The Soul of America Caught Naked in Ryan Adams' Voice

A Saturday night and Ryan Adams' Jacksonville City Nights is on the turn table while the whiskey is in the jar and the sun is setting beyond the Great Plains, the Rockies spreading their vast shadows over the graves of gun fighters and the long forgotten bleached bones of outlaws. Ryan Adams has managed to do something that I was tempted to think impossible in this digital/electronic mechanized age--he has recorded an album striking in its originality while somehow hearkening back to an age that the prairie sun long ago set upon. Listening to Jacksonville, you here hints of Sun Records by way of the old crackle of Hank Williams sr. records on a dust covered jukebox in some lost west Texas town. He has constructed a sonic looking glass that possesses the magical power of looking upon past and future simultaneously--the pain of a lonely rain-speckled afternoon when your girl has let that front porch door slam behind her for the last and final time. And yet, your grandfather's sorrow is in there somewhere, caught between the subtle creek in the voice and the cry of the petal steel. It's the static of some half-captured radio station heard absentmindedly while cruising over wind-swept highways of the southwest where the cactus open needle-covered arms up toward the sky as if in quiet reverence to the silent master of creation. It's the midnight river swelling with a storm's ugly might and threatening the farmhouse that has been in the family for three generations and has outlasted even bankers covetous designs, the one that gave shelter to those dust bowl refugees and who knows if even Woody Guthrie himself weren't amongst their ranks. It's in the cigarette scarred voices of old men sitting around a honky tonk bar trading shots of Wild Turkey and stories of the old days when cattle roamed the range 'stead of telecommunication antennas. And it's in the eyes of the old women, bless their wind-burnt souls, hanging laundry on the lines at twilight.

Yeah--it holds all those things, like a sonic scrapbook of who we were when the blood of struggle shook the land, when Wobblies battled it out with the boss's hired cops on the streets so that making a living wouldn't leave ém in their graves. It's all those things, all those things that are so quickly disappearing from the scene to be replaced by another collection of plastic people (all apologies to FZ), all lookin' just alike in the same jeans an' same triangular glasses frames, readin' the same book lookin' for the same tired codes to lead them through to the same checkout line payin'with plastic credit cards bought with plastic souls.

So thank you, Ryan Adams, for casting a little bit of fading light on this long sun down on the American soul. Who knows what's gonna happen when that darkness finally falls? I hope and pray that there will be a few troubadours like yourself to shoot some sparks out into that godforsaken night to give us a little bit of light to see by, a little bit of light--just enough to look at that face squarely in the mirror and keep us honest, a little bit of light to look back upon our forefathers, into the future and out of the past, and keep a few outlaws alive until the next great awakening comes stormin' from the sky above.