Blaze Foley – Clay Pigeons (Secret Seven)
Country music has been guilty of a lot of things – schmaltz, jingoism, nostalgia for some halcyon America that never was – but one thing it's unfairly been nailed to the wall for has been the idea that it's overly depressing or melodramatic. One could call to mind the old joke about country singers, something to the effect of playing their songs backwards and having the protagonist's wife return, his dog come back to life, and his job re-hire him. But that sort of dismissive attitude often fails to consider the way that, in capable hands, the music can reflect reality's hardest truths in an honest and emotionally nuanced fashion.
Such was the case with Blaze Foley. Foley was pretty much hard luck personified. Though much of his early life was somewhat apocryphal (apparently getting a straight answer from Foley about his childhood wasn't a guaranteed success), he was homeless to some degree for most of his life, spending his childhood as an itinerant gospel singer and his adulthood as a drink- and drug-addled songwriter, sleeping on friends' couches, in his car, or even in a treehouse. He had brushes with success – Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered “If I Could Only Fly”; both Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams wrote songs about him – but all the copies of his first album were confiscated by the DEA after the label's owner was busted for drug-running (apparently the few copies he was able to procure ended up being traded for beer money), the master tapes for his follow-up were stolen out of his car, and the final version of a third album was lost for many years, re-discovered, then lost again in a flood. In 1989, intervening in a dispute between his neighbor and his neighbor's son, Foley was shot and killed. Adding insult to injury (what seems to be his life's recurring theme), his killer was acquitted.
And it would be simple to let a story like Foley's overshadow his music, but it wouldn't be fair to the songs themselves. His ability was subtle, reliant on a subtle yet powerful instrumental ability and a hushed, gravelly voice. It often takes several listens to really grasp the depth of what Foley achieved with very few components. Possibly the best instance of this is “Election Day,” what at first seems a straightforward telling of an interaction between a narrator and police officer over some small quantity of drugs. “Hey Mr. Policeman, please don't take my stuff / It cost me a twenty dollar bill and coffee ain't enough / To get me through Election Day,” he sings in a muted, almost sorrowful voice, and it's not hard to imagine him gravely staring down the prospect of sobriety during a day in which alcohol sales had traditionally been illegal (it's interesting to note that the narrator's grim demeanor stems more from the prospect of lacking some sort of intoxicant than it does any legal ramifications of his actions). But on another level, it's not even about the drugs. It's a sly jab at institutionally-mandated demoralization and the way that dominating social foces – the police, the electoral system, the enforcement of antiquated legislation – display an alienation from a large body of the American populace, their desires, their dreams, the things they need to make it through the day with a shred of dignity and sanity.
“Election Day” isn't Foley's most direct political screed (that title would likely belong to either the anti-Reagan diatribe “Oval Office” or the “Masters of War”-style accusatory second person jeremiad of “You'll Get Yours Aplenty”) but his ability to evoke a cold, uncaring society in barely over thirty syllables is a testament to the economy with which he approached his word choice. Perhaps it's too much of a stretch to assume that the frugality a lifetime of poverty can impart had affected Foley's deliberate minimalism, perhaps not. It's often a mistake to assume that a narrator's voice and a writer's intentions are one and the same, even in the case of somebody like Foley, who derived so much of his credibility from having walked so distinct a walk. But even in the instances that these songs are not intended as literal representations of his own thought processes, so much of his personality and worldview bleed through that the line is less distinct than it is in the hands of a great many songwriters. Songs like “Cold, Cold World” and “Clay Pigeons” often frame the well-worn country trope of loneliness in terms of restlessness and the narrator's insatiable desire to be somewhere that he's not, a yearning directly reflected by Foley's own experience.
It was this same life experience that prevented Foley from being an especially prolific recording artist. In addition to the misfortunes that befell him, he apparently was more interested in living life than trying to reflect upon it in a recording studio (“He's only gone crazy once,” remarked Townes Van Zandt of Foley. “Decided to stay.”). Clay Pigeons, then, draws from a fairly sparse pool of sources – some live recordings, some demos recorded in different living rooms across the country, a bit of studio material. While the songs are all consistently excellent, the aesthetic varies. A handful of the live songs have a full band accompanying Foley, and are relatively up-tempo even when the lyrical content is dour or combative. The other recordings tend to rely only on Foley's guitar playing and singing, with only occasional fiddle or harmonica accompaniment, and these are the moments that carry more weight. The suffering imbued into the songs – whether that's loneliness or righteous indignation – is more convincing when viewed as a solitary act, the struggle of a man perservering against forces both inside and out.
And ultimately, that's one of the reasons why good country music can delve into the less pleasant and savory sides of the human experience without seeming overly maudlin. When it's done right, it approaches sadness, anger, and confusion with a steely determination, with the knowledge that each life has its share of tribulations (and some, in the case of people like Blaze Foley, more than others), but that there is little choice except to push forward. One would be hard-pressed to pick up on this from mainstream country music's reliance on cheap emotional ploys, but it's something that's permeated the music's counter-cultural currents from the start and something that's informed every capable practitioner since. Blaze Foley's reduction of this school of songwriting to its barest essentials, an approach with no word or note out of place, in turn leads to some of the genre's loftiest achievements, and while scant recorded evidence of his work survives, Clay Pigeons provides an indispensable overview of the body of work of a conssumate practitioner of his craft.