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| Hard, Hopeless & Brutal |
| band: Cletus Romp |
| Album: Restraining Order Romance |
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"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
~ William Faulkner
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
~ Flannery O'Connor
"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
~ Flannery O'Connor
Cletus Romp is the band most likely to be playing in a William Faulkner novel. He has dime store values, ambition, and a sense of privilege that comes from knowing he won't win playing by the rules. When a man at a bar notices that a band is playing, he'd rather hear a good story than be forced to dance. Cletus Romp is a colossal failure in polite society, and a real page-turner as the subject of a song. Cletus is frail and unethical to the point of being human. He lacks the redeeming empathy that might bring him to a sense of justice. As a character, he stands for that devious teenager in any adult who is bored enough to consider killing, burning, or escaping, but without the hope of escaping judgment that leads a normal person to choose patience and safety over the risk that the system will find us out. Dreams are for orderly people, who live vicariously as though they were in any sense the hero when they are asleep. He is a man without a dream.
The epic of action is the story of doing things most people don't admit they ever dreamt they would do. It is best expressed in rhythm & blues sung by a country boy raised in bars. These are campfire tales told about relatives seldom mentioned at the dining room table. Cletus is our wayward relative whose use as a cautionary tale will only be enhanced when he comes to a violent end. But when he dies, we sleep differently, because we have lost hope in escaping the consequences of our own rejected plans to live as he did between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and the alarming hour of 6:00 a.m. No story of an intrepid defender of the public good can ever keep us listening when the fire is down to embers, the air turns icy, and safety beckons from a tent.
Derek Stinson is Cletus Romp to the core, but you wouldn't know it without hearing the songs. He has the gumption to kick against the pricks in life and the force is with him strong enough to sustain the slings and arrows of outrageous, modern, work-a-day misfortune with a baby on the way and the galling realization he has lived enough to be a figure of authority worthy of rebellion just for falling in love with an existing family. He'll never wear a striped prison uniform, but in his dreams he jet skis with Jesus and apparently breaks prison for a run into town. Since bad boy Will Faulkner was a southern gentlemen, and Flannery O'Conner was Faulkner with a figure raising peacocks in the deep south, it's no wonder he has a story to tell despite his good looks, dependable charm and punctual responsibility. I think he looks like Rick Springfield on a bad hair day, but in his heart he is Cletus. He's not the trained dog you might ignore in a crowded mall, but the wild animal described in Willie Dixon's "Signifying Monkey" choosing to suit and show up with a host of other choices available to him. I was half pissed on beer at The Comet when I asked him the important belligerent question for any free man: "What is this ethics shit you keep talking about?" His response was as true as any redemptive story in Flannery O'Conner's A Good Man Is Hard To Find: "I went to school in a small town schoolhouse. When my grandfather gave me a watch, I took it with me. At the end of the day, the watch was gone. I never want anyone to feel what I felt that day."
Restraining Order Romance is an imperfect record with something important to say about what matters in a song. I told Derek my tried and true formula for holding a crowd: "You must think you are the most important sound in that room." He would have none of it. "That conversation at the back of the room during a song when two people meet," he said, "is more important." That's one teaspoon full of empathy over my line drawn in the sand. I stand corrected. I'll maintain it's necessary to believe in your own song before you sing it, because I've heard the blather that comes from anything less. By all accounts, Cletus Romp is a great bar band. They are loose and loud with plenty of R&B played with a country accent, a dash of surf, and loads of fun. Tim Golliher is upright on the electric bass, fully capable of a little "Mountain Jam" Allman Bros. solo on the title cut. Larry Gross keeps the jitter in the stomach in each breaking-the-law song of redemption with a down home honest inventive spirit. Annette Christianson is the lyric soundtrack for each of these stories, and the goodness from which each violation of the public good flows. Joe Riddle tightens the gut with a big bass drum, and keeps Cletus running wild as you drink your beer and consider jumping around and calling it dance. They are loose and loud as rock 'n' roll, R&B honest, and ready to howl at the moon before you get tanked enough to join them in the last set. Cletus is that man ill dressed to create a public disturbance whenever you have the balls to book him. He's the bad seed brought into a civilized world to burn down the slaughterhouse in a vengeful fit of poetic injustice. He's the Wildman you stuff into your jeans before you trot off to work.
