12. See America Right
“I do not like year-end lists,” Darnielle wrote in an article entitled “Some Albums John Darnielle’s Dug in 2004.”
It’s hard enough to say what I mean when I say “This is a good record”: good for what purposes? Good for who? Good for how long? Good as in “useful” or good as in “noble”? And so forth. Dull voices croak things about “posterity” and whatnot, but I don’t buy any of that: Straight Outta Compton was better than anything else I heard in 1988 largely because it sounded like it wanted to expend all of its energy right fucking now. Is great sex any less great if I’m not still enjoying it the next day? And so on.
Good-for-me-right-now, good-for-us-right-now—those are the implicit criteria that most people use when they’re talking about the music they like. Some critic-type people declare their expertise and say definitive things about what’s best, but most people don’t. Most of the time, in non-specialist music talk, you either like it or you don’t, right now. Explaining why it’s timeless is the last thing on your mind, because you like lots of things and want more of them and might be moving on to something else in a little while.
I like “See America Right.” I like how quick and explosive it is, how spat-out the lyrics are. I like its minor-key blues pattern (Em-Em-Am-Em, Csus2-B-Em-chk chk chk chk chk chk chk). I like—a lot!—Hughes’s raw bass line, especially when it goes into a hammering series of Ds on the Em chords. Darnielle listened to stacks of blues records when he was young and recorded plenty of blues-based songs in the early 1990s, so he knows very well that “See America Right” is, structurally, a version of a version of a version. But “[s]omething need not be novel to kick total ass,” as he wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta a couple of months before Tallahassee came out. “All’s it has to do is, y’know, like, line all its targets up and then totally kick ass.”
“I—was—DRIVing,” it begins, with the band coming in hard on the first syllable of “driving,” “up from Tampa,”
When the radiator burst
I was three sheets to the wind
A civilian saw me first
And then there was the cop
And then the children standing on the cornerYour love is like a cyclone in a swamp
And the weather’s getting warmer
Each of the lines in the verse bumps the action forward, but you don’t have to piece together the narrative—car breaks down on a hot Florida day, driver is arrested for being drunk—if you don’t want to: it just feels great to say or sing things like “And then there was the cop/And then the children standing on the corner.” And then the tagline, which makes a separate point about the growing cyclone of your love, and we’re out.
And right back in. The speaker gets out of jail, heads toward the Greyhound, but has the DTs (I was shaking way too hard to think/Dead on my feet, about to drop). This time the tagline is part of the narrative: “Went and got the case of vodka from the car/And walked the two miles to the bus stop.” Forty-two seconds have gone by, and there’s just one verse and tagline to go. After an extremely restrained guitar solo from Bruno, Darnielle says/sings,
Got on the bus half-drunk again
The driver glared at me
Met up with you in Inglis
Thumbed a ride to Cedar Key
If we never make it back to California
I want you to know I love youBut my love is like a dark cloud full of rain
That’s always right there up above youHey!
In the studio, in October 2001, Darnielle whirled around, bent over, and shouted the last word. “[T]he whole point of rock and roll is joy,” he wrote on Last Plane to Jakarta in January 2002, a “raw, naked, sexually charged, almost intolerable sort of joy.” When he shouts “Hey!” he’s the character who truly knows his love is a terrible thing in his partner’s life and he’s the singer who just lined up his targets and blew them off the wall. He’s shouting away from the mic and so the room reflection is dirtying up the already distorted sound. And it was all born in dirt, too, the smell of the side of a Florida highway on a hot day, the smell of a Greyhound bus after you’ve been drinking for a long time. Non-transcendence, in fact a kind of de-transcendence, that suddenly shines with its own strange light. I love it.