My mini-tribute to Slim Dunlap, here, didn't mention that the lyrics to the song I highlighted, "Times Like This," were in time made almost unbearably poignant when he suffered a debilitating stroke that required his wife to become his devoted caregiver:
Well, we found ourselves some trouble
Or did it find us?
Trouble seems to find you when it's most unjust
Things got a little hairy
We thought we'd lost a lot
Now we know our fortune isn't what we still got
We know we can lose it all
But if we still got each other then
Girl, that's all there is:
You can blow all the rest a kiss. . . .
It would be a sweet guy who wrote those words, and it seems he's sweet enough so that his friends—almost all musicians, almost all bigger acts than he—came together to put out a 2-CD set of Slim Dunlap covers, "Songs for Slim: Rockin' Here Tonight," that I read somewhere raised about $150,000 to defray the family's medical expenses. This article in Pitchfork expertly fills in details.
One of the contributors was Lucinda Williams, whose history at First Avenue, like Slim's, is not wholly musical: he worked there as a janitor before he became "the replacement Replacement" in 1987, and she was married on stage in the club in 2009. Here she is on "Songs for Slim" performing his "Partners in Crime":
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