Green Grass and High Tides

Memories, and the sands of time, and best, worst? The way a song starts to circulate in my brain, and it won’t let go.

In a distant past, there was Southern Rock, and it was crowned with a triumvirate of Southern Guitar Armies, Allman Brothers being the most obvious. Not far down the list was a minor regional player, “The Oulaws.” And their stand-out hit, a staple of AOR in its era, Green Grass and High Tides.

“Kings and queens bow and play for you…”

Like Freebird, another anthem of the genre, perhaps the most widely recognized — potentially abused — these are songs that originally had two or three lead guitars playing and riffing towards a musical climax of epic proportions. When radio rewarded much shorter songs, the Southern Guitar Armies played anthems that lasted over eight minutes with live versions veering towards ten minutes — after editing.

Someplace else, pretty sure I’ve noted this already, but that song was one of the first digital tunes I purchased, something to fulfill a checkmark in my understanding of musical history, but then as a motivational piece of music, too. The lyrics are overly simple and typically misconstrued, and if I recall, essentially only two stanzas. Not that it matters, the guitars with their solos, reaching back forth across tone and rhythm, build to a crescendo at least twice before arriving at the song’s ultimate conclusion.

These are the bands — they didn’t invent the wall of sound — but they did make excellent use of ear-bleeding noise.

Just when the song peaks? The guitar solos start at the bottom, after that precipitous drop, and began building back up. Truly an audio roller coaster of a ride.

Green Grass and High Tides

I don’t travel east well. Houston is too far east for me, not a big deal, nothing personal, just I have a westward bend in my nature. Way it is, and by now, I have embraced this. To quote a legendary Houston singer/songwriter? “Out in New Mexico, people there they treat you kind.” (“White Freightliner won’t you steal away my mind…”)

However, a portion of my family is rooted in the Deep South, and I’ll ascribe that familial line with any vestiges of Southern Roots in my heritage.

There’s an interstate highway, runs from Laredo to passing through Oklahoma, then up Canada. That interstate is an almost arbitrary eastern boundary for me. So the affection I have for that Southern Gothic, especially the loud guitar music in the last half century, sure, that might be genetic.

Green Grass and High Tides

The bay’s high tide, the raw Pacific hurling itself against the craggy edge of shoreline, high tide peaked around 4 AM or so. The not-so-gentle susurrations of beach being breached, the rolling thunder of breakers incoming, that almost startled me awake, third or fourth morning in a row.

With a time change, and “jet lag,” me waking at 4 is sleeping late by my own standard internal clock. It was well passed 6 AM in Texas.

The first morning I knew there was a musical allusion from my own history, and I waited. By the third or fourth morning, same 4 AM noise, the not-quite gentle sound of surf, it was reminding me the sound of High Tide, then it was — this little slice of the West Coast is lush and green, “Green Grass and High Tides.”