touts les mots du Fermez les Honky-Tonks

Pëëpså and Imaginary Space are just one of thousands of Math Rock bands that play the Holiday Inns and Radissons in the Dwingeloo 2 Galaxy. But Ciudad Vleeptron is also the galactic hot spot of a genre that has almost vanished from Earth: Acid Country.

Country & Western music ordinarily gets its nutrition and inspiration from cheap American beer (Miller, Bud). But around 1967-71, a completely unexpected genre popped up in Southern California. The chords were the same, the instruments (pedal steel et al.) were the same, and many of the songs were directly abducted from Nashville.

But it was different. It was Acid Country, and instead of cheap American beer, its artists were dropping LSD like M&Ms. These were the days of Woodstock and Winterland and the Avalon Ballroom, and Acid Country quickly developed a rabid following, easily seduced from young people who had never heard Country & Western music before, or who had heard it and detested it. The genre was almost entirely focused on Roger McGuinn and the Byrds, and The Flying Burrito Brothers, and its lead singer, Gram Parsons. A mesmerizingly handsome but poetically sensitive-looking young man, with an authentic Country music background from Louisiana. Gorgeously ornate fancy cowboy boots, a cowboy outfit of remarkably elaborate hand embroidery specially made for him by visiting Martians, and beautiful raven hair that at times hung down to his ass.

He died wretchedly young, and Acid Country almost instantly died with him. Before he died, he started partnering with a very young singer named Emmylou Harris, and their Country harmonies -- buy the CDs. I can't waste words which could only pathetically fail to describe how beautiful and deeply moving these harmonies were. Still are, if you buy the CDs. Still every bit as beautiful and deeply moving as the day they were first sung 35 years ago. I have never heard two human voices so perfectly matched in musical beauty and artistic sensibility.

Emmylou Harris, of course, continues to sing the most interesting music, and every note like an angel. But it breaks my heart that she can no longer harmonize with Gram Parsons. Buy the CDs. Or shoplift them. Or download them for free like the young folk do these days. But prepare yourselves for unique beauty, one of the few things planet Earth can be terribly proud of in the 20th Century. It was broadcast on the radio, and the electromagnetic waves eventually were received (like Chuck Berry) on Vleeptron. Vleeptron went wild. Acid Country was instantly re-born. The Red Fox Tavern is the best place to catch it every night in Ciudad Vleeptron.

"Close Up the Honky-Tonks" was one of the Nashville standards that Gram Parsons liked to sing when he and the Burritos were blasted out of their fucking skulls on Purple Paisley Owsley lysergic acid diethylamide. (Somehow -- don't ask me to explain exactly how -- Acid Country helped to end the Vietnam War. You had to be there. But maybe if we re-introduce it to Earth, it can help to end these ghastly new American wars.) It is a great song. Particularly deep in the night, under spectacularly clear skies, speeding along on a two-lane highway in Northern Quebec, somewhere west of Val d'Or, coming out of an AM radio en Quebecoise.

Like all Country & Western songs, it is about sick, diseased, doomed romance, and the Bad Things of Modern Urban Life which are killing once-innocent young love.

You would think that Acid Country existed to make fun of and parody these Nashville songs, but Parsons and the Burrito Brothers were always deeply reverent of this music, and though they were hard to find in the midst of all the Nashville merde, they only picked and sang the treasures.

Parsons died suddenly of some sort of unnatural causes. His parents in Louisiana ordered his body shipped home, and made it clear that once the coffin arrived, they were going to give him one last severe haircut, and dress him up decently. His friends stole his body from Los Angeles Airport, drove the coffin up to the Sierra mountains above Los Angeles, and gave him a Viking funeral -- he died with all his beautiful long hair, in a nightime pyre. His friends were arrested and got into trouble -- but not much. Even prosecutors have a hard time punishing friends who give their dead young friend a Viking funeral high in the mountain wilderness. If the prosecutor wants to be a hard-butt, you can always explain what you did and why to a jury. Maybe the judge will let you play one of your dead friend's songs to the jury.

Guitar and pedal steel tablatures are available on several websites.

Fermez les honky tonks
Paroles et musique: Steve Faulkner (?). 1979
(originally "Close up the honky tonks" by Buck Owens and R. Simpson.)

A doit encore être
Dans un bar à soir, je l'sais
Ou la musique joue fort
Et pis qu'c'est plein de fumée
C'est tout c'qu'a sait faire
Dans la vie grimper des runnin' bills
Mais tant qu'y aura des honky thonks
A sera jamais tranquille

Fermez les honky thonks
Barrez les portes
Ne laissez plus jamais
Celle que j'aime courir la gualipotte
Fermez les honky thonks
Jetez les clés
Et peut-être que celle que j'aime
Va finir par me revenir

J'aimerais ramener
Le temps par en arrière
Au bon vieux temps
Où c'était elle qui aimait pas la bière
Parce que ça me brise le coeur
De la voir tripper dans le bas de la ville
Pis tant qu'y aura des honky thonks
On sera jamais tranquille

========================================

Close Up the Honky Tonks
by Buck Owens and R. Simpson

She's in some honky tonk tonight I know
Running where the music's loud and the lights are low
In a crowded bar she likes to hang around
And as long as there's a honky tonk, she'll never settle down

So close up the honky tonks lock all the doors
Don't let the one I love go there any more
Close up the honky tonks throw away the key
Then maybe the one I love will come back to me

I wish I had the power to turn back the time
And live again the hours when she was all mine
Cause it hurts to see her running with that crowd downtown
And as long as there's a honky tonk she'll never settle down

So close up the honky tonks lock all the doors
Don't let the one I love go there any more
Close up the honky tonks throw away the key
Then maybe the one I love will come back to me
Then maybe the one I love will come back to me

The Flying Burrito Bros
"Sleepless Nights" A&M Records 1970