Desperate Man's Blues tells quite an American tale in its offbeat fashion and subject matter. This film on DVD from Cube Media explores personal quests, passion of subject matter and the love of music, although this love confines itself to a finite recorded period of music. The film spreads joy in an unpretentious manner as we follow Joe Bussard, American musicologist and record collector, through his daily routine at home and on the road.
Joe hates rock 'n roll. He voices strong opinions from the time we join him and the film crew recording the events and his turns on a marvelous 78rpm turntable. Joe finds the stuff of 45s, LPs and CDs inauthentic. He lets us know homogeneous America offers little real culture of value.
Real culture was tucked away in defined small neighborhoods blanketed behind twisted unique roads. These roads led to places where honesty and individuality was personified and recorded on old shellac records of the 1920s and early 1930s.
I spent a goodly portion of my life on the road travelling throughout America. By the 1980s much of what differentiated regions had been swept away. Lost accents and peculiarly beautiful architecture bulldozed under by big Caterpillars of development crazed speculators looking for quick bucks. As Malvina Reynolds so aptly noted fifty years ago, a nation of "ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." If Malvina were alive today I doubt that she'd be surprised at what America has become. She would enjoy talking to a kindred individualist like Joe Bussard.
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