All in Writing
Politicians on both sides love to use all of this music – Creedence and Sam & Dave and the rest – but they don’t know anything about it. Academics love to pick apart this music but they never felt a note of it. Because this music is an exchange. It’s why The Texas Tornados sound so good in a dancehall on a hot night in San Antonio and why Jimi Hendrix gets something out of “All Along the Watchtower” that Bob Dylan never did. This land, friends, was made for you and me.
Much has been made of the “Disneyfication” of America, and there is much to be said and discussed about this. Dreaming your dreams is not easy. Things aren’t always getting exponentially better. There is an element to Disney and the Disney idea that is, well, oversimplified and rosy. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of bullshit to it. But there’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's little more than half a mile from New Hope Baptist Church to Prince Memorial CME. About 10:45 a.m. every Sunday, Pauline Thomas leaves New Hope, where she is a member, after Sunday school to play piano and lead the choir at Prince Memorial. This article first appeared in the July 2009 issue of Parker County Today.
Among this dire setting my friend Philip and I decided to start a band, mostly because we enjoyed listening to music and buying records and we wanted to do something creative and fun. We eventually recruited Philip’s co-worker and friend, Pauly, to play drums. Philip played bass. I played guitar and sang. Later we added a keyboard player, Ryan. Our big hope was to meet some fellow music nerds and make friends.
I look back now and I think about my two phone calls with Bob Johnston — a man who made Dylan sound his best, and who recorded some of the most timeless American music ever put to tape – and I think about how effortless the conversations were. He was completely charming and likable. This article appeared Aug. 12, 2012, on darrenwhitecreative.com.
Carlin said in an interview he was inspired to write about R.E.M. because of their political significance — what they stood for in the “Don’t Stop” ‘90s — and that’s what he’s done here. He’s written a book about the idea of R.E.M., which, of course, is what R.E.M. has always been so good at selling.
Curtis found a whole new sound in 1954 on East Belknap Street in Fort Worth while visiting an uncle, at a little store called Melody Shop Record Store, run by Lena Mae Ball. The store sold used 78s from jukeboxes in the back of the store for 10 cents. It was there Curtis heard music like he'd never known before. This article first appeared in the June 2009 issue of Parker County Today.
Orlando, as I still know it and feel it in my own soul – the idea of the place that resides in me – is rooted deeply in the ‘90s. It is not a city. It is a pair or wraparound Oakley sunglasses – cobalt blue with the orange polarized lenses. It is a No Fear t-shirt. It’s bands like the Nature Kids and Matchbox 20. It’s a Lil’ Penny Nike commercial and Shaquille O’Neal dunking.
Every few years it seems like someone picks up the banner for John Anderson as one of our country’s truly great artists, and, inevitably, the people who have been here the whole time are appreciative, but it fails to really generate the kind of renewed interest the faithful think he deserves. It’s fun and then John settles back into his routine – playing shows in beloved haunts and occasionally appearing on RFD-TV.
When I was in journalism school the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer visited our class. Someone asked him for advice for a young journalist and he said we should get out and see America before it becomes completely homogenized. From his perspective, this was still a weird and wonderful land. He was right, too. Yes, people are glued to their phones and Walmarts abound, but the geography rules.
Beneath all the highways, sub developments and strip malls, there is a lost kingdom. A once-real, now-mythic place called Florida. The name literally means The Land of Flowers. It is a place of vulgar abundance, a place of underground springs, plentiful fish, wildflowers, panthers, bears, alligators and pumpkins. There is no place else on Earth — and probably in the universe — that looks like it.
Last year I started blogging again – writing about topics like my family, the myths and stories they told, art, music and travel. I hope to write in more detail about all of these topics and expand into other ideas. My own experiences have helped me to better understand myself and I hope to share more of them here.
Allsup met Buddy Holly at Norman Petty's legendary studio in Clovis, N.M. in 1958. He played guitar on about 10 of Holly's songs, including the classic "It's So Easy." A lost coin toss kept Allsup off the plane that took Holly's life. This article first appeared in the February 2008 issue of Parker County Today.
Even in liberal Hollywood, cowboys are cool again. Yellowstone – a TV show I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing – has reinvigorated America's fascination with ranch life. Beyonce posed wearing a cowboy hat astride a horse on her latest album cover, Cowboy Carter. It seems America’s Culture War has returned to an old battlefield – the idea of the cowboy.
Three sisters board an orphan train headed for Jacksonville. They were not mythologized like the Western cowboys or the Irish and Italian immigrants of the Northeast. Yet stories of struggle like the 2017 film The Florida Project seem to echo Priscilla, Ida and Louvenia’s story. We all come from somewhere. I come from these women and I come from this story.
I watched Yacht Rock: A Documentary on Max this weekend, and I thought it would make for a good opportunity to reflect on this odd little subgenre that has become its own cottage industry over the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a certain type of bouncy, smooth adult contemporary music popular in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
How can one of the biggest media markets in the nation produce such ineffectual, booster-happy journalism? How can a city with limitless financial resources fail to build anything beautiful in brick-and-mortar? How can a place that hosts concerts daily fail to capture the national imagination with any consistency?
There’s not much chance to turn around until you reach Cedar Key, where everything is built out of that dark, weathered wood. You see kids with coolers selling various morsels like oysters and clams on the side of the road. This article first appeared on darrenwhitecreative.com on Feb. 11, 2013.
I don’t have any other marketable skills. I am unfit for manual labor (tried that), my math skills are remedial (that means bad) and I’m too honest for sales (didn’t get past the interview). Writing keeps the lights on, even if they aren’t burning brightly.
As I was eating two tacos and a bag of store-bought chips – which cost me, all told, about $22 – from a food truck with an absolutely horrible name, it occurred to me that I cannot remember the last time I had a good meal from a food truck.
