Moonshiner

My posting has been on hiatus for nearly a year. My sobriety hasn't.

Better than the other way around.

Let's settle the needle back down into the record groove with the next track from my early sobriety collection Another Day to Face Up, Another Day to Wake Up:

"Listening to it now, what I hear most in my voice is fear."

That's what Jay Farrar said about the recording from which Uncle Tupelo's "Moonshiner" comes. That whole album, mixing original compositions with folk and country standards like this song, is stark and gorgeous. Beautifully spare tales about the Other America, somewhere far from the privileged world in which I grew up. It made them critic's darlings.

But Uncle Tupelo also had their detractors. People who gave them shit because they believed that two 20somethings like Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar had no business singing hardscrabble classics when the worst deprivation they knew was working in Farrar's mom's used bookstore.

If we're going to apply that standard of musical authenticity, there goes the whole of the folk movement of the last 50 years. And throw out the first, maybe the greatest, folk-pop hybrid, "House of The Rising Sun" by The Animals.

Reaching back doesn't mean copping out, even if it's a fine line between homage and theft. Some cover versions so improve upon the originals that it's like the cover is an entirely new creation.

But maybe the greatness of a cover song is beside the point. Perhaps the question for Uncle Tupelo's "Moonshiner" isn't "Is it great?" but "Is it true?" Like emotionally true? I don't know.

I think I hear what sounds like authentic despair when Farrar sings:

let me eat when I'm hungry

let me drink when I'm dry

two dollars when i'm hard up

religion when i die

the whole world is a bottle

and life is but a dram

when the bottle gets empty

Lord, it sure ain't worth a damn

In my more morose drinking I could imagine myself singing the words of "Moonshiner." But had I really ever earned that kind of world weary sadness? Does anyone? Or does problem drinking always mask some deeper, less approachable, anxious sadness that alcohol can never cure, and only ever exacerbates? Hopelessness can be as big a lie as any fairy tale, and worse, because there's no moral at the end of despair's story.

Maybe that's why the older Jay Farrar heard fear in his younger voice. Maybe he caught a glimpse of a young man aspiring to a world-weariness he couldn't have had yet, and hopefully never would.

Thinking of my drinking self, what I remember most is fear.

I drank at the very first because of fear of never matching up to any real standard of success or value. And then bitterness after the fear because I felt I was entitled to feel secure but never did. There were, honestly, plenty of good times as well when I drank. Stories and friends I'll never give back. But at the bottom of all my drinking was the sense that happiness was infinitely weaker than despair. I couldn't believe that feeling good, or feeling right, was sustainable without alcohol.

The problem was that drinking never released me from my fear. No amount of momentary liquid courage could alleviate it. The grip just tightened.

Some people drink their lives away and call it poetry. A few people with immense talent have managed to make that kind of tragedy sound romantic, even noble. Tom Waits and Shane McGowan, as much as I love them, have both made careers singing about their dissolution. Many of their songs are beautiful lies. Drinking as an excuse to avoid facing fear, and perhaps finding out that there's some power in reality that's greater than fear. I really started to get to know that reality, that Higher Power, in the fragile hope of my early sobriety.

What I hear now in the despair of "Moonshiner" is my own cop out. My two decades long refusal, now mercifully ended, to authentically put myself on the line or in the game.

The musical snob in me hates to say it, but as much as I still love "Moonshiner," I now believeMama Cass Elliot's "Make Your Own Kind of Music" more. There's more heart, and certainly more hope, in its bubblegum pop than in any barstool philosophy. The 25 year old me wouldn't believe I could believe such a sentiment. The 40 year old me is grateful that I finally can.

Like ee cummings wrote, "it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." Such a fearful thing. Such a necessary thing.

Until the next post, Happy Living. Happy Listening.

Here's "Moonshiner" and the two other songs I mentioned.