Biloxi. Ted Hawkins. 1994. DGC.

 Dreamlike and languid, Ted Hawkins’ masterful cover of the Jesse Winchester ballad is paced with the slow and dazed mid-summer eroticism of the season of heat. Like Otis Redding before him, Hawkins sang from deep inside his torso but on record he’s more relaxed than Redding, languorous as the calm Gulf waters he’s singing about it. Hawkins was a modern troubadour, mixing soul, blues, and country folk without making an ostentatious fuss about his influences. In the great folk tradition—Hawkins’ formidable talent easily transcended genre; Robert Christgau called him “an American original”—Hawkins and his voice had the power to unify. After DGC released his breakthrough major label  record, The Next Hundred Years, store employees at Sound Warehouse kept it in heavy in-store rotation. We were a disparate group of the record’s fans, and a large part of its appeal was that a sense of justice had been gained, Hawkins’ great talent having been at last vindicated. Without knowing any of the details of Hawkins’ life we bonded with The Next Hundred Years, trusting it to charge the air around us with the unsentimental poetry of contemporary reality. What Hawkins communicated, using the beauty of his voice, was the durability of the will to withstand the impact of American freedom and all of its terrible, consequential weight. Biloxi’s final verse is a brief, lyrical description of its characters at twilight on the Gulf beach, the overhead sky filled with stars and the surface waters of the Mississippi Sound lit by their reflection. Idyllic, but soon the mood begins to shift. “And the sky is red from off toward New Orleans,” is the song’s closing line, and, recited repeatedly, it acquires an incantatory power that holds together Biloxi’s dreamlike quality while still admitting the distant shriek of anxiety that reality is wed to.

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