Sturgill Simpson Rolls Through Bakersfield

It’s Friday night in Bakersfield, the week after the election, and the country musician Sturgill Simpson is on stage at the Fox Theater, singing a Nirvana song. In jeans and a denim button-up over a dark T-shirt, Simpson has led a full band through much of his own catalog, and also through When in Rome’s “The Promise” and Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” We are two hours and 22 songs deep. The crowd is rowdy. Venue staff are attempting to diffuse a small mosh pit of sorts that formed near the stage an hour earlier, a defiant swarm of cowboy hats and phone screens. In two and a half weeks, the Grammys will nominate Simpson for Album of the Year, for his latest record, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, along with Justin Bieber, Drake, Adele, and Beyoncé. His talent will be news to no one here. Someone hollers from the back: “Get it, Sturgill!”

When I made plans to see Simpson’s mid-November show in Bakersfield, I did not think that Donald Trump would be elected president. By which I mean, I had not considered that I might be driving into one of the reddest cities in one of the reddest counties in California at the precise moment that the past would seem to overtake the future.

I was thinking instead of the Bakersfield sound, and of Simpson’s role as a keeper of the outlaw country tradition. The Bakersfield sound is a genre of country that took root alongside the cotton fields and oil rigs of this rural capital in the postwar years—a hybrid offspring of the country ballads brought by Dust Bowl refugees, the rockabilly favored by Midwesterners who came to work the shipyards and stayed to work the oil boom, and the Norteño music of Mexican field hands. The raw and stripped-down twang was pioneered by Buck Owens and made rougher by Merle Haggard, but, as a book I picked up at the Kern County Museum explains, the sound did not attain its dominant place on American radio because of any one troubadour or honky-tonk: “It got there the same way Dust Bowlers got to California—one state at a time and slowly.”

It got there also by defying the slick, string-heavy bubble gum produced by country music’s establishment, then being pumped out of Nashville as relentlessly as oil was out of the wells north of Bakersfield. “Nashville West,” as the Bakersfield sound came to be known, was an orientation of geography and attitude. No one embodied it more than Haggard. Born in the dusty town named for all those oil wells, Oildale, and raised in a converted box car, Haggard landed in San Quentin by the age of 20, in time to watch Johnny Cash perform there. With songs like “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” and “Mama Tried,” he brought the outlaw to outlaw country, that other subgenre, where he was in the company of Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings. Not all Bakersfield sound is outlaw country, and not all outlaw country is Bakersfield sound, but were you to draw a Venn diagram of the two, the overlap between them might as well be superimposed with Haggard’s face: deep lines and steely resolve, trucker’s hat and mutton chops.

It’s this mantle—Haggard’s—that was passed to Simpson, effectively by music critics and near literally by Haggard himself, if I did not misread the implication of “The Legend and the Renegade,” a joint interview the artists gave earlier this year to Garden & Gun. “I think he’s about the only thing I’ve heard that was worth listening to in a long time, to be real honest,” Haggard said of Simpson. The two were photographed together in a wooded field, sitting on stumps and playing guitars, in a tone that bordered on sepia. “We’re going to do a lot more shows together, I think, if I don’t die or something.”

Weeks after the interview was published, Haggard did die, from pneumonia on his 79th birthday. And when the Academy of Country Music announced their creation of a Merle Haggard Spirit Award a few months later, the move was met with strong words from Simpson. “I want to go on record and say I find it utterly disgusting the way everybody on Music Row is coming up with any reason they can to hitch their wagon to his name while knowing full and damn well what he thought about them,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “If the ACM wants to actually celebrate the legacy and music of Merle Haggard, they should drop all the formulaic cannon fodder bullshit they’ve been pumping down rural America’s throat for the last 30 years along with all the high school pageantry, meat parade award show bullshit and start dedicating their programs to more actual Country Music.”

Simpson, 38, did not grow up in Bakersfield, but he is from Jackson, Kentucky—coal country—which by certain key measures is closer to Kern County than to Nashville, where he now lives. Simpson is the first male from his mother’s side to not work in a strip mine, a detail repeated so often by writers and Simpson himself, it has taken on the air of a credential. (Simpson, in a recent interview with Marc Maron, described latter-day Jackson this way: “Big Coal left. Walmart and OxyContin came in.”) Before he started making albums, Simpson spent three years in the Navy, then worked in a Union Pacific railroad yard in Salt Lake City. There was at one point, according to his website bio, “a lost year in Seattle.” Simpson was 35, married, and living in Nashville when in 2013 he put out his first solo record, High Top Mountain, a collection of solid, earnest country songs named for a cemetery where many of his family members are buried. Though High Top drew comparisons to Haggard and Jennings, it was his second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, released in 2014, that brought Simpson a crossover audience, his first Grammy nomination, and the New York Times–bestowed distinction of “top-notch miserablist.”

Metamodern also announced Simpson as a Nashville dissenter. On the cover, his face appears in an oval-shaped, tintype-ish image that seems plucked from inside a locket, and which floats against a dark, celestial, psychedelic background. In the first song, “Turtles All the Way Down,” he sings of meeting the Devil in Seattle and the Buddha somewhere else, then declares: There’s a gateway in our minds that leads somewhere out there far beyond this plane. / Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain. And, in the next verse: Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT. / They all changed the way I see. Faith Hill this was not—“People think I pour LSD on my Cheerios,” Simpson later said of the notoriety Metamodern earned him—but still, it was not immediately clear how anguish-extracting extraterrestrials would go over in Kern County, the largest in California to vote Trump, a place where even Haggard made a hit of “Okie From Muskogee” in 1969 by singing: We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. / We don’t take no trips on LSD. / We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street. / We like livin’ right and bein’ free.

