Old stuff on YouTube, ah, how amazing

[maeve66]

Wow. I was reading a friend's blog, which is mostly about Brit socialist politics, but sometimes about music, and he'd just trashed an idiot (no, really, an idiot -- somehow L. had gone until age 47 or so without ever hearing of Kid Rock, lucky him) and posted a video to take the taste out of his mouth, one of the Violent Femmes, which was kind of ... academically interesting to me, as I'd never seen a video of theirs. ANYWAY. That's not my point! My point was that in the comments, there was a little back and forth about iconography in videos (at least, I guess it was about that) specifically, Kid Rock uses confederate flag shit unironically (actually, I don't believe you can use that ironically) and provocatively, because he's an asshole, but someone posted a 1970s clip of a beloved lefty musician whose video had one in the background, because he was playing at a bar. So this discussion of how brilliant and lefty the musician gets started, and leads to exchanges of old clips of him. Man. I had never seen these. I am blown away. I SOOOOOOO would have had a crush on Steve Earle at that age. That was EXACTLY my taste in men. Small, skinny, wiry, long hair, and amazing musician wouldn't have hurt. I mean, I think he's fucking amazing now, and love his music, and think he's a really great actor as well. But. I could never have imagined him as a young guy. And this song is wonderful. Enjoy.

Oh, and the video is "Mercenary Song", from a 70s documentary called something like "Heartworn Highways", with a bunch of alt country singers that included tons of people I've barely heard of, like Rodney Crowell, and Townes Van Zandt. I mean, I've heard of the last guy, but I know nothing about him. I would never have identified him as a country singer, alt or not.