first round game
(1) Guns n’ Roses, “November Rain”
SOLD OFF
(16) Sammy Kershaw, “Yard Sale”
139-72
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/11/26.
Erin Keane: “November Rain” in Denmark
Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me:
—Horatio, Act 1 Scene 1, Hamlet
Wouldn’t time be out to charm you?
—Axl Rose, “November Rain”
When I first read Hamlet in high school, I pictured the Prince of Denmark as Axl Rose, his Use Your Illusion-era melancholy and melodrama having usurped Appetite for Destruction’s sexy nihilism just as the 1980s fully gave way to the ’90s. “I know it’s hard to keep an open heart,” Axl croons over his piano in “November Rain,” the third single off Use Your Illusion I, “when even friends seem out to harm you.” It was a poetic departure to say the least from his defiant Appetite howl, practically Shakespearean lyrics compared to “They’re out ta get me / They won’t catch me.”
Hamlet nursing his hurts and paranoias, crawling Elsinore, muttering and stabbing at the drapes, performing his “antic disposition,” betraying his chums, messing with everyone’s head: Later I would have Stoppard to help me make sense of Shakespeare, but in the beginning, I had Guns N’ Roses palace intrigue—Izzy’s out, Steven’s out, Axl’s out of control, Slash doesn’t want to talk about it—to guide me, emotionally if not textually, into Denmark.
Ghost walks, dead girls, gravesites, slings and arrows, whips and scorns of time: Tortured by the violence of his fathers, the betrayal of his mother, a young man lashes out yet struggles to articulate and enact a way forward. The audience is waiting for one, two, two and a half hours, just waiting for him to go on and do it already, but he can’t until the exact moment he’s ready. Made sense to me and my MTV habit, my subscription to Rolling Stone, my grocery-aisle People-skimming habit: Hamlet a tortured rock star, Axl a prince wrestling with his demons. Both of them making their problems everyone’s.
Just look at Sante D’Orazio’s portraits of Axl from that era and tell me you don’t see it: Incorrigible darling of the Sunset Strip channeling the original literary “I can fix him” by cradling the skull of poor Yorick, alas, in front of his naked crotch.
*
Like Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play, “November Rain” has stamina. Released as a single in 1992, at the time it was the longest song in history to crack the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10, landing at number 3. The final album version is (forgive me) restrained, even, clocking in at a mere nine minutes, when earlier versions that predated Appetite had run anywhere from fifteen to eighteen minutes long.
“November Rain” is a song about a couple that is off and on a lot because they’re afraid to fully commit to their overpowering love, or something. The lyrics are almost too mature for the genre in places: “Do you need some time on your own? / Do you need some time all alone? / Ooh, everybody needs some time on their own,” which sounds like something I would say in my own functioning, middle-aged marriage when I have already put my soft pants on for the evening. The central metaphor is the Elton John-esque candle fighting to stay lit in the rain (not the wind!), an image of hope persevering through the storm of their conflicted emotions. “Rocket Queen” it was not. “November Rain” would not sound out of place in a Broadway musical. Not even Kurt Cobain’s scorn could make me hate it.
Some bands dropped a power ballad on an album to give the girls something to request on the radio, sure, crafting an illusion of the rock star as a sensitive guy who definitely wasn’t doing all this just to feed his own ego. But emphasis on the power: Such a song requires an operatic sense of bombast, of its own importance, that a softer acoustic or piano tune can’t sustain. It also requires an electric guitar solo to really cook, for when tragic feelings get so epic they overwhelm the song’s verse-chorus-verse container and must be confessed openly, to appeal directly to the audience’s heart.
It wasn’t just about sliding a love song like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in between the Appetite bangers, or a crooner like “Patience” alongside the gross and antisocial (racism, homophobia, Charles Manson) parts of their pushed-out-the-door follow-up, G N’R Lies. Backed by the full firepower of an orchestra and choir, and constructed of several distinct movements, the heft of “November Rain” was emblematic of the artistic ambition Rose funneled into the double album in hopes of demolishing the band’s precedents.
Not everyone appreciated the scope—not even everyone in the band—which rankled Axl. “Maybe it would’ve been best for the purists if we’d died or broken up,” he sulked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “Then they’d get to keep it the way they liked it.”
Later, Axl would claim Slash was one of the band members who didn’t love the direction the Illusion ballads were taking them. Slash wouldn’t remember it like that. At the end of the day, though, tensions real or imagined appear to have worked in their musical favor, for those two epic cathedrals of emotion and sound, at least. Slash’s big moment in “November Rain” is no mere solo. He’s got two, each one a goddamned soliloquy.
*
I only dated one real musician in high school. The rest were drummers. It was over almost as soon as it started, an innocent interlude, a small detour he took on his way from and back to the love of his life. It didn’t devastate either of us when it ended; we took other people to prom and traded photos and hugs. He was the rare guitar obsessive in my life whose charm was sincere, earned, and lasting. He loved Led Zeppelin and Monty Python and guitars and Mustangs and El Caminos and occasionally blowing things up, and I know how that last part sounds, but he never hurt anyone, never would. He grew up to be an engineer whose specialty was something like industrial safety. (He was always the funny one.)
The year Guns N’ Roses released “November Rain,” I had spent hours on the phone or at his house listening to him attempt some riff or imitate an epic solo over and over, not Slash but rather some classic rock number, starting over at the beginning every time he messed up, beaming like a little kid when he nailed it. We probably danced to “November Rain” at homecoming, though, laughing at the DJ for playing a song with a final third that’s neither slow-dance material nor up-tempo enough to head-bang. So I don’t really associate the song with romantic heartbreak, personally speaking.
And yet. I spent so many hours of my youth pining for boys while they played guitar, but he is the only one I want to call up tonight to get an opinion on what Axl Rose was to us then, and what he has come to mean in his crone stage, and who we grew into, knowing what we now know about the power of the rock star image, and I can’t. They say only the good die young, and that’s just silly. My friend died in a sad, medical, grown-up way, when we were in our thirties, married and busy and not in as close of touch as I wished I could be. I haven’t been to a high school reunion since his funeral. I’m not sure what the point would be without the possibility of him showing up and maybe, accidentally, setting something on fire.
*
I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on
—Hamlet to Horatio, Act 1, Scene 5
For a 1999 SPIN cover story, Marc Spitz wrote an oral history titled “Appetite for Self-Destruction.” Here’s his highlight reel of Axl on tour in the summer of 1991, just a taste of business as usual at the time:
At Rose’s “homecoming” show in Indianapolis, he compares young people there to “prisoners in Auschwitz” and is fined for performing past curfew. On July 2, Rose starts a riot at the Riverport Amphitheatre near St. Louis by leaping into the crowd to take a fan’s camera; more than 50 people are injured and $200,000 worth of damage is done to the venue. As a result, the band’s next two shows are canceled.
Marc is another one I wish I could call tonight. I’d ask him about the process of collaging a cohesive narrative together from anecdotes, apocrypha, memories, and scattered records. I was his editor for several years when he wrote for Salon. Calls with Marc—he still used the phone a lot, still filed copy that feared no style guide from an AOL address—tended to be intense, forty-five-minute-long digressive pacers. Some days it felt like he was calling me from the past, somehow a ghost already. He talked about his pet theories and obsessions with a care, a deep and abiding personal stake that reminded me of how invested I could be when I was younger, before this was all a job and I had learned too much about the distance between the illusion and the reality. “If you’re hooked enough to talk to me this long about it,” I would tell him, though, “I think readers will be into it, too.”
*
By the time the Use Your Illusion albums came out, it had become increasingly hard for the public to tell whether Axl’s whole deal was an affectation he could be made to snap out of—his fits, his moods, his offenses—or whether unresolved trauma from a childhood marked by violence, had collided with the personality-warping that can be a side effect of fame, exiling him to a land beyond reason.
“That hour-and-a-half or two-hour time period that I’m late going onstage is living hell, because I’m wishing there was any way on earth I could get out of where I am and knowing I’m not going to be able to make it,” he said in this 1992 friendly Rolling Stone interview, in which he also talked openly about sexual abuse in his early childhood of which he had recently recovered memories.
“I started therapy in February [1991] and, Jesus, I’m right in the middle of stuff. I mean, if a heavy emotional issue surfaces and you’ve got a show in four hours, you have to figure out how to get that sorted out really quick before you get onstage so that you’re not in the middle of “Jungle” and have a breakdown. The pressure of having to do the show when whatever else is going on in my life is hard to get past.”
*
He never set out to be malicious, but by living under a microscope with the world scrutinizing him, any wrongdoing, public or private, tended to blow up in his face and often wound up as Nightly News. Personal flaws and fuck-ups are not allowed of the elite. —Del James, “Without You”
“Axl said to me, ‘I want to make videos more out-there than Michael Jackson’s,’” Josh Richman, who directed the video for their cover of “Live and Let Die,” said in Spitz’s SPIN story. “When we made the ‘November Rain’ video, we brought all these models in. Axl desperately wanted Stephanie Seymour—period. That night they went to the set, which was being built in an airplane hangar out in the Valley. That was their first date. She left Warren Beatty the next day.”
I remember certain details of the “November Rain” video, with its glam nuptials—Stephanie Seymour’s thigh-high wedding gown, Duff McKagan offering his own silver rings at the priest’s prompting, a guest jumping through the cake as the rain begins to pour on the reception—like it debuted yesterday. The director, Andy Morahan, was responsible for dozens of iconic videos of the MTV age: George Michael’s hypnotic ass in “Faith”? Andy Morahan. Cyndi Lauper in Trafalgar Square in “Change of Heart,” Mariah Carey having a “Vision of Love” in that giant empty cathedral window? Neil Tennant’s deadpan “West End Girls” standoff with the camera? That’s right. I hadn’t read “The Wasteland” yet. What were West End girls to a West Kentucky kid? I could see the Pet Shop Boys, at least, through Andy Morahan’s eyes.
The “November Rain” video was planned as one-third of a trilogy from the Use Your Illusions, along with “Don’t Cry” and “Estranged,” both of which are much sadder songs than “November Rain,” now that I think about it. It boasted a literary pedigree, even: “Based on the short story ‘Without You’ by Del James,” scrawled across the ending credits. The visual syllabus for “November Rain” includes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (same cinematographer), The Godfather wedding scene, my grandfather’s John Wayne movies, and a thousand Elton John concerts run through a goth filter. And then there’s this short story by a writer I’d never heard of and had virtually no chance of reading at the time.
You have to understand: Back then, you couldn’t just Google an unfamiliar writer and find their work. If it wasn’t for sale at the local Waldenbooks or on the shelf of my high school’s library—and most weren’t—then it simply did not exist for me, for all intents and purposes.
Now that everything lives on the internet, I can say that’s a shame, because “Without You” by Del James is a story that has absolutely everything I would loved in a story when I was sixteen: a misunderstood, self-destructive hero who rejects the wealth and comfort that has insulated him because he’s emotionally wounded too deeply to be helped. A woman who’s dead because she loved him so much his mistreatment drove her to a desperate final act.
The story begins, as many stories loved by sixteen-year-olds do, in a dream. We know this when the hero, a rock star who goes by the stage name Mayne Mann, wakes up; the woman he has dreamed of is still dead. We get the back story—the friends who have forsaken him to his addictions, the girl he loved but couldn’t help fucking around on, because what was he supposed to do, not fuck around? When he took a sincere line she gave him about the pain he caused her and wrote a blockbuster song out of it, she shot herself and then proceeded to haunt his dreams.
“Inside his mind, he analyzed why his relationship with Elizabeth had failed more times than were countable,” Del James writes. “Like the scholar he wasn’t, he dissected situations, pondered things he should’ve said and shouldn’t have been caught doing.”
It ends (as many stories actually written by sixteen-year-olds also do) in a blaze of self-righteous self-immolation, a fire engulfing Mr. Mann, his rare guitars and luxury apartment up in flames. The rock star plays the piano while he burns his home down around himself, literally. What a waste of a talented young man! One had hoped—I would have thought at sixteen—he might pull it together. Maybe they’ll all be sorry now.
*
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers?”
—Hamlet to Laertes, at Ophelia’s grave, Act 5, Scene 1
The “November Rain” video doesn’t show much of Del James’s story outright, except the opening scene of Axl waking, surrounded by bottles and pills, before going back to sleep and dreaming fitfully of the wedding ceremony, which is Act 1. Slash plays his best man—he had one job and still turns up at the church without the rings. After the ceremony concludes with Axl and Stephanie being pronounced husband and wife anyway, Slash walks down the aisle alone, exits the church into the desolate landscape of wherever they shot this in the Valley, then cries to the heavens with his first guitar solo. So of course, that move made me believe the video storyline was about a love triangle. What else makes sense at sixteen?
Act 2 is the reception, for which the bride has changed into a slinky black cocktail dress—iconic—maybe the first time I saw such a wardrobe change, which certainly never happened in the church-basement receptions I went to back home. A downpour sends the guests scrambling from the party. Again, a metaphor. The music shifts again. But what happens next is a mystery: dot-dot-dot.
In Act 3, there’s a funeral. The church sanctuary is mostly empty, in contrast to the joyful crowd at the wedding. A different priest presides. There’s some kind of mirror contraption reflecting half her face back to the crowd, allowing her to have an open-casket ceremony despite what horror it suggests is being concealed on the other side. That’s the only thing in the video to indicate what James’ story depicts, which is that she died by her own hand, with a gunshot, in despair over her man’s betrayal.
The short story is told in the limited third-person point of view, which is also the guiding lens of the video: In the end, he’s kneeling at her grave as the rain pours down on him, mingling with his tears. She’s been dead the entire time, and this is all memory for him, and while the narrator traces the guilt that leads his Mayne Mann to his big climax of self-destruction, it isn’t really interested in her side of the story. She is the object around which his story revolves, not the subject.
*
He took me by the wrist and held me hard
—Ophelia, Act 2, Scene 1
Seymour starred in two installments of the Use Your Illusion video trilogy. The volatile, fighting couple she and Axl depicted in “Don’t Cry” was also inspired, according to Axl, by his relationship with longtime girlfriend, then wife, Erin Everly (daughter of Don of Everly Brothers fame), which ended in annulment in 1991. In “November Rain,” the violence happens off-screen, the mirror bisecting the dead bride’s face and the sparse funeral crowd the only indicators that foul play had, perhaps, been self-inflicted. Seymour doesn’t appear in “Estranged.” She had already left Axl when they started production on that one.
Her contributions to Spitz’s SPIN oral history come in the form of court-recorded testimony, as do Everly’s, who was subpoenaed in Seymour’s case, alleging that Axl assaulted her, to testify that Axl had also been violent during their relationship as well. Everly filed her own lawsuit against him soon after. (All of the suits were settled out of court.)
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can still read the 1994 People feature, “Bye Bye Love,” (Jesus Christ, People) on Everly’s allegations against Rose, a relationship the magazine compared to O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson, who had been murdered weeks earlier: “Everly says that throughout her four years with Rose, she suffered regular beatings that left her bruised, bloodied and sometimes unconscious. ‘You never knew what would set him off,’ she says.”
There’s also a sidebar about the dueling legal cases between Rose and Seymour that precipitated Everly’s:
Rose had fired the first shot by suing the supermodel in August 1993, claiming she had "kicked and grabbed" him during the party at the Malibu home they shared and that she refused to return more than $100,000 worth of jewelry he'd given her as gifts.
Countersuing, Seymour claimed it was Rose who attacked her, giving her a black eye and bloody nose. Angry because she had held the party after he had wanted to cancel it, he had slapped and punched her and kicked her down a flight of stairs, said Seymour, 25. When other defensive measures failed, she admitted, she "may have even...grabbed his testicles."
Let’s rewind. The actual band’s performance depicted in “November Rain” wasn’t grimy strip-club anarchy or a rioting arena crowd, two primary visuals associated with Axl in the years leading up to his two-volume magnum opus. He’s playing on stage in a classy theater. There’s a conductor, a violin section, a fucking flautist. Axl isn’t berating the crowd or jumping around or preening in chaps. He’s pensive, seated at a piano, channeling John Lennon, framed by the stage’s serious velvet drapes. That’s an artist, the staging indicates. If art is sacred, so is he.
I did not yet have the vocabulary, the framework, to understand how the glamorous woman on the cover of my Victoria’s Secret catalog could rendered for the public into both muse and victim, with the former bestowed as an honor, so the implication goes, that should more than make up for the latter, not a kind of depersonalization that allowed it to happen in the first place.
I didn’t even understand that I had absorbed—accepted it as a divine given, even—that an artistically ambitious and accomplished man couldn’t possibly be just another meathead who lashed out when he didn’t get what he wanted.
I didn’t yet know how many times in my life I would see a woman branded “crazy”—by suggestion or even outright statement, by the culture I consumed but also by men in my life who would never think of themselves as misogynists—for behavior that would later turn out to be completely justifiable.
*
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear
—Laertes (to Ophelia), Act 1 Scene 3
If we peel back the calendar even further, there are other stories, glossed over for years, recounted blithely like tall tales, myths even. These days, the truth can come out, but even now we aren’t sure what to do with it.
Here’s one: In 1985, the guys in the band were mostly squatting in this rancid, drug-addled hangout dubbed the Hell House, writing songs and playing club gigs and running with all kinds of misfits. You know, the stuff Hollywood rock legends are made of. One night, the police show up. Mick Wall’s 2016 book Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N’ Roses, excerpted in Cuepoint, doesn’t try to hand-wave the details away.