Cletus Romp is set to break a new and more percussive sound soon. As Derek puts it, quoting Rev. Tom Waits: "When I ask my percussionist to bring the fender, I'm not talking about a guitar." Cletus will run again, get caught, and dig another ditch no doubt in work farm stripes. You know in your heart you want to hear what he done to get into so much trouble.
THE SONGS
1. SLAUGHTER HOUSE outlines the "simple little plan" Betty dreamed up to "[m]ake a stand against Jimmy and his swinging back hand." Well, you need a lead pipe and some rope. "She won't stop swinging till that pipe cracks bone." Then wrap Jimmy "tight in a tarp in the bed" douse in "a couple gallons gas" and light. Then wait two hours or so until that slaughterhouse is burnt. Next, "dance in the ashes till the sun comes up." Point is they won't find Jimmy, and I guess dancing ain't illegal. Dancing vengeance is best when the ashes are cold.
Annette savors the moment on the violin a little more lyrical than the rest, perhaps playing the sense of loss of that Jimmy who once was worth a shit. Derek sings this one dark like an angry recipe for Cajun pepper soup.
2. CHILD sounds like rhythm & blues gospel with a country mandolin and violin sitting in for flavor. Mom is praying, Dad may be begging forgiveness, but the Child is caught in the vice of domestic violence trying to take the sage advice of a local Dr. Phil to "take what you're given and grow. Just grow." The rage and fear behind this particular message song makes "take what your given and roll" a somewhat literal roll with the punches aphorism. There is a sense of honest outrage in the call and response story telling here. There's very little good news in this gospel. Just survive it, it don't necessarily make you stronger.
3. CLETUS ROMP is a surf's up romp down the beaches of the Ohio State Penitentiary and the nearby general store. There's a touch of The Flight of the Bumblebee or Devil Comes Down to Georgia in the fiddle but "they'll never catch Cletus" is just wishful thinking without a chance or a plan. Mr. Romp takes freedom for a joy ride only to be rousted by a recognizing flunky so the song gets mainly sung in the can waiting for the privilege of a walk in "The Yard." Romp is wasted digging ditches for the state, since he has such a deep appreciation of the dash.
Note the flavor of the Allman Bros. bass from Mountain Jam plucked by intrepid Tim Golliher as Cletus heads for the hills.
4. HOWL AT THE MOON is a sweet ballad to the bottles of bitters sends you howling at the moon proud to be alive and likely to explore the freedom of dreaming in a doorway your not careful. Cletus makes it home in this drunken waltz going nowhere much bleary eyed, proud of being free, making an ass of yourself, waking to a screaming oxygen deprived world between the temples, and planning to do it again. Waltzes are about repeated things, like seasons, and visits to the C&D of Papa's Office for a howl. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked...," so begins the Howl of brother Alan Ginsberg. Kerouac drank. Mistakes were made. He wrote a good story too.
5. GARDEN WEEDS is a romp down Tin Pan Alley with a hoe in hand to cut out the parts of the world gone bad. "Ain't it funny how quickly they grow" these unplanted bloomers. There's a little justice for you, order brought about with "just a whack with the shovel he's in the garden no more." There's a pretty purple flower in my back yard. I asked if we could plant some of those, but the answer was "No!" Those pretty purple flowers have a root that goes too far. They don't let nothing else grow. Have to whack them with a hoe. This is a little R&B to get you to tap your foot and read "Home & Garden."
6. DEVIL'S EYE has a great line: "Don't cry over broken dreams there are plenty to go around." When we go around trying to make a life among the walls and weeds, The Golden Palominos remind us all that "something else is working harder." Cletus calls that a Devil's Eye. "He [God] might tell you that it's been a long time and time is treating you well / But don't believe those words he says, they're just as empty as you feel." There's freedom in nothing left to lose. You are as empty as you feel when the Devil's Eyes is upon you. Just surfing the waves of misfortune, you ask me.
7. TRESTLE SONG is a hymn to change when "lucks turned her back on you." You can always meet a friend by the trestle "if you're cold and lonely," hop a train to another nowhere but it's new. The hope of something more than a distinction without a difference has been the motive for many a locomotive cut and run hobo trek from what don't work to find a someplace to be somebody. Hear the hope: "And we'll ride that line as far as it goes. And the whistle will blow."
8. THE CITY takes a beat from Drop Down Mama to the dirty city with it's 6:30 a.m. screaming alarms and
"bums begging on the freeway." The City takes it's toll. "I say it takes more than water to keep the city clean." There's a great Exene or Lisa from Wussy harmonizing wail in the backing vocal here enough to wake the dead drunk. "A child cries as its momma gets taken away / The cops steal all that they can carry away / Crack houses thrive on every corner / suburbanites think it all happens so far away / A drive by tears a neighborhood apart." Sounds like Cletus has slept in my neighborhood. A little surprise at the end. It must be an election year. "We feed other countries' kids without our bleeding hearts / Cause no more kids should be starving in the streets / THere's more than enough food for all of us to eat." R&B with a little cottonwood or water moccasin in stuck in the throat.
9. BILL'S PORCH has a progression in common with Stray Cat Blues for a memorial of the perch on the porch telling the local news. "You know I missed you, all those carefree days." The stories of misfortune of others spun from a rocking chair with a brew and a smoke talking about "white trash Jim" and all the others who got lost was what it was. Miss those times. "I've enjoyed your company but I think that it's time we both moved on." It's almost always time to move on. This porch song is a capsule of Cletus from the source. Theodore Roethke said something like this: "Whenever I am down in the dumps, I simply consider my contemporaries and I am forever encouraged." H.L. Mencken had another way to say it: "Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband." Yeah, things are bad, but did you hear about...
10. ANGEL OF MERCY may be a moment of clarity, or just a drunk's meeting with the euphoria of last stage pneumonia once called "The Drunkard's Friend." At the worst times, when there may be no tomorrow, that fiddle seems to creep into the soundtrack wearing wings and offering a ticket to the train of change or a trip behind the mystery curtain, the dark river, and a walk into the light. There's beauty at the bottom of the barrel.
11. WAITING SO LONG is the cycle of fifths writ large with the encouragement of the found companion. There's a cigarette halo anthelion of holy companion dressed in white looking down for each of us sometime walking into our room to "smile down on me." "Your eyes so bright as they danced across the cluttered bedroom floor / You glide like an angel back to her throne." Derek is a man in love long enough to wonder what he got into, and so am I. But that smile makes it all worth the changes. My drama teacher at CalArts wrote for Sam Peckinpah, and had some stories to tell. He said, "When you love someone, you love them because you love them, and you hate them because they are changing you." Guess that's the Cross of Iron we bear.
12. WHO'S KNOCKING is that "ghost from my past is haunting me tonight" deadly thud on the hardwood like to bring back trouble, or collect what can't be repaid. "A skeleton escaped from my closet and it dances / It lurches around the room to my heartbeat." Yep, I've seen that dance. You?
13. LONG WALK is a brilliantly observed aimless walk through the lights away from home with the realization: "I know I did you wrong, but won't you let me come home." Funny how the same dazzle that refreshes on occasion is cloying with a little shame in the soul, and butterflies in the belly. Contrite is a slow motivator, but sure. "Christ knows I can't take it no more / This weight in my chest / A heart turned to stone." Cletus with a conscience or at least a heavy soul fit to turn back to redeem himself again is sad for all of us waiting for another story of unwarranted freedom. "I'll be damned if I will stand by and take it all in stride as you lie straight to my face / And tell me everything is gonna be alright / And I can't sleep at night / With the blood in my veins turn cold as ice." Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly.
THE BAND:
Derek Stinson ~ guitar, lead vocals
Tim Golliher ~ bass, vocals
Larry Gross ~ mandolin, vocals
Annette Christianson ~ violin
Joe Riddle ~ drums, vocals
TRUE GRIT
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