From the Top

by Michael Perry

  In short order I became a hardcore Steve Earle fan and proselyte, able to recite his albums in order and name his touring band and all of his five or six ex-wives, and I once found myself so moved by one of his performances in Birmingham, England, that I became that guy and hollered, “All the way from Wisconsin!” and “WOOO!!!” while he was tuning. “Man,” said Mister Earle, “yer lost.”

  I’ve never—even at the peak of fandom—been a hero worshipper. I remember my dad getting grumpy with me when, like so many of my age, I discovered the Beatles only after John Lennon got shot. I went around plaintively crooning, “All we are saying …” but even then the farm-booted church-boy part of me had a firm grip on the idea that life requires more heavy lifting than a pop song can provide. And so it was with Steve Earle. I knew I had to do my own work, I knew it wouldn’t likely change the world, but it was his songs that built a fire in my belly. Or at least beneath my butt.

  • • •

  In 1991 Steve Earle recorded a live album called Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator. He was on a grungy downhill slide and sang like a man forcing up crushed glass. Right near the beginning of track 10 some audience member hollered something and Steve responded with a simple, declarative “Doin’ fine.”

  He wasn’t, of course. As a matter of fact, right around the time I was listening to that album he was likely in jail, or under a bridge, or in a pawn shop in East Nashville. But he survived all that and came back.

  The albums have stacked up now, the cassettes became CDs, the CDs became digits, and I’ve been grateful for every bit of it, even the stuff I didn’t quite get. But for me it will always come back to Exit 0, because what I heard above the pop-pop of that John Deere was music that suggested folks from small towns and unpolished circumstances might try their hand at art as well, and that there was a life somewhere between low-down and uptown, and although I’m never quite where I want to be and certainly never where I ought to be, I am where I am because Steve Earle put up that big green exit sign.

  I don’t feel the need to scream “Wooo!” tonight. I’m just content to kick back and listen to good work by a guy still standing in his own boots. Steve Earle. All these years. And y’know what?

  He’s doin’ fine.

  ADVICE FROM A GRAMMY WINNER

  I wrote this monologue for a Big Top show that featured me with my band, the Long Beds.

  Sometimes I drag out a guitar and work on a song. Things never get too complicated. Oh, every once in a while I toss in a busted fourth or a jazzy clam just to keep it real, but things never stray far from 4/4. I call it the clodhopper beat.

  I grew up singing in church. Again, it was nothing fancy. No choir, no robes, you just sat in your chair and tried to find the notes. Sometimes my brother and I worked out simple harmonies, and once in a blue moon someone might play piano, but it was all basics, no boogie-woogie, lest the devil get your toe tapping off toward the path of wickedness.

  Mom had a record player—a phonograph—in the house, and one of those big boxy Reader’s Digest music collections, each vinyl disk tucked in its own sleeve, and there was a song on there us kids just loved called “A Boy Named Sue,” sung by Johnny Cash. We learned all the words to that one, and it’s a wonder we didn’t scratch it right off, we picked the needle up at the end and dropped it back at the beginning so many times.

  After Johnny Cash I skippity-doodled around listening to pop music for a while, then one day in Wyoming my boss and I were bombin’ along in a four-wheel-drive ranch truck when we hit a hidden irrigation ditch and went airborne. When we landed, everything inside that truck was jarred loose and out from beneath the seat flew an eight-track tape. I picked it up, looked at it, looked at my boss, then asked, “Who’s Waylon Jennings?”

  “Son,” he said, pointing at the eight-track player in the dash, “you need to jam that thing in there.” And of course I heard the boogety-boogety and the whoop-whoop-whoop and was hooked forevermore.

  I’ll stop right there, because if you start listing influences it can sound as if you’re claiming some sort of equivalency, and I’m under no such illusion. I’m a typist who is now and then allowed to hang his words on a D chord and perform them aloud. I stand onstage with my poor patient guitar like some musical Walter Mitty, surrounded by true musicians who bear me carefully along while I just stand there and sing from my boots. My band is called the Long Beds but I’ve often said they should be called the Bowling Bumpers, because the song is a bowling lane, and I am a lumpy bowling ball, and I start rolling along and kinda veer off to one side or reverse verses or maybe get to thinking about whether or not I remembered to jiggle the handle on the toilet before I left home, and gently as you please the band nudges me back into the lane and keeps me rolling along until finally I get to the end of the song and knock down a few pins and then they smile at me like it’s the best anyone could hope for.

