Skeeter Davis – "The End of the World" (1962)

Why do the birds go on singing?

Why do the stars glow above?

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

Unlike Coke and Pepsi, Dr Pepper is not a cola drink.  (That’s not a typo – it’s “Dr Pepper,” not “Dr. Pepper.”)

I think that’s why my mother allowed me to have one small glass of Dr Pepper daily – she had the idea that colas were bad for you, but Dr Pepper wasn’t.

In any event, I’m still loyal to Dr Pepper.  I have some other strong brand preferences – when it comes to blue jeans, don’t expect me to see me in anything other than Levi’s – but there’s something more fundamental about my preference for Dr Pepper.  It’s partly a personal history thing, partly a tribal/cultural thing.  (I could ask my therapist to help me get to the bottom of this issue, but she has the same answer to just about everything I ask her: “If it makes you happy, that’s what you should do!”) 

I will drink Coke or Pepsi if Dr Pepper isn’t available, but only reluctantly.  But when I was young, Dr Pepper was very much a regional drink – it was big in Texas (where it was created in the 1880s) and nearby states, but very few restaurants on the east or west coast offered it.  So I usually had to do without when I went out to eat.

The closest I could come to Dr Pepper at restaurants that featured Coca-Cola products was Mr. Pibb – the Dr Pepper wannabe drink that Coke introduced in the seventies.  

But Dr Pepper is now the second best-selling carbonated soft drink in the United States, trailing only Coca-Cola.  So you can find it at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Sonic, Chick-fil-A, Subway, Jack in the Box and many other chains.  (Taco Bell is a notable exception – it serves only PepsiCo products.)

I haven’t had a Mr. Pibb in many years, and I can’t imagine what would drive me to drink one today – if Dr Pepper wasn’t available, I’d go with Coke or ginger ale rather than stooping to drink Mr. Pibb.

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I recently watched Hell or High Water, a 2016 film starring Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine.  That movie is set entirely in Texas, although it was actually filmed in New Mexico.  (The director of Hell or High Water is a Scotsman, so he probably has no idea that there’s a big difference between the two.)

The movie’s script was penned by Taylor Sheridan, who is best known as the co-creator of the Yellowstone series. Sheridan moved to Fort Worth – the most Texas of all Texas cities – as a child, and spent a lot on his family’s ranch near Waco.  He was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2021, and his favorite author is Larry McMurtry – who wrote a number of wonderful novels set in Texas, including The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove.

In other words, the man has some serious Texas cred.  

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There’s a scene in Hell or High Water that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Taylor Sheridan gets Dr Pepper.

In that scene, two brothers who are on their way to rob a bank in a small West Texas town stop at a convenience store to get some refreshments and fill up their car with gas.

The older brother (Tanner) asks the younger one (Toby) to get him a Dr Pepper, and is dismayed when he returns with a Mr. Pibb.  Here’s the ensuing conversation:

Tanner’s not wrong. 

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Skeeter Davis was born Mary Frances Penick in a tiny Kentucky town in 1931.  

When she was a child, her grandfather nicknamed her “Skeeter” (slang for mosquito) because she had so much energy.

As a high school junior, Skeeter and classmate Betty Jack Davis won a yodeling competition.  The two were billed as the Davis Sisters when they subsequently appeared on a local television station, and she used Davis as her stage name for the rest of her life.

Skeeter Davis didn’t have an easy life.  When she was a child, her mother attempted suicide more than once.  “I once slapped a bottle of Clorox she was drinking out of her mouth and sat on her hands to keep her from reaching for a butcher knife,” she wrote in a 1993 autobiography.  On another occasion, her mother attempted to leap from the family’s apartment window with Davis and her infant brother in her arms.

In 1953, the Davis Sisters released “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” which held the top spot of the Billboard country chart for eight consecutive weeks.  Later that year, a sleepy motorist crashed head-on into the car in which the duo were riding.  The collision killed Betty Jack Davis and seriously injured Skeeter.

