Deciding what's cool since, like, five minutes ago...

The Man With Curious Hair

by Wayne Wise

It was a long, cold Saturday night during the winter of 1988-89. I was trapped at my parents' rural home, forced to endure yet another episode of Hee Haw. The musical guest was some guy called Lyle Lovett. When he came on — all skinny black tie and hair with a mind of its own — and opened his mouth, he was the coolest thing by far I'd ever seen seen on that country music show. Dad hated him.

Lovett sang two songs, "M-O-N-E-Y" and "She's No Lady," a Texas twang evident in his smooth, low-pitched voice. He was country, but he was also blues and gospel, tied together in a way that no one else in the country music world was doing. It made him hard to categorize, and as a result, no one was playing his albums. When he started to add big-band sounds to his already diverse repertoire, it only made things worse.

His big break came a few years later in an unexpected way when he briefly became Mr. Julia Roberts; suddenly his face was on every tabloid and magazine cover. The marriage is long over, as is Hee Haw, but Lovett's success has continued to grow. 1996's The Road to Ensenada was a return to his country roots, and brought back a lot of his original fans. It's been two years since his last album, Live In Texas, was released, but Lovett continues to write and perform. He doesn't seem to worry much about what labels are affixed to his brand of song; he creates the music he loves, and manages to make others love it as well.

Even Dad has grown to like him.

(Reprinted from In Pittsburgh Weekly, 08/08/01, by permission of the author.)

Who's Cool?

Iggy Pop. Okay, you can argue that he hasn't been musically relevant for decades. His last couple of albums pretty much blew. And he (or somebody) keeps pimping "Lust For Life" to TV commercials and bad TV shows, completely out of context. But Iggy the man, the stooge, the legend, will probably always be very, very cool.

Iggy was in an Apple Computer commercial that ran last spring. I don't know if his speaking part ever made it to TV; he was always cut from the version I saw. But it was included in the longer internet version that you could download.

The ad is a metaphor for burning your own compact discs on Apple's iMacs. We follow this college-age kid as he goes into a theater, empty except for an eclectic group of music artists standing around on the stage: Iggy, George Clinton, Dwight Yoakum, Aimee Mann, Barry White, and others. The kid requests a song from each to put his compilation disc together. Presumably, he has obtained all of these artist's CDs legally and has not downloaded the tracks from Napster; otherwise the artists would likely pull him out of his seat and kick his ass. Or "drop the funk bomb" on him, as George Clinton says.

In the 'net version, the kid asks Iggy for The Stooges' "Search and Destroy" (which he probably heard in a Nike TV spot).  Iggy replies, "With or without jumper cables?" and makes like he's getting shocked in the temples. Maybe Iggy was thinking of Lou Reed's backstory instead of his own; I thought Lou was the one who went through electroshock therapy?

As far as I'm concerned, Iggy escapes this shillfest and all of his other "sellouts" with his integrity intact. It's got something to do with his sense of humor about himself, his lack of pretension... you can always tell that he's grateful for his career and that even he marvels at his good fortune. That enables him to get away with artistic crimes I might find inexcusable in others (David Bowie, please pick up the white courtesy phone).

Shortly after the commercial with Iggy started running, I bought an iMac with a CD-RW drive.  I swear I had planned to buy one anyway.