The man who’d turned into a rat had the same sickness, Ali says. You have the sickness if you dream of boys and want to press against them.
This is something Ali has heard from the kids on the street.
My father has left me with Ali’s parents. He is staying with Mother who is hospitalized in the city. It was supposed to be only for days. But it has been weeks.
Ali and I go to different schools. He is two years older than me. Ali’s brother is younger than both of us. I sleep in their room on a futon on the floor between their beds.
At night, their mother comes to the room, kisses them both, then kneels down and kisses me.
You’re like my son too, she says.
Ali and his brother take off their pajamas when they go to bed.
Each time I call my father he says Mother can’t talk.
I don’t tell my father anything about being sick or the Rat man.
Before turning into a rat, the man had thrust an eggplant into his asshole. It was only after his wife left him that he turned into a rat.
Do you want to watch it for yourself? Ali asks me one night. They speak in French, he says.
His younger brother is sleeping. We check to make sure his parents’ bedroom door is shut.
Ali inserts the VHS tape in and turns on the TV, mutes it. I hear rustling as Ali takes off his underwear.
Back in the bedroom, I cover my head with the blanket and try to go to sleep.
I want to forget about the Rat man.
I want to forget about the sickness.
I want to sleep in my own bed again and kiss my own mother goodnight.
Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes (Tyrant Books, 2018). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, among others.
Tawny
by Lincoln Michel
Some of the colors of the dog shit were ochre, taupe, beaver, and burnt umber.
I was standing in the dog park with my girlfriend, Olivia Mantooth, and her dog, Claudius Mantooth. Claudius was normally white, but the brown dust of the park had already turned him tan. Olivia Mantooth’s face was bright red, or I guess I should say scarlet.
“These filthy animals.” Olivia looked at me with her lip curled all the way up to the nose. “Can you believe it? Disgusting.”
Olivia wasn’t talking about the dogs. She was talking about the owners. “Nobody gives a crap about anything but themselves. That’s the problem right there!”
Olivia walked around the park picking up pieces of trash. Some of the pieces of trash were coffee cups, bottle caps, broken glass, and one limp and translucent condom.
“Hey, let’s go home,” I said, meaning back to her apartment. The flushness of Olivia’s cheeks was making me awkwardly aroused. “I bet Claudius is tired.”
“Could you imagine what I could do with this dog park?” she said, waving a silver snack wrapper in my face. “I could put in a new fence, plant green grass, add a watering trough for all the dogs. If only I had the authority, I could turn this place into fricking Shangri-La!”
A large black dog ran by, kicking dirt into my face. I wiped the grit out of my lips. “Let’s go home, roll around ourselves.”
Olivia just shook her head. She was in one of those moods where she didn’t get in the mood.
“Goddamn animals.”
Some of the breeds in the park were bulldog, basset hound, shiba inu, chow chow, and wire fox terrier.
“Can you believe that?” Olivia pointed at a mutt who was pooping an inch away from her foot. “Tell me if you can believe that! Am I going crazy?”
The dog looked up at her with an inscrutable expression, then sprinted off to join the rest of the pack.
“They’re not even going to pick that up.” She moved her pointer finger to aim in the direction of a couple on the bench across the park. She shouted, “Hey, did your dog just poop?”
The woman pulled off her earphones. She was wearing a chartreuse blouse and had long nails painted tickle me pink. “Which dog?”
“That little brown dog,” Olivia said. “You need to clean up after your dog. There are such things as rules. This is a society.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Which brown dog, bitch?”
Olivia turned her hands into tight little tennis balls. “Clean up after your dog. Have some self-respect.”
The woman waved her open hands, pink fingernails extending like the spikes of some deep-sea monster. “Oh, no,” the woman with the pink fingernails said. “Hell to the no.”
Olivia and the woman were a few inches away from each other, shouting and growling.
“This park is disgusting. People like you make it disgusting.”
“I asked which brown dog, bitch. They’re all brown.”
The two women looked like they were about to bite each other’s throats out.
“Tawny,” I said.
The woman with the pink fingernails and Olivia both whipped their necks around.
“What?”
“Tawny,” I said a little louder. “The dog that pooped was tawny. It was the tawny dog.”
“I don’t have a tiny dog,” the woman said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.
“Not tiny. Tawny. Like yawn with t.” Then I added, “And also a y at the end.”