After marrying Kenneth DePew in 1956, Skeeter realized he had married her for her money.  She divorced him in 1959 and married Ralph Emery – a famous radio DJ and TV host who was called “the Dick Clark of country music” – shortly thereafter.  

According to Davis, Emery became convinced that she was cheating on him: “Ralph accused me of being with everybody from guitar players to agents to producers to my hairdresser and believe it or not, to my brother and sister,” she wrote.  “Male or female, it made no difference.”  She divorced him in 1964 after learning that he had impregnated another woman.

Skeeter Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988.  She eventually died of the disease in 2004, when she was 72.  

“The End of the World,” her most famous record as a solo artist, was released in 1962.  It peaked #1 on Billboard’s “Easy Listening” chart, #2 on the “Hot 100” and “Hot Country Singles” charts, and #4 on the “Hot R&B Singles’ chart – the first and only record to get into the top five on all four of those Billboard charts.

“The End of the World” is a classic female weeper.  I decided to feature it in this post after stumbling across an old black-and-white video of Davis lip-synching the song on television.

Click here to watch that video and tell me if you’ve ever seen a woman with more amazing hair – Davis’s do is epic!

Click here to buy “The End of the World” from Amazon.

Attila – "Hate Me" (2014)

I don’t give a f*ck 

About my bad reputation

A lot of people are saying that Hell or High Water is the best movie of 2016.  

I almost agree.  Everybody Wants Some is my favorite movie of the year so far, but Hell or High Water isn’t far behind.

I say that even though the movie’s plot is based on a Bernie Sanders-ish premise that is (in the words of my high-school English teacher, commenting on the first draft of my valedictorian speech) Communistic, socialistic, and critical of parents – not to mention contrary to fact.

Here's the official trailer for Hell or High Water:

Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, the protagonist in Hell or High Water is a “justified criminal” – in the words of the TVTropes wiki, that’s “a person [who] becomes a criminal because of socio-economic reasons, or just plain horrible circumstances, and is portrayed sympathetically because of this.  Basically a person or a group of people are in dire straits and need money immediately and become bank robbers, and drug dealers out of necessity.”

In Hell or High Water, the “justified criminal” is Toby Howard (Chris Pine), a divorced father whose mother had to take out a reverse mortgage on the family farm to pay her medical bills.  Now that she’s dead, Toby has to pay off that mortgage or the bank gets the property.

Did I tell you that Toby has recently learned that there’s oil on his family farm, which makes the property vastly more valuable than anyone thought it was before his mother signed up for the reverse mortgage?

Toby doesn’t care about himself, but he wants the oil-rich farm to go to his sons so they won’t have to grow up poor like he did.  He decides to raise the cash he needs to hold on to the farm by robbing banks – not just any banks, mind you, but branches of the bank that gave his mother her reverse mortgage.  He asks his brother Tanner (Ben Foster), a hot-tempered ex-con, to help.

Ben Foster (Tanner) and Chris Pine (Toby)

“Justified criminal” movies usually feature a crime committed against an “assh*le victim” – a victim who deserves what he/she/it gets.  

A bank usually makes an excellent assh*le victim – especially if it’s a very large bank headquartered in some far away place and managed by people whose appearance and accents are very different from the justified criminal and his salt-of-the-earth neighbors.

I expected to have a problem with Hell or High Water because some of the reviews I had read made it sound like cartoonish left-wing propaganda – evil bankers engage in predatory lending so they can profit by foreclosing on poor hard-working folks who fell on hard times, until a couple of modern-day Robin Hoods show up and give them their comeuppance.

There are a number of problems with the movie’s plot.  For example, once oil was discovered on his family farm – making the property worth many times the amount of the mortgage debt owed to the bank – Toby would have had no trouble refinancing the loan . . . which means that he didn’t need to rob banks to hold on to his property.  (If you don’t believe me, go to any bank in the world and see if you can get a $45,000 loan secured by a property that produces $50,000 in oil royalties every month.  I think you’ll get that loan toot sweet.)  

Toby and Tanner rob a bank

But I’m used to having to overlook a little illogic when I go to the movies.  Sometimes the scriptwriter has to cheat a little to make the movie work dramatically. 

Hell or High Water gets really interesting when Toby’s decision to rob banks has some unanticipated – and very bad – consequences.  

The movie opens by showing what happens the first time Toby and Tanner rob a bank.  Tanner – who’s a real loose cannon – smacks a harmless old banker in the face for no apparent reason.

In this video, the director of the movie discusses the that opening scene:

Later, the boys hit a branch that was full of customers – and since the movie is set in Texas, several of those customers are carrying guns.  Toby and Tanner lose control of the situation and a full-scale firefight ensues, resulting in the death of two bystanders.

The brothers then split up.  Tanner really has nothing much to live for – a fact which he is all too aware of – so he takes a rifle and heads for the hills, hoping to draw the attention of all the lawmen who are chasing them away from Toby so Toby can get to the bank on time to pay off the mortgage and save the farm for his sons.  

Tanner is outnumbered, but he has the high ground and he’s a good shot.  He takes down a Texas Ranger with a gruesome head shot before being flanked and killed by that Ranger’s partner. 

Paying off the mortgage

At this point, we can no longer characterize Toby or Tanner as a “justified criminal.”  While it may be OK to rip off a bank that’s ripped you off, it’s hardly OK to kill several innocent people along the way.  And while it was Tanner, not Toby, who pulled the trigger, Toby knew his brother well enough that he should have anticipated that him losing control and going off the rails was a real possibility.

So while Hell or High Water may begin as a simplistic morality tale pitting a working-class hero against greedy bankers, it turns into something much more subtle and compelling along the way.

Jeff Bridges in "Hell or High Water"

The Texas Ranger who becomes Toby and Tanner’s nemesis is played by Jeff Bridges, and Bridges delivers a tour de force performance.  But I couldn’t help but wish that the producers had cast Tommy Lee Jones in that role instead.  

Bridges does a great job depicting a crusty, politically incorrect, soon-to-be-retired Ranger who is a lot smarter than he looks.  

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of his acting chops is when he sits back and lets an even crustier and more politically incorrect waitress absolutely steal the one scene that she appears in – Bridges knows that what she is doing is magic, and he gets out of her way and lets her have at it.  

But I feel like Jones would have not only have been able to do everything that Bridges did, but also would have inhabited the character so completely that you would have forgotten that you were watching an actor.  

If yu want to know what I’m talking about, compare Bridges in True Grit to Jones in No Country for Old Men.  Bridges was very good, but Jones was perfect.

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When New York director Sidney Lumet came to the Texas panhandle years ago to make a movie based on a book by Texas native Larry McMurtry, McMurtry was dismayed by Lumet’s utter lack of knowledge about all things Texan.  “I doubt that he’s ever had a Dr. Pepper,” McMurtry said.

By contrast, Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is a west Texas native whose script displays his broad and deep understanding of Texas culture.  Sheridan fully appreciates the significance of Dr. Pepper to Texans.

In my favorite scene in the movie, Toby and Tanner stop for gas at a nondescript convenience store.  When Toby goes inside to pay, Tanner asks him to bring back a Dr. Pepper.  

But before Toby returns, a couple of young punks with more testosterone than brains pull up to the pump.  The driver tries to stare down Tanner – who pays no attention to him – then waves a very large handgun around while berating Tanner verbally.  

You expect the volatile Tanner to pull his gun and start blasting away.  But it’s the mild-mannered Toby who returns from paying the cashier and proceeds to beat the everloving crap out of the driver.  

As the brothers drive away after the beatdown, you hear this exchange:  

Tanner:  This is a Mr. Pibb.  I asked for a Dr. Pepper.

Toby:  So?

Tanner:  Only assholes drink Mr. Pibb.

Toby: Drink up!

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When the two punks pull up to the gas pump in the scene described above, today’s featured song is blasting out of their car stereo.

Attila is a metal band from Atlanta that formed about ten years ago.  “Hate Me” – which has truly appalling lyrics – was released in 2014 on the group’s fifth album, Guilty Pleasure.

Here’s the official music video for “Hate Me”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: