Gerard Sampaio's sloshed, lost weekend: a tour of country music's most booze-laden songs. Drink up, bourbon most likely. And listen IRResponsibly. With Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Loretta Lynn et. al.
Words & Curation by Gerard Sampaio, Artwork by Mick Clarke, as ever
No-one’s ever written a great country song about drinking responsibly and knowing your limits. ‘Just a glass of wine with dinner’ is not a lifestyle choice celebrated by the great country songwriters. It’s all about falling into an ocean of pain and floating away in a river of anaesthetic booze.
I have divided the songs on the this playlist into the three stages of the pain/booze country song continuum:
1) The good times. Booze is good, you should try it.
2) The bad times. Hang on, I don’t feel so good.
3) The really bad times. Oh shit, I’m in real trouble here..
Part One
The Good Times
Kicking things off is Webb Pierce singing ‘There Stands the Glass’. Yes, he’s kicking off the good times section, but he’s still heartbroken, sitting in a bar, miserable, thinking about the woman who rejected him. The thing is, he has absolute confidence in how the booze will sort him out and help him to forget. What could possibly go wrong?
“There stands the glass that will ease all my pain
That will settle my brain it's my first one today
There stands the glass that will hide all my tears
That will drown all my fear, brother I'm on my way”
Remember that glass he’s staring at. We’ll be seeing it again later.
George Jones gets excited about his ‘pappy’s’ White Lightning made in his secret stillhouse. We’re talking high grade hooch here, the kind of booze where the term ‘blind drunk’ comes from. Sadly for George, alcoholism saw his career decline throughout the mid-60s and 70s, just when it should have been blooming. Yes, we’re still in the good times section.
Tom T. Hall keeps it simple and ups the enthusiasm level with the jaunty ‘I Like Beer’. It makes him ‘a jolly good fellow’ apparently. Meanwhile on ‘Two More Bottles of Wine’ Emmy Lou Harris is sweeping out a warehouse in west LA and reassuring the listener that “It's all right 'cause it's midnight/and I got two more bottles of wine”. Now, by the time she’s releasing this song it's been five years since her dear friend and collaborator Gram Parsons died from taking all the drugs, washed down with all the booze, but I think we can we can forgive her for extolling the virtues of booze as the simple answer to complicated problems. She’s Emmy Lou Harris for goodness sake, if she kicked my dog I’d still forgive her.
Flashing forward though time and taking us into the realms of Alt-Country/Country Rock, Jeff Tweedy sounds to me like he’s caught up in the romanticism of being in a hard drinking band on the road on ‘Passenger Side’. Or he might just be in a car with a friend. He’s certainly too drunk to drive the vehicle himself and eager for someone to ‘roll another number for the road’. I’m not 100% clear on the lingo, but I think he’s talking about some kind of reefer. The middle eight takes us into more mysterious territory:
“Should've been the driver, could've been the one
I should've been your lover, but I hadn't seen”
The second line remains intriguingly unfinished. Was there some kind of drunk driving incident? Was there a victim? Is that ‘the one’ he is singing about? Biographical note: Jeff Tweedy, whose dad was a functional alcoholic until quitting aged 81, turned his back on the booze at the tender age of 23 only to substitute alcohol with cigarettes and diet coke, before moving onto valium and painkillers. In his very readable memoir ‘Let’s Go (So We Can get Back’) attributes his addictive personality to the same pain and anxiety that kept his father drinking so hard all those years.
Taking us back all the way to 1930, Charlie Poole (and The North Carolina Ramblers) is imagining that ‘If the river was whiskey and I was a duck / I'd dive to the bottom and I'd never come up’. There’s that river again. We soon learn that ‘his’ woman is with another man and he’s been suffering from ‘The Hesitation Blues’.
Now I certainly don’t condone the attitudes of George Jones, Ray Charles and Chet Atkins on ‘I Didn’t See a Thing’ as they promise to cover for each others’ scandalous behaviour, but it’s jaunty, it’s two minutes long and we know they’ll get their comeuppance soon enough..
