“Hey baby, it’s the 4th of July….”
Happy Independence Day! Let’s celebrate with an appreciation of a Dave Alvin song that X made famous, which is hardly an anthem of blind patriotism.
Exene Cervenka (l) and John Doe, from X’s 1983 X: Lucky 13 postcard set, featuring photographs by Michael Hyatt. (Courtesy The Tim Stegall Archives)
She's waitin' for me
When I get home from work
Oh, but things just ain't the same….
Yesterday afternoon, I interviewed John Doe to get to the bottom of the X final tour/final album news. It’s all true, and I’ll let John explain next week, as we launch that series here at The ‘Stack.
At the end, something occurred to me:
“Hey, John?” I chuckled. “You do realize we are doing this interview the day before the ‘4th of July,’ right?”
He laughed. “Oh, yes! ‘Hey. baby!’”
If Dave Alvin isn’t my favorite living American songwriter, he’s a strong contender for the title. And Goddamn, if he didn’t whip up a world of devastation with “4th of July.” A terminal romance plays out its last acts “on the lost side of town, in a dark apartment,” as Yankee Doodle Dandy scenarios unfold in the neighborhood: “On the stairs I smoke a/Cigarette alone/Mexican kids are shootin'/Fireworks below/Hey baby, it's the 4th of July.”
This doesn’t feel like a time for celebration, though. Our narrator recognizes “things just ain’t the same,” as he sees all the signs written on the wall in red spray paint – how she “turns out the light and cries in the dark,” and “won't answer when I call her name.” He goes in for a kiss, and she offers her cheek.
“We gave up trying so long ago,” he sighs.
But he’s either the world’s most hopeful soul, or a damned fool. He somehow thinks there’s some gas still in the tank:
What ever happened, I
Apologize
So dry your tears and baby
Walk outside, it's the Fourth of July
Obviously, we have no idea of the outcome. The version X recorded for 1987’s See How We Are album ends at 3:59. The renditions Alvin spins out live can stretch out for five minutes or more, but the narrative ends in the same place, the song resolving in some of his brilliantly twisted Stratocaster inventions, like he’s a one-man Television.
“We were really fortunate that he allowed us to record that first,” Doe said yesterday. “I still sing that song, now and then.”
He laughed and noted that X and Alvin with Jimmie Dale Gilmore begin their respective summer tours the same day.
“I think our first shows are both on the 6th of July,” he audibly grins over the phone. “So isn't it ironic that neither one of us are playing on the 4th of July? I'm sure it will be on several people's playlists. God bless them.”
He concludes, “It's a great, very sad song.”
“This next song,” Alvin intoned on a 2011 live version, “I wrote for…all of us.” It sure sounds like it. I can’t think of any of us who haven’t lived out his words at some point or other. And on this July 4th, when the Supreme Court and certain presidential candidates have made it so hard to be proud of being an American? When we need to be reminded we come from the country that gave the world Elvis and the Ramones and the electric guitar, and Jack Kerouac and Andy Warhol and Walt Whitman, and that even fascists with bad combovers cannot take that away from us? I’d rather listen to this song than some fakeass George M. Cohan shit.
Hey, baby. It’s the 4th of July.
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Happy to see the old postcard set is seeing the light of day now that’s in your hands!
Brilliant observation on Alvin’s guitar work: “like he’s a one-man Television!”
I recently unearthed the X anthology from the piles of auditory media in my house and realized that I’d forgotten all about this track. So it’s nice to read a bit about it after having just re-listened to it for the umpteenth time.
I suppose the meaning it still holds for me is the transient state of our emotional landscape — not just regarding romance but other aspects of life as well.
I also have to ruminate on how the words sung so many years earlier and looked upon NOW by those who performed them… how do they feel about their lives today? …how do those words affect them now? Do they still hold the same meaning? Is there a locked memory embedded in the song itself or has it just become a pathway to nostalgia?
Great song! Just listened to it. By the way, I do like Yankee Doodle Dandy!