The Evolution of Dead Boyfriend/Cowboy

When I first listened to “Dead Cowboy Song” [DCS] on Chris’s 2004 album War Crime Blues, I assumed that he had written it in response to the Al Qaeda  attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The lyric about “the towers lick the wrecking ball” surely suggested that.  But, in an interview, Chris explained the genesis of the WCB album and highlighted my erroneous assumption:

One track, “Invisible Day,” was recorded under a bridge, complete with ambient park sounds. “I just wanted to do it on the Elbe River,” Whitley explained. “Purely sentimental.” The overpass over the Elbe was, according to the 43-year-old musician, the one bridge not destroyed in the Dresden bombings of the Second World War. Those bombings, a brutal Allied campaign against a city of no military importance, are the offenses of War Crime Blues. Mistakenly, the album’s title has been interpreted as a reference to much more recent misdeeds.

In another interview, Chris described how living in Dresden during the early 2000’s affected him and informed the original tracks recorded on the album:

“I actually put out War Crime Blues more than a year ago in Europe,” Whitley says. “It wasn’t written around these elections at all. Really, I didn’t even know what was inspiring it. Looking at it now, a lot of it was living in Dresden and being an American and feeling my own awareness of — or lack of — history. At the same time, the World Trade Center came down, and I guess I started to ask questions. I woke up one morning in Dresden — which we bombed the shit out of (in WWII), remember — and looked out the window on September 12th at this empty lot with an American flag at half-mast and all these candles around it. I thought it was Martin Luther King Day or something…we bombed the shit out of this city, and there’s this American flag at half-mast for the World Trade Center! It kind of shocked me — my own sort of American isolatedness, if you will. A lot of that went into the record. I can’t really write that sort of thing well, that topical shit. I mean, I can’t do it honestly. Bob Marley could do it. Sting does it and it sounds ridiculous — like rhetoric. And it’s way too important to sound like rhetoric. You can’t turn it into jive or sloganeering.” 

In yet other interviews, Chris concluded that the album was not about war at all:

Singer-songwriter Chris Whitley’s new album is called “War Crime Blues” – but he says that despite what some fans have assumed, the title isn’t a veiled allegation about the situation in Iraq. “It’s not topical. I don’t write topical songs,” he said. “It was basically questioning my own internal pain about people killing other people but, in the end, it turned into a whole existential exercise about questioning love and mortality, not some topical thing.” 

An anti-war protest album may seem like a quaint, hippie notion to some. Yet the title of guitarist Chris Whitley’s War Crime Blues now seems sadly prescient — just as its driving emotions of frustration and anger, sorrow and pity, threaten to feel like fresh wounds for the foreseeable future.  ….  The mix of apposite covers and potent originals may carry a cautionary message of “Life is short (and then you die).” But for all the raw feelings channeled into these songs, not a single verse is stridently “political” or superficially nihilistic. A sense of hope and beauty resonates in Whitley’s vital, very human musicality.  ….  Perhaps most powerful is the closing track, an a cappella version of the old pop/jazz standard “Nature Boy.” The famous closing lines have never sounded more desperately, elusively true than here, with Whitley sounding like a fallen angel offering hard-won wisdom: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.” 

So, nope, my original take on WCB and, specifically “Dead Cowboy Song,” was wrong … as I discovered when the ATCW group first discussed the album and the song.  Now that I have Metter Bozze’s tour guide and a few hundred bootlegs from Hiroshi and others, I can date the first recorded live performance of DCS to 1998-04-23 at Fletcher’s in Baltimore, MD:

The opening lyrics seem ‘lifted’ from Terra Incognita‘s “Aerial” but here ‘windowpane’ replaces ‘naked steel again’.  I’ve bold-faced the second ‘burn’ and ‘boyfriend’ as being different from later lyrics.  Regarding who is ‘kneel[ing] against the wall’, I’m very uncertain and likely influenced by teenage-me’s horror about and deep interest in the Holocaust.

Psycho-linguistics explains how certain moments/sensations in our lives are memorialized in semantic nets that link the stimulus of those sensations to deep-seated responses.  For example, seeing the reds, oranges, and browns of autumn leaves always elicits a memory of a photograph of me and my siblings (now more than a half-century ago) and our paternal grandmother with a background of those autumn leaves in the deciduous forest on our land.  Similarly, ‘kneel’ and more specifically ‘shoot’ paired with ‘against the wall’ elicits those teenaged memories of reading and watching documentaries about the Holocaust and other atrocities.  So my hearing ‘Jews’ may be tied to my semantic net, not to Chris’s actual words.  Another possible semantic net interfering with my hearing may be this Francisco Goya painting, another teenage deep-dive into the Spanish Civil War: