The Steve Reynolds Program - The Christian Life
Sorry, for the week's delay. We opened up the shop a couple of days and that took up my time. Then this weekend, we went to beautiful downtown Fort Worth (the St. Paul to Dallas's Minneapolis) and saw Guided by Voices. I think it may have been the thirty-fifth time for me to see them? I'm not going back to count, but yeah, something like that. They played fifty-three songs and filled my heart with joy.
Speaking of joy, I stumbled upon this under twenty minute documentary Sunday and want to share with everybody. The story of this man and the supportive community around him is great. It almost dovetails perfectly with The Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the South Korean show on Netflix I watched the first episode of last night. Both show people on the spectrum with their talents, but one doesn't have corny subplots and clunky court scenes.
My kid wants to go as Walter White from Breaking Bad for Halloween, a long way from when he was a lamb as a wee one. At least he's still down for trick or treating. Aging out of that is gonna hurt.
All right. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Song #12
The Christian Life
by The Louvin Brothers
I’m not going to get into the whole history of the Louvin Brothers. Cocaine and Rhinestones has an episode that covers them in amazing detail. The pdocast creator, Tyler Mahan Coe, has a voice similar to the weaselly villain who yells “Warriors, come out to play-a-yay!” in Walter Hill’s 1979 masterwork The Warriors. So it may be preferable to read the transcript on the podcast’s website. Theirs is a heartbreaking story of pain, poverty and drink.
I, like most people under the age of 75, first heard the Byrds cover of this song. I distinctly remember first hearing it on a homemade mixtape in my truck driving back to our apartment in an area with no definite neighborhood name—somewhere between Koreatown, Silverlake and Hollywood. I was temping at a bank in Downey for too little a wage to justify driving to and back from Orange County, and the sound of old country somehow was comforting. It was like Oklahoma football in that it took me moving far away to look to these things as a way to connect to home. I really wasn’t enjoying connecting to a temp job in Downey, California.
“The Christian Life” first appeared on the Louvin Brothers album Satan is Real. The cover is incredible, featuring a plywood cutout of a Satan, equivalent in scariness to the googly-eyed Abominable Snowman in the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, over a photo of hot coals with the Louvin Brothers in white suits and black ties looking like a novelty auctioneer act. It belies the claim that Satan is real, but the songs erase any doubt that the Louvins believe it.
One big difference between the original and the Byrds cover is the Louvin Brothers kick off the song singing the last line of the chorus “I liiiiiike the Christian life!” I’m guessing they did this because the first verse “My buddies tell me I should have waited/They say I’m missing a whole world of fun” was too vague and would lead to imaginative speculation about dastardly fornication before the reveal they’re talking about good clean living.
The lyric from the song to, in the trite phrase of recent years, unpack is “others find pleasure in things I despise.” First, both Louvin brothers found, if not pleasure, refuge and release in markedly unchristian endeavors: drinking and carousing and fighting. The definition for despise in OED is “regard as inferior or worthless; feel contempt for.” In this sense, they chose the perfect verb for this line. In it, a lot of guilt, shame and remorse gets crammed in that single word. They know they should live on the high and narrow; things are easier then. Those others who find pleasure in these things, how do they get away with it?
Separating art from the artist is a subject that persists. If this were released today, would the Louvin brothers be called hypocrites when they failed to live up to the Christian life? Maybe. Still, hearing the yearning of faith as a salve is something very relatable. I like the idea put forth of this Christian life, no matter how removed from reality it is.
Postscripts
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is "Oh, The Guilt" by Nirvana which popped in my head while writing about the Louvin Brothers. It was one side of maybe the best split single ever released.