It took less than fifteen minutes to realize I had found a place that fit a part of me that I have kept prisoner under the guise of corporate bullshit for 30 years. I was still in the cab when it hit me. I see why Harry “Give ‘Em Hell” Truman loved to come here. Key West is so far from DC – or his native Missouri – as to seem foreign. I know. I’ve lived in both. People in Key West have their own opinions about life, love, law and liquor. Independence flourishes. Eccentricity rules. Best to bring you’re a-game in that department.

Conch’s – what Key Westerners choose to be called – don’t care what you think about them or politics, religion, work ethic, prejudice or government. Just to prove it, Key West has left the United States officially several times (I lose track), forming the Conch Republic and still flying the blue Conch flag every chance they get from New Town to Old Town. According to the pilot, the sign on the airport building: “Welcome To The Conch Republic” is longer than the runway. The motto “One Human Family” is displayed at businesses and homes across the 4×2 mile stretch of very flat and independent land. People are happy, behaved and respect each other, even when they do not get along. It is another world down at the southernmost tip of the U.S. So leave yours behind when you come here; changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes and all that.

Leathery fishermen work docks; leathery tourists roam hundreds of bars; leathery Conch is served in balls of spicy cornbread. Dogs are everywhere. Some are dressed like pirates. Chickens dip and peck across streets and under tables. It seldom rains in Key West. The sky is so blue and the trees so red that people run into each other looking up at both. Of course, looking down you will likely see a plastic cup of rum or beer or “greenish booze from the blender.” Music pours from almost every open door on Duval, cool air rushing the sidewalk, luring sweating people inside. Word is there are well over 300 bars in 8 square miles. Most are packed. Some are disguised as restaurants. When the cruise ships dock, the crowd swells, the patrons get older and hundreds of Hawaiian shirts snug the bars.

The smell of salt breeze, fish, coconut, alcohol and cigars waft down Duval Street, a place much like Mardi Gras without the police. I saw two cops in 6 days while walking at least 10 miles a day. Then again, I was not in the thick of it at 3 A.M. I heard more laughter than a lifetime of jokes and more lies than a lifetime of politics. Except the lies are told knowingly as humorous stories meant to entertain.

“Life is just too damned hard and too damned short to spend it listening to lies told by assholes who think we believe them to begin with,” said a man who tossed his former job, life and wife and runs a fishing charter boat catering to “short-termers.” That’s what he calls people like me who only come down for a few days. “We understand our lies here. They are told with flair and honesty. Honest lying. That’s storytelling.”

“The tales are tall under the palms,” said a woman driving a tour bus passing us near the first headquarters of Pan Am. “If you want a beer, there’s Kelly’s in the old Pan Am house.”

No shortage of beer in Key West. They sell it in four-foot wide alleys “just big enough to wedge two drunks into,” according to the guy sipping a cool one in front of the “smallest bar in the world.” Open containers are no problemo on Duval. The Anheuser-Busch distributor must be a happy guy.

Over by the Hog’s Breath Saloon sign a man laughed with passersby. Friendly and wanting nothing from anyone, I think his name was Bart or Ben. Could have been Louie or Frank or Gerald. Hell, it doesn’t matter. No one has a name down here.

“You will be lied to at least 30 times a day at work, I bet,” he said. “That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, they don’t even know how to lie in a good way. They are pathetic liars. They’re just deceit wrapped in fake concern. There are two kinds of liars. Only one of them you want to hang out with. The rest of them can go to hell. And will.”

“I’m in advertising,” I said, smiling.

He nodded, holding up one hand like an evangelist on TV. “Preaching to the choir, brother.” He walked over and rubbed his dog’s head and turned to me and squinted. “I hope your lies are the good kind. Not bullshitting some poor bastard about what happens in a meeting. You getting me here?”

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, make it a good story about something that…” He cut me off.

“Look, sorry to cut you off, but Hemingway lived up on that hill over there.” He pointed up Whitehead Street to what was likely a one-foot-above-sea-level rise in the landscape, not exactly a hill to most people, but easily a hill here in Key West.

“I was there earlier today,” I said. “Lots of cats. Some six-toed. The guide said a few things I know to be suspect.”

“So?” he said sharply. “Did you go there for the guide or for Hemingway?”

“We both know the answer to that question,” I said.

“Hemingway knew how to tell a good lie, didn’t he? Wrote them in an attic behind his house. A Farewell to Arms, Death In the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls – all his best lies were written down right up there. Tennessee Williams wrote the first draft of A Street Car Named Desire over at the La Concha Hotel. There are a lot more too. I’m just too drunk to remember them all.”

He seemed more sober than most people I know.

“I wouldn’t call what Hemingway wrote lies, necessarily,” I said. “I’d call them great stories.”

“But were they true?” he said, pausing for effect. I grinned. “Same thing!” He burped silently, his eyes remembering lunch. Obviously a red onion was involved.

“Hemingway didn’t lie about what some shit at work. He told lies about fishermen and wars and struggles with being human,” he said. “Great stories, his lies.”

I turned to leave, but he caught me. He was not finished.

“Jimmy Buffet records his lies in a concrete building near the harbor,” he continued. “Michael McCloud sings his over at the Schooner Wharf Bar. Some famous country stars steal songs from Michael, you know. Sometimes we inspire other people to lie. You get YouTube?”

“Some of Mr. Buffet’s and Mr. McCloud’s lies sound pretty true to me,” I said.

A group of loud people came by. One woman was loudly telling her friends about an adventure she most likely had not been on. She waved her arms in circles for effect. Everyone listened drunkenly.

“Proof right there,” he said tilting his head towards them. “I’m telling you, this is an island of damned good liars. And a few Nashville Pirates.”

VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube, Michael McCloud singing Tourist Town Bar at the Schooner Wharf Bar, Key West. As he has done for over 20 years.

Scribbled on an AirTran barf bag are these words: “Below me, the Atlantic meats the Gulf of Mexico, blending in shades of Galaxie 500 peacock blue, luminescent aqua and deep cobalt surrounding the last island in the Florida Keys. Scabs of other islands sprinkle to the left, northeast to the horizon. White froth follows boats in gently curling arcs between splotches of uninhabited tropical scrub that likely holds the bones of pirates and bootleggers and lost drug dealers. White houses hide under the pedals of thousands of flaming red Poinciana trees, hugging palms, shading people drinking frozen margaritas. It is hard to tell the haint-painted front porches of the hundreds of Conch houses apart. From row 11 of this plane, everything seems to be green, white or red down there. The entire island is shaped like Michael McCloud’s crooked smile.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtiZpbRGHZg

Bits and pieces of paper fill my Moleskin notebook. On each one is scrawled slanting and abbreviated words that connect to memories I plan to share one day, somehow. The barf bag is a bit longer, however, bending and folding at the torn edges.

More scribbles: “A long bridge stretching U.S. 1 from Fort Kent, Maine dead ends 90 miles from Fidel Castro’s backyard next to the “first and last bar on U.S. 1” – The Green Parrot Bar, known for Jazz on Sundays. Music on the rest of the bougainvillaea-laced island, once known as Bone Island, sounds more like something in Jimmy Buffett’s head. To some younger people Jimmy Buffett is just a character on South Park. A joke. But down here, he’s the Parrot Headed Patron Saint of sunburned middle-aged white guys wearing Hawaiian shirts and wishing pretty girls still looked at them like it was 1975. I guess there are worse things to be. That said, I like Jimmy Buffett. But then again, I kind of fit that demographic up there.

Over the next few posts, I will tell stories of what I saw, heard and felt in Key West. It is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes inspiring, at least to me it was. So stay tuned if you have a few minutes to waste on tropical verbiage. Or book your own cheap flight and drop into a world where things are not like they are where you live, unless of course, you live in Key West where it is always 5 o’clock.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPCjC543llU

No one expected him to show up. After all, he was supposed to be dead. Should have been dead after all he did. But there he was, bigger than a preacher after a dinner at Golden Corral, wearing a bulging suit fresh out of 1975, smelling like Brut and Jack Daniels.

I had not seen Buck Walnut in at least thirty years, if not longer. He did not look like I remembered back when he used to play a little music and race cars and get into fights at the Shady Bar up on Conecuh River between the dam and the bridge. Yet Buck looked exactly like I expected he might look had he lived. Considering that I was staring at him beside the casket of my old friend who should still be alive, I figured Buck had a story to tell. I was right. And wrong.

“Guess you never expected to see me again,” he said. That was all he said.

Before I could even shake his hand, he turned toward the body, nodded his head and left. Buck was never much for talking. He let other people tell his stories. And they told more than I can repeat here. Some I would rather not remember. Others don’t belong in mixed company. A few were simply strange. Buck was not a normal man.

I do not even remember the day I met him. He just seemed to have always been there. When I was growing up, he was like a grown man – at fourteen. Gave himself a tattoo in the shape of a badly drawn bobcat on his forearm, pricked with a Singer needle and etched in blue fountain pen ink. He was no artist. Instead of a cat, the tattoo looked like a camel with big teeth. Unlike regular people, breath did not protrude from his lungs, it rushed out in a vortex of tobacco-tinged heat. When he walked his feet made sounds against the ground like hammers missing nails and striking wood.

