When I moved into my first college apartment at the tender
age of eighteen, neither I, nor my roommates owned any sort of sound
system. We had a transistor radio with a
broken antenna to pull in Tiger games from the voice of the Midwest (WJR in
Detroit) and a cassette player. Not a
boom box, mind you, with real speakers and perhaps a tweeter or something. A cassette player, with one tiny, tinny
speaker. You had to flip the cassette to
hear side two. Jim was the guy that was
as broke as I was, staying home while our other roommates pursued theatre interests
and sorority girls. I don’t know how
many times we flipped that solitary cassette, but I would bet I could still
sing every song it played. I bet Jim
could, too.
The other two roommates had decamped within a matter of
months, both claiming that they just couldn’t live with people who insisted on
them paying their fair share of the bills.
What had been an austerity budget before became a sustenance budget,
spending only what we had to to stay alive while shouldering our share of the
house as well as the shares of the absent renters. It meant a lot MORE evenings that consisted of
baseball radio broadcasts and hundreds of repetitions of the cassette tape. There were only two artists...side A was
Roger Miller, he of “King of the Road” fame (though that song was NOT on the
cassette) and side B was Merle Haggard.
Jim was perhaps six months older than me, we’d graduated
together from the same high school. We’d
known each other for years, yet both of us admitted years later that we weren’t
sure that we would get along. We wound
up being best of friends, bound together by hard times. You work with a person, you create a
friendship. You starve with a person,
you become brothers. I’m still humbled,
all these years later, that I was selected to be the best man at his wedding. There are ties that are forged by eating
Cost-Cutter Macaroni and Cheese with only butter because the milk is gone. Shit, we were grateful we still had the
butter.
With all respect to Roger Miller, who I loved then and love
still, our bond was forged by Merle Haggard, the poet of the common man. His grasp of hard times and his lyrical hopes
of better days to come was a thing to hold on to when you felt that the world
was aligned against you. We were two
boys who thought they were two men, together but alone, far from the girls we
loved and loath to admit defeat and move home to our parent’s houses. When Merle sang, “Think I’ll Just Stay Here
and Drink”, we did. When “Misery and Gin”
would play, we would both fall silent for two and a half minutes. I don’t know what he was thinking and I never
shared my thoughts. It sure seemed like
Merle knew what we were both thinking.
By this time, Merle had been consigned (along with Hank Jr,
Cash, Jennings, Kristofferson and Nelson) to “Outlaw” Country, meaning that he
was too old to be considered marketable in the post-“Urban Cowboy” era. While they still had a few tricks up their
sleeves, separately and together, the Country music we had grown up with was
largely vanquished. The upstart artists
called themselves “Young Country”, and while many made the attempt to describe
the forefathers’ music as “Classic Country”, the implication was clear…if you
ain’t “Young Country” you are “Old Country.”
Merle Haggard was born in a converted boxcar in an oil town
not far from Bakersfield. He lost his
father when he was a boy. He was in and
out of jail as a youth, even while “Mama Tried” to raise him better. He was a guitar-playing inmate in San Quentin
when Johnny Cash played a concert there in 1958 and Merle thought he could see
a future for himself. As a boy, he’d
hopped on freight trains to go see the country.
He eventually found himself in solitary after getting caught making “spud”
(a potato-based intoxicant) talking to the man in the next cell…the soon-to-be-executed
“Red-Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman.
Upon his release, Merle dedicated himself to his music. He could sing, he could yodel like Jimmie
Rodgers, and play both the guitar and the fiddle. By 1970, he was appearing on network
television alongside the man who had inspired him on “The Johnny Cash Show”. Merle was an Okie in spirit but wasn’t from
Muskogee, or even Oklahoma. What the
hell, it was a convenient rhyme. He went
on to have a long and storied career, with dozens of gold records and millions
of fans.
When Merle died last week, after a long period of being
ignored by the Country music establishment, my first thought wasn’t about his
family or his legacy. My first thought
was about Jim. About where we were then
and where we are now. Neither of us
finished college and neither of us stayed with the girls we had pined for all
those years ago. Yet today, each of us
can claim to have come through the fire, at times with only one voice on a
cassette tape telling us that it was possible.
It was a voice that had been there, from a man who wouldn’t deny his
past and wasn’t giving up on the future.
When I was a kid, my Mama used to cry every time she heard “If
We Make It Through December”, because that was when the U.A.W. lay-offs happened.
But Mom and Dad always made it, just
like Merle did. I was fortunate enough
to grow up with both of my parents alive.
Dad would always look skyward when I played the Nelson-Haggard duet, “Reasons
to Quit”.
Like all of us, we want to go out on top. Merle’s career ended with an album co-written
and performed alongside Willie Nelson, followed by a tour with the “Red Headed
Stranger.” The album went to number one
on the Country charts the week it was released. The halls they played were
jammed. Pneumonia was the ultimate winner, ending the tour early and sending
Haggard home for his coda. He predicted
that he would pass on his 79th birthday and was correct.
With only Loretta and Dolly and Willie alive, the rafters of
Country music sag with Merle’s passing.
Yet when only the music remains, the sound of a cassette player in a
shitty college apartment is a symphony to the people that lived it.
