The 5: Chris Maddock’s Top 5 Proper Country Songs About Self Medicating and Life Crippling Despair, That Crack Me Right Up

From the land of sunkissed beer guts, Stillwater, MN, in the scenic St. Croix Valley, Chris Maddock describes himself as a gorgeous and classically styled stand up comedian, made of solid grapes-47% Comic, 19% Hot Waiter Guy, with the rest amounting to pure Country Music Legend. For 15 years beginning in 2003, Chris “Mad Dog” Maddock hosted the storied Death Comedy Jam, a weekly hub of MPLS comedy and subject of a documentary film, “Death’s Last Stand”. He recorded his first comedy album, Point of Entry, at the legendary Minneapolis rock ganglion First Avenue in the 7th St. Entry, and released it in 2012 on Stand Up! Records. In 2014 Minneapolis weekly organ City Pages named him Stand Up Comic of the Year, and his 2nd record and special was just released in October titled Country Music Legend. In honor of that release which you can purchase now, everywhere, Chris scribed this week’s edition of The 5 featuring his picks for the “Top 5 Proper Country Songs About Self Medicating and Life Crippling Despair, That Crack Me Right Up.”



Endless “Best Country Drinkin’ Songs” lists abound, and they all suck. They feature any ninny-mewled formulary that reminisces of “good ole days” drinking “cold beer” in a “new pair a’ blue jeans”, and it ain’t country. Or music. COLD beer? Wearing Pants? NO LUKE BRYAN! I want Puke Flyin’! It’s like this: Thems that’s raised wholesome should play oboe. 6 strings are for West Virginia dirt kids who huff gas and get reared by the neighbors’ dogs. Country Music comes from souls with SORROW and WOE, not found in the blubberments of such aforementioned registers that advance neck freckled Boob Dicks like Toby Keith, who is literally on record bellyaching a singsong vow NOT to smoke weed with Willy Nelson! Well who hasn’t done THAT, lampshade? Also, I find the sadness hilarious as well as awesome. You may think some stray a bit in style, but they have the important values of a Country Song, in this humble Legend’s opinion.

Signed,

Country Music Legend, Chris “Mad Dog” Maddock

“Trucker Speed” by Fred Eaglesmith

I play country music and do stand up comedy, which might make me the saddest a human can be. But it could be the reason I laugh at the saddest things I can see or imagine. Or maybe I’m loaded. Hopefully you, however, are at least too depressed to get up to disappear the rest of your ol’ lady’s pills she never takes. Because this one takes Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door and drags it into a purgatory of heartache, about a trucker who drives an empty rig back and forth cross country, tortured by a recently found old letter from the one that got away, and daily mixing up the world’s roughest smoothie of uppers and downers, without losing any time pulling over at rest stops. At one point he just starts listing drugs. HILARIOUS! The line “I been so lonesome I made Hank Williams look like Party of Five” feels like Cool Hand Luke winking at you right as he dies. Fred E. gets it.



“You Would’ve Never Crawled Alone” by P.W. Long

Do you have any friends that aren’t with us anymore? If not, you just don’t party.

If I ever suspect I’m becoming numb to my grief, I’ll pop this number on and weep like Nancy Kerrigan and John Boehner had a baby and broke it’s kneecap with a baton. The GUIT-ar sounds like the terrible kind of drunk you never mean to get, where you’re exhausted, alone, sad, far from home, and can’t speak the words to get a cab home. Then you see a bar and realize not even booze is killing the pain anymore, in slide guitar form. P.W. Long is the greatest.



“The King is Gone (And So Are You)” by George Jones

Let’s lighten things up with a little George “No Show” Jones. Did you know the ol’ Possum, who once was pulled over driving his lawn mower the 8 miles back from the liquor store (because 3 of his wives had hidden the keys to all of his cars), has a dark side as well? Darker, even, than driving 16 miles round trip at 5 MPH on the freeway, in middle age, for booze. (‘Course, nowadays these little so and so’s get their Energy Drinks Uber’d to their Air B’n’B’s so they can stay up late apologizing to the internet for calling tacos Mexican).

In this song George finds himself alone in an empty house, save for a table, an Elvis shaped decanter filled with Jim Beam, and a Flintstones “Jelly Bean Jar”. Then he sits on the floor and drinks all of it. Later he talks to Elvis and Fred about women. “Yabba Dabba Do, the King is gone, and so are you”. George Jones is better’n n’ drunker’n’ you.



I Drink by Mary Gauthier

Yes we do. This song is truly the saddest, most This-List, of the bunch, due to the total resigning of the will to the appalling, lonely existence Mary finds herself in. She grew up in a fully dysfunctional home of alcoholism and abuse, and sees no way out of becoming exactly what her Father was. It’s almost not even that funny. “Fish swim, birds fly…..Old men sit and think/I drink.” It’s a powerful and beautifully sad ballad, and if hearing it doesn’t bring the likes of Zac Brown or Brantly Gilbert’s human truck-nut-ness into sharp focus, take the Oakleys off the back of your head and spend some of your monster-claw-marks-that-reveal-an-American-flag-underneath energy drink bumper sticker money and get some…I don’t know, peyote? No, it won’t work on you. No, just walk. Walk for years and ask “why am I like this?”



Guilty by Randy Newman

I don’t care. If “Old Town Road” is legal to play at all, then I’m playing Randy Newman. Ol’ “R-New” resides atippy top of the pyramid of wounded songwriters. He went from this lacramaticulous sonnet straight to “Toy Story”. To peer into the blackest of black, the un-ending depth of wounded agony that would have to exist to make that transition…I shudder at the thought, and I’ve done shows in Wisconsin. He moans of a man drunker than 10 Kristoffersons, showing up wheres he ought not be, to express his selfish and narcissistic needs that only a true jerk can have the grapes to expect. “It takes a whole lot of medicine”, the man explains, “for me to pretend that I’m somebody else.” Hmm..Wonder what that’s like?

 

 

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