Author: Brad Zellar

—Irwin Norling

My grandfather played Santa Claus for more than twenty years, purely, I liked to believe, out of the goodness of his heart. His annual ritual was completely a volunteer effort and a solo undertaking.

This was in a small town in the Midwest, and every November my grandfather would build a tiny candy-striped cottage in his front yard. In the evenings in December he’d sit out there after dinner waiting for the neighborhood children to stop by.

My grandmother played a plump and largely unenthusiastic elf for the first several years of her husband’s long run as Santa Claus, but she eventually expressed the opinion that the experience was depressing and ruined a perfectly good holiday. My grandfather soldiered gamely on without her. He was a rail-thin Kentucky native with a pronounced twang and eccentric habits (including a crackpot streak that compelled him to write regular, not entirely coherent letters to the local paper) that had long made him an arms-length stranger to most of the people in town.

He was working from a pretty serious handicap, then, right from the beginning, but in the early years of this annual undertaking neighborhood families seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing. There wasn’t another Santa in town in those days, so my grandfather actually managed to become something of a holiday tradition for a number of years.

Then the neighborhood got older, and those kids who might have had fond memories of the Santa on Sixth Street grew up and moved away, and my grandfather found himself being increasingly rejected by subsequent generations. Every year there were still a few visitors, but it became more discouraging each December, and for years local teenagers had been spreading the rumor that my grandfather was a pervert.

In reaction to this increasing indifference, every year my grandfather built larger and more elaborate Christmas displays in his front yard, hoping to capture the attention of the town’s dwindling number of youngsters. He’d actually work the entire summer building a hill right in the middle of the yard. He trucked in tons of dirt and terraced the thing carefully to avoid erosion, and the hill was eventually so large that it literally obscured much of the house behind it.

My grandfather had a fierce and constantly evolving vision of his Santa Shack (he called it the "Castle"; it was always "Santa’s Castle" to him) that was perched atop this hill. He also imagined scores of local children, walking hand-in-hand with their parents and winding their way up the long path –"Candy Cane Lane"– to visit Santa Claus.

Loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the shack blasted Christmas carols out over the neighborhood.

It was this hill (and this music) that eventually turned much of the neighborhood against my grandfather, and one year the city council actually deliberated shutting him down. A young and smirking local newspaper reporter took my grandfather’s side –"Santa Claus vs. Joyless City Council"– and the story was picked up by news services and television stations all over the state.

The town was inundated with mail, virtually all of it supporting the beleaguered local Santa Claus, and my grandfather was eventually allowed to carry on his increasingly escalating holiday spectacle. All this new attention ultimately succeeded in making the Christmas Village on Sixth Street a destination for road-tripping young ironists from all over the area.

These teenagers –many of them clearly stoned– would drive in from towns all around, and were alleged to leave beer cans in the street and urinate in yards up and down the block. My grandfather was so caught up in this new and unexpected wave of attention that he was apparently oblivious to the streak of ridicule that was predominant in these young visitors.

The last year I went home for Christmas I was appalled by the marked decline in my grandfather’s original, pure vision. The place looked almost perverse, part third-rate theme park, part used car lot spectacle. The actual house was now completely hidden behind the huge hill and the outrageously festooned shack that sat upon it.

My grandfather had by this time spent several years working –or eating– toward what he considered the proper level of obesity for his annual turn at Santa Claus. There was, however, nothing proper at all about his arrived-upon corpulence. He became monstrous; his naturally thin frame was obviously ill equipped to carry so much excess weight, and he now walked with a pronounced, staggering limp and sweated profusely. I was horrified to see my grandfather in such a clear and dangerous state of mania. He must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds, and eventually had to be assisted on his painfully labored trek up the path to "Santa’s Castle."

That year, I noticed, two, and even three, drunken teenagers would pile onto his lap while he gasped out his congested ho-ho-hos.

Eventually, of course, even the young ironists abandoned the old Santa Claus, and my grandfather was left with his unreliable memories and lingering fantasies.

My grandmother had inherited a considerable sum of money some years earlier, and she reluctantly –ever more reluctantly as the years went by– allowed her husband to appropriate increasingly unconscionable sums of this money to subsidize his annual Christmas displays. The utility bills were almost too much to be believed, and as my grandfather’s morbid obesity and mounting health problems no longer allowed him to contribute anything in the way of actual physical labor to the elaborate and protracted set-up procedures, all the work had to be contracted out to local laborers.

The city had also become increasingly tough in enforcing any and all pertinent codes, and there were constant battles with the inspectors and neighbors.

