By now you’ve likely read about the new movie Crazy Heart, which is getting good reviews and some Oscar buzz.
Not having seen the movie (in my backwater, it will likely be on DVD before it gets to a theater near me), I can’t address it. But it’s based on the book by Thomas Cobb, and his Crazy Heart one of my favorite novels of all time.
It’s the story of Bad Blake, a broken-down has-been country singer who’s still on the road, playing at honky tonks, roadhouses, gin mills, and other down-scale haunts of the American West. It opens with Bad at a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colo., performing in front of a local garage band, and not real sure where he is. His next stop, as he chugs along in his old truck with a bad engine valve, is Santa Fe.
It’s a hard and well-told story. I encountered it about 20 years ago after my wife read it and told me “Ed, I know you don’t like country music much, but you’ve got to read this book.” I did and started pressing it on my friends, especially musicians, who talked about how true it rang with them even though they were rock ‘n’ rollers.
My mother is a country fan — I grew up listening to her Hank Snow, Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold and Hank Williams 78s — and she loved the book, even though she’s a Baptist who generally frowns on novels with drugs and sex.
Thomas Cobb is one of my favorite writers; a couple of years ago, he produced another fine novel, Shave Tail, set on an Army post in frontier Arizona.
As for his Crazy Heart, it’s been long out of print. But with the movie now out, it appears that the book will be re-issued. It’s a wonderful tale of low-life night-life, mostly set in our part of the world. Bad Blake is so well-drawn that it seems possible that some afternoon, I’ll go down to the Victoria Tavern for a cold one, and on the next barstool, there will be Bad, getting primed for a performance while he muses about his travails with his agent and his ex-wives.
Read it and weep — and laugh a lot, too.
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