Pint of Beer and a New Tattoo

Album: Billy Bragg, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry, 1986

Acquired: Purchased at Mother's Record & Tape Company at Military Circle Mall around Christmastime 1989. Who could I hit up to make good on the lifetime guarantee if this cassette ever broke?

Best Track: "Help Save the Youth of America"

Lasting Memory: Playing "The Marriage" as a tribute the nuptials of my friend Wes during my short stint as the Sundaymorning DJ for WUVT during the fall of 1993.

"The Marriage," of course, is not at all an endorsement of that institution. Bragg's male narrator dares his bride to be to wear white, wonders why their living together is a sin, asks how it could make a difference if they were "wearing that bloody, bloody ring," and eventually resigns himself to the fact while "love is just a moment of giving, marriage is when we admit our parents were probably right."

Bragg subtitled Talking With the Taxman as The Difficult Third Album. I can only speculate as to how hard he had to work to write and record the songs on Talking With the Taxman, but the end products come to together to make what for my money is his masterpiece. (Yes, this blog is free, so take my assessment as worth at least that. Do keep reading, though. There's always a slim chance that I might turn an amusing or insightful phrase. One hopes, doesn't one?)

Choosing a single track as the best, which my self-imposed format compelled me to do, was a near impossibility. Any of the ten Bragg originals would do. I originally intended to just make this post a series of lyric quotes, giving a verse or two from each song. I'll link you to Bragg's site instead so you can peruse at your leisure and I can make a pithy observation that I stole from somebody else.

I do have to get in this bit from "Help Save the Youth of America" first, though, how Bragg plays with word forms and images as well as any plain language poet since Robert Penn Warren:

And the cities of Europe have burned before
And they may yet burn again
And if they do I hope you understand
That Washington will burn with them
Omaha will burn with them
Los Alamos will burn with them

In making his third album his best, Bragg was in great company. Jimmy Iovine explains in the excellent if badly in need of editing Tom Petty documentary Running Down a Dream that he has been one of the luckiest producers in the world because he has gotten to work on so many third albums. Two notable thirds Iovine produced are Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and Petty's Damn the Torpedoes.

Iovine said that thirds are typically best because even though a songwriter spends his or her whole life making the first album, he or she doesn't know anything. Second albums are usually poor products because they are rushed out to capitalize on the public's momentary awareness of an artist and all the songs are written in the distracting environment of the first big tour. The third album comes after the songwriter has learned more than a few musical tricks, as well as some hard lessons about life and the business of making records.

Just the very title Talking With the Taxman demonstrates that Bragg had recognized that his strength and uniqueness as an artist was mixing the personal with the political, the emotional with the ideological. Or sometimes it was about the interplay of sports and sex, like in "Greetings to the New Brunette," where the girlfriend says

Sometimes when we're as close as this
It's like we're in a dream

And the boyfriend complains

How can you lie there and think of England
When you don't even know who's in the team

The boyfriend goes on to consider how "sexual politics has left me all in a muddle" even as he and his girlfriend are "joined in the ideological cuddle." As nearly Communist as he is, Bragg knows that sometimes all the proletariat has to gain are the chains on their hearts.

Up Next: Billy Bragg, Workers Playtime, 1988

Listen to "Help Save the Youth of America"

Bonus video of "Greetings to the New Brunette"

Word Count to Date: 11,245

Snark from Management: I explained in my inaugural post that I would be keeping a running word count throughout this month in dishonor of NaNoWriMo. That's just the kind of ass I am. I feel thousand of words vindicated in my self-righteousness this morning because I read on one of the message boards I frequent that a NaNoWriMo participant had given up his attempt for this year because "it was looking like my story was only going to end up being about 30K. Haven't written anything for a week."

Who is this guy, John Grisham? If word count counts more for you than any pretense of quality, you have no business writing anything. Gaa, I can't stand NaNoWriMo. If you want to write, write. And try to be good at writing. Don’t make a parlor game out of it that you can quit when it looks like you’re not going to “win.”