Greg Brown: Ballingall Hotel

2008.Feb.17

ballingall hotel, greg brown, ronnie the limo driver, time travel

This one has everything you expect from a dirty, Greg Brown crawler:

  • marital infidelity
  • sorrow and/or disappointment and/or fishing
  • one or more dirty hotels
  • low, low baritone
  • local references
  • lack of appreciable melody
  • time travel
  • Bo Ramsey

So as you can see there’s not really that much more to sa– woa, woa, woa - stop the clock. That bullet says time travel. Here’s why: near the end of this dingy, lugubrious tryst, Brown says:


One night I knocked on the wrong door
One night I knocked on the wrong door
and myself as an old man answered - so drunk and so poor.

I said I'd never come again to this ugly old hotel -
but what the hell.

See? Time travel. Kind of a nice twist, but time travel just the same, which WILL NOT BE COUNTENANCED here at Milleria!

Established. But Brown is from good ol’ Iowa City, so he sets a lot of his sad regretscapes in the ratty, decaying small towns of Eastern Iowa. And it turns out the Ballingall is legit; is, in every likelihood, this one (postcard view) in Ottumwa, Iowa. Fair to assume it had perhaps atrophied a little by Brown’s time, as this account briefly timelines why it was razed in 1996.

MAPPING IT

Off you go to Ottumwa, Iowa, storied in poem and song. This one, anyway.

HEARING IT