Buck was a nickname given to him by a shop class teacher because the large boy always carried a big knife with a walnut handle. When you carry a big knife, people tend to give you a nickname – like Buck Walnut. That is how it works in the Deep South; you lose your reality to other people’s imaginations.

No matter what anyone says, Buck was always nice to me. He was not nice to everyone, however. People told of a fight in Opp where he ripped off a grown man’s nose in a fight when he was sixteen. He once threw a drunk over a ten foot-tall bush near Court House Square in Andalusia. I saw that one. Damned near broke the guy’s neck. He tore up a garage, beating up three mechanics with a soft drink bottle, leaving one with a crease in his head in the shape of a dented milk jug. This was back when soda bottles were 12 ounces and thick and would lay a pop knot up side your head without breaking. Buck laid his share of pop knots upside heads. He had a professional grade temper that snuck out from under his shirt when somebody needed an ass whipping. According to Buck, a lot of people needed one back then.

Through the years, there were stories of drugs and women and alcohol and police. Jail was mentioned a time or two. A deputy shared that Buck bare-handedly dismantled the light on the top of his cruiser trying to make a point about a speeding ticket. “That boy was a walking misdemeanor aching for a felony,” said one officer.

People as far as Phoenix City and Prattville knew Buck. Thugs in Mobile left him alone. I’m not sure he ever got up as far as Birmingham or Huntsville, but if he did, they would remember him, guaranteed. He carried a lot of hurt and some of it got loose.

Buck was supposed to have died in some kind of altercation near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A woman’s husband was involved. A dog was shot. And after that, no one ever saw him again. Rumor had it that he was buried in a loblolly grove at the back corner of a church cemetery, which struck me as odd since Buck and church were two words that never fit in the same sentence.

All that said, Buck had just walked in and walked out amongst the whispers of the funeral home in front of at least 25 people and a well-dressed corpse. I caught Buck in the parking lot about to get into his car, a 1996 Oldsmobile, beat up worse than most of the people he had offended or who had offended him. An old dog sat in the backseat, slumped and hassling.

“Buck? You remember me?” I asked. I stayed back far enough so that his arms could not reach me.

He pulled off his jacket, tossed it into the passenger’s seat and smiled. “Yeah. I do. By the way,” he said in a voice scraped dry by decades of cigarettes, “I ain’t dead. One day I will be, though, but not yet.” He looked like he might strike up a conversation, then thought better of it. “Later, man.”

He folded his 300 pound frame into the torn front seat, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette and cranked the car, twisting his tree truck neck around to see while backing into the driveway.

“What happened?” I said, walking beside his car, his short sleeved shirt revealing the old self-inflicted, toothy camel/cat tattoo on his meaty forearm, his dog struggling to snarl at me through the back window. The question seemed dumb before I got the whole two words out of my mouth.

“Everything,” he said through a grunting laugh. “Everything happened.”

A plume of smoke drifted into the South Alabama breeze as he pulled onto the Bypass headed west toward Mississippi. His face filled the rearview mirror like a pissed hippo, the dog barking into the roof lining.

As Buck drove away, I figured the story about the husband was probably true, except it was the husband who died in that altercation. And, unless I am mistaken, the dead dog was alive and well too, just like Buck.

Some of the best storytellers make their living doing other things, like playing music or writing ads or laying bricks. The best storytellers I’ve known were farmers or drunks or a combination of both.

I met a great storyteller hobo in the 1970’s, but he got on a train and I never saw him again. Bartenders are capable of telling a decent yarn, if they are not too pissed off about their tips. Now and then a preacher can tell a good story too, if he will just stick to the story. I have even seen writers tell pretty good stories, but not too much.

Let me grease up that phrase a little. I do not have an issue with writers. I just have an issue with writers who cannot turn all of those damned words into a story worth reading. And if you have been to Amazon recently, there are a lot of writers cramming sentences between two covers. I say God bless them if they can sell enough books to make a living, which few do. Why? There are just too damned many free storytellers out there, present company excluded.

Ray Wylie Hubbard tells a pretty good “Redneck Mother” story on the stage in that video up there. Some people may not agree. That’s why we have different fast food joints. Not everyone agrees on one. But if you like stories about real people put to a tune, here’s Jerry Jeff Walker telling one of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s tales:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcBOcwgb4OA

On an aside: why country music singers, presidents and serial killers all feel the need to use all three of their given names is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is just part of the story. If Lee Harvey Oswald had bought a guitar instead of a gun, we might all be living in a better place right now. Imagine that story.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz24oE2GDaU

What do you say when you hear a really good country song? What do you say when you hear a really bad one? Now you can say both in one word: Honkytonkulous. Let the intent be nebulous like so much of life. But if I had my druthers, Honkytonkulous would be a good thing.

I made up that word riding in a car outside of Raleigh, North Carolina a few weeks ago when someone said, “That’s redonkulous.” At that exact moment we passed a “beer-and-a-beating,” cinderblock joint beside the road surrounded by pickups and a few Harley D’s. Something clicked in my brain and I said, “No, it’s Honkytonkulous.” And like so many worthless things that come to mind, I wrote it on the back of a gas station receipt, which just might put me in the rarified literary world of Shakespeare and Sarah Palin. That fete alone is Honkytonkulous. But the word fits music more than funky fetes.

That’s how frivolous stuff happens. Usually it happens on the highway within sight of a beer joint’s neon glow and a conversation about something meaningless. Now and then it rolls in on the backwash of a dream about something you won’t remember if you don’t write it down. That’s Honkytonkulous.

Does Brad Paisley want his new song to be Honkytonkulous? Would Reba McIntire or Keith Urban or Martina McBride be flattered or pissed by the moniker? Not that Willie Nelson and I are tight, but I think he would be pretty damned happy to be Honkytonkulous. Steve Earle and Johnny Cash would have too.

I grew up in an Alabama town where Hank Williams pretty much got his start near a saw mill, got married and played in local honky tonks. So Hank sang on the good side of Honkytonkulous. George Jones might smile like a squinty-eyed possum about being included in this category. Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt sure come to mind when that word starts growing flesh and bone and leans over towards several other legends like Kitty Wells, Tammy Wynette and Ray Price. Jeff Bridges won and Oscar for playing Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart.” If you saw that film, you know damned straight up that it was Honkytonkulous beginning to end.

Honkytonkulous will only begin to take on a cultural pedigree if we all begin to use it. So if you are reading this now, please try to use the word in your blogs or conversations. It would mean a lot to me. If you are a country singer, help me feel like David Allan Coe for just a few words. I’m not much for trade marking things that seem like they should belong to everyone like open source software. I’m just looking to slide Honkytonkulous into the lexicon of country music.

If I hear Trace Adkins or Lady Antebellum say Honkytonkulous while being interviewed, I’ll know you all succeeded. But if I hear Alison Krauss sing a song about it, I’ll take the day off, drive out in the country, sit in the tall grass and think about the day my mom and dad got married by the same judge who pronounced Hank Williams and Audry Sheppard man and wife. My life will be totally Honkytonkulous.

Unless you are from Sacremento, it’s hard to imagine that the band, “Cake,” has been around since the early 1990’s. Yet there stands John McCrea in his worn gimme cap talksinging the words to one of the hottest songs on the air: “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.”

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me if I’d heard the new song on the Apple iPod Nano commercial. I said, “Yes, I have. And not just on the commercial.”

It doesn’t take an Apple commercial to make you start tapping to this alternative beat with the brilliantly mundane lyrics about a girl, a skirt and a long jacket, but scoring an iPod Nano spot sure helps – especially since the song was released in 2001. My friend argued with me until he finally succumbed to Google. The iPod spot launched in early September 2010. Now the old song is hotter than melted caramel blistering your tongue.

If you were born when “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” first played, you would be almost 11 years old – easily old enough to cinch the Nano to your own long jacket, ear buds tucked in as you unconsciously nod and weave to the beat on your way home on the school bus. If you were twenty when that song came out, you are now officially old. If you were already old when Cake first wanted to meet that girl at Citibank, you may now be dead. That’s how culture works. You hear something new and it’s ten years old before you can even look it up on YouTube.

John McCrea was born way back in 1965. So he’s every bit of 45 years old. He could easily have a kid who’s 25. I can see your face while you’re reading this. I’d bet a crisp Andrew Jackson that half the people listening to “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” think the singer is not even that old. Kind of messes with your sense of cool, doesn’t it?

Even though my friend’s question prompted the general idea of this post, the real reason why I’m writing about “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” is one simple line: “She’s touring the facility.”

I laugh every time I hear it and have for years. You have to respect anyone who can write that in a song, sell it, get paid, sing it with a straight face while wearing a gimme cap – and wait ten years for it to be a huge hit. Damn. Nice job, Mr. McCrea.

“Band of Joy” is the result of Plant’s decision to abandon his follow-up to “Raising Sand,” the beautifully done duet with Alison Kraus, produced by T Bone Burnett. Got to be a story in that abrupt cancellation.

