Blood on the Honky Tonk
Floor
»Gone Gone Gone«
What the hell are these
men thinking? We don’t know. We don’t want to know. There we go,
into the realms of symbolic music, borrow bars, the CD as a piece of composite
art with melted down egos. I hear a kind of "cowboy" through all
of that, but - if it is a "cowboy" at all - it is a broken one,
like the broken English of Marianne Faithful or "cowboy" in a Lee
Hazelwoodian sense. Broken as in Clint Eastwood.
Performing what John Miller describes as "performance that embodies the
audience’s desire". A very sensitive and educated audience is required
to get the conceptual gist of it all - unless you listen to it just because
you like guys doing funny things. "Gone Gone Gone" can be understood
as a music-cultural-wrestling-show just as well.
It had to happen in Germany, a funny place for the reading of the country
music genre. Country ballads with a touch of pop happen under special cultural
conditions. Growing up in the 60’s on lots of American "Western"-TV-series,
and the influence of Karl May, the German novelist who fantasized bookshelves
full of adventure (especially known and widely read were the cowboy & indian
stories "Winnetou I-III"). Kids, young and old, male ones in particular,
were affected by the idea of the "cowboy". That figure became a
highly constructed artefact/projection site.
There is no way for any notion of authenticity here. No origins required,
just a platform for expressing feelings that might not spill out everyday
- transmitting those feelings to others. There was something uneasy about
the stuff that came out of them. Perhaps because "I’m Still Your
Hoss" made me think of these pathetic saturday afternoons, when it was
raining, watching "Bonanza". Hoss made me and my sister always feel
sorry for fat guys, but we loved the hats. What a dark, doomy and domestic
vibe. Like existentialist theatre. Almost.
And we were always waiting for that moment when things would get out of control,
but it only happened much later in life, when you could finally access Sam
Peckinpah movies. I thought it would be great if the guys from Blood on the
Honky Tonk Floor would fall into the hands of Shania Twain, a big contemporary
country-schlock-pop-rocker of garanteed non-countryesque origins and deal
with THAT. I’m fantasizing about a duet for the title track; "Gone
Gone Gone" might be described best as a preparation stage for the bigger
fantasy. They’ll go there... higher into the cultural political, the
perverse, the pathetic. They are... ready to blossom.
|
|
Blood on the Honky Tonk
Floor |