Part VI - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug's Sketch of a Promised Departure

5. Brother John (Charcoal on Paper)

This title might lead a listener acquainted with the first four tracks to expect some explicitly biblical material from these lyrics. The song might be about Jesus’ disciple, the author of the last canonical gospel, or about Jesus’ friend and cousin, John the Baptist. But besides a few words with religious connotations, there’s not much on the surface that suggests identification of this song’s subject with either of those characters. Still, I’d argue Brother John is the album’s John the Baptist.

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The figure that takes shape in the first verses is something like an early 21st century hipster. He was a member of a group of the speaker’s friends, and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the youthful present turned into the past. “Brother John,” we learn, is a nickname his friends  gave this guy. He had “a poet’s heart and a painter’s touch” and “was more honest than the world would allow.” His honesty, a trait that distinguishes him from his friends, precludes him from playing the game his friends’ play–growing up and compromising. The refrain explains the plight this put him in: “He was caught between a cold machine and an everlasting flame.” The flame, here, seems to be the element toward which John’s poet’s heart and painter’s touch would incline him; the cold machine might as well be the system, run by the Man, which doesn’t typically make too much room for people who tell the truth and have artistic ambitions. Since “the world’s a giant, spinning coin,” it might be better to work at a bank. The paths of glory that lead toward the high peaks of fame, fortune, stability, and opportunity–in short, “success”–are heavily pocked with footprints that stopped and turned back. And every now and then, there are bones in the ditch. It’s a better bet to become an engineer or an accountant. It’s a theme Pug has explored throughout his career with varying degrees of severity and pessimism (“Hymn # 76,” “Those Thankless Years,” “Silver Harps and Violins,” “Bright Beginnings,” etc.) and sometimes with something more like optimism (“Hymn # 101,” “The Door Was Always Open,” “Windfallen,” et al.).

The second verse offers a vignette of a seminal moment in the speaker’s and Brother John’s friend group. For me it conjures images of River Phoenix and Co. in Stand by Me, but it also evokes the kind of things American teenagers (boys usually) always get up to. These young men are in the habit of smoking by the railroad tracks and telling “jokes that they shouldn’t have told.” This mischievous innocence is interrupted when “the powers that be” lock them in a room “with a confession” they “couldn’t withhold.” The authorities then challenge them with a trope from cop movies and thought experiments–the prisoner’s dilemma. They tell them, “You can save your friends or you can save yourselves,” adding, “you really oughta be ashamed.” Then the refrain returns to say this group of friends, like Brother John (presumably with them), is “caught between a cold machine and an everlasting flame.”

The choice between martyrdom and betrayal of a cause is a motif not only on this album but also on other Pug albums. In “After Curfew” from The Flood in Color, the singer addresses someone who is found in the street (dead presumably) with a list of “all our names” with “stars beside the strongest and the weakest.” The list represents the addressee’s betrayal of some underground group and has to do with a deal the authorities cut the betrayer. In the second verse, the betrayer’s father, who “spoke a truth that was clean as an island,” is revealed to have refused compromise and rather to have chosen martyrdom. This theme of being honest and defying the powers at risk of martyrdom is also present in “Hymn # 101,” in which the unidentified speaker comes “to meet the sheriff and his posse / to offer him the broad side of [his] jaw.” In “Brother John,” we’re not directly told whether John stands alone in refusing to betray anyone or not, but since he “was never one to play that game,” we can suppose he maintained omertà. 

