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#56 Kerosene Hat-Cracker. Richmond and Oregon Hill Continued.

Posted in Cracker with tags kerosene hat on September 29, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery

In #47 part 2 I mentioned the move Johnny Hickman and I made from California to Richmond Va. The 64 plymouth threw a rod in Arkansas stranding us in the middle of rice paddies in the middle of the night. That’s where i’m gonna pick up.

We were being eaten alive by mosquitos in the rice paddies while we were waiting for a tow. Johnny started smashing the mosquitos with a magazine on the headboard of the car. Finally aftter 2 hours a tow trucke arrived and took us to a local Uhaul facility. We had to wait several hours for the place to open up. We’d now been up all night. We rented a truck and a tow dolly and towed the station wagon all the way to Richmond. When we pulled the station wagon off the dolly in Richmond i noticed all these brownish red smudges all over the headboard of the car. I stared at them for a while trying to figure it out. Those hadn’t been there before.

Johnny leaned in the passenger window to see what I was looking at.

“It’s our blood”

I guess I gave him a confused look.

“from the mosquitos”

There were hundreds of these smudges. “We’ve already played a price in blood” I thought. I knew this was funny and overdramitic still I didn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t decide if this was an inauspicious or auspicious start for the band.

Big Dirty Yellow Demos were recorded on a machine like this.

Big dirty yellow is what we named the house at 239 S. Laurel street in Oregon Hill. Because it was well Big, Yellow and Dirty. This is also what we called the demo tape of 20 songs we turned in to Virgin Records. The house had a few distinct pluses. The first was the neighbors took an immediate liking to us, cause Johnny (always the goodwill amabassador) did an impromptu duet of Streets of Bakersfield with the neighbor lady to the right. This drew a small crowd. When Johnny flipped the last chorus to Streets of Oregon Hill the small crowd broke into pandemonium. They had to play it 2 more times before the crowd dispersed. Meanwhile I had managed to unload half the truck by myself. It was a small price to pay for the goodwill of the neighbors. We never had to lock our doors, and no one EVER complained about the noise we made recording the demos.

It also didn’t hurt that the neighbors on the left were a deaf family. Well not entirely. The oldest daughter could hear. She would play the pop radio station quite loud. On weekends we noticed that the radio would often blast all night. This was because the one hearing member of the family, the daughter, had gone away to the grandmothers for the weekend.

It was not always easy to gain the locals trust. Oregon Hill had been it’s own little city within a city for 140 years. A white some would say white trash ghetto in the heart of the city. And the neighborhood was beginning to be not exactly gentrified but filling up with artists, hipsters and especially musicians. They were drawn there by the ridiculously low rents and charm of the funky houses. Members of GWAR, The Alternatives, The Fugs, Michael Hurley, House of Freaks, Flat Duo Jets and Cowboy Junkies could be seen wandering around the neighborhood. The old locals which dominated our block were hostile to these newcomers. But never us. It was fortunate that Cracker was such a country rock roots oriented ensemble.

Big Dirty Yellow had three bedrooms and was 300 dollars a month. It was the classic Oregon Hill row house. Narrow like a shotgun shack. Each room lead into the next room till you got to the kitchen on the back of the house. It had no heat or air-conditioning. There was a hole in the floor between the kitchen and living room. You could crawl down into the basement through it. We tacked a large piece of plywood over the hole. I found an industrial strength restaurant kitchen fan at a junk store. I installed this in the uppermost window of my bedroom recording room. It basically sucked the cool air out of the basement into the upstairs of the house. Except for the hottest days it was adequate. In the winter Johnny and I each had a kerosene heater. We would actually carry these around the house with us. not lit of course. But if we had people over we would drop both of them in the living room and kitchen. If we took a bath or shower we would bring our kerosene heater with us. To this day the smell of kerosene reminds me of the poverty and the wistful hope we had for our music.

Site of the old East Coast Gas Station in Gunsmoke. Cary and Meadow Richmond VA.

In some ways this is part of the inspiration for the song Kerosene Hat. The kerosene hat was the wool hunting cap with earflaps that I would have to wear when I walked to the gas station in the middle of the night to get more kerosene. This was sometimes a scary proposition because if it was too late and the local texaco by VCU was closed, we had to walk to the East Coast station up in the neighborhood known as “Gunsmoke”. Cary and Meadow st. This is still a sketchy area today. It was really quite dangerous in 1990.

