round 2

(3) The Clash, “I Fought the Law”
smoked
(6) Willie Nelson, “The Scientist”
272-87
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/16/22.

jamie a. lee on the clash’s “i fought the law”

1975.

It might have been earlier or later, but this feels right. I think it was my Aunt Theresa who taught me how to carefully open the small suitcase to take out Mom’s and Dad’s record player. It folded into the suitcase and could be carried to different rooms in our home. I cannot recall what it looked like, just its portability. However, I do remember the second case that carried the small 45 vinyl records. It was red and white with a design of flecks or small leaves as I remember. When I unlatched it and lifted the lid, the inside, too, was red. Inside the records formed a wave that my parents rode in on. That sounds funny and a bit cliché, but a phrasing reflects what I can actually picture. And feel. Music was meaningful to them.
They were high school lovers and then there was me.
I fought the law and the law won.
Their record collection of 45s consisted of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Hey Jude.” I adored the labels on these records and imagined myself a designer. Then there was Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me, But She Died.” So queer in a way. The baby queer that I was back then loved the play with language. I like it still. The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” was one that we all sang out loud. I developed a crush on Davy Jones. LOL. Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” (1966) was in this mix of the songs I remember loving and singing along to when I was 6, maybe 7.  I love this opportunity to return to it now in my 50s.

I remember these songs so clearly. We lived in the first house my dad built, a modest ranch-style house with a large garage where he worked on cars. Before that we lived in the old house at the back of the property where my great grandmother lived for a long time. I have a vague memory of that house; I think it was bright with windows and yet dingy with light blue walls and peeling wallpaper. Not a lot of walls, though. Old. No running water. Of course, I was too little to remember these details of this old house that speak to the working-class context that framed our lives. Mom tells stories of corralling me in the living room with chairs or in my crib so that she could go outside to pump water for my bath. I was all over the place. Naughty, she described.

Dad had a job at the local gas station; he pumped gas and fixed cars at the station and in our front lawn; later our garage. I remember the gas station sold pop in tall glass bottles and we always got 7-UP to share. Mom didn’t have an out-of-the-house job at first. She stayed home and took care of me and then my brother when he came along two years after I was born.
The laws and social norms pushed Mom out of high school once she was showing her pregnancy. She could not set a bad example for the others in the school. She was considered dirty and hypersexualized. She was pushed out. There were different rules for women and men. Dad, however, got to graduate from high school. Eventually Mom took night classes to get her GED. Then she worked as a cleaner at an office and then as a waitress. Today, I wear her class ring everyday as a reminder of the time, the laws that foreclose dreams, and the fight I have in me.
I fought the law 

My Grandma, Dad’s mom, helped Mom by watching us at her house. I got in trouble a lot because I messed up Grandma’s houseplants. She regularly sent me outside to play with my Aunt Theresa who was nearly two years older than me. It was this same Grandma who also filled Mom’s head with soap opera storylines of deceit and of cheating husbands. Mom was naïve and gullible; what this means to me is that she trusted people and that they betrayed her trust. Mom recounts these stories she was told. She was a teen-age mother stuck with two kids, no high-school education, in an old home with no running water, and in a family and community where she was never given a fighting chance. I learned to fight first for her, later for myself, and then for others.
I fought the law.
Dad had his buddies. He had fun. He tells stories of an ice storm when he and his friends tied a long rope to the back of his old Ford hot rod car. They took turns skiing behind the car on Interstate 94. On their sneakers. Nearly got killed. And he was a smoker. I remember the smell. It burrowed into my clothes and stuck to my hair and, seemingly permanently, in my nostrils. I think I can still smell it. His mom smoked too. She sat in her living room chair smoking, sipped coffee and then bottles of Coke, and watched soaps. These were the days of our lives. Dad stopped smoking when he threw his cigarette out the car window as he was driving and it blew back inside and burned up his backseat. Glad we kids weren’t in there.
Dad is the oldest of seven kids. Two brothers were his “real” brothers who are dead now from various cancers and disease. The younger four siblings were born later with the only Grandpa I remember. One big family with different histories but shared cycles. The law of the land and the law of the father structured who might change these cycles of dis-ease, poverty, and trauma. It was not Grandma’s generation. It was not Mom’s and Dad’s generation. I look back and understand that Mom was caged in ways; Dad, too, was caught up in a cage. Only a bit bigger than hers. Social norms functioned to squish dreams and hurt each of my parents. They were given impossible choices. They didn’t know what they were doing. To each other. To us.
I fought the law.
Still the music played. Throughout the 1970s, Mom and Dad listened to music. The car radio always had something playing. They sang out loud sometimes. Country Western songs mostly. I remember when that stopped. Mom was jealous. Remember those soap-opera stories that Grandma fed her for years? Well, real or not, the storylines stuck. The storylines were ones that Mom and Dad thought about and fought about. They were ones that moved me into action to make peace and hold tight to my frightened brother. We both knew how the story would be played out and we each stepped into the roles that we thought could comfort us.
I remember riding in the backseat of our red Chevy Nova listening to the country station. The song played “Your nobody called today. She hung up when she I asked her name.” Sylvia’s “Nobody” was a song about cheating. It became the background music of the storyline in which the husband is confronted by the wife about having an affair. Mom and Dad were the main characters. Then there was another fight. Mom jealous. Dad angry and violent. In the aftermath of such episodes, the radio was turned off and we drove in silence. The car was filled with a dark mood and no more music. I held my breath and my brother’s hand in the backseat as the car continued down the country road. Farm fields, barns, cows, trees, and a not-peaceful quiet. 

