People Who Go To Twelve

It was in a Keith Richards interview many years ago that I learned that ‘the English really dig country music’. We have learned over the years that they actually really loved a very old kind of country music and subsequently experience dismay and despair when confronted with what Nashville called C&W these days.

The Ramones may have given ‘birth’ to punk (or was it the Dolls?) but it was the Brits who embraced it and began the mythology.

And we all know that Willie Dixon’s recordings are not the reason that he is known to white American Rock Fans from the 60’s & 70”s. We Have Eric, Jimmy and Keith to thank for that.

But Eric, Jimmy and Keith can’t keep 4 bands going at one time; They certainly have shown no interest in social change; They have never been uber-producer’s for legions of label mates; They don’t write very many great lyrics (leaving that to others); Only one sings passably, one sings w/ Character and one sings not at all; And, art school backgrounds aside, have you ever seen any of them paint anything?

After a long two weeks of pondering, assessing and even resisting, we have succumbed to the obvious: IF you are a founding member of a seminal English Punk Band; IF you are the Godfather, emininence gris’, renaissance man of Alt Country’s Major American City’s Alt Country Movement; IF Robert Christgau gives you all A’s; IF you generate not one, not two, but THREE Albums devoted to ending the Death Penalty (take that Steve Earle); IF you are an MVP of all live performances of an NPR Radio Show devoted not to music but to telling stories; IF the drummer in two of your groups also helped give us Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks, IF you can capture despair and humor more assuredly than Bruce Springsteen and capture them in ground breaking Rock and Ground Breaking Country and, IF You Are The Only Person In The History Of Pop Music To Actually Generate Real Genuine Interesting Distinctive Valuable Paintings and Drawings (Take a hike Tony, Joni and, Oh Christ did you ever see any Dan Fogelberg Paintings….?), well, then you could only be Jon Langford, and You Most Definitely Go To Twelve.