“Sometimes there’s a man … I won’t say a hero, ’cause, what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man …”
The man in question is William McCarthy. The sometimes is now (but the times they are a-changin’. Let’s face it, “things” have never been so different). THE SONG is Ballad For The Unemployed. The quote above is from The Big Lebowski.
I feel now, spontaneously, as if I should include here the Wiki link to “Protest Songs”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_song
There, I’ve done it! Billy is that type of guy, a guy who makes you do things spontaneously, just as you think about them, rather than turning over in bed. As well as spontaneous, he makes you feel generous, loquacious. Ridiculous? As Ken Kesey’s McMurphy nails it in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest: “But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I DID THAT.”
Steinbeck said of his novel The Grapes Of Wrath: “I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.” And F Scott Fitzgerald said: “There are no second acts in American lives” (which is kind of/ sort of a misquote, taken out of context, whatever). McCarthy, an American life if ever there was one, has already embarked on his very own “second act” but, with the timeless Ballad For The Unemployed, he has fully justified it, screwed it down into the good earth for always and in the meantime rewritten Acts 1, 2 and probably 3 of the crazy play we’re living in right here and now.
All the singers, all the writers, all the guitar players, all the rest of them (Jason Isbell … Eric Church … all my heroes) now are looking for routes to communicate differently during lockdown, to “drop” songs any old way, EPs, LPs, digital, vinyl, downloads, streams of live threads and threads of live streams. They’ve all tried to put into words what lockdown means to them, and to us, and the sheer mental-health cost of it all on a scale humans can begin, perhaps, to comprehend. For me, William McCarthy and his Ballad For The Unemployed does it best of all. With this song, he has turned it up a notch. He did it for ALL those “left standing in God’s tail-lights” … “returning … and to WHAT? And for WHAT?”
There’s baggage here, heavy baggage – Billy’s been around, come back around. He’s been around tragedy, tragedy has come back around. Now we’re all singing his Ballad For The Unemployed – or at least we should be. What was it Steve Earle said? “Come back, Woody Guthrie, to us NOW.”
And, on top of all that baggage, I’ve added more mad weight – too much for one man to carry? I’ve mentioned William McCarthy in the same article/ paragraph/ sentence as Kesey, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Woody, Steve Earle, others, The Stranger from The Big Lebowski – real, true poets. But I just want to put it on record that I’ve been blown away by Ballad For The Unemployed. If I’ve gone over the top, over sold it, I’m sorry about that – I really, truly am. But it’s that type of song, that type of moment, when you get out of bed and say: “At least I DID THAT.” Goddamnit.
This is a GREAT song – if I’m wrong, TELL ME I’M WRONG. American Pie? How about “American Dream haunting the mind everlasting”? Or at least for six minutes and 21. It’s the song of the moment, the Howl of eternity, the Bohemian Rhapsody, the Ni-ni-ni-ni-19.
I hesitate to say “Dylan” (although, obviously, I’ve already hinted at it, as does “The Ballad”). I hesitate as a deer hesitates, poised to drink from a cool pool of water, but not certain of the danger around, or as the “other” McCarthy says, of the guy with the wolf in The Crossing: “He didn’t know how much of the water she was getting or how much she needed … he studied the veined and velvet grotto.” He hesitated. We hesitate. Poised.
But I’ve said it now, I’ve said “Dylan”. More than once. Now I’m saying “stream of consciousness”, and I’m adding Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Iggy Pop, even! Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, Eminem, in the way great songs remind you of other songs. Unemployed sounds like Riders On The Storm. Hold Steady have their Chips Ahoy! and its: “She can tell which horse is gonna finish in first”. This Ballad has: “And I bet on imaginary horses in my dreams … Tony, I always come last place it seems.”
For Jolene, Ray LaMontagne sang: “I found myself face-down in a ditch, booze in my hair, blood on my lips.” McCarthy adds: “So here I am, broke, caked in rust, dirt in my mouth.”
Kristofferson wrote: “And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing, and it echoed through the canyons like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.” Billy writes: “Just a stark starkness like a burned-out car in a canyon at sundown.” He adds: “If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table, not a higher fence.”
He is the real deal.
By Callum Reid