The third verse offers a comparison between the speaker and John and assumes a difference between their life paths. A difference, however, doesn’t really emerge. When Pug sings, “I moved away too young to a violent town and chased a dream that I shouldn’t have chased,” he describes an origin story not at all unlike his own–dropping out of college his senior year, moving to Chicago (a violent city if there ever was one) to become a musician. John–and here, there seems to be an implied “however”–moves to St. Augustine (possible allusion to the Bishop of Hippo–cf. Meditation Part IV on “Then the Rain”) “to work the door at a shot and beer place.” In the next line, the speaker says, “I think he fell in love with a world he dreamed that in reality it never became,” and one has to wonder how this is different from the speaker’s own experience of going on an ill-advised quest after a dream. Working at a dive bar strikes me as a pretty standard day gig for a starving artist.  John’s dream, though, is never realized. The speaker speculates, “I think he fell in love with a world he dreamed that in reality it never became.” There’s neither a description of the consequences of John’s quixotic mode of life, nor an account of how the speaker’s own ill-advised quest turned out. At this point, we only get the chorus’s account of why John’s dream failed–“He was caught between a cold machine”–but here, the expected flame is not mentioned. Instead, Pug breaks off into the nearly contentless repetition of “hey hey hey hey hey.” And unless the voiceless glottal fricative of the “h” sound and the ending vowels is supposed to resemble a flickering flame (unlikely), it’s hard to say why the flame disappears. It’s probably just variation for musical reasons. But the flame’s disappearance could suggest John’s flame has been snuffed. Either way, the cold machine remains. 

The meaning of “cold machine” isn’t obscure. At this point, it’s associated with the powers that be. Experience suggests it’s also all the economic, social, and perhaps spiritual forces that make it so hard for any artist to succeed. The cold machine is the inhumane power of the world, opposed to John’s honesty, artist’s touch, and poet’s heart. It’s The Man, the system, the Scylla on the port side of the artist’s vessel; on the starboard side is the “everlasting flame.”

Or is the cold machine like Troy, and the artist is stuck in time between the end of a war and a decade’s long journey for Ithaca, identified with the eternal flame? Pug’s formulation of his and John’s dilemma is aptly evocative of more than one meaning. In “What is Good Will Never Change” and “Bright Beginnings,” the flame is unambiguously positive. It is hope, it is energy, it is light. In “Brother John,” it almost seems like something out of reach or something to be avoided–like a Charybdys. An exploration of John’s fate might enlighten us.

The speaker gives scant detail of John’s demise, but in the song’s refrain, Pug sings, “They say he had the right to choose / But his life was not just his to lose.” The tragic implication is that he committed suicide, or at least played some part in his own death, and the singer rules out any justification for this. The curious tag, “now that he’s gone,” seems like a belated realization that John really didn’t have the right to make whatever choice he made–suicide or perhaps even chasing the dream. The reason the speaker cites is that there were others to whom his friend’s life also belonged, people who loved him and to whom he owed allegiance. The refrain is an evaluation and a lament, and at the end of the song, Pug offers a metatextual commentary on the line’s structural role. He sees John’s face “more than our time together can explain / Like a slow refrain.” 

The simile of the refrain is another instance of Pug riffing on his own figurative lexicon. In “Messenger,” from Pug’s first LP, he sings, “She’s a messenger who sings a sad refrain.” (For my money, by the way, “the messenger” is the male libido–or just a courier for a message addressed thereunto–and the sad refrain is a lingering disappointment after a certain type of sexual experience, good or bad, we never know for sure.) 

In “Brother John,” the subject’s face in the speaker’s memory is like a slow refrain: it appears in his imagination and lingers longer than other images or memories, longer than their time together can explain. They were friends growing up, but the singer wouldn’t have figured on John being the friend whose face would haunt him.–I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though, and skipped over a very odd fourth verse.

The relationship between the scenario described in the fourth verse and John’s story is difficult to pin down, but at the very least it describes another instance of people being caught between the machine and the flame. “Meanwhile,” the singer begins, “some shallow men in a far off town dragged us all down a slippery slope / And the doctor’s brand new miracle drug was just good old fashioned dope.” It’s worth noting that like several lines on this album, this one is really funny. I'll admit, these "shallow men in a far off town" reminded me of the milieu bluntly pilloried in “Rich Men North of Richmond," and while I could imagine somebody thinking about the government response to the coranavirus here (perhaps even the government/pharma collab.) the tone of the song differs from that of Oliver Anthony’s run-away hit. Although Pug is wry where Anthony is earnest, both critique overseers of the cold machine. What are they being satirized for here, though?–since it probably isn't handouts for fudge rounds.

A likely referent is big pharma, government, medicine, and the opioid crisis. That, or the medical marijuana boom in certain states–such as mine. When Pug played at The Dancing Rabbit Festival in McAlister, Oklahoma, he remarked about the obscene number of weed dispensaries that had cropped up in the brief time since his last visit. But while weed has it's liabilities, I'm pretty sure it's hard to O.D. on. Whoever these shallow men are, and whatever slippery slope they dragged us down–and whatever this good old fashioned dope might be–Pug’s comment on all of it is that “They say the road to hell is like a Sunday walk / Until the devil gets to know your name.” For all I know he came up with this proverb himself. If so, it ought to be in idiom dictionaries and proverb collections from now on. I couldn’t find it. And at risk of stating the obvious (a risk I've often run in these meditations), the process of decline is easy and pleasant until it turns to agony and ends in death of one kind or another. Wide is the gate and broad is the way. Getting addicted to something is fun; the disease taking everything you have is not. 

Though the link to this wide-scale problem is never made explicit, it has to do with John’s death. In the lineup of suspects, the opioid crisis best fits the description. Given the clues about John’s death–that it's not unlike suicide, had something to do with “good old-fasioned dope,” and results from John’s inability to escape the cold machine or to obtain the everlasting flame–it would make sense to wonder if John died from an overdose. Too many people with John’s personality and gifts have suffered this fate. We’ve all probably known at least one victim of this legalized form of drug use, and far too many artists have gone this way.

If this song is about an artist's tragedy, about someone who was inexplicably doomed whereas Pug was graced–and if the lockdowns were a little overboard and ruined some people's careers and abetted their addictive tendencies–then maybe everything that occured to me as the satirical subject applies.

By naming his character Brother John, Pug taps into another archetypal lode.This is what he does at his best. Just as the speaker of “Hymn # 101” is a Christ figure, the Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Pug himself, so Brother John is John the Baptist and anyone who’s ever been driven to despair through the collusion of the system and their own demons. Especially any artist.

John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin, friend, and colleague in the mission of bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. As the herald who announced the coming of the Messiah, he baptized and preached repentance to prepare the way for Jesus. He was a voice crying in the wilderness; Jesus said he was Elijah and that there’d never been a greater man on earth. He called a spade a spade and thereby preceded Christ as an innocent victim of the cold machine. In John’s case, the machine was Herod’s lust, cowardice, and unwillingness to disappoint a lady. The flame, I suppose, was the Word of God.

The last verse is short, and the instruments diminish to give the voice space to reflect on the results of John’s life. Per usual, the symbolism is oblique and slightly surreal, but it suggests that John left something good behind him. As if by some miracle of grace, “There’s a silver stream of water in the street about a block from where his body was found / And the children laugh and sing their songs as the summer starts to wind itself down.” No details of John’s death are given, and for all we know, he could have been murdered, could have died in a ditch like Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, or he could have overdosed in an apartment. In any case, this silver stream flows in the street as if to memorialize his life and death. Having followed some of Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack series about his visits to Ireland’s holy wells, I’m inclined to see this silver stream as a sort of sacramental phenomenon caused by “some god above” to honor John’s greatness, not unlike one of the myrtle trees, nightingales, or narcissus flowers of Greek mythology. Via juxtaposition of the stream and the children, the speaker suggests the silver water provides place and occasion for levity and leisure. There are plenty of artists who died too young–Hank Williams comes to mind–whose catalogs are left to us like silver streams. The speaker feels John’s absence, though: “But I see Johnny’s face when I close my eyes / More than our time together can explain / He was caught between a cold machine…” and Pug breaks off into the plaintive repetition of “hey hey hey hey hey.”

The title to this song is the first obvious illumination of the word “Sketch” in the album title. The parenthetical tag labels this track a “charcoal on paper.” Obviously, Pug is comparing this musical composition to a visual one, and we presumably get a portrait here. The metaphorical medium can make for exquisite details of shading, shadow and light where the charcoal has left the white page untouched. The details of the story and the connections between event and character are only suggested by the dark strokes and purposeful smudges of the lyrics. Much is left unrepresented in the blank spaces the tortillon hasn't touched. Compared to oil painting or sculpture, I suppose charcoal on paper is a bit casual, a bit provisional, and the fact that Pug calls this whole album a “sketch” indicates a degree of modesty. As a musical composition, it is polished and gleaming.

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