MICHAEL ATCHISON

Year-End Musings and the Year in Music

Michael Atchison

My friend T.J. Quinn, who writes (gorgeously) about sports for the New York Daily News, says that the best writing comes when a scribe has enthusiasm for his subject. If that’s true, and I know that it is, the Missouri Tigers seem dead-set on making this a challenge for me, as they drop obstacle after obstacle into the stream of enthusiasm that runs between my brain and my fingers. Luckily, I subscribe to the “out-of-synch, out-of-sorts, but not out-of-time” school of thought when it comes to basketball before the New Year.

Not to hit you over the head with the big rubber mallet of obviousness or anything, but losing stinks. Even worse is losing when you should win. It’s one thing to line up against Oklahoma and to get blown off the ball by a bunch of clearly superior football players; it’s quite another to lapse into a 15-point or 21-point deficit against a less-talented basketball team before unleashing Mr. Hyde, only to fall short at the buzzer. In the Tigers’ last two games, they’ve gone on the road against good teams, and have spent the last 20 minutes trying to prove that the guys who played in the first half were imposters. Unfortunately, the imposters have been just a bit too good (or bad), and they’ve cackled as victory has come into view, only to slip into darkness in the closing seconds.

Everyone seems to have a theory about the Tigers’ troubles (which reminds me of a vulgar saying about something else that everyone has), but there are no easy answers. If there were, Quin Snyder and his staff (who know infinitely more about coaching than I do, and probably more than you, too) would implement them, and this team would go 32-4 with banners galore to hang in the new arena. Unfortunately, you can’t just turn it around by shouting “hustle!” or “hold on to the ball!” or “get a steal!” Those admonitions have been drilled into the Tigers’ heads time and time again, but to little avail in the early going. Clearly, guard play on both ends of the floor has stung this team. My earlier column predicting the emergence of Jimmy McKinney hardly looks like genius-level analysis at this point, but I still think McKinney can be a huge part of the solution, along with newcomers Randy Pulley and Jason Conley, neither of whom yet appears to be fully integrated into the offense.

As much as anything, people have complained about a lack of intensity. But this team doesn’t lack intensity so much as it lacks ferocity, a player or two who will go into a cage with a mountain lion and come out with some scratches and a pelt, someone who will impose his will on a game. Everyone, in your best Edith Bunker voice, sing, Mister, we could use a man like Clarence Gilbert again. Not the I-just-might-shoot-from-thirty-feet Gilbert, but the Gilbert who would fight you to the death for a rebound or a loose ball or the last pork chop. Right now, this team lacks a fiery presence on the court. More than anyone – and to the surprise of everyone – power forward Travon Bryant has displayed that kind of fire, but Mizzou needs a perimeter player to burst into flames, too. Travon can burn bright as the sun, but it won’t matter if the ball doesn’t get into the post. The Tigers need their guards to make the right decisions, to make the extra pass and to make opponents burn up their own energy for 30 seconds or more on each possession just looking for a decent shot. Maybe I’m too much of an unbridled optimist (I can look at an empty glass and see it as half-full), but I still think there’s fire just over the horizon.

Still, when I watch this team, I can’t help but think of the 1987-88 Tigers, which bore some striking similarities to the current group. After winning the 1987 Big Eight championship with nary a senior on the squad, every significant contributor returned for Missouri, and the team added a precocious freshman big man (Doug Smith) and a talented transfer swingman (Byron Irvin), completing one of the deepest and most talented rosters in Tiger history. Senior forward Derrick Chievous – who owned Mizzou’s career scoring mark before the season even started – led the team, which stood eighth in the Associated Press preseason poll. Those Tigers should have been titans, but they just never clicked. Early in the year, they narrowly defeated Eastern Michigan and Drake, and they lost at Memphis (then Memphis State) and to Illinois in St. Louis. After the shaky start, they rolled over some lesser-weights and even scored an upset of seventh-ranked UNLV in Las Vegas. But they rarely played well away from home. They lost just once in the Hearnes Center, but they won only one road game during conference play. The problem wasn’t that Norm Stewart couldn’t coach. It was that he wasn’t a quality chemist, at least not during those four months. Ten different Tigers found themselves in the starting lineup at least once, and all of them found themselves on the bench for at least five tip-offs. But no mix could replicate the previous season’s magic. The problems were exacerbated by injuries that cost point guard Lynn Hardy half of his senior season, putting most of the ball-handling burden on sophomore point Lee Coward and an array of wing players. The end result of a season’s worth of scuffling was a 7-7 record in the Big Eight and a first-round exit in the NCAA Tournament. A wealth of talent could not overcome an absence of chemistry.

As depressing as that comparison sounds, remembering that time actually offers some solace because of what happened the year before, when the Tigers achieved different results with most of the same parts. Mizzou entered the 1986-87 season unranked and with few expectations. They did nothing to raise those expectations in November and December. The Tigers lost six times before conference play even started (again, they fell to Memphis State and Illinois), and they recorded unimpressive wins over Southwest Missouri State, Drake and Austin Peay. After eight conference games, they stood at just 5-3, and seemed to pose no great threat to Kansas and Oklahoma in the Big Eight race. But then they simply came to life, boosted by contributions from a pair of newcomers, freshmen Lee Coward and Nathan Buntin. When Coward drilled a three-pointer at the buzzer to beat Kansas, 63-60, the Tigers went on a tear. They won their last six conference contests and captured the Big Eight championship. In March’s first week, the Tigers made their first appearance in the national polls and then punctuated their mastery over the league by winning the Big Eight Tournament, as Coward again sank Kansas (this time in the title game) with a cold-blooded three-pointer. Though they stumbled in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, the Tigers made something special of their season after a shaky start.

The moral of these stories, if there is one, is that December can tell you precious little about a basketball team, especially when that team is working through the additions of new personnel like this one is. At this time last year, Kansas already had accumulated three losses, including a pair of fairly thorough undressings by North Carolina and Florida, and Jayhawk fans suffered conniptions left and right. The Hawks then steadied the ship and marched to a Big 12 title and the finals of the NCAA Tournament. So far this season, Kansas and Texas – along with Mizzou, the preseason conference favorites – have lost twice each, and both have been beaten soundly on the road in games in which they mounted no serious comebacks. Despite their struggles, those teams will be in the Big 12 hunt until the bitter end, and I suspect that the Tigers will, too. Missouri, at 4-3, is six points away from being 7-0, and the Tigers haven’t come close to playing their best ball. That’s not an excuse or a rationalization, it’s just fact, one that can be either heartening or demoralizing, depending on your point of view. I choose to be heartened, mostly because it beats the heck out of the alternative.

Odds are good that, soon, this column will appear with less frequency. Come early January, in the words the immortal Willie Dixon, I got a boy-child comin’, gonna be a son of a gun. The insomnia that has been feeding this corner of the Web will be spent feeding something a tad more precious. If these Tigers follow the path of the 1987-88 club, I’ll still love them and live and die with them, but it will be hard to find the will to sit down regularly and chronicle my disappointment. But if they follow the course of the 1986-87 Tigers, I’m much more likely to sneak down to the computer after the 4:00 a.m. feeding to wallow in a little triumph. Here’s hoping for an enthusiastic winter of writing.

Musings from The Shack: The Year in Music

To date, this space has been devoted almost entirely to basketball, but, hey, I’m a multi-dimensional sort of guy. I dip into the all-purpose world of The Shack from time to time. I’ve learned to embrace my metrosexuality, to ponder the relative virtues and/or suckiness of St. Louis and Kansas City, and to wonder where all of those pictures of kissing girls come from. And I’ve learned that nothing stirs up a big, dumb debate like a list about music. So here, friends, are random thoughts on music and musicians that caught my attention in 2003.

The White Stripes, Elephant and live at Memorial Hall, Kansas City, Kansas, June 28, 2003: On Elephant, this year’s entry into the pantheon of classic rock and roll albums, the Stripes proved that a boy, his guitar, his ex-wife (or sister or whatever) and her drums can explode through their limitations and create a sound as mammoth as the disc’s titular beast. On stage, they proved that the blues is a living thing, evidenced most clearly by their 50,000-watt defibrillation of Son House’s timeless “Death Letter.”

Outkast, “Hey Ya!”: I’m still shakin’ like a Polaroid picture from the first time I heard this irrepressibly catchy slice of James Brown-in-Wonderland dance floor mayhem, and I’ve heard it a hundred times since, each spin adding to the tremors and rendering me a twitching heap of funkified apoplexy.

Justin Timberlake, “Rock Your Body” and 50 Cent, “In da Club”: From opposite ends of the spectrum come two men who have been shot a combined nine times, both determined to use their charm (be it impish or rogue-ish) to talk the ladies on to the dance floor and out of their pants. I’m no teen-pop aficionado but I know a massive rhythmic hook when I hear one, and “Rock Your Body” sounds less like an *NSync remnant and more like the great lost outtake from Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, making it one of the year’s great guilty pleasures. Fitty’s breakthrough, on the other hand, is all raw-boned manhood, with a bouncy fat-bottom throb that will put hair on your chest and a woof in your subwoofer.

Rodney Crowell, Fate’s Right Hand; Emmylou Harris, Stumble into Grace; Lucinda Williams, World Without Tears: These three artists have spent lengthy careers making country music or something very much like it, variously working inside and outside the Nashville establishment. Lucinda Williams, the least traditional of the three, has worked entirely outside the hit-making machine and has cultivated a singular personality. A child of the South, Williams has spent a lifetime absorbing rock and roll, blues and country, music that comes back out as naturally as her breath and sweat in a mélange evoking nothing more or less than real, truthful humanity and an honest sexuality that has nil to do with collagen and silicone, and everything to do with the kinds of insecurities, heartbreaks and lasting fulfillments felt by real women. Lucinda has made better albums, 1998’s classic Car Wheels On a Gravel Road tops among them. But when her drawl, which yearns like a distant love and creaks like a favored floorboard, argues in favor of the pain that gives context to our lives, she makes this as essential as any of them.

Emmylou’s Stumble Into Grace is worth buying for the cover photo, which captures a 56-year-old who is as stunning and graceful as any woman of any age and who is completely without artifice. The music inside sounds just like the picture looks. The favored harmony singer of two generations of country artists, Harris has turned her celestial voice to a set of mostly atmospheric adult pop music that retains the earthy charm of her more traditional recordings while plowing through country music’s boundaries. From the gentle kick of “Jupiter Rising” to the honeyed warmth of “I Will Dream,” Stumble Into Grace is a subtle and engaging collection with an appeal that expands with each successive listen.

For a moment in the late 1980’s, Rodney Crowell was the King of Nashville. His 1989 album Diamonds & Dirt spawned five number one hits, but Crowell and his restless musical spirit balked at repeating a formula for the sake of commerce, and he reverted to the cult status that he had enjoyed upon graduating from Emmylou Harris’s band in the late 1970’s. On Fate’s Right Hand, Crowell works in a mostly Nashvillian setting, but without the gigantic hat or affected drawl that seem to be prerequisites for mass appeal. His east Texas twang is genuine, and his music is flecked with the rock and roll and folk that have long colored his work. The title song, a brooding bowl of word salad in the tradition of the Beatles’ “Come Together” and Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” is the album’s least representative track. The rest of the album alternates between country shuffles and kickin’ honky tonk-style rockers, and features the kind of clever wordplay that reveals Crowell as an inheritor of the proud Nashville songwriting tradition. The subject matter, however, is not typical country fare. Crowell offers the perspective of a middle-aged man reflecting on a changing world and a changed self, and in the process, he delivers a modern country classic.

The New Pornographers, “The Laws Have Changed”: I have soft spots for power pop and pathologically polite Canadians, predilections that render the lead single from the Electric Version album irresistible. At the end of the verse, when Neko Case and her impossibly perfect voice wrestle the microphone from bandleader Carl Newman, the song explodes into a rainstorm of colors and new wave tricks, and buries its hook very deep into your brain.

Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers: These guys are good, and they know they’re good, and they know that we know that they’re good, all of which could be terribly grating if they didn’t deliver the goods like they do on this vaguely conceptual song-cycle about dead-end jobs and Quixotic characters tilting at windmills both sexual (“Stacy’s Mom”) and professional (“Bright Future in Sales”). They toss off melodies as easily as toenail clippings, switch gears from blazing guitar pop to stone country and its glib lyricisms (“Hung Up on You”), and then amuse themselves by setting traps for inattentive listeners who fail to notice anything but the huge pay-offs in the choruses. If you’re not careful, you’ll hear “Halley’s Waitress” and its gorgeous, lush refrain of “it’s been so long, so long, darling don’t you know we miss you when you’re gone” and think it’s a lament for an absent love, when it’s really just a put-down directed at an incompetent waitress. The tone isn’t all snide, however, a fact that pushes this collection past the piles of detached irony that come out of the radio at any given moment. The Fountains handle the losers that populate Managers with empathy, including the sad-sack laborer in “Hackensack” who holds on to hope that the Hollywood starlet who sat by his side in homeroom all those years ago will come to her senses and return to him.

The Life of Johnny Cash: In a world of hyperbole, there are few artists who can’t be overestimated, and Johnny Cash was one. When Cash died on September 12, he left behind a legacy befitting his epic life, one that is honored in the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, among other places. Cash lived enough life for ten men, with more joy and pain than most could bear. His was a life marked by addiction, recovery, transgression, redemption, love, betrayal, triumph, tragedy, wealth, poverty and every other contradiction you can imagine. In the process of becoming more myth than man, he helped to invent the American popular music of the Twentieth Century’s second half, in part by unleashing a clickety-clack rhythm that suggested nothing more than the railroads and their mysterious and limitless possibilities. It was the sound of freedom and exploration. Had he done no more than write “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line,” he would have guaranteed himself a certain immortality. But after he wrote those songs, Johnny Cash lived almost 50 more years, and along the way he became a model for artists and others with independent minds and pure visions. He inspired other legends, like Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard and Bruce Springsteen. He gave voice to lost souls and held close to his faith, even in times of great personal darkness. Even during periods when he fell out of popular favor, his music always rang true. He was the living antithesis of trends and fads. Johnny Cash was for all time.

In my youth, I always liked Cash more than anything else that played on my parents’ preferred country music stations, but, of course, I’d never let that on to them. Still, I didn’t understand my depth of feeling for him until I worked on the local crew for a show he played with Waylon Jennings while I was in college. I was backstage doing some menial task, when I turned a corner and there he stood. He was talking to someone else, and I didn’t try to interject myself into the conversation. I just took him in for a moment. There he was, this big and graceful man, dressed in black, with that “hello, I’m Johnny Cash” voice. I’m not much for the mystical, but he had an undeniable physical presence, if not quite a visible aura. I was in and out of the arena that night as he and his wife June played a set full of warmth and humor and bedrock-solid songs. That show reignited a dormant appreciation for the Man in Black. I didn’t become an obsessive fan, but I mined some of his back catalog (Columbia’s three-disc The Essential Johnny Cash, 1955-1983, is everything the title suggests) and dipped into the well of renaissance that he created with Rick Rubin in his later years. I spent hours debating a friend over which was the greater song, “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Ring of Fire”, not that it matters or that there’s any real answer (if there were an answer, by the way, it would be “Folsom”). I connected the dots between Cash and the punk rock heroes who demanded so much of my attention in those years.

As his days dwindled, he defied expectations again, using his version of a Nine Inch Nails song as the vehicle for a video that somehow managed to cram a spectacular lifetime into four measly minutes of film. That video captured a man and his wife, neither of whom would survive the year, very much in love after a life that could have ripped them apart, but instead made them closer, so close that they became virtually indistinguishable. One hardly seemed to exist without the other. Cash’s health had failed him in various ways for years, but when June died on May 15, you had to know that Johnny wasn’t long for this world. I remember feeling terribly sad at June’s passing, recognizing that Johnny’s would be just around the corner. When his time came four months later, the feeling was much less acute. Johnny Cash did not get cheated by this life. He squeezed every last drop of living out of it, and then went to be in the place that June had made for him. We should all have it so good.