“What the fuck is tawny?”
“It’s like a brown,” I explained. “A light brown.”
“Don’t call my dog tawny, asshole.”
Olivia stepped in front of me, shielding me with her body. “Don’t call Franklin an asshole. Franklin is a sensitive and accurate man. And tawny is a sensitive and accurate word!”
The woman stepped to the side, and looked at me from head to toe, stopping and shaking her head halfway at the midway point.
“He looks like a tawny piece of shit to me,” she said.
Some of the dogs were starting to notice the excitement. They crowded around us, wagging their tails. Some of the owners were walking over too. The sun was bright and hot, and the dust was floating all around us.
“Step back,” Olivia said.
“Let’s all just calm down,” someone said. “It’s a nice day at the park.”
The tawny dog trotted up, a chocolate brown stick in its mouth. It dropped the stick at my feet, looked up with its tongue out.
“Hey, here’s the tawny dog.” I stuck out my hand and started tousling the dog. “See? The tawny dog. Right here!”
I smiled and looked at Olivia and the other woman, trying to get their attention.
I kept jiggling the dog’s face and saying, “See?”
I guess I was too busy trying to get Olivia and the woman to notice the tawny dog that I didn’t notice that it was growling. Didn’t notice that it was baring its bright white teeth.
We had to take a taxi to the hospital. They charged me extra for bleeding on the seats.
Later, the bite on my hand started to blossom with a variety of colors as the infection spread. Some of the colors around the wound were rose madder, eggplant, smoky topaz, and lemon chiffon.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press 2015) and the forthcoming novel The Body Scout (Orbit 2021). His short stories appear in The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. His essays and criticism appear in journals such as The New York Times, GQ, BOMB, and The Guardian. You can find him online at @thelincoln and lincolnmichel.com.
V. Oscillation
Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker
James Parker: Aren’t we describing an endless oscillation, or a kind of aortic valve that you’re closing between these two conditions?
Carlo Rotella: Maybe we are. My original hope was that we might just find a more wrinkly way to think about it that isn’t the obvious compromise of Well, you need both.
JP: When you compromise, you’re risking fucking up both ways.
CR: You do it wrong and don’t make it new?
JP: Exactly! You do it right, badly.
Charles Farrell: Or you do it right in fifteen different ways, which makes it wrong.
CR: That’s the How many sets of hands has this screenplay been through? problem.
CF: That’s exactly what it is.
CR: I still have a deep suspicion that it’s not just my perverse personal taste, that in fact there’s a kind of systematic logic to one’s perception of the relative merit, relative value, the relative importance of doing it right versus making it new as you go across the forms and genres. As we’ve been saying, part of the answer is that historical conditions can create a situation in which somebody needs to make it new or play it right. Market marginality or centrality can squeeze out all the making it new or playing it right, so if any shows up you treasure it and value it.
CF: There are so many fail-safes put into doing it right when there’s a lot of money involved. By the time it reaches the market it can only have been done right.
CR: You mean, like, if I was going to a big arena show of some major entertainer, I would really be hoping—
CF: You’re looking for the experience that separates it—
CR: I would hope that they would screw it up in some way that it would make it new. Like come out roaring drunk and make a spectacle of themselves.
CF: And that’s why with mainstream entertainers like, I don’t know, Judy Garland, people live for the fuckup. I mean, that’s the thing that elevates it. Because that’s the only thing available.
CR: Sort of a substitute for making it new.
JP: At that level, the fuckup is the only thing that will make it new.
CR: The halftime show at the Super Bowl might be the ultimate example of that. The only reason I would watch the halftime show at the Super Bowl with interest is if I knew that something was going to go wrong. Like the lip sync would screw up and they had to actually play the instruments. And I would be, like, Okay, let’s watch, because that would be interesting.
CF: This is all the opposite of the Little League game, which resonates for you in a very specific way, as does hearing the group at the Station Inn. And it’s quite a similar way.
CR: There are institutions involved that shape the work and the experience—a music club, a youth baseball league—but they’re not money-intensive. In both cases we’re at the margins of the market, getting together to put on a show in the old barn, essentially, which is reason enough that I will be thrilled for them if they do it right.
CF: So in a sense, doing it right is very secondary. Because doing it right is the product of what’s interesting to you. And what’s interesting to you is a kind of problem solving.