I left Los Angeles early Friday morning, drove the 120 miles north, over the Tejon Pass, to the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. My mom, who grew up in Bakersfield and planned to meet me there, had begun monitoring wind reports three days before, a habit left over from when too much wind or heat or snow on “the grapevine,” the steep grade that divides Southern California from the Central Valley, could make the drive extremely treacherous. (Though cars are now better equipped to withstand the elements on the grapevine, “Is the grapevine clear yet” is nevertheless a frequent search phrase.) She arrived in the afternoon, relieved the wind had been negligible.

We had five hours to kill before the show, so we drove around. In some ways, Bakersfield does not appear to be a shell of itself. Downtown has been undergoing something of a revitalization, and a few historic buildings—the Padre Hotel, the Fox Theater—have been refurbished in recent years. But the city saw a 12 percent increase in homelessness between 2015 and 2016, and it shows. It’s uncommon to go a block without encountering a small encampment of some sort, a gathering of street kids, or someone sleeping in a car. That Bakersfield is Trumpland can at times seem discordant with its own history. Twenty minutes southeast of town, for instance, you will find remnants of Weedpatch, the camp built by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration to house Dust Bowl migrants, where John Steinbeck set The Grapes of Wrath. (To give you an idea of how persistent the Okie stigma was: My grandfather, a cotton farmer here, never told my mother or her siblings that he was born in Oklahoma. They learned this fact by reading it on his death certificate.) Half an hour east of Weedpatch is Keene, where stands Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz (“La Paz”), once the headquarters of the United Farm Workers of America, the agricultural union established in 1962 by the Mexican-American labor leader César E. Chávez, whose movement’s slogan, “Sí Se Puede,” would decades later inspire Obama’s “Yes We Can.” When the sun started to set, we drove to the oil fields, as we have done before, to watch the black silhouettes of the pump jacks bend and rise against the sky, which on this night was Easter egg–color and streaked with pale jet trails, a vista that always looks both a little prehistoric and a little Mad Max.

The Fox Theater, when we arrived close to 9:00, was already a rollicking scene. The lobby teemed with people who greeted each other heartily while standing in line at the bar, or waiting for the bathroom, or loitering around the perimeter of the mezzanine floor, on either side of an antique-looking, red-carpeted staircase. A striking number of people were very tall and wearing overalls. An even more striking number of people were drinking cans of a beer called 805, so named, my mom surmised, for Bakersfield’s old area code. (Tagline: “Properly chill.”)

Simpson took the stage on time and opened with “Sitting Here Without You,” perhaps the countriest of the true country songs on his first album, an up-tempo choice that struck the guy sitting to my left as a nod to Bakersfield’s music lineage: “This is hee-haw right here!” he exclaimed. He was Jon Coley, a native Bakersfieldian of Jamaican descent who happened to work at Front Porch Music, a famous guitar store in town whose owner is known to have the largest collection of Mosrites, a vintage brand of guitar once manufactured in Bakersfield but adopted well beyond country. Simpson had visited the store earlier in the day and invited Coley to the show.

As Simpson plunged from one song into the next, the din of the audience warmed to a simmer, fueled by an unending supply of 805. “Long White Line,” an earworm of a work song from Simpson’s second album—Gonna push this rig ’til I push that girl out of my mind—bled into a cover of “Call Me the Breeze,” the Oklahoma singer-songwriter J.J. Cale’s groovy road song. Though the music played by Simpson’s backing band was country, their overall vibe at times felt more jam-band noodle-y, an effect heightened by the stage backdrop, a black curtain on which were painted two gigantic Grateful Dead-ish skeletons, one lunging toward the other with a spear. As we moved deeper into the set, ever more audience members were compelled into the pit now forming at the foot of the stage. Coley meanwhile was building a case for the importance of Mosrite guitars, flashing his phone to display another piece of photographic evidence in what became a comically impressive survey of musicians playing Mosrites over time: Ryan Adams, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Ramone, The Ventures.

It is not unusual for Americana musicians to avoid talking politics. It is also not unusual for Simpson, when he is on stage, to avoid talking altogether. So it is entirely my projection when I say that Simpson’s silence between songs seemed to say as much as the songs themselves. By the time he started in with the Nirvana cover, a man lodged in the scrum of the pit was holding a bottle of Budweiser up in the air with one hand and his phone with the other, carefully composing an Instagram frame of Simpson and the Budweiser side by side. Coley leaned over and whispered: “Kurt Cobain would hate them.” I would say that it seemed more than a little incongruous, the crowd’s spirited embrace of a grunge anthem, if calling such things incongruous didn’t suddenly sound so quaint.

The Nirvana song was “In Bloom,” which Simpson rearranged and recorded for A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. Nirvana’s music video for “In Bloom,” you may remember, was a parody of a 1960s variety show filmed in black and white with Kinescope cameras, in which Cobain and his bandmates appear on a TV-studio stage first in blazers and ties, a vision of early Beach Boys–style conformity, but by the end are wearing dresses and destroying their instruments. (In Cobain’s original concept for the video, a young girl born into a Ku Klux Klan family comes to realize the inhumanity and evil of white supremacy.) In Simpson’s hands, slowed down and countrified, and echoing off the walls of one of Bakersfield’s oldest theaters, Cobain’s lyrics acquired a sly aura: He’s the one. / Who likes all our pretty songs. / And he likes to sing along. / And he likes to shoot his gun. / But he don’t know what it means. A young blonde woman in the pit, swaying suggestively, unfurled an American flag.