Ruby.

Early on I’d planned to do some covers, though I didn’t have any particular ones in mind except two, one of which was “Ruby.”  I think it’s a great song, maybe a perfect song (one of the reasons I wanted to cover this one was to try to come up with a definition of what I mean by a “perfect song.”  I won’t have time to get into it now, and I doubt I’ll ever come up with a precise and elegant definition, but it would be something like “a song that would be diminished by any alteration.”  By that definition there are great songs that aren’t perfect and perfect songs that aren’t great, but I think “Ruby” is great and maybe perfect.)  It’s inarguably one of the darkest and weirdest in mainstream pop or country or whatever it is, and it’s surely an anomaly in Mel Tillis’s career, which would be an estimable career regardless of “Ruby.” 

The story Mel Tillis tells is that it’s based on a WWII veteran he knew as a kid but that he set the song in the Korean War, “that crazy Asian War.”  Because in 1968 of course everybody was writing songs about the Korean War.

But I’m not here to make the case for the song as a protest song or to give it any kind of sociological or socio-political significance.  There’s no way to get me to look at my watch faster than to say, “Hey, listen to this new protest song I wrote!”  Any protest song, just like any right-thinking bumper sticker, usually has only one point, which is for the displayer to be congratulated on his moral uprightness.  “Ruby” is much better than that.  It’s a two and a half minute song, four verses of four lines each (the last line just the title refrain, with one variation in the second verse), and in that span of time and space it covers themes of war, paralysis, sexual impotence, infidelity, self-pity, rage, revenge and death.  Ninety percent of what passes for modern country music seems to be about some simplistic thing the singer’s pappy told him that would be boneheadedly obvious to anybody with sense enough to pour piss out of a boot but that is so revelatory to the singer he is compelled to write a song about it.  “Ruby,” by contrast, is what country music would sound like if written by the ancient Greeks.  Except not in Greek.

And naturally Kenny Rogers turns this dark and horrifying song into a sing-along-clap-along crowdpleaser for the Branson set. 

When I recorded the song, I was mentally preparing what I’d say about it, and I assumed I would trash Kenny’s original, which is the best-known version, of course.  But then I listened to it and found that it wasn’t all that bad.  The version below is from Kenny’s First Edition days, recorded in 1968.  (Note the beta version of what would become The Kenny Rogers Look.)

I kind of dig it.  In 1968 that probably sounded pretty radical, the chicka-chicka-chicka stuff, the melodramatic a cappella ending.  The problem is that it was so catchy that somewhere along the line people stopped hearing the song and just started clapping to the chicka-chicka-chicka stuff.  There have been several other versions of the song recorded (the album covers of some are featured in the half-assed video I did), including a version by Leonard Nimoy in which Spock sounds exactly like Kenny, and almost all of them have the chicka-chicka-chicka stuff.  Including this atrocity by Walter Brennan:

I’ve been playing the song for about twenty years, but I think I started playing it just by childhood memory and had never listened to the record since.  After recording it and then listening to the original version this week, I discovered that I’ve been playing it wrong all this time.  Where I’m going to the V chord, the original goes to the II minor chord.  I also got some of the words wrong.  The door doesn’t close a thousand times, only a hundred, and I leave out the word “move” in the line “If I could move I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.”  You can be the judge of whether those changes “diminish” the song and thus determine whether the song is perfect by my definition.

I’m tempted to do a line-by-line explication of the song, starting with that arresting first line (Isn’t “rolled” and “curled” redundant?  But the song is so great that you find yourself defending its flaws.  In Absalom, Absalom! Faulker had Thomas Sutpen build a stone house that somehow burned down at the end of the novel.  That’s okay, because he was Faulkner.  It’s okay here, too.)  I’ll refrain from that, except to say that every line and every word is necessary to move the song forward–the thing tells a huge story in such a small space, and it is nothing if not vivid.  In two and a half minutes you know this guy; his despair is visceral.  The shadow on the wall, the tinted hair, the heartbreak in the line “And the wants and needs of a woman your age, Ruby, I realize”–that’s good stuff.  (Consider how much those two words “your age” do to complicate the whole song, how much tenderness and ruefulness are in those two words.) Look also at its strange architecture, especially the way the first and last verses mirror each other (with the a cappella beginning and ending, which I chose not to do on my version’s ending, just because I couldn’t pull it off with a straight face–my fault, not the song’s), and the way the second and third verses have a different chord progression from the first and last verses, which seems to give the narrator’s words the quality of a stream-of-consciousness digression.  The first three verses are addressed directly to Ruby, but with each verse you hear him becoming more distant, talking more to himself than to her.  (And you get the sense she’s just continuing to fix her hair and makeup, ignoring him while he rattles on.)  By the last verse the door has slammed and she’s gone.  He’s left lying in a helpless rage, talking to nobody. 

The Outlook After Ten Weeks.

I’d have assumed that by this point I’d know why I was doing this, but I don’t.  I thought it had something to do with making me write about . . . stuff, but I’m tired of listening to myself talk.  I was pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with the songs and certainly not with the videos.  So over the last few days I think I’ve determined that the nutcracker deal is played.  I’ll probably continue to post the songs on schedule until I run out, just because I don’t know what else to do with them–I have about 14 recorded, probably another 20 or so written or close to written and not yet recorded.  I’ll keep recording them unless I get bored with that, too.  I am unlikely to do any more videos except for purely pro forma ones (like today’s.)  The writeups will be minimal, maybe even haikus, except for any cover songs I do.