CR: Yeah, I love problem solving—problem solving in context. Let’s say Elizabeth Warren is in a TV debate and a crazy person rushes in from the audience and tries to hit her, and she makes him miss and makes him pay in absolutely orthodox fashion: she, like, double-jabs, hooks off the jab, head-body-head. There’s nothing more overcapitalized and predigested and inevitable than a presidential campaign, so there’s just about no value to me in watching her do the debate right and solve whatever debate problems it might present, like how to talk about gun control without alienating centrist independents, or whatever. But I would be immensely satisfied by watching her solve this other problem, do this other thing right—even better, in some ways, than watching her make it new with some crazy idiosyncratic martial art she invents on the spot. Because I would want to know how it came to be that Elizabeth Warren knew to hook off the jab. I would start having questions about the historical and stylistic conditions in which she learned how to hook off the jab. Whose gym has she been spending time in? Who’s she training with?JP: I watched this footage of Crosby, Stills, and Nash playing a festival in California somewhere, and basically that thing happens. A nutter arises and starts having a go at them, like, Ah, everything’s being commercialized! Stephen Stills gets so triggered by this geezer that he just comes over like he can’t handle it and is very uncool about it and ends up almost fighting with this man, who’s clearly very vulnerable himself. They have to be pulled apart, and it’s kind of a disgrace. But it’s a magical fuckup, a beautiful moment.
Charles Farrell has spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. His book (Lowlife): A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob, will be published in July, 2020.
James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.
Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.
How Not to Get Spat Out
James Parker
I saw the Who the other night at Boston’s Fenway Park. What’s left of me saw what’s left of the Who. Pure magic. Full moon over the Citgo sign, and my face molten with tears as seventy-four-year-old Pete Townshend, in a red boiler suit, windmilled at his guitar, clanged it over his raised knee, forced gorgeous unpredictable sounds from it. They did the best bits of Tommy, then the hits, then the best bits of Quadrophenia, then some more hits. Jesus Christ, what a band. What a story. (Somewhere in there they also did a new song called “Hero at Ground Zero.” Cue mass piss-break.)
Opening for the Who was Peter Wolf, formerly of the J. Geils Band. I never liked the J. Geils Band. In fact, as a younger man I would have taken this opportunity to write something virulently shitty and vaguely militant about the J. Geils Band. But not today. Because as I watched Wolf and his band, the Midnight Travelers, perform the J.Geils hit “Must Of Got Lost”—Yeah I musta got LAWST… —I was granted a precious insight: this, this kind of comfortably catchy mid-paced mid-brained blues-based chugalong singalong, is what all of rock’n’roll would sound like if there had been no geniuses in it. No one to make it new. Kevin Barry, guitarist for the Midnight Travelers, is very very good: he peeled off a couple of exquisitely shapely solos. Talk about playing it right. But the surrounding music, the surrounding dynamic, was resolutely genius-free.
Pete Townshend is a genius. He’s a possibility channel, a conductor for the ineffable. It’s still visibly pouring though his gangling high-tensile body: even though he’s seventy-four, you wouldn’t want to get in a fight with Pete Townshend. Who-music has not dated. Why? Because the entire agon of Townshend’s creativity has been to connect the base elements of rock to the transcendent, to wire them up to the unearthly, the beyond time. The beyond the J. Geils Band.
So am I coming down on the Charles side of things? Am I, finally, of the pro-make it new party? I don’t think so. I will explain.
This is a tricky position for me, and yet it’s one I am very used to. I always seem to end up here, in the middle, at the dull heart of the dialectic: Charles has his shining radical thesis (“Make it new, ever new!”), Carlo has his barbed antithesis (“Play it right, goddammit.”), and I have my spongy and vitamin-deficient synthesis (“Uh, how about a bit of… both?”)— Zzzzz. The intellect moulders at room temperature. Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
But what if, what if, we took this discussion away from boxing and free jazz and into the realm of the personal, into the realm of (say) ME? My life. I wake up in the morning and I bloody get on with it: cold shower, bring the wife her tea, rouse the boy for school, eat the oatmeal, boil the egg, walk the dog, get to work. I love it. “Very easy to assassinate me,” I say merrily. “I do the same thing every day, ha ha!” I luxuriate in routine. The liturgy of habit. I wedge myself into layers of familiarity and sleep there like a beetle. I play it right.
And then, every few months or so, I don’t. I wake up with a demonic desire to—yes—make it new. I say “demonic” because it possesses me: it gets me between its teeth and shakes me like a dog shakes a rabbit. Shred everything. Rip it up and start again. There’s a riot in the nervous system. Shearing silver volleys of Charles Farrell piano-notes are coming at me. From the inside! It’s a wild feeling, not to be accommodated. And at such times I have to manage myself quite carefully—I have to, if possible, play it even righter than I was playing it before. There’s brimstone in the air. Head down, plough the well-worn groove.
Does that make sense? (Have you noticed how everyone is always asking that these days, as if we’re all on the verge of a catastrophic failure of understanding, a Babel-esque breakdown?) I think you know what I’m talking about, reader. The nice man who just served me my coffee advises me that this is a Taurus thing—but not exclusively. Repetition adds value, builds significance, stacks on power: it’s the science of a good riff. But something in us, with exactly equivalent force, seems to demand the opposite: the scream of ungovernable feedback. What’s to be done? Cultivate the old Keatsian “negative capability,” perhaps—the capacity to flourish in tensions and contrarieties. Or in my case, as I once heard the poet Don Bajema say (he was opening for a spoken word set by Henry Rollins): “Try like fucking hell to be a man.”
I’ve been meditating/trying to meditate, on-off, in-out, up-and-down, for eight years. Like (I assume) every other meditator, I am the worst meditator in the world. Which is to say, the most feckless, fidgety, carnal, trivial, incipiently schizoid, obsessively woolgathering and tail-chasing person ever to attempt the noble practice of meditation. I’ve felt this way for as long as I’ve been doing it; I feel this way every time I sit down to meditate. I claim it and I wear it—the wobbly, wobbly crown of worst-ness. And so (I assume) does everybody else.
It was my friend Tina, a priest, who taught me to meditate—who transmitted a technique to me (the inner repetition of a word), and steadily renewed the invitation to practice it. The introductory sessions left me quite rattled. Tina calls it “the first gift of the spirit”: this dramatic, instantaneous acquaintance with your own fragmentation and restlessness. What the second gift is, I haven’t yet found out.
But I have gained, in fits and starts and fallings-away, a sort of education. I’ve learned that you can’t stop thinking. The brain is a thought-generator, that’s one of the things it does, so here come the thoughts, one after another. (Don’t attach, let ’em pass, yeah yeah.) I’ve learned additionally about the physicality of thought: with what speed something that starts immaterially, up in the rafters of your skull, moves to un-ghost or embody itself. A thought, an idea, just a little waggling of the wires, can tighten the chest and coat the gullet with nausea and drench the system in adrenaline. Drizzlings of sadness, elation sparks, roaming anxiety bubbles, a rumble in the underpants. When you meditate, you watch these things happen, over and over again. And cycle by cycle you cultivate, I suppose, I hope, a certain perspective.
That’s me and meditation. By no means a hero’s journey. The point is that trying to meditate puts you right between the antlers of the make it new/play it right dichotomy. In following your practice—the word, the watched breath, whatever it might be—you are doing your damnedest to play it right. Doggedly you sit down, doggedly you settle. Your brain, meanwhile, insists on making it new: What about this? How’s this? Did you ever think of this? And so on. I think there’s beauty here. I believe that reality is the second-by-second self-renewal of the Logos, the first powerchord of Creation ringing through us with eternal sustain. All new, from beginning to end, from the utterance to the eventual silence. And playing it right—maybe—is developing an ability to get to the edge of understanding this. Does that make sense?
Racing Thoughts
Jaime Lowe
My thoughts at first raced. They shouldn’t race at the idea of a theoretical writing question. But they did. I thought: What would everyone else write? What would be the cartilage in between? What are Carlo and Charles doing with this? Do I have anything to say? Do I care about this question? Do I understand the question? What is doing it right versus breaking the form? Ugh, I have no idea. Why am I having anxiety about this? If I have nothing to say, write nothing. But I have never had nothing to say. So, here. Here is my something.
Once, a friend gave me a first draft of a profile of a musician he was writing about and it had four ledes, one right after the other; each lede, one thousand words. It was meant to mimic the spinning of a record. When he told me that, I was annoyed. I had never thought about form following thesis. While I was reading it, I just kept thinking, When does this story start?
