Sneak of the Week: Chip Taylor’s “Christmas In Jail”

The man who wrote “Wild Thing” was a country/folk troubadour at heart.

Here’s your weekly intro to a little-known tune from the past that’ll sneak up and blow your doors off.

With the loss of Chip Taylor at 86 on March 23, it seems like the right time to remind people of what the legendary songwriter was really about. Most of the world knows him as the writer of two huge ‘60s hits: The Troggs’ No. 1 garage-rock evergreen “Wild Thing” and Merilee Rush’s blockbuster pop ballad “Angel of the Morning.” The songs couldn’t be more different from each other. And in their best-known versions, neither one offers much of a clue to the true artistic identity Taylor eventually developed.

Early on, Taylor did plenty of songwriting as a gun for hire, venturing hither and yon into all sorts of stylistic terrain. But by the time he started releasing solo albums in the ‘70s, it quickly became clear that he was neither a roof-raising rocker nor a practitioner of big, billowing production numbers. At heart, he was basically a country/folk songpoet in the mode of his buddies Guy Clark and John Prine (Just note the difference between his own recording of “Angel” in the morning and the hit version sometime).

From the early ‘70s up through the final year of his life, he never quit cranking out the kind of rootsy amalgam that’s currently codified as Americana but didn’t even have a name when he began.

Of course, those aforementioned ‘60s smashes had an infinitely higher profile than Taylor’s dozens of solo albums, so the many gems he turned out on his own are largely the domain of his small but hardy cult following. There’s a mountain of mighty choices to single out from his huge catalog. But in honoring his memory, let’s go with a heavy one. If you aren’t already seated, you might want to consider it in preparation for the emotional impact.

Taylor was in his mid-sixties when 2006’s Unglorious Hallelujah came out, and time had only increased his ability to write endlessly inventive, subtly devastating songs. Case in point: “Christmas in Jail.” In a nutshell, it’s the non-autobiographical tale of an older man arrested on Christmas Eve for driving drunk and crashing his truck through a police barricade on the highway.

It’s the kind of setup any country songwriter worth his salt could make a meal of. But Taylor’s idiosyncratic method of telling the story is emblematic of his deceptively low-key mastery. It’s all done in flashbacks, with Taylor taking his time, leaving plenty of space between each line. First, we get the narrator’s memory of what occurred on the date he specifically identifies. But at no point does he employ a conventional “This happened, that happened” approach. Instead, he tosses out events, images, and quotes from the experience, so they hit your ear exactly the way memories would actually enter someone’s mind.

Only in the regret-soaked chorus does he even begin to get more documentarian about it all, and then only in the most artful way possible. Then, he suddenly switches POV for the next flashback, speaking from the perspective of the narrator’s son, who was at home expecting his father’s arrival for Christmas Eve dinner. Again, it’s all completely cinema verité style: The son is at his father’s house, fearing the worst on account of his absence, as he warns that he’s about to break the door down out of worry.

As Taylor wraps it up in the closing lines, he takes the opportunity to zoom out of the protagonist’s problems to make a larger point before driving the final point home like a hammer to the heart.

“Sad eyes in the shadows

So many this system has failed

There ain’t nothing lonelier than missing your family

And spending Christmas in jail”

Crucially, Taylor finds the ideal musical setting for the story—a bare-bones ballad with a dusty, Tex-Mex border feel and a Willie Nelson tinge to it. And his weary, weatherbeaten vocal delivery holds all the sadness and shame the character conveys.

In a manner not dissimilar to classic tear-jerkers like Townes Van Zandt’s “Marie” or Guy Clark’s “The Randall Knife,” it’s the kind of song that makes you feel like you’ve just been socked in the gut. But in a good way.

-Jim Allen

Photo: Sachyn Mital via Wikimedia Commons