nothinggetsold

Nothing Gets Old Anymore

I have a friend named Bill in Colorado. He's a carpenter. lives in a little shack on the edge of Fort Collins, and I mean a shack. It's a pleasant place, a one room log cabin with a wood stove in it.

Bill can get a job as a carpenter any place or any time he wants. He's that good. He'll get a job with a building contractor doing a housing development, work there one day , and get fired. The reason is that he won't do what the contractor asks him to do.

The contractor is on a time limit and on a budget limit. He'll say, "Bill, we've got to meet our budget, so build it this way." And Bill will say, "I'm a good carpenter. I can't do that."

"All right, if you can't do what I tell you, then you're fired."

I went over a lot of these songs with Bill, be cause Bill's a Western person, he knows a lot about Colorado. Bill said. "Phillips, what about the carpenters? You sing about cowboys, and you sing about miners and you sing about the railroads. but you have forgotten that all of those people lived in buildings. If they could get a house. they had a house. The bars they drank in were built by carpenters. They kept their horses in stables built by carpenters. Why is it that nobody ever sing., about the carpenters?"

So I made up this song for Bill. That line, "Nothing, gets old anymore," comes right from Bill. He got fired off of one of his jobs, and he came over to the shack we were living in. We got drunk, and he started lamenting, "The stuff that I'm building is going to be new for a couple of years, and then it's going to be trash. It's going to fall over. because it isn't built right. You look back at all these old buildings in these old towns that you sing about. Those buildings were built to last? The people who built them - the plumbers, the carpenters, the stonemasons - put love and skill and pride into the things that they built. They just don't build anything like that anymore. They can't on this bid system, where you hire anybody who can hold a hammer as a carpenter.

I thought all that over. And I thought back to El Capitan, a bar I used to drink in, in Northern Arizona. It was stone on the lower floor and wood on the upper, with that long wooden balcony across the front. Stagecoaches used to stop there. Then the railroad went up the middle of the street, so it was a railroad hotel for a while. The town was, at one time involved in silver mining: later, there was a lot of agriculture and cattle ranching around there.

The range dried up and the silver played out, so gradually the town grew more and more abandoned. It's long a main road going to California, so now you've got a lot of plastic motels and the same kind of cheesy shit that Bill refuses to build.

I remember reading in the Salt Lake Tribune a little notice about how they were widening the highway for more development and had decided to tear down the El Capitan. Not a one of those new buildings could have stood up to the first strong wind that came along, but it took a ton of blasting powder to knock over the El Capitan. That place was really built.

SPOKEN:
When the big event was the west-bound stage
A carpenter then was worth his wage,
And whatever he built was built to age
Like some fine and ancient wine.
With skillful touch and patient hand
He built on rock and sage and sand,
And left behind El Capitan
To weather the passing of time.

Now through her bones the Norther wails,
Drifting sand on the long brass rails
Where tin-horn gamblers polished their nails
And hustled the dance hall whores.
Her hardwood floors and polished beams
Bore the weight of a thousand dreams,
'Til the dried-up range and played-out seams
Boarded her windows and doors.

The hotel served the railroad line,
But the highway followed close behind
With cheap motels and flashing signs
And the European Plan.
It took a ton of powder to kill
What was built with love and pride and skill.
Build another? You never will,
Like the old El Capitan.

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