Day 10: R.L. Burnside – Too Bad Jim

Oh man oh man oh man, I liked this a goddamn lot. From the opening notes of Shake ‘Em On Down I could surmise a number of things about R.L. Burnside:

1. He is probably blind.
2. He was probably in his 60s when this was recorded.
3. He was probably drinking continuously during the recording, including while singing; probably this involved a straw and a bottle of rye suspended from his neck by a frayed rope.
4. He probably has had difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.
5. The vicissitudes of his life have probably been the result of bad luck as much as bad decisions.

One look at his Wikipedia article revealed I was not too far off. This paragraph says more than enough about how beautifully, classically blues this album is:

Around 1959, he left Chicago and went back to Mississippi to work the farms and raise a family. Burnside was convicted of murder and sentenced to six months’ incarceration (in Parchman Prison) for the crime. Burnside’s boss at the time reputedly pulled strings to keep the murder sentence short, due to having need of Burnside’s skills as a tractor driver. Burnside later said “I didn’t mean to kill nobody … I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

The album is not just a triumph of style, though. It’s genuinely great music. Any track from the album could stand up as a high point. The guitars on .44 Pistol positively saunter, sounding bitterly indignant. While RL’s voice is just perfect — ravaged by menthols and grain alcohol — the guitars really make it bleed. His leads are beautifully expressive, earning the phrase ‘licks’; he reaches into the deep footprints the rhythm section stomps out and plucks out the bluest chords you could imagine. He and his band are content to repeat a chord or two for a long while, letting a suggestion of a pattern linger, teasing it with flourishes, before R.L. seems to get annoyed and dig into his guitar for a second before regaining his composure. The whole sound is the blues, as far as I’m concerned: It’s a musical bad mood, and like real bad moods it juggles frustration, bitterness, disappointment, and elation, all in flashes that leave you haggard and bitter.

The complex soul of the music is especially evident in a song like Short-Haired Woman, which manages to be lazy and restless, sad and ambivalent, dismissive and insistent, blending all of these states in a true way. It’s not the garish sound of someone setting out to paint with tones, thinking “I would like this to be a sad song so it is going to be sad, and I would like it to resolve cathartically so it will eventually get upset and loud.” It is the sound of someone accustomed to strife shrugging at their misfortunes, knowing that real life, even at its worst, consists of too many concurrent feelings to be flattened out.

This album, in all its humanity, was especially invigorating today. See, I’ve now gone a week and a half without listening to music. Maybe that’s not technically accurate, but believe me it feels like it. The challenge of not being able to listen to the music I want to is the true soul of this project. The daily album is a way of assaulting my system, of expanding my horizons, of filling in some of the woefully cavernous gaps in my musical knowledge, of learning how to write about music in any kind of an effective way. But that’s all beside the point. The project is a way of instilling discipline in my life. I’ve always had a hard time sticking with things for very long. I have a hard time envisioning a year down the road, let alone constructing the things I want in my life when I get there.

Two things in my life have been relatively constant: music and writing. Music has always been my passion. Nothing mattered more when I was a kid, and not much matters more now. I wish this passion could have translated into a musical career of some sort, but I could never muster any talent on an instrument and the sad fact is I’m really not that creative. I’ve been playing piano for a while now and the best I can do is pluck out parts to songs I really like, and like enough to want to know how they operate.

“After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside’s doctor advised him to stop drinking; Burnside did, but he reported that change left him unable to play.” – Wikipedia

A friend was a bit puzzled at how abruptly I started this project. This is usually the kind of thing someone starts on January 1st. But I had been coasting for a while now, writing short stories here and there, trying to get into the right mental space to conjure a 2nd novel, and despairing at how vague an idea of the future I had. Moving to a new city has derailed my sense of continuity, and without any big career goal outside of eventually having spent enough time writing to hone my talent enough to convince someone to give me enough money for writing to pay my rent with, I needed something.

Inspired by my friend Kelsey’s blog project, Dear Mr President 365, where she has been writing a letter to the president every day for a year, I was thinking how nice it would be to have something like that: A daily task. A purpose. A small thing I have to do every day that actually draws on things I like. An opportunity to write, to converse with myself and a reader, about something that really means something to me. To learn something.

The idea for this blog hit me, and I jumped.

And so, for the next year, my life has meaning. It’s insignificant in the grand scheme of things; but it’s a concept I can stand for, trying to throw myself hard against something that has always been my greatest failing — sticking to a goal for more than a week — and in the process delineating a year in music, finding three hundred and sixty-five surprising new things to like, hate, and/or respect, gorging on a buffet of art greater than any I’ve ever tackled before.

Last night I overheard the first minute of Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place, the opening track from one of my favorite albums, and couldn’t stop hearing it all night and all morning. It was tormenting me, and calling to me. It was an itch I couldn’t not scratch. And then I got this, my random album for the day, and put it on, and immediately realized that the remainder of the year will not be a challenge; it will be an adventure.