The second part of the inspiration for this song was the simple fact that Johnny Hickman and I were older than many of our peers in the alternative and indie rock scene at that time. Also we were one of the few bands that was playing what would later be called Americana. So this is exactly what i’m talking about when I sing:

How can I fly with these old doggy wings

While a magpie sings some shiny song.

Finally the main body of the song is populated by characters that are similar to the broken down houses and people who populated the neighborhood at that time. I’ll go into this more in the next post “Can I Take My Gun Up To Heaven”.

04 Kerosene Hat

[INTRO & BREAK:]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[D(bass F#)]
[Em]–[C]–[G]–[D(bass F#)]
[Em]–[D]–[C]–[A]–[G]–[C]

[Em] How can I fly with these [C] old doggy wings
While a [G] magpie sings some [D(bass F#)] shiny song?
[Em] Old corn face row of teeth, she says [C] sweetly to me
In the [G] elevator [D(bass F#)]

CHORUS:
[Em] Everything [D] seems like a [C] dream
and [A] life’s a scream.
[G]–[C]

Here come old Kerosene Hat
With his ear flaps waxed, a courting’ his girl
Come clattering in here on your old cloven skates
With that devilish spoon

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
And life’s a scream
When you’re submarine

[BREAK]

So don’t you bother me death with your leathery ways
and your old chaise lounge (old chaise lounge)
Wickerman’s fence of leathery tyres
And the cook’s gone bad, started several fires

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
When your submarine

Head like a stream she says softly to me
from the rattling chair
Bring me a steak and my old pair of crows,
my medicine lamp

CHORUS:
Everything seems like a dream
So life’s a scream
(life’s a scream)

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#55 James River- Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. Richmond Virginia.

Posted in Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker with tags James River on September 28, 2010 by Dr. David C Lowery

The James River in Downtown Richmond.

The James River is the major waterway through the center part of the state of Virginia. The river is quite deep until it hits the “fall line” at Richmond. Indeed this is why Richmond was built at this spot. It is the farthest you navigate up the James in an ocean going vessel. After that there are a series of falls and rapids. In the early 1800’s the James River and Kanawha Canal was built to bypass these rapids and bring trade from the mountains of Western Virginia down the James River to Richmond. As a footnote it was surveyed and designed by George Washington. But that’s another story. This canal helped bolster the city’s commercial activity turning it into a relatively prosperous and large city.

Although Richmond is very far inland few people realize that there is actually a Port of Richmond which accepts container ships -albeit the smallest container ships. The port is tucked away along the south eastern side of the city, in an area dominated by large (and mostly abandoned) industrial sites. Few people who live in Richmond even know where it is. I’m not sure how financially viable it is. I suspect that the fact the Defense Supply Facility is nearby has something to do with it’s continuing function

But these days the James is a relatively unimportant waterway. And it figures little into the commercial life of the City. The city literally turned it’s back on the river for many years. The banks were dominated by railroad right aways,sidings industrial facilities and power plants. Until recently there was no easy access to the river from downtown. It was only in the last 15 years a riverwalk was built along the river in downtown. There were parks along the river but you still have to cross railroad right aways to reach them. And thenyou were often in close proximity to railroad hobo camps (south bank) or the rough but not unfriendly denizens of Oregon Hill.* It is a beautiful river nonetheless. There are spectacular rapids for rafting and this is in the core of an urban city. Quite strange really. Deer, foxes, bald eagles and even bears are often seen wandering along the forested banks of the city’s river. But to me there is a certain sadness or nostalgia to river. It feels at times a relic of the past. Like the antebellum mansions and the Civil War battlefields and monuments. And a hint of even darker things. Belle Island in the center of the river was a POW camp for Union troops throughout the Civil War. By american standards a gulag of unimaginable horror. 30,000 prisoners on this island. 1 in 25 perished. A prominent Baltimore surgeon who treated some of the released captives from the Belle Isle prison had this description of the prisoners:

“in a semi-state of nudity…laboring under such diseases as chronic diarrhoea, phthisis pulmonalis, scurvy, frost bites, general debility, caused by starvation, neglect and exposure. Many of them had partially lost their reason, forgetting even the date of their capture, and everything connected with their antecedent history. They resemble, in many respect, patients laboring under cretinism. They were filthy in the extreme, covered in vermin…nearly all were extremely emaciated; so much so that they had to be cared for even like infants.”

Talk about Southern Gothic! Cormac McCarthy in his imagination could not do much better. But it is less the horrors along the river that captured my imagination. It was the sense the river was part of the lost past. Once important it is now but a shadow of itself. It is irrelevant to the life of the city. Just as the city was once the capitol of the Confederacy it is now a second tier urban center. It is somewhat irrelevant to the greater life of the nation.That is both sad and sweet.

The river was the heart of a system that sent the products of the colonies and antebellum south mostly tobacco back to England and Europe. An export oriented agricultural / natural resource economy. Trade that went East to West with Richmond an important trans shipment point. But as the North began it’s rapid industrialization, and railroads proliferated trade shifted North to South. The Civil War only accelerated this trend. Indeed one of the minor frictions between the norther and southern states was over tariffs. High tariffs protected developing industries in the north. Richmond was also industrializing and was becoming more tied to the northeast than the south. Hence many Virginians reticence to join the cause of the Confederacy. As Corry Arnold (Rock Prosopography 101) recently explained to me:

Thus the geography of Richmond is infused with a logic that no longer applies to the way the city works, as it is oriented towards the river when that is not actually the economic engine of the city (rivers are pretty, fortunately, so its not a terrible thing, but I’m not researching quality of life). In effect, the economics of Richmond were literally rotated on its axis, as the James River initially facilitated East-West transportation, but was of no value when commerce in the the region moved to a North-South axis (eg Atlanta and Florida to Baltimore).

(This post on richmond is largely based on research that Corry sent to me)

I wasn’t aware of this when I began to write about the James River. But one – even an recently transplanted westerner- could sense that the James River represented the old romantic past of Richmond. It’s sorry state also represented something else that I came to associate with Richmond. “Elegant decay” and “opulent poverty”. Two evocative phrases my ex-wife Mary uses to describe Richmond.

The first time I ever spent any real time in the City was my 29th birthday sept 10th 1989. Camper Van Beethoven was on tour with the 10,000 maniacs. We played a show at the Mosque theater (now called the landmark theater) just west of downtown in the middle of the VCU campus. Natalie Merchant had some friends that lived nearby. Later Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to a party at her friends house in this funny little neighborhood to the south of the VCU campus. This neighborhood is called Oregon Hill. It is a former factory neighborhood built along the banks of the James for the workers at the Tredgar Iron works. The neighborhood is very distinct. It even has it’s own accent despite the fact it’s a 4 by 10 block area. Tiny two story row houses with porches. It looked like some neighborhood in New Orleans. The residents were out on their porches this fine late summer evening. Some polite with nods or “good evenings” others drunk with catcalls and wolf whistles. Cicadas buzzed in the trees and I thought to myself? “where the hell am I”. I’ll explain this neighborhood more in a later post (Can I take my Gun Up to Heaven).

It was at this party where i met my future ex-wife. (I’ve always wanted to use that expression). It is the neighborhood that Mary and I lived in for many years. And more importantly this is the neighborhood that Johnny and I set ourselves up as we sought to finish writing the first Cracker Albums.

So the song started as a Camper Van Beethoven Song. With me trying to evoke what I would term the “Old-fashioned seediness” and “antiquated decadence” of Richmond. There were a surprising number of junkies, drug fiends and decadents in the music scene when I first began courting Mary. So that was what first struck me. That’s what the Camper Van Beethoven version and early Cracker demo reflects. Later I would come to appreciate the “Elegant Decay” and “Opulent Poverty” of Richmond VA. Thus the later more gentle more evocative version of the song on Gentlemans Blues.

Finally I hope my description of Richmond comes across as honest but still affectionate. In many ways my musical career is deeply infused with the life of three places the Inland Empire, Santa Cruz and Richmond VA.

james river (live) Camper Van Beethoven Italy March 1990

05 James River (Demo) Cracker Sept 1990

04 James River-Cracker Gentleman’s Blues

James River (later version)

[INTRO & BREAK:]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[Dm]–[Ddim]–[F]–[C]
[G]