There’s a record I play. A Bill Callahan album called Apocalypse. The whole damn thing sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a whiskey bottle at three in the morning. And there’s one song on it, “One Fine Morning.” It’s not a song; it’s a goddamn weather report from the future. It’s the quiet, steady hum of the engine in a getaway car.
I’ve played it a thousand times, sitting here in this Tucson shithole, the sun a big, stupid, and completely honest fist, beating down on the dust outside. The needle drops, and that quiet, simple guitar starts, and it’s not music. It’s a countdown.
You have to understand, the “apocalypse” isn’t some big, loud, Hollywood bullshit with fire and brimstone. The apocalypse is a quiet, personal affair. It’s the morning you wake up in a house you built for a woman you don’t love anymore, and you realize the whole goddamn thing is a beautiful, expensive, and completely soul-crushing tomb. That’s an apocalypse. It’s the moment you look in the mirror and you see the ghost of your father, the one who ran, or the one who stayed and rotted, and you realize you’re just another character in the same sad, fucking play. That’s an apocalypse.
My whole life has been a series of quiet, personal apocalypses. I’ve been a Mormon, a millionaire, a drunk, a husband, a goddamn guru on a mountaintop. I’ve burned every one of those lives to the ground. And after each fire, there’s a quiet, gray morning where you have to stand in the ashes and decide what the hell you’re going to do next.
That’s what this song is about. It’s the soundtrack for the morning after.
“One fine morning…” he sings, his voice all calm and cracked and beautiful, like an old piece of leather. It’s a promise. A threat. An inevitability. It’s not a question of if. It’s a quiet, steady, and completely terrifying statement of when.
“…we’re gonna ride…”
And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the whole goddamn show. The ride. The escape. The quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary act of turning your back on the wreckage and just… going. For me, that ride is a plane ticket to Argentina. A one-way trip out of this great, beautiful, and completely fraudulent American circus. A final, desperate, and beautiful attempt to outrun the ghosts.
“…into the silver city…”
What’s the silver city? Christ, I don’t know. It’s not a real place. It’s the idea of a place. It’s the quiet, desperate hope that there’s a bar somewhere at the end of the world where a man can sit down and have a drink and not be haunted by all the men he used to be. A “pure land,” he calls it. A place where the dirt from the old world can’t follow you. It’s a beautiful lie, probably. But a man needs a beautiful lie to aim for, or he’ll just drown in the ugly truth.
“It’s all coming back to me now…”
He sings that over and over again. And that’s the part that really gets you, the part that sticks in your teeth. At fifty-six, it’s all coming back. You stand on the pile of your own personal wreckage, and you can finally see the whole goddamn blueprint. The failed marriages, the businesses that burned, the women who left, the father who was a coward, the other father who was a rock of quiet desperation. You see the pattern. You see the machinery. You finally understand the quiet, ugly, and beautiful architecture of your own damn cage.
It’s not a lament. It’s a fucking revelation. It’s the quiet, sober clarity of a man who’s finally run out of road, and he can see the whole ugly, beautiful map of where he’s been.
And that’s when you get to the end of the song. The part that’s the real prayer, the real goddamn destination. After all the riding, all the apocalypses, all the memories coming back, what’s left?
“And the only words I said today are ‘beer’ and ‘thank you’.”
“Beer.”
“Thank you.”
That’s it. That’s the silver city. That’s the pure land. A life boiled down to its two most essential, beautiful, and completely honest components. A simple, cold, and honest pleasure. And a quiet, simple, and honest gratitude for still being alive to taste it.
No more performing. No more trying to be the millionaire, the husband, the boss, the son. No more long, complicated, and completely bullshit conversations with women who are just as lost as you are. No more trying to explain the quiet, ugly, and beautiful war that’s been raging in your own goddamn soul for fifty-six years.
Just “beer” and “thank you.”
That’s what this song is. It’s not a story about leaving. It’s a story about what a man hopes to find when he finally gets to where he’s going.
It’s the quiet, desperate, and beautiful prayer of a man who has been screaming his whole goddamn life and is finally ready for a little bit of silence. A man who has been through a hundred apocalypses and has finally realized that the only paradise worth a damn is a quiet room, a cold drink, and the simple, beautiful, and completely honest peace of being left the hell alone.
That’s where I’m going. One fine morning.
