We’d Never Heard Them Before.
While Larry and I may not have been kindred spirits, I adored listening to him sing. Larry was a master of old, funny songs. He knew them on the guitar and sang every word beautifully – but he rarely sang them on stage. Instead he sang these songs to me, to Bonnie, and to anyone else our age who would listen.
Though the songs were decades old, we’d never heard them before.
He sang, “I’m gonna hire a wino to decorate our home….” about turning a house into a bar. I thought, brilliant! It was especially funny when Larry sang about installing a pay phone in the house “for when your friends can’t find their car.”
Ignorantly, I credited Larry with all the songs he sang. The first time I heard them, Larry sang them. So I gave Larry credit for being a brilliant, funny lyricist – even though all he did was memorize and perform songs.
It didn’t hurt that the songs were occasionally older than I was.
The Kingston Trio’s song, M.T.A., was about a man who got on the subway and couldn’t get off. “Did he ever return? No, he never returned….” That was true hilarity. … in a 1959 kind of way.
It is not, however, as funny as the incredibly unfortunate animals featured in the song, Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road. Loudon Wainwright III apparently knew how to make people laugh in the seventies – and Dead Skunk, as far as I was concerned, was his crowning achievement: a song about road kill. In addition to the poor skunk, “You got your dead cat, you got your dead dog; on a moonlit night you got your dead toad frog.”
This went right up with Fish Heads in my list of funny songs although I am 100% animal lover; go figure.
The legendary David Allen Coe song, You Never Even Called Me By My Name, was also brand new to me. It taught me that country songs should all include lyrics about trains, trucks, Mama, prison and getting drunk.
Crediting writer Steve Goodman, Larry sang: “I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison….” and I would hoot with laughter. Well, there’s no way to explain the genius of this one; it must be heard.
You Never Even Called Me By My Name specifically mentions superstars like Charley Pride and Merle Haggard who, I now know, are icons of country music. But when Larry sang this song to me the first time, I’d never heard those names before.
Many of “Larry’s songs” depicted the simple life in such a way as to make me appreciate the world in which I suddenly lived – especially songs by Merle Haggard, including one of my favorites: I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink, where “drink” somehow rhymes with both “blank” and “bank.” Rhyming fun was also something I enjoyed about country music.
Eventually these songs became “my” songs, too. I even purchased a Willie Nelson album.
I remember Larry playing guitar and singing his repertoire of funny songs in the dorm. Specifically I remember Bonnie’s laughter – it was forced, more of a giggle, and not a laugh I recognized. I wonder if she was trying to endorse my new lifestyle, accepting through music the man she didn’t want to accept into her reality.
Sometimes I think my connection with Larry was, like many of my drunken relationships, developed solely through my ability to connect with his music.
It wasn’t until years later that I considered that my relationship with Larry was really a complete sham.