Aunt Theresa and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music. Chicago was our favorite band (though we did love Seals & Croft, Bread, and the Jackson 5). She was my big “sister” and my best friend. She knew what cages I was trapped in because she was trapped in them too. She loved me and I loved her. Her room was that soft place to land. We listened to love songs. Love found. Love lost. We played games, Barbies, read, and just chilled with the sounds of the music that we came to love. There was that one Dan Fogelberg song about meeting his old lover in a grocery store. Love found again. The song unfolded in story. Aunt Theresa and I knew all the words. Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was another favorite that we sang in her room and in the way-way back of Grandma’s brown station wagon. Our way back seats folded up so that we looked backwards out the car’s back window. Always moving in a backwards direction or going nowhere. Fast. She and I were in our own little world of song and singing. Other days we hiked through the cow pastures and corn fields to the fence that separated Grandpa’s and Grandma’s farm property and Interstate 94. We sat on the fenceposts and sang songs to the passing cars. We performed the songs after watching Friday late night music videos and other music-centered TV shows like Solid Gold and American Bandstand. “Stop in the Name of Love” was one we sang and danced to, copying the arm movements we saw on TV. We performed but the cars never stopped. We stopped doing these things once my little family moved to another small Wisconsin town about an hour away. She and I would be separated until we got our driver’s licenses. We then faced our growing pains and challenges of relationships and being young women on our own. We tried to know ourselves and also keep knowing each other.
I fought the law and the law won.
Why did every verse end with the law winning? Would there be a chance to win? The Bobby Fuller Four’s song was a bouncy one. The band hailed from El Paso, TX. Considering the US politics in the 1960s, how can fighting the law and the law winning sound so—hmmm….—danceable?!
I fought the law and the law won.
In the early 1980s, I discovered The Clash singing this same song that framed much of my early childhood. Here British punk slams right into Bobby Fuller’s toe-tapping song to invite a much-needed fighting spirit. The difference was palpable. Alas, the law still won.
My friends and I were into music. We bought cassettes from record stores and made each other mixed tapes on our boom boxes. Once we could drive, we borrowed cars to drive the 40 minutes from rural Wisconsin to First Avenue in Minneapolis for the All-Age Danceteria nights. We were 16 and in a brand-new milieu of music, movement, love, loss, anger, and rage. We shouted! We sang! We danced it out!
The Clash lived up to its name. The punk sounds of this familiar song returned me to the quiet car rides when we were silenced and uncomfortable in the storylines of deceit and betrayal that were always followed by violent outbursts and a disempowering silence. The Clash filled me with power.
The music video is what really hooked me. Watching Night Tracks on late Friday nights to see music videos without having to have cable TV was a turning point for me to understand how musicians understood their own music in the context of world politics. The videos were not only documentations of bands performing, but the telling of stories. I fought the law and the law won. The Clash music video centered politics, international conflict, and ended with named wars and invasions. It centered the power of the media, too, in our changing landscape of TV news and entertainment. I was a part of this changing landscape. I wanted to be a part of this story, this storytelling. I wanted to change the stories. I wanted to fight the law. I wanted to win.
I fought the law and the law won.
I keep fighting.

Jamie A. Lee is a queer archivist, activist, and Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona. They are an award-winning filmmaker and founder/director of the Arizona Queer Archives and the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab. They also have an amazing NFL football card collection that they started in the mid-1970s. Visit www.thestorytellinglab.io for more about their business.

BACK TO THE START: RON HOGAN ON WILLIE NELSON’S “THE SCIENTIST”