This eclectic collection finds Robert Plant channeling Chris Isaak or even the Beatles now and then. If a Bluegrass band did Zeppelin’s “When The Levy Breaks,” you’d have “Angel Dance.” Sort of. With “I’m Falling In Love Again” all I can think of is how Patsy Cline would have done it. Townes Van Zandt’s “Harm’s Swift Way” is stoked by the harmonizing of Patty Griffin since Plant sounds so much like Marty Robbins that it’s a bit creepy. Griffin, like Krauss, pulls him through this album in more ways than one. Plant again plays the chameleon on “The Only Sound That Matters.” sounding a lot like Tom Petty.

The psychedelic “Monkey” feels a little more pure Plant, yet still hiding behind the Chris Isaak’s thing. Then Griffin’s harmonizing rolls in and you smile. This is the best song, in my humble opinion.

I’ll give the dude props for “Cindy I’ll Marry You Someday.” Plant found a funky, nostalgic groove and the band is ripping it up. I can hear this riding a movie like “Get Low” with Robert Duvall.

Plant likes to experiment with American Roots, Blues and Bluegrass. He does a nice job with “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.” Haunting, in a good way. Then again, starting way back with Led Zeppelin, Plant has always brought Satan across nicely.

The unintelligible “Even This Shall Pass Away” stumps me. Oddly, I kind of like it, though. Robert Plant sounds like a man in his 30’s, and he’s all of 63. My grandfather died an old man at 62, worked into human jerky by a life spent sweating 16-hours-a-day in the hot Alabama sun.

Plant says he is still getting acquainted with the South. He can sing it quite well, to be sure, but studying the Blues, Bluegrass and Country versus living the reason why they were invented are two very different things.

Country music singers can nail a hit song about anything. The old standbys about drinking and mama and God and country are still getting clichéd to death with the cowboy hat crowd, but new topics are making the scene. Few stars lead this category like Brad Paisley. He’s got a current hit about water. Yep, water. Hard not to like it, either.

Brad has sung outside the lines before with songs about pants, a dollar, mud, topsoil and breathing just to name a few topics. I appreciate such eccentricity. And he tops it off with some damned fine guitar playing, too.

So many country singers go straight for the same old subjects like divorce, trucks, patriotism, partying, the aforementioned drinking and God (and sometimes in the same song), fighting, jealousy, cheating, fishing and general redneckry. Paisley writes lyrics like he just might be making fun of the establishment, and I like that. He sticks it to the rhinestoned man with a wicked-eyed glance, a well-rhymed verse and a greased-up guitar track.

I can hear his new CD new with tunes about toast and soap, socks and toothpaste. He may toss one in there about a fork or a napkin, perhaps even paper towel if he’s feeling the urge to flip the tall-man finger to the powers that be. We just don’t do that enough today, in my humble opinion. Brad does. And gets away with it.

If you like traditional country music, you may find it hard to imagine, but I’m already humming his new song about light bulbs and throw rugs and he hasn’t even written them yet.

Some music goes beyond the sound that comes out of your speakers. From time to time, these sounds define a cultural or political movement. In a few cases, they become the soundtrack for a generation.

Neil Young wailing, “four dead in Ohio,” still conjures memories of a black and white photograph of a young girl on one knee, panic stricken, next to the face-down body of a student shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.

“The Pusher,” written by Hoyt Axton, and growled by John Kay over a grinding Steppenwolf beat brings images of Easy Rider and a drug culture that slapped America’s conservatism right between their eyes and the sound machine. This is where my intentions went off the tracks.

I started out to write this piece about Steppenwolf. They cranked out several seminal songs in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Magic Carpet Ride, Born To Be Wild). “The Pusher” sounds like a Steppenwolf song. No surprise there. But knowing Hoyt Axton wrote those words is an interesting contradiction. At least to me.

Growing up, I saw Hoyt Axton as sort of a folksy character like Glenn Campbell or Mac Davis. Then, when you see that he wrote “The Pusher,” it kind of twists in your head a little. I remember the notorious lyrics (“God damn the pusher man”) and I remember Hoyt Axton. I just can’t put the two memories together. John Kay’s voice, yes. Hoyt? No way.

Hoyt Axton wrote a lot of song you have heard for 50 years. He wrote “Joy To The World” (as in Three Dog Night’s “Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) for god’s sake. He wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis and “Greenback Dollar” for the Kingston Trio. He wrote songs covered by Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and John Denver. He wrote some pretty pop stuff. And then he wrote, “God damn the pusherman.” That is some first class contradiction with a true Southern bent. Got to like that.