Big Red Sun Blues/Dry Lightning

I admit it, Lucinda Williams didn't really come across my radar until suddenly Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was seemingly everywhere—and by that, I mean, was being lauded in every music magazine I read, although I've still never heard a single note of her music on the radio. Undoubtedly I'm not listening to the right stations.

Maybe because the praise set the bar too high, or I just wasn't in the right place for it at the time—I was in my nothing but jazz phase at that point, I think—Car Wheels didn't do much for me, much to my disappointment. But I believed the non-hype, so I checked out what I'd heard was her first major critical success, her self-titled LP from 1988. And although I approached it with some trepidation—my understanding was that she didn't fit comfortably in the country scene at all, being far too much her own artist prone to go her own way—that still implied she was at heart country-based, and that's the one major American music for which I still have something of a blind spot. So imagine my delight when I discover a wonderful album that sounds, to my ears, more than anything like a slightly (but only slightly) more country female Jackson Browne.

Until it came to "Big Red Sun Blues." Which I loved from the very first.

Everything is goin' wrong 
it's not right anymore
We can't seem to get along the way we did before

Sun is hangin' in the sky
sinkin' low and so am I
Just for the love of someone and a big red sun

How'm I gonna lose these big red sun blues
Big red sun big red sun big red sun blues

True love to hold is worth everything
It's worth more than gold or any diamond ring

But this little diamond and a heart that's been broken
Are all I got from you big red sun

How'm I gonna lose these big red sun blues
Big red sun big red sun big red sun blues

Look out at that western sky out over the open plains
God only knows why this is all that remains

But give me one more promise and another kiss
And I guess the deal's still on you big red sun

How'm I gonna lose these big red sun blues
Big red sun big red sun big red sun blues

But the thing is...I knew this song. Except I couldn't, because it was an original, and I'd never heard it before. And yet I did. From where? The bassline, which sounds like the Drifters? Not quite.

And then I realized.

Lyrically, they may not have a whole lot in common, but thematically they surely do.

I threw my robe on in the morning
Watched the ring on the stove turn to red
Stared hypnotized into a cup of coffee
Pulled on my boots and made the bed
Screen door hangin' off its hinges kept bangin' me awake all night
As I look out the window the only thing in sight

Is dry lightning on the horizon line
Just dry lightning and you on my mind

I chased the heat of her blood like it was the holy grail
Descend beautiful spirit into the evening pale
Her appaloosa's kickin' in the corral smelling rain
There's a low thunder rolling 'cross the mesquite plain
But there's just dry lightning on the horizon line
It's just dry lightning and you on my mind

I'd drive down to Alvarado street where she danced to make ends meet
I'd spend the night over my gin as she'd talk to her men

Well the piss yellow sun comes bringin' up the day
She said "ain't nobody gonna give nobody what they really need anyway"

Well you get so sick of the fightin'
You lose your fear of the end
But you can't lose your memory and the sweet smell of your skin
And it's just dry lightning on the horizon line
Just dry lightning and you on my mind

I'm going to guess I'm not the only one who can see the similarities between the two sets of lyrics, and that's before even mentioning that the bit about "the piss yellow sun" being not only a skewed echo of the "big red sun" but the line in the song that gets mentioned the most.

Circumstantial? Sure. Hard to hear? Nope.

Valentine/Drain You

So Tommy Stinson recently said this:

It may have been time, but the timing was less than ideal. The year the Replacements wandered off into the sunset, Nirvana dropped "Smells Like Teen Spirit," effectively ushering in the alternative-music revolution that would dominate rock culture in the '90s. It was the unlikely triumph of underground culture, and it's hard not to think the Replacements, having been key players, wouldn't have benefited somehow from that breakthrough. 

"I'll be honest with you," Stinson says. "I never really got the connection, to be frank. I didn't hear anything in Nirvana or any of the so-called grunge bands that had anything to do with us. I really didn't. In my mind, we were more a sort of rock and roll, sort of almost rootsy punk-rock kind of band. That stuff was more metal-leaning to me. Having people make a lot of to-do about them sounding like us or any connection, I think, was a bit of a misstep in the journalistic world. Aside from wearing flannel shirts."

Which just...

I mean.

Tommy. Tommy.

I love you, brother, I really do, as much as one guy who's never met another guy can love that second guy. But I'm going to say you're a mite too close to see what's pretty obvious. Which is that this, amongst many other things:

pretty clearly helped give birth to this:

Now, look. Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to say you guys are on the hook for a paternity suit or nothing. The breakdown, por ejemplo, pretty clearly owes way more to, say, early Led Zeppelin than it does vintage 'Mats (or even later LZ)—although if, Kurt Cobain's underrated guitar playing aside, Nirvana had had a Bob Stinson in the band, that breakdown might (would) have sounded mighty different. And I loves me some Chris Mars—one of the great drummers of the post-punk 80s, and a fine songwriter in his own right—but he ain't no Dave Grohl: them's some bigass drums being played on this song, sounding (as always) far more like John Bonham than someone from Sonic Youth or Hüsker Dü or R.E.M. or, yes, the Replacements.

But the drum part itself? That could have been written by one Christopher Mars. The melody? Paul Westerberg, without question. The bass? Well, okay, that doesn't sound much like Tommy Stinson, I'll grant you, although Grohl's harmony vocals kinda do; Tommy was and is a great bassist, but Krist Novoselic—one of the most important and most unheralded bassists in history, Iggy Pop perceptively aside—doesn't seem to have been much influenced by him, at least to my ears. Even Cobain's voice has that Westerbergian ability to be sweetly vulnerable one minute and then gravelly and rock as all get out the next second.

Sure, Nirvana was heavier, although much of that was simply that they were of their time as the Replacements were of theirs. But the basic DNA underpinning each band? It might be too much to say they were twin brothers of different mothers...and then again, it really might not be.

Misfits/Sixteen Blue

DT and I were speaking recently of the various ties between bands, influences of older artists on younger, as well as contemporaneous artists sometimes symbiotic relationships.

I've been in a Kinks mood recently, and I'm always in a Replacements mood, which may be why, upon hearing this song for the first time in 20+ years, it sounded so clearly proto-'Mats.

Tell me that doesn't sound like the blueprint for this.

From the lyrical thrust to the arrangement down to the melody to even the playing, with its pop elegance juxtaposed against a country background; I mean, even the first few seconds of each sound like, at most, first cousins—appropriate, given the genetic bonds at the heart of each bands' genesis.

It's no coincidence that the Replacements would bear more than a few similarities to the Kinks: both were fronted by amazing lyricists but massively aided and abetted by a sometimes unheralded group of musicians with whom they grew up. Both had aspirations far beyond "mere" rock and roll, but Cole Porter be damned, neither could help but return to balls to the wall rock again and again.

Paul Westerberg once talked about how maybe some bands had done the ballads better, and maybe some had done the hard rock better, but that no band had ever done them both as well as the Replacements. As a diehard fan, I find it hard to entirely disagree...but when listening to the Kinks it's hard to entirely buy in, either.