Alabama 3 - Woke Up This Morning

Make Up Your Mind To Go On

1. It’s absurdly difficult to separate this from the show that transformed Jersey boy James Gandolfini into a household name while simultaneously ignoring the network that produced the show’s volcanic eruption into the premier prestige television producer. I mean, MY GOD, but I’m gonna give it a shot. Legal disputes stateside wouldn’t allow Alabama 3 to use the name Alabama. (It seems there’s a venerable country music outfit that objected.) So, the least self-serious, most delightful odd musical outfits to emerge from late-’90s London didn’t get a fair shot until they showed up as the intro music to one of the greatest television shows in history as A3. Then people went scrambling to places like CD Warehouse, Sam Goody’s, Tower Records, Media Play, FYE, and Borders (Like Gandolfini, all gone) and shouted “WHAT’S THE SONG?!?!?!” And the clerks all said, “WE DON’T KNOW EITHER!” Then the marketing geniuses at Home Box Office got their shit together, released the first season soundtrack on CD, and then everyone knew just how fucking awesome Alabama 3 is. They open the show and appear alongside Sinatra, Dylan, Them (featuring a young Van Morrison), Springsteen, and Bo GODDAMN Diddley. What those of us who own the album Woke Up This Morning originally appeared on, Exile on Coldharbour Lane, know and what others do not is that the song starts with a one-minute, 45-second melancholy, spoken word lament.

   And after three days of drinkin' with Larry Love
   I just get an inklin' to go on home
   So, I'm walkin' down Coldharbour Lane
   Head hung low, three or four in the mornin'
   The sun’s comin' up and the birds are out singing
   I let myself into my pad
   Wind myself up that spiral staircase
   An' stretch out nice on the Chesterfield
   Pithecanthropus Erectus already on the CD player
   And I just push that remote button to sublimity
   And listen to the sweet sculptural rhythms of Charles Mingus
   And J.R. Monterose and Jackie Mclean
   Duet on those saxophones
   And the sound makes its way outta the window
   Minglin' with the traffic noises outside, you know and
   All of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality
   'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world
   Comin' up on forty-one years
   Forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave
   You know the box, awaits its gristly load
   Now, I'm gonna be food for worms
   And just like Charles Mingus wrote
   That beautiful piece-a music, Epitaph for Eric Dolphy
   I say, so long Eric, so long John Coltrane and Charles Mingus

   So long Duke Ellington and Lester Young

   So long Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald

   So long Jimmy Reed
   So long Muddy Waters and so long Howlin' Wolf

   Our narrator’s great lament is that those musicians will live forever and he will not. Their music will never fill his ears again, and that’s an immeasurable tragedy. We cannot take those sweet sculptural rhythms with us, and that’s the damnable misery of it.

2. Alabama 3 wants to hold, as they call it, a “sweet goddamn pretty motherfucking country acid house music” seance to conjure up the Old Gods. They want to light candles, pull up some John the Conquerer root, and sew a Mojo Hand into the group’s collective quilt. To invoke Muddy and Wolf? Ella and the Duke? Lady Day? Trane??? The conditions have to be exactly right. I mean perfect. I’m talking about a Mojo Hand filled with the light from the break of dawn, a mother’s incantation, created under the most rare and evil of circumstances.

   Woke up this mornin', got yourself a gun
   Your mama always said you'd be the chosen one
   She said, "You're one in a million, you got to burn to shine"
   But you were born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes

   That will fucking do nicely. That will summon the Old Gods. The real question is what to do once you’ve summoned them and everything has still gone to Hell. That’s really what Woke Up This Morning is about - what we do when our tiny little worlds get tossed upside down. The Blues walked in and stripped everything we held dear away and we’re left holding an empty sack and a gun. That, by the way, is precisely why there are so few authentic Bluesmen left: they’re too afraid to let life strip away the niceties. The other side benefit is one realizes exactly how little they actually need, but that’s for another song. What differentiates Woke Up This Morning from the rest of the would-be provocateurs is Alabama 3 actually has the balls to answer their own question. That brings us to the third verse.

3. The simplicity is as staggering as Tyson's uppercut.

   Last night you was flyin', but today you're so low
   Ain't it times like these makes you wonder if you'll ever know
   The meanin' of things as they appear to the others
   Wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers
   Don't you wish you didn't function? Don't you wish you didn't think
   Beyond the next paycheck and the next little drink?
   Well, you do, so make up your mind to go on
   'Cause when you woke up this mornin', everythin' you had was gone

   The anchor was never not self-destiny and heavy doses of empathy. Run from it, hide from it, shield yourself from their infrared and ultraviolet rays, but self-destiny and empathy remain omnipotent. Like time and salt water, they are undefeated.

   The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

   - Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

   Woke Up This Morning isn’t about being a gangster. It has nothing to do with being a hard man with a pistol. It has everything to do with shaping one’s legacy and caring for those in one’s charge in the most dire of circumstances - what does one do when everything is gone? It’s a polemic decrying bad luck charms and voodoo spells. Woke Up This Morning ultimately shouts down the very luminaries it initially conjured. It will not bend to superstition or circumstance. Our drunken narrator calls on these heroes just to tell them “Fuck off with your Mojo Hand and your bad signs. I don’t give a good goddamn about no blue moon. Everything’s gone? Perfect. Now I’m perfectly free.”

   Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

   -Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee

   It says, very plainly, make up your mind to go on. Hell, high water, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse… make up your mind to go on.