I was interviewing for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, because I was a delusional idiot. This happened often enough that the camera crew following the lady running out of Green’s Liquor on Ponce, who proved to be shockingly fast sprinting uphill in heels, and the huffing policemen in pursuit didn’t seem out of place at the time. The apartment sat in a stretch of intown Atlanta still wild enough that COPS filmed there. The computer I typed all this into was a gigantic CPU block Dell with a fan so loud it could be heard on phone calls at a distance. When I started EDSBS, I was underemployed in a terrible uninsulated apartment, fresh out of grad school with next to no plan, and not entirely able to think rationally about my situation. You are reading this because I flunked out of the CIA. Worst of all: It was achingly sincere, the kind of song to play at tailgates after eight tallboys too many, and at the funerals of guys who died helmetless in rural highway motorcycle accidents. In what was a serious error of bad taste for some, it had what could only be called a cartoonish number of guitar solos. It was huge, anthemic, sincere, and beloved by hippie-compatible country types who wore t-shirts with serious-looking totem animals screen-printed on them. It was uncool enough to become a joke at concerts for bands that would never play “Free Bird,” or play music for those who loved it. It was so deeply uncool, and in so many ways. from your uncle’s Nissan Z as he pulls up late to your seventh birthday party Blasting during preshow for Alabama at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium at moderate volume from a passing Silverado on I-40Īpril 7th: 8:18 p.m. It could be cited in Almanacs, like the phases of the moon or the next neap tide.įebruary 18th: 2:40 p.m. No one ever had to take the trouble to play it because it just got played, it came on like an assumption, like the weather. They thought it was cool because it just made the car louder, and the volume on “Free Bird” on the radio would just have to be twice as loud. “Free Bird” people bought Trans Ams and Fieros and drove them until the sound insulation fell out of them and the mufflers started to rust. “Free Bird” is the song of the kinds of people a kid growing up in Tennessee desperately hoped to avoid. “Free Bird” is not the song anyone alive at any point in the 1980s would have liked in order to be cool. It is the song I associate with the relatives and neighbors who’d inevitably fall out of trees they’d climb as adults on a dare, kill rattlesnakes in their driveways with shotguns while kids rode bikes around the cul-de-sac, and show up to family events with new wives without warning. It is the song played in the documentary The Dancing Outlaw, while Jessco White and his friends party and drunkenly tear up someone’s front yard in a car doing donuts until the engine smokes and the back axle almost falls off the car. It started as a joke, because “Free Bird” was the song rednecks loved to play when doing super redneck things, things you hoped weren’t contagious but wanted to try anyway.
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