It’s a long and
complicated story, and one that I’ll go on about all day if you
let me, but what seems pertinent to me this week is the way that Autry
O’Day nurtured their feelings of persecution. You’d see
flyers wheat-pasted to the windows of empty strip-mall storefronts,
and they’d be almost all text, going on and on about how Autry
O’Day was a band that brought solid songwriting skills and a
pure dedication to their craft to an age that had forgotten the value
of such things. Implicit in such self-presentation was the notion
that there was no room at the table any more for a content-focused
band like Autry O’Day; one got the feeling that the author of
the Autry O’Day flyers believed that history would one day vindicate
the band, probably sooner rather than later. I have no resistance
whatsoever to this kind of thing. These grandiose statements that
belie their own self-doubt, these proclamations of supremacy delivered
by entities that teeter on the brink of total obscurity even as they
speak: they reach me somehow. When I hear this sort of stuff I respond
at what feels like a very primal level, with pity and with fear, and
wonder.
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