There are so many debts of gratitude I owe. It can get hard to remember gratitude when the kind of compassion you have to practice involves forgiving things that have aspects like, they had no choice or they know not what they do. So today and in the context of this song, I’m drumming the gratitude drum. I have gratitude for inspiration and comfort and the ways I have defined home and community. It helps me see the whole thing differently.
Firstly, songwriters who have inspired me and from whom I have stolen choice lines in songs because, as a result of having listened to the songs and enjoyed them enough to listen enough to get the lines stuck in my head like words, sometimes my brain goes, Oh! The thing that goes right there is that one line from that one other song. I do that. I did it in this one. I am thankful for the music of Greg Brown and Paul Simon specifically within the bounds of this piece.
My mom’s brothers and probably her dad were all bar regulars. My parents drank every day. I think that’s normal. My dad’s dad’s dad died from drink when my grandpa was 11. That’s when grandpa Melvin took over general operation of a farm, his older male siblings having dispersed to escape the madness. I was a bar regular before I was old enough to drink. I have since quit, but during what is still the majority of my adult life I spent part of every day drinking in a bar. It's what grown-ups do, I thought. As it was the place I was, the evidence bore this theory out.
Bars are amazing. Going to the same bar every day is like being in a show. The actors are real if slightly removed from their responsibilities. And they become funnier and more attractive and loveable over the run of the show, each night. Bar regular life has all of the drama and reward and tragedy and ecstacy and agony that real life has. It’s a sub culture as old as time. It’s a real community. It's a common, enjoyable drug experience. I have theorized that the yeast that makes alcohol, uses the humans to favor carbohydrate baring plant species to feed itself and we drunkenly and hungoveredly oblige it all over the world with corn and wheat and rice and sugars from fruits and cacti, similarly to how house cats train their owners to rise and feed them in the morning. We are simple like that.
It raised me in its hearth -the bar, alcohol did. Like a town raises a baseball player. It rewarded me for being a good steward of it’s consumption and for that, I am truly thankful.
I think being hung over every day at work for more than 20 years may have been a hinderance, but today that is beside the point.
I experienced all of the joy and love and community and inspiration that lead up to the last 12 ish years of my life in bars and I am thankful to be the alive person I am. If I had a drink in my hand I would pour some of it out on the ground because there are people who were loves of mine who are in the ground and likely would prefer to be having a drink.
This Town, The Bar
I’m rough around the edges, and I’m fat on the inside, and I could light up a baseball park just walking around without my pride. There’s angel’s floatin’ over the north side black as the night and railroad tracks got the south side sewn down tight. Travelling companions and lovers and high water marks are stacking up like rainwater in a champaign glass in the dark. And the radio’s blasting me into obscurity. Every one knows my name and no one knows that it’s me. This town’s given me all that I’ve had so far and I beleive that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long.
When I have had my fill of this place you can have my stool. I’m gonna take my crack at living by the golden rule and when I’ve had my fill of holding onto strangers in the night, I’ll be cracking one on the front porch at my place playing guitar in the fading light. This town's given me all that I’ve had, so far. I believe that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long.
The bar.
Its got quasi paraphrasing from Greg Brown’s song Small Dark Movie. There’s champaign and deception. When I wrote it, the albums a band and I made were in the juke boxes in the bars. Sometimes I would walk in and a song I sang would be playing. There’s that Paul Simon song called Homeward Bound - “Home, where my thoughts are sleeping. Home, where my music’s playing…” etc. It’s more homage than theft in both cases. And then Iris Dement’s Our Town, I mean…
There's probably more I absorbed and passed off.
Anyhoo here's a video which includes the song:
And here’s a link to purchase the track on Bandcamp, please do:
