Two Roads Diverged

Album: Blue Rodeo, Casino, 1990

Acquired: Bought in August 1993 from the 3 for $10 bin at The Wall in a mall in the center of Nashville

Best Track: "Til I am Myself Again"

Lasting Memory: Spending a month with my sister Clair (second post on linked page) driving to appointments she had with state-chartered bank regulators in Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, and maybe Kentucky right after I finished up my undergrad.

Casino is great driving music and great drinking music. Never drink and drive kids, but once you decide to do one or the other, slip this album into the tape deck or CD player or mp3 dohickamabob and settle in for a trip down the road to the next horizon, as a bottle will get you to tomorrow's sunrise just as surely as any interstate heading east.

I'm hammering on the road metaphor because, like so many great country acts, Blue Rodeo packs their albums with songs about needing to travel to a place where you can settle comfortably and with other songs about being so uncomfortable in your current situation that you just have to head out of town.

"Til I am Myself Again" is the story of a guy who hit the road too soon and has been living with his regret over that decision for too long:

I want to know where my confidence went
One day it all disappeared
And I'm lying in a hotel room miles away
Voices next door in my ear

Daytime's a drag
Nighttime's worse
Hope that I can get home soon
But the half-finished bottles of inspiration
Lie like ghosts in my room

"After the Rain" is the story of a guy who has reached his breaking point with his dead-end, well, everything but can't move on to anything better:

If I had my way
I would never go back
With my back to the wall
I just let myself fall
Watch the days turn black
But now and again I find
You cross my mind

If I was a train
I'd never slow down
With my head in the sky
And the world going by
Every nowhere town

"Montreal" (congrats to my niece Claire, who graduated today!) is about a man and woman who were once happily living together but have come to realize that their break-up happened long before either one of them physically moved out:

We met in Montreal
Far from the crime
....

You wore that dress
From the old market stall
People and places
Said you were forgetting them all
I don't know if I
Believed you or not
....

Late in your bed
You said "Don't you be sad
Think of how lucky we are
For the things that we've had"

I did listen to Casino several time during that 1993 road trip. It just fit the whole mood and motive of the trip. For that August, I was a train that never slowed down. I had finished school, but I had no plan for what to do next. I was physically moving, though, and that was enough for then. The drive was my backpacking trip across Europe, except everybody spoke English and bathed regularly.

I also really liked the album because by 1993, I finally knew that Casino was the kind of album I would like. I had matured enough in my tastes to know that country music was MY music. I might go on to dabble with ska or power pop, but country would always be my musical home. Fortunately, the way I thought of country made it a very big house with no rooms for the Diamond Rios or Big Texases that were topping the charts in the early 1990s.

I do like my genres broad, so I have long considered real country to include everything from The Carter Family through all forms of bluegrass and up to and including groups such as Reverend Horton Heat and Uncle Tupelo. I listened to a lot of Uncle Tupelo during the road trip, too.

Blue Rodeo is very much a traditional country band that plays tunes with a touch of rock. Early Steve Earle and most of the work of Dwight Yoakam serve as good comparisons. Except Blue Rodeo is Canadian. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm going to stretch the road metaphor here, a la Robert Frost, to point out that Nashville had a clear choice to make in the late '80s and early '90s regarding what country radio and country video was going to sound and look like. The record companies could have pushed traditional acts like Blue Rodeo, but they chose to put their money behind acts that were different from those on the Top 40 only in their choice of wardrobe. I blame cable television. Even I'll admit, though, that Shania Twain is way better looking than John Hiatt.

Still, it would be great to be able to get authentic music in mainstream media. CMT does throw real country fans with digital cable a bone, but the pretty boys and girls and their easily digestible sounds play on the radios of the cars cruising along the road most taken. And that has made all the difference for the worse.

Watch the video for "Til I am Myself Again"

Up Next: BoDeans, Outside Looking In, 1987

Word Count to Date: 8,102