Wed Aug 1, Tractor Tavern, $5.
"If you're like me, love is pain. To say the word can hurt you. I'm not drunk enough to say 'I love you.'" So goes Rex Hobart on "I'm Not Drunk Enough" from 2000's The Spectacular Sadness of Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys.
I'm thinking about an old friend who used to drink far too much and half-dance/half-stumble his mornings away, smoking cigarettes and singing Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls" because it reminded him of his dead father. Though pain like that is terrible, it was eerily beautiful to witness. Of course I was drunk as well, falling in love with my friend's pitiable torment, vampirically empathic. And none of this would ever have happened had it not been for the accompanying soundtrack of "Hello Walls."
Country music justifies every important indulgence, with alcoholism and excessive self-pity topping the list. Rex Hobart's earthen, elegiac music is real country. He and his Misery Boys bring us George Jones, Johnny Paycheck, and even a hint of Loretta Lynn in brief moments of sheer, sweet simplicity.
You may not want to trust what I write here. I'm sentimental to a fault, as was my friend the drunk. Hobart, in contrast, is more complex--far moodier, less youthful, his sadness more erudite. Hobart would likely never have been present with my lonely friend on that sad, alcoholic morning. He likely would have scoffed at how overwrought the situation was, because Hobart's tragedy is more grown-up, and while it is usually embellished, it is also reasoned and accepted. His songs are written in the voice of a seasoned drifter with a tough and accommodatingly drunken exterior, which is what makes him far more appealing for observation than my friend and I were that morning.
Hobart's tragedy is indeed spectacular, and The Spectacular Sadness is aptly named. It's shot through with the perfect amount of desire and heartbreak, broken love philosophy, and, of course, romantic errantry. Pain goes both ways with Hobart, a reasonable victim and a reasoning victimizer: "All the neon and booze is playing tricks on me," he says in "Here Comes Nothing," as he imbues a narrator on the verge of slipping up. Hobart has made the mistake of offering a lover perhaps the most foolish of all promises: Nothing will come between us. "Here comes nothing," he sings. "And she's looking pretty good. She's got me wanting more than I know."
Oh, sexy, sexy alcoholism. I'm not talking about the later alcoholic stages here-- not those of broken happy-hour drunks who've squeezed out their very own souls to make room for their livers. I'm talking about the romantic drunks. The ones who are nomadic and self-contained, who ache with sexual desire and long simultaneously for an honest life of respect and dignity. Within such a person, the most attractive quality is usually a staunch authenticity. And Hobart is insistent upon authenticity.
"Now the drink in my hand matches my wedding band, the color of riches untold. I'll drink 'til the booze is up to my eyes and turns all my teardrops to gold," he sings on "'Til My Teardrops Turn to Gold." It's boozed-up, charming, and funny. A warm pedal steel guitar played by Misery Boy Solomon Hofer gives the song a woozy, intoxicated flow that is definitively country. In its lush intonation, it plays out like the voice of Hobart's sweet soulmate for whom destiny seems to have permanently denied existence--the long-unimagined woman of magic, who will never wait for Hobart around some serendipitous corner the way fairy tales envision love's sparkling impetus.
"Now every time I hear the word 'forever' I know it's just a lie, so I move on," he sings on "Forever Always Ends." Guitarist J. B. Morris and Hofer twin the guitar and pedal steel to gently mock Hobart with their strings, playing a melody that sounds something like the ringing grade-school taunt na-na-na-naa-naa. The Misery Boys--who include Morris and Hofer, Hobart on acoustic guitar, Blackjack Snow on electric bass, and T. C. Dobbs on drums--create a clean, rollicking sound to accompany Hobart's words and wet, gentle vocals.
The Misery Boys are learned and excellent. They trace country music's roots as far back as the 1960s for a sound that is clean, twangy, and smartly referential. Happily, the sound is even hokey in certain places to further illuminate Hobart's flashes of tongue-in-cheek humor. And Hobart would be a fool to expect anything less from his band. After all, how can a listener be expected to wash down all of love's blood and dirt without a few beers and some fine melodies?