Hang It On A Shelf In Good Health And Good Time

I'd like to lean into the wind and tell myself I'm free.

If you graduated high school any time after 1997, there’s a pretty good chance you have graduation memories wrapped up in a particular song: Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” Maybe there’s an end date to that range; I’m not sure if the song is “cringe” to today’s #teens or whatever. But we were for sure listening to it in 2008.

My students, after tricking me into saying the word “swag” out loud. “okay 1990” still haunts me.

(I guess Vitamin C’s “Graduation” might also be stuck in your head from that era. Vitamin C used to be my aunt’s roommate and is a very nice lady—she even cooked me dinner once. But that’s a different story.)

If you know anything about “Good Riddance,” it’s probably the irony of so many people using that song as a vehicle for nostalgic remembrance. Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day’s lead singer, wrote the song as a sarcastic, spiteful message to a girlfriend that ended their relationship by moving to Ecuador. Its origin is far from the saccharine, sappy path it’s taken since. The fact that many people know at least part of that story but don’t let it diminish their enjoyment of it is, I think, pretty sweet.

I bring this up not to provide an interesting bit of pop-punk history but because I recently came across a surprising cover of the song by Glen Campbell, who you may know from “Wichita Lineman” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Gentle on My Mind”. The cover is a good one. Merging Campbell’s good-old-boy sound with an angsty teenage anthem works, is the thing. It doesn’t come across as a cheesy, look at this wacky genre-bending we’re doing gimmick. Campbell was nothing if not painfully, almost embarrasingly sincere in his own hit songs, so it ultimately wasn’t much of a reach for him to put his own stamp on this particular tune.

In the introduction to the cover, Campbell names the song, and then with a chuckle asks “What’d he mean by that?” There is an almost childish innocence to that intro, one that stings in hindsight. Part of the sting is because it so neatly fits with Campbell’s oeuvre, which is rife with adult suburban regret that he isn’t still a free young man, a Nick Adams-style wanderer. His first commercial hit, “Gentle on My Mind,” encapsulates this perfectly:

It's knowing that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line
That keeps you in the backroads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind

Knowing nothing about his personal life, I remarked to my wife during our first listen-through of his Wichita Lineman album on our record player that he sang like “the most divorced man in history.” I wasn’t far off, it turns out.

“Gentle” continues:

I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin'
Cracklin' caldron in some train yard
My beard a rustling, cold towel, and
A dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round the tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you're waiting from the backroads
By the rivers of my memories
Ever smilin' ever gentle on my mind

Campbell was a career musician, comfortable and successful, hardly the roughneck hobo he played in song. He was impeccably coiffed, tanned, and groomed at all times. But these fantasies had clear and concrete roots: he kept up with the Joneses just long enough to realize the effort was killing him, a familiar repressive trap of that particular era. Campbell’s addictions, relapses, affairs, and divorces were all well-chronicled during his career.

The other part of the sting comes from knowing that he recorded his version of “Good Riddance” just two years before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the ultimate expression of adult regression into helpless innocence. His death in 2017 kicked off a lengthy estate battle, which often seems to follow such cases.

All of this is probably proof that even if the author isn’t dead, he is at least able to be shoved away into a dusty corner. Good cover songs—the ones that aren’t just professional karaoke—do this. One man’s venomous, sarcastic barb to an ex is another’s saccharine remembrance of younger days.

There’s something about people in the twilight of their lives singing sentiments penned by much younger men that really gets me, I’ve discovered. Three years before his death in 2017, the singer Don Williams released his own version of Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” which Van Zandt recorded when he was 22. In the original, these words are the hasty reassurances of a young man torn between needing the freedom to wander and needing the person he loves back home:

There's lots of things along the road
I'd surely like to see
I'd like to lean into the wind
And tell myself I'm free
But your softest whisper's louder
Than the highways call to me

Close your eyes
I'll be here in the morning
Close your eyes
I'll be here for a while

As someone who did his fair share of wandering between 21 and 26, I am no stranger to sentiments like these—their necessity, and the fear that on some level you’re deceiving the other person, or yourself, that undergirds them.

But when it comes from Don Williams, crooning at 75, the dimensions change. This is no painful early love whose contours are still unknown. This is an old man who has earned the right to make these promises because at this point in his relationship they are self-evidently true. I love that about music. That the exact same set of words can mean different things depending on who they’re coming from.

Speaking of music, I’ll be on the road Thursday-Monday for a music festival in Montana that was supposed to happen last summer. I can’t promise I’ll have any brain space left for a newsletter once all that driving is done. Stay (ahhh goddammit don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it) tuned.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you soon.

-Chuck

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