A few years back, legend has it, a young punk rocker followed Jason Ringenberg’s trail out of Illinois and sojourned to Nashville with guitar in hand. This young man, like so many before him, was looking for fame and fortune in the Music City. He wrote the right songs, worked the right clubs and played the game like everyone told him he should but, tho’ not for lack of talent or ambition, he found naught but heartache in the hallowed home of country music.
This young man found a manager, a silver-tongued fool who talked a good game but did little to advance his career. The young man recorded an album full of fine songs that nobody got to hear. After years of trying, he found himself beaten, bruised and battered, chewed up in the gears of a star-making machine that has little regard for talent, heart and soul; pissed off and pissed on, this young man left town and went back home, leaving Nashville that much darker and less interesting a place…
Like too many faithful,
Pete Berwick found that there ain’t no train outta Nashville. Hundreds of hopefuls flock to the Music City each year, and for every Tim McGraw or Faith Hill that finds fame, there are dozens that return home to Illinois, Oklahoma and points beyond, leaving behind their dreams and a piece of their soul. How many future Hank Williams or Patsy Clines have been denied the city’s embrace after spending years traipsing up and down Music Row, how many have given up their musical ambitions in the face of indifference and corporate ignorance?
In Pete Berwick’s case, there’s a happy ending to the story. Unlike many who give up music altogether after suffering through the traumatic experience of trying to make it…whether in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles or wherever…Berwick refuses to go quietly into that good night. Five years ago, when the urge to create new music became stronger than the beatdown he took in the Music City, Berwick wrote the songs that became
Only Bleeding. A powerful album that seamlessly mixed rock and country with punk attitude unlike anybody since early Steve Earle or Jason & the Nashville Scorchers,
Only Bleeding was a defiant message that Berwick’s Nashville experience may have left him bloodied, but definitely unbowed.
After the release of
Only Bleeding, Berwick spent a year or so banging it out on the Midwestern circuit, playing smoky clubs and funky honky-tonks before once again retreating from music. However, the muse is hard to deny, and Pete starting thinking about the “lost” album that he had recorded back in Nashville in ’93, the one that nobody got to hear. Taking it down from the shelf and listening to it with fresh ears and the benefits of hindsight, Berwick decided that it was too good a bunch of songs to let go to waste, and I agree with him.
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville is a brilliant collection of hard-knock tales that reveal the Music City for the provincial small town that it remains in spite of its big city ambitions. These songs are about the lovable losers and hopeless dreamers that flee their one-horse towns every year to go somewhere, anywhere else in search of something that will break them free of their lives of quiet desperation. Although written a decade-and-a-half ago, these songs still resonate with truth and beauty and are just as true today, in the face of corporate homogenization and the “American Idolization” of music as they were when Pete wrote them between his shift at the car wash and “writer’s night” at some Nashville club. Although the words here apply to many nameless travelers going down that same road, I suspect that they are also more than a little autobiographical.
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville kicks off with “Rebels and Cadillacs,” a rowdy rave-up with scorching guitar and honky-tonk piano that brings a traditional edge to this blistering portrayal of musical hypocrisy (perhaps more so than when Pete first sang these words). He decries the MTV star “with a diamond ring and a pure silk scarf, singing his concern about the homeless man,” adding “I couldn’t help but notice his Acapulco tan.” Over at CMT you’ll find “more of the same, some talking hat with a common name, singing a song about the poor man’s blues, while turning on the heel of his snakeskin boots,” the singer boldly declaring that “I don’t want to be no rebel in a Cadillac.” With this opening song, Berwick has staked his turf, drawn a line in the sand that is pure punk attitude with Hank Williams’ twang.
“Six Pack Town” is more than a place, it’s a state of mind as well, the sort of place that people try to escape from to “find” themselves. Berwick’s description of the town as a “stop and half on the road from nowhere” is deceptive because although “there ain’t nothing going down,” it’s still home, a place where people know their neighbors and care about their neighborhood. “Six Pack Town” is working class, small-town America, the kind of place that produces soldiers and singers, dreamers and madmen…the kind of place that people have a love/hate relationship with, the kind of place that never leaves you, even when you’ve left it behind...
“The Years We Left Behind” is one of the most brilliant and moving songs that these ears have heard in nearly 50 years of listening to, and loving music. We’re every one of us getting older, and facing down a half-century of frustration, unfulfilled promise and lost opportunity brings with it the tendency to reminisce about “the good old days” that, to be honest, were mostly anything but good. Wise beyond his years, Berwick sings:
“Everywhere I go these days, it seems I always hear;
People talk about desperation, heartache and despair.
The broken-hearted dream that died, the memory from the past;
The good old days, the glory days, the love that didn’t last,
And the childhood that disappeared too fast.
Sometimes at night when all is quiet, and I am all alone;
I hear the voice of yesterday through people I have known.
Some are laughing, some are crying, some of them have died.
I always thought the grass was greener on the other side,
I guess that’s why I can’t kiss the past goodbye…”
“Time doesn’t wait for no one,” sings Berwick on the chorus, declaring that “it’s not patient, it’s not kind; it seems to me we see the future only through our eyes so blind,” concluding that “we’re living in the years we left behind.” Pete’s insight is both poetic and bleakly realistic – we can’t escape our past, no matter how hard we try, and our future is just the sum of the experience and heartache that we’ve lived through. None of us is unblemished by the past yet, when facing our inevitable mortality, we hang on to those memories like a life raft as the minutes tick by ever more loudly. Berwick addresses these concerns with dazzling beauty:
“When nighttime turns to morning, still I’m clinging to the past.
I want to stop the clock some times, those hands just turn too fast.
I don’t want to get old; it’s a shame how fast time flies.
If heaven’s what we’re living for, then someone tell me why,
Why no one, why nobody, wants to die?”
You’d think that after a stroke of musical genius like “The Years We Left Behind,” that
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville would flicker and burn out from lack of energy. No, Berwick has lulled us into a warm, quiet remembrance only to kick us back awake with the jolting “Devil Knows His Name,” an eerie, Western-tinged tale of betrayal and escape. If the protagonist of the earlier song finds comfort and solace in his memories, the figure at the heart of “Devil Knows His Name” is trying to outrun the nightmares of his past. Washes of haunted instrumentation flow through the song like a tumbleweed until the guitar explodes and the song fades into an uncertain fate…
The album’s namesake, “Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville,” tells the story of every hopeful songwriter and singer that ever made their way to the Music City in search of something to build a life upon. With the lyrics set to a swinging rockabilly beat, the song’s truth lies beneath Berwick’s tongue-in-cheek delivery, the words summing up the songwriter’s experience. Describing a staggering blur of beer, cheap motels, bad jobs and dashed hopes, he sings, “I play most times for free, and sometimes I just play to eat.” There’s no way to escape intact, “once you’re here, you’re here to stay, if you’re a songwriter, they just throw the key away.”
The hauntingly beautiful “Only Bleeding” ties
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville with its predecessor and it fits perfectly well on either album as both recordings, in their own individual way, are primarily about the continued chase of fame in the face of constant rejection or, worse yet, lack of recognition. Displaying the same sort of defiance as Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” Berwick’s Midwestern drawl sums up the intense loneliness and the darkness felt by every songwriter and poet in the face of indifference. The song’s protagonist is an almost divine figure, shouldering the sins of everyman and offering salvation through his own pain, as expressed by this, and every other song that touches upon the bleak fate that befalls us all, from Springsteen’s “Darkness On the Edge of Town” to Joe Grushecky’s “Blood On the Bricks.” In the end, however, by forgiving those who would sin against him, the poet triumphs against those who would try to silence his or her words.
Fittingly,
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville ends with the one-two punch of “Rusted Ball and Chain” and “This Used To Be A Town.” Berwick searches for answers on “Rusted Ball and Chain,” finding nothing but more questions. He reaffirms his commitment, however – to life, to love, to music – singing “freedom’s just another word, if you ain’t got a dream. Without a dream, your freedom, it just don’t mean anything.” And for those who doubt his efforts, he adds, “people try to put me down, and throw me off my track, but I just keep on keeping on, there ain’t no turning back.” Roaring down the lost highway in that ghostly Cadillac, Berwick is in it for the long run and won’t be dissuaded by the obstacles that are thrown in the path of every creative person. While others would give up with a whimper, this singer carries on regardless of the weight.
In the end, the singer does escape, getting out of Nashville only to go home and discover that “This Used To Be A Town.” The memories of the past have been betrayed by the unrelenting march of “progress,” the kind of small-town development that tears down the past to rebuild every town in the image of every other town. “Time bulldozed it away, built a couple of malls, and they both look the same,” he sings, “don’t they realize the childhood that died when they tore it all down?” It’s an uneasy commentary on the state of America, a sad exclamation mark on the old saying that “nothing stays the same.” It’s also a down song to end the album on, reinforcing, perhaps, the idea that you can’t escape the past, so you may as well embrace it, protect its innocence lest somebody comes to take it away.
The best album of 2007 was actually recorded in 1993 and, surprisingly, it was so damn far ahead of its time that it sounds as fresh, dynamic and topical today as it would have fourteen years ago; maybe more so. Too rock & roll for Nashville’s taste, too country for the coasts, Pete Berwick has nevertheless been on the verge of his “big break” for almost two decades now. Luckily, it hasn’t kept him from making great music.
Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville is proof that you can’t keep a good man down, and if you ain’t listening to Pete Berwick, then you ain’t listening to shit… (Shotgun Records, released 2007)
Review originally published by Trademark of Quality (TMQ) blog, 2007
