Phthursday Musings: The Needle and the Amazing Feats Done

My dad once explained it to me kind of like this:

You have to go out in the world and make some mistakes. That’s how you learn.

But, some mistakes you don’t have to make yourself. You don’t need to stick a needle in your arm to know that’s a bad idea.

I guess the lesson took. No needles around.

And yet…

The best podcast going is Tyler Mahan Coe’s Cocaine & Rhinestones, about the history of the 20th century country music. It can be something of an investment; I’m 15 episodes into season two now, and a typical episode is two hours long. Episodes begin with histories of things that don’t seem directly related to country music, like Catherine de Medici, bullfighting, or soap operas.

Episode 15 began with a history of cocaine use. And then the episode was about the years when George Jones discovered cocaine. I’ve never heard anything like it.

My friend Matt made this wonderful observation about Bono a couple weeks ago:

Bono was playing a character until he became the character sometime in the 90s

Now, there are a lot of other public entertainers where the line between the character they persistently portray and who they are “in real life” can get hopelessly blurred. Dirty Harry wasn’t just some character Clint Eastwood played in the movies, right? People in the 1950s were afraid to play cards with Nelson Algren because they thought he somehow was the man with the golden arm, and that was just a character he wrote about!

Repeatedly in this season of C&R, Coe has returned to the idea of the George Jones and Tammy Wynette “characters” as conceived in song and in popular culture. And I think that this blurring of the lines between the real and the character had become so extreme with Jones and Wynette that… well, you couldn’t create fictional characters like these people, it wouldn’t be possible. But you can create plenty of fiction. The crash between the unreal and real is where things truly get weird.

In turn it seems that, inevitably, those spectacular crashes require a shitload of drugs. Not just the crash though: the momentum leading up to it as well. George Jones, the greatest country singer of all time, was constantly derailed by alcohol and then cocaine, but it’s hard to imagine how he could have become what he did without the alcohol. Not that it gave him power, exactly; rather that his entire existence was so intermeshed with his addiction, his powerlessnesses conspiring against him, but so integral to how he saw himself in good times and in bad; I just don’t think the narrative exists without the booze. And while the cocaine came on late in the story, that’s so embedded in the overall narrative too…

Would we have the artistry, would we have the spectacular moments, would we have our connections, would we have us, without what this man, the greatest country singer of all time, put into his body?

Would we have the artistry, would we have the spectacular moments, would we have our connections, would we have us, without what this man, the greatest home run hitter of all time, put into his body?

Ahh, but, Barry Bonds is not headed for Cooperstown.

No, you see, all those home runs, they were real, but we mustn’t count them as real. Oh, sure, the games went on. The games still count. And, well, the home runs still count, because they were parts of the games. But we mustn’t embrace any of this. We mustn’t even come to terms with it all. The man was a cheater! And this simply cannot stand.

Keeping Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame is the baseball equivalent of telling people to throw their George Jones albums away. Yes, the home runs happened, but they must be consigned to memory. Yes, the songs happened, but we mustn’t listen to them anymore.

Oh, sure, all of those guys, they made baseball fun again, and they kickstarted a renaissance in the game, but, they cheated, none of that really counts.

Get this:

In 2000, David Glass bought the Kansas City Royals for $96,000,000.

In 2019, David Glass sold the Kansas City Royals for $1,000,000,000.

The man who oversaw baseball’s renaissance, commissioner Bud Selig? Oh, he’s in the Hall of Fame. Well, it’s not like ol’ Bud put a needle in his body, right?

Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who brought fans back in 1998 with their home run hitting exploits? Nope.

Tony LaRussa, though, who managed McGwire in Oakland and then again in St. Louis… yeah, Tony’s in the Hall. But then again, he didn’t put a needle in his body, now did he?

What does it mean for us, the fans, the people still paying money to go to the ballpark, still sitting through all … the … commercials … about … sports … betting, the people who made all of these other people rich? Are we supposed to believe that we were the ones who were cheated?

Shouldn’t we get to make that call?

Shouldn’t we decide whether we hold on to our George Jones albums or not?

I have major misgivings about the Steroid Era in baseball. It’s blatantly obvious that Barry Bonds was using something. I do think it’s a terrible shame that he, not Henry Aaron, holds the all time record. But… he does. Erasing that, declaring it somehow be void from our understanding of baseball history… let me make my own call about that. If it was so goddamn important to the gatekeepers then, when it was blatantly obvious what was going on, they would have put an actual stop to it. They chose not to. They had their reasons. So too did Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and Roger Clemens and Manny Ramirez and a whole host of others have their reasons. I still want them in the Hall of Fame. Not because they’re great heroes of mine. But because their presence there would constitute a powerful part of the history of the game. Their absence, though? What, exactly, does it constitute?

Now, I don’t have George Jones albums scattered around the house. I got a little country via my grandmother and all those episodes of Hee Haw, but I grew up on rock ‘n’ roll. When I was 5 or whatever my favorite bands, as I remember it, were Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, and Pink Floyd. (Though with Floyd, I think it might have just been that pink was my favorite color…)

What, you think there wasn’t a shit-ton of cocaine in rock ‘n’ roll?

I know I saw World Series games before 1985, Cardinals-Royals, but that’s the first one I remember in much detail. And then the first baseball game I remember in a LOT of detail was Game 6, 1986. Mookie. Buckner. Vin’s call. Of course I’ve seen it a million times since. But I remember watching. I told everyone at school that the Mets were going to come back and win even after they were down 3-1.

Good god, do you not realize how much coke the ‘86 Mets did?

The point isn’t to defend any of it, to dismiss any of it… quite the opposite of dismissal, it’s to acknowledge that all of this madness has been going down for a long time, it is often hopelessly intertwined with a lot of other things that aren’t bad, that are maybe even good. You can’t just run away in terror from confronting any of this. This is reality. Blotting out the reality you don’t like is less real than blurring the real with the unreal. I’ll take the world, warts and all. Yeah, I’ll even take the drugs. I just won’t, you know, take the drugs.

The debate about how you separate the art from the artists, I don’t usually like engaging it, in part because I feel it can be overly trite, in part because I feel like it’s often being moderated by the same kinds of gatekeepers who decide that their concept of the Hall of Fame is what really matters.

But even if we’re not eager to engage it, I think we’re remiss if we don’t at least acknowledge that the debate is out there, and I think it’s healthy to confront and accept that we might ourselves, from time to time, hold contradictory, even irrational views. The idea that we are all somehow purely rational creatures fully capable of parsing ethical perfection out of every situation is maybe the sickest kind of shit you could pump into your veins. We’re not perfect, our heroes aren’t perfect, we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

This doesn’t mean that we should somehow blithely accept any and all shortcomings as perfectly acceptable. Sometimes coming to terms with what’s complicated really does mean throwing shit away.

I operate from this mindset though: Most bad things are done by good people. Little lies, petty thefts, cross words. We are human. We should not celebrate the bad because it is bad, but rather, we should celebrate our basic humanity, trespasses and all.

My guess is most META-SPIEL readers are not hardcore country music devotees. A lot of what has been the most popular country music over time has, let’s face it, been even slicker than a lot of what’s shown up in the Top 40. And there has always been something about that which, to my ear, has just seemed wrong. Incongruous, and not in a way that ever much worked for me.

Via Cocaine & Rhinestones, I’ve heard a lot of George Jones and a lot of other country from eras which I just wouldn’t have gone out of my way to hear. There are a lot of trappings which I’ll never like. I don’t like a lot of the way that strings are arranged, for example. And, I’ve come to realize, I don’t like a lot of the storytelling, I don’t like a lot of the formulas, they’re not what grab me. But hey, I’m one of those people who felt compelled, when in Palm Springs, to head up to Joshua Tree, and drive past where Gram Parsons died. So I suppose I like plenty of the storytelling after all. I’m just… one of those country music fans.

The idea then that George Jones is the greatest country singer of all time, this is an interesting one. Does it require me to want to listen if I should decide I agree with the pronouncement?

What I’ve been coming around to is the allure I find in how he could be so emotionally moving when he was so often a complete wreck. You can gain an appreciation for just how good he was from this 1970 performance on Johnny Cash’s show:

This 1982 video though - my god, what the kids are wearing in it - this song feels even more on point. It is George Jones the singer, but even more so, it is George Jones the character:

It’s this video which hammers home a point about country music, and really about humanity writ large, which I think is important to all of this:

If you want to go out and sing country music, and you want to be like George Jones the singer, well, yeah, that all makes sense. But my god, do not try to be George Jones.

And yet the singer and the character aren’t separable. You can talk about the elements separately but they are combined in the man.

Similarly… hit play on this, then close your eyes. Just listen to the sound. Who else makes that sound?

And this video, the whole story of this at bat, with a Hall of Famer on the mound, his first game back after his father died, the narrative we were given at the time:

Can’t that narrative be true too?

I’m not saying that you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity.

But I am saying that you should strive to be comfortable with not being comfortable with the ambiguity.

Or, well, just slash through it altogether: