The following is a Designated Cheerleader for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, which starts today! Soon after this, you'll receive two more DCs from Best Album readers: one for Nirvana's NEVERMIND, and another for this Hal Ketchum record. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
1992. In college, I fell for a girl. A girl who liked, among other things, country music. This was not something I was familiar with; in fact, I disdained it. This was the era of Big Stadium Country, when stars like Garth Brooks, Wynonna, and Billy Ray Cyrus could command giant venues, and it all seemed corny and corporate. But my heart won out over my self-assessed hipster credibility, and so when I came home for the summer, one of the first things I did was Project: See If I Can Like Country Music. I tuned the radio to the country station, plopped a cassette in the recorder, and listened for songs that I think I could like. There was a lot of “hit record, decide the song is junk, rewind back, get ready again.” But one song got past my defenses, like an X-Wing diving through the valley of the Death Star. It was “Sure Love” by Hal Ketchum.
I ended up buying Sure Love, and soon after, his album from the previous year, Past the Point of Rescue. I think what I found appealing about Ketchum was that I don’t think he could’ve been a Big Stadium Country guy even if he wanted to. (And I highly doubt he wanted to.) He was more like Sitting on the Porch with a Guitar at Evening Guy, or maybe Iowa Writers’ Workshop Visiting Assistant Professor Guy. Too calm, too soft-spoken, too internal to be a superstar.
Past the Point of Rescue had two big hits on the Country chart: “Small Town Saturday Night” and the title track. “Small Town” is a bouncy banger with an eye for just the exact details to bring this tiny burg to life; it’s kind of like The Last Picture Show in three singalong minutes. “Past the Point of Rescue” was a hit for Mary Black in Ireland in 1988. Her version’s good, but it sounds, to me, like someone interpreting an ancient ballad — one step removed. Ketchum places himself in the middle of this emotional maelstrom. He sounds desperate, like it’s life or death.
The two big hits weren’t written by Ketchum, nor was, obviously, “Five O’Clock World.” (That was a #1 for the Vogues in 1965.) But Ketchum wrote or co-wrote the other seven, and they reveal Ketchum’s big theme: how love is inevitably entwined with pain and regret. (One could probably slot “Past the Point” here, but his version feels like something closer to Gothic obsession.) “Old Soldiers” obliquely suggests the end of a long, perhaps decades long, love affair, while “Somebody’s Love” could almost be the prequel, the tale of a man in love with his best friend’s wife. Married couples fare no better in Ketchum’s world. The fire between the unnamed man and woman in “Don’t Strike a Match (to the Book of Love)” is dying, perhaps for good, while “I Miss My Mary” and “Long Day Comin’” are both laments of fathers, one who has left his family and one who is about to. It would all be unmentionably grim if Ketchum didn’t wed each of these sketches to strong pop and folk melodies. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but he makes sure it goes down easy.
But even with all these songs of love’s sharp sting, Ketchum makes room for jubilation. “I Know Where Love Lives” and “She Found the Place” find Ketchum making the case for love, despite the possible pitfalls. It’s the thing that’s more valuable than Montserrat real estate (likely destroyed in 1995 anyway) or a Bel Air yacht (Bel Air is technically landlocked, but we get what you mean, Hal). Love is the thing that is made of laughter and tears and “crazy things,” that is always waiting there for you, if you choose to open yourself to it. Of course, this being Ketchum, it doesn’t come without struggle: “She found the place where I’ve been hiding/Have I grace to let her in/to where my heart has been residing/away from the joy and pain again?”
Ketchum passed away from complications due to dementia last November, at the age of 67. Is it weird, perhaps too much, to suggest that he changed the course of my life? And with a song, at that? Yet, that girl that liked country (which was just a small portion of what made her her), not only went out with me, in 2003 she married me. We’ve been together ever since. Thanks, Hal.