  Early on I’d get real nervous before we played. Then finally one show came along when we walked out before a decent-sized audience and I found myself more eager to play than nervous to play. I strapped on that ol’ Larrivée acoustic with the International Harvester decal on it, began boldly strumming a hefty open E, and strode toward the mic. At the last minute I turned back to survey the band. I wanted to make sure everyone was set to go, but I also wanted to make sure they saw in the eyes of their leader that there was nothing to fear. I noticed one of the fellows, a young man who would go on to Grammy-winning fame, jerking his head at me in a “c’mere” sorta way. And so, still strumming—I was feeling professional, after all—I walked back and leaned in and put my ear down where I could hear him, and he said, “Hey—plug in your guitar.”

  GUITAR GIRLS

  I had my guitar out the other day and was noodling around on it, playing a very complicated riff constituted around plucking a D chord over and over and not much else, when Jane, my youngest, climbed up on my lap and started singing made-up lyrics along with my stumblebum strumming. The first verse had something about a dog and a princess, so you know there was some potential there. I threw her a G chord then, and she went with it, which seems like a good sign, like she’s got a sense of pitch. Life goes better if you have a sense of pitch. You know, so you can sing along, but also a sense of pitch so you can get a read on folks, maybe figure out if you want to sit in with ’em, kinda try and match their groove—or maybe you wanna move along and hum a different tune.

  When her sister, Amy, was the same age, we used to do this very same thing—I’d just strum at nothing in particular, and she’d sing. One day we were noodling along when she stopped, turned her face up to mine, and said, “I want to sing and play with you for all my life.” I suppose she wondered why all of a sudden Dad’s eyes got all shiny.

  There are a lot of reasons why you might wanna learn to play a guitar. I’ve heard many guys—famous and not famous—say their main reason for learning was so they could get girls. I know Townes Van Zandt said he got his first guitar because he decided it was the shortest route to get girls and Cadillacs just like Elvis got. Of course you don’t need a Y chromosome to play six strings. I’d like it if my girls learned to play guitar sometime, because one thing I’ve noticed about women who play guitar is that they don’t tend to suffer fools. And if they do suffer a fool, why, they put him in a song and run him out of town forever.

  I’m afraid my girls won’t learn much about playing guitar from their old man. I didn’t learn my first guitar chord until I was in my thirties, and when it comes to workin’ the ol’ fretboard I’m about as clunky as they come—I often say I play guitar with all the nuance of a guy cuttin’ brush. But there we were, my younger daughter and I, just easin’ along, me going D-A-G, and her going along verse by made-up verse, when—just like her sister all those years before her—she stopped and looked up at me and said, “Daddy, when I sing, my heart feels colorful.”

  Of course I went all shiny-eyed again.

  Nobody’s ever gonna plunk down their cash to hear me play guitar so
los. Nobody’s ever gonna give me a Cadillac for my finger-picking. But twice in my life now I’ve played just well enough that my daughters said something so pure-hearted that it makes my eyes shine up even this very moment. To all you fellas out there playin’ your guitars so you can get girls, eat my dust—I’ve got two of ’em now. And someday they will be together recalling their childhood days, and one of them will say, “You remember how every time Dad played guitar he’d get all teary? I know he wasn’t all that good, but jeepers …”

  BLUES FOR AMATEURS

  The other day I was feeding the chickens and thinking about the blues. Chickens never seem to get the blues. They get the flapping cackles, and the goggle-eyed blinkies, and now and then they get the worm, but you can’t really say they get the blues. But you and I, we can get the blues. It should follow, then, that if we are capable of gettin’ the blues, of feelin’ the blues, we ought to be able to sing the blues.

  But most of us (I am raising my own hand here) are not. Not only are not, but should not. We’ve all had our moments alone at the stoplight with Ray Charles, where Ray is singing every single sad note of intangