Need Never Get Old
Nathaniel Rateliff knew from the beginning he was going to die playing music, as though he were called to do so from some invisible almighty, be it the devil or God.
By the time he was thirty-three, he had put out three less-than-mediocre acoustic folk albums and all wisdom in the world would have told him to burn the guitar and come to terms with reality.
Around this time, he was one of a half-dozen struggling and unknown musicians as the subject for a documentary called From Austen to Boston, where they tour in a caravan of old vans from Texas up to the northeast, playing bars and backyard parties.
In what was supposed to be a climax for the film’s storyline, the epitome of victory over adversity and struggles and arriving into the world of established musicianship, Rateliff performed an acoustic show by himself at his hometown in Missouri, expecting somewhat of a triumphant and celebratory return to where it all began. What he received was an audience who did not care or even notice him sing, talking and laughing over his lyrics, even booing him until he finished his last number and walked off stage. In his performance, he seemed like he’s the product of something, not himself yet physically born, playing a string progression not matched with his heart, his voice, his story, and seemed like a thing being choked to death by a cocoon, or drowning in the high seas before swallowed by Ahab’s whale, like he was fighting to come to some place of truth and beauty, fighting to become himself and could not.
Directly after this performance, the film crew interviewed him. He was heartbroken on the riverbanks, likely the Mississippi, holding his head in his hands, amidst a breakdown, crying and trying not to. So far in his thirty-three years he had put out three records that nobody bought, that weren’t very good, had followed the beat of his spirit and had nothing to show for it save for failure and what appeared to be a serious lack of talent. He was realizing it at this moment and was crying just as pathetic and pitiful as you want. He was in so much pain that he couldn’t even speak, could not make out words. It’s hard to watch.
It’s said a grown man ain’t supposed to cry, and yet is written in the Gospels that even Jesus had tears stained upon his cheek when they drove the nails through his palms, wept before he was crucified and then born again, risen up from the depths of death.
Rateliff’s musical rebirth would be a soul fused rock ‘n’ roll sound and he picked out a cool-ass band to back him, calling themselves The Night Sweats, fittingly so, as his career up to this point had been a nightmare and fever dream, never awakening from the horrors of the reality of the material world. It took thirty-seven years on earth for him to come to, wake up and deliver the punch that had tried to swallow his entire being from the bottom up.
Their debut and self-titled album is itself is a gong-bell awakening, it ain’t the rooster rising and heckling the dawn, it’s the rooster being picked off by a cowboy, the lead singer of The Night Sweats greeting the new day.
They’ve put out two more albums since, including Tearing at the Seams, which is as good a record as there’s ever been made and will endure what is called the test of time. When he sings lines like, “You ain’t gone far enough to say my legs have failed,” or “They’ll have to drag us away,” or “I’m choking on my words,” or “Are you afraid of what the future might bring?” or “You ain’t worked hard enough to say at least I tried,” you don’t need to know his history of chasing an empty calling that has eluded him for his entire life, to believe the words he delivers--the words are true, you know it through your senses, your own soul and own heartbeat, it’s been down in his guts a’brewing and a’boiling, like a dream been deferred for some long awful time.
His own soul beckons out from his voice like a bullet, triumphant finally, because he knows what triumph now and finally does mean, what it’s worth. Through his lungs, rifles his blood and heart drilling out from the darkness within and striking his name and sound amongst the world, fighting with all the guts inside him, what one might call the good fight.