While YouTubing around the living room one evening, you’re suddenly hit with a long-suppressed urge to find a clip of one of your favorite songs, “Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day),” by Jethro Tull.
Laugh all you want, you’ll tell them, but Jethro Tull isn’t one guy, they’re definitely not a heavy metal band — even though they famously won that damn heavy metal Grammy — and they’re far too innovative, melodic, mysterious and virtuosic to garner even a whit of ridicule for what “music critics” or people unfamiliar with a single note of their sound loved to label as painted-back-of-jean-jacket fodder for the burnout prog-rock heap.
And if those jerks still don’t believe you, tell them to YouTube the Feb. 10, 1977, television performance of “Skating Away,” in which Tull frontman Ian Anderson, clad in a red bowler hat, a tan-and-brown suit and festive scarf tie, leads his sextet in a passionate version of this song that bubbles with xylophone, accordion and glockenspiel as Anderson, not playing his signature flute, leads his band of merry pranksters on acoustic guitar as eyes of genius practically pop out of his head.
The song, rooted in Tull’s woodsy British mélange of folk, classical and medieval rock, speaks of breaking from a staid, “normal” life and of not being afraid to get out and glide over that slick, fragile sheen of frozen lake that everyone has always warned you about. “Do you ever get the feeling that the story’s too damn real and in the present tense?” Anderson sings. “Or that everybody’s on the stage and it seems like you’re the only person sitting in the audience?”
Which brings you to Blitzen Trapper, the closest thing to Jethro Tull in today’s musical landscape, as far as you can tell.
They’re a six-piece band, they’re hard to define, they mix all the influences you love — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, maybe even Jethro Tull? — and their lyrics actually mean something. Take “Furr,” the title track off their latest album and one of the best songs you’ve come across in the last ten years.
Like “Skating Away,” it offers a metaphorical wrinkle on coming of age — in this case a man who goes to live with wolves. “And I lost the taste for judging right from wrong,” frontman and songwriter Eric Earley howls in his best Zimmerman drawl, “for my flesh had turned to fur, yeah, and my thoughts they surely were, turned to instinct and obedience to God.”
The soil is tilled.
***
On the day that I turned twenty-three, I first became awake while kicking a Hacky Sack around with my Deadhead buddies Lasky and Jablow and a girl with skin the color of mocha swirl who called herself Cozy.
We were smoking hash mixed with opium in the parking lot of Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon, having flown up from Arizona to celebrate my birthday with Jerry and Bobby and Phil and Mickey and Billy and, yes, even Vince, along with everyone else in that crazy green and yellow town of Ducks and debauchery.
Two late-August Dead shows with the Indigo Girls opening, maybe a quick spin by Kesey’s place, maybe even a dip in the freezing, sparkling Pacific, and then we’d have enough of our fill and a few more tales of Americana to tell when we shoved ourselves back into the Sonoran oven.
Getting cozy with Cozy robbed us of the Indigo Girls’ set and forced us to plow through a football stadium floor to the stage, leaving a wake of buzz-killed Heads rising in protest from their patchouli-saturated Mexican blankets as the sun blazed, fittingly as always, right into “Here Comes Sunshine.”
By the time Huey Lewis (yes, that Huey Lewis, and if anyone was unsure that it really was Huey Lewis, I’ll ask out loud again: Who else has hair like that?) had joined the Dead on harmonica for “Good Mornin’ Little School Girl” and Jerry croaked his way through the “I Fought the Law” encore, we were already angling to get dinner back near our hotel, which was fifty miles northward in Salem.
***
You play the rest of the “Furr” album and can’t believe how good it is.
The opening track, “Sleepytime in the Western World,” tears out of the speakers as a most victorious Liverpool anthem, makes a screeching turn in a red 1967 Mustang GT, raining gravel into a the living room of a freewheelin’ Minnesota dream house for the first bridge, and somehow manages to quote of all your favorite Brian May guitar solos in its three minutes and thirty seconds.
“Black River Killer” immediately becomes the best hip-hop song you’ve never heard, despite the fact that it’s an outlaw country tune with a fucked-up story (“Her mouth was sewn shut but her eyes were still wide, gazing through the fog to the other side.”) and the mesmerizing lilt of synthesizers Howard Hawks might have thrown into the “Rio Bravo” theme if he knew what they were.
You hear the final song on the album, “Lady on the Water,” for the first time and assume it just has to be one of those public-domain staples like “Wayfaring Stranger” or “Greensleeves” that nobody knows who wrote but have been part of the collective musical canon for centuries.
Earley’s poetry arouses and haunts (“With your jacket blue and strange, change these rivers in my veins into wine, learning, burning, driven deep into this maze, all of my days”) and his finger-picking cascades down the fretboard like a creek-fed waterfall as spooky synth sounds suggest gathering storms.
You drive directly to Easy Street Records and empty the Blitzen Trapper section, taking home the self-titled debut, the predecessor to “Furr” called “Wild Mountain Nation,” and the acoustic “Black River Killer” EP. Everything is good. Everything is new.
You get home and go online to claw for more, and Wikipedia delivers the news like the birth of a newborn cub. Earley and most of them Blitzen boys are originally from Oregon.
