All The Way To Jackson
or "I Just Want to Praise Lu Like I Should"
In the summer of 1998 legendary singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams released an album that changed my life.
Ms. Williams had already been making records about as long as I’d been pootin' through this life when her fifth album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, dropped in the summer of 1998. By this point in her career she had already received critical acclaim for her songwriting. Four years earlier she had earned a Grammy after her song “Passionate Kisses” became a hit record for Mary Chapin-Carpenter. But I was a dum-dum and had missed the glory of Lucinda up until 1998. If I knew who Lucinda Williams was at all it was only because I’d seen her name as a songwriting credit in the liner notes of a soundtrack to the mostly forgotten Ed Burns movie from 1996.
The movie was She’s the One. I cannot speak of any lasting impression that the film’s story or performances made on me. I was there for the songs. The songs were the real stars of this film. The soundtrack to She’s the One is a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album. A REALLY GREAT Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album. It's got leftovers from Petty’s phenomenal Wildflowers sessions along with new compositions written for the film. Five tracks into the album is a raucous kiss-off anthem called “Change the Locks” (which I assumed was a Petty original until I read the credits). Petty and company blow the roof off that song and it was instantly one of my favorite moments on the album. Yet it would be at least another two years before the name of Lucinda Williams would grab me by the collar and handle me like one of those polaroid pictures Andre 3000 is relentlessly imploring us to shake on the dance floor.
Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbor.
The summer of 1998 came and went. For me, it was a rather memorable one. Alongside my younger brother, I flipped steak burgers and made milkshakes late into the evening and into the next morning. Not by coincidence, I got very little sleep that summer. I spent a couple weeks at Camp Olivet goofing off with my friends and apparently kicking off a song-leading partnership that continues to this very day…
I also drove a bunch of my friends to the east coast where we swung some hammers and spent some time on the open water before I murdered my folks’ minivan and stranded us in New Berne, North Carolina…
So… yeah… the pieces of my future were all falling into place.
I started my ninth semester at Ball State University in the Fall… yes, you read that correctly, my NINTH semester. It took me a while to get my shit together and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. After a couple years of floundering, I experienced some real energy around creative writing, but lacked confidence and direction to know what to do with it. Having dipped my toes in the fine arts department, I was finally swimming in the deep end, studying printmaking and painting, and thriving. I was beginning a wildly successful career as a book illustrator under the name Hector LaVeta. Soon, I would be casting a certain young lady under the spell of my irresistible charm. To this very day she is unaware of the dark magic that brought us together.
It was in the printmaking studio, my home away from… dingy rental home, that I heard the name, Lucinda Williams, uttered aloud for possibly the first time. The name was only familiar as I pictured the letters in my mind’s eye. The name that I had previously known only in print, transfigured as I overheard a colleague of mine breathe it to new life while enthusiastically endorsing the album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. This fellow printmaker was a Neil Young fan. Therefore, their endorsement needed no further validation. I stored up these things in my heart. The following February that album would earn the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. At long last, Lucinda Williams was receiving wider recognition for her work as a writer, performer, and an artist. The world was paying attention. I was paying attention.
I went out and bought Car Wheels in the popular compact disc format and it went into a lifetime of HEAVY rotation.
I was taken by these songs very quickly. They held stories, and histories, and Lucinda’s well-worn, lived-in voice related them in a raspy howl that assured me she’d been there herself. Maybe she was still there. I heard grief, lament, longing, and hope in her lyrics amplified by a jukebox of American roots, blues, and country music. Long before I was aware of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, or Steve Earle (whose fingerprints are all over Car Wheels), Lucinda Williams invited me to exercise my own demons through stories and poems that reveal themselves through the haze of the clumsy fingering of guitar strings.
Music had always been important to me and quite often found its way into aspects of my visual artwork. I enjoyed writing words, but struggled to set words to a melody worth singing. Music was my favorite form of creative expression, but I didn’t think the creative part was for me. I wasn’t a terribly strong singer or an accomplished musician. I was also terrified of failure…
With her distinctive voice, and her poetry, Lucinda Williams unwittingly ignited a creative spark in a dorky, under-confident art student. Her songs knocked me upside the head and growled into my ear: “You wanna write a song? Then write yourself a goddam song.”
So I did.
And just as I feared, it was shit.
But then I wrote another shit song!
And then another!
*Here is where we take a break from the written word and I charm you with observations on my first song, thanks to the magic of voice recording…
Suddenly, I was inspired to write stories and put them to melodies. I didn’t know the first thing about writing songs, but I kept doing it anyhow. Most of the early songs I wrote reflected on the destructive habits that had plagued me both mentally and physically for a few years. I had experienced deliverance from a path that very well may have lead to a destruction of my own making. I had tasted a kind of salvation and I wanted to tell that story through songs. They were also often OVERTLY evangelical in nature, even when I thought I was being clever. Recently I scoured through some old journals of mine. It may not surprise you, dear reader, that many of the lyrics from those earliest songs today make me physically recoil.
We all gotta start somewhere, yeah? I was starting at the bottom, clawing my way through platitudes and bad poetry. But it was my bad poetry. And I believed I had something important to say to myself, and maybe to share with others, through my bad poetry. Sure, it may have been informed by a very narrow worldview, but it was honest and the hunger for more songs pushed me to keep critiquing that narrow worldview, and to hopefully grow and evolve into a slightly better human in the process.
Almost twenty-five years later, the spark that Car Wheels ignited continues to flicker with each new ditty that I push out.
Thanks, Lu.
XOXO, JDR
Jackson (Lucinda Williams cover)
Here's a recording of me performing a cover of the final track from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
I love this Joel. Thank you for never quitting…