by Ingrid Croce
“It’s just a beginning,” Jim told me, his spirits clearly soaring. “I know it isn’t going to be easy for us to live with Tommy and Pat. But we’ll find our own place soon. This will work out, Ing. I promise.”
Jim and Tommy left for the studio, and I stayed with Pat, who worked out of their apartment writing songs.
Pat and I had been friends since I’d met Jim and Tommy, but we hadn’t seen each other since she and Tommy married. While catching up, she revealed what had been troubling her:
“Tommy and I used to love doing music together, but he’s so serious about the business now; it’s just no fun anymore.” She spoke with grave finality.
“But—but you and Tommy still sing and play together, right?”
“Not anymore, and I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”
I felt sad for her, but what she didn’t tell me at the time was that she and Gene Pistilli were having an affair. They were also starting a new band with Tim Hauser and Erin Dickens called the Manhattan Transfer.
The day after we arrived in the city, Tommy took us to meet with Phil Kurnit.
With the same thin-lipped smile, Phil said, “To do the album, there are some papers you’ll need to sign.” He handed us each three contracts. Jim shrugged and reached for a pen. He trusted Tommy, but I hesitated.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“Read them,” Phil said abruptly.
Jim scanned the words and shrugged again.
“What is this one-year option about?” I asked.
Kurnit read the legalese out loud. When he finished, I asked him to make sure I understood:
“So you’re telling us, if things don’t work out after one year, we’re free to leave?” At the top of my mind was my $1,000 fellowship from Moore. I had to complete college the following year or pay the money back.
“That’s the deal,” Kurnit said.
“And what are these separate pages that give Cashman, Pistilli and West exclusive publishing, production, and management rights? I thought this was just a record deal.”
Jim looked at Tommy and asked, “Are the contracts okay?”
Tommy responded by telling Jim, “We’ll pay you $200 a week to write songs for the company. Plus, Capitol will give you an advance as soon as you sign.”
“I thought you said you’d pay us as much as we were making back home, or at least enough to keep us going until the album comes out,” I insisted.
“Well, the advance will help cover that,” Tommy insisted.
Jim picked up the pen, ready to sign.
“Jim, I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t understand these contracts.” But Jim trusted Tommy and scribbled his name anyway, handing the pen to me. Reluctantly, I signed too.
_____
Two months later, in December 1968, Jim returned from the office and told me the recording of our album was delayed until spring. “Capitol is going through some changes. Tommy says these things happen all the time, Ing. But he can get us a college concert tour so we can make some money. At the same time we can put together more songs for the album.”
“Who’s booking the tour?” I asked. I was beginning to worry that we might have made a mistake in moving to New York.
“Merv Frankel. He’s their new partner. He’s in charge of managing their acts through his company, Showcase Management. He wants to put us on Albert Grossman’s college concert tour that’ll start in Minneapolis and end in Tennessee. We’ll perform five or six consecutive nights at each college, mostly at campus coffeehouses. We’ll get $300 a week, minus 20 percent of the gross that goes to Showcase.”
“What about travel expenses, food, and lodging?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess the schools will put us up.”
“Financially, Jim, I don’t know how we can do it. You were making more money teaching, and we were living in Media, not New York City. This really concerns me. I know we don’t need much to get by, sweetie, but we’ll get in debt at this rate. We might have to borrow money. I don’t mind not having things, but I don’t want to owe anyone anything!”
“I know, but we can make it, Ing. Just think: we’ll be traveling around the country and getting paid for playing music. Doesn’t that sound romantic? It’s like Woody Guthrie. We’ll get a chance to really see the country. It’s just too bad we won’t have an album to promote.” I began to soften. The money seemed scant, but getting out of New York and being alone with Jim sounded perfect.
Since leaving Pennsylvania, his anger had slowly melted. I knew Jim felt guilty for a lot of things: his response to the rape, taking me out of school, and breaking his promise to my dad about helping me graduate from college. To make it up to me, he had become tender again, caressing me when we lay in bed at night, bringing back foreplay, and telling me he loved me more and more often.
_____
Two days later, as we drove northwest toward the University of Minnesota, Jim looked back at the New York skyline. “What a pretty sight,” he said, “to see the armpit of America getting smaller and slipping away.”
We had to drive the eighteen hours to Minnesota without stopping in order to make our first concert on time.
“Isn’t it great how well Frankel is managing our schedule from the very start?” I asked cynically as Jim drove and I opened the cooler. “Who else does this guy manage?”
“I think he’s managed a couple of baseball players. I really don’t know much about him,” Jim admitted.
“Baseball players? Jim, are you serious? Do you think he knows anything about the music business?”
“Who knows? What difference does it make? We’re on the road, and that’s a start at least.”
“You’re right, it’s a good start, but we could get our own college concerts and pay a real manager. I don’t understand the benefit here.”
“Ing, could you grab me something to eat?” I pulled an Italian ham sandwich on a baguette with arugula from the cooler and poured coffee from the large thermos into its red lid-cup.
“Ing, you make the best food in the world,” he said, changing the subject. “You’ve become such a good chef I may never cook again.”
We drove through the night, stopping only to take turns at the wheel. It was almost evening when we finally pulled into the university’s student union parking lot.
Otte Boersma, a handsome, blond Swede in charge of campus entertainment, was waiting for us. “There’s only a few hours before the show,” he said with a smile. “Let’s go on over to the Hole and get something to eat.” After dinner at the coffeehouse where we were playing, he showed us to our lodgings in a tiny room on the edge of campus. It was in an old brick building above another coffeehouse.
“There are a few other guests staying here tonight, too,” he said, apologetically. “You’ll have to share the bathroom at the end of the hall.” The room was clean and neat, and after we’d spent so many cramped hours in the VW, it looked wonderful to us.
Later, we were disappointed to learn that our performance had not been advertised. Only twenty students showed up the first night. It was a casual gathering, and we enjoyed the intimacy of the friendly crowd anyway. When we finished, the small, enthusiastic audience begged us to stay. We were beat but sat down with the students. A few of them had guitars and banjos in hand and were ready for an impromptu jam session. Jim entertained them with a few bawdy ballads. Finally, Ottie politely interrupted, saying that the Hole was closing.
We performed nightly for a week. By the second night, all the seats were filled. And the crowd kept growing.
During the day, Ottie took us on tours of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We loved the excitement of being in a new city. We took in museums, historical sites, and even the local industries.
Jim was always interested in the local culture and history of the people we met, and I made sure to visit every art department at every college we went to.
In the Twin Cities, word about the Philadelphia folk singers spread. By th
e end of the week, we were playing two shows a night to packed houses.
“I can’t believe there’s such an interest in folk music here,” I told Ottie. “I guess I just hadn’t expected this kind of reception in the Midwest.”
“Where do you think Dylan came from?” Ottie chided.
_____
We drove south to Ohio. At one stop we performed at a Protestant college in a small country town.
“Golly gee, you’d never guess it was 1968,” Jim joked in his Gomer Pyle imitation. “Most college students are burning their draft cards and growing long hair. These kids look straight off the set of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver.”
Still, Jim was anxious to please them and even sang a few church hymns. “I guess I’ll pass on the bawdy ballads,” he whispered to me during the performance. “But wow, the temptation is great!”
Between shows in southern Ohio, students invited us to a church social. A potluck dinner was spread out across a huge table. Jim’s eyes widened, and he nudged me. “Can you believe how many different uses these folks have found for mayonnaise and marshmallows?” He pointed to the ambrosia and Jell-O salads lining the table. “Look, even the tuna salad has marshmallows!”
Later, the students escorted us to the fanciest restaurant in town, the Bolo Inn. It was the former convention center and the pride of the community. The enormous restaurant was filled with naugahyde booths and large, round tables.
Hundreds of pictures of a dog and its master lined the walls. Jim thought it was some kind of joke until a student introduced him to the owner of the club, the same person in the pictures.
“I built this restaurant as a shrine to my dog, Bolo,” he said sadly. “He was a black lab. He died last year.”
Jim nodded in sympathy.
“You’ve done a good job of decorating. I especially like the repeating pattern of Bolo on the wall-to-wall carpet.” He choked back laughter as I elbowed him.
“We just got this carpet,” the man said proudly. “I had to send the first batch back because it didn’t look at all like Bolo.”
Later, when we drove south out of Ohio, Jim wondered aloud, “What do you suppose ever happened to that rejected carpet? My guess is somewhere out there in an Ohio trailer park are families eating crustless, white-bread sandwiches and marshmallow ambrosia salads, thrilled over the deal they made on their new Bolo carpet.”
At dawn, Jim woke me up. I’d fallen asleep on his lap while we were driving. The sun had just climbed above the hills of eastern Kentucky and was glowing orange on the fields of bluegrass. He gently stroked my hair and whispered, “You’ve got to see this sunrise, babe.” I looked up at him and smiled, then reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He was as relaxed as I had seen him in a long time. “I love this life on the road.” We had been traveling for a month, logging thousands of miles in the VW.
We played music nearly every night. The students’ overwhelming acceptance of our material encouraged us. We wrote whenever we could, in the car and motel rooms and college dormitories.
“Let’s stop and have some breakfast,” he suggested. He looked for a truck stop and pulled off the road. Jim and I thrived on the opportunity traveling gave us to meet ordinary people in every walk of life.
After we ate, we went back to the car, and he unpacked his guitar. “I want you to help me with this new song I’ve been thinking about all night,” he said.
I took the cassette tape recorder from the dash and turned it on, as I always did when we began developing a new song.
“Listen to this,” he said, strumming, and began to sing: “I like to think about her and the way she used to love me, but I just can’t live without her, ’cause . . . dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,” he went on, trying to come up with the end of the line. “And the season’s getting later . . . dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah.” I sang with him as we repeated the first verse a couple of times, and I helped him complete the words.
We moved on to the second verse and then the third. A half-hour later, we had a new song and named it “Vespers”:
I like to think about her and the way she used to love me,
But I just can’t live without her,
’Cause her arms are not around me,
And the season’s getting later,
And my body’s getting colder,
And the vespers ring and I’m all alone without my love beside me.
She’d call me in the evening
And ask me to come over,
She’d be standing by the window,
With her hair down around her shoulders,
We’d talk a while and then she’d smile.
And then she’d lock the door.
And she would sit beside me,
And we would talk no more.
The bells would ring at six o’clock,
And she’d be in my arms,
Her head upon my shoulder gently resting,
And then she’d wake and look at me
Not knowing I’d been watching,
Kiss me softly, then drift off to sleep.
As we packed up to get back on the road, I recited the song to myself. To me, Jim was not just writing a song when he put words to music, but communicating his deepest feelings to me in the best way he knew how.
_____
To our delight, the colleges in the South often arranged to have us stay in private homes near the campuses. At the University of Tennessee, we were guests in a rundown plantation manor. Norma, who ran the house, was the epitome of Southern charm.
She was a housewife who needed the extra money she got from renting rooms through the university. She was comfortable with the lifestyle of entertainers and relished having them stay in her home. Norma had a lot of outrageous stories to tell and liked having an audience.
I caught a stomach flu a couple of days before we got to Kentucky, and Norma nursed me back to health with her special home remedies. “I’ve made you a treat,” she said. “It’s an old family prescription for youthful skin, good health, and a long life.” She set a plate with an open-faced sandwich on it in front of me.
“What is it?”
“A bone-marrow sandwich. You see, the secret of youth is in the bone. I boil up some beef bones in a soup, extract the marrow, and spread it on white bread with salt and pepper. It’s good for ya,” she said. “Try it.” I reluctantly took a few bites.
“It’s delicious!” I was surprised. “It’s definitely better than grits,” I assured Jim.
While in line at the school cafeteria my first morning on campus, I had mistaken hominy for cream of wheat. Jim had watched but said nothing when I ordered a bowl of what I thought was cereal. The unusual flavor surprised me. Without hesitation, I brashly spit the mouthful back into the bowl.
“Yuck, this is disgusting,” I complained so blaringly that everyone in the room turned to look. Jim pointed to my mouth and started laughing out loud. “Ing’s instant reject,” he called it. From past experience, he suspected I might react that strongly to grits, and his forethought made him giggle all the more. He loved setting me up to watch my spontaneous, uncensored reactions.
We both liked Norma’s gutsy style, her generosity, and her sultry Southern accent. Jim listened to her tales and took the opportunity to ask her about her life story.
She said she’d come from a small, rural, Southern town, and when she was just sixteen, she fell in love with a tightrope walker and joined the circus. Her former husband taught her his trade, and she performed and traveled with him in the circus from town to town for several years.
“When I came to Louisville, I was ready to go back to school and get an education,” she told us. “After I graduated from the University of Tennessee, I married a professor of mine, had three kids, and here we are, livin’ happily ever after.”
“Norma, before we leave tomorrow, let us give you a private concert. It will be our way of saying thanks,” Jim offered.
Norma and her family invited a few of their friends
to come over for the performance in her living room. Everyone was welcoming to us, and their home felt a lot like ours back in Pennsylvania. We played, ate, and shared in conversation all night. We promised that if we got back to Louisville, we’d come see them again. The following morning, we left, feeling full and happy.
But our carefree spirits sobered when we reached Harlan County, Kentucky, an impoverished coal-mining district. Jim had been sensitive to the miner’s situation from his work on The Miner’s Story, but this was the first time he had seen a mining community so close-up and personal. The hungry faces and worn clothing of the people affected him deeply. At Bellarmine College, the student representative, Jenny Hawkins, filled us in on the growing economic and political problems of the area.
“The United Mine Workers Union has just called a general strike. We’re all on edge here. Every man in my family works in the mines, and none of them are being paid. Gunfights have broken out between the workers and the police. I’m scared,” she admitted.
Consistent with what Jenny told us about their troubled times, the small town itself seemed to be dying. All that remained were a post office, two bars, and one movie theater, which played Thunder Road every night of the year. It starred Robert Mitchum as a Southern moonshiner and had been filmed on location nearby.
The next afternoon, Jenny took us to the mine where her family had worked before the strike. The entrance, an ugly black hole in the hillside, was boarded up and patrolled by armed guards. All signs to the mine had been blasted away by shotguns. Violence flared during the week Jim and I played at Bellarmine College. The police imposed a 9 PM curfew. Virtually locked in our tiny hotel room, we wrote a country song about the tedious part of traveling called “What Do People Do?”
Tell me, what do people do when there ain’t nothin’ to do?
When there’s nobody else around to do nothin’ with or to?
Have you ever been in that position in a small town hotel room
Where the diners all close at nine,