through the cotton/From the Mississippi Delta up to Memphis town." And a mandolin sweeps through this spirited song like wind through a wheat field.
Another backward glance comes in "Talkin'
Cheap Trick Blues." With a slowed
down, laid back pace, a grown up Hinly cops to a wishful fondness for
cruising in a Chevy Malibu with Cheap Trick's "Live At Budokan" blasting
on his Tri-axle speakers. (I have no idea what Tri-axle speakers are
but I know Hinely does and some of you may, too. I am, however, assuming
they're
loud.) What makes this not just seem like his punching a cherished single
from his personal jukebox is each successive verse shades the story a
little:
"Maybe that dates me, makes me unhip/But you ain't lived son ‘til you've
made that trip/It was far too quiet in a Texas town/So I cranked it up
with the windows down/Flying through the night with the Dream Police/And
40 thousand adolescent Japanese." What Hinely describes plays like a
lost scene from Richard Linkater's Dazed and Confused, that
buoyant, music filled
comedy-drama from 1993 set in Texas in the 1970s. The capper is when
Hinely confesses that, like parents of all ages, he will eventually be
horrified
when his kids hear the music from his youth and can't get into it at
all. Sweeter still is when Hinely tosses in a few especially applicable
lines
from a famous Cheap Trick track: "Momma's all right, daddy's all right,
they just seem a little ... weird." I wasn't a Cheap Trick fan but that
catchy refrain from "Surrender" floated back into my head from an innocent
time before, uh, music was a product.
On the aforementioned We Built A Fire, "Gasoline" was about
an unhappily married woman who talks to her husband about running away
and eventually
does just that. Johnny Bellar's exquisite dobro playing managed to briefly
cover up the sadness under the wanderlust. There's a similar woman-leaves-man
situation on Giants but "Blue Ink" is many times more powerful.
The pace of "Gasoline" was kind of frenzied to capture the mood of someone
impatient to take off. But in the haunting "Blue Ink," Hinely quietly
retraces the steps of a woman who's torn because she still has some love
left.
A songwriting class could teach a lot if they asked students to write songs based on Hinely's premise: a man comes home, his wife has gone but left behind a diamond ring and a note. I'm sure some memorable lyrics would be written but I doubt they could top what Hinely has done. Even more than in his other songs, he starts with a personal problem only to reframe it as something universal: "Nothing burns as bright as illusions/The heart wants to believe/And nothing is as black as the cold truth/Written down in blue ink." David Henry's cello gives the proceedings an elegant air but it's the pump organ he also plays that between the notes gently reveals a broken but still beating heart.
A lot of memorable things have and will continue to be written about the global mess Bush has made. Republicans hated Bill Clinton but I can't think of any songs inspired by his presidency. That's perhaps because Republicans are always better at tearing things down than building things up. There seems to be something in the GOP psyche that genetically resists creativity.
That thought brings us to the title track on Hinely's album. On the surface, "Giants" is his "Abraham, Martin and John" with an extra John (Lennon) thrown in for the missing Abe. (Nice timing, too: last week marked the 25th anniversary of the former Beatle's death.) Here's how Hinely revisits the King assassination: "And I wasn't quite five when America burned/I know 'cause they interrupted 'As The World Turns'/Momma held me tight as she rocked and she cried/As the fire spread from Memphis all through the night." When it's time for the chorus, Hinely makes a Big Statement without being preachy: "Carve all the names in a monument wall/Come gather 'round the flames and pretend nothing's wrong/While the smallest of men play to the crowd/There were giants back then, we could sure use them now."
This song deeply touched me, especially those last 11 words. Those 1960s' icons loom so large in our collective memory while Bush and his boys seem so puny of purpose and tiny in stature. Lucky for us, some "giants" have emerged like Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan and John Murtha. We're also lucky when gifted artists like Donal Hinely are saying things out loud that many of us had rattling around in our minds but never reached our lips. A song like "Giants" is one many of us will be humming to ourselves as we speak up, speak out and march towards voting booths in 2006 and 2008 to turn America around.
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Tony Peyser writes political poems every day for BuzzFlash and draws editorial cartoons twice weekly. His new music column, The Blue State Jukebox, is now a monthly feature for BuzzFlash. Mr. Peyser (who loves referring to himself in the third person) is shamelessly using BuzzFlash as a springboard to help him land his dream job: becoming the new Washington Bureau Chief for Talon News.