Salem, Oregon.
***
Denny’s is hardly ever a welcome sight, and that was true even on August 21, 1993, the day my years matched Michael Jordan’s jersey. Even when Denny’s gave you the meal of your choice just for being the birthday boy (now it’s just a Grand Slam breakfast, and I’ve never been much of a breakfast guy).
But after six hours baked while baking and bopping to the synapse-stinging stringed meanderings of Garcia, not drinking nearly enough water, fifty grueling interstate ticks and, come to think of it, nothing to eat the entire time (sure as hell not the “kind veggie burritos” and “killer ganja Rice Krispie treats” that Cozy offered us in exchange for the Hacky Sack and an Ozric Tentacles tape), the green sign that said Salem City Limits and the yellow one with the unmistakable red writing welcomed us into the hometown, kitchen and heart of a familiar American friend.
Lasky and Jablow got the table while I peed, and when I found them in the middle of the restaurant floor, they were corralled into a rodeo ring of two four-tops, looking right at a six-pack of high school dudes who’d already jumped down, turned around and shook it on a Saturday nite. Not only were they playing the crowd, but they were saying it out loud. Really loud.
Back in those days, when I happened to know most of the finer points of just about everything, kids like these would figuratively kill me and I’d roll eyes while silently considering literally returning the favor.
But being freshly twenty-three? Knowing we’d get an even better Dead show the next day? Mere minutes from the glorious, glistening, fabulously phosphorescent and free Moons Over My Hammy? Nothing could bother me. We laughed along with the loony lads and even started leading them through the night.
Then it got quiet. Fast.
***
You haven’t talked to Eric Earley (or you have, but that doesn’t really count because it was seventeen years ago), but you’ve been reading some interviews.
“I played in a couple of bands in high-school, and the members of Blitzen Trapper were in those bands, ’cause we all went to school together. Me and [bassist] Mikey [Van Pelt] had a band called The Baldricks, which was named after a character from that [TV] show ‘Blackadder,’” he tells about.com.
“We were just pretty straight rock music, emulating whatever it was we were listening to at the time. Which, in high school, was all about Nirvana. Smashing Pumpkins were big. And maybe R.E.M.”
Hmmm, you think. That must’ve been around … 1993.
You look at their press photos. Could it be? Was he the uncomfortable one in the flannel coat?
***
The cowboy with the handlebar mustache strutted into the frame, and at first I kept smiling, but once the shadow of his six-foot-seven mass darkened the seating section and the only remaining light in the corral bounced off his big ol’ brass belt buckle, I knew we had problems. He pointed at the kids. I could read “Wrangler” almost too clearly off the patch above his back pocket.
“Will you mother fuckers shut the fuck up already?” he yelled. “My wife and I are trying to have a nice meal and y’all are ruining it for us and everybody else!”
Thoughts counted down through the mind of a tired, hungry man embarking on the maiden voyage of the Goodship Two-Three:
4. “Is he serious?”
3. “Does he need to be so profane?”
2. “Well, I guess that means he really is serious.”
1. “Denny’s is a ‘nice meal’?”
Thoughts were quickly interrupted by the rise and subsequent mouth of Lasky — five-foot-nine, 107 pounds, tie-dyed pot leaf hoodie, Lennon specs, hair flowing down to ass cheeks, earrings in both ears.
“Last time I checked, America was a free country,” Lasky said.
Cowboy spun around. I was half-expecting him to draw.
“Was I talking to you, hippie?” Cowboy yelled, even louder.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lasky yelled back. “I’m talking to you now … hick!”
Sometimes you have a little bit of time to assess situations. Sometimes you have none. I did quick math. Six-foot-seven plus 220 minus five-foot-nine minus 107 equals … Jesus Fucking Christ.
I jumped up, got in between them, braced myself for saliva, possible meat fragments in said saliva, or the butt of a concealed weapon to the chin, and said something like, “Let’s not get crazy here, OK?”
That didn’t seem to work. I think I might have seen Cowboy crack his knuckles and shorten his sleeves. Lasky kept standing there — a Haight-Ashbury Ken doll.
But just as quickly as the chaos had arrived, so did salvation. The manager came. Cowboy went away.
And within minutes, so did the kids, all six of them, silent, suddenly witless, and scared. Shitless.
***
On June 10, six of your dearest old friends, living remnants from a great place and time in all of your lives, a band of misfits, majesty, and musicmusicmusic that have blessed themselves Blitzen Trapper, will play at the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. They tell you that they’ll go on at about 10:15 p.m.
You’ll be seeing them for the first time … well, OK, the second time. But for the first time playing their music.
You tell everyone you know to come on by and hang with you during the show. It’ll be dark, you say, but you’ll be easy to recognize — one of the tallest guys right in front of the stage. You’ll be wearing wraparound sunglasses (why not?), a Jethro Tull trucker’s cap, and a huge and possibly hallucinogen-addled smile on your face.
Oh, and you almost forgot … a T-shirt from Denny’s.
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So have you done the math with ages now and then? Does it add up? You think they would remember the encounter in the Denny’s? BTW, I bet that Denny’s t-shirt rocks.