All the World Is Lonely Now. Marty Robbins. 1957. Columbia.

 Loneliness, our experience tells us, is inevitable. If we aren’t currently enduring it, then it’s there, waiting to poison us, in some unavoidable future. I listen repeatedly to Marty Robbins sing about it not because he has any relevant secrets to share about ridding oneself of it, but to remind me of the mechanisms of our internal worlds, their disruptions and the many ways we resolve to ornament and mitigate them with emotion and imagination. All the World Is Lonely Now is like a Joseph Cornell or Jess postcard mailed to us from the ephemeral locale of shared associations; in this case, the lonesome white cowboy of the post atomic age, his big acoustic guitar tuned to a key of abandonment. Robbins strips the Roy Acuff original of its squeezebox and fiddle accompanied carnival atmospherics and evokes a desert landscape of torment and loss, populated by one. In our time, the American stranger has come to signify any one of our most enduring mythological figures who operate in solitude. The serial killer, the sexy trick, the misunderstood celebrity genius, enacting his latest drama on Instagram. Rock and roll, and its associated genres, was the exemplary public shelter for the lonesome American stranger. It was where we learned to recognize him by any of the now familiar signs: she was looking out on the morning rain. He was wiping his hands as he walked from the grave. And so forth. Walk into a barroom today and you can still find him, pleading with another stranger not to play A-11, or ready to sit with you and share that drink he’s been waiting on you to buy him. If uncertainty prevents you from taking that first, fatal step towards company with the stranger—whom Neil Young referred to as the Loner—look for guidance in the playlist, the car radio, the great gnostic oracle of the American jukebox. Your future has already been foretold. On limited, collectors’ edition colored vinyl.


Feb 22 022

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
Read more

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, a...
Read more

Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...
Read more