Hawks News
In the Nest and On the Road
September 07, 2008
NASHVILLE - ST. PAUL -D.C.
Our new American Age is the ascendancy of warped rural values.
What made us strong, what gave us soul, what defined us and defended us went sour, and weird. All of us born after 1950 are warped by comfort and technology, by discarding of the old ways,
and by the safe haven of the city and suburb. We've traded life expectancy for life itself.
My cousins in Bakersfield in the 60's were super cowboys. They were on the tractor by age 12, and not the kind with air conditioned cabs and stereo systems, but the nasty old beasts that left you at the end
of the 10 hour day with sunburned skin and dust in every pore.
They were rodeo champions and pro football prospects. They played guitar well enough to master the lick from "Born On The Bayou." They listened to Glen Campbell and Barry Sadler's "Ballad Of The Green Beret," and made you believe this was the word of God.
"I beat up a Mexican this afternoon. On the canal."
My cousins were racists through and through. It was a deep family belief, like their belief in Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It was a warrior's creed that allowed earlier Americans to kill the Indian and the Mexican, and know that it was right and just. Racism defined the cousins--along with allegiance to Dodge trucks and the Super Bee, quail hunting, hard work, early and faithful marriage, and huge families straight into the last years of the 20th century. And country music.
KUZZ in Bakersfield played Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and Porter Wagoner, and it just sounded different in a pickup truck on an endless road cutting straight across the flat Valley floor, alongside the swift black irrigation canal and the endless cotton with the sweet reek of pesticide from the daredevil crazies in the buzzing cropdusters. The steel and fiddle and brave lone Telecaster. This is how you're supposed to hear it.
But today the cowboys and ranchers and family farmers are scarce enough to be exotic, exemplary, an image to fill us with yearning, like the village blacksmith or the quilting bee. The rural people have moved to the suburbs, after an era lost in the factory towns and the big city. Country music followed them on their broken path, a path like an Indian stripped of the endless horizon. With songs of losers, cheaters, self destructive crazies, d-i-v-o-r-c-e, of course, the Streets of Baltimore, and tears for the old home, shuttered and peeling paint on weed filled acres.
Now we're all working for the man. We sit at computers, stock auto parts shelves, drive big rigs to Walmart. In the worn out fields pumped with nitrogen and Roundup, day laborers work, no, toil, for Archer Daniels Midland. And at night we all watch. This is our common ground.
And country music, severed at last from its isolated white man's pain, has drifted and twisted and mutated, like an invasive species in a strange new land. Nashville producers discovered gated reverb, drummers learned Kiss and Metallica licks, guitarists bought Les Pauls and screaming metal distortion boxes. And songwriters discovered Jesus lite, upbeat sentimentality, and how to subtly reference
the never forgotten soul of our rural past.
And with 9/11, Nashville found its mission, its message, and its Party. A new holy alliance formed, unspoken, or spoken with awesome crudity, brutal effectiveness. Karl Rove discovered gated Jesus and the terror pedal. The president found an exaggeration to the Texas twang grafted onto his New England blue blood branches. He learned a parody of rural tasks on his newly purchased ranch.
The Republican convention in St. Paul is a gleaming extrusion of these random historical trends, values, sounds and furies. Sarah Palin is Mylie Cyrus, all adolescent passion and cleverness and rage. The throaty roar of the Republican delegates is the group hysteria of lost Disney Channel girls, pitched down an octave, primed and cued to outburst at the slightest rise in pitch or rhetoric from their scrubbed new prophetess.
Sarah Palin is the American Idol of the new political landscape. Three weeks ago she was singing in her bedroom, or at Karaoke Night at her sorority, and now she's before a national audience who are aching to adore her, and an addled media clucking with grudging admiration. And she may soon be the one to give the nod to the mightiest collection of weaponry on earth to go into action, or to crush the eco movement, or to appoint the final Justice to make official the Corporate State. How strange it has become.
And rural soul is the trussed, bound and gagged prize pig in this contest for the reins of American power. John McCain, privileged son of a Navy Admiral, has to play up his warrior status, like the ghost of a Confederate soldier willing to lie down for the old ways. Never forget, we are reminded, that we were formed from war, and that we will never be anything else.
On the final night of the Republican convention in St. Paul, the big screen dazzling production video that introduced our next President had the over the top naivete of a Nashville top ten single. Were you offended by the aggressive orchestral music, the hushed religious tones of the narrator, the story of Christ re-writ in a Hanoi torture pit? Are you shocked and bemused at the lack of taste amplified to Wagnerian epic scale?
Too bad. Move to France. The banjo has no context, other than how you manipulate it to make your point. The steel guitar has left the honky tonk, and the honky tonk is found only in the margins of the nation, in towns the candidates will never even hear of, let alone visit. Coming to Fresno, Mr. McCain? Mr. Obama?**
Rural soul lives. It's in all of us. A mere 100 years ago our people farmed. The whole
earth farmed. Get thee to your garden. Grow your own.
**Alas, Obama is far too indebted to corporate America to embrace a populist stance and save America from the rich, the greedy, and the willfully ignorant powerful. The private racism of the voting booth could deliver the coup de gras that puts Sarah Palin a 73 year old heartbeat away from the Presidency.
August 31, 2008
MARIPOSA COUNTY FAIR
It's Labor Day Weekend 2008 and the Hawks are playing their first ever county fair gig. We're excited and apprehensive. We believe in America. We love fairs. Corn Dogs, the Demolition Derby, Funnel Cakes and Ferris wheels. But will they love us? Will the fair goers embrace us as we long to embrace them?
August 30 is clear, dry, and hot as we hit the 5 north and roll onto the mysterious exit to 99. There's a lot of corn growing, and grapevines and almond trees, newcomers to these parts, where cotton and alfalfa are the deposed kings. It's 104 at the Fresno County line. Paul L texts his brother Anthony, lyricist of Hecker Pass: "its 104 at the Fresno county line." Anthony texts back: "desolate there?" We hit a Fresno Starbucks, refresh ourselves in an artificial climate as reliable as a McDonalds shake, hit the highway, through Merced, and up to Mariposa via the Plainsburg cutoff. Into the foothills forested by native and 2nd growth evergreen, into Mariposa town.
It is indeed Labor Day Weekend, the last blowout under summer sky. Lots of bikers prowl the short Mariposa main drag. RW almost hits one by accident right off the bat. That pisses the dude off of course and words are exchanged. But it's cool. Most bikers live their lives to be annoying assholes. Why else jack the exhaust up to deafening levels? (note of dissension from Paul L: hey, man, I rode a Triumph 650 for a few years, and I'm here to say that there's nothing like pulling out of town in a rumbling pack of big machines. You're with your people, you're living the life, and the civilians that have to show up to the computer on Monday morning can feel the noise a little. It's not going to hurt them)
We follow the cars down the winding road to the Mariposa County Fair grounds, sneak past the line of pickups and SUVs into the lot. With a little help from the Rotary Club volunteers we find the Amigo Dance Slab, an indeed wide stretch of plain concrete at the edge of the dusty fair grounds, and start to unload. It's pretty alienating to be here at first. There's a big bald guy with a laptop playing aggressive techo drum beats and calling square dancing on top of it. What the hell is this? An elder cadre of square dancers decked out in colorful dresses and bolo ties dutifully march to this futuristic disembodied beat. There's a real disconnection here. The music and the dancing make no sense together and yet there it is happening right in front of us. Next they're square dancing to hip hop and urban grooves. And then the line dancers come out. They'll all got black pants, white tops, and black hats. Uniformed uniform dancing. Wow.
It all makes sense if you're from these parts. Country life is pragmatic, not romantic, and not yearning for times past, unlike urban folkies like ourselves. When fiddles were state of the art, that's what you danced to. If you can get a guy with a laptop to play kickass beats, who cares if the fiddles are banished to the folk clubs? If you have to plow 160 acres, are you going to pick the quaint old tractor or the air conditioned gleaming monster combine? A swamp cooler or full AC in your new suburban monster house? And satellite TV is sweet. Kill the old ways. Kill them dead.
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August 20, 2008
FESTIVAL ATMOSPHERE -- DOWN ON THE FARM, NORWAY
FRIDAY AUGUST 15
Morning comes well into the afternoon for the Hawks at the Grand Hotel. Shockingly, the only Hawk to make it down for breakfast (which ends at 10 am) is RW, the least likely Hawk to ever make it to free breakfast. But the breakfast is wonderful. Eggs, potatoes, and sausage, of course. But there's fresh breads, yogurt, muesli, fruits, cheeses, coffee & tea, & juices, and the widest assortment of canned fish and fish products ever. What a spread.
The day passes by quickly. Shawn assaults the hill looming over the town and visits the ancient fort. Paul and Victoria walk along the canal, watch an old house boat fire up its engine, the middle age couple gunning the boat towards the fjord entrance. Then it is time to get picked up and driven out to the festival. Our quiet, dutiful driver Andreas returns with the van outside the hotel just a little late. We have to wait a little longer for the equipment van. Some of the other bands are getting edgy. They want to get out to the fest to catch a friend's set. Or are they just squeaking the wheel a little for some later advantage in festival negotiations? Perhaps there is something to be learned here.
The drive out to the location is beautiful. The road runs south along the fjord, overlooking majesty in the long long evening light. More pine trees and golden fields and big barns. We arrive finally at the Farm and all is revealed. There's the Main Stage, the Barn, and a muddy walk through the woods to the Campfire stage, at the edge of a wide dry oat field, a soft white glow glows in the still stalks. But we want the Back Stage and we want to eat. The food turns out to be fantastic. More grilled local salmon cooked perfectly. We have our own tent stocked with all kinds of goodies. Angelic Heidi, a tall dark Nordic goddess, mothers us. We check out the other bands, hang out and chat. Pretty fun.
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August 19, 2008
NORWEGIAN WOOD
THURSDAY, AUGUST 15
Morning comes early to the Downshire Arms, our comfortable (Northern) Irish home. Do we really have to leave? It seems too soon. We'll have to come back promptly. There is so much more to explore here. Andy shows up to drive us down to the Dublin airport. It's a gentle drive south as we've given ourselves plenty of time. Andy tells us his own tales of the Troubles, moments with a pistol at his head, pistols both IRA and British military, his car stolen and used to transport a bomb, Andy's stolen car abandoned at the blast site, a serious questioning by the authorities. And this in gently rolling hills and small towns. The Troubles hit everyone up here.
We roll on the luxuriously wide M1 across the now invisible Border. Dublin Airport now kilometers away. Desperate cell calls to the luggage people finally break through. They have RW's and SN's bags. Will Rob be wearing his own fresh underwear later today? It seems too good to be true.
A magical summoning to the depths of Dublin Airport's baggage region and indeed the bags are back in our possession. Oh, Lordy! Personal possessions! Just when we were getting used to the simple life that comes from traveling with nothing. This time all goes well at the airport. We get on a plane. Our inappropriately oversize and over limit luggage is mysteriously allowed into the cabin. The SAS bird takes off. We are not taking this for granted.
And now we are imperious over the North Sea, where far below us on black seas many a brave Viking went down, or rode with dame fortune and a favoring wind to the Irish coasts, raiding monasteries, allying with Irish ri and ard ri and wedding their royal daughters, controlling Wexford and Cork to a day's ride from the ports, founding Dublin.
We're over forest, field, river, and it looks just like the Norway of our minds. Norway. Gleaming OSL, Ikea clean with bold steel and glass. Norway of the old simple wood frame house and old severe empty church, has led the world of design into gleaming simplicity. We land, we walk brand new cathedral-scale corridors, collect our bags, and all in reasonable time. We cautiously admit that Lady Luck is showing her elusive face at last. A young man approaches us with a small piece of paper with I SEE HAWKS IN L.A. written on it. "Are you?" Yes, we certainly are. And it's off to the woods of Norway for the Down on the Farm Fest. Here we go.
The drive through southern Norway farmland is gorgeous. Tall pines, oat fields, big red barns, lakes and ponds, and the big fjord that runs for miles and miles all the way to the sea. It reminds RW of a rockier Minnesota, or Wisconsin with an ocean. Magnificent puffy gray and white clouds dot the sky and the sun is warm. We pass through functional looking Oslo, modern and small, and we're quickly rolling through fields and forest again.
Two hours southbound, and we arrive in the small port town of Halden, its rail line ending at the small harbor, where our Grand Hotel sits gazing down on the canal. A lovely town of 27,000 souls located at the very end of a long fjord pointing long to distant sea. There's a huge ancient fortress on the hill above town. From this vantage point the Norwegians defended themselves against the unruly Swedes, and a mad Swedish King was felled by a single bullet. Our hotel was built around the turn of the last century. There's a nice wooden pub downstairs and a huge, twelve foot tall ornate porcelain Koken Oven used to heat the dinning room. The train station is right next door and trains come by ever few minutes. The place has a charming 19th century quaintness to it. We settle into our comfortable rooms, shower and get acclimated to the Norwegian sensibility.
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August 18, 2008
FROM BRONTE TO BELFAST
We woke up in our little cozy digs behind the Downshire Arms at Hilltown's only crossroads, lined by 4 pubs, a SPAR store, and a few other small town shops. Ah. The smell of breakfast being prepared downstairs. Eggs, scones, hearty brown bread, tea and cheese and milk. Our hotel was much more like a little house, two stories with the bedrooms and bath up stairs and kitchen and living room below. Quite a nice little arrangement. Paul and Vicky were at work in the kitchen. A day ahead and comfortable in Ireland from their many trips over, they warmly cared for the other travel-bedeviled hawks. It felt as if we were visiting their home in Ireland rather that hanging in a hotel. Breakfast was crucial for a busy day lie ahead.
And then something shocking happened. A knock at the door and what do you know: guitars and one bag. PM was the lucky bag winner--both his bass and bag arrived. RW and SN will still be washing their drawers in the sink or squeezing uncomfortably into the donated undies of a luggaged band mate. Quick showers follow the reunion ceremony and we're off in the van to Belfast with our very own gear.
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