The Twisted Genius Of Mike Cooley

The ‘lesser’ of the Drive-By Truckers main songwriters only in terms of output, Mike Cooley takes home the trophy for consistency. Patterson Hood’s work can often feel scattershot; sometimes there even seems to be a template for the songs (not that I can work that template out, because if I could I’d be out there on the country-rock circuit myself). But Cooley—other than Jason Isbell, who managed some pretty fantastic material during his stint with the band—tends to carry the emotional center of Truckers’ records.

Take, for instance, the laid-back beauty of a song like “Loaded Gun In The Closet,” the closing track of the band’s 2003 album Decoration Day. In an album riddled with problems of incest, divorce, and family feud, this song comes across as by far the saddest. (Although Isbell’s “Outfit” makes a strong case for the most ‘emotional’ song on the record.) Like so many of Cooley’s tunes, “Loaded Gun…” is primarily a character study; he takes a close look at the lonely life of a woman whose husband works while she stays at home. There is additional desperation in the fact that the possibility of children is never mentioned; as much as I fear the wrath of the feminists and the general bad feeling I get wandering carelessly into gender-stereotype-land, children seem like exactly the kind of detail that would solve the problem of how “by two o’clock or so every afternoon / the quiet [of the house] would start getting to her.”

But that’s pointing out just one detail that Cooley buries in the woodwork. On the surface, the song is obvious until Cooley arrives at the final line. We learn, with a kind of sickening twist, that the husband has put the loaded gun in the closet not—as we were lead to think—because of break-ins, but because it provides his depressed wife with a way out. The loaded gun is her sad, simple ticket out of a lonely life.

…she’s got a loaded gun in the closet

and it’s there anytime she wants it,

and her one and only man knows it and

that’s why he put it there in the first place.

[Apologies for the live version, but you can find clean studio versions on Grooveshark, Spotify, iTunes, etc. You can also read the full lyrics here.)

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The real power of the song emerges once we start considering how she treats the gun earlier in the song. The last verse toys with the idea that she might use the gun to kill herself, but, as far as the listener is aware, she never actually acknowledges that possibility. The only person who acknowledges that idea is the husband and Cooley’s wily narrator. Metaphorically, the loaded gun in the closet aligns itself with the truth of this woman’s life. It seems as if she won’t use the gun to kill herself because she still has not come to terms with her life. The only person who recognizes the suicidal utility of the gun is her husband, a fact which then forces us to question the entire basis of this marriage.

Our vision of the marriage, as provided by Cooley’s narrator, is filtered through the life of the woman—not the man. We don’t see where he works or what he looks like or even hear any of his daily complaints when he goes home. The emotional connection between the couple, in fact, works like a one-way street for most of the song: the woman would “hug his neck and tell him how much she loved him” every morning and “[understand] just what he needed.” She’s about as emotionally present as it gets, while the man evinces no outward connection to his wife—he never tells her that he loves her and, in fact, isn’t seen to acknowledge her a single time over the course of the song.

That lack of emotional attention throughout the song causes me to be troubled about that single action directed towards his wife at the end—that is, putting the gun in the closet. Because we’re not talking about straight poetry—we’re also dealing with melody, the timbre of Cooley’s voice, and the general expressive power of the music—it’s hard to say whether or not Cooley’s narrator reads that act on the part of the man as sympathetic. My first impression from the song is that the husband is, indeed, providing an obligatory service to his wife; I perceived a sense of bastardized chivalry in his recognition that she was utterly bored by her life.

But is she?

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As awful as her existence might seem to most of us—I, for one, can’t imagine sitting around the house not only with nothing to do but actually doing nothing for hours on end (although I love hogging a pot of coffee to myself)—who are we (or the husband) to say that this isn’t the life she wants? My initial 'reading' ('hearing'?) of the song’s ending was that she hasn't yet realize she wants to kill herself . I’ve italicized that bit, because it now seems to me such a self-centered reading—emblematic of some bad literary criticism.

Consider the verse that deals with the “other people”—the women who “would say she was a disgrace” and the men who “would say she wasn’t much to look at.” These people are projecting their own values onto this woman’s life. The tone of the narrator isn’t exactly disparaging towards these judgmental characters, but it certainly doesn’t seem to buy into their vision of the world. What the introduction of these characters does for us as listeners (or at least me), however, is that it hints at how we are projecting our own values onto her life. As I noted above, I would be upset if I lived her life…but can I really offer the thought that (I’ll italicize again) she doesn’t realize she wants to kill herself?

Effectively, in putting the gun in the closet, the husband is trying to provide an easy way to commit suicide. The song’s ending is sad only because we have denied her the agency to think for herself. We don’t think she knows that her life is depressing, so we bemoan the gap between reality and fiction. But should we?