A Bellyful Of Empty And a Pocketful Of Dreams (1/7/13)

As I pulled out into the roundabout, the warning flashed up on the dashboard. Service needed NOW. That's 'NOW' not just 'now' which would be much more polite. Luckily I found the button that changes the display and made the rude interruption disappear.

It was then that I realised that my Road Tax ran out yesterday and that I probably should have renewed it before now. Then I started musing in the fact that I seem to be constantly spending stupid amounts on this thing that basically just exists to get me from A to B and occasionally C, D etc. I'm fairly certain that there's a massive conspiracy between car companies and garages and that if we were just left to our own devices the damn things would just happily tootle along forever with no work required, no attention needed. It's simply that they build problems in so that they can keep garages in business.

I haven't figured out how this aids the manufacturers yet (apart from the obvious needing a new one when it dies completely) but I will; the answer must be out there because there are just so many better things to spen money on.

Which brought me nicely to 'The Essential Kris Kristofferson' which I'd just bought.

Kristofferson is a genius. No, really. A Rhodes Scholar (not entirely sure what that is but it's bloody impressive), helicopter pilot, sometime actor and one of the greatest songwriters that has ever walked the planet.

If it was just 'Me & Bobby McGee' he'd be one of the greats but there's 'Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down', 'For The Good Times', 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' - there's a hell of a list and you may know that list from the cover versions, the soul versions, the rock versions but the real versions, the definitive versions are his own country versions.

And that's where people turn off. There's a bizarre aversion to country music; there's a lot of people that don't get country.

But that's okay, I don't get people that don't get country; the best of it is as good as the best of anything else. Ignore your Garth Brooks and Shania Twains, that's not the real stuff. The real stuff is poetry; it's the music of the dispossessed, the drunk, the desperate, the lost and the lonely, it's the truth about the human condition.

Springsteen gets country, The Beatles got country, The Stones got country; the greats get it. 

You can claim that it all sounds the same if you like but then you'd have to apply that argument to the Blues, Classical, Rap, Indie.

Here's your homework then;

Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Michael Nesmith (yes, the one from the Monkees), Wilco, Billy Bragg's Woody Guthrie covers, Gene Clark, John Phillips (John, Wolf King of L.A.), Dolly Parton's Bluegrass albums (yes, really) and of course the very great Kris Kristofferson.

Make the effort because those that don't understand country music don't understand life.