Hippies vs. Punks: Richmond Fontaine's You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing To Go Back To (2016)

Sometime last month I noticed that someone had clicked on one of the nihilism posts I had written a couple of years back. Not recalling its content, I reread it. The post is devoted to a song, "Allison Johnson," off Portland alt country band Richmond Fontaine's 2004 album, Post to Wire. If placed under erasure, "Allison Johnson" perfectly encapsulates nihilism.

Richard Fontaine's principal songwriter is Willy Vlautin, an award-winning novelist, sort of a Great Basin Bukowski minus any good cheer. Vlautin's musical specialty, an example of which is "Allison Johnson," is the ability to capture the nirvana of intimate female companionship. (Doing without this companionship is the primary burden of a bachelor.)

Struck by the power of "Allison Johnson," I checked to see what Richmond Fontaine has been up to -- it has been a while since the logging opera The High Country (2011) -- and come to find out the band has just released a new album, You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing To Go Back To. I downloaded it and have been listening to it repetitiously ever since.

I also went back and audited all of Richmond Fontaine's recordings. I have been a big fan since my friend and coworker Tony turned me on to Lost Son (1999) probably in 2001. (Lost Son I think is the finest cowpunk album of all time.) This sent me off on a reverie of my failed loves of the aughts, the soundtrack to which was provided by Richmond Fontaine.

We'll have to return to this topic another day. For now, I would like to draw your attention to the YouTube at the top of the post. "A Night in the City" is the second-to-last track on You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing To Go Back To. It is Vlautin's masterpiece statement; his answer to his own "Allison Johnson" and "Making It Back."

A middle-aged guy goes to a strip club with a coworker, ends up leaving but decides to stay out all night drinking by himself. He ends up puking and sleeping in a bank parking lot. But he grabs breakfast in a doughnut shop and makes into work on time. Then Vlautin delivers the coup de grace:

I got sick behind a car, slept against a bank wall 

Ate at Annie’s Donuts and made it to work on time 

Is this all there is? Is this what life is? 

A job that means nothing 

A woman who sleeps right next you but she ain’t yours at all 

A one night rebellion that ends up just being a drag 

Like a weight around your feet that ain’t heavy enough to     send you down 

I remember in the back of a bar called the Blue Sea 

My wife sitting on my lap whispering, “You and me, only you and me”

A night in the city 

The city at night

What makes "A Night in the City" amazing is the combination of those last two lines before the refrain with the bleak narrative of a middle-aged man trying to break free of his cage -- "Is this all there is? Is this what life is?/A job that means nothing/A woman who sleeps right next you but she ain’t yours at all." But he can't do it. The "Allison Johnson" memory of intimacy, when his wife whispered to him "You and me, only you and me," still haunts him.

This is our human condition: Forever trying to restore a lost intimacy that won't reboot.

Nihilism #3

Nihilism #2 was devoted to a Richmond Fontaine song, how "Allison Johnson" was a perfect projection of the nihilist mind -- a mind unconscious of its own nihilism, yes; but nonetheless a beautiful expression of the essential nothingness of being.

Tonight, it's "Making It Back," the concluding song of what might be the finest Richmond Fontaine record, The Fitzgerald (2005):

3 AM and the bottles are lined up in rows on the floor again
'Summer in Siam' plays on repeat again we never get sick of it
Now that I'm home again
In the kitchen with you
There's no one else I can talk to
The lights are all covered and dim and there's nothing but a gentle ease here
'Summer in Siam' plays and you and me and our whole place, we're okay
Now that I'm in your arms again

This is a beautiful love song dedicated to the joys of being flat-out drunk wasted with your wife/lover/girlfriend/partner/woman listening in the secure comfort of the low-watt light of night's end to The Pogues. It is a wonderful feeling. I have experienced it. Willy Vlautin nails it. There is no doubt about it.

But once you have given up on romance and you live alone, "Making It Back" means making do with your self. This is nihilism. Strength is all there is. The strength of the self.

Or to quote from that heroic poem of the zenith of Grunge, Rollins Band's "Low Self Opinion":

The hatred you project
Does nothing to protect you
You leave yourself so exposed
You want to open up
When someone says
Lighten up
You find all your doors closed
Get yourself a break from self rejection
Try some introspection
And you just might find
It's not so bad and anyway
At the end of the day
All you have is yourself and your mind

The End of Silence (1992) was an album I listened to religiously when it was released, and I continued to listen to it throughout the 1990s. I don't know how much of its material was written prior to the murder of Rollins' buddy Joe Cole, but I always interpreted the record as a deconstruction of the tough guy "Search & Destroy" persona Rollins had assiduously developed and marketed.

I was wedded to the tough-guy myth throughout the 1990s. Street fighter, construction worker, independent scholar -- all the paperback fictions -- Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac. But the toughest tough guy is the one who takes apart the sacred idea of toughness.

Remember, it is Jacobi who coins the term "nihilism" in order to characterize Kant's critical philosophy, a system perpetually open, never able to be shut, forever overflowing with meaning produced by a striving, self-reflecting consciousness.

Nihilism #2

Listen to this song, "Allison Johnson," one of my favorites from Portland band Richmond Fontaine's Post to Wire (2004) album, and its elegiac, boyish faith in an ultimate feminine companionship. This song, I think, is a perfect succinct statement of the romantic worldview:

Allison Johnson Allison Johnson

I won't let you down 

I'll find us a house on Wilson Street and
Our kids will play in the yard and at
Night the cottonwood trees they will
Sway to the music that we play 

Allison Johnson don't fade on me 

Our clothes lay intertwined
On the floor together and we could sleep all day
Stay in bed all day

This song shuffled on this morning as I sat at my PC preparing a post on Ukraine. And I was struck by the extent to which this romantic worldview governed my actions throughout my adult life -- this fiction of a final resting place of peace and bliss and contentment and repose that was not death but rather bedding down with a beloved female partner.

See, that is not going to happen. Nihilism is the acceptance that you can't sleep in bed all day, stay in bed all day with your lady, with your god, with your mommy, with whomever, with your clothes on the floor intertwined. Allison Johnson is a fiction, a projection of the boy's mind looking for nothingness but not knowing it. Realizing this, this is nihilism.