Detours

by Tim Rogers

  ‘Drink, Cuss, Forget.’

  The benefits of walking alone include choice of route and pace, and also an opportunity for wordplay. This morning’s program includes recitatives on Eat, Pray, Love, a pursuit that up until then I hadn’t given a thought, only having used the title of the memoir as a punchline to many a cynical slobservation.

  ‘Consume, Exhume, Presume.’

  Last night I fell asleep listening to podcasts from the World Book Club on the BBC, waking three hours later to Elizabeth Gilbert’s taut, vital voice explaining the methods involved in writing a book with sales in the multi-millions about fulfilment and self-awareness. It was impressive, and a voice that beckoned like north on a compass. We had played at Dingwalls Pub in Camden to a few hundred people. A good show, though not a cause for long celebration, just many pints with some dear acquaintances in London who shared stories of record fairs in Bath and their own glory days playing music and working for magazines in London. Not wanting to pursue the direction I could feel the conversation was heading – that ‘things were a hell of a lot better back then’ – I pretended to be far more buoyant than I felt, threw compliments around and pinballed to the bar and back, sure that if I kept moving and drinking I wouldn’t get caught by a post-gig malaise and the still-present jetlag. Hitting bed at the positively custodial hour of 2 or so I was back up at 6, cursing both time and motion. But Elizabeth Gilbert’s voice was sage-like. I resolved to either read her book or watch the movie and then begin meditating. I would eat Italian for lunch instead of hitting the pub. I watched the trailer for the movie and my resolve creased ’til it could have resembled an empty bag of crisps thrown in anger to the floor. Between Julia Roberts’s lox-like top lip and the caterwauling soundtrack, I foresaw the morning plunging into crisis if I adopted the Gilbert/ Roberts method. The story of a woman traipsing the globe with food and meditation as a means to self-actualisation was not an appropriate vade mecum for a ropy gent in a small hotel room with a dozen pub shows ahead on the schedule. Placed next to my black boots on the musty carpet were two cans of Carlsberg Lager. I searched on my laptop for Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall, a film about a drunk country singer who leaves it all behind to work at a little hotel in the country, marry the owner and repent. Even before Ellen Barkin turned up as his estranged daughter, I cried so much I got thirsty again.

  I once wrote a song about defiance in the face of ageing. Not by trips to the gym or rigid dieting but by blithely accepting the changes wrought upon you by the years and dressing them to advantage. Not chasing lost youth by chasing young sexual partners or sports cars but looking for the freedoms ageing can offer (among all the other dull stuff). I thought ‘Givin’ Up and Gettin’ Fat’ was one of the best things I’d written. Thinking on it today it doth sound like one protesting too much. I was crying watching Robert Duvall and drinking warm beer in London on a day off. Defiance in the face of ageing? I could make out last night’s gig shirt hanging from a curtain rod. It looked like seaweed hanging off the bow of a boat. It was time to get mobile.

  This was the year I had designated to allay all fear. I was sick of the superstitions and tropes I’d stitched to my phobias and paranoias. I was to confront all of the fuckers, including heights, flying, and hourly fears for my daughter’s safety. So now I’m walking mournfully through a fecund park in the north of London, with a view to the centre of the city that anyone with a heartbeat would regard as spectacular, fearing that I may be the most ungrateful human alive. It is one thing to fear losing the love of another. Today I’m buckling with a fear that I no longer love what has navigated everything I’ve done for over thirty years.

