Inspiration Case Study #3: The Case of the Blues Cowboy Calling out to Me
[Published on the Facebook Thunkity Thunk: Open Ideas forum on January 24, 2020]
The opening brush strokes of this song stumbled out of my teenage bedroom stereo’s speakers like a determined, fresh-birthed foal catching me unawares with its vivid beauty as I sat on my bed doing homework. I was in 11th grade and this was 1991, the same year the rash of singles off “Nevermind” were blotting out the Modern Rock radio format and ushering in not Grunge but, really in the long run, Alternative — a genre so *off* that it often wasn’t even followed by the word “Rock.”
Chris Whitley’s “Living With the Law” and his titular debut album’s other standout single “Big Sky Country” were the last gasp of the expansive lungs that composed a decade-wide genre. LIVE 105, my local SF-based Modern Rock station, would be less likely to play Depeche Mode and New Order back to back than to collage together Talking Heads, Enya, Bobby McFerrin, Nine Inch Nails, and Falco. It taught me to take for granted contrast and contradictoriness — rather than homogeneity — ingraining in me an unconscious compulsion to find connections.
But his voice! Chris Whitley’s see-saw between lived-in rasp and glorious falsetto was unheard of before by me. — Except no, it did have a precedent! 1991 was also the year U2 released “Achtung Baby,” with Bono singing in a high register as alarming as the Edge’s chainsaw guitar moves “Love, we shine like a/Burning star/We’re falling from the sky/Tonight” on the first single “The Fly.” I saw that band for the first time on that tour at the Oakland Coliseum, with the Sugarcubes and Public Enemy opening and all those old East German cars dangling above the stage and the giant tv screens stitching together an Art of Noise-worthy intro that ended with footage of George HW Bush saying “We will. We Will. Rock you.” There was the crest of the 80’s collage culture also racing up, to look down the sheer face of the last decade of the millennium at the pathetic copycat culture of references and mash-ups that lay beyond.
But the poetry! The way Chris Whitley had with words was just what I — a Gerard Manley Hopkins-besotted yout! — needed to hear right then: that such concise, unique, yet precisely evocative phrasings could make it on the air. He channeled John Mellencamp’s Americana through the sieve of Woody Guthrie’s This Machine Kills Fascists fret board. He pried up floorboards with his cadences and “Made the dirt stick,” as he sings on another song on the album. He’d put in his 10,000 hours plus, moving innumerable times as a child, spending 6 years in Europe in the 80s playing with avant garde bands, busking on New York City street corners, then finally getting discovered playing in a club there in 1988 by, of all people, uber-U2 producer Daniel Lanois. (And in 2008, Lanois recruited Chris Whitley’s daughter Trixie — a wunderkind musician herself — to sing lead in his new band Black Dub). Chris Whitley had his own patois, but it was all of ours too, with something hidden yet recognizable in each syllable.
Listen to what he does with the thrice repeated use of the word “out,” the final time followed by six syllables that lull you with repetition until you realize — like the narrator of the song — you’ve ended with the word “crime” on the tip of your tongue.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be 45, the age Chris Whitley was when he died — in a flash it seemed like — from lung cancer. 1960 — 2005, there stretches a grave across time for a great man in the history of music, as well as — more specifically — my own mysterious personal aesthetic, as an artist and art connoisseur.