We’re back to the nineties again as The Silver Jews founder and frontman, Dave Berman, is in good humour as he encourages other motorists to ‘Honk if you’re Lonely Tonight’.
“We'll laugh and we'll flirt and we'll dance every dance
And before the night's over, we'll make romance
The morning will find us with a smile on our face
And we'll be together in a lovers' embrace.”
His plan for the evening sounds fairly plausible, even if the morning after doesn’t… unless they’re still drunk and/or still drinking which does seem likely, come to think of it.
Tragically, after long battles with depression and substance abuse, Dave Berman commited suicide last year aged 52 shorly after releasing the excellent, eponymous, Purple Mountains album, which now sound like a beautifully crafted goodbye. Bill Callahan (whom we’ll be hearing from shortly) has gone whole tours saying little more than ‘hello’ at the beginning of each gig and ‘thank you’ at the end. So it was all the more moving when, on his most recent tour, he took the time to pay tribute to his friend Dave Berman and covered one of his songs, saying that ‘The world is and will always be a Dave Berman lyric’.
Lorretta Lynn keeps it simple and direct on Don’t Come Home a-Drinking’ (with loving on your Mind) in fact the title tells us exactly what the song is about and when she goes on to sing that ‘Liquor and love, that just don't mix, leave a bottle or me behind’ it’s game over.
The Uncle Tupelo instrumental Sandusky doesn’t mention alcohol, but it doesn’t not mention it either, and what with it being absolutely gorgeous with such a palpable sense of longing, it’s fair game in my book..
That image of the river return sonce again thanks to Bill Callahan, the best writer of river-related-songs there is. Listen to the final Smog album ‘A River Ain’t Too Much to Love’ and tell me I’m wrong. ‘The Sing’ is the sublime opening track on the sublime ‘Dream River’. Bill Callahan has written some of the most shake-your-head-that’s-brilliant opening lines to songs and albums that I’ve heard.This isn’t even in my non-existent top five, but it comes pretty close.
“Drinking
While sleeping
Strangers unknowingly keep me company
In the hotel bar
Looking out a window that isn't there
Looking at the carpet and the chairs”
In no hurry whatsoever Mr Callahan (who loves his pauses) goes on to explain that ‘ Well the only words I've said today are "beer" and "thank you”’. Then after another pause, short by his standards, he speaks the words ‘Beer’ and ‘thank-you’ just to make sure you're right there with him. Simple, playful and brilliant.
Part Two
The Bad Times
So here we are, where things start to turn sour. On ‘The Party’s Over’, Willie Nelson tells us he once had ‘a love undying’ but too much partying put an end to it. Being a good sort, Willie takes responsibility for this as he tells us “Life for me was just one party / And then another / I broke her heart so many times.”
Despite being in a different bar somewhere, Rod Stewart is in a very similar place to Willie Nelson, in fine voice and pinning the blame for a lost love for his inability to say no to another round of beer, the amber nectar that ‘Made Milwaukee Famous (and made a loser out of me)’.
I feel like Kitty Wells doesn’t get enough credit for being the trailblazer she was. In 1952 ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’ made her the first woman to have a number one hit on the Country Music charts, a major step in opening the country music doors to so many talented women. She didn’t write the song herself, but made it her own while showing rare courage in taking it on. So inflammatory was the song’s content (this is 1952, remember) that it was banned by various radio stations and The Grand Ole Opry. It’s actually an answer song to Hank Thompson's chauvinistic ‘The Wild Side of Life’ which blamed women for the indiscretions of men in honky tonks, you feel like she’s addressing every male songwriter who ever blamed alcohol or the low morals of female honky tonk patrons for their behaviour.
Dolly Parton pulls no punches on ‘Daddy’s Moonshine Still’ as she describes with sweet ferocity the damage the father in the song does to his family as he drags them into his moonshine side-hustle.
“Well it broke mama's heart but she understood
The day that I left home for good
But I had to find me another way to live
Well I sent mama money nearly every day
And how I made it, well I'd rather not say
But at least it took me far away
From daddy's moonshine still”
I do love the Emmylou Harris version of ‘The Bottle Let Me Down’ and it would be a clever call-back to her earlier mention of bottles of wine, but in this case it seems only right and proper to go with the man who wrote it, ‘country outlaw’ Merle Haggard. Here we find him admitting that the pain-relief he used to find in drinking is wearing off fast.
