“….Now, Daddy ran the whiskey in a big-block Dodge, Bought it at an auction at the Mason’s Lodge. “Johnson County Sheriff” painted on the side, He just shot a coat of primer, then he looked inside. Well, him and my uncle tore that engine down, I still remember that rumblin’ sound, And then the Sheriff came around in the middle of the night, Heard Mama cryin’, knew somethin’ wasn’t right. He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load, You could smell the whiskey burnin’ down Copperhead Road” – Steve Earle (Copperhead Road)
“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion” – stated a philosophical and wise man that ended up defining the rebel, the metaphysical outlaw: a man leaning into, accepting the absurdity of life rather than looking for exits; a man refusing to accept the meaningless silence of the world; a man free of any grand design, purpose or destiny; a man passionately, intensely, defiantly involved in life, reaping the bounties of the present, instead of awaiting future rewards.
Copperhead road – the gritty, generational tale of rebellion of honest men facing the eventual absurd reality of life, forced to confront their values and forced yet again to separate the right from merely legal, is by no means an elegant, philosophical treatise but in its sound and storytelling it does reveal the hard driving sentiment behind an outlaw state of mind – “He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgement but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life. That would be unfair”. Camus philosophizes, defines the Rebel – Copperhead Road is where the Rebel resides.
Smoked, Sequestered and Subpoenaed – the AV2 reveals its Outlaw state of mind: a droning, driving aromatic smokiness that quickly succumbs to a whiskey-soaked woodiness accompanying the traditional, folksy notes of sweet molasses and jaggery. There is an absurd salty, hot stone imagery accompanying the smokiness – saltiness that disappears as quickly as it appears, to reveal a more rational caramel like sweetness. Large tippy leaves clumped together – there is a rural audacity, a revolt in their smoke; a freedom so aware of its temporal limitations that it refuses to sacrifice its smooth underlying floral-honeyed sweetness with a nostalgic tanginess when it expresses the ‘passionate and peated’ – whiskey burnin’ down copperhead road.
Smoked AV2 from Arunachal
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