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You know the cliché when it comes to music: “I like everything except for country.” And for the first 20 or so years of my life, I was under the impression that I liked everything except for country too. I worked at a pizza place in high school, and the owners loved country most of all, and so most of the time, the little radio propped above the pizza prep table was tuned to 92.5 KJJY: Iowa’s Country Station. This meant enduring lots of Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. Enduring might not be the right word. There are plenty of people, snot-nosed critics included, who would go to bat for those artists, and fair enough, it’s just, they never did much for me. How many times can one sullen teen who prefers Public Enemy listen to “Gone Country?” The one song that I remember hearing on KJJY and liking was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Passionate Kisses.” It was only some years later that I learned this song was, in fact, written and originally recorded by Lucinda Williams.
If I can credibly claim that any two albums changed my life in so much as they fundamentally reoriented my taste in and understanding of music, they are “Fever” by Kylie Minogue and “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” by Lucinda Williams. Grunge was the genre always said to speak for my generation, but it never really spoke for me, not like Kylie did and has continued to with her unique blend of authenticity and joy. And I innately and spiritually connected with Lucinda’s synthesis of blues, country, and rock ‘n’ roll in a way I never did with grunge’s sludgy guitar, or all the soft-as-The-Andrews-Sisters pop-punk that followed it. I had already been drifting toward country through deeper inspections of The Rolling Stones, but “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was the light and the demarcation line. Lucinda not only opened my eyes to country but made me realize that music was alive, that on some level it was all love and theft, to borrow the phrase of Bob Dylan, and that genre was flexible. For me, all music is Before Car Wheels and After Car Wheels.
Nobody would confuse suburban Des Moines with rural Louisiana, or Mississippi, or Texas, or Arkansas, places where Williams cut her teeth and set her songs, but when you stepped inside the Val Air Ballroom back at the turn of the century, you felt transported to some honkytonk down south. Lucinda certainly made it appear that way when she and her band, including Iowa native and guitar hero Bo Ramsey, strolled on stage that Friday night on September 21, 2001, most of them sporting cowboy boots and shit-kicker hats. She leaned into the microphone and in her immaculate southern drawl said one word: “Hey.” Then they tore into “Metal Firecracker,” the greatest break-up song ever recorded, and proceeded to play, I don’t know, four, five, maybe six songs in a row before she said another word, foreshadowing the theme of the night: we’re here to play.
It’s not that Lucinda did not speak. She did, briefly commenting on how much the Val Air resembled an old honkytonk, in fact, and as a prelude to her bluesy onslaught “Joy,” she excoriated the 43rd President. And though Iowa was still a purple state in those days, this was the patriotically correct post-9/11 era, remember, where a single discouraging word could bring you up on charges of treason in the court of public opinion, and so her boldness stayed with me. Mostly, though, she just played. She and her band played so long that they reached a point where they had obviously exhausted their planned setlist and at the end of a song, they would stand there on stage for a minute and discuss what to play next and then play it. During this improvised portion of the show, they played “I Envy the Wind” off the record she had just released that June, and midway through it, a woman standing near me ran off in tears, hiding her face. Maybe the song made her cry, maybe the world did, or maybe it was both. It was 10 days after 9/11, everybody was a wreck, and nobody would have minded if the show just kept going forever.
