Fiddles Chasing Chickens
October 26th, 2009 | 10:00 am est |
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A somewhat forgotten footnote these days, string bands in their time were an indispensable part of rural community life, and these bands were particularly suited for live shows, rattling off reels, quicksteps, and waltzes for dances where the only rule was to move your feet. Within that framework, however, there was room for variety, including galloping gallows confessions (like Kelly Harrell’s “Charles Guiteau,” the first-person story of the man who assassinated U.S. President James Garfield in 1881, complete with fiddle blasts from the great Posey Rorer), surrealistic lyrics (try making literal sense of any version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe”), and country blues lyrics dressed up with fiddles and banjos — whatever worked, as long as you could hear it across the room or yard and dance to it. Often the songs were fitted with floating verses that allowed the bands to shorten or lengthen a tune to fit the dancefloor flow, and the best of these bands could turn as one on a dime, and being acoustic, they could literally play anywhere, anytime, and for as long as needed.
If anything, it was the late 20th Century rise of the shopping mall that killed off malt shops, at least as a place where teenagers hung out, met and practiced social skills, enacted adolescent drama, fell in love for perhaps the first time and, most often of all, played music on the jukebox. These days, of course, teenagers congregate in the malls, hanging in food courts, walking around, mingling and doing pretty much the same social enactments, but now the music is piped in and it just isn’t the same, there isn’t that shared sense of choice. And even the jukeboxes, if you can find one, are different, too. Now they’re connected to the Net and you download your play with the whole history of pop music at your disposal, with the eras, decades, fads, phases, styles all merging into one huge musical buffet in which the existential “now” can be any time at all. What’s lost, at least musically, is the present as a singular moment in time. But for a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before all those sprawling, enticing malls, there were malt shops that gave teens a place to, well, be teenagers. 
Now that the Grammys are over and the winners are crowned, perhaps now is the time to address this topic: Every year there are plethoras of features on the web that highlight “classic rock” artists — particularly those from the 1960s — that never won Grammy Awards. This is the result of a bad habit of some journalists of judging the past by the standards of the present. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences give out the Grammy Awards every year for this purpose, “to honor excellence in the recording arts and sciences. It is truly a peer honor, awarded by and to artists and technical professionals for artistic or technical achievement, not sales or chart positions.”
The calendar is relentless, spinning its fixed cycle of days and dates without prejudice or foresight as the numbers whirl by on their annual trek to yet another new year, and each of those numbers, each of those dates, has its own set of events and associations that travel with them, accumulating like stars in the heavens or grains of sand on the grand beach of time. Today is February 8, a day deep enough—if you happen to live in the Midwest—into the heartless grip of winter as to be just another drab, meaningless day to slush through without freezing or ramming your car into a tree on the drive home. This year February 8 falls on a Friday, which makes it a little better (Mondays being the worst), but it pales beside the twin poles of Super Bowl Sunday (February 3 this year, meaning Groundhog Day, February 2, and a Saturday, was clearly overshadowed) and the love-it-or-hate-it faux holiday of Valentine’s Day (February 14 rolls up on a Thursday in 2008, a red-letter day for doghouse roses), but it is hardly a day of particular distinction. But oh, it is, for like every other day and date on the great spinning wheel, things happened (and continue to happen) on February 8 that give it its own special history. 
The Eagles were one of the most calculated bands in the history of American rock, and were undoubtedly one of the smartest as well. They didn’t invent country-rock, but they certainly put it on the map with their early singles, easily outstripping musically purer bands like Poco and the Flying Burrito Brothers in the commercial arena. Glen Frey, Don Henley, and company knew exactly what they were doing, and while Gram Parsons may have championed a seamless blend of country, rock, and soul that he termed “Cosmic American Music,” the Eagles actually pulled it off and landed it on the charts to boot. This was a band that not only represented the drug-fueled hedonistic lifestyle of mid-’70s Southern California, they also had the balls to comment on and be socially critical of that same lifestyle in their songs, the musical equivalent of having one’s cake and eating it, too. Their legacy is immense, and it’s virtually impossible to listen to a contemporary country station without hearing traces of the Eagles everywhere. Think “Lyin’ Eyes” and you’ll get the picture. No, this band knew what it was doing from the very first, so it should come as no surprise that the group’s first new album of studio material since 1979’s The Long Run, the double-disc Long Road Out of Eden, is such a savvy example of precise content, exact timing, and shrewd marketing that it ended up being the top selling album in 2007 from a U.S. group.
