“Frankie’s Gun” by The Felice Brothers
Like spinning on a carousel, this song is a fun ride. The narrator is making a run to Chicago for some sort of contraband. It is a run that he has made so many times that “I think I know the bloody way by now.” Also like spinning on a carousel, you can predict exactly where this ride is going.
Like all such endeavors, they have to be prepared for trouble. When he tells Frankie to check the glovebox and ignore the 30, is it $30 in cash, or might the 30 refer to a handgun?
Every word is a warning: Don’t speed. No fender benders. Don’t draw attention. Frankie, keep your head down and your mouth shut.
The loose, rollicking arrangement mirrors the trip—one wrong turn from disaster, and almost certainly doomed. The song sounds like it was recorded in a rest stop bathroom—and I mean that as a compliment. I can see our narrator, Frankie using a dirty towel to put pressure on his bullet wound, bleeding out as we hear the sirens closing in.
The old-timey names (Frankie, Lucille) give this song a Bonnie & Clyde feel. Frankie and the narrator are so deeply immersed in this life of thievery and violence that they are fish swimming in it.
Their world feels small and brutal, like the diner scene in A History of Violence — men so steeped in blood that violence is their only language.
In the end, our narrator meets his fate. You can only make so many of these runs to Chicago without some sort of bad luck catching up to you. Was it a store robbery gone wrong? A cop who caught them breaking a minor traffic law?
In the end, it doesn’t matter. What we get from The Felice Brothers is a painting of a lifestyle out of Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” All that is missing is the fawning, superficial faith of a witness who “would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
The Felice Brothers don’t moralize. They just turn on the tape recorder and let the bloodstains tell the story.
The Good Noise 
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