The girl in question was fifteen:
Slash, in his autobiography, published, of course, many years later, offers: “My memory of the events is hazy but from what I remember she had sex with Axl up in the loft. Towards the end of the night, maybe as the drugs and booze wore off, she lost her mind and freaked out intensely. Axl told her to leave and tried throwing her out. I attempted to help mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that wasn’t happening.”
A naked, underage girl running away from adult men along one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles was not going to go unnoticed, and within hours the LAPD were back at the Hell House with the girl, looking to ID her assailants. Everyone in the house was brought outside except for Axl, who hid behind some equipment along with another girl. “While the cops are out there harassing everybody, asking their stupid questions, I’m with this girl behind the amp and we start going at it,” he later boasted. “That was the rush! I got away with it! It was really exciting.”
Her parents pressed statutory rape charges. Axl and Slash go into hiding to avoid being arrested for this. (They’re out ta get me!) Eventually, though, the charges were dropped, which means everyone else is free to drop the subject. The band signed with Geffen in 1986, and they were on their way to rock royalty.
In 2023, Axl was sued by a woman who alleged a violent sexual assault in 1989. He denied the allegations. A year later, the suit was settled. But in between, the girl from the Hell House in 1985 gave an account on a podcast of what happened that night, how she ended up out on the street naked and what led to those felony charges. (She obscures their identity in the original interview, but Rolling Stone confirmed that her allegations were made about Rose.) It’s even more disturbing and violent than earlier accounts indicated. At the time, one has to assume, if there hadn’t been a whole band plus a manager, on top of a scene’s worth of believers invested in protecting a young man with such potential, legal consequences may well have stopped Appetite for Destruction from being made in the first place. Then again, maybe not.
*
Draw thy breath in pain
to tell my story.”
—Hamlet to Horatio, Act 5, Scene 2
In the early 1400s, when you wanted to make a big statement, you hijacked a theater troupe and wrote a play implicating your uncle the king in your father’s murder. In the late 1900s, you spent an unprecedented amount of money—more than twice as much as you did on her starring vehicle—riding a dolphin through the ocean to make sure everyone knows you’re over your ex.
Stephanie Seymour had left; the third act of the “Without You” trilogy couldn’t be filmed as planned. In its place, a baffling, expensive debacle that in retrospect foreshadows Axl’s post-Illusion years. In a Vice retrospective, Rich Monahan called the video for “Estranged” an “extravagant and thrillingly misguided monument to Axl Rose’s own persecution complex. It’s like watching the sleek production values of James Cameron applied to the melodrama of Tommy Wiseau,” noting it as “an extension of the sort of bloat Rose insisted on retaining in so much of Guns N’ Roses’ work whenever expectations were high.”
Oh, no. Don’t think about bloat. Don’t think about getting older and dodging, poorly, your own appetites. Especially don’t think about the 2016 Axl memes, don’t welcome me to the diner where we have pie and cake. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, sure, sure, but one thing will always be incontrovertible: Those of us who don’t die on the dueling floor will end up degraded by age. That’s how we know we’re the lucky ones.
“Along the way what happens to our bodies and minds astonishes and horrifies us and sometimes it’s easier to simply not look,” Spitz wrote for me on the morning we heard about the death of Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland instead of the essay he was supposed to be writing about never going out to shows anymore, which, now that I look back at the archives, he never did file.
Axl didn’t die young, no blaze of glory, real or metaphorical. He took seventeen years to put out his magnum opus follow-up, 2008’s Chinese Democracy, churning through sidemen and producers, fourteen studios and $14 million. In the New York Times, Jon Pareles called it “the Titanic of rock albums: the ship, not the movie”—yikes—its “glimpses of heartfelt ferocity and despair” overwhelmed by “a tone of curdled self-pity.” But even in the savage critical takedown, in all the mocking of his long and tortured road to this album, there’s a hint of the reverence we hold for the artistic commitment that could just as easily have swerved into genius as it lurched into travesty. Axl’s humbling is such a letdown because we keep our expectations for our erstwhile princes so high. That back-to-form return is, theoretically, always right around the corner.
Axl pretty much stays touring; I’ve seen him thrice, arena shows all. On one of those dates, in Cincinnati for the 2016 tour, we even saw Steven Adler, fired during the Use Your Illusion sessions over his heroin habit, join the band for two songs. I’ll say this for Axl: He puts on a better show than some of his contemporaries who ended up more busted by time and excess than he did. He’s not had to hit the state fair circuit, a shell of his former self. But there’s little illusion of glamour left in the show now, grinding it out on the road in an industry that doesn’t really put up with two-hour delays and tantrums anymore.
When I first read Hamlet in high school, it was thrilling that he got to be the center of the universe for five whole acts. He was a reckless, selfish, untreated wound, a bottomless pit of hurt who couldn’t get out of his own way and who took down pretty much everyone around him in the end. I couldn’t get enough of it. Reading it since has always hit different. Listening to “November Rain” now can’t transport me back to high school, either, to the version of myself that fell for the glamour, the allure of the sensitive and untouchable. With his dying gasp, Hamlet begs loyal Horatio to tell his story—the one we’re all supposed to believe counts the most. It’s still a sad song, just not in the way that he must have imagined it.
x
Erin Keane apologizes to her Shakespeare teachers for this essay, though she thinks Dr. Gatton would have secretly gotten a kick out of it had he known who Axl Rose even was. The author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022, and Demolition of the Promised Land, a collection of poems about Bruce Springsteen and other mythical creatures, she is chief content officer at Salon.com and teaches creative writing in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
One Last Look Before They Take It All: camellia-berry grass on Sammy Kershaw’s “Yard Sale”
A wise aphorism that found its way to me at some point posits that the thing you grieve most about a long-term relationship ending is the private language of in-jokes and references that you built with that romantic partner or creative partner or family member. I recognize that particular pain of old communicative reflexes becoming synaptic dead-ends, stage plays with an empty house, jokes that turn ghost and haunt themselves. You stub your toe, as you often do, on the awkward leg of that chair you got off Craigslist with your ex, you know, the one you drove through a sudden downpour on a gravel road and you almost went into the ditch but hey you made it and the chair is gorgeous, mid-century modern, but you always stub your toe, and you did it again and you can’t text your ex about it. It’s not funny anymore. Which invites a less wise, but certainly very American, way of conceiving relationship grief: through locating the self that you were with that person, the version of you that you only were alongside and with that person, not in shared communication but in shared belongings. Stuff.
This is the way that the speaker in the 1992 song and music video, “Yard Sale,” by Sammy Kershaw, deals with his abrupt loss of context and derealization of self. “Oh they’re sorting through what’s left of you and me,” Kershaw laments about the folks shopping at his own yard sale. The music video shifts between Kershaw sitting alone in the empty house that’s on the market, dramatic lighting from the other side of a window suggesting a thunderstorm, and Kershaw walking around his yard sale on a sunny day while people flip through vinyl records and summer dresses and kitschy commemorative glassware picked up during a rare vacation. The fiddle in the backing track sounds mournful, lonesome. The lap steel twanging and warping the contours of who you only recently used to be. “Paying yard sale prices/for each golden memory,” Kershaw pouts, sung almost with a sneer that ought to be self-directed but instead is projected onto the people just looking for a good hallway mirror at a fair price.
*
I need you to know that my mom’s garage sales, twice-yearly at their peak, held event status in my lil Missouri hometown. Growing up in the 90s there was a garage/yard sale culture generally in my neck of the Clay County/Ray County border. It’s not like we had a lot of retail options beyond the Wal-Mart to choose from for clothes or children’s toys or appliances, let alone used items (the thrift stores were all in the bigger towns up the highway); and this was well before our present era of listing individual secondhand items on Facebook marketplace. Before Craigslist. Before eBay even really took off. Before the internet dominated our lives. People looked forward to the yard sale listings every other week in the Town & Country Leader, a free area newspaper/advertisement circulator printed on paper so cheap that it was already yellow when it landed at your front door. So when Connie, my mom, announced through the paper that it was time for her garage sale, lemme tell you a lot of folks circled that listing. Her sales built a reputation. Cars would line each side of our small residential street on the far northeastern end of town, a minute’s drive from the city limit. Sometimes people would just park in the front yard, ornery in that rural Missouri way.
I need you to know that we needed the money; that’s why twice-yearly. That extra $600 a year stretched far for a family that was eating squirrel and frog’s legs out of necessity in those weeks where we’d eaten up all the crappie from the last fishing trip and where the 70/30 ground beef or the cube steaks weren’t on sale at the IGA. I need you to know that sometimes my mom would sneak some of my toys that I had no interest in getting rid of out onto a sale table, hoping I wouldn’t notice. I need you to know that we’d spend some of that money at the Long John Silver’s in Liberty, MO, on our way back from Metro North Mall or Antioch Mall, where mostly we were window shopping, but where sometimes mom would pick up this or that clothing item whose eventual destiny was to wind up being sold at the garage sale, not even at a profit. Like renting time on a bit of joy. I need you to see me as a little kid in the backseat drinking chocolate milk, mom driving around to all the garage sales and yard sales going on each week. The hours spent shopping, wherever it was, were load-bearing for us. I wonder if mom’s garage sales were themselves load-bearing for someone else’s happiness. A couple Saturdays a year of joy borrowed from somebody else’s memories, everybody doing their best not to think too deeply about the exchange rate of any of this.
*
“Ain’t it funny,” Kershaw remarks at the end of the first verse, “how a broken home can bring the prices down.” One of my longest running jokes is that I tell people Sammy Kershaw is my real dad. The guy who actually sired me was a terror of booze breath and quick fists and all that pathetic-in-retrospect yelling. We needed the money during those years of twice-annual garage sales because my dad maxed out the family credit card at riverboat casinos. He was gambling to try and pay back some meth dealers he was indebted to. This isn’t an essay about his abuse, but his abuse does ground the essay in that the reason why my mom took me and my little brother shopping in the city a lot, more weekends than not, was just to have a reason not to be home, around my dad’s volatility and violence that was directed at my mom, mostly, and then me, the booknerd sissyboy failing over and over to be what he wanted out of an eldest son. Its easy to see myself, my family, as archetypal roles in country music songs. That’s what makes country music songwriting so effective across generations—the timelessness of the archetypes, the ease with which you can understand the world around you through lyrics and characters.
At least that’s how I always took the songs playing from mom’s record player or from the radio in her red Mercury Villager (purchased with help from Grandpa’s Ford plant UAW discount) or from music videos on CMT. I had a hard time understanding why people did the things they did, especially the mean things, and country music storytelling helped me understand people’s motivations. Especially the motivations of men, who were consistently inscrutable to me. A song like Toby Keith’s “Who’s That Man?” allowed me to conceptualize what a man like my dad might feel after a divorce, after his ex-wife has moved on and found a new partner, a supportive partner; I enjoyed projecting my dad into the lyrics of that song, thinking of him in a place of somber reflection over what he lost. At the time, my parents weren’t yet divorced, so I recognize that this was a bit of wish fulfillment on my part. I liked to think that my dad was capable of somber reflection or maybe even self-improvement. I wanted him out of my life but I always held out a kind of hope for him. I wonder how long my mom did too, until she didn’t, couldn’t.
I cannot recall a moment where my mom spoke to my actual dad with any kind of affection. I can maybe see some moments in old home movies where she finds traces of the love she used to have for him, but I cannot sincerely say that I remember their marriage as anything other than broken. But Sammy Kershaw? The Louisiana country music singer with the combed-back brown hair and a voice like Steen’s cane syrup? My mom adored that man. We’re talking highest tier in the fan club, writing letters and getting autographed pictures in return, attending any meet-and-greet she could when he’d tour through Missouri or Kansas or Iowa-level adoration. I would sometimes imagine Sammy Kershaw as a supportive partner to my mom, to imagine her happy.
Sammy’s career blazed brightest on the charts in the early to mid-1990s, and while he never reached the double-digit #1 hit heights of Brooks & Dunn nor had an album go multi-platinum like Tracy Lawrence (Sammy’s direct contemporaries, each releasing debut albums in 1991), he has three platinum albums, and 11 songs that reached the top 10; a notable amount of them songs sympathetic to women.
Songs of female empowerment and independence weren’t altogether rare in 90s country. It was the decade of Shania Twain, after all. Martina McBride and Pam Tillis were two of my mom’s very favorites of the era (and they remain favorites of mine as well). But it was a little more uncommon for men to put out singles celebrating women’s social advancement. Not uncommon for Sammy Kershaw, not with songs like the wifeguy anthem “National Working Woman’s Holiday,” or the country-camp take on nonmonogamy, “Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer,” or “Don’t Go Near the Water,” which offers the progressive-for-its-time-on-country-radio perspective that if your child has premarital sex when they’re a teenager it’s not actually the end of the world. Even the divorced couple in the “Yard Sale” music video are on good terms after separating—the ending of the video depicting that they’re being very adult and mature about navigating joint custody of their daughter, who looks happy, hugging her dad. Wish fulfillment again, I say about myself, watching this video in late 2025, essaying.
*
Look, I get it. The way memory attaches to stuff, brings sentimentality along with it. After cancer killed my mom in August 2016, I had to hurry back to Philadelphia a few days after her funeral, where I needed to be back in the classroom for my students. We needed to sell her house that she’d lived in since the early 90s. Mom had secretly taken out a second mortgage on the house, you see, to cover medical expenses, because this is the United States of America. So I wasn’t able to be there as my brother, my Aunt Rhonda, and since my mom and he were on cordial terms despite it all, my dad, were all going through mom’s stuff. Deciding what could be kept at dad’s house (which already held onto so much of my grandpa’s stuff since it was grandpa’s house before he died), what could be kept elsewhere, what could be sold to a local auctioneer, and what could be donated to charity.
I’ve got an occasional recurring daydream of having been able to host one last garage sale. I imagine myself putting an ad in the papers so that everybody knows. Like a kind of hermit crab essay, really: A celebration of life in the form of a garage sale. That would have been for me more than anyone. I think my mom (a woman who demanded she be buried wearing jeans) would have found it fitting and funny. But it would have been mostly for me. It’d have been a way to say goodbye to her through saying goodbye to some of her stuff. I get it. I wished I could have sorted through her, just a little bit more.
*
The other side of my daydream might as well be studio soundstage thunderstorm lighting. I thought I was safe from becoming my dad just because I didn’t develop harmful substance use patterns, didn’t “become an addict.” I did develop harmful spending patterns, however. A lifetime of seeing shopping as emotional safety, on top of a lifetime of untreated ADHD (which I suspect my dad also to have) & its attendant dopamine seeking meant that I spent way too much in the grief-filled years after my mom died on clothing, food, sneakers, stuff. Inexcusably, I tried to manage the debt in secret. This essay isn’t about my divorce, but my spending and my secrecy were substantial, and rightful, factors in my divorce.
My ex and I didn’t have a sidewalk sale or anything like that. We divided up our belongings amicably and easily. I did begin to downsize some of my wardrobe in advance of moving, putting more of an emphasis on selling thrifted stuff online, through eBay or Poshmark and the like. One of those things I told myself all along that I should start doing but not putting enough effort into it and whoops where does the time go. Not the first thing about myself I could describe with that sentence, and certainly not the last.
Early in the video, we see a brief scene of Kershaw’s character sitting at the kitchen table, thunderstorm raging outside, when his wife walks up, removes her wedding ring, and calmly places it on the table in front of him, before walking away. Kershaw looks surprised. He shouldn’t have been. He should have been more concerned with communication than with stuff.
*
I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of my dad’s stuff, and I fear that I’m going to have to figure that out soon. Maybe even by the time you read this essay. His motor skills are rapidly in decline. Dementia seems to be setting in. His working memory and short-term memory have crumbled, sometimes forgetting what was going on just five minutes prior. He’s losing himself, and I just don’t know if all of the stuff surrounding him in that house, his dad’s house, are helping him to hold onto himself in any way. Perhaps it hinders him, overwhelms him, the clutter and accumulation akin to the plaques and tangles in his brain. It’s not only his and other people’s belongings lying around the house. There’s the half-empty pop bottles and empty takeout containers and paper grocery bags filled with trash. He’s not the first in his immediate family to have “hoarder” tendencies.
I’m tempted to see in him a loud neon warning sign about my own future, and while that’s real, it’s also a distraction from my discomfort here. This is what this essay is about: I don’t know him, this version of my dad. He barely knows himself, having lost so much access to his past experiences. I can look at the stuff in his house and I can know him through it. All my memories of him are preserved in that way. But he, my dad, isn’t him any longer. He’s not the man that I know him to have been. He’s someone else, and I am uncomfortable with treating him like the asshole that I know him to have been when he’s someone else. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still an asshole. But…if and when me and my brother hold a yard sale after our dad passes, they’ll be sorting through memories that have long since become dislodged from the person who once held them, held the belongings and the memories both, and I don’t think that will make anything, any of it, any easier.
I’m estranged from my dad for many reasons. It’s been a little over two years since I’ve spoken with him. But I feel within me the urge to take one last look. At everything. At the man himself. I don’t know if it’s an urge that can even be satisfied. Maybe my chance has already passed. Maybe any attempt at looking at him is already, only and finally, a reflection.
And here I am, selling you that reflection at a fair price: just a consideration to vote for Kershaw and this essay. Ain’t it funny.
Camellia-Berry Grass is trying to live. She is the author of Hall of Waters (The Operating System, 2019), and her essays appear in DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, the Texas Review, and Waxwing, among numerous other publications and anthologies. She lives in Philadelphia, and still has her mom's vintage Sammy Kershaw "Haunted Heart" album art screenprinted t-shirt.