This question of doing it right versus breaking the form feels very academic. I don’t mean that to be pejorative. It’s just not something I can relate to. I don’t debate writing very often or think about various forms. I didn’t go to J-school; I barely majored in English. My degree is in art and my writing started with deadlines for my weekly high school newspaper. I don’t write—as I should—on a regular schedule, independent of assignment. If I don’t have a deadline, I’m fucked. I just won’t write.
I guess I have done both. I have written extremely traditional newspaper reporting, pyramid-shaped who-what-where-why-when-up-top kinds of things, and some of them have been the way that story should have been written. And better for it. As a writer, I resent how hard it is to present things in a simple, clear way. To follow structure and form and let a story tell itself. Other pieces I’ve written have been fragmented and more experimental, like trying to convey what it feels like to be a spawning salmon while writing about the actual natural journey, or writing about a manic episode in the manner of having a manic episode, a narrative dictated by racing thoughts and anxieties.
But I reject the binary, I even reject the idea of a method in between. Because here’s the thing: the question, which seemed innocuous at first, and like something I had very little to say about, is really a grand-big-giant question about writing itself. How do we do it? Why? In what way? What is the best strategy to convey ideas, feelings, stories, people, life, atmosphere, color, sound? How do we use words to capture attention? Sometimes I can sneak in an experimental sentence or approach in an extremely conventional story. Other times, scientific research can be folded into a paragraph that just describes feeling. But there are so many variables. Who is reading? What is the context? What is the venue?
Most important to the process: am I bored writing it? If I’m bored, there is no right way. It’s always a puzzle, a balance, a mixture of as many perspectives and feelings and sensory explosions and details as you can get into one well-crafted, long-winded, circular sentence. Or maybe an elegant simple sentence? Doesn’t even have to be a sentence.
What is the right way? I have no idea.
What is the wrong way? Not doing it at all.
What did we learn here? Jaime should probably never think too hard or too often about writing! Because my brain goes explode.
Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the author of Mental and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, and a contributor to This American Life.
The Perfect Country and Western Song
Philip Deloria
Well, it was all That I could do to keep from crying Sometimes it seemed so useless to remain But you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’ You never even called me by my name
“That’s it,” my father said, twisting the volume up. “The perfect country and western song!” I was doubtful. The rhyme in the very first verse (“remain” with “name”) is technically an “imperfect” rhyme, putting a hard stop on perfection right there.
Still, the key line in the verse, set to a perfect honky-tonk swing beat, struck me as quite smart. Its first words (“You don’t have to call me…”) seem to telegraph one of those phone calls that does not come. The next word (“darling”) immediately shifts the meaning from phoning to naming: “don’t call me darling.” This is how good lyrics work, unfolding changing meanings at the level of the micro-second. And then, even better, the second “darling,” spins the line inside out. Singer tells listener they are under no obligation to call him darling—even as he uses that very term of endearment. That “darling, darling” is a fine little piece of irony that presents a question: should one read the verse as sarcastic or as crying sad? The last line offers an answer: pissed off.
The song was “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” and the singer was David Allan Coe, a Nashville songwriter with an attitude. He’d done time in prison, would later record country metal music, and in the 1970s found his sweet spot in the meeting of the humorous and the offensive. His biggest song—”Take This Job and Shove It,” recorded by Johnny Paycheck—was the essence of pissed-off country. But while Coe sang “You Never Even Called Me . . . ,” he did not write this particular attempt at the perfect country and western song. That honor went to folkie Steve Goodman, one of the outstanding songwriters of his generation, and (though he purposefully went uncredited) to the equally gifted John Prine.
The second verse, however, bears little trace of such talent at work, settling for mere cleverness. It’s a novelty turn, with Coe doing impressions of Waylon Jennings, Charlie Pride, and Merle Haggard. The chorus that follows announces itself with a raucous transition and a big beat, and it plays to strength, returning again to those concluding lines of the first verse, the best in the song. And then, after another meandering verse, Coe starts talking. Goodman, he says, sent him the song, claiming he had written the perfect country and western song. Coe rejects the claim, defining the genre around critical themes (trains, drinking, trucks, prison, mama, etc.) notably absent from the song. Goodman sends another verse, and Coe now admits that his friend has written the perfect country and western song:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got run over by a damned old train
Another chorus or two, and then out. My father—a knowledgeable fan of country music—laughed and laughed and said that, yes, this was indeed the perfect song.
