Great lies and broken promises - Escaping the California Dream: Clyde Wrenn goes home

I just wanted the fuck out.  I didn’t want to leave…but I knew I wanted the fuck out. California’s vicious poison had polluted my soul; escape, symbolic as it may have felt at the time, was the end game to an American Dream that turned out to be a mirage - everything gone plastic and grim.

 I can still vividly remember driving out of the high California desert, 1987. Nighttime set heavy on the barren landscape of dirt, dust, and dying foliage as I pulled out of some bleak scar on this good planet that called itself Norco, California.   As the ranch house of an old girlfriend’s parents’ faded away into my California past the darkened black-blue sky that hovered over the East was brilliantly clear as I drove my little red Honda Civic hatchback as hard as I could – straight into the yawning, indifferent mouth of my Ohio past.  

  The back of that car was messily filled with a load of shit I’d had the gall to consider my “worldly possessions”.   Books sat on top of pillows sitting on top of clothes sitting on top of an old radio “boom box” which leaned against a brown box full of the oddments of three years of living in the Golden State – all of which I knew I should have just left behind.  I felt sick.

  I rolled down the window as I limped across the desert toward Arizona, which stood between me and New Mexico, which kept distance between me and Texas, and so on…and so on.  It would be a long fucking trip across a Saturday, a Sunday, and into a Monday morning, traversing a thousand plus miles of mind-numbing American Interstate highway that turned everything that might have been unique about this country’s geography and regional cultures into one long fucking cow pasture littered with gas stations and billboards.  Fuck California - this whole trip seemed a dismal fucking experience.

  What was I expecting? Some sort of highfalutin Kerouac-ian revelation?  Christamighy! That shit was pure fiction – this was the true American experience: solitude, loneliness, emptiness, ugliness, cheapness, get-there-as-fast-as-you-can-ness. Jesus! Was it really just California I was escaping? And why?  At least that place had the fucking ocean.

  Still it felt good. It felt right (what would have been my option at that point? Regret? Knowing what and asshole I really was?) It was the only option in a life, at that point, completely devoid of options.

  Driving out of the darkness and into the rising Arizona sun I was the only one alive as far as that stretch of dawning highway was concerned.  Not a soul in sight.  I rolled down the window and felt the cool slap of morning in the air.  Hell, if my shitty car were capable of it, I might have been tempted to really open it up and see how fast I could race toward the horizon, but I knew I’d likely just wind up killing the remaining three working cylinders in that tiny Jap motor.

  I was the last man on Earth. I felt good.

    I saw the overturned truck about fifteen seconds before I saw the parade of flashing red and blue lights and about twenty seconds before I heard the siren’s cry.  To my left, in a median strip that was about a hundred yards wide, rest a battered pick up truck, upside down and almost on its side.  I thought I saw a front wheel still spinning.  But it was quiet at first. Too quiet for this to have just happened I thought.  I slowed up a little and looked to see if there were any people out there but I saw no one. There were beer cans and debris scattered along a forty or fifty foot stretch of tire track that came down off of the westbound lanes and into the middle of the median, stopping about ten feet from where the truck now lie. Thirty yards away, toward my side of the grassy no-man’s land, lay a motionless body.  Behind the truck, about ten yards from where the tracks left the pavement for the grass lay another.  I nearly puked.    Then I started to speed up…scared, spooked, and not wanting to be the one who first met and dealt with these now empty and soulless vessels. I closed my eyes and ran through a quick prayer – the Our Father, for lack of knowing any more appropriate devotions. 

  The lights and sirens seem to come out of nowhere.  Oddly enough these cops and emergency workers - merchants whose trade is often this sort of grim death - are on the scene and working far more quickly than I am even able to process what my role in all of this is supposed to be.  I speed up and drive away, putting more distance between California and me, racing like all hell now, not just to escape, but to stay one step ahead of death itself.  I turn up the car stereo – just hoping it could make me forget…about everything. 

  Clyde Wrenn left California too – earlier this year.  Although we hardly know each other in a greater sense, I consider him a friend. He also happens to be a musician.  And he possesses the voice of a thousand angels - angels that cry out from their own sad, sorrowful past in hopes of escaping.

 “They say that the world is extinguished, but I never saw it live”

   Clyde Wrenn weeps those exact words at the end of the second part of the two-part fracas noise assault that opens his new record called “Zombies”.  If it sounds (Sam) Beckett-ian that’s because it is – and as Wrenn quotes Beckett in song, he also continues to define his own unyielding and unrelenting vision.  It is a vision of music as dramatic possibility; an approach that is as literary as it is tuneful.  It is music as at times as gorgeous as it is frightening.    It’s music of the self, the sound of a soul and, in this day and age this is as high praise as anyone can dish out, it sounds like nobody else.

  I’d have to guess that Wrenn was feeling as obvious as he was cynical when he slapped the title Happy Days on this new record.  For there isn’t much to smile about in these songs - and Clyde Wrenn fucking knows it. He must have worn the devil’s grin when he slapped that banner on this music.

  As much a displaced farewell to Wrenn’s days in Los Angeles as it is the continuation of his musical yearning for what has always sounded like his true spiritual home back East (that has always been there, the sense of Wrenn’s longing for something he left behind, in his songs).   And in that, Happy Days is the glorious celebration and display of everything in which Wrenn has always found his inspiration: country flim-flam (“Good Time Buddy”), voice poems (“Western Teen”), a combination of the two (“Lilly of the Valley”), folk-pop (“The Preacher”), psych-noise freakouts (“Zombies”, “Nosebleed”) and darkness (“Not Like You”).  The record is a ghostly blend of acoustic punk, Appalachian horror, daydream yearning, and hopeless romanticism rendered with precision and intelligence.  It is a wholly amazing and definitive recording that has only one flaw – Wrenn’s penchant for writing eternally perfect songs that are so grand and glorious that everything else, as good as it is (and, damn it, it is very, very good here), bows to its beauty.

    “Armies of Curses”

   What can I say about this song that would do it the appropriate justice? Nothing.  I have no words. It soars. It’s shattering. It’s gorgeous. It’s elegiac. It’s uplifting. It’s damning. It’s life.  It is one of Wrenn’s finest moments (and he has had more than just a few of those – “Sawdust in the Mash” from The Blue Cliff Record comes quickly to mind).  “Armies of Curses” is pure Wrenn - heart stripped, bare, and beating.  It is a death letter. A tear-stained, romantic cry to be passed along for generations.  It is music done so true, so passionately, so focused and perfect that it makes life itself seem to cower in its wake. 

   “Whatever happened to that California Dream? They said head west young man, there ain’t nothing in between” - an old Midwest rockroll song

   Life, like rockroll and the aforementioned California (American?) Dream, is filled with lies, cons, and an endless array of phony promises broken. Clyde Wrenn has heard and seen them all by now.  So he did the only thing he knew he could and packed up his things and wandered back home. “Home.” Whatever that is.  But for Wrenn home is the place where his music comes from…and the place where his music makes sense.    Virginia is his home.  His songs have an affinity for the ghosts of the old America, they exist in the cobwebs of the past, and that past is where he was always from – both musically and spiritually. Happy Days is Wrenn’s final California record and it is a fine one, but now he is back home, amongst the specters that have always been his music’s muse, and there’s no telling what those ghosts might tell him now.

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