“I've always had a bottle I could turn to
And lately I've been turnin' every day
But the wine don't take effect the way it used to
And I'm hurtin' in an old familiar way.”
Bob Dylan’s ‘I Threw it All Away’ is a simple but beautiful song about letting love slip through your fingers. There is no mention of alcohol, it’s not even implied, but for this Dylan fan it provided a backdoor into the world of country music so I’m bending the rules. Also, it has one of my favourite lines of his, ‘Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand’. Also it mentions rivers.
“Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away”
I could have gone with the original Kris Kristofferson version of Sunday Morning Coming Down, but I heard the Johnny Cash version first and it painted such vivid pictures of The Man in Black stumbling around some dusty town somewhere that for me it’s the definitive version. Sorry Kris.
“And there's nothing short of dying
That's half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleeping city sidewalk
And Sunday mornin' comin' down.”
Dave Berman returns with, allegedly, the first song he ever wrote and performed as/with The Silver Jews, ‘Trains Across The Sea’. It begins with allusions to ‘scotch and penicillin’ and a ‘dream attack’ where a lady named Shady sides tells him ‘It’s been evening all day long’, but it’s the images conjured up by the closing lines which make the song so hard to forget.
“In 27 years I've drunk 50, 000 beers
And they just wash against me
Like the sea into a pier”
Part Three
The Really Bad Times
On Drunken Angel Lucinda Williams sings with woozy bitterness about the tragic waste of talent that was the hard-drinking singer-songwriter Blaze Foley. Describing his fans, she captures this tragic, apparently willful waste, singing ‘Some threw roses at your feet / And watched you pass out on the street.’ In an interview after Foley’s untimely murder - something to do with Foley accusing someone of stealing from his father - Williams talked about Foley’s friendship with, and admiration for, another self-destructive soul, Townes Van Zandt. She wasn’t laying blame at Van Zandt’s door as such, but said, "I think Townes was his [Foley’s] hero. Unfortunately, I think he romanticized that whole self-destructive, outlaw lifestyle.” Ethan Hawke made a movie about Blaze Foley a couple of years ago called Blaze, which is by most accounts rather good.
And right on cue, here’s Townes Van Zandt singing ‘Waiting around to die.’ The world view of the persona he creates here is straightforwardly bleak.
“I guess I keep a-gamblin'
Lots of booze and lots of ramblin'
It's easier than just waitin' around to die”
Much as I love the Gram Parsons version of The Streets of Baltimore, I always thought that casting himself as the home-loving, responsible one in a marriage who sells his farm just to make his woman happy was always a bit of a stretch for our Gram.
“I sold the farm to take my woman where she longed to be
We left our kin and all our friends back there in Tennessee
I bought those one way tickets she had often begged me for
And they took us to the streets of Baltimore.”
When the song’s writer Bobby Bare sings it, I believe it that much more. He also goes for a bit of spoken word action which is always welcome.
‘Well I did my best to bring her back to what she used to be
But I soon learned she loved those bright lights much more than she loved me’.
What makes ‘The Whiskey Made You Sweeter’ such a special song is that often, and quite understandably, what we hear from female singers are accounts of the damage done by their partners’ drinking. Here, Cantrell sings beautifully about whisky clouding her judgement and causing her to stay in an unhealthy relationship. She goes on to credit her man with introducing her to spirits mind you.
‘"Sweets for a sweetheart", that is what you said to me
As you handed me a shot glass, and drank down hungrily
I was lost in dreams of sweet things, runnin' through my head
If it wasn't for the whiskey, I'd have run away instead’
Hailing from Austin Texas, Two Nice Girls were never a country act as such and were apparently happy to be labeled as ‘Dyke rock’. Nonetheless, the brilliant ‘I Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer’ is at once a great example of country song storytelling and like no country song anyone had heard back in 1989. Founding member and songwriter Gretchen Phillips tells the story of how natural being a lesbian felt only for a bad breakup see her fall into the arms of a man. Slightly ashamed of herself and blaming the booze, she explains that,
‘Before that last heartbreak nothing made me more sick
Than a hairy-chested, cheap double-breasted suited man with a hard dick
I guess that I was curious I guess that I was young
I guess it was that rum and coke I guess that I was dumb.’
The song has so many funny and quotable lines. but the chorus is just genius, made all the better by Phillips’ delivery.
On $1000 Dollar Wedding Gram Parson sings about a groom being jilted on his wedding day which is so traumatic that “He took some folks out drinking / and it’s lucky they survived.’ He also seems to suggest that someone ‘do in’ the groom (a mercy killing under the circumstances) so that the wedding can be converted into a funeral. Presumably none of the deposits were returnable.
Remember that Moonshine Still that Dolly Parton raged about earlier on? Well here’s Gillian Welsh singing as the owner of one pleading that someone ‘Tear My Stillhouse Down’ when they die. A lack of profits seems to be his main complaint, but they accept that they are going to pay eternally for the damage his product has done.
“Oh, tell all your children that Hell ain't no dream
'Cause Satan lives in my whiskey machine
And in my time of dying I know where I'm bound
When I die, tear my stillhouse down.“
On the waltzy When We’re Dry, Steve Adams from the excellent Broken Family band describes a repeating pattern of relationships fueled and/or lubricated by booze. Apparently this is not a sound foundation for a long-lasting relationship. Who knew? It leaves Adams to wonder,
“Oh, where do we go when the booze runs out?
Oh, what do we do when the booze runs out?
When we're dry nothing makes sense.”
‘Father of the Bride’ by the The Sweetheart Revue describes what happens when a no-good dad shows up uninvited at her daughter’s wedding reeking of booze ‘In your borrowed suit and your borrowed tie / and your purple brown black eye’. He has a plan to smooth things over, but can’t remember the script he had prepared the night before. Finally the bride takes control, telling him in no uncertain terms that ‘I’m not yours to give away.’ Full disclosure dear reader, I wrote this song.
There were so many Hank Williams songs I could have included here, but you just can’t beat Lost Highway, which was actually written by Leon Payne, which I didn’t know until five minutes ago. Here Hank describes how easy it was to get on the wrong path.
“Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine,
And a woman’s lies makes a life like mine.
Oh the day we met, I went astray,
I started rolling down that lost highway.”
As far as he is concerned, it’s a done deal and there’s no point trying to change direction, but he does at least take the time to warn others not to follow him.
“Now boys don't start to ramblin' round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you'll curse the day
You started rollin' down that lost highway”
There’s no two ways about it, ‘I Drink’ by Mary Gauthier is profoundly miserable, but equally beautiful. First she describes how her father would come home every evening and hit the bottle, but quickly shifts focus on herself and how she developed the same habit.
‘At night he'd sit 'lone and smoke
I'd see his frown behind his lighter's flame
Now that same frown's in my mirror
I got my daddy's blood inside my veins’
It’s the resignation that’s so heartbreaking.
‘I know what I am and I don’t give a damn’
It’s no wonder our final song,‘So Much Wine’ by husband and wife duo The Handsome Family has been covered so many times, it’s just that good. The Andrew Bird version is well worth looking out, but I’m compelled to go with the original because I can barely get through a listen without welling up. You could write a great country song about the writing of this great country song. As I understand it, and please don’t correct me if I’m wrong because I love this story, Rennie Sparks wrote the song about husband Brett Sparks’ struggles with alcohol. She paints a pretty grim picture of his collapse before making her escape and leaving him with the most beautiful and hard-hitting chorus
‘Listen to me, Butterfly, there's only so much wine
You can drink in one life
But it will never be enough
To save you from the bottom of your glass.’
There’s that glass again, the one Webb Pierce was starting at way back when. This time it offers no kind of relief or salvation. It’s the whole world, everything he’s been trying to escape from but can’t. Just devastating.
Gerard is a Glasgow-based TV writer and front-person of Glasgow-based band, The Sweetheart Revue.