But, I wondered, perfect in what way? Was it trying to be a perfect example of the genre, distilling its forms, styles, and themes to a representative essence, flawlessly performed? Or did it self-consciously assert country’s rules in order to subvert and transcend them on its way to being something else—more like parody or critique?
The folklore surrounding the song suggests that we should hear it as a diss of the Nashville music industry, which saw Goodman, who had followed a different set of rules in producing songs like “City of New Orleans” and “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” as too folky to be part of its scene. Listen to “You Never Even Called Me . . .” as a pissed-off hate letter to Nashville—and thus to the formal rules of the genre—and the song takes on a wholly new character: “Well, I’ve heard my name a few times in your phone book” (Nashville! Why don’t you call?); “I’ll hang around as long as you will let me” (ouch); and, of course, there’s the title line, in which Nashville blithely forgets Goodman’s name. In that sense, the last verse that makes the song “perfect” was not a goofy novelty riff at all but a well-crafted dig at the ways in which tradition, rules, and the institutional flow of money had combined to turn Nashville into a soulless stereotype of itself.
As a distillation of the genre, “You Never Even Called Me…” was not the perfect country-and-western song. It easily mastered forms, styles, and tropes, but did so in order to reject the very premises and rules that made the country tradition possible. And it was not only Goodman who felt outside to Nashville. Wanting in and never quite getting there, Coe instead sought to build a career on wanting out. He was part of “Outlaw Country,” a loosely-identified cohort of supposed Nashville rebels led by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings who fled to Austin, Texas to set up an alternative shop. The very premise of the outlaw, literally, was to be outside the law—stepping beyond the rules of a particular context—into a place where they could ignore tradition and make it new.
That newness, though, was not translated (much) into harmony, melody, or rhythm. It most often took thematic form in the lyrics of songs about literal outlaws (Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, for example), metacommentary tributes to the Nashville escape (the Jennings-Nelson duet Luckenbach, Texas), bodacious boasting (Hank Williams Jr.’s Oedipal anthem Family Tradition), band names (The Outlaws, natch), or shake-it-up professional moves (Nelson’s Stardust album of Tin Pan Alley standards). David Allan Coe was a minor star in this firmament, but he had the attitude right.
It was a blast growing up with country rock and outlaw country music in the 1970s. Banjos and electric guitars competed for space. Deep-voiced, gravelly-throated men proclaimed themselves outsiders to it all, and they did so through the standard medium of I-IV-V-I harmonies and ABAB rhyme structures. Like most popular commercial forms, outsider country was always splitting the difference between well-crafted formula and a genuine effort to do something new. Isn’t that the essence of the popular song itself? It must hew closely to the familiar, establishing repetitions that grab the listener by the cultural ear, while also offering little surprises that defy—usually at the smallest scale—the listener’s expectation. Both are good impulses. The familiar captures a listener in one way—when we effortlessly slip into singing along—while the surprise captures us in another—the slightly odd little hook that we want to hear again. Introduce too many new things and the song collapses out of its pattern and falls into incoherence and chaos. Repeat too many old things and the song yawns with repetitious boredom.
For Goodman (and Prine) and Coe, the “perfect” verse was the new thing. Indeed, the song may not have been the perfect country song, but it might have been the perfect country novelty song—a genre all its own, with uncomfortably intimate ties to serious mainstream country. Novelty, I remind myself when I hear the song, is goofy—and also another name for newness. Outlaw country was a novelty act in both senses: an institutional revolt straight out of the marketing tradition of Nashville itself. Outlaws like Coe (and perhaps Goodman and Prine) expressed their rebellion through an unwavering commitment to the rules of craft, down to every tic of lyrical cleverness and honky-tonk shuffle. In that sense, maybe Coe and Goodman had actually built the perfect country and western song—a perfect representation of the tradition in its form, style, and affect, and a perfect transcendence in its rejection of Nashville, made through an equally traditional claim to the newness of “outlaw” innovation. Like the riff on “darling, darling” in the first verse, the song folded back on itself, and then folded again and again. Perfect.
Philip Deloria, a recovering middle school band instructor, teaches history and American studies at Harvard University.
