Spider John Koerner listens to the The Phleshtones
at the Battle of the Jug Bands, Minneapolis, February 11, 2007
As I write, we’re socked in here this morning with the biggest snowstorm in many years. Big drifts, lace in the trees, shovels everywhere, cars rocking back and forth. Whenever I see such scenes, strangely enough, I think of my first summer here in Minneapolis.
I moved here from Tucson in the summer of 1988, a miserably, scorchingly hot summer in the Twin Cities. The drought was so severe that nobody knew if the water level of the Mississippi River would drop below the intakes — if it did, a million people would suddenly have no running water. As if it weren’t miserable enough, it was also an election year.
My move to Minnesota probably magnifies my memory of that summer. But it felt as if the whole state knew the same existential dread, almost as if we could all sense it was the first season of the end of the world (which, in fact, may not turn out to be so far from the truth).
More than a decade later, I first saw Spider John Koerner in concert, and was surprised to find this legendary Minnesota musician had written a great song about the summer of 1988. It sure seemed like he’d seen the same summer I had.
Good profiles have been written about John Koerner and I can’t top them, not today. Even Bob Dylan himself — The Great Written About — wrote about Koerner at some length in his Chronicles autobiography. For one thing, Dylan says Koerner introduced him to the albums of the New Lost City Ramblers.
It’s said that Koerner wrote “Summer of ’88” after many years of not writing anything at all, and it does sound like something you’d say after a long silence. Koerner casts his eye on everything on planet Earth and pulls it all into the song — liberal-conservative left-right wingers, crop prices, fools in the local water hole, money boys, nasty boys, science boys, religion boys, a girl named Lou …
A red-tailed hawk when he’s flying up high
Can see a little bitty snake with his razor-sharp eye
And an eight-hooter owl with her sensitive eye
Can see a hundred-thousand stars more than you or I
Spider John was thinking about the Apocalypse that summer, too — quite a bit, it seems — only what he thought about it was that it didn’t seem to be going on at the moment … at least not around the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, where he’s still playing his gigs, sounding better than he ever has in his life …
Well the moon hangs low and the moon hangs high
And the good old Earth hangs in the sky
Well the sun never rises and the sun never sets
And you know it ain’t over yet
You can get a recording of the song on his Raised By Humans CD. I remember there was footage of Koerner performing the entire song — and nine others, I believe — in the documentary about him, Been Here … Done That, although it’s hard to know how to get a hold of the DVD. I saw it in the theater.
The best thing is to see Koerner in person. I don’t have his complete recordings, but from what I can tell, that’s where the strange beauty of his guitar style strikes home best. He plays in ragged phrases that lurch, like a long deep breath, and then fall silent for a couple beats, and then start again. These wonderful pauses say a lot, and allow him the opportunity to just change tempo or meter, or key or song — whatever it takes — for as long as he pleases. It’s an unmistakeable style. His voice is rough but high and clear, and is perfect for his playing and perfect for singing folk songs for people drinking bourbon. They say there was a time when people used to give him crap for not being “authentic,” although it’s hard to imagine now.
Well, there’s a coda to this story. The first winter I was in Minnesota, I sat in an ice cream shop in Dinkytown, looking down 14th street just after that winter’s first really deep snowfall. It dawned on me that I had seen that exact same street buried in that exact same snowfall before — big drifts, lace in the trees, shovels everywhere, cars rocking back and forth. But this was my first winter in Minnesota, so how could this be? I had not seen it in a dream, and this was not déjà vu.
It took about five minutes of puzzling to realize that, back on the hottest day of the summer of 1988, I had sat in the same ice cream shop and looked down the same street, anticipating what it would be like to experience winter for the first time after spending four years in Tucson. It was on that blisteringly hot day that I had IMAGINED how that snowy Dinkytown scene would look during my first Minnesota winter. I’d seen it before, but only in my mind’s eye. So … there was something about that summer of 1988, the way it played games with my memory and imagination, and maybe Spider John’s too.
Editor’s Note: This is installment 25 of 28 entries in which I seek to post something to The Celestial Monochord every day for the entire month of February. Around here, that’s quite a feat.