photo by Bridget McQuillan
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Whenever the time for “White Clay” comes in a concert from The Bottle Tops, you can watch the crowd behavior visibly change.
Singers Mike and Kerry Semrad still harmonize in zest and unison, and Mike McCracken’s steel guitar still twangs along at fever pace. It’s the people in the audience that stop bouncing and start leaning forward to make out the lyrics. There’s none of the playful romance in “White Clay” of the songs that came before in the set or the songs to follow.
The baleful-sounding social justice song about the predatory business practices of White Clay’s four off-sale beer stores on the Lakota people of the Pine Ridge reservation — and the fifth track on The Bottle Tops’ forthcoming album — stands alone, as if watching the decade-long tragedy unfold.
[“White Clay”] lives in that darker realm … it’s a very dark scene,” said Mike Semrad in a June 2013 interview with Hear Nebraska. “And it’s happening in our state, which is even worse.”
Originally written in spring 2011 for Semrad’s previous band Haywood Yards, the lyricist Semrad focuses on the numbers. Two. And 11,000.
Two dead bodies in a ditch, a scene that could have come from any lonely night in the last ten years just outside the 14-person Nebraska town with four off-sale beer retail stores. Alcohol is illegal on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is almost entirely located in South Dakota, nor can it technically be consumed on the premises of the four stores, making the foot path which cross the border a kind of human wasteland.
The verses of “White Clay” come off something like an eloquent report on the situation: two people founded dead in a ditch, 11,000 cans of beer sold each day. When the chorus rolls in, so does Semrad’s commentary.
He personifies an ambivalent broader America as a wayward child that deserves a whipping, and says those words just sprang out of him once he began reading further and further about deaths, poverty and subjugation that surround White Clay and the alcohol sales.
“The song just wrote itself,” Semrad said. “When you're in that mindset and you want to help, the words just … ‘white hot knife over the people’ … it just wrote itself.”
“Why as a country are we sitting back not offering any help for these alcoholic families? It’s a shame what happens to these communities and it just gets overlooked. Hopefully it makes a difference, that’s my only hope for that.”
Look for The Bottle Tops’ album release show on March 8 and stream “White Clay” here:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. For another Nebraska artist’s take on the White Clay tragedy, here’s Great American Desert. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.