The writer Catherine Marshall, via Dean Smith’s memoir, “A Coach’s Life“:
Crisis brings us face to face with our inadequacy, and our inadequacy in turn leads us to the inexhaustible sufficiency of God. This is the power of helplessness, a principle written into the fabric of life.
From Questlove’s memoir, “Mo’ Meta Blues“:
1. I was and am so devoted to the review process that I write the reviews for my own records. Almost no one knows this, but when I am making a Roots record, I write the review I think the album will receive and lay out the page just like it’s a Rolling Stone page from when I was ten or eleven. I draw the cover image in miniature and chicken-scratch in a fake byline. It’s the only way I really know how to imagine what I think the record is.
2. Imagine if there was a “Legend of Bagger Vance”-type figure who came to me when I was in London and told me that I wouldn’t see my first big check — I mean a real big check, a check that could make me feel secure and safe — until I was twenty years into the industry. I don’t know what I would have done.
3. Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It’s a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.
Tomorrow I turn 50. I’m fairly sure at this point that my dream of playing in the NBA will not be realized. I think the rock-star dream might be gone, too — I never advanced beyond the blistering guitar solos I played on the tennis racket in my bedroom. (Van Halen, if you can rig a Wilson T2000, I can fill in for Eddie as needed.)
It’s natural, I guess, that I’m drawn more lately to people who built careers that last. Tim Duncan is my favorite athlete because he has been so good for so long with so little drama. Bruce Springsteen gives everything he’s got for three hours a night until his black shirt (and it is always a black shirt) is soaked with sweat. The great magician Ricky Jay spends hours alone, shuffling cards, until it seems as if he can move them with his mind. This is the trick of all great artists. Work and work and work until it no longer looks like working.
The one thing I’ve learned in half a century is that it’s ALL work, even the fun things. Getting in shape is work. Marriage is work. Being a good son and brother and friend is work. Having a dog is work. Owning a house is work. I have a bad habit of getting mad when easy things don’t turn out to be easy — one of the few things that makes me really angry is when a simple tool won’t work right. But everything worthwhile involves effort and failure and frustration and mistakes. The payoff comes in those moments when you’ve done the work and the joy you get out of it feels effortless.
This past year, work-wise, was a lot of failure and frustration. I had a great job doing stories I love and then I got let go. I’ve scrambled around trying to make a living and find a stable spot to land, even if I have to build it myself. Lots of other people are in the same situation or worse. I’ve been lucky in countless ways. But now I start to feel the creep of time. Turning 50 means you’re clearly on the back nine of life’s golf course. The mystery is, you never know which hole you’re playing.
Over the years, there’s been one deep philosophical pothead question that I keep chewing on. Can God allow himself to be surprised? Most of the time I think of it in terms of sports. If the Super Bowl is tied after the third quarter, can God will himself to NOT know how the game turns out so he can enjoy the ending like everybody else?
Uncertainty can eat at you. But I think knowing the future is worse. What good is life if you’re never surprised? As a writer, it always helps if you know the ending of a story — that way, everything else you write can lead up to it. But sometimes you don’t know the ending. Sometimes you get way deep into the middle, and it feels like you’ve been working on the thing, oh, I don’t know, 50 years. You panic, you sweat, you struggle. But eventually you find a way through. Those are the most satisfying stories of all.
I made a list of the best stuff I read, heard and saw in 2013 — it’s down at the bottom of this post — but in the end I kept wanting to write about one thing, and one idea. Jason Isbell’s “Southeastern” cut deep to my soul — I wrote about it once, then rewrote that a little bit. It’s the finest piece of art I experienced all year. But I think it’s more than that. It’s a Perfect Album. And there aren’t many of those.
I’m not saying “Southeastern” is one of the greatest records of all time. That requires some distance. The greatest records are more about the height of the peaks, and how they land in the culture. A Perfect Album is a little different. To me, a Perfect Album has three requirements:
1) I love every song on it.
2) At one point or another, just about every song has been my favorite song on the record.
3) It never gets old.
A lot of fantastic records — some of my absolute favorites — aren’t quite Perfect Albums. “Abbey Road” is amazing, but “Octupus’s Garden” loses me every time. I really wanted to put Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Second Helping” on here, but I just don’t love “Swamp Music” enough. I have deep feelings for Zero 7’s “Simple Things,” but it starts to fade near the end. R&B from the ’70s is my favorite music, but even Stevie Wonder in his “Talking Book”/”Innervisions”/”Fulfillingness’ First Finale” prime didn’t bat 1.000. (Greatest-hits records don’t count, in the same way you don’t pick a ballplayer’s best season by looking at the highlight reel.)
I spent a lot of time — probably too much time — going through my collection and thinking about this. My hardest cut was the first Boston album; my 14-year-old self argued for it long and hard, but I just don’t love it like I used to. Although I turn up the radio every time the deep-cuts station plays “Something About You.”
In the end, I come up with exactly 10 Perfect Albums. I can’t even begin to put one of these over another, so they’re in alphabetical order.
1) “Ben Folds Five” (debut album, 1995)
2) Isbell, “Southeastern” (2013)
3) Los Lobos, “How Will the Wolf Survive?” (1984)
4) “Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” (1989)
5) Prince, “Purple Rain” (1984)
6) R.E.M., “Reckoning” (1984)
7) Kim Richey, “Bitter Sweet” (1997)
8) Tom Waits, “Closing Time” (1973)
9) “Who’s Next” (1971)
10) Lucinda Williams, “Essence” (2001)
The Kim Richey record is the one you probably don’t know. She might make more of a living as a songwriter — “Every River Runs Dry” was a hit for Brooks & Dunn, and they used “Why Can’t I Say Goodnight” on the TV show “Nashville.” But her versions are better. Every time I play this record once, I want to play it twice.
But that’s how I feel about all of these. And that’s why “Southeastern” hit me so hard this year. At first “Cover Me Up” was my favorite song, and then for a couple months it was “Live Oak,” and then it was “Songs That She Sang in the Shower.” Lately “Elephant” has been working on me. The narrator drinks and smokes with his good friend, and thinks about screwing her, too … but she’s got cancer, and the only thing they can do is joke about it:
We drink these drinks and laugh out loud
Bitch about the weekend crowd
And try to ignore the elephant somehow
Somehow
It hurts my heart to hear it. But I always want to hear it again.
The whole point of a list like this is the debate, so of course I want you to shred my choices and nominate yours. I reserve the right to change my mind multiple times about this.
In the meantime, check out the rest of the best of 2013:
Read Michael Kruse on the Bounty, and David Shoemaker on pro wrestling, and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” by Ben Fountain, and Wright Thompson on Dan Gable. (I could have picked half a dozen other Wright stories — the fly-rod couple or Johnny Football or Bushwacker the bull or Michael Jordan. Wright’s 2013 was an all-timer.)
Stream the last half-season of “Breaking Bad” (especially “Ozymandias“) and season 4 of “Justified” (especially “Decoy“). I can’t recommend “Justified” enough. The new season starts Jan. 7. Good bandwagon seats available.
Listen to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry Go Round” and anything by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, who put on the best show I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Watch Andy Murray finally win Wimbledon, and David Ortiz’s grand slam (with cameos by Torii Hunter and a Boston cop) and, one more time, the end of the Iron Bowl.
What follows, in no particular order, is my best work from the past year. But first, some thank-yous:
Larry Burke at Sports on Earth, for letting me explore. Elizabeth Hudson at Our State, for good ideas and enthusiasm. Monte Burke at Forbes, for reaching out. Paige Williams at Nieman Storyboard, for shining a light. Roland Wilkerson and Gary Schwab at the Charlotte Observer, for saving me a guest room. Jena Janovy and Jay Lovinger at ESPN, for opening the door.
Thank you, also, to all of you who read my stories and passed along kind and thoughtful words. Thanks to family and friends. And thanks most of all to Alix Felsing, not only the love of my life but a damn good coach, in writing and everything else.
Even when athletes seek out the camera and are in our faces all the time, it’s hard to say we know them. Sometimes beneath the surface is just more surface. But we really don’t know Tim Duncan. He keeps his life off the court private. He turns down most endorsements. He declines soul-searching interviews. The vast majority of what we know about him, we know from watching him play basketball. More than any other modern athlete, Tim Duncan is what he does.
No NFL player — no pro athlete of any kind — had come back from three ACL tears on the same knee. There was no point in thinking about it.
Then he thought about it.
He thought about all he had gone through that everyone knew about. He thought about the one thing almost nobody knew about.
The next morning, he showed up at Panthers practice. And he got ready to start over again.
The queens of women’s bowling.
In an hour or so, here in Tennessee, they will demolish Arkansas State 4 games to 1 to win the Music City Classic. Just after the trophy ceremony, UMES bowler Megan Buja smiles and touches her nose. The other players frantically do the same. It turns out this is like calling shotgun in reverse. Last one to touch her nose has to pack the crystal bowling pin in her luggage. Coach Frahm loses.
Jason Isbell and a fat man’s walk.
I’ve gone to bed a thousand times – ten thousand times – believing I would start getting in shape the next morning. Sometimes I hang in there for a while. I’ve always backslid. There are a lot of reasons. Here’s the one that makes me sound a little crazy.
I worry that when I lose all this weight, I’ll also lose some essential part of myself. I worry about the good parts going with the bad parts.
Most people who know wrestling consider it one of the best matches of all time. It wasn’t the sweaty ballet you normally see in a great wrestling match. There were no graceful moves or daring stunts. There was just the dark drama of two guys full of hate beating the hell out of each other. The I Quit match is great because, after a while, it felt real.
“You know what?” George says, dealing the cards, never looking up. “I had that same situation one time. Except it wasn’t for 50 bucks like you guys are playing for. It was for $600,000.”
My first drive at Augusta National went maybe 200 yards into the right rough. It did not bonk off the pro shop, hit a tree, kill a squirrel or get lost in the woods. This is how I define a successful golf shot.
The Braves’ move to the suburbs.
In Atlanta, many people define their lives by the Perimeter, the I-285 loop that circles the city. You hear people talk about Inside the Perimeter or Outside the Perimeter as separate countries. Part of that is racial, but it’s also cultural and philosophical and a bunch of other -al words. Outside the Perimeter is a sea of Home Depots and brick houses with bonus rooms. Inside the Perimeter is where you find organic Thai food and you might have more than the average number of piercings. I know people Outside the Perimeter who never go Inside the Perimeter except for sports. Now the Braves are moving Outside the Perimeter. That’s a huge cultural shift.
So it turns out the narrator is sort of a bad guy, right? He just murdered another man in a jealous rage. But by now, because of his love for Felina, you care about him even if you hate what he’s done. Empathy for your subject is essential. Your main characters don’t have to be heroes. But you have to see the humanity in them somewhere. Sound familiar, Walter White fans?
Everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.
That’s what makes stories matter: when you read or watch or hear a story about a total stranger, in a completely different world, and you recognize that story as your own.
Today I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to tell you about a band that people all over the country are going to be talking about in a few months. This is not quite a “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” moment*. But maybe it is. The other night I saw the best live show I’ve seen at a club in 30 years. And I heard one of the greatest lead singers I will ever hear.
St. Paul and the Broken Bones are a soul band out of Alabama. They’ve been together only a year or so — they have just 38 minutes of original material. When they walked out on stage Halloween night at the Chop Shop, here in Charlotte, I had seen some YouTube videos, so I had an idea what was coming. My buddy Greg did not. Paul Janeway, the singer, grabbed the mike and hit his first note. Greg turned to me, and his eyebrows had flown halfway up his forehead.
“FUCK,” he said.
Janeway used to be a bank teller, and he looks like … a bank teller. For the Charlotte show he wore a charcoal suit with a bow tie and a pocket square. But he grew up on gospel in a Pentecostal church, where the music director had him sing backup instead of lead. Somewhere in Alabama there’s a Pentecostal music director who ought to be fired. That gospel music was still in his head when Janeway discovered the rough voices of rock and soul — Tom Waits and Nick Cave in one ear, Otis Redding and James Carr in the other.
This is what came out.
The videos don’t come close to what it’s like to see that band play live, for an hour and a half, in a hot room. By the end Janeway was toweling off after every song and the horn players were chugging beers and out in the crowd we were soaked through with sweat. I’ve been to hundreds of club shows. The last band that made me feel like St. Paul made me feel was Jason and the Scorchers back at the 40 Watt in Athens in the ’80s. The two bands play completely different music — Jason has this revved-up Hank Williams cowpunk thing going. But both bands play like they’re going for it all. St. Paul and the Broken Bones, on a Thursday night in front of a couple hundred people, acted like it was the last show they’d ever get to play.
In the middle of the set they played Otis Redding’s “Otis Blue” album in its entirety. (This is the kind of thing you do when you have 38 minutes of originals.) Otis is Janeway’s most obvious influence, and the band is set up like the classic Stax touring band — guitar, drums, bass, keys and two horns. At this point I ought to acknowledge that this soul band playing an entire Otis Redding record is made up of white guys. That’s not just something to gloss over. Anybody who tells you they don’t see color, that race means nothing, is lying to you. But music, more than anywhere else, is the place where race and culture mix and cross and blend until sometimes you can’t tell what belongs to who, which is good. It’s been that way from DeFord Bailey to Hendrix to the Muscle Shoals Swampers to Prince taking ownership of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” (Prince owns EVERYTHING.)
The point is, I’m always aware that St. Paul is a band of white guys playing soul music. I’m also aware that they are fantastic at it.
This is from the Charlotte show.
You might recognize the trademark James Brown fall-to-the-knees move. That scream comes from James, too. It’s clear that Janeway has watched the great soul singers as well as listening to them. But he does what all the greats do: he steals like an artist. He takes from all the things he loves and makes something of his own.
Maybe you won’t love St. Paul and the Broken Bones as much as I do — it would be hard for you to love them more, because I’m about ready to sell the house and follow them around the country. But part of that is personal. I grew up Southern Baptist, and I sang all those old hymns that were washed in the blood, and then I discovered all those old soul singers who sang about worldly things over music that was rooted in the church. Soul music speaks to me more than any other. It still hurts that I never got to see Sam and Dave in their prime. It hurts even more that I can’t sing like Al Green. What I guess I’m saying is, in a way St. Paul and the Broken Bones is the band I always wanted to be in, and Paul Janeway is the guy I always wanted to be.
The next-to-last song they played was “Land of 1000 Dances,” written by New Orleans R&B artist Chris Kenner, made a hit by a Mexican-American group called Cannibal and the Headhunters, made a hit again by Wilson Pickett, turned inside out by punk singer Patti Smith. The last song they played was “Try a Little Tenderness,” a big-band standard way back in the ’30s, covered by everyone from Sinatra to Three Dog Night, but made famous as one of Otis Redding’s biggest hits and his show-closer. Janeway kept walking off stage like he was done, but then running back on to shout a few more bars; it’s a move straight from Otis, and Otis lifted it from James Brown, and JB probably lifted it from some Pentecostal preacher, or maybe from Gorgeous George. If you happened to know the history of the last two songs St. Paul played, all the interracial and intercultural and intergenerational and interdenominational blurred lines that led to this white band from Alabama playing soul music that felt real and authentic, it might have made you smile a little wider. But you didn’t need to know any of that to sweat and holler and press together as the clock strolled past midnight on Halloween. You felt it in the music. You’d never forget how the music felt.
So today I evangelize for St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Go watch the YouTubes, and buy the songs, and God help you go see them play if they’re anywhere near you. They have a full-length record coming out in February. Six months from now they’ll be famous, and you’ll be cool because you knew them back when. But it won’t matter so much that you got to be cool. What will matter is, you got to hear the music.
*UPDATE: Reader Extraordinare Blu points out that Rosanne Cash, as usual, is way ahead of the curve. This is from June:
Went to Mercury Lounge tonite. I have seen the future of music & the name of the band is St. Paul & the Broken Bones. http://t.co/6opPTEQoSV
— . (@rosannecash) June 6, 2013
Now I feel even better.