The visitors to my grandfather’s Christmas Castle finally trickled to a very few annual regulars, mostly the confused or frightened children of the occasional local who still retained some fond memories of their own childhood visits to the eccentric small-town Santa.

Most evenings in December my grandfather would sit alone in his shabby Santa suit in his little shack on the hill, listening to Andy Williams or Robert Goulet or the New Christy Minstrels drifting out over the neighborhood from the speakers on the roof. He would read tabloid newspapers and drink straight from two-liter bottles of RC Cola.

That last year I visited I could see that a sad ending was taking shape for my grandfather, a sad ending for the whole family, really. He had worn us all out, and what had started as a sort-of cheesy, harmless, and charming holiday tradition had spiraled out of control. The rest of us weren’t really properly equipped to understand the fierceness of my grandfather’s vision, or his motives.

Perhaps I alone actually made some attempt to figure out what drove my grandfather to such extremes of fantasy. My grandfather had always been an oddball and interloper, and had long had a reputation in the family as something of shiftless character. He’d had a checkered job history and was a pack rat. It seemed clear enough that my grandfather wanted desperately to fit in, to have his neighbors like him and accept his children. He had grown up poor, and I suppose there was something generous and magical in the image of Santa Claus that appealed to his lingering sense of insecurity. He had been in the military for a number of years before he married my grandmother and settled in the small town in Illinois, and this long part of his life had always been a mystery to everyone in the family. It was something he resolutely refused to discuss.

At any rate, the Santa Claus suit, I had come to believe, was a disguise for a man who desperately wanted to be disguised. What more puzzling outsider was there than Santa, the exotic yet entirely benevolent other, eccentric but completely non-threatening? I think my grandfather hoped he could get to the parents –win their approval– through their children. And the whole thing worked –sort of– for years, but eventually, when it morphed into a full-blown and ultimately destructive obsession it negated all the good will and largely turned the town, and even his family, against him.

The year after I made my last visit my grandfather’s health declined. He was in and out of the hospital, and was eventually moved into an assisted living facility. My uncles finally got around to bulldozing the hill and restoring my grandmother’s front yard to a proper lawn.

If you visit that town now and can manage to locate the local historical society (which is located in a Quonset hut at the county fairgrounds) you can see my grandfather’s fully recreated Christmas Castle hidden away in a back room. They also, I am told, have a number of vintage photographs from the archives of the town’s newspaper.

Though I’ve been back there several times in the intervening years, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to pay a visit. I’m not quite ready –I fear it would break my heart– but I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to it, by which time I’m hoping it will flood me with appropriately happy memories.

There were increasingly more mysteries than he could get his head around.

The puzzle of texture, pattern, and repetition. The idiot wonder prompted by even the most prosaic mosaic or randomly occurring stain. Prompts, responses, and resolute silences from the interior continent. Sounds of no clear origin. Desires of no clear etc.

Desires. Desire.

The absence of desire.

The incomprehensibility of all transmission, whether of blood, belief, truth, or information.

The magic of a phonograph record, compact disc, or photograph.

The process of ruin and deterioration. Erosion, the real deal and the metaphor.

The slow dazzle of contentment.

The planet’s tantrums and stoic productions.

The involuntary heresies of the hobbled heart.

The helpless disgrace of despair.

The missing things, the absence of, etc.

The tragedy of memory and forgetting.

The fact that even a telescope can’t find tomorrow, that even a microscope can’t make sense of yesterday.

The blood-muddling transformations, defeats, and ecstasies possible in a single moment.

The strange human resistance to the merely practical.

The drab compromises and uneasy pacts.

The irresistible persuasion of percussion.

The takeaway prerogative of fate.

The way that water moves, travels, falls, settles, or sits still.

Some agreed upon sense in the second hand, that we pretend to recognize or understand time.

That we choose to believe this is all real.

That we choose to believe.

That we reach out.

That we pull away.

That we fall.

That we get back up.

That we go on.

That by tomorrow every single one of us might be gone forever, and in a hundred years the sound of our laughter, the touch of our hands, and the stories we paid for with our lives will be forgotten by every breathing thing still living.

That this is where we are: Here.

That this is what we have: Now.

That this is who we are: Who?

That this is what we want: What?

E…T…C.

Let us each tattoo a rising sun on our heart.

—Harry Crosby, “Tattoo”

Imagination is that around which

Mysteries assemble for devotion.

It believes everything, even reason,

Which denies everything. Pay attention.

—James Galvin, from “Reading the Will”

It has long been rumored that somewhere in a remote part of the world there survive at least a few remnants of a pack of laughing dogs. The existence of these dogs has never been conclusively proved (or so I am told), but what is purported to be the distant, haunting sound of their hysterical, congested laughter has been captured on tape and subjected to years of study and speculation.

The sound on these tapes, recorded late at night from the edge of a deep, dense forest, is of a creature –clearly amused– that sounds neither wholly human nor like any known animal.

For generations, natives of the region where these animals are said to live have passed down the legend that the laughing dogs are descendents of a dog that was created by God in the earliest days of the genesis of the world. God, it is surmised, originally intended to provide this dog with the gift of speech, and had given the beast the initial fundamentals necessary for forming words when He thought better of the idea and aborted the project, leaving the poor creature with nothing but a primitive voice box and the ability to form crude, guttural sounds.

Initially, as the story goes, the dog had been confused and embittered by this betrayal, and had sputtered and raged unintelligibly like a mute.

In time, however, this original dog had found a companion in the woods and had fallen in love. Together these animals –the one capable of producing sounds slightly more advanced than the barks and yaps of an average dog, and the other almost mute from loneliness– produced offspring that had for the most part inherited the dubious genetic gifts of the male.

The happiness experienced by this family of dogs (a family that over the years became a small community), and the pleasure and contentment they discovered in each other’s company, found expression in the laughter that eventually evolved from their stunted capacity for speech. It has been hypothesized that even those dogs that did not inherit the ability to produce the actual sounds of laughter learned to laugh along with the others by using nothing but their expressive eyes, nodding smiles, and innate talent for howling.

I have recently had an opportunity to hear the tapes of these purported laughing dogs, and though I am in no position to confirm the source of the sounds on these recordings, there is absolutely no mistaking what is being heard: Laughter. Joyous, uninhibited, full-throated laughter that ranges from a raspy, incredulous chuckle to a wild giggle to rollicking communal hysteria. It is a wonderful sound, and hearing it I have to imagine that even the most rational and humorless of scientists must be hard-pressed not to join in the laughter.

Having listened to this merriment, however, there is one question that continues to intrigue me, and it is apparently a question that holds little or no interest for the researchers: Just what the hell is it that those dogs find so damned funny?

I feel like I need to explain myself.

The aliens drilled a hole in my soft palate and inserted an energy depleter that uses my saliva to deliver a continuous feed of a stupefying agent into my bloodstream.

Do you feel this rough spot behind my left ear? That’s an even more sophisticated negative energy implant that inhibits the secretion of adrenaline and dopamine and sets up neural roadblocks that impede the assembly of rational thoughts and makes concentration of any kind virtually impossible.

Few of you, God willing, will ever know what it’s like to be taken from your place on the floor and transported to a planet millions of miles away, where the greatest minds of an alien race subject you to exhaustive experiments on the circuitry of the human mind. There’s no doubt that such an experience changes a man, and makes him a veritable stranger among his fellows.

I should also say that I can find little in my own experience that corresponds to anything I’ve yet heard in my alien abduction support group, and I’ve grown tired of the endless game of anecdotal one-upsmanship that I encounter there. It’s no longer enough to simply claim that one has been abducted by aliens, and these days everybody and his grandmother purports to have had a chip implanted in their buttocks or brain by aliens; those sorts of stories won’t even raise eyebrows anymore, so these folks –most of whom I have come to realize are discrediting the stories of legitimate Alien Abduction (AA) survivors like myself– have to concoct ever more fantastic claims to get the attention they so clearly crave.

As a result I’ll admit that I’ve grown increasingly self-conscious about my own experience, and find myself reluctant to relate the tale to even my closest friends and family members. I worry, though, and wonder how much longer the fact that I am slowly turning green will go unnoticed and unremarked upon by the people around me.

Every Christmas when I was a child much of my extended family would gather at my grandparents’ farm outside a small town in Illinois. We’d all trek there from various points around the Midwest. My own family would usually arrive early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and many of my other aunts and uncles and their families who lived nearby would come out to the farm for dinner that night.

My grandparents had a big farmhouse. They’d raised seven children, so there was always plenty of room for everybody. My uncle Dick, who’d never married, still lived at home and helped my grandfather out around the farm. Dick was a bit of a drinker, and a big, jolly fellow.

One year when I suppose I was maybe five or six years old uncle Dick corralled all the kids –there were probably close to a dozen of us– after our huge potluck dinner.

“Everybody get bundled up and come with me,” he said. “I’ve got a big surprise to show you.”

“Oh, Jesus, Dick,” my grandfather said. “Go on and leave that thing alone.”

It was already later than most of us were accustomed to staying up, and I remember it was a cold, clear night with a good deal of snow on the ground. After we’d all pulled on our boots and zipped ourselves into our snowsuits we headed out into the farmyard with uncle Dick. I imagine he’d had a few drinks by this point, and he had a big, hissing Coleman lantern that sent dark angles of shadow swaying before him as he walked. We followed him across the dark yard and along the fence line that separated the feedlot from the fields, trudging through the snow and struggling in his tracks through the deep drifts.

Uncle Dick led us way back along the fence to the edge of the property line, where the corn field gave way to a wood lot, on the edge of which was a frozen dumping pond. He paused there and bent low to illuminate something in the snow. We all gazed with a combination of horror and wonder at a pink, hairless thing, wincing, glazed with ice, and curled up like a grub in a cradle of snow.

There was a sustained silence as we all crowded around for a closer look, the steam from our breath billowing in the lamplight.

“What is it?” somebody finally asked.

“That there is an elf fetus,” uncle Dick said. “A dead little baby elf.”

“What happened to it?” one of my cousins asked.

“You know how it is with Santa on Christmas Eve,” Dick said. “He must have had an elf with him who started to have herself a baby, and when she finally squeezed that thing out they flung it over the side of the sleigh as they went flying by. That’s how much Santa Claus and his elves care about getting presents to you kids. On a night like this they’re just too damn busy to mess with a little baby elf when they’re out buzzing around the world. They had to toss it overboard and go on with their important business.”

A couple of the kids started to cry.

“Aw, don’t you worry about a thing,” uncle Dick said. “Them elves are like rabbits; they have all kinds of babies. There’s more where that one came from.”

Someone suggested we bury the elf baby.

“Nah,” Dick said. “Santa Claus will take care of it eventually, once he’s done with his chores.” He then reached down into the snow, grabbed the tiny creature by the head, and pitched it toward the dumping pond.

We all followed Dick back along the fence to the house, our heads –or my head, certainly– full of all sorts of disturbing questions.

The next morning I went back out with my brother and some of my cousins to look for the elf fetus, but –sure enough– it was gone.

I think I believed in that dead little elf longer than I believed in Santa Claus, and it wasn’t until a number of years later that my older brother told me that what uncle Dick had shown us that night was actually a stillborn pig.

My brother, of course, claimed he’d known all along.

A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life. Many assumed Kunkel would join the Armed Forces like his father had, and would rise quickly through the ranks. Others thought certain that he would become a supper club singer, what with that fine voice of his. He was always getting up to sing at parties and special occasions around town, and he knew all the songs from the famous Broadway shows. As for myself, well, I thought perhaps Richard Kunkel would carve out a place for himself in the political arena. I always pictured him smiling and waving from the back of a train, waving goodbye to that little town of ours forever.

But no, sir, it turns out that our Richard Kunkel didn’t have the ambition God gave a field mouse, and he never went anywhere. As he grew older it was always one odd job around town after another. The fellow couldn’t seem to hold a position to save his soul, and it was the death of his poor mother. After a time rumors began to circulate that Richard had a fondness for liquor and played cards with the priests for money. He never married, but he never did stop being the same friendly, outgoing Richard Kunkel the town had known as a boy. He never amounted to a hill of beans, either, which saddened all of us. You like to see your bright young people go out into the world to make something of themselves.

Then one year Richard Kunkel did an unusual and entirely unexpected thing, a rather scandalous thing in our little scheme of things. Richard recruited some children from the church youth group and mounted a Christmas pageant from a play he had apparently written himself, based on some of the questionable stories regarding St. Nicholas of Myra. In actuality the play had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas and focused almost entirely on the legend of St. Nicholas’ resuscitation of three boys –Timothy, Mark, and John– who had allegedly been slaughtered, pickled, and sold as meat during a fourth century famine. This peculiar incident was described by Richard Kunkel –and most clumsily enacted by his rankly amateur players– in obsessive and grotesque detail, complete with much shrieking, writhing, and the liberal spilling of false blood.

This inappropriate production was staged as a prelude to a chili dinner in the church basement, and needless to say whatever point Richard was trying to make was entirely lost on the horrified spectators, most of whom were elderly folks from the local senior citizen center who had come expecting some celebration of the spirit of the season.

Richard –playing a filthy and half-dressed pawnbroker (St. Nicholas being the patron saint of pawn brokers, or so Kunkel explained in the program notes)– narrated the play with a disturbing and incoherent zeal. There was much speculation that Richard was, in fact, intoxicated, speculation which was perhaps fueled by the fact that his character was swilling messily from a large bottle of whiskey throughout the production. A prop, Richard later claimed, but there were few believers.

People need to recognize the effect one untoward incident can have on a man’s reputation in a small town. I’m not saying it’s always fair and square, but after Richard Kunkel’s little lark at the church dinner people’s attitudes towards him changed. He’d been a bit of a disappointment to that point, but this was something else entirely. Richard Kunkel went from a boy with failed promise to the sort of mystery nobody really wanted around. It’s sad, but that’s the way of the world. He finally left town a year or so later, and the word around here is that he’s working at a Fleet Farm up in Rochester these days.

1) The Critters, Mr. Dieingly Sad

On the surface a simple little song with a borrowed melody (from Paul Williams, no less), The Critters’ masterpiece takes a turn down a very dark road about mid-song, and the next minute-and-a-half is a pure, harrowing cage match with Satan. No surprise: Satan wins, and before he’s done with Mr. Dieingly Sad there’s broken glass, a shotgun blast, and blood all over the walls.

2) Three Dog Night, One

Hank Williams’ entire catalog boiled down to three minutes of existential longing. When the pedal steel starts raining tears after the last chorus you’ll feel like you’ve never been in love, never felt the sun on your teeth, and never had a haircut you didn’t regret.

3) Jim Stafford, Swamp Witch

Stafford’s got something of a bum reputation as a novelty act, but ‘Swamp Witch’ ought to convince anyone who cares that the man has a hole in his dark soul that you could drive a Mack truck through. When I heard Jim sing this song at his theater in Branson I had shivers running up and down my spine, and some of the old buffet vultures around me were actually crying out in terror.

4) Charlie Rich, There Won’t Be Anymore

This, in a nutshell, is what country music is really all about: a man makes a short, hopeless, declarative statement, and then sings it like he believes it.

5) Cat Stevens, Banapple Gas

Not what it sounds like or seems, neither of which I –or you– could define. That said, it’s something mighty special all the same. But, you ask, is it really country? You’re damn right it is.

6) Red Sovine, Teddy Bear

Sure, it’s kind of corny: a little Teddy Bear gets abandoned in the woods, gets lost, is harassed by predators, gets hit by a pick-up, and finally finds happiness in the arms of a little girl. Yet in that little girl’s willingness to overlook the bear’s mangled limbs and missing eye there’s a tidy and useful lesson for all of us. If this song doesn’t get the tears flowing, you need to see a therapist to help you understand all the damage your parents did to you.

7) Terry Bradshaw, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Make no mistake: Bradshaw was a great quarterback, and he’s entertaining enough playing an unhinged whack-job on TV. But as this peerless interpretation shows, he’s an even better country singer, and in Hank Williams’ classic Bradshaw found an outlet for all the repressed feelings a professional athlete in America isn’t allowed to express in public.

8) Sheena Easton, Morning Train

A classic song of abandonment made even more unforgettable by the reliable presence of the Jordanaires and the sizzling fiddle break provided by Vassar Clements. Also features an uncredited Leon Russell on piano.

9) Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra

‘Abracadabra’ shows that Miller obviously spent some time studying what Gram Parsons was up to, and there’s a languid quality to the arrangement that would make this song right at home tacked onto the end of ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo.’ Country –and rock and roll, for that matter– is full of singers pining for some sort of magical remedy for lost love and broken hearts, but few of them get their hopes squashed so completely as Miller does here.

10) Oak Ridge Boys, Wasn’t That A Party

It sure as Sam Hell was. ‘Nuff said!

11) John Anderson, Swingin’

No roadhouse jukebox would be complete without a copy of this classic. You want to get a bar full of drunk fat folks dancin’ and hollerin’ along to the record player? Just punch up Anderson’s deathless party stomp –mission accomplished!

12) John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, Tender Years

A beautiful version of ‘Tender Years’ that actually, miraculously, manages to wring more emotion out of the song than George Jones ever could. Before Hollywood stole his soul, Cafferty was a great, hugely underrated singer, and this may be his masterpiece.

13) The Tijuana Brass, The Lonely Bull

Country is a music where people have always gotten drunk, cried in their beer, and slept in their clothes, yet in a genre steeped in all manner of lonely funk, fog, and fractured hearts, nobody ever got it so right as the Tijuana Brass. I hope like hell the boys in Calexico get down on their hands and knees every night and thank their version of God for Herb Albert.

14) Dean Martin, Houston

There are scads of great versions of this song, but Martin’s is the only one you need to own –unless, of course, you need confirmation of how great it really is.

15) Gilbert O’Sullivan, Alone Again (Naturally)

Sadder than a sack full of nothin’, and if you’ve been drinking I’d strongly recommend you lock the gun cabinet before you drop the needle on the turntable.

16) Eric Carmen, All By Myself

Ibid.

17) Gary Wright, Dream Weaver

Just how completely fucking great is ‘Dream Weaver’? You know the answer to that question as well as I do, so let’s just move right along.

18) Randy Vanwarmer, Just When I Needed You Most

I’ll admit this one has a bit of personal history behind it, but it still has the power to tear out my spleen and tattoo ‘Oh, Fuck’ on my buttocks every time I listen to it.

19) Victor Lundberg, An Open Letter To My Teenage Son

Raw, honest, unflinching, and powerful as a shot of monkey serum. If you’re a parent –and I’m not– I suspect it’ll make a mess of you in a hurry and then make you a better man (or woman). Sort of like ‘Blind Man in the Bleachers,’ only different. No blind man, no bleachers, but the same desperate attempt to communicate something vaguely important.

20) Blues Image, Ride Captain Ride

This one might have ranked higher if the pale Marty McGraw cover version hadn’t poisoned my memories of the original just a bit. Still, no road trip would be complete without it.

21) Ray Stevens, The Streak

Ok, so maybe this one falls under the ‘Guilty Pleasure’ category, but sometimes when I’m listening to music I just want to laugh, clap my hands, and sing along.

22) ZZ Top, Tush

An elegy, a prayer, a shout of praise, a cry in the darkness, a yelp of unabashed lust –how can one song be so many things? I don’t know, but ‘Tush’ proves it can.

23) Sammy Hagar, Winner Takes All

Obscure gem from the soundtrack to an equally obscure Canadian Western starring Merlin Olsen, Susan Dey, and Herve Villechaize. Hagar takes an old chestnut and makes it all his own (with help from Mark Knopfler).

24) Will to Power, Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird medley

It’s the craziest idea in the world, and it shouldn’t work, and it shouldn’t be country, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t and it isn’t.

25) The Sweet, Fox On The Run

Timeless song of a Nashville dream gone bust, complete with some of the most vivid bus station imagery in all of country music. You feel for this young girl as she falls into the clutches of a ‘talent scout’ and ends up snorting coke and starring in $500 porn movies. And you cheer for her (sort of) as she finds God.

26) Billy Idol, Hot In The City

The song that launched a million line dances still holds up pretty damn well, all things considered. All I know is that when I tossed it on the stereo at a party recently my guests erupted in a boot-scooting frenzy right there in my living room.

27) The Nashville Teens, Tobacco Road

Who says there’s not a place for doo-wop in country music? Not me, not when it’s steeped in the dust of gravel roads that go nowhere and the longing of small town teenagers everywhere. This one might be hard to find, but it’s worth the journey.

28) Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I’m Falling

Sex addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, and codependency –it’s all right here, years before Betty Ford ever crash landed at Hazelden. It’s all right here, and it’s all good in the way that only country music can make bad things good.

29) Styx, Miss America

There’s so much going on in this song that I don’t know where to begin. Taken on its own –and with the unstated ‘I’ tacked onto the beginning– it could be a lazy declaration of disillusionment. Add a question mark and you have a political statement lurking in a tossed-off query. But however you care to interpret Styx’s dense, metaphorical rip through the American Dream, it all adds up to a pure, timeless classic of country music –and for once that’s country in the broadest sense. Meaning: the place where all of us live.

30) Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

An epic of American heroism, and the sort of song that gets stuck in your head and drives you absolutely batshit fucking crazy. What ‘Battle of New Orleans’ demonstrates is that some things are worth fighting for, and some things that are worth fighting for are worth singing about. Also, implicit in this song, as in so much of the great country music I love: Don’t fuck with America. Bonus points for rhyming ‘beans’ with ‘New Orleans.’

31) Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home

No list of the greatest country songs of all time would be complete without a contribution from the randy Welshman, who proved that a hirsute wanker could belt out an American classic with all the style and emotional nuance of a Nashville pro.

32) Pat Benatar, Hell is for Children

In one of country music’s finest examples of method acting –or maybe, God help her, she wasn’t acting– Benatar wrings every ounce of pain out of this succinct and wrenching portrait of rural poverty and child abuse. ‘Hell is for Children’ is a rare example of a country song that dares to tackle social issues without resorting to trailer trash cliches and self pity.

33) Spandau Ballet, True

Tremendous song that touches on country’s timeless themes of fidelity, infidelity, and the broken hearts that result when tortured souls venture down to the dark end of the street.

34) Curtis Mayfield, If There’s A Hell Below We’re All Going To Go

Mayfield’s forays into country deserve to be placed next to Ray Charles’s ‘Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music’ on your shelf, but chances are you –and millions of other people– never even heard them. Here he tosses salvation out the window and wages a wrestling match with sin in which we’re all losers. This is a record the Louvin Brothers might have recorded, and if they ever update the splendid ‘Goodbye Babylon’ set Mayfield deserves a place on the roster.

35) Tommy James and the Shondells, I Think We’re Alone Now

One man, one woman, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a long night of lovin’, Tommy James style. Dim the lights, and cue up a little Ed Ames or Ray Price.

36) Neil Sedaka, The Diary

This one seems so obvious at first listen, but listen again: Sedaka’s predicament (he finds his faithless lover’s diary) is a familiar one, but what he does with this discovery is satisfying and surprising beyond belief. You’ll find yourself thinking: I wish I’d thought of that.

37) Jay Ferguson, Thunder Island

What a wonderful metaphor. I think it was John Donne who said ‘No man is an island,’ and Jay Ferguson might be inclined to agree. A man and a woman, however, now that’s a different story, and Ferguson’s artful exploration of the pure, tempestuous oblivion of sex is country music’s Song of Solomon.

38) REO Speedwagon, Keep the Fire Burning

When it feels like love is slipping away, Speedwagon’s ‘Keep the Fire Burning’ is the perfect lover’s plea that’ll remind you both of what’s at stake and why it’s worth fighting for. A nice antidote to D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and one of Owen Bradley’s most sumptuous productions.

39) Fats Domino, Jambalaya

It should be apparent by now that I’m bending over backwards here to avoid the obvious choices, but I’d emphasize that this isn’t purely a perverse attempt to be contrary. I love Hank Williams as much as the next guy, but his music is now so familiar that it’s become like the wallpaper in this room, and more often than not when I get a hankering for Hank I turn to one of his countless interpreters for a fresh spin on the master’s music. Domino’s take on ‘Jambalaya’ is about as fresh as it gets.

40) Carol Douglas, Doctor’s Orders

It’s not often a doctor dispenses practical advice of the sort Ann Landers routinely dishes out, but Carol Douglas had a damn good doctor, and the advice he gave her would have proved useful (and would still prove useful) to country’s legion of unhappy women: get rid of that man. Of course such advice sounds a bit like common sense when the man in question has infected you with syphilis.

41) Terry Jacks, Put the Bone In.

The flipside to the smash ‘Seasons in the Sun’ is a classic of country cooking (Jacks is ostensibly talking about a pork and beans recipe), with a filthy insinuation that takes it over the top.

42) The Alan Parson Project, Eye in the Sky

The anthem for all those paranoid peckerwoods holed up in the mountains out west, as well as the anti-government tax-dodging zealots all over the midwest. Despite the fact that ‘Eye in the Sky’ was allegedly found in the car that Timothy McVeigh was driving when he was arrested, it’s still a powerful song that taps into some of the anger and distrust that is lurking out there in country’s heartland, and as such is a nice counterpoint to the jingoism of Lee Greenwood et al.

43) Cream, White Room

A clear-eyed account of the aftermath of a debauched night on the town that ends in a detox cell. In the sorrow of the hungover protagonist, a man who has let everything slip away, you can hear the echoes of everyone from Hank Williams to George Jones.

44) Foreigner, Dirty White Boy

White trash exploitation songs don’t come any more unsavory than this one, the sad tale of a backwoods Don Juan who makes his reputation deflowering virgins and cuckolding husbands. Despite the obvious relish with which Foreigner serves up the nasty details, there’s a morality play at work here, and justice is ultimately served. Marty Robbins for people who don’t know who the hell Marty Robbins is.

45) Thompson Twins, King For A Day

Another tale of a roadhouse Lothario who comes into a boodle of cash (an inheritance of some sort, I think, although the song is vague on this point) and lives high on the hog for a day. This is essentially the old story of money burning a hole in a man’s pocket, and though you know exactly what’s coming –the guy squanders every last dime on liquor, women, and riverboat casino slots– it’s a hugely entertaining yarn all the same. Almost sounds like something Hank Jr. might have coughed up in his prime.

46) Jody Reynolds, Endless Sleep

Easily the best of the tributes to Hank Williams that flooded the country market after his death. Its timelessness is a product of its ability to tap into the anguished fuck-up’s ancient longing for peace and serenity. It almost makes you wish you were dead, and that’s as high a tribute to a great country song as anything I can think of.

47) Rick Astley, Cry For Help

Astley’s one great, defining song, and one of the finest things to come out of Nashville in the last 20 years. It’s exactly what it says, and more. As pitiless and pitiful a performance as anything in the dense catalog of blues, soul, and country. Unfortunately no one heard Astley’s cry, or realized how raw and real it really was, and he’ll be remembered –if he’s remembered at all– as one more great talent who died too young.

48) Melanie, Brand New Key

Great off-kilter take on the theme of a woman who’s had enough of a philandering lover. Beyond the central metaphor (a revelation that will open up a whole new world for the protagonist), there’s an entertaining tale in which the woman changes the locks on the house while her soon-to-be ex is out drinking and carousing with his pals. The locksmith, of course, is more than willing to participate in the woman’s liberation, and what ensues –Melanie is clever enough to make you use your imagination a bit– is straight out of Penthouse Forum.

49) Foghat, Stone Blue

A fat slab of the bluest country you’ll ever hear, delivered with typical butt-kicking whump by the titans from Fenniman, Mississippi. The record industry, and its attempts to remake them in the mold of Alabama, ultimately wrecked Foghat, but before the weasels got their hands on them they were one of the most volatile live acts in all of country.

50) Consumer Rapport, Ease On Down The Road

Country music has always been full of songs about people leaving things behind–lovers, families, dead-end jobs, jerkwater towns. Sometimes these characters are leaving to pursue a dream elsewhere; often they’re just getting the hell out of town. It’s a liberation theme that has resonated with countless people trapped in lives of quiet desperation, and it’s certainly not unique to country. It’s interesting to note, however, that ‘Ease On Down The Road’ beat ‘Born to Run’ to the charts by five months, and it’s a more stoic, laidback version of Springsteen’s anxious, revved-up classic. The guys in Consumer Rapport don’t know where they’re going, and they don’t much care, just as long as it’s somewhere else.

I’m not going to lie to you: I lie to you all the time. Seriously, all the time. There’s absolutely no me here. Whoever or whatever Brad Zellar is, it isn’t this.

I have never, for instance, owned either a Plymouth Duster or a Scamp, let alone done any of the things I might have claimed to have done in the backseat of such a vehicle. I never attempted to roller-skate to Duluth with a giant cross strapped to my back. The things I claimed to have done with Boxcar Willie would almost certainly qualify as libel (not to mention obscenity) under virtually any strict interpretation of the law.

This is not my life. Honest to God, you can’t even begin to imagine, and neither can I.

You know how really lonely people will buy those shrink-wrapped picture frames that have the idyllic demonstration photos of beautiful men, women, and children already in them and then they’ll just hang those complete strangers up on their walls because they don’t have anybody in their own life who’s nearly as happy or beautiful as these pretend family members and friends?

I don’t know; maybe it’s just me, but I have these photos all over my house, and it’s somehow comforting to me. I’ve given the smiling people in these pictures names and histories, of course, and it’s gotten to the point where I can sometimes actually convince myself of their reality. This is my family, I’ll think to myself. This is my life. I’ve done pretty damn well for myself.

Seriously: I don’t think there’s a phrase in the world I love more than make believe.

That said, I’d like to be honest with you for a moment. I want to be clear on this: I prefer a lot of things to a lot of other things; a lot of things that are not right here and right now to a lot of other things that are, unfortunately, right here and right now. Just so you know.

I suppose this is just a phase, or maybe it’s the time of year, but I spent the last several days trapped in ice, flat on my back and bloated, staring up through the gray crust at the bright and blurry world above, where I saw greasy splashes of color that I supposed might have been balloons. Volkswagens seemed less probable, as I had no idea how they would have gotten into the sky above the river. The muffled and badly fractured sound I heard could have been the plaints of lonesome dogs, church bells, cries for help, or something else altogether. I didn’t know and frankly didn’t much care.

Somewhere close by, I knew, my old heart was lying in a dark field in a patch of purple velvet, listening with longing to the sound of geese winging their way free of here.