I’m here to celebrate a Chipotle commercial, but before I get to that we should discuss Johnny Cash and American Recordings.
I remember when that album came out in 1994. It seemed like a lot of people listened to it and said to themselves, “Oh, hey, Johnny Cash is actually pretty cool.” To me, it felt more like vindication—I’d had a “greatest hits” cassette of the Man in Black since the mid-1980s that I’d permanently borrowed from my grandfather, something he’d probably acquired from one of his record clubs. I played the heck out of that tape. For a while I even took to wearing a black short-sleeve shirt with black slacks—more than a bit presumptuous on my part, but not, in retrospect, the worst look of my late teens and early twenties, either. So, yeah, I saw everyone raving about American Recordings and I said to myself, “Congratulations on catching up to the rest of us.”
As I say, I was more than a bit presumptuous at that age.
Anyway, as Cash’s star continued to ascend, I would occasionally think about who should “be next” to get that sort of minimalist “a man and his guitar” relaunch, and Willie Nelson came up frequently on that mental list. Now, their situations were somewhat different at the time. I’m speaking here not of their status within country music fandom, but in the general popular consciousness.
Johnny Cash hadn’t fallen into obscurity in 1994, of course, but the world at large seemed to think, and record sales seemed to confirm the notion, that you could safely ignore him and not worry that you were missing out on anything.
Willie, on the other hand, may not have had a single on the Billboard pop charts since the early 1980s, but in 1994 he was constantly in the public eye as the face of Farm Aid, the series of benefit concerts he’d helped launch together nine years earlier to raise money for family farmers in the United States. (Cash had played the event three times, including one performance with Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson as The Highwaymen, but if Farm Aid was associated with anyone, it was Nelson.) He seemed, to me especially, ideally positioned for the sort of mainstream reappraisal that Cash had begun to enjoy.
I even had the song picked out: Bob Mould’s “See a Little Light,” from his 1989 solo album Workbook.

Now, if I had bothered to track down and listen to the albums Nelson was putting out at the time, I’d have discovered Across the Borderline, an album released more than a year before American Recordings that included covers of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” and “Graceland,” as well as a duet with Sinead O’Connor on “Don’t Give Up” that, if you’d never heard Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, would convince you that it had been a country song the whole time.
Nelson’s sound on Across the Borderline isn’t as stripped down as Cash’s—guest musicians abound, from Mose Allison on piano to Don Was on bass guitar—but there’s a crispness to the production that rivals American Recordings, and it deserves to be better remembered than it has been.
Instead, for the rest of the 1990s and into the 21st century, Nelson seemed to settle into an iconic status within American pop culture, becoming more famous for his tax troubles and his enthusiasm for marijuana than for anything he’d recorded since “Always on My Mind.”
I mean, I didn’t realize that Nelson had recorded an entire album with Ryan Adams in 2006, where they covered the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen. Around 2010, I picked up another collaborative project he did, with the Texas band Asleep at the Wheel, but in all honesty that was because I was going through a Western swing phase at the time.
So the shock the first time I saw “Back to the Start,” a short animated film made for Chipotle by Johnny Kelly in 2012, was real:

You don’t even hear Nelson’s voice until more than 30 seconds into the film; that first half-minute is devoted to the opening bars of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” on acoustic guitar as a man walks away from his wife and infant son and builds a small farm for himself. The computer-generated shapes are simple—the farmer is a head on a sphere that has thin arms and legs sticking out of it, the pigs are pink cylinders with tiny legs and big round noses, the cows are even more abstract, recognizable as cows more by their black and white coloring than their shape.
As Nelson’s voice comes in, the cartoon continues panning to the right, and the simple family farm becomes a meat factory, the pigs juiced up until they become rounded spheres that are compressed into neatly stackable cubes that can be loaded onto trucks and driven off to wherever. The highways fall away, and the farmer, older now, walks across a snowy field at night, his head hung low. “Nobody said it was easy,” Nelson sings, as the farmer’s visualized thoughts turn to caged pigs, chemical supplements, and industrial waste: “No one ever said it would be this hard.”
As the music swells, and Nelson sings “I’m going back to the start,” the farmer goes all Jesus and the moneychangers, overturning the buildings that store the livestock and pigs as the landscape behind him transforms into a free range, until finally, as an old man, he loads a single crate onto a Chipotle truck, which drives off as the farmer reunites with his family.
I’m not going to lie: The first time I watched this on YouTube, I was blinking back the tears by the time the Chipotle truck showed up.
(Keep in mind this was a decade ago, back when “Chipotle” was still in most people’s good graces, as we were more inclined to think of “wholesome ingredients” than, say, “terrible labor practices.”)
The film is only half of the song, but the sound on the full-length version remains just as exquisite—better, in fact, because here Nelson sings “Oh, take me back to the start,” and then another delicate instrumental passage kicks in before he reprises the entire first verse with a fuller arrangement, which builds up to the lush climax. It’s all just as pristine as “Don’t Give Up” in 1993, or the version of Daniel Lanois’s “The Maker” that Lanois himself produced for Nelson’s 1998 album Teatro. And though the song was originally recorded especially for the commercial, it was eventually added to Heroes, an album that came out later in 2012 with covers of several classic country tunes, as well as songs by Pearl Jam and Tom Waits.
Other than the fact that Coldplay didn’t release A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002, this was almost exactly the sound I had imagined for Nelson throughout the late ‘90s. If only I had been paying closer attention, I would have realized it was the sound he’d been making all along.

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. These days, he publishes a newsletter about developing your writing practice, "Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives," at ronhogan.substack.com, and his latest book, Our Endless and Proper Work, came out from Belt Publishing in the summer of 2021. He’s @ronhogan on Twitter and @theronhogan on Instagram.