This is all about Chris Knight and why you should listen to his new album, the one called Heart Of Stone, and why it may be the best album he’s ever made even if nobody much cares at this point. But it’s a long story, and it digresses some.
It begins here: After sixteen months in Los Angeles, I flew to Nashville blind and rented an apartment in Tusculum, at the edge of town, from an old man named Guy P. He had lost his wife to cancer, and so he looked for people to talk to, but he warned me that he heard poorly and I should take care not to creep up behind him because he’d think I was Charley, and he might kill me. He was a big man, a powerful man, even in his 70s.
I lived in one of two apartments above a three-car garage in his back yard. He’d built the garage to work on his RVs and his trucks and whatever else kept him sane, and the original apartment had been meant to house his son and his son’s new wife, only the boy had a heart attack and a stroke, and the new wife, a nurse, left.
As we got to know each other a little, I heard a few stories, mostly having to do with his capacity for rage – doors he’d splintered at the Veterans’ Administration and his attempts at suicide, which included gnawing through an IV. I never complained when he found it necessary to completely disassemble a pickup truck beneath my bedroom one night, swearing at each bolt as it added another bruise to his hands.
Does this make clear that I liked him, though I knew on a bad day he might do me harm? I did. He tried hard to be a good man, and managed best he could by his lights. Another story: He left his wallet at the bank, and a customer followed him until she got his attention and gave it back. So he bought her dinner, insisted on it, even though, as Guy P. put it, she was colored.
He is, in short, exactly the sort of fellow who dwells in Chris Knight’s songs: Angry, conflicted, self-destructive, and unexpectedly self-aware.
Guy P.’s rules for his tenants were simple: No loud parties, no wimmin stayin’ overnight. Since I knew nobody, this did not seem to be a problem. Later, when his insurance company had reason to look at the place and told him it could house only one tenant, I managed – as we sometimes tell the story, nearly ten years later – to get married ahead of the eviction notice.
A few days after Maggie was born five and a half years ago, I ran into Guy at Lowe’s, but we did not speak; rather, I walked the other way, and did not intrude. He was in a wheelchair, having finally yielded both feet to diabetes, as he had yielded his sanity to two tours in Vietnam. That first stint, he said, involved a detachment to the CIA, who employed him as the first man out of the helicopter door – he’d been a paratrooper, a farm boy from Pennsylvania – when rescuing downed pilots in Cambodia, where the U.S. officially was not dropping bombs.
The second song on Knight’s new album, “Hell Ain’t Half Full,” isn’t about that. But it could be.
When Guy P. built his son’s apartment, he had apparently forgotten to leave room to run the plumbing. Which was only a problem if one forgot that the living room was a step up so as to accommodate all those pipes. Somehow that step made that space, which was the Nashville office of No Depression for some years, not entirely stable.
And that’s how I came to hear Chris Knight, see. One of the publicists I trusted, one of the few freelancers who chose clients on merit not money, had sent me a four-song cassette tape of his demos. Part of what came to be called The Trailer Tapes , part of which finally came out, fixed up some by Ray Kennedy, in 2007.
The tape fell on the floor, or the whole stack of them did, and for whatever reason – because it had the right business card on it, I suppose – I put it in, and went back to work. And then my head spun back, for there was this song: “If I Were You”, a sharply written morality play, a short story in song form, a gut-wrenching bit of unflinching social commentary. It was and is an amazing piece of work.
