I never gave much thought to where a song belongs in the world—whether it’s fated for stadium roar or the dim hush of a single lamp in a lonely kitchen. Some songs seem to find you quietly, mostly unbothered by the loud parade of their more famous kin. There’s one in particular that’s haunted me since the first time I stumbled on it back in the old Vinyl Express record shop, wedged between faded Don Williams and George Jones LPs. It was 1977, a year where I suppose I was just as lost as that record itself. The song: “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” by the great Billy Joe Shaver.
In Holland, especially in my corner, country music was an odd flavor in those years—about as popular as a bowl of chili at a boerenkool dinner. But lord, when I heard Shaver’s voice—the dust in his throat and the resignation in his words—I knew something inside of me was being examined. The title track begins:
**“I’ve spent a lifetime making up my mind to be
More than the measure of what I thought others could see.”**
Reading that now, I shudder a bit because my mind’s been the same maze. I keep tracing my dreams by other people’s yardsticks. All through my teens, I wanted to sing, but Dutch sensibilities don’t always make room for a man who comes home reeking of pedal steel and heartbreak. I was chasing applause in smoky bars along the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal, but even there, applause was a rare breed—a wary dog, not yet certain you were friend or foe.
I hear you, Shaver. I hear the battle in your voice: the need to justify every wasted day, to find value in what others overlook. At home, my father could never quite decide if my music was a phase or a flaw. I remember evenings, his face turned away from the small radio where I practiced harmonies with the ghosts of Nashville. The kitchen was thick with the smells of Thursday stew, plates scraped clean except mine. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t belong at the office he dreamed for me, but the words stayed stuck somewhere between my doubt and my tongue.
The refrain cuts right through all my old shame:
**“And I’ve got a long way to go,
Still I’d just be a five and dimer, my friend
Ain’t got no place to go…”**
There’s something devastating and beautiful in admitting you’ll never quite fit. “Five and dimer”—a cheap trinket, a man who costs just coins, overlooked in favor of something shinier. The truth is, that’s how I felt from the start. It hardly matters that the people around you love you. If you feel like a five and dimer inside, you wear it like a second skin, invisible to everyone but yourself.
Sometimes, when the city pressed too hard, when gigs dried up and the world felt like a cold draft beneath the door, I’d put that song on. I’d let the sadness in, let Shaver’s rough edges scrape against mine. Those were the nights I took the long walk under streetlights, boots on Dutch paving stones, humming the notes to myself, keeping cadence with the failures I kept secret.
For a long time, I thought being honest about my limitations was an admission of failure. Shaver’s words convinced me otherwise—they said that honesty itself was a kind of success. He wasn’t making excuses for himself; he was confessing the whole story. Maybe what makes “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” so precious is that you have to grow up a little to see its value. If you hear it young, you might shrug it off, reaching for something flashier. If you’re battered enough by your own ordinary life, if you’ve been passed over for the big payout, the song feels like a friend. You might even believe, like I do, that it’s written for you alone.
Shaver could turn a phrase that stuck to your soul like stubborn mud:
**“And I might have been just a wild-haired kid
With a lot of dreams but not a lot of sense.”**
Couldn’t we all? I spent half a decade bouncing between failed auditions and odd jobs—one month sanding boats, another stacking crates at a potato depot—always half-convinced I’d made a wrong turn somewhere. But what if none of those turns is wrong? What if they’re just the slow, stumbling path toward acceptance? The world is brutal to those who don’t shine, but in Shaver’s world, there’s honor in staying the course, in loving your own scarred and battered reflection.
I wonder sometimes about how many folks missed this song, how many records sat unsold in bins and dusty shops, and what would have happened if more people had let it in. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed the world, but it could have helped some small soul hanging by a thread. There’s warmth in being seen. There’s bravery in admitting your life has a ceiling, and it doesn’t make you worthless.
I carry “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in my pocket every day now, even as the years have sanded me down, softened the hard shell I built as a young man trying to outgrow his own skin. When I sing it in some back room, with the lights low and the crowd not quite sure who I am, I think about everyone who feels cheap in the glare of more expensive dreams. The song reminds me: you don’t have to shine for everyone. It’s enough to flicker for the ones who see you.
Sometimes I walk home along the Dommel and hum those lines, the old city silent around me. I’m not looking for stardom anymore. I’m just grateful for those rare songs that find us and tell us we’re not broken, not alone—just rare coins in a jar, waiting for someone to see the glint.
Yours in song and silence,
Kroes den Bock