  The first time I looked for an exit was in Toronto in 1996. A show in a pub that from memory had a semi-circular stage, therefore our operations were visible to an audience from more angles than usual. The dread started a few songs in – the pit of my stomach opening to cavernous dimensions as every chord and vocal expression, and especially the showy, dramatic flourishes, felt foolish and hackneyed. The crowd’s indifference to what we were doing wasn’t any more obvious than in hundreds of other shows and there were plenty of people watching and listening, but after the last tune I placed my guitar against my amplifier, let the feedback howl and walked briskly up a row of stairs at the back of the stage into the band room. It was nondescript but had a smell of paint, with the kind of decayed plaster covering that felt mocking to a sweaty, malnourished prima donna. I grabbed a bottle of Molson’s beer, drained it, smashed it on the sink to create the necessary blade, and sliced my inner left forearm twice in downward strokes of about three inches. The sight of your own blood leaving your body at speed will sober you up real quick. As the blood spurted and pulsed – far more violently than I had anticipated (if I had anticipated anything) – I imagined the English actor Penelope Keith say, with her nostrils as wide as the mouths of teacups, ‘Oh, dear.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d acted impudently, but this was the first time that included a hospital run and a significant cleaning bill. Our Arizonan tour manager felt obliged to offer some counselling during the dash to the emergency ward, which only compounded how utterly daft I felt. Bloodied hands, with a heart so white. I had sputtered an apology to Andy and Russ as I was escorted out of the band room, expecting them to be shocked, and they both reacted with gentleness.

  I was a twenty-six-year-old who couldn’t appreciate his outrageous good fortune not to be washing dishes in the north-west of Sydney. Ambition was crammed up inside me like bananas stuffed in the exhaust pipe of a car and I was choking on fumes, immobile. The band was doing well beyond what I thought our capabilities were both musically and in audience sizes, so under-attended gigs should have been dealt with with humour and a shrug of the shoulders. (On a tour the following year we played somewhere in California in a club that would have fit four hundred folks but instead had only three young women, who were on the guest list because they’d met and made friends with our tour manager the day before at a festival – so the sum of paying audience was exactly zero – and we played cover versions of songs we barely knew and drank a truckload of beer and laughed it off.)

  The doctor, an older gentleman with silver hair and thick-rimmed glasses complemented with thicker black eyebrows, who reminded me of actor Martin Balsam as Washington Post’s editor Howard Simons in All the President’s Men, looked at me without a word while holding my wrist long enough to break any resolve, petulance or self-pity I had left.

  I thought of all he got to see daily, hourly. The pain, the misery, the heartbreak.

  ‘Anything we should talk about?’ he asked. He had a voice that wasn’t gravelly but there was a burr surrounding all his words that sounded like hot toast being eaten with creamed honey. I wanted him to like me and was relieved our tour manager, who had an Arizonan enthusiasm for the truth, was not in the room. I rapidly constructed a story about being attacked by a guy with buck teeth and a hockey jersey, but all that came from my mouth was, ‘I’m sorry. I’m an Australian.’

  He patted me on the shoulder, once I’d been repaired with Canadian stitches, and muttered with the barest of smiles, ‘Get home safe, son.’

  Whether he meant the hotel or the country of my birth, I didn’t know, but I nodded and tried not to cry. I left the hospital with a prescription for painkillers and asked our tour manager to grab some beer on the way back to the hotel. He was itching to counsel me, almost like I was a date and he was desperate to get into my pants. We got back to the room that Andy, Russ and I were sharing and I gave a quick thanks to the TM and said goodnight in a way that implied no further congress was welcome. I sat on my bed while the guys were playing a video game and having a smoke. Nothing more was said, and the insect-like noises of the game they were deep into were a welcome static. The tour went on with significantly less extra-curricular movement from my left arm but a great deal of bandage redressing, washing blood from shirt sleeves, and time spent walking by myself. I appreciated the next two dozen shows like I
was out on probation.

  After playing to four people in Detroit around the same time I found myself in a bar with Diana Ross and her entourage after they’d played to twenty thousand at an arena close by. As she swept into the bar and ordered a tequila for herself and gestured to me with a hand flourish that I initially interpreted as a sign to have me forcibly removed but was actually the gesture of recognition from a diva to a stranger, the incongruity of it all was a bemusing joy. It felt like I was the little servant boy summoned to the court of the queen. She left after only ten minutes – whether she’d had her tequila I couldn’t see – but her exit was such that if a trail of diamonds was left in her wake I would have been surprised not one iota.

  Once at the Dragonfly Club in West Hollywood we played to a disappointing crowd, hoping for a few more heads having lived there on and off for the year and having spent the previous month slogging around the country. We bashed through it as best we could with flagging spirits and energy, knowing we had to fly to Minneapolis in the early morning. Andy and Russ left the club quickly to go drinking with some old friends while I sat in the band room with a bottle of bourbon, a little glum. To my surprise, Chris Robinson, then of The Black Crowes, who’d made a few records I adored, strolled in and sat down, explaining that he’d come to see us on the recommendation of a mutual friend.

  We shared a drink while I tried to muster some enthusiasm in the otherwise empty dressing room. Chris was someone I admired a lot, but his bonnet bee was buzzing, and he ranted about the many ways he’d been ‘fucked over’ by the recording industry. He also explained that his Humble Pie T-shirt (that I was bedazzled by) had been given to him by one of Steve Marriot’s family members. Marriot, Humble Pie’s late lead singer, is a perennial hero of mine. To hear the frustrations of a great, deservedly acclaimed and popular singer in a coveted T-shirt in an empty dressing room – after having played to a sparsely attended gig – was like being presented with an apple and biting into it to find it’s soft and powdery. The worm nudging its way into the bite mark was that I didn’t know if I was despairing or just pissed off. An ugly little uninvited worm.

  I resolved to not make the plane to Minneapolis. After Chris left I wanted to find any dumb drug I could, settling for two lines of blow with a barman at the club. I made it back to the Beverly Laurel, and mapped out my exit from the band while packing and unpacking my suitcase like a kid the night before the first day of school. Just a lot higher and drunker.

  As sun broke and the notes I’d left under two hotel doors were read and comprehended, our manager Todd came to my room pleading with me to catch the flight. The bribe offered comprised a bottle of Maker’s Mark and the cancellation of a few dates after Minneapolis. I agreed to the terms like a sullen six-year-old.

  Minneapolis was the hometown of my favourite band of all time, The Replacements, and we were booked to play one of their old haunts, 7th St Entry. After a sound check where we could barely look each other in the eyes, we split – the others to a hotel room, while I moped off to a nearby bar to stare out the window and decide what to do. I met three guys who wouldn’t have been an hour over twenty-one. They’d driven a while to see our show. They were among the thirty people who turned up that night. Ending the show shirtless and leaving a puddle of sweat, I’d never had so much fun. The tour limped on. No shows were canned.

  Loudon has been such an inveterate presence in my life that I wonder, as I used to with Hawkeye Pierce, whether for large swathes of time I haven’t been living his life and not mine. (Loudon even acted in a few early episodes of M*A*S*H* as singing surgeon Calvin Spalding.) I listen often at home alone, looking out a window, to his song ‘Living Alone’, which is a litany of the trivialities that make up his daily routine at the age of fifty-three and, yes, living alone. It’s an ode to fighting off colds and thumbing through a Bible with no avid interest, of cooking for one and onanism before sleep as your solitude vacillates between being a chosen vocation and a damning probation.

  It’s hardly ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (the tune I want playing as I’m laid to rest). And as I look around at my bookshelves and record mountains, heaving with iconoclastic works of Gide and Greer, Beefheart and Baudrillard, Patti and Parker, I’m forced to think: Aren’t these songs just a little . . . compliant? Shrugging their shoulders rather than raising a fist? Evoking a sigh rather than invoking the Muses? Confessions as opposed to declarations?

  It says more about my education than the artists’ intent perhaps; my misunderstandings weigh a ton. The poems of the Symbolists keep me smoking and tease my imagination, but Philip Larkin gets me out of bed in the morning. The compositions of Stravinsky taunt my education, but Randy Newman’s songs allow me to leave my apartment. A heart so white.

  Loudon’s little odes to ageing and loving are what I go to on mornings like this where ambition and its bony fingers are prodding me, teasing . . . and I’m wondering if it’s enough to be playing shows and getting a lot of drinks for nothing. The travel isn’t generally enjoyable, and culturally I’m learning little apart from what I can glean on walks in between travel commitments and shows. The malaise is, of course, compounded by the shame in admitting that you’re not happy.

  Touring in a rock’n’roll band.

  Tomorrow in Hamburg, we will again do some radio interviews, one of which is for a station now set up inside one of the huge above-ground anti-aircraft Flak towers constructed by the Nazis. We will answer questions with our typical enthusiasms about what joys there are in being a rock band on the road. About ‘just makin’ this noise for the simple-minded joy of it’ and ‘feeling part of a litany of like-minded troglodytes’ – but I will be lying.

  I no longer know why I am doing it.

  The music isn’t enough, or the drinks, or my friends. A few more folks at the shows, getting some recognition for what you’re trying to do now not the past, a more reliable voice. All or any of these would maybe make touring a more reliable conduit to happiness, and I could stop being a curmudgeon. Not for the first time, someone recently suggested I go see a therapist, as I was probably depressed. I replied that if a therapist can cure me of occasionally being a wanker, I’ll sign up. But I’m not depressed, merely a little sad. Maybe I should just grab a sandwich.

  I head up towards Highgate Cemetery to look for Sidney Nolan’s gravestone. Karl Marx’s stone is there too, but Sidney’s sad, handsome face was in my dreams recently. The Hurricane and I bought a framed print of his Pretty Polly Mine a few months ago in a nearby suburb. On the walk home, we stopped at a bar and propped the frame up against a wall while we had afternoon drinks. To the curious, and to our amusement, it appeared as if we’d purloined it. We shall forever refer to the painting as ‘The Stolen Nolan’.

  Talking this route on foot means I’ll not only wind through Hampstead Heath, but I’ll pass a pub The Hurricane worked in twenty years back. Though it’s decades since she lived here, I’m eager to feel her beside me in any way. I’m hoping there is a bartender working there, with light freckles, blue eyes and hair long, dark and shiny like a pony, who can be as extemporaneous as The Hurricane. If not, I can dream it up.

  Loudon is still with me, a catalogue of his tunes is being lifted and dropped on the turntable whirring in between my ears. His song ‘Tip That Waitress’ is next up as I conjure up The Hurricane at work back in Melbourne, charming tables of guests and then turning on her heels to head back to the kitchen before the last person at the table makes sense of her double entendre. Though he takes the position of a flirtatious customer rather than complicit in the trenches, he evokes the nightly treadmill of hospitality and its capricious rhythms – being on your feet for half the damn night, makin’ change for a fifty by dim candlelight. It’s written and sung in the vernacular of a North American, where the waiting profession is codified, but as a dreary convict adrift who has been both a waiter and the attentive lover of one, the song remains in my bones.

  Loudon writes about ambition and ‘career’ in ways that eit
her buckle my toes at his churlishness or make me blanch when I recognise an uncomfortable truth. Twenty or so years after he started recording and touring, he wrote a song called ‘Talking New Bob Dylan’ that namechecks John Prine, Steve Forbert and Springers – a motley bunch of scruffs who will forever be compared and dismissed with reference to the great Zimmerman without ever being spoken of with the same ecclesiastical yawp.

  There’s songs dedicated to hecklers, to ladies he ends up sleeping with after shows, and a particular favourite of mine called ‘My Biggest Fan’, which happens to be about a gentleman who, at nearly four hundred pounds, is physically his biggest fan, though Loudon remains number three on his list after Dylan and Neil Young. Though I don’t doubt that truths are stretched and failings manipulated for humour or pathos, Loudon’s not a myth builder; he lays himself out on the rack for prodding. The guy even has written lyrics about his afternoon nap for fuck’s sake. ‘No nap, I’m crap,’ he assures is his motto, and then puts it in a song. The first hundred times I heard this lyric I flinched at its banality, but I’ve come to admire its brio. But thumping the table next to droll little confessions like these sit a gang of similarly confessional declarations from geniuses like Handsome Dick Manitoba of New York’s The Dictators, extolling the values of cola for breakfast, a disdain for formal ‘ediumacation’ (sic) loud guitars and screwing, whomever the hell you want.