Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s a real humdinger today, readers, because MAR has been around for a year! We haven’t missed a single week and it’s been a lot of fun. This week, we have a review of a crime novel, a discography from the world of “alt-country,” an Observed Life, with Peter, and an Election! That’s right, all readers will get to do what Citizens normally get to do and vote on what I read! All in all it’s a fun time. Thanks, readers, and especially Citizens- there’s no MAR without you!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Joseph Hansen, Death Claims
Election!
Dick vs Howard vs Mandela!
Discographies
Steve Earle and Justin Townes Earle
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: The North Country Fair
REVIEWS
Joseph Hansen, “Death Claims” (1973) - Murder and insurance fraud in rundown California beach towns and amongst used booksellers — fancy first edition types, not the kind of places I frequent — is the order of the day in this second in the Dave Brandstetter mysteries. Dave is an insurance investigator- tough, cynical, honest, and gay. Hansen was the first big openly gay American crime writer, and Brandstetter walks in the shoes of hardboiled private eyes like the Continental Op and, especially, Philip Marlowe. Ray Chandler didn’t like gay people much- to the extent Chandler was a leftist, he was very much in the old west coast, Jack London mold that saw deviation from the norms of white working class masculinity as a threat. But I think Hansen saw in Marlowe, the archetypal detective hero Chandler created, a way to explore gay themes. Chandler might not have liked the gays but he made a hero out of a loner with sensitive perception, fine taste (Marlowe is forever judging clothes and interior decor), and a code of honor which he rigorously adheres to despite it being at odds with the society around him… perhaps that sounded familiar to Joseph Hansen.
In any event- John Oats, life insurance policyholder, goes for a swim in the ocean during unlikely weather and drowns. There’s a variety of people around him — a new young lover, an angry ex-wife now shacked up with his former partner in bookselling, a squeaky-clean cowboy actor — but signs point to his son, with whom he was close. Brandstetter unknots the mystery through persistence and perceptiveness, and it helps he sees things — especially certain aspects of relationships — that are opaque to others, especially cops. In the end, we wind up with a tale of opiate addiction and blackmail, and there wind up being plenty of candidates for who took John on his final swim. On top of it all, Dave has his own domestic issues to worry about, as both he and his boyfriend are in love with dead men. This was by and large pretty good, though I could see it getting a little tired, over the course of ten or twelve books, Dave solving these mysteries basically using gaydar. But they’re decent crime novels and an interesting depiction of gay life just before Stonewall- “Death Claims” is set in 1968, and I’m curious if subsequent installments will deal with the increased prominence of gay people and their claims for rights. ****’
ELECTION!
You, subscriber, are invited to do what only paying Citizens usually do- vote on what I read next!
I will present three candidates. You may vote for one (1) by leaving a comment indicating your choice. This election will close at 9:30 AM EST on Saturday, July 31st. Any ties will be broken by Roomie Ed. I have heard people say “I don’t feel qualified to vote!” Nonsense! If you can read this, you should vote.
This election is for the next book in my “recreational reading” slot. This is stuff I read for fun in interstitial moments, like on commutes or before bed. It includes genre fiction, light literary fiction, and easy-to-read nonfiction like journalism and memoirs. The last book I read in this slot was Joseph Hansen’s “Death Claims,” chosen by the Melendy Avenue Review Citizenry!
THE CANDIDATES-
Philip K. Dick, The Eye of the Sibyl (1992) - This is the fifth of five volumes of the great Philip K. Dick’s short stories. Who knows what will be in here, or what Hollywood or the streaming services will make of them? I also just read Erik Davis’s “High Weirdness,” as close as we’ve gotten to real intellectual history of Dick and his scene, so that has me thinking of him, too. I love Dick and would be glad to return to his world.
Robert E. Howard, Conan (1967) - Genre homework! If you’re gonna understand fantasy, especially the swords-and-so recent stuff, you gotta read Conan. It appears the best way to get through that material is through the collections Lin Carter and some other SFF big shots out together in the sixties and seventies, which include original stories from Robert E. Howard going back to the thirties with stuff that Carter and others contributed. I liked the Arnold movie!
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994) - I have no idea whether this is any good or not, but Mandela was a giant of the twentieth century and his story is well worth telling. I’d like to know more South African history in general, especially the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. Now is an especially poignant moment to read this book, when it seems like the arrangements he helped bring into being for a post-apartheid South Africa are coming apart at the seams.
DISCOGRAPHIES
Steve Earle and Justin Townes Earle! I first learned about Steve Earle from his role on “The Wire,” playing Walon, recovery sponsor to homeless addict Bubbles. I encountered him again when I got into previous Discographies topic Townes Van Zandt. Eleven years younger than Townes, Steve Earle left home as a teen to become a country singer-songwriter like his idol. Earle lived the life- poverty, booze, drugs, wandering. He worked for years as a Nashville songwriter before getting his break in the eighties and his first album, “Guitar Town.” That one sounds a lot, to my untrained ear, like John Cougar Mellencamp- a cigarette-voiced man yarling over loud-twanging guitars about heartland disappointment. It wasn’t bad, and Steve Earle always had a way about his songwriting that made his songs more interesting than your average singer. He came into his own, to my mind, with “Copperhead Road” in 1988. Above and beyond it being heavier than his early stuff — Earle said it was the first heavy metal bluegrass album — the production was more interesting, and he had The Pogues on one song. He was doing something interesting as most country music was getting very very bad.
He was also going in a different direction politically than most country music at the time. Steve Earle always had a blue collar consciousness, and unlike a lot of people at the time, thought (thinks) that means something more than a preference for trucks as cars. Along with songs about rural unemployment and hopelessness, he criticized the drug war and American imperialism, including with a song seeming to sympathize with American taliban follower John Walker Lindh at the height of the war on terror. Stuff lighter than that ruined the Dixie Chicks’ career- I guess Earle was insulated by being a relatively niche act, an “alt-country” guy, respected but not widely played like the Dixie Chicks. Kind of seems like a weird flex, empathizing with Walker Lindh, who seems like a rich kid who went hunting for meaning and found it with some real assholes, but that’s songwriters for you, to say nothing of the W. Bush-era left. He also wrote plenty of songs about love. They’re pretty good, I think, too.
It’s “alternative country,” which is a cringeworthy phrase in some ways but appropriate. It was always hard to tell what, exactly, alternative rock was an alternative to- Def Leppard? Guns n Roses? Especially after grunge ate the rock world and shat it out in the course of the nineties. It was mostly the same nihilism and horniness you saw in any rock, minus some lecturing by Eddie Vedder. But alt-country really does represent an alternative to mainstream contemporary country. You can tell, because alt-country is niche — a respectable niche, a Grammy-winning niche, but a niche — while mainstream country grows and grows. Alt-country, even at its least political, is a message from an alternate dimension where country music didn’t become the soundtrack for American empire and empty-headed know-nothingism.
Steve Earle had a son, named Justin Townes Earle, his middle name derived from his father’s idol, mentor, and friend, who died in 1997. Justin Townes became a musician too, and also lived that country musician lifestyle. God help me, but some of his earlier songs, especially on his first album, 2008’s “The Good Life,” sound like nothing so much as the sort of phony Americana music you hear gaggles of bespectacled hipsters playing at overpriced brunch restaurants that want live music to distinguish themselves from the dozen other overpriced brunch restaurants in any given gentrifying district. Fake twang, fake nasal voices, fake lyrics about fake Americana. No thanks. He probably could have gotten some Mumford and Sons type money if he had gotten luckier, maybe gotten more dramatic- need that big banjo sound and the millennial “whoop-whoop” background vocals for the car commercials!
But Justin Townes came into his own, too, found his own voice, with 2010’s “Harlem River Blues.” The production gets a lot better — ironically, he sounds more real the more “pop,” as opposed to fake old-timey, his songs sound — and he had his dad’s songwriting talent, telling good stories, conveying complex emotions in simple ways. That’s a gift, something the best country songwriters excel at, reaching those states- the awareness of one's own complicity in one’s own woes, for instance, and the awareness of the impossibility of change…
Both Steve and Justin Townes were making good music as the 2010s became the 2020s. My understanding is that they loved and cared for each other, talked, collaborated, but there was tension. Steve was an addict, has been in recovery for a long time, and left the family when Justin Townes was a kid, only for Justin Townes to take up much the same lifestyle, but with some bitterness towards the old man- arguably, his characteristic arc of records were a trilogy recorded between 2014 and 2017: “Single Mothers,” “Absent Fathers,” and “Kids in the Street,” which kind of says it all. Steve, for his part, got deeper into his own thing- maybe my favorite record out of the maybe two dozen I listened to for this discography is “Ghosts of West Virginia,” a thumping, droning, haunting forty minutes or so that seems to have been dug up out of the Earth.
Justin Townes died in August 2020 of a drug overdose. His father had already recorded one tribute album- “Townes,” his 2009 tribute to his son’s namesake, which includes some great takes on Van Zandt’s songs. This year, he did another, “J.T.,” to honor his son. It’s a good album, but it’s sad to hear. Steve Earle seems like a good man- no one deserves the pain of losing a child, but it seems especially hard here. Musicians, especially country musicians, seem to run on pain- not an original observation, but unavoidable. We all sit around and gawk for our amusement, or maybe some of us just feel better knowing someone else has felt what we felt, can reflect those things back at us in an honest way. Both Earles did that.
Next up on Discographies: “Four, three, two, one…”
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: North Country Fair
I took a trip with some friends to visit another friend who lives way up in the boonies, in Saint Lawrence County, New York. I didn’t take as many pictures as I might have but I took a few.
There was a nice river.
I don’t think I’ve mastered the photography genre of “holiday snaps”
They had nice pedestrian covered bridges
Our host had sweet old dogs, like this gal
Nice old dog exhibit B
We ate pretty good
This is what it looked like driving around
Traveling can be fun but it’s always good to get back home.
Mandela
Philip K. Dick! He seems the most fun.