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Road Signs & Broken White Lines
“The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it’s a joke, “Headin’ out for the East Coast, lord knows I paid some dues gettin’ through…” “Now all that was left for me was a ragged, weary, cynical world with all the
Day OnE Leaving home for two months was as simple as walking out the door. It seems like some sort of elaborate ritual or grand hullabaloo should accompany the beginning of a trip this long, but it never does. You just walk out the door. -------- Home is Kings Road Apartments, West Hollywood, California. Just off Melrose Avenue amid blocks of appointment-only antique shops, chic eateries, and gay bars. West Hollywood is the center of the gay universe. Gay cops, gay city council, rainbow flags flying proudly on the median strip of Santa Monica Boulevard. The shops are hip, the restaurants are great. West Hollywood puts most of the rest of over-developed, strip-mall-plagued Los Angeles to shame. A pleasant oasis in a city I can barely abide. I live here with Karen Nash, my longtime girlfriend and now fiancée. Other girlfriends have appeared and disappeared during the course of this book, but there will be no others. There really never has been anyone else for me. It just took a while to figure that out. I met Karen nearly ten years ago. Our timing could not have been worse. We were drawn to each other in a way that was far bigger than the two of us – like lovers in a tragic play. Then we weren’t. Afterwards, I really tried to make it work with other perfectly wonderful girls who deserved better, thinking “the one” had gotten away, and I’d best get on with my life. Those relationships were clearly doomed. The only person who couldn’t see that was me. There is much talk around here lately of wedding rings and wedding dresses and wedding cakes and other overpriced wedding effluvia. I care little for the rituals of marriage, but I care very much about the thing itself. I will go to the alter willingly. Karen used to manage the building we live in. Part of that job’s perks was getting just about the best apartment in the building. High ceilings, fireplace, great view of the Hollywood Hills, two bedrooms, two baths. Every morning I wake up, look around, and think: “I can’t believe I live here.” Karen hasn’t worked in this building for three years – she’s going to law school now – but we’ve got rent control. Only way we can afford this neighborhood, bubele! The building is honeycombed with Mediterranean-style brick courtyards, stucco alleyways, and palm trees. The one unfortunate lapse in taste at King’s Road Apartments (besides that the outside of the building – nearly a city block long – is painted fucking pink) is the three “theme” elevators. One is done up in “medieval-castle” with ominous-looking iron ornaments on the faux-wood Formica door. My favorite is the tiki-bar theme elevator. All it needs is a guy named Joe shaking Martinis, and Marty & Elaine playing “More” in the corner. The building went up in 1971. There is little you can say to defend what was in style in 1971. In the center courtyard is a pool that has too many random curves to properly be called “kidney-shaped” – “aging-rock-star’s-failing-liver-shaped” would be more accurate. It’s surrounded by wooden benches, palm trees, bird-of-paradise plants and a couple of mammoth, out-of-place-looking pine trees that tower over the building. The pines are indigenous to L.A.; the palm trees are not. Nary a swaying palm was ever seen in Southern California until thousands were brought in a century ago to spruce up the place for the Worlds Fair. But that’s Los Angeles for you: only the flagrantly artificial seems to fit in around here. God may have created the rest of the planet, but Los Angeles was created wholly by man. This poolside oasis is my cigar-smoking spot. I like to sit and smoke and watch the people who live in the building rush in and out. Especially the anatomically perfect little twenty-somethings who scurry by with their workout clothes and water bottles and scowl at my cloud of blue cigar smoke as if Satan himself had sat down by the pool and lit up. Pissing them off brings me a deep pleasure. This also used to be my bourbon-drinking spot, but I quit drinking in August 2001. Do I miss it? Sure. But I probably wouldn’t have lived past forty had I not stopped. My name is Bob and I am an alcoholic. Once I was able to say that out loud, the rest was relatively easy. The way I figure it, everybody has a lifetime allotment of alcohol. I had already used mine up by age twenty-eight. So I’m not really missing anything…I just finished drinking earlier than everyone else.
Day Six It was one of those heartbreakingly lovely Monterey Bay mornings as I left the studios of KPIG radio in Freedom, California, four-hundred miles north of Los Angeles. I always look forward to doing a show at The Pig. They specialize in only the hippest strains of blues, folk, alt-country and rock & roll. Plus, there is always an entertaining call or two to hear on the Swine Line. The station is so cool that folks all over the world tune in via Internet. During the half hour I was playing live on the air, we heard from people in Luxembourg, Illinois, South Carolina, Italy, and Schenectady. On Sunday mornings at KPIG, the door is propped open to let the cool Pacific breeze into the studio. Coffee and donuts are on a table just outside the door, and musicians who will be on the air that morning are milling about, exchanging road stories and tall tales. A mild party atmosphere prevails. Hosting the show, holding court amid a tangle of microphone wires and other radio studio effluvia, is legendary Santa Cruz concert promoter and antique seller John Sandidge. He’s been bringing me to town to play for years. This latest show was at the Rio Theatre. There is no place in the world quite like Santa Cruz. The clock stopped ticking here around 1972, just before the 60’s fell apart and things turned ugly. It’s the kind of world that perhaps would exist everywhere had the counterculture closed the deal instead of caving in and eventually evolving into yuppie scum. Take the Pig, for example. Beholden to no faceless corporate weenies whining about demographics and market share, frustrated because music cannot be marketed and sold like boxes of cereal. The Pig is serious about music. They play musicians’ musicians. Songwriters’ songwriters. The whole town takes music seriously. Some of the finest crowds I’ve ever played to have been at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in downtown Santa Cruz, opening for folks like Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, Robert Earl Keen, and Fred Eaglesmith. In Santa Cruz, those people are rock stars. Any mention of Britney, Mariah, or any other freeze-dried, mass-marketed pap would elicit a blank stare here. Cut off from the world, 30 miles from overcrowded San Jose over a mountain via the treacherous snake of Route 17, it is a small paradise, untouched by the creeping homogenization that is turning the rest of America into one endless Baby Gap store. The KPIG show was my final stop on a quick Northern California hit and run, which included the Rio show, a concert at the Palms Playhouse a hundred miles north in Davis, and live shows on four different radio stations. My next gig would be in Philadelphia five days hence, and I was driving there. This is a routine I’ve become accustomed to. I often do tours of the eastern seaboard that last two to three months. Flying there and then renting a car for that long would cost most of the profit; so I drive, and play gigs along the way: Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago, OK City, Dallas, etc.. This works out great because I’m not trying to swallow the country whole, I’m just working my way across, concentrating on the shows. Then one day I wake up and, hey – the Atlantic Ocean! I’ve taken all the major routes across America. I-10, I-40, I-70. This time I was taking my least favorite route: Interstate 80 across Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Say it with me friends: Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Doesn’t that just want to make you slit your wrists?
Day Seven The desert west scares me when I drive across it alone. Nothing makes this New Jersey boy more claustrophobic than all those wide open spaces. As I cross northern Nevada and the forbidding wastes of Southern Wyoming, I feel the land repel me. We’re not supposed to be here, I think. We killed all those Indians, wiped whole cultures from the earth, and for what? So we could build pissant little towns full of trailer-trash with more guns than sense, whose whole purpose is to provide unleaded gas and Slim Jims to the weary traveler? The first night, I stopped in Winnemucca, Nevada, halfway between Reno and the Utah state line. Checked into a hotel, then headed a block down the street to the only thing open: the Winners Casino (“We put the Win in Winnemucca!!”). My plan was to lose a little money and eat whatever passed for dinner in the joint. The place was gamely trying to be lit up like a casino, but it looked more like a discount department store in New Jersey. I discovered an Avo cigar in my coat pocket that I had bought in Vegas the week before. I cut it and lit up. I played a little blackjack – $2 minimum, just my speed – and threw some change at the slot machines. Forty dollars lighter, I entered the all night eatery. It was around midnight and I was the only customer except for this Nazi skinhead looking guy who was complaining to the waitress, and I quote: “I don’t know where my kids think I’m gonna get the fuckin money. First we go see rasslin and then the next week they wanna see monster trucks!!” The waitress was surprisingly perky and attractive for this place. Every other woman I’d seen in this town was twenty-five going on fifty – dried out and hollow-eyed from the desert climate, the hard drinking, the two packs of Marlboros a day, and the amphetamine abuse that eats so many of these desert towns alive. I ordered a Caesar salad with chicken on it. Except for the French dressing, lack of cheese and croutons and anchovies, and the fact that the chicken had been cooked in recycled motor oil, it was a pretty good Caesar salad.
Day Eight Another grim slouch through the big empty. I had been lonely and depressed on the road before, but today I was feeling defeated as never before. I just did not want to be doing this. No gig could be worth doing it for. I was feeling I must be crazy. What I had left behind was a beautiful home I had made with Karen, the first real home I’ve ever made with someone during this wandering life. Certainly the first place I’d ever lived where the furniture matched. I’d abandoned warmth, love, cats, good books, and some really nice lox in the fridge. You try getting decent lox in Wyoming. I like to listen to books on tape during these long drives. They really pass the time. Karen had given me an interesting artifact for Christmas: a boxed set of tapes of all the Dragnet radio shows aired between 1950 and 1953. I threw a tape on and settled in. I could hardly believe the first thing I heard. Those shows were sponsored by Chesterfield Cigarettes, and the tapes were unabridged with the cigarette ads left in. During my lifetime it has been illegal to advertise cigarettes on radio or TV, so I’d never heard anything like this before. To merely bend, fold and mutilate the truth was not enough for these advertisers, they aimed shamelessly for comically blatant fabrication: “Our medical experts agree!! It has been clinically proven by our medical experts that smoking CHESTERFIELD cigarettes causes absolutely NO DAMAGE to heart, lungs, and auxiliary organs. You can confidently smoke your normal intake of 10 to 40 CHESTERFIELD cigarettes a day (forty?!?) and be confident that there is NO HEALTH RISK!” Did people ever really believe this crap? Even back in 1951? I listened to six or seven shows, each containing two ads that were variations on this theme. A couple of the ads actually had the “medical expert” (who sounded suspiciously like an actor) speaking. Of course, they never said who these medical experts were. I’m not an anti-smoking nazi. I don’t think cigarette companies should be sued for selling their product. It is common knowledge around the globe to everyone over the age of five that smoking is bad for you. If you still choose to do it, it’s your own damn problem. I smoke cigars, and I know they’re bad for me – but then again, driving back and forth across the country to play loud music in bars isn’t exactly adding years to my life, so what the fuck. My lifetime’s intake of red meat and whiskey hasn’t made me a paragon of healthy living, either. People should be able to do stuff that’s bad for them. It’s our right as Americans. Besides, ya gotta have vices. I share Abe Lincoln’s view: “it has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” Another fascinating aspect of the Dragnet shows was the marijuana paranoia of the 1940s and ‘50s. On almost every show, kids were going bad and turning into murderers and muggers and sexual deviants and communists all because they had a couple puffs of “maryjane,” “tea” or “reefer.” But remember kids: smoking your normal intake of 40 CHESTERFIELD CIGARETTES a day poses NO HEALTH RISK. Ahh, the good old days. It began to snow as I passed through Salt Lake City. Desperate to eat something that didn’t come on a bun, I ordered Chinese food at a truck stop. In Utah. It was horrible. I couldn’t eat it – and after all these years of traveling the American Interstates, I thought I could choke down anything. I should have known – there were no Chinese people working there, always a bad sign. All I saw behind the counter was one of those pear-shaped, vaguely inbred looking women you see a lot of in Utah…a state where it’s illegal to have a shot and a beer at the same time, but ok to have seventeen wives. Don’t get me started on Utah. How they’ve managed to remain exempt from the separation of church and state all these years is something I’d like my congressman to explain to me one of these days. Around Heber City, I considered stopping. I’d done eight hours, I was tired, and the weather was turning increasingly nasty. I checked the map, seeking a sense of place. It was Tuesday, and I had to be in Philadelphia by six p.m. on Friday. If I stopped here, I’d have to do an all-nighter along the way. I admitted to myself that I was getting too old for that sort of shit, and decided to push on a few hundred more miles into Wyoming. At the Wyoming border the snow disappeared right along with Utah, and the roads were suddenly clear. St. Christopher was riding shotgun tonight. I made an easy two hundred mile run halfway across the state to Rawlins before calling it a night.
Day Nine I filled a white Styrofoam cup with the gritty dregs from the motel’s complimentary coffee pot, considered adding some generic powdered artificial creamer, thought better of it, and got behind the wheel. As the car warmed up, I looked at the map and considered the journey before me. Looking at the vast continental space that Rand McNally was telling me I still had to cross, it was hard to imagine that I would be sitting on a stage in Philadelphia three days from now. As I looked around the Rawlins, Wyoming Best Western parking lot and the featureless country beyond, it was hard to believe Philadelphia even existed. After an interminable drive across Wyoming, I finally gained the Nebraska border. Almost at once, I felt the oppression of the Western terrain slip from my psyche. The fields became grassier, the towns more inviting. The little burgs I had passed in the west looked desperate, foreboding. Trailers and tumbledown shacks huddled grimly around rusty water tanks under a gunmetal sky. I really knew I was in the Midwest when I passed Potter, NE. The entire little town lay on the grassy plain to the left of the interstate: a white church steeple, a couple of grain-silos, and rows of tidy houses lining the main street into town. Charming. Not quite small town New England charming, but after Nevada and Wyoming, it charmed mightily all the same. I was gunning the truck along at a steady eighty-five, hot to make Omaha before the restaurants closed, so I could get some sushi. Sushi is one of my great road rewards. After days of greasy road food, a plate of sushi is like settling into a hot tub after a long sweaty day of manual labor. A cup of miso soup and a couple of pieces of raw tuna can be a nearly spiritual experience after two or three days of McTruckstop food. My vision of the demure Japanese babe bringing me the hot towel and the steaming bowl of miso soup while the sushi chef rolled me a spicy tuna handroll was not to be. Thwarted by sheer continental space and a time-zone change, I got to Omaha too late, and ended up eating at the 24-hour joint next door to the Motel 6, where I have eaten many a late-night meal after playing in Omaha. I shoved listless and wooly Salisbury steak into my mouth and listened to this dork in a brown suit the next table over excitedly explain his technique for successfully selling insurance to little old ladies who don’t need it, and can’t afford the payments. A table full of rapt sales-animatrons in training were clinging to his every slime-coated word. It wasn’t so much the zeal with which he approached demographics and market-share at one o’clock on a Wednesday morning that bothered me. It was his lack of a sense of humor about the whole thing. Screwing people out of money was like a religion to this guy. I find the humorless and irony-impaired most offensive. They need to go.
Day Ten This was the end-run, the final chance to make significant miles. I wouldn’t make Pennsylvania today, but I had to at least get in range – tomorrow was a show day. I got on the road early and crossed Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Late afternoon, I passed through the Quad Cities that straddle the Iowa/Illinois border. I randomly thought that naming all four of the Quad Cities would be just the kind of question you would have to answer for the big bonus prize on a game show (Moline, Bettendorf, Rock Island, uhhh, uhhh, wait wait – bzzzzzzzzzz! Davenport!!). The ringing of my cell phone interrupted a reverie in which Alex Trebec congratulated me on my prowess in naming bleak, dying midwestern industrial cities. The call was from my good friend and sometime musical cohort Carla Ulbrich. She had terrible news. Carla had suffered a stroke – at age thirty-five – and couldn’t move her left hand. Poor Carla seemed plagued with bad luck lately. I spoke with her a long while on the phone, trying to cheer her up. It was tough – what could I say? She was going to Florida to see a specialist for an extended time, and would not be able to play the shows we were supposed to do together in Syracuse, New Jersey, and Nashville. I wished her well and told her I’d check in on her progress. A few hundred miles later I got a speeding ticket near Zanesville, Ohio. Since California, the speed limit had been 70 or 75. The Ohio border marked the beginning of the more crowded Northeast, where speed limits are low and taxes are high. After three days of barreling across the plains at 85 miles per hour, the sixty-five mph Ohio speed limit felt like walking. Bleary eyed and worn threadbare, I found a hotel and packed it in for the night. I fell asleep considering a life outside the music business. I knew that if I got out, I would not be able to dabble – do it as a hobby, or play music I did not believe in just for the money, or play only on weekends. That would be akin to divorcing your one true love but still occasionally sleeping together for laughs. If I left, I would have to get out completely. I’d never done anything else…I’ve made music for a living since I was eighteen. But lord, I would be free from this life at last.
Day Eleven I passed south of Youngstown, Ohio into that little sliver of West Virginia between Ohio and the Western Pennsylvania border, which contains the city of Wheeling and nothing much else. This is the blighted industrial Northeast of so many Bruce Springsteen songs. Coal mining country. Steel mill country. The air quality has improved greatly here in the last twenty years because much of the coal-burning industry has been moved to third world countries where it’s still possible to exploit labor and pollute the air like we no longer can in America. But the scenery looks worn out. Something badly used and then discarded. Like many of the people who have lived and worked here, I imagine. I got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the last leg of the journey. As I negotiated the hills and twists and turns and double tractor-trailers, near a cruel joke of a highway exit called California, PA, I was once again startled by flashing lights and a police siren. It turns out that the speed limit here was fifty-five. The old double-nickel – I thought they’d gotten rid of that. Two tickets in two days. My mood could not get any blacker. Or so I thought. The transmission started to go on a hill just east of Pittsburgh. This tranny had been installed four months ago, and was my third in three years. It commenced a horrid bumping and slipping as I began to pass a semi on the upgrade. I went numb. The time had definitely come to cut my losses, cash in my chips, hang up my spikes, hit the showers; sell, sell, sell. I would abandon the car here with the musical gear in it (wouldn’t be needing that anymore), and catch the first flight back to LAX with nothing but my suitcase and a grim smile. Right. I forged on. Time was very short. Unless this problem stopped me altogether, I would worry about it after the gig. By dark, I was sitting in Friday-night Philadelphia rush-hour traffic. Half an hour before showtime, I pulled into the parking lot across the street from the Tin Angel, paid the attendant $17, and bounded up the stairs to the club with a box of CDs and a change of clothes. Tonight I was opening for Saffire the Uppity Blues Women, which is always a great time. I was in my dressing room changing into my suit when the parking attendant burst in and told me I had to come downstairs – my van had lost its reverse gear. Down at the lot, the scene was this: a line of disgruntled motorists stretched all the way to the end of the narrow one-way street in front of the club, waiting to get into the small, cramped lot. This lot served three blocks of clubs and restaurants, and Friday night was in full swing. My van was blocking access to the lot. It would not back up, and it couldn’t go any further forward. The two attendants and myself attempted to push the truck, but we couldn’t get it into neutral. The truck now apparently had two drives and no reverse. We shut off the motor and finally got it out of the way, with no power steering or power breaks. One of the attendants began yelling at me in a melodious island accent that somehow made his anger sound even more ominous. His back was ruined from pushing my stupid van. He was in such pain. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t work. He would have to quit his job. Confined to a wheelchair, how would he feed his family? I told him that while it may be true that many well-known and well-paid performers play at the Tin Angel, I was not one of them. I was merely the opening act. My pockets were not nearly deep enough for him to waste his time or mine on a frivolous lawsuit. I ran back up to the club, and he ran (rather lithely for a cripple, I thought) over to the next customer to collect another seventeen dollars. Back at the club, the Tin Angel’s sound guy and the women of Saffire made me feel like I’d come home. I nearly cried tears of joy. I had opened for Saffire a year ago at this very same venue, which, like all the venues they play, was sold out. Ann Rabson (the piano player) and I became acquainted after being introduced by a mutual friend, Ann Sternberg – who plays us both regularly on her syndicated radio show, Rock ‘N Roots. Ann Rabson was looking for songs for the new Saffire CD, and it was suggested that she might like mine. I sent CDs and Ann Rabson told me to pick two songs I thought might work for them, as she was busy, and didn’t have time to listen to the entire contents of three CDs. Two days later, I heard from Ann, and she told me that she liked the two songs so much that she ended up listening to everything. And she really did, too. I got detailed accounts of what she liked about various tunes. The most enlightening was a comment she made about “Born A Yankee,” in which I sing: I was born a Yankee, but you can bury me in New Orleans. She said: “I really like that song, but nobody actually gets buried in New Orleans.” She was correct, of course: in New Orleans, the water table is so high that all the bodies are laid to rest in above-ground crypts. Six feet under would be six feet under water. A real smartass, that Ann Rabson. That must be why I like her so much. The Tin Angel show went great. There is nothing quite like a Philly crowd. I sold lots of CDs. By the end of the night I was back in touch with the reason I put myself through all of this. I was very glad the show went so well. A bad gig on top of everything else would have been the final impetuous to implement my getting-out-of-the music-business master plan. But after this fine evening of blues music and camaraderie, that notion seemed impossibly silly. One good show is all it takes. I did not choose to play music for a living. It chose me. Not an easy thing to walk away from. I got lost on the way out of Philly. I always get lost on the way out of Philly. I spent an hour driving around an ominous south Jersey industrial wasteland in which the frames and wires of the electric commuter railway were silhouetted in moonlight like some weird deadly mechanical creature. I finally found a hotel, paid way too much money to the indifferent, gum-smacking teenage girl behind the counter, and got my key. I pulled way into the back of the parking lot away from the other cars and parked sideways…because I couldn’t back out of a parking spot.
Day Twelve A colossal snowstorm raged as I drove north on the New Jersey Turnpike. Tonight I’d be playing the Towne Crier in Pawling, New York, a small town about an hour north of Manhattan on the Connecticut border. The Town Crier is a renowned listening room that has featured everyone from Jerry Jeff Walker to Leon Russell since it opened twenty-five years ago. By the time I got to Pawling, there was a foot of snow on the ground, and the roads were a mess. The radio broadcast an unceasing litany of school closings, government building closings, basketball game cancellations, play cancellations, and, uh…concert cancellations. Shit. I pulled into the empty Towne Crier parking lot, and parked sideways. I felt like one of those obnoxious self-absorbed pricks who just got the new SUV and parks diagonally across two parking spots so nobody else’s car door will touch the sacred paintjob. I hate those guys. These are the same guys who piss on the toilet seat in a public bathroom. Inside the club, Phil, the owner of the joint and a really great guy to work for, told me the show would go on, but the headlining band’s van had broken down in Boston, and it was questionable whether they would make it. I did soundcheck and headed for the bar to drink coffee and wait. The bar, separated by a wall from the concert part of the venue, was cozy and warm and deserted. A perfect place to have a drink, were I having one. I passed the time drinking black coffee and entering new mailing list address into the laptop database. The glamorous life of the traveling musician. An hour before showtime, people started filing in. It wasn’t a large crowd, but not bad considering the snowstorm. I wouldn’t have come to see me in this weather. The headlining act, The Boneheads, from Maine (oh ayah!!), were still not in attendance, but it was rumored that they would be showing. Whatever. A good portion of the crowd was made up of my own following anyway, and I was confident that I’d make converts out of the rest of the crowd. It looked like my kind of audience. I figured I’d just play ‘til the Boneheads showed up. As always at this venue, I had a great set. The band showed up halfway through. After my encore, I tried to make small talk with the band – I’d never met them before – and was met with cold Yankee reserve. I didn’t hold it against them. Mainers don’t make small talk easily, and besides, they’d had a tough day. Things thawed a bit when I told the keyboard player he could use my keyboard. I thoroughly enjoyed the Boneheads. They were kind of a cross between The Band and Little Feat. You can’t go wrong with that. They were real nice to me afterwards. We exchanged CDs, sold the rest to the crowd, signed autographs and went forth into the snowy night. I limped the van across the Connecticut line checked in at the Danbury Holiday Inn where I would be spending the next four days. My van would be spending the next four days at the Danbury Dodge dealer.
Day Sixteen Danbury, Connecticut was once the hat-making capital of the world. The last hat factory there was torn down in 1968, and nothing remains to indicate that at one time, 80 percent of the hats worn in America – in a time when everybody wore a hat – were made here. Danbury now looks to be the ugly-generic-strip-mall capital of the world. I only found out about the town’s past because the Danbury Holiday Inn was working a hat theme. “Come in and hang your hat!” said the sign outside. “The place to hang your hat!” said the sign inside. Pictures of hats on all the signs, and on the walls. Hat wallpaper. They were really overdoing it, but otherwise, it was a pretty nice hotel. For a Holiday Inn. In Danbury. Flipping listlessly through the TV channels one evening, I happened upon the new Ken Burns documentary about Mark Twain. I’ve always been a Twain fan, but I never knew all that much about his life. I was smitten all over again, and resolved to re-read the Twain books I already knew, and buy all the all the ones I had not yet read. Mark Twain is timeless. That his humor is still laugh-out-loud funny after more than a century is astonishing. That his social commentary is still relevant after more than a century is breathtaking, and a little sad. His outrages against racism, imperialism, and the church, even when tempered by humor, show that we’ve learned woefully little as a society since the days before electricity and automobiles. I think nobody understood the human race so completely as Sam Clemens. By Wednesday, I had blown a significant portion of my earnings staying at this hotel waiting to blow the rest of it on a new transmission. The transmission had to be delivered, and after three days, it still had not arrived. The work would not be completed until Monday of next week. I had a gig in New York City the next day, and I had to get out of this town before I started drinking again. When you’re on the road, the days off are the worst. Sitting in another McHotel in another McNowhere. Lonely. Bored. If I played the guitar, I could fill these empty hours writing depressing songs about being on the road. Fortunately for the record buying public, I don’t play the guitar, and I’ve already written a depressing song about being on the road. One is enough. It may have been one too many. I checked out and rented a car. Less than two hours later I was crossing the Spuyten Deivil into Manhattan. I’d be staying at my friend Ann Sternberg’s apartment at 95th and Columbus. The first thing I did in New York was make a right on a red light and get violently screamed at by a crowd of outraged pedestrians. The anger. The tension. It was great to be back in New York. New York is my favorite city in the world. If I could afford to live there, I’d be there right now. Last summer, Karen and I spent a few months living at 67th and Broadway on the Upper West Side. One block from Lincoln Center. Two blocks from Central Park. Karen got there a week or two before me and called me the first night, breathless with excitement: “I just had sushi delivered at three in the morning! I’m never leaving!” L.A., despite its rep as sin city, is not a late night town. Except for a few greasy spoons and 7-11s, there isn’t much available after 2 am. Karen was in New York doing law work for Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project. I was making my customary rounds of the East Coast summer blues and folk festivals. The money was rolling in. Good thing it was – our rent was $2,500 a month for a one bedroom. New Yorkers we knew said it was a real bargain. We strolled Central Park. We ate at Vince & Eddies and Ocean Grill when we had disposable income, and at Gray’s Papaya or the West End Cottage when we didn’t. I became such a regular at Peter’s, the cozy little bar around the corner, that the bartenders knew me by name and gave me the occasional free shot of Maker’s Mark to go with my six-dollar beer. We saw Ray Charles perform at Lincoln Center. We swayed to the music of salsa bands on the streets of the Lower East Side, in a Spanish district where some homesick soul had planted a palm tree in a paint bucket on the front steps of his building. The tree was growing in sickly and anemic fashion under the New York skies, but the tree and whoever planted it deserved points for effort. Saturday afternoons, we watched roller-skate dancers in the park. We did and saw a million other wonderful things without having to go more than a few blocks from our apartment. We found out what it was like to not be able to get a cab or squeeze onto a subway platform when we made the mistake of staying in town on the fourth of July. We learned how to navigate the subways and not accidentally end up getting shuttled out of town on a Brooklyn-bound express. When we left, we were heartbroken. We were also broke. Now I was back in the Apple. Little had changed, except I still couldn’t afford the place, and I was now a sober man in a superior drinking town.
Day Seventeen The Bitter End, where I was playing tonight, is full of musical history; you can feel it when you walk in the door. One of the great formative albums of my musical youth was Randy Newman Live at the Bitter End. It always excites me a little to play the same club and the same piano Randy Newman played on that record. I have played the Bitter End many times, and was looking forward to tonight. I got to the club about an hour before Dave’s True Story was to take the stage. I’d become friends with the members of this skewed-jazz-cocktail trio through a breakfast ritual we shared with Ann Sternberg at Shopsin’s General Store on Bedford Street in The Village. Kenny Shopsin serves great food and wonderful running commentary. The restaurant is a funky little dive, kind of like a Woodstock general store dropped down into the West Village. Since these breakfasts began, I have done many a double bill with Dave’s True Story in New York. Usually at the Bitter End, sometimes at the Living Room (right around the corner from Katz’s Deli, the best deli in the world). At the Bitter End bar I spied Dave’s True lead chanteuse Kelly Flynt. The place seemed extra crowded, and it didn’t look like our regular crowd. Kelly told me that Warners or Columbia or some big label had booked a last minute set for an artist they were thinking of signing. We’d be starting our sets an hour late. I ambled over towards Kenny Gorka, the guy that books the joint. We never say much to each other, but it’s always good to see Kenny. He was standing in the same spot he always stands in. I get the feeling he’s stood there every night for the past twenty-five years. The Bitter End is comforting that way. Nothing much ever changes, and nothing much needs to. Kenny welcomed me back and confirmed the news about the label act. I watched the major-label hopeful’s set. She was pretty, young, and musically predictable. Not untalented, but not special either. I’m sure she’ll get a million dollar advance. Some sleazeball, all in black with the gold chains and the little ponytail, came up to me at the bar and started laying major-league schmooze on me. He figures that since I’m wearing a suit, I must be a suit. “Hey, babe, we’ve met before, right? You’re with the label, right babe? Grrrrreat to see ya!” Hand on my back. He actually said “babe.” The guy was giving me vertigo, as if through some kind of time warp or black hole I had magically been transported back to Los Angeles, and I was standing at the bar at the Coconut Teazer. In L.A. you can pick guys like these right off the trees – in New York they are a rarer breed. I informed him that, no, we’d never met and, no, I was not with the label. Then I threaded my way through the crowd to the backstage area so I could hide. I couldn’t help but think: Good God, do I really look like a label guy? I gazed for a long while into the mirror and determined that I did not look even remotely like a label guy: you couldn’t look into my eyes and see the back of my head. Backstage, I sat quietly in a corner and observed the circus. Various hangers on were all vying for a chance to suck up to the label hopeful and yes her to death. I felt bad for her, trapped in a room with a bunch of star-fuckers. She hadn’t even gotten a deal yet and already she would not be able to tell who her real friends were and who just wanted a seat on the gravy train. After an eternity, I got on stage and did my set. I was using the New York chapter of the Malone Band tonight. Richard Crooks on drums, Arun Luthra, Chuck MacKinnon, and one-of-a-kind-trombone-and-ukulele-phenom J. Walter Hawkes in the horn section. Chris Landi was playing bass. I met Chris 10 years ago in L.A. when he was living out there. He was the original Malone Band bass player back when I played every Tuesday night at the Chimneysweep Lounge in North Hollywood. That place was a dump, but I met a lot of people there who are still in my life all these years later. The ‘Sweep was a real old man’s bar, where the same people would sit on the same stools seven nights a week all day and night and get blotto on scotch, bourbon, and beer. No blender. Chris was then, and still is, one of the most obscenely talented people I know. He plays dozens of instruments well, and was a classical trumpet prodigy as a kid. He got offered a full scholarship at the Julliard School of Music. I got a rejection letter. Chris can play any tune once and have it memorized for the rest of his life. What he likes best is to plug a cig into his mouth, have a couple of beers, and sit on a stool and play bass all night. That works for me. Once, when I was recording a tune and lamented that I needed a trombone player, Chris told me not to worry – he had bought a trombone for fifty bucks at a garage sale a while back, and had been meaning to learn how to play it. “Give me a week.” He said. “A week! How can you learn to play the trombone in just a week?” “Well, it plays the same notes as any other instrument, it’s just a different shape.” He came back a week later, trombone in hand, and nailed the part. We had a good show at the Bitter End this night. My crowd, plus most of the Dave’s True Story crowd hung in for the late start. As I sat up there, I thought: everything here is exactly the same as the last time I did this gig except that this time I’m sober. Playing sober was turning out to be more fun than playing drunk ever was. Also, last time I was here, Kelly Flynt was pregnant, and now she’s a mom. That summer before, she had sat backstage with a big ol’ tummy and that powerful earth mother glow that pregnant women get. It’s a power that you have to stand back from. In the presence of a pregnant woman, you realize that, as a man, you are little more than a means to an end, a small part of the life-puzzle. For all of the male of the species’ bluster and blow, it is a woman’s world. There is no greater power in the world than when that birth engine is firing on all cylinders. Last year, in that dirty Bitter End back stage, all of us mere men crowded in awe around the glowing woman, and one by one we put a hand on her belly – on that powerful engine that renders us all weak and powerless in its wake.
Day Eighteen Tonight I was opening for Johnnie Johnson at the Turning Point in Piermont, New York. This was my second time opening for Johnnie at this same club. Johnnie Johnson is one of my all-time favorite piano players. If rock and roll ever had an unsung hero, this is the guy. Johnnie Johnson played piano on most of Chuck Berry’s hits. For reference, get out your copy of The Great Twenty-Eight by Chuck Berry and put it on the turntable – this music is best heard on vinyl. Don’t have a turntable? The CD will do, as long as you play it real loud. Don’t have a copy of The Great Twenty-Eight? Put down this book and get your lame ass to the record store! Johnnie Johnson is a quiet, sweet-natured and modest man. Yet he has much to crow about. Besides being one of the finest jump and boogie pianists that has ever lived, he also invented the famous opening guitar lick that is heard on so many of the Chuck Berry classics. Everybody who’s picked up an electric guitar over the last forty years has learned that lick. Chuck transcribed Johnnie’s tasty piano lick over to guitar, and the rest is, as they say, plagiarism. Not to take anything away from Chuck. Chuck Berry was rock and roll’s first great songwriter. He wrote the blueprint for everything that would come after. Still, the little matter of the origin of the intro to “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven” and all the rest needed clearing up for those of you who didn’t already know. I left the Upper West Side at 6:30, drove up the West Side Highway to the GWB, crossed over the Hudson to the Jersey side, and took the Palisades Parkway back up into New York State. I was in Piermont forty five minutes later. Probably a ten-minute trip as the crow flies, but the crow doesn’t have to go by way of Fort Lee. Since I was opening for another piano player tonight, soundcheck lasted about twenty seconds. I love that: nothing to carry, nothing to move, nothing to adjust, no treacherous nest of guitar stomp-boxes to carefully tiptoe over while setting up your keyboard. No microphone stand with guitar-picks taped to it for the star to throw at the groupies. No groupies. Sigh…it’s a guitar-player’s world, I just live in it. I set up my CD display in the back and waited for the room to fill up. The Turning Point is a small club, but a lot of acts that normally play bigger venues like to play here ‘cuz the joint’s got vibe. Last time I played here, I was telling the owner how I wished I could have caught the NRBQ show the night before. This brought about some amused grumbling. Terry Adams, NRBQ’s piano player, always brings a real grand piano to every gig. There is a small electric piano on the stage of the Turning Point that is already taking up way too much valuable space (every time I look at it, all I can think is: that’s three paying customers – four if you count the piano-stool!). When NRBQ gets that grand piano wedged on the stage, with its ass end hanging out past the front of the stage and being held up by cinder-blocks, boards, and milk-crates, they end up losing seating for about ten people. Every year NRBQ sells out two shows at the Turning Point and always asks why they never get a raise. The owner tells them they can’t get more dough unless they lose the piano so they can cram more paying customers in the room. But the piano is not negotiable. No piano – no show. That story made Terry Adams my goddamned hero. Right fucking on, baby! I can’t wait for the day that I can demand a grand piano at every gig no matter how much it pisses people off! The thing is, you see: we’re piano players, not keyboard players. It’s a whole different instrument. Every night that I don’t play a real piano because of space or money (mostly money) is a night I really haven’t gotten to play my instrument. The Turning Point gig was very cool, as it always is. I had to sit on the edge of the stage and wait to go on because the room was so packed I’d have never been able to get across it. We did two shows, both sold out. After my set, I got to watch Johnnie Johnson play. He was his usual wonderful self, and the people loved him. Between sets I schmoozed the radio guys that were playing my record on their stations, collected CD sales cash, operated the credit card machine, and signed autographs. Multitasking, I believe they’re calling it now. After the second set, I went backstage to visit with Johnnie and also got a chance to talk to Jimmy Vivino, who is Johnnie’s guitar player and bandleader when he comes to New York. Jimmy is a fine blues guitarist, best known as the guitar player in the band on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Jimmy said he’d recently seen me on TV and really dug my act. Seven years ago, I had taped an installment of a L.A. cable-access show called “A Man, A Bass, and a Box Of Stuff.” The “man” of bass and box of stuff fame was my friend Ritt Henn, a fine bass player with a deeply weird streak. Ritt had moved to New York recently and was re-airing all of his old shows on the Manhattan Cable Network. That’s how Jimmy Vivino, of Conan O’Brien fame, came to be sitting on his couch with the remote at three in the morning, watching me. In this business, you just never know…
Day Nineteen I left New York on a disconcertingly warm January morning. It was nearly seventy degrees. I couldn’t help but think that we had finally gone one too many cans of hairspray over the line, and that ozone hole was about to become more than something you just read about every so often in Time magazine. I stood at the corner of Columbus and 96th and looked around at all the happy people strolling in the unexpected sunshine. All of this will be under water someday, I thought. Filled with an unfocused dread, I got into the rental car and sped up the global-warming process a bit on my way out of town. I was headed for Rowayton, Connecticut. This seaside hamlet on Long Island Sound was just far enough away that I didn’t want to drive back to the city after the gig, and just close enough that I felt guilty squandering money on a hotel room. Rowayton is a nearly picture perfect New England coastal town. Saltbox cottages and little shops. Seagulls on pilings. Clamshell driveways. Boats floating lazily in the bay. I got to town early and it was a beautiful day, so I parked the car and wandered the town. There were a lot of unpleasant rich people about, with large poles lodged in their rectums, which spoiled the experience for me somewhat, but I decided to ignore them. At least they had kept their town from going to shit. I looked at overpriced tchachkies in tasteful store windows, and had lunch a sub shop. Looked for my name in the Calendar section of the local paper. Bought Karen a Valentine’s Day card. It was times like this that I missed her the most. I wrote mushy stuff in the card that you are never going to see, and dropped it in a mailbox. There were no hotels in Rowayton, so I drove back out to a Ho Jo’s by the interstate. I bet you anything there used to be a grand old Victorian pile of a hotel in that town, and it got bulldozed during our long hell of postwar architectural unenlightenment, by people who thought a squat, featureless box with a garish plastic sign on it surrounded by an acre of parking lot would look so much better. Tonight I was playing an acoustic concert series run by Brandi Hayden, a large, jolly African-American woman of unknown vintage that I was fortuitous enough to meet two years ago at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. She’d been operating a cookie booth just behind one of the stages, and heard my show. After that, she was determined to book me at her Good Folk Coffeehouse series. I would have come just for Brandi Hayden’s cookies. The gig was in the Rowayton Methodist Church. I headed to the performers “green room,” which was actually the children’s classroom: a room full of very small chairs, very low tables, and lots of primary colors. I felt like a sinister interloper. Much to my surprise, there was a guy in here that I knew. Montgomery J. “Minty” Delaney, itinerant folk-singer, ex-cop, and practicing attorney was sitting on one of the kid-sized tables, tuning his guitar. Minty had written a song about Karen, inspired by her special combination of politics and pulchritude: “The Folk Babe.” We called Karen on the cell phone and sang a verse of “Folk Babe” to her answering machine. She called back later, delighted. Minty, it turned out, would be doing a few tunes to open the show tonight. Then I’d split the bill with folksinger Terence Martin. Fred Vigdor, who plays sax with Average White Band, lived nearby and came down to play a few tunes with me. Fred’s a great musician, a very well read guy, and a real smartass – so from the very first time we met, we took to each other right away. The last time I had seen Freddy V. was in fall of 2000 when I opened for AWB at House Of Blues in New Orleans. That was a rip-roaring good time – at least what I can remember of it. The gig we did before that, however, was under far less pleasant circumstances. It’s a story worth telling, if you’ll detour with me for just a moment. From my 2000 tour-diary:
My show here in Rowayton was everything that Albany gig wasn’t. It was exactly the kind of gig that has kept me on the road even as my taste for the road life has evaporated. The crowd was listening, they were getting it, and they were with me every step of the way. Fred played very cool sax on a couple of tunes (reminding me of what my friend Neale Eckstein was purported to have said the first time he heard me at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with a full horn section: “Now that’s how I like my folk music!”), and I did two encores. I don’t think it’s all that strange that I mostly play for folk audiences, even though what I do is far from folk music. I think many of these people aren’t looking so much for a specific kind of music as they are looking to be moved by something real. In this increasingly corporate-dominated pre-fab world, musical acts are packaged, marketed, and disposed of like so many boxes of cereal. In early twenty-first century pop-culture, incompetence has become the accepted status quo. The ability to get on stage alone, with no props or fancy light show or dancers, and sing and play real songs about real life – and do it well – is a commodity people now have to go outside the mainstream to get. People come looking for that, more often than not, on the folk scene. I am proud to be a part of it. Day Twenty It was sunny and warm outside my motel room window, and I had the day off. I drove up to Hartford to see Mark Twain’s house, a wonderful, fanciful Victorian pile on Farmington Avenue. What was a pastoral setting for the twenty years that Sam Clemens and his family lived there, was now crowded on every side by ugly condos and apartment buildings. The house still gleamed on its grassy perch in spite of it all. Mr. Twain loved this house more than any other place he ever lived, and when he was driven from it by a series of foolish business dealings that left him all but bankrupt (as a businessman, Sam Clemens made an excellent writer), he was never again quite as happy. The tour of the house was wonderful, but the plush Victorian furniture and sumptuous tapestries on the lower floors were strictly his wife’s domain. Livy Langdon was born into Gilded Age wealth and power and Mark Twain – former itinerant newspaperman and riverboat pilot – had to work very hard to get her to marry him; and to get her family to approve of their daughter running off with such a lowborn sort. On the third floor I really felt the ghost of Mark Twain. Up here were the servants’ quarters and Sam’s writing and billiards room. This was the place. I could feel him here. This is where Sam would shoot pool, smoke cigars and drink whiskey with the likes of Bret Harte. This is where the good book ideas were conceived at three in the morning when the rest of the house was sound asleep. This was where Sam Clemens really lived. Few of his books actually got written in this study. Most were written when the Clemens family spent their summers in rural tranquility up in Elmira, New York. The Hartford house was a social scene, with people constantly dropping in all day. There was a balcony off of the third floor that Clemens called the “stepping-out balcony.” When the stream of visitors became intolerable, he would go out on this balcony and his wife would tell guests that Sam had “stepped out.” Two annoying women in our tour group clearly had never read a word Mark Twain had written, and probably would not have gotten it if they had. They were there to view the antiques. They could barely disguise their impatience with the tour guide, who wanted to tell us about The Innocents Abroad and Life on the Mississippi. They wanted to know about the wainscoting and the china pattern. I bought copies of Following The Equator and Roughing It in the gift shop, and floated out the front door of Mark Twain’s house in an agreeable mood. It was an easy drive back to New York and a late dinner at Empire Szechwan on Upper Broadway. Day Twenty-Four Today I was supposed to do a radio show in tiny Jeffersonville, New York, two hours from New York City out in Sullivan County. Very close to Bethel, home of Yasgur’s Farm. Two years ago I played the “Greenstock” festival there on the site of the original Woodstock festival. Lots of mud. Lots of body odor. Lots of stoned people wandering aimlessly. Complete lack of organization backstage. I ended up going on three hours late. In the middle of my set, as I fiddled furiously while Rome burned around me, a couple of crew guys, baked out of their skulls, began to set up a drum set for the next act right in front of me. It made me very glad to have missed Woodstock the first time around. I would not have made a good hippie. A few days from now, I’d be headlining a show at the Braman Arts Center in nearby Callicoon, so it was important to get out there and hype up the show. But a massive cold front had swept down out of Canada and kicked New England and most of New York State squarely in the ass. Sleet, freezing rain, fog. I began thinking fond thoughts about Los Angeles. Earlier in the week, I had met Ritt Henn (he of the bass and box of stuff) for breakfast at a diner on 98th Street. I was running late and had left with my hair not quite fully dry. By the time I’d walked two blocks, my wet hair had frozen to a rock-solid crack-glazed helmet on my head. This was, as my friend John Meadows is fond of saying: “wrong on so many levels.” I ate breakfast with Ritt while my hair thawed, dripping ice water on my eggs-over-easy and sausages. Today, I stared hopelessly down at the traffic on 95th Street and listened to sleet tick on the windowpane. Karen called me from West Hollywood. She was doing a little shopping on Sunset Boulevard and it was seventy six degrees. “I love L.A. on a day like this, don’t you?” She said. I tried to think of a disparaging witticism regarding the lotus-eaters in Hollywood and all that, but nothing came. Right then I longed mightily for Los Angeles, in all its sun-kissed self-absorbed glory. Maureen Neville (no relation to the brothers), who’s radio show I was supposed to be doing tonight, called to say that I probably shouldn’t come, they could just play my CDs, maybe do a phone interview. I told her that unless I died or wrecked the van on the way, I’d be there. I’d driven all the way across the country to work, and I wasn’t going to let the bad weather keep me from it. Besides, I had nothing better to do all day. I left for Jeffersonville four hours before I was scheduled to arrive, and still barely made it. It was a miserable icy crawl all the way. I drove down a steep hill to the radio station, contemplating the very real possibility that it could be days before I would be able to drive back up the hill, and went in. I liked this station because they had a real piano. I love anything that involves a real piano (unless the piano sucks – then it’s just a tease, and therefore worse). Last time I played here, Maureen had assembled a small live audience in the studio, a little concert on the radio. It had enabled me to sell a bunch of CDs and turn the radio promo into a moneymaker. Tonight, I was just barely able to make it here, let alone the locals, so it was just me and Maureen and the piano and the microphone. We had a very nice interview. I played a few songs, took a few phone calls, did a couple of station IDs, and about an hour later was back on the slippery road, headed back the way I came. I take a perverse pleasure in getting my job done under such trying circumstances. It’s perhaps only in moments like these that I can really justify to myself having a phony-baloney job like playing the piano and singing.
Day Twenty-Five I hadn’t played Syracuse in five years. And considering where my career was at five years ago, it was pretty much as if I hadn’t ever played Syracuse. That gig back in 1997 was the last in a dismal circuitous tour I had done starting in New Jersey, going as far as Chicago, and then heading back by way of Cleveland, Buffalo, and finally Syracuse. It had been winter. I played Borders bookstores in Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Indianapolis. The gig in Cleveland was in a tiny coffeehouse full of students grimly studying for final exams. They were not at all in the mood for my show. Streaking in a library is the closest analogy I can come up with for what it felt like to play that gig. Or farting loudly in church. The gig in Buffalo was cancelled…I found this out the day of the show, when I called to get directions. In Chicago, I did a three night gig at a Middle Eastern restaurant across the street from a lesbian bar. I played three sets a night for $100 plus all the falafel and scotch I could hold. I slept above the club in an unfinished attic on a dirty futon, listening to attic mice scurry across the floor…my futon a thin raft on a sea of dirty floorboards, dust kitties, clumps of bare electrical wire protruding here and there like random weeds, and hungry Chicago attic rats. The gig in Syracuse on that long-ago tour was perhaps the worst of all. It was a squalid snowy Wednesday, and I was doing a set prior to the weekly open mic night – the paid ringer warming up the room before the parade of inexperienced and often questionably talented performers began their assault on the stage. The entire audience was made up of dour, self-absorbed college kids, waiting impatiently to get on stage and do either: A: their bad Ani DiFranco imitation, or You would have thought that they’d be at least mildly interested in watching someone who was good at, and making a living at, what they aspired to do. But they gave nary a shit. They cared only for their ten minutes on stage, where they all played as if in a vacuum, oblivious to all but their pain, which they wanted above all to share with a room full of people who could not have cared less: isolated aspiring artists providing no sense community or support for each other. I’ve seen a lot of this all over the country. I don’t know how they do it. If it wasn’t for all of my musician friends to talk to and lean on through the years, I never would have made it this far. For such a long time, all we had was each other. Tonight, five years later, I was back at the same club – a listening room called Happy Endings – but this was a Saturday night and I was headlining. I was really looking forward to the gig. The night before, I had opened for the fine jump and blues guitarist Duke Robillard at Bodle’s Opera House in Chester, NY. I had become something of a regular there since that first gig back in ’98 opening for Somebody & the Something-or-Others. This latest gig with Duke Robillard had gone great, but it was another in a long stretch of opening slots, and I was dying to headline so I could stretch out and play a nice long show. Joe Cleveland, who books Happy Endings, met me at the door and we chatted a bit. The place had come a long way since I’d seen it last: nice stage, nice p.a., tiered theatre-style seating. Joe was getting the bigger acts now. He’s a real nice guy and it had been way too long since I’d seen him last. We grabbed opposite ends of the spinet piano lurking in the corner of the room, and lifted it up onto the stage. I hooked my pickups to the back of the piano and we did soundcheck. The piano was a funky little thing, but not bad. This gig was one of the shows I was supposed to split with Carla Ulbrich, who was now laid low recovering from a stroke down in south Florida. Between the two of us, we’d been confident that we could fill the room, but on my own, I was not so sure about that. I wasn’t completely sure that anyone would show up. The single blurb I was able to find about the show during my perusal of the local rags said: “Folk singer Bob Maroney brings his guitar and introspective songs to Happy Endings tonight, $12.” A small but respectable crowd gathered – many from my mailing list, who had been waiting a long time for me to show up here – and I had a good show. This was the first headlining gig of the tour. I wallowed in the luxury of time, and gave then a solid hour and forty-five, plus encores. Joe and I had some dinner around the corner after the show, and then he dropped me off at the house I was staying at that night. It was a real nice twenties-vintage craftsman house in a chichi neighborhood. There was nobody there, so I made myself reasonably at home. I didn’t even meet the couple that owned the place until the following morning. I called Karen on the cell, checked the e-mail, checked the fridge, read a few chapters of Following The Equator, and dropped off to sleep under a snowy-white comforter…a gypsy in the palace.
Day Twenty-Six Callicoon-on-the-Delaware had a short vogue as a resort town from the turn of the century through the beginning of the Depression, and things have been pretty slow there ever since. Playing a small town in the middle of nowhere in New York State, I’ve found, is not like playing a small town in the middle of nowhere anywhere else. So many of these places in the Catskills, and along the upper Hudson River Valley, and down here along the Delaware river, and in the Leatherstocking Region, are full of ex-pat New Yorkers who left the big city for the tranquility of the country, but they still want their culture. There is more arts appreciation in many of these out-of-the-way New York backwaters than there is in the whole of Los Angeles. While these small towns continue to allow true artistic expression to flourish in splendid isolation, L.A., with its vast global influence, continues its quest to systematically lower our standards. I drove along the short, perfectly preserved 19th century main street of Callicoon until I found the Braman Arts Center, a narrow one-room storefront filled with folding chairs facing a small stage at the end of the room. The wonderful couple who ran the place – a ballet dancer from New York and a classical actor and comedian – also lived in and operated the B&B I would be staying at just across the river in Pennsylvania. They were setting up for the show when I arrived. There was a p.a. ready to go, and an upright piano. A very old upright piano. This piano hadn’t been in its prime since ragtime was the cutting-edge thing. It was just barely in good enough shape to be played. I feared this show might be its last. But it was tuned and it was there. It was Super Bowl Sunday, and only eight tickets had been sold for my show. I wasn’t worried. For those of us with no interest in football, Super Bowl Sunday can be an excruciating bore. Nothing else going is on, and everyone you know is in front of the TV, drinking beer and watching the game. I figured the entire tribe of football-haters in town, starved for entertainment options, would come to my show for lack of a better thing to do. The Sault Falls Inn B&B was a funky 1880’s farmhouse. You are greeted by a swirl of black cats and a white dog the size of a small pony, and a fat, sassy Rhode Island Red rooster that fears no man. I was shown to my room. It was small, in the Victorian manner, but very cozy. The bed was way up high, requiring a footstool to get to it. A small antique table was in the corner with a lamp on it. Fresh cut flowers and a couple of books on the table. Old tintypes on the wall. Except for an electric lamp, there was no trace of anything beyond the nineteenth century. This was as far from a chain hotel as you could get. It got me wishing that every venue I played was owned by folks who also happen to run a nice bed & breakfast. I set up my laptop on the table, shattering the nineteenth-century illusion. I was tired. Too tired to sleep, too tired to move. After a shower in an old claw-foot tub, I got up on the bed with Following The Equator. Our intrepid Mr. Clemens was in Australia, observing the plight of the Aborigines. “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion Between chapters, I looked up and noticed a number of ladybugs busily trundling around the light fixture above the bed. Two of them chased each other up the pull cord in a barber-pole swirl. I looked elsewhere in the room, and began to notice ladybugs everywhere. A plague of ladybugs. They somehow lent the room a festive air. Like all humans, I judged on looks rather than merit. A ladybug is just as much an insect as a roach or pill bug or beetle, but by virtue of its jaunty, polka-dotted covering, the ladybug is generally allowed to go on living. Had all these bugs been roaches, I would have stomped ‘em flat and complained bitterly to the management. But the ladybugs just made me think: what a nice place this is! Later, back at the gig, the place was packed. I emerged from backstage, said: “good evening, sports fans!” and launched into the first tune. The gig was hands-down the best of an already good tour. The piano was laboring mightily – you could hear all that old wood and moth-eaten felt clunking away in there – but it got the job done. I sold a record amount of product, signed many autographs, and met a lot of very wonderful people. Maureen Neville, who had put this thing together, was apologizing about the smallness of the room and the smallness of the town and the funky backstage and the piano. She used to book a club, and was therefore accustomed to musicians complaining. I told her not to worry – I’d never been happier. Back at the Sault Falls Inn, I was too far out in the sticks to use the cell phone, and I couldn’t get online. Cut off from the modern world, and enjoying it very much, I lit a cigar and spent the rest of the night reading Following the Equator, a book written when this house had been new.
Day Twenty-Seven I awoke in a buoyant mood. I was heading south to the land of Dixie, dropping winter like a bad habit. I have fond memories of the winter family vacations we took in Florida when I was a kid. Not just the vacations in Miami or St. Pete, but the trip itself. I sat alone amongst the luggage in the back seat of the ’72 Pontiac, with my books and Mad-Libs. Mom and Dad up front. Dad driving. We had eight-track tapes of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’ Greatest Hits, the soundtrack to The Sting, and Freddy Fender’s Greatest Hits (in 1995 and 1996, I did a few gigs as Freddy Fender’s piano player – Mom and Dad were very proud). Herb Alpert and The Sting were my favorite tapes on those winter trips. I made my poor, sainted, incredibly patient parents play them over and over. Herb Alpert got most of the play, because the Sting eight-track was defective and made a horrible squeaking sound. That just annoyed the shit out of my dad, who sat right next to the tape deck. To this day, when I hear “Tijuana Taxi” I get that holiday feeling. On these family trips, a couple of hours out of DC, the first Stuckey’s would appear, and sagging tobacco barns with Red-Man advertisements painted on the roof. That’s how we knew we were really in the South. We’d get up the second morning, somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, and have breakfast. This would be the transitional moment of the trip where a friendly waitress with tall hair would ask: “Y’all want grits with that?” My parents, Yankees to the core, not only didn’t want grits with that, they found the whole idea of grits offensive. Southern cooking must seem mighty extravagant to someone raised on New England food. New England cuisine is plain and reserved and sensible. Southern cooking is rich and bawdy and often eccentric. New England – Maine in particular – is a place where salt and pepper are considered exotic spices. Anyway, my next gig, the Lowcountry Blues Festival, was in Charleston, South Carolina, so I would be taking at least part of the family winter migration route for old time’s sake. Charleston is one the most beautiful cities in America. As post WWII America was expending much of its considerable energy tearing down as many of its architectural treasures as possible and replacing them with cheap, ugly pre-fab modernist boxes, Charleston stayed just as it always had been. I got an early start – a real rarity for me – but knowing you can leave a place where it’s gray and cold and wake up the next day in a place where it’s balmy and warm is a great motivator.
Day Twenty-Eight By late afternoon, I reached one of my traditional southbound stopping-off points: The JR Cigar Outlet in North Carolina. JR Cigars has the largest walk in humidor in America, low low prices, and a great selection. Over the years, the place has turned into a massive Sprawl Mart type of store, selling staple items in bulk and all kinds of tasteless cheap kitsch you’d have to live in a trailer in North Carolina to love. After threading my way through the milling hoards of overweight, chain smoking women in polyester stretchy-pants and men in sweat stained wife-beater t-shirts, and traversing acres of Cheese-Whiz cartons, Hamburger Helper cartons, plastic potted palm trees, and Virgin-Mary-and-the-Baby-Elvis lawn sculptures, I finally located the walk-in humidor at the back of the store. I stepped into a vast, high-ceilinged room full of cigars of every size, style and description. Carcinogenic heaven on earth. I stocked up on my various favorites. The “cigar of the week” was the Aristoff, normally a pricey smoke but two bucks a stick here – how could I resist? I picked up a couple of those. I went back out to the van and lit up one of the Aristoffs. Ahhh. A satisfying blue tendril of smoke drifted up towards the rear view mirror. I was feeling good, smoking a good cigar, on my way to a beautiful city to play a great blues festival. I had survived the bad transmission, the drive across Wyoming, and the Chinese food at a truck stop in Utah. I was sober. I was getting paid to do what I love. I had a long pull on the stogie and thought: I am one lucky son of a bitch. Soon I began to see the first of the billboards for the infamous South Of The Border. South Of The Border is an unabashedly tacky monument of kitschy souvenirs, cheap tourist tat, cheap Chinese fireworks, and greasy truckstop cuisine. It features the tallest statue of a Mexican east of the Mississippi. I love the place. I can’t help myself. We always stopped there on the way to Florida when I was a kid – after 120 miles of billboards for something like that, what parent could resist the pleading of a bored kid in the back seat? Stopping at South Of The Border always signaled the official beginning of the vacation in my kid-mind – they sure didn’t have a giant neon-encrusted statue of a Mexican named Pedro in New Jersey! The billboards were as tasteless as ever, featuring the aforementioned mascot of the place, a stereotyped cartoon Mexican named Pedro, and emblazoned with witty repartee like: “I never sausage a place!!! Everybody’s a wiener at Pedro’s!!!” South of the Border mugs, keychains, lighters, and beach towels. South of the Border umbrellas, refrigerator magnets, plates, coolers, and fans. South of the Border basketballs, baseballs, footballs, and golf balls. South of the Border Frisbees. South of the Border bathing suits, t-shirts, tank tops, shorts and underwear. South of the Border guitars, mobiles, salt and pepper shakers, back-scratchers, clocks, watches, oven-mitts, barbecue tongs, postcards, hats, earrings, necklaces, rings, lunch-boxes and tampons. OK, no tampons, but I bet they tried! There were also a number of other great things here I hadn’t seen in years. Rubber sharks. Rubber alligators. Rubber spiders. Giant straw sombreros. Chia Pets. A giant plastic shark anchored the back of the room. I was hoping to find some seashells. That’s mostly what I bought here when I was a kid, and I always buy a shell for Karen when I’m on the road, it’s a tradition with us. I found a dusty shelf with bins of seashells in the back, and picked up a couple. Across the street was Pedro’s Hamburger Heaven. I could smell the odor of unclean grill and overused fryer oil from all the way across the street. I bought a cheeseburger and fries. The fries had that fried clam undertaste that happens when they cook the potatoes and the clam strips in the same deep fat fryer and never bother to change the oil. It’s a taste sensation, as far as I’m concerned. Usually one has to go to the Jersey Shore to find grease of such stature. I strolled around some of the different shops – mostly it was more of the same. As I looked closer, and stayed longer, my coveted childhood memory began to wither and become corrupted by the tawdry and faded reality of the place. So I left. I drove on down to Charleston and located the downtown residence of the people who were putting me up for the next four days. No one was home, so I let myself into the downstairs apartment where I’d be staying. I could not believe my good fortune. The room was beautiful and tranquil, done up in a tasteful Cape Cod/Outer Banks/Lowcountry beach décor with a few antiques thrown in. A kitchen, a stereo, a queen-sized bed. This was my third year in a row playing this festival, and the previous two years I had been put up at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel ten miles out of town. Of all the hotel chains in America, I have come to loathe HoJo’s the most. They have perfected the corporate mantra of cost-cutting, corner-cutting, and the customer is always wrong…as in, if the customer doesn’t like the dirty rooms, rundown hallways, and bad service: fuck ‘em; some other sucker will come along; it’s the cost of doing business; we’ve got location. The last two years, before going up to my room, I’d always get loaded at the hotel bar so I wouldn’t notice the cigarette burns on the bathtub, the holes punched in the plaster walls, the threadbare sheets, the moldy carpet, and the burnt-out light bulbs and anemic water pressure. This year I was moving up in status at this fest, staying at the plush home of some festival fans. Next year I might make it to the Mills House, swankest hotel in town. That was where they put up all the elderly, grizzled African-American blues legends. I really hadn’t minded staying at the HoJo’s so those guys could wallow in the lap of luxury. They had paid more dues than I would, and they’d built the musical foundation my house was constructed on. Without them, there would be no me. Plus, a couple of years staying at the Howard Johnson’s out by the railroad tracks undoubtedly made me play the blues a whole lot better.
Day Twenty-Nine In the morning I got a call from the homeowners upstairs. There were bagels and lox – come on up! I spied the mezuzah on the door as I walked in, and again smiled at my good fortune. I had been delivered, praise God, to a home of that rarest and most welcome of creatures in this land of fundamentalist morons and fried everything: Southern Jews. I’m most comfortable around Jews. My fiancée is Jewish. My last three ex-girlfriends were Jewish. My band – mostly Jews. Also most of my friends. They tell me I’m an honorary Jew – a great honor indeed. I munched on bagels with raw onions, cream cheese, capers, and lox, drank coffee, and met the family. They were awfully nice. My ability to do what I do for a living had depended so much on the kindness of strangers such as these. For all the jerk-offs, liars, scuzballs, wannabes and morons I’ve met playing music for money, I’ve met just as many kind and generous folks who have made their home mine when I’ve needed a place to stay. The Lowcountry Blues Bash was a “club-crawl” type of event, instead of having the festival in one location, they had music in many venues all over town. Many of those venues were not the type of place you would expect to hear loud blues music in. The first year I played, I did a set on a grand piano in the lobby of a chi-chi downtown hotel. Normally, this is where some poor slob (me, in a former life) would play background music softly for hours while indifferent patrons checked in and sipped watered-down drinks at the bar. The only time anyone would acknowledge your presence was to either tell you to play softer, or to ask you to play a really horrible tune, probably by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I walked in after driving all that day and my wind was immediately up: this was going to be a disaster. But it was not what it seemed. There was a p.a. system set up, and rows of folding chairs, filled with blues aficionados and just plain folks who loved the blues. My set was a rousing success. The following day, I played in a large recreational center on a stage under a basketball net, for about 500 people. That was also the year I got to be King for a day. From my 2000 tour journal: Between February 1 and February 28, I logged nearly 8,000 miles in my trusty green minivan. The tour began in Omaha, Nebraska, progressed to the edge of the continent in Charleston, South Carolina, and ended on a foggy night in St. Paul, Minnesota. How’s that for great routing? While playing the Budweiser Lowcountry Blues Bash in Charleston, I got to be King for a day. Earl King, that is. Earl King, a New Orleans music legend who wrote “Big Chief” among other Crescent City classics, was supposed to be headliner the same day I played. As it turned out, Earl King never did make it to South Carolina. I played an early evening show, and assuming I was finished for the night, was sitting at the bar of the Mills House hotel, working on my fifth (or was it sixth?) boilermaker. Playing another set that night was the farthest thing from my mind – I already had the check, by God! Gary Irwin, the festival promoter, burst into the bar: “Earl King missed his plane! You gotta help me!” He said. Before I had a chance to point out that I was too drunk to play, he had me stumbling up the street, drink in hand, to the Cumberland Club, three blocks away. The club was packed, the local backup band was on stage, the beer was free. I got up there and stomped my way through about 40 minutes of New Orleans classics, “Big Chief” included. The booze had liberated me from most of my motor functions, but muscle memory kicked in when I sat down at the piano, and I found that I was able to play the tunes quite well, in spite of the condition my condition was in. The crowd enjoyed this drunken high-energy spectacle immensely. I thanked the band, thanked the crowd and got out before they realized that it was over, and Earl wasn’t showing. It helped, of course, that most of the audience was in the same shape I was. Back to this year, 2002. My first show was at the Mills House hotel, and after it was over, the hotel manager offered dinner and drinks on the house. I ordered a dozen blue-point oysters on the half shell and a big ‘ol T-bone steak, very rare, with garlic mashed potatoes. No use holding back when the food is free. The tables were full, so I sat at the bar to wait for dinner. Since I quit drinking, nights like this have been the most trying. The setting was tailor-made for a night of imbibing in the Malone fashion. I had just done a great show, good jazz music soothed the ear while challenging it at the same time, the bar was softly lit, stocked with a fine selection of top-shelf booze, patronized by no one possessed of the dread “woo-hoo” gene, and the bartender was friendly and competent. I had an open tab, carte blanche to drink all the top shelf single-batch bourbon, single malt Scotch, and obscure microbrew beer I could hold, without having to pay a dime. I ordered a club soda with a lime: the official drink of the recovering alcoholic. Luke, the bartender, was a big friendly guy from New Jersey. Years of living in the South had added an agreeable expansiveness to his regular-guy-from-Jersey personality. He remembered me from when I played last year and was eager to set me up with a shot of bourbon and a beer, just like I liked. Like I said: he was a good bartender. In South Carolina, it is illegal to dispense liquor from full sized bottles. Do not ask me why. It’s the South, I don’t pretend to understand. In South Carolina, all hard liquor is served from mini-bottles. It’s disconcerting the first time you walk into a joint in South Carolina and see nothing behind the bar but hundreds of tiny bottles of liquor. You get used to it, though. I like mini-bottles – they put me in the mind of airplanes, and – by extension – adventure. Perfectly rendered miniatures of Makers Mark, Bookers, and Knob Creek bourbon bottles gleamed mellowly from the tastefully lit barback. Ol’ Jack Daniel and Jim Beam, two of my best loved road buddies until I had to kick ‘em out of the band, sat on the shelf below. A woman directly to my left waved a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale around as she talked a little drunkenly to her friend. The spit in my mouth turned electric as I watched drops of the amber beer spilling out of the bottle onto the shiny mahogany bar. The waitress trundled off to a dark corner of the room with a tray containing two frosty margaritas, not pulverized in a blender, but over ice, with salt – the way they should be. A man in a suit to my left ordered a Belvedere vodka martini, up, very dry, with two olives please. All of my favorites. Why couldn’t I be in a sports bar surrounded by a bunch of college kids drinking MGD and Jaegermeister being served by an out of work actor? Joining in would have been the furthest thing from my mind. I was sitting at this bar only because a free meal was coming my way, and the bartender had invited me to this stool not knowing the conflict this would set off in my addicted little brain. I sipped club soda, forced my gaze from the bartender’s pouring hand, and settled back into the role of detached observer. Being a detached observer is how I make my living after all. I write songs. I need material. I observe myself as detachedly as I do anybody else. It’s cheaper than therapy. Speaking of therapy, there was a therapist’s convention in town. Everybody at the bar, except the bartender and myself, was a shrink. Three of them to my right had caught my show and liked it enough to buy CDs. They asked me to sign them. These ladies were agreeably blotto. They were a little loud, but not annoying. They were among the more endearing loud drunks I have encountered. Just three hardworking women on a short respite from kids and duties and jobs and husbands and cold upper-Midwest weather. The other shrinks at the bar smiled ruefully. We’d all been there. The women were cussing a lot and continually apologizing about it. You could tell they never uttered so much as a relatively tame “shit” in their day-to-day life – let alone all the “fucks” they were slinging about currently. A waitress happened by just as the trio had flung forth a fresh volley of obscenities. They said, “Pardon our French,” to which the waitress replied, “I don’t mind, I used to be a truck driver.” I added: “Who swore like a therapist.” This got a large laugh. That was my cue to leave. Like George M. Cohen said: always leave ‘em laughing when you go. I left a ten-spot for the booze-jockey, wriggled into my coat, lit a cigar, blew a cloud of blue smoke in the direction of the door, and followed it out.
Day Thirty I was doing my morning puttering around, enjoying a coffee and waiting to attain liftoff, when there was an alarmed knocking at my door. The lady upstairs asked if I wouldn’t mind moving my truck off the driveway. Transmission fluid was flowing freely from it as if a vein had been tapped. As far as I knew, my truck should not be leaking anything, least of all transmission fluid. The transmission was brand new for Christ’s sake! I quickly got behind the wheel just as I had been caught at the moment: barefoot, blind as a newborn kitten without my contact lenses in, and covered in nothing but a threadbare pair of sweatpants, and an unkempt mat of hair. I was, as my friend Renee Safier is fond of saying, at the “lowest possible ebb of my grooming potential.” The transmission started bumping and whining as soon as I put it in gear. Shit. Now what? I hauled out the Yellow Pages and called Doug, the head mechanic at my friendly Charleston Dodge dealer. Exactly one year before, I had played this very same festival, driven to it in this very same van, and had lost a transmission along the way. I was barely able to limp the sorry thing into the garage before the game was called entirely. I rented a car for a week to continue my tour while Doug twisted wrenches on my tranny, and then I went 800 miles out of my way to come back to Charleston and pick up the van. This is how I came to know Doug. The rebuilt transmission he’d put in last year was what I had just replaced in Danbury two weeks ago. Visions of this same horror of a scenario flashed through my mind as I drove to the Dodge Dealer out in the strip-mall-fast-food-cheap-hotel-car dealer belt around the outskirts of town; the truck grinding and squealing all the way. There was a certain black comic irony to all of this. More proof to back my theory about the meaning of life and the capricious turnings of the universe: the glass is neither half full nor half empty. There is no fucking glass. I walked up to Doug at the counter as if I had been there just yesterday. “Bob!” he said amiably, “What’s up? Y’all playing the blues fest again?” “Uh, remember that transmission you put in last year…” Gary, the festival promoter, would be picking me up here on his way back from a run to the airport, so I had an hour to wait. I dropped off the truck, went across the road to the local Awful House*, and ordered the Triple Bypass Special (would y’all like a side of lard with that?). After Gary dropped me off back in town, I spent the day wandering the wonderful brick and cobblestone streets of Charleston, and did a set that night at Mistral, walking distance from where I was staying. Mistral was also the home of some very credible French cuisine, so after the show, I got a table in the back and had myself a plate of fromage and some escargot. Ahh…snails and stinky cheese. Ya gotta love the French…for that at least. * For the uninitiated, I am referring here to the Waffle House, a chain of roadside greasy spoons only seen south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Also sometimes known as a “Huddle House” when someone has purchased an out-of-business Waffle House and can’t afford to change the whole sign. These establishments, like pickup trucks, gun-racks, Confederate flags, and house-trailers, are very common in the American Southeast. The amount of lard they use during the preparation of their various dishes would be considered highly unacceptable in all other parts of the country – of course, so would dating one’s sister, but it’s a different world down here.
Day Thirty-Five – Fat Tuesday I heard from the Dodge Dealer in the morning – the spetzer-valve or something or other had been put in wrong and was hemorrhaging transmission fluid all over the place. The patient, however, was not critical; it was easily fixed for a relatively low sum of money. I reclaimed the van and headed directly to the studios of WYBB – Charleston’s Classic Rock Station. Although WYBB, being a tightly formatted commercial rock and roll station, was not going to be putting my CDs in regular rotation any time soon, they were promoting the blues fest, and a lot of people would be listening to this live interview. The DJ, Mike Allen, was a real good ol’ boy and we got along famously. We had some laughs, and he spun some tunes from my new CD. I played a couple of things live, and took some phone calls from the listening audience. I had two gigs to do this evening. The first was at the historic Charleston Circular Church. The Circular Church is just what it claims to be: the hall inside is perfectly round, and made of wood from top to bottom, lending it particularly fine acoustics. The original building was built in 1804, burned down around the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, and was rebuilt on the original foundation in 1890. I arrived early and meandered through the late afternoon stillness of the old graveyard, passing headstones going all the way back to the mid 1700s, when the first church had been built. Entering through a back door, I slipped into the dimly lit sanctuary and sat down at the piano. It sounded wonderful in this room. I butchered a little Beethoven, and listened to the Steinway ring out in the wooden hall. A great piano and a great room together are unbeatable. It’s the only time you really hear a piano as it is meant to be heard. The gig – billed as a “Blues Vespers” – was wonderful, a real listening crowd and very enthusiastic. This was Fat Tuesday, and although New Orleans is the only place you can really get your Mardi Gras on properly, much of the crowd showed up decked out in full Carnival attire. I was a little concerned about singing my songs about drinkin’ whiskey and chasing cocktail waitresses and such in this setting, and expressed this to the people running the thing. They said not to worry about it – they knew what they were getting, and it was exactly what they wanted. After selling CDs and signing autographs, I was off to the Cumberland Club, about four blocks away, to do a Mardi Gras show. This was the scene of the Earl King incident, only this time I was supposed to be the headliner. And I wasn’t tweaked out of my skull. I played a couple of loud sets to a fun, energetic crowd. Did a lot of Mardi Gras tunes. It was a younger crowd than I usually played to, and I was glad and a little surprised that they were enjoying the show so much. The next day I headed back north to the land of ice and snow.
Day Thirty-Seven Six weeks at sea. I wasn’t a sailor becalmed on a long ago tall ship, but as I drove the long miles from South Carolina back up to New York, I was beginning to understand that hopeless, cast-adrift feeling of loneliness one would feel on the open ocean, thousands of miles from home. In the days following, however, my mood brightened considerably. My drummer from Los Angeles, Jake Jacobs, had flown in to do the next week of gigs with me. I was looking forward to having a traveling companion. I picked Jake up at his Mom’s house in Livingston, New Jersey, and we headed into Manhattan to play at the Cutting Room. Instantly I was soaking up the camaraderie like those aforementioned sailors would have savored a fresh island mango after months of nothing but salt-beef with a rum chaser. Jake Jacobs and I have played music together for nearly twelve years. Early on, our relationship progressed quickly past professional deference to a toxic sibling-like relationship in which we fought like brothers. Two headstrong alpha males who should have known better. But he was the best damn drummer I’d ever played with, and he genuinely cared that my music be the best it could be. When we were on – which was often – we made the best music I had ever come close to making. And, looking back on all the nights I cared more for chasing skirts and drinking till I could no longer stand than I cared for turning in a flawless performance, I’m thankful he was there to be my most merciless critic. We fought, but we were always close. Jake is the brother I never had. We met during my first year in Los Angeles. I was twenty-five years old, and had lived my entire life in the Northeast. Just like everyone else, I came here to pick at the carcass of The Dream. I imagined the local music scene as it was when Little Feat and Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne and Steely Dan defined the So Cal sound – sadly ignorant that those glory days had been snuffed a decade before by a raggle-taggle hoard of hair-metal bands. Now I was stuck in Hollywood, expectations slaughtered, trying to make rent with any gig I could get, and experiencing severe culture shock. It was like moving to a foreign country. I had gotten a gig playing in the backup band for Filipino singing star Bekka. She supposedly filled stadiums back home, but here she could ride the bus unmolested. She was going to make her American debut at the Wilshire Ebell theatre in Los Angeles and we had two weeks to put the show together. The musical material for this show consisted mostly of covers of top-forty dance material (Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul – that type of shit) with a couple of the worst kind of over-dramatic, soppy ballads thrown in to compound the misery. The “musical director” was a perpetually drunken British rock guitar player who couldn’t read a simple chord chart, let alone lead a seven-piece band through a set of glossy dance-tunes. Or write charts and arrangements. Or tell us what key the tunes were in. Or play guitar. The drummer was a leaden, un-grooving, German heavy-metal thumper with a five-hundred piece drum-kit and absolutely no clue about the kind of music we were supposed to be playing. At the first rehearsal, with this Teutonic drum-abuser flailing away at his china-crashes and double kick drum – completely liberated from the concept of keeping time – we couldn’t manage to get through a single tune. During the break, the entire band took the musical director aside and told him that either he replaced the drummer, or he’d be replacing the whole band. Next rehearsal, in steps Jake Jacobs. He showed up with charts for all the tunes, detailed with various colors of highlighter and little anal-retentive lines and arrows drawn with a ruler, pointing at important things on his charts. He knew the tunes as if he’d been playing them all his life. He grooved like a bad motherfucker. And, most importantly – he was from New Jersey. The only keyboard I owned at the time was a Yamaha Electric Grand. This monster from the pre-digital palientoic era of keyboard technology was a real grand piano, but with much shorter strings than a regular grand, no soundboard (thus eliminating about a thousand pounds) and pickups built in (thus eliminating the tricky job of miking a piano). It broke apart into two pieces, making it easier to move than a regular grand piano, although not by much. The whole thing, assembled, weighed in at about 500 pounds. By this time, digital pianos – 400 pounds lighter and they never went out of tune – had been on the scene for quite a while, but I was still clinging to my old beloved axe. It was a real piano, and no matter how heavy it was, and how much money I blew having to get it tuned all the time, I was going to play a real goddamned piano! Ahhh, the convictions of youth. I used to move the piano by myself with a handtruck. Usually, by the time it was set up, I was too worn out to play the thing. So I’m standing in the hall after rehearsal, and I turn to the new guy – Jake – and ask him if he’d mind helping me move the piano out to my van. His first ever words to me, the words upon which a lifetime musical relationship would be based, were: “fuck you!” I was delighted – this guy had to be from New Jersey. “You from New Jersey?” I said. “Whadda you think? Are we going to move this fucking thing, or what?” A couple of weeks after the Bekka gig, I hired Jake to play drums on a demo I was cutting at the now defunct Group Four Recorders. My best friend Buzz’s wife worked there, and I had procured some free late-night recording time with Buzz as the recording engineer. After the basic-track session was over, we began an attempt to get female background vocals on tape. Things were going disastrously. I had not mastered the psychological techniques required to corral two high-strung chick singers and get them both pointed in the same direction. Jake, watching from the control-room couch as the session collapsed around me, stepped up to the mixing board and unceremoniously took the reigns. Two hours later we had a stunning background vocal track on tape, and Robert “Jake” Jacobs was not only my new drummer, he was my new producer as well. He has since produced every CD I’ve made. Throughout the first half of the nineties, I was playing every bar between L.A. and San Diego with my band. I had gotten a publishing deal and was madly showcasing my act, often a nine-piece band with trumpet, trombone, sax, drums, bass, guitar, and a constantly shifting pair of female background singers (depending on whom I was dating at the time). But many nights, the working for money nights – it was just me, Jake on drums, Lynn Keller on bass, Steve Stassi on trumpet, and Larry Goldman on Tenor Sax – and we were tight. I’m still amazed at the sound that little band made. One by one, the paying club gigs dried up in the Los Angeles area, the record deal everyone assumed I would get never materialized, and I took to the indie road: playing solo not because I was enamored with the sound of all-me-all-the-time, but because I couldn’t afford to pay a band. Larry and Steve and Jake and Lynn and I still play together sometimes, but sadly it is sporadic. I can’t afford to take them on the road, and the L.A. club scene is at a dismal low I don’t think it will ever recover from. Jake was there for all of it. Now we play more back east than we do in California. He’ll fly out, and we’ll use local bass and horn section and play New England, New York and New Jersey. He gets to visit his family, and I get my regular drummer in my best touring market. And after all these years, we have finally learned to get along. It feels wonderful. It feels earned. So many times I could have walked away from our constant bickering; now I’m profoundly glad I didn’t. We’ve both learned a lot, and now we have fun making music – which is how it should be. So now we were taking the Holland Tunnel into the city, to the Cutting Room. The Cutting Room is a somewhat swanky and hip-at-the-moment music club and bar in the heart of the Flatiron District, around the corner from the Flatiron Building (the first skyscraper in the world, built in 1901; most everyone at the time predicted that it would fall over for being too tall and skinny). The bar area is separated from the music area, so the talkers can talk and the listeners can listen. The bar area in front was moderately populated with post happy-hour office workers knocking back overpriced martinis at the rail. We went around to the backstage area with Jake’s drums, to wait for our set. A standard issue R&B cover band was on stage flogging the regular assortment of moldy chestnuts. It seemed a reasonably responsive and attentive crowd for a New York club. As we sat there waiting, various members of the east coast chapter of the Malone band wandered in. A guy I had never met showed up, trumpet in hand, and said “I’m playing with the next band, are they here yet?” I told him that he couldn’t possibly be playing with the next band, because we were the next band. He said, “No, I’m sure of it. I’m playing with Bob Malone.” The regular trumpet player had sent a sub, and didn’t bother to tell me. I gave the new guy the charts, and hoped for the best. When our time came, we went out and did a good show: nice and loud! The venue had a good piano, but my monitor speaker had been blown to shreds by some previous act, and so everything I sang and played sounded distorted, as if it were coming from a radio station a little too far away to get a good signal from. But that’s rock and roll! There’s no crying in baseball! I did my best to ignore it, and occasionally leaned my head towards the horn section’s monitor when I wanted to hear something that resembled music. The trumpet player was great. After the show, Jake and I prepared to walk back out through the bar to put his drums in the car and take the tunnel back to New Jersey. We were blocked at the stage door by a solid wall of humanity: hundreds of trendy young downtown types crammed in there like cattle, fully decked in black clothes and geek-chic specs. The din was spectacular. I could not fathom how any of this was supposed to constitute a fun night out. I nibbled around the edges of the crowd, trying out a loud but polite “excuse me!” I was roundly ignored. It seemed there was no way we were going to get those drums out of here without pissing off a whole lot of these yuppies-with-training-wheels. I didn’t mind. Nothing gives me more pleasure than tweaking the trendy, young, vacuous, and self-absorbed. Jake and I each grabbed a couple of drum cases and started batting the kids out of the way as if plowing through jungle underbrush with a scythe. Just as I thought I would suffocate on cigarette smog and claustrophobia, we burst through the front door onto the icy sidewalk. I don’t think I ever appreciated a blast of arctic winter air as much as I did just then.
Day Thirty-Eight The Muse at the Gray Goose II is a listening room in southern New Hampshire that I have been playing for years. It is a fairly major stop for the touring folk acts on the acoustic circuit. I started out here as an opener, progressed to headliner, and finally progressed to headliner with band. Kent and Meredith Baxter, the wonderful old Yankee couple who run the place, have been very kind to me from the start. The place seats a little over a hundred, cabaret-style, and is decorated in what can only be described as “New England Gift-Shop Traditional.” The walls are festooned with all kinds of country arts and crafts of the type you find north of Connecticut. It always looks vaguely like Christmas at the Muse. I often find myself sitting on a handmade doily while banging on their old spinet upright piano and shouting out my tunes about drinkin, cheatin, and living the blues life. The crowd is always wonderful, and tonight was no exception. Chris Landi drove up from Long Island with his wife Jodi (whom he met back when he was our bass player in L.A. – eleven years ago) to play bass with us. We had a great show. We played hard for two hours without a break. Did two encores. After getting paid and bidding fond farewell to Kent and Meredith, Jake and I headed back to the home our old friends Bob and Sue Lynch in Andover, Massachusetts. There we commenced our traditional evening of hot-tubbing, cigar smoking, and (except in my case) tequila-drinking. We had a wonderful evening out there. Laughing and smoking and drinking and reminiscing as the water burbled and the snow fell on us. I’m not rich or famous, but this is the life I always dreamed of: making a living playing music with good friends for an appreciative audience, and making new friends along the way. I felt like the luckiest man alive that night. I only wish Karen had been there – then it would have been perfect.
Day Thirty-Nine In the morning, Jake and I headed back to New Jersey, land of our people. Tonight we were scheduled to play the Coffee With Conscience concert series. This monthly series raised dough for an array of good causes and was held at the Westfield, New Jersey Methodist Church. The event is run by Ahrre Maros, a quintessentially nice guy that everybody calls Arpie. He is a purveyor of fine coffee in Westfield and a Jersey boy through and through. As we got on the New Jersey Turnpike, the guy in the car in front of us pulled up to the unmanned toll basket, and instead of tossing in his fifty cents, he casually opened his door and foraged around on the curb below the toll-basket until he had amassed fifty cents from the scatter of dropped change one always sees there. He tossed the coins in and took off. Jake and I broke into spontaneous applause. Never before had I witnessed such a combination of faith and frugality. We found the church and loaded our stuff into the basement rec room, where the thing was being held. Finding out that the show was not going to be in the church-proper was a little disappointing…I was looking forward to another one of those nights where I would be sitting on a sacred Christian alter singing my songs of debauchery and putting a ruinous hurt on a church piano. We got the p.a. going and were shortly joined by our bass player for the night, Jeff Eyrich, who is one-third of Dave’s True Story, the band I played with at the Bitter End earlier in the tour. Jeff grew up in Los Angeles and had moved to New York to be with Kelly, his wife. He longs to return to sunny Southern California with the same intensity that I long to return to New York. We keep reminding each other of the downfalls of the places we live, so we’ll feel better about where we are. Mostly it doesn’t work. There is something about the place you’re from that you will always miss. The show went great, the audience was everything you hope for in an audience, and I sold so many CDs that I nearly ran out of product. Add to that the happy glow of playing to the hometown crowd. Jake and Arpie and I repaired to a diner just up the road after the gig for a late-night grease fix. As we contentedly munched patty melts and pigs-in-a-blanket in the red-linoleum booth, I told Jake: “No matter how far we travel, no matter how much we change, no matter what we do to better our lives and transcend our humble beginnings – sooner or later all roads still lead back to a diner in New Jersey.”
Day Forty-Three Three days off, and Jake and I were on our way back to Massachusetts. We paid the same tolls. We drove the same route. We stopped at the same truck stop near the Connecticut/Massachusetts border for gas and cigars and to switch drivers. We made it to Johnny D’s Uptown Tavern in Somerville, Mass, in not-a-whole-lot flat. Johnny D’s has been operating in the same location across the street from the Somerville Theatre for years. The joint is somewhat of a temple of roots-music worship and a lot of great touring blues, alt-country, and roots-rock acts play there. It’s got atmosphere to spare. The food is good, the drinks are cheap, the p.a. is great, and the guy that books the place is a real sweetheart. Still…it’s a bar. I’d much rather hang out there than play there. The Somerville Theatre across the street – where people play after they get too big to play Johnny D’s – is always there to greet me each year, as if to say: “Hey loser! Looks like another year went by and you still didn’t make the grade! Another gig at Johnny D’s, huh? Your whole audience at that club could fit in the first two rows of this place, you know! Bet you wish you were playing here instead of the joint across the street! Maybe next year, ya slacker!” I’d like the gig at Johnny D’s a whole lot more if not for its proximity to the Somerville Theatre. I actually did play the Somerville Theatre once, back in 1995. That gig was the catalyst for my whole dubious career as a gonzo-indie-touring act. I had been living in L.A. for five years, playing the bars, getting abused by the usual assortment of drunk yuppies, drunk college students, and just plain drunks, and getting turned down by every record company in town. The usual. Somehow, I had remained on a mailing list from the old days when I lived and played music in Boston, and received in the mail one day an application to enter the “Acoustic Underground Singer/Songwriter Competition.” In Boston. It is not mine to question the vagaries of fate. Having nothing to lose, and nothing much better to do, I entered…and was invited to the first round of finals. I bought a cheap flight to Logan Airport, did three songs at the Tam O’ Shanter club somewhere in the suburbs of Boston, and – much to my surprise – made it to the semi-finals. I flew back to L.A. and played bars for another four weeks. The following month I flew back out again and played the semi-finals at the Hard Rock Café in Boston. Mom and Dad came up from New Jersey to attend. That night I made it to the finals. The Ps were very proud. Back to L.A. again for more abuse. The final round was another month later in front of a packed house at the Somerville Theatre. A third plane ticket…but it would turn out to be worth it. All of the major Boston papers were there to review the show. Most anyone that mattered in the New England folk community was there. A win at this thing would pretty much guarantee a shot at all the A-list New England folk clubs without having to go through the standard send-your-demo-wait-three-months-we’ll-call-if-we’re-interested-please-send-another-demo-we-lost-the-first-one routine. Also, it was the first time I’d ever played my show in front of a crowd larger than 300 people. From the end of the first song, when the applause of those six-hundred-plus folks washed over me, I was hooked for life. I kicked ‘em square in the ass and won the male category. No one was more surprised than me. Especially as I was going up against some really fine New England singer/songwriters and I was this guy from California! A real upset. At the end of the show, I went out on stage with the other winners to accept my award. As I exited stage left, one of the crew put a virgin fifth of Jack in my left hand, and monster joint in my right. I went to the dressing room to partake and be interviewed by various representatives of the fifth estate. It was one of the top-five-most-rock-and-roll moments of my life. Which brings us back to Johnny D’s. So close, but yet…so what. We did the gig. Lou Ulrich, who was the bass player in my band when I lived in Boston in the eighties, held down the low end. The crowd liked us okay, when they weren’t talking and waving cigarettes at each other during the ballads. We got paid. We got fed. We were treated with respect. Nothing to complain about, really. But there weren’t six-hundred people hanging on my every word. There was no vast comber of applause washing over me at the end of the songs. There was no fancy stage lighting. And even though nowadays I would not have partaken of either the fifth of whiskey or the bomber joint, had they been handed to me after the show, it still would have been great if someone had offered something to ease the burden when I went backstage after the set. There is no backstage at Johnny D’s. We loaded out just the way we came in – through the kitchen – and made a late-night run back to New Jersey.
Day Forty-Six The final show in the Jake Jacobs segment of the tour was at a joint way out at the eastern end of Long Island called Paula Jean’s Supper Club, a Cajun restaurant that features blues bands on the weekends. Mostly local acts play there. The P.A. is so pitiful that you gotta bring your own if you don’t want to sound like there’s a guy holding down the “suck” button all night. The stage is tiny. The stage lighting consists of four bulbs. Usually at least one of them is out. It makes Johnny D’s Uptown look like, well…the Somerville Theatre. Yet, oddly, it’s been a highly enjoyable gig every time I’ve played there. Maybe because our expectations are so low. We bring in the horn section from the city, and the six of us cram onto the stage under the four-bulb light show. The crowd, up until the point you start playing, is focused everywhere but the stage, talking loudly and eating their dinner – looking like the last thing they want is for a six piece band to start playing loud music while they are already having a perfectly good time. Once the music starts – they magically transform into an enthusiastic listening crowd. It always freaks me out a little. We usually do two sets, sometimes three. In between sets, the owner, Peter Lutzen, treats us to a massive spread of his excellent Cajun cooking. It was great having Jake on this gig, because due to the length of the show, I had to reach back into the archives and dredge up tunes we rarely play anymore. Only Jake really knows them as well as I do, and as long as he does, it sounds as if the whole band does. Also, the close quarters on stage, while extremely uncomfortable, and not at all aesthetically pleasing, does create a wonderful energy amongst the musicians. We were on fire all night.
Day Forty-Eight I was on the final stretch, the back 40. I still had a week to go, but after a month and a half, that seemed a short enough time. I was heading south again, and this time I was going all the way – South Florida. First stop was Lexington, Kentucky. I made it from Clinton, NJ to the KY border in less than a day and a half – stopping only for gas and food and to sleep for a few hours at the Stupid 8 Motel in Staunton, VA, at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. In Lexington, I would be taping a segment of the Woodsongs Old-Time Radio Hour at the beautiful Kentucky Theatre downtown. The show is presented by a folksinger and writer named Michael Jonathan, who has made the absolute most of his big-fish-in-a-small-pond opportunity. Every Monday at six, that five hundred seat theatre is packed when they tape his show, which is syndicated on more than three-hundred NPR stations. Right before I walked out on stage, Michael said to me: “Don’t suck.” I didn’t. After the gig, I signed autographs in the lobby, then said a quick goodbye and slipped out the backstage door, into the van, and onto the interstate. Karen, who I hadn’t laid hand or eye on for nearly two months, was meeting me in Nashville, just two-hours away. That put some lead in my foot. A little too much lead. Just before the Bourbon County exit to the Makers Mark distillery, I got pulled over for a flagrant speeding violation. Speeding ticket number three. I considered telling the cop that I was in a hurry because I hadn’t been laid in two months (the Blueball Defense), but thought better of it. I also considered telling him that I had poured a substantial amount of my hard earned dough into the Bourbon County economy over the years, so he ought to go easy on me. I didn’t work that angle either. Karen met me at the door of chez Mike Williams about two hours later. What followed is none of your damn business.
Day Forty-Nine I had lured Karen away from her law school servitude by booking her to play in the round with me at Nashville’s Bluebird Café. Playing the Bluebird is an impressive addition to anyone’s resume, but for an alt-country/folk singer/songwriter like Karen Nash, it is absolutely essential. I got her the gig in the same fashion that I got the gig myself: nepotism. Mike Williams put me in the round with him there back in ’96, when nobody had ever heard of me, and pretty much ever since then, I can pick up the phone and book myself a gig at the ‘Bird. In the morning I inhaled coffee and headed down to Mike’s basement studio to put piano tracks on some of the tunes he was recording. That’s how I pay Mike back for the myriad things he’s done for me. It’s all I’ve got. I was a bit impatient this morning, as I really wanted to spend as much time as possible with my girlfriend, but Mike smoothed me through my bitchiness with uplifting witticisms such as: “Well, if you play it right, we’ll finish quick!” After the piano parts were done, the three of us headed down the street to a place that Mike and I lunch at whenever I’m in town: Fate’s Pig & Pie. It’s the last thing on Charlotte Pike before the urban sprawl abruptly ends and the Tennessee countryside begins. On the way, we passed a Waffle House, Mc D’s, Subway, Burger King, Cracker Barrel, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Arby’s, and a big ugly Sprawl Mart. It delighted me to pass by all those cookie-cutter joints to patronize a local place with personality. Fate’s Pig & Pie is your basic wooden bar-b-q shack surrounded by a dirt parking lot. Inside it’s picnic tables with paper towel rolls, Tabasco, jars of pickled okra, a bare-bones bar at the back of the room serving beer and a couple of perfunctory cheap brands of wine for the clueless, a wooden sawdust covered floor, and the finest bar-b-q ribs, chicken and pulled pork sandwiches in town. We lingered over lunch and had a lot of laughs. We were doing the early show at the Bluebird, six o’clock. There were rumors of snow on the radio and in the air, and on the way over to the club it began to flurry. Being from the Northeast, I found no cause for alarm, but I knew the locals would feel differently. South of Maryland, a half-inch of snow can paralyze a city. No snowplows, no salt for the roads, and most of all – no winter driving skills. The crowd would be small tonight. “In the round” shows at the Bluebird usually follow this format: four singer/songwriters with guitar or piano (or “88-string guitar,” as they sometimes call it down here – a Nashville stomach-turn-of-phrase I loathe nearly as much as “piano-picker”), take turns singing their songs, telling tales and trading quips. With the right four people, it’s a whole lot of fun. Besides Karen, Mike, and myself, Carla Ulbrich was supposed to the fourth. She was still laid up down in Florida, so we had to scare up a quick sub. Erik Moll, a good friend of Mike’s, happened to be in town. Eric is from Texas and Norway (now there’s a geographical combination you don’t hear too often) – he lives and plays half of each year in each place – and he plays a very cool Tex-Mex style of country music. The crowd was smaller than usual, but as enthusiastic as ever, we had a lot of fun, as usual. The Bluebird is always a great gig. After the show, we walked out the door into a raging, authentic snowstorm. We were supposed to do a late showcase at another club across town. We made a call and quickly confirmed that it was cancelled. Everything was cancelled. Nashville was cancelled. Out on I-440, we merged slowly into a crawling mass of traffic. People setting their brakes unnecessarily on the snow and ice, making the interstate look like a bumper-car concession at the Jersey shore. Southerners, when driving in the snow, are a menace and should not be allowed to leave the house. I feared my fellow drivers far more than the road conditions. The ten-minute trip back to Mike’s house took two hours, during which Karen and I grew increasingly hungry and cranky. Somehow, we got into an absurd argument about whether or not to eat at Waffle House, which was the first eatery we would come to at the exit for Mike’s, and likely the only place that would be open after ten p.m. on a weeknight. Nashville is not a late-night town. We raged on and on… till the debate reached fever pitch and we realized what we were doing. Then we couldn’t stop laughing. As it turned out, the Cracker Barrel just down the street from Awful House was open for bidness. We slid into the icy parking lot and loaded up on comfort food. The next morning, Karen was on a plane back to Los Angeles.
Day Fifty-One Two days after leaving the Nashville snow behind, I was in South Florida – soaking up the Florida sunshine and dodging the worst drivers in America. Combine the road rage and impatience that unchecked urban sprawl and its attendant congestion will spawn with the presence of six million or so elderly retirees well past their driving-prime, and you will begin to get a picture what it is to operate an automobile in South Florida. Swimming in shark-infested water with ten pounds of chum tied around your neck is far safer than driving down A-1-A on a Sunday afternoon. I painfully negotiated the entire length of the West Palm-Lauderdale-Miami corridor and made it to soundcheck just in time. I was playing at the Main Street Café in Homestead, the last Florida town before the mainland gives way to the keys. This was my first show in this part of the world since playing the South Florida Folk Festival in 1999. I was going to be opening two shows for a very talented singer/songwriter named Cosy Sheridan. Cosy and I both pulled up in front of the club at the same time and introduced ourselves. She was instantly likable: straightforward and pleasantly businesslike, free of any hippy-dippy folksinger tendencies. She was from New England – one of my people. There was a good crowd, and the show went well. I discovered that I pretty much had a gig for life at the Mainstreet Café – which was just fine with me. The people I encountered that night were the kind of people that make me very glad to be doing this for a living.
Day Fifty-Four Today was the day I would finally get to make my long-awaited cigar pilgrimage to Little Havana. Just off I-95 in downtown Miami is 8th street, known to the locals as Calle Ocho. Little Havana doesn’t look much different from the rest of Miami town, but it is a world unto itself. I parked the car and began a leisurely stroll down the boulevard towards the El Credito cigar factory. Along the way, the wonderful odors of Cuban cooking wafted at me from every direction, and salsa music blared from a multitude of doorway speakers. I’m an immense fan of both Cuban food and Cuban music, so I was very happy to be here. I hadn’t even gotten to the cigars yet, and it was already a great excursion. El Credito is the type of place you’d walk right by without noticing if you weren’t looking for it, but their cigar – the La Gloria Cubana – is world-renowned. I located the place – just a single storefront with a dirty window with a faded cardboard “El Credito” sign hanging in it, and walked in. There were a few old men rolling cigars at tables in the back, and a good sample of their wares displayed in the front of the store. I picked up a large handful of cigars and paid at the counter. These things go for eight or nine bucks a stick at cigar shops around the world – here they were two dollars. Three for the big ones. The entire transaction was done mostly with hand gestures. The English-speaking world is kept at bay here in Little Havana, which is part of its charm. Next stop was Moore & Bode, another shop whose cigars are spoken of with hushed tones amongst connoisseurs of the leaf. The proprietors were out for lunch. I stopped in at a gift shop next door and browsed for what must have seemed a suspicious length of time to the lady behind the counter. After forty-five minutes, the cigar store was still closed and I hadn’t purchased so much as a postcard. I picked out an ashtray and a fridge magnet and brought them to the counter. I fell into conversation with the very nice lady working there, who spoke English with a delightful accent. She told me that if I really wanted a great cigar, I should go across the street to a place called Tabacalera Las Villas. Arnold Schwarzenegger gets his cigars there, she told me. I headed over. It was an even more unassuming place than El Credito: an open stall with cigars stacked on tables in front; chipped paint on the walls; a wooden fan hanging from a tin ceiling, turning lazily. No labels on the seegars…and they were dirt-cheap! I grabbed a healthy selection and went in back to pay. In the dim rear of the store, surrounded by bales of tobacco and cigar rolling tables, a couple of guys were smoking the merchandise and talking over cups of coffee. The relaxed tropical air of this place slowed my heartbeat and brought a feeling of peace to my road-addled brain. For lunch I wandered down a few doors to a joint called Exquisito Restaurantand ordered a Sandwich Cubano. The place was a basic lunch counter, serving all manner of Cuban dishes. All signage was in Spanish. Nothing on the menu was the least bit Americanized or tarted up with faux gourmet touches for the gringo tourist trade. Just the basics like your mamma used to make – if your mamma happened to be from Cuba. The sandwich was so good it was all I could do not to order a second one. It felt strange paying for it with American dollars. Back on the street, I lit up one of the unlabeled cigars – a delightful smoke – and headed down the street to nowhere in particular. I was in no hurry to leave this place and plunge back into the stressed-out world of Anglo Miami. I eventually came to Maximo Gomez Park, a little piece of Havana beamed down into Broward County. Old men in summer-suits and panama hats sat at tables smoking fat cigars and playing dominoes. You could tell they did this all day, every day. Various onlookers loitered around the tables, watching the games. Some hours later, I floated out of there, feeling more content than I had in a long time. I headed back into the suburbs to do the last gig of the tour. Tonight’s show was an acoustic concert series run by a couple named Singer. I would be opening for Cosy Sheridan again. After soundcheck, I stepped outside into the balmy air to do my comprehensive vocal warm-up – which consisted of smoking a cigar and waiting to go on. Before I quit drinking, my vocal warm-up was to drink two shots of Jack Daniel’s and smoke a cigar. I’m still getting used to the new exercises. The gig was great. I got a standing O, and collected a record amount of cabbage at the CD table. A fine way to end the tour. After the show, I went back outside to depressurize and have another cigar. People came by to say hi on their way out. A few asked where I had bought the cigar, and I excitedly told them about my excursion to Little Havana. The majority of them nodded approval, but a couple of people were genuinely appalled that I had gone there. “Have you ever been to Little Havana?” I inquired of these coddled suburbanites. “Of course not!” They were offended that I had even asked. How amazing that they could speak of the dangers of the place with such conviction.
Day Fifty-Five I had one final duty before the long journey homeward. Three days before, I had gotten a call on my cell phone from my good friend Brian Pothier. Brian is a member of a great rock and roll band called Vesica Pisces that used to play all of the same clubs as I did back in the early and mid nineties when we all lived in Hermosa Beach. He’d also played guitar on a couple of my CDs. The band had signed to a record label based in Florida called Big 3 Records. The label was new and had obscene amounts of money. They had moved the whole band out to Florida a year ago, and put them up in a beach house in St. Petersburg to write songs for their new CD. Nice work if you could get it. Brian called to ask if I wanted to play some keyboard tracks on the new CD. “Where are you right now?” he asked. “Florida.” I said. “Where are you cutting the record?” I figured they were in a recording studio somewhere back home in Hollywood. “Florida.” He said. We set today as the date for me to come in and play. I was met at the studio in St. Petersburg by the band – we all went way back and it was great to see them again. It was also gratifying to see them finally getting the payoff for all their years of hard work. Jack Douglas was producing the record. He is a music business legend who has produced classic recordings by Aerosmith and John Lennon, among others. The studio was a hive of activity. Lead singer Kelly Fitzgerald was in one room doing a vocal overdub. One of the engineers was in another room mixing a tune that had been completely tracked. Another engineer was in another room doing some editing with the Pro-Tools machine. It must be great to have this much money to spend on a record, I thought. Their budget for lunch was about what I normally spend on a whole CD project. We had a great time. Jack Douglas’s production style was to mostly do nothing until he saw the band about to do something that would make them sound bad…then he’d step in and head the mistake off at the pass. He was an east coast guy, so we got along great. I played accordion and organ on a few tracks. After the tracking was done, I exchanged cigars with Jack; he was a real fan of the La Gloria Cubana, so I gave him one of those. He gave me one of the Drew Estates “Acid” cigars, which turned out to be one of the finest smokes I’ve ever experienced. I followed the band back to the beach house where we had some dinner, and they showed me around the pad. After dinner we sat on the deck overlooking the Gulf Of Mexico and talked about the old days and the future ahead. Around 10 p.m., I bid a reluctant farewell. I needed to drive five hours up to I-10 that night…the same I-10 that goes all the way to Santa Monica. This would cut nearly a day off the trip home. Sad to be leaving old friends behind, but elated to be finally heading home after two months away, I fired up the engine, fired up the Acid cigar, and headed on up the interstate.
Day Fifty-Six, Fifty-Seven, I awoke the next morning in a Best Western in Live Oak, Florida, right on the shores of the famed Suwannee River. This was quintessential Northern Florida – which is to say that it has nothing to do with Florida as we picture it, and everything to do with the rest of the redneck Deep South. I wanted to be out of here as quickly as possible. I stopped for breakfast at a café attached to the Southern Sportsman Gun & Pawn Shop. While I ate, I was stared at by taxidermied deer, squirrels, raccoons, and other critters that had been gunned down by one southern sportsman or another. They all looked terrified. It made me want to hunt up a few southern sportsmen and taxidermy them. Perhaps in poses typical of these animals in their natural habitat. Can of beer in one hand, dragging their wife by the hair in the other, sitting in a house trailer on a sprung couch in front of a TV with tinfoil on the rabbit ears. I got out of there and drove as fast as I could. Live Oak to San Antonio, Texas the first day. San Antonio to Willcox, Arizona the second day. Willcox to Los Angeles the third day. Home at last.
Day Sixty & Sixty-One I was at home for exactly one day before having to leave again. There was one more gig to do in Oregon before I could truly put my feet up. I had received a call one day at the palatial office suites of Delta Moon Records, a.k.a. the second bedroom of our apartment. The entire staff was there in their usual work attire, a.k.a., I was sitting at the desk in my bathrobe. “You have reached the palatial office suites of Delta Moon Records,” says I. “May I help you?” “I’d like to speak to you about booking one of your artists, Bob Malone.” “Sure. When do you want me to play?” The caller had seen me open for Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks at the Aladdin Theatre in Portland, Oregon earlier that year, and was interested in booking me to do my show at a big corporate shindig he was organizing in central Oregon. He was clearly surprised that I answered the phone. People often get the impression that I’m more successful than I actually am. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The gig was for the annual Oregon Waste Disposal convention. People in the garbage business. Being from New Jersey, I figured they’d all be mafia, but that would turn out to be incorrect. The money was great, and they were picking up the tab for the flight, the piano rental, and two days and nights at the Eagle Crest Resort in Redmond, Oregon. How could I refuse (no pun intended)? I flew into the Redmond airport and was taken directly to Eagle Crest Resort under heavy, lead-gray clouds. Central Oregon looked nothing like I thought it would. I expected the pine groves and green expanses of the costal region, but here it was high-desert country. Eagle Crest was a nice enough place, designed and decorated in late 20th century Rocky Mountain chateau modern. At the front desk, they wasted no time making me feel welcome: “It’s The Artist!! Right this way. We’ve been waiting for you!” (If this were L.A., it would have gone like this: “Oh, a musician. Go around back to the loading dock. Someone will be by in a couple of hours to show you to your quarters in the janitor-supply closet. Don’t touch anything while you’re in there. That’ll be $250.”) My two-room suite had a fireplace (fire already ablaze), kitchen, balcony, and a wonderful view of the Cascades looming up against the misty sky. I commenced with my traditional anal-retentive, obsessive/compulsive-disorder hotel room setup ritual. Lay toiletries out neatly by the bathroom sink, plug in the hair dryer, put the suitcase on the suitcase rack, hang up all the suits and dress shirts. Put the portable alarm clock and whatever book I’m currently reading on the bedside table. Get the laptop plugged in and up and running. This ritual goes a long way towards easing the dislocation I feel when I’m on the road…that feeling of having been pulled unwillingly from my rock and thrown into an alien body of water. I was invited to attend the big opening-of-the-conference soirée taking place under a big white tent just across from my room. There were piles of free food, all of it great, and an open bar…not that I had any drinks, but it was nice to know it was there. I wandered around for a bit with a paper plate piled high with food, and looked at the various displays for trash-collecting paraphernalia, and garbage truck companies touting their latest models. The Peterbilt Trashmaster 653-A with the Hydraulic Can-Crusher 980 – all new for 2002!! It was disconcerting – garbage trucks, like subway cars and taxicabs, are something I’ve never thought of as having ever been new. I worked a club soda and was introduced to various important people in the Oregon Waste Management community. As soon as was polite, I slipped away and headed back to the room. The next day, I awoke in a deluxe bed at this tranquil resort, this peaceful haven from the work-a-day world, and…God, I was bored. Nothing of interest was within walking distance, and I had no car. I ate a disconsolate breakfast in the hotel restaurant. I finished “Following The Equator” and found myself without another book to read. Most of the afternoon I spent on the balcony, smoking cheap cigars with the balcony doors open and the TV turned around so I could watch it from where I was sitting. Late afternoon, I headed to soundcheck. I had never been so excited to go to a soundcheck in all my life. The piano was good, as were the sound and lights. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my room again – bored out of my fucking tits. Sigh…just this once, a piano-shaped-object, an Italian mixing-board, and an incompetent soundman would have been a welcome diversion. At the show that night the audience was attentive and responsive, although it was mighty hard work to keep them that way. If I’d let up long enough to have a sip of water, I’d have lost them. CD sales were great, although most of the people were so drunk that I suspected they were going to regret buying so many CDs on their credit cards while they nursed their prodigious hangovers the next day. A few hours later, I was still wide-awake. Bored. Restless. I wanted movement, I wanted to go. My final duties had been dispatched and there was nothing left to do but go home. I was just about crazy with the desire to get out of there. I strolled the grounds with a cigar until I finally got tired enough to sleep.
Day Sixty-Two Back in L.A., I resumed the domestic life. Smoking cigars by the pool, picking up groceries at the Gelsons Market down on Santa Monica. Going to the post orifice and the dry-cleaners, where after four years they still can’t spell my name right. Cooking, cleaning, feeding the cats. After two months of getting asked for autographs, I was now getting asked to take out the garbage. It was great to be back home. The moveable world I had lived in for the last two months receded to a distant dream, as if it had never been. This safe, predictable, homebody existence is my real life, I thought. At least until it’s time to leave again. Now the road is a friend of mine © 2004 by Bob Malone
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