“I’m Still Crazy”
Vern Gosdin
Written by Buddy Cannon, Steve Gosdin, and Vern Gosdin
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
September 2, 1989
Vern Gosdin’s final No. 1 hit is perfectly serviceable. It’s pleasant on the ears, yet it carries a whiff of disappointment as the end of his modest collection of No. 1 singles.
Alone had some great songs on it, one of which would go top five right after this (“That Just About Does it.”) But the lead single is a step down from the level of material sent to radio from Chiseled in Stone, settling on a cool groove to carry it over the finish line.
It doesn’t get there. The way Gosdin stretches out “crazy” in the choruses isn’t catchy. It’s just awkward and harsh on the ears. The production is the primary highlight, previewing the sound that would make Hal Ketchum’s “Past the Point of Rescue” such a fetching listen. But everything else here is a disappointment.
The third single from Alone went top ten, a feat matched by “Is it Raining at Your House” at the end of 1990. One more album for Columbia failed to produce a hit, and Gosdin then released a limited amount of independent recordings while continuing to tour.
A stroke in the late nineties limited his abilities, but he still continued to write and sing until his death in 2009.
“I’m Still Crazy” gets a C.
Every No. 1 Single of the Eighties
Previous: Rodney Crowell, “Above and Beyond” |
No idea how this one made it to #1. It has almost no personality at all and I can’t pick up on even a trace of the groove from “Past the Point of Rescue”. I didn’t necessarily find Gosdin’s enunciation of “craaaazy” to be unpleasant but I likewise didn’t find myself wowed by any part of his vocal performance. The whole thing really fell flat for me. It’s as though radio was giving Vern a consolation prize #1 for their mishandling of “Chiseled in Stone”. This one got a bit of recurrent play on my hometown radio station through the 90s but I largely memory-holed it since I left no more an impression than it does now.
Grade: C-
I can more easily draw a line from this to Clint Black’s later work though I can catch the influence of the tumbling energetic roll of Ketchum’s “Small Town Saturday Night.” I think the connect to Black lay in the percussive energy and drive of the instrumentation, the bright guitar work, and the clever wordiness of the lyrics.
The song works for me probably because of my strong Vern Gosdin bias. “The Voice” elevates, and makes special, most anything he chooses to record. I have always loved the lines “Lord, it hurt me to the bone/I was just a fool to think/You could be just a little bit gone.”
This song is better than it is getting here because it is being compared to his own classic material.
Teasing apart which kind of crazy in love he is an interesting lyrical trick he pulls off here.
If “Do You Believe Me Now” paled in comparison to “Chiseled in Stone,” what song wouldn’t sound like a disappointment by those same standards?
I get the sense everyone in town knows the narrator in this song is crazy precisely because he is not over her.
This is better than a “C” (I’d give it a B-) but to some extent I’m biased. Vern produced many great singles that never got to the top, so perhaps it is appropriate that the charts gave him one last hurrah. There were some great tracks on his post-Columbia output but only his diehard fans (of which I am one) ever got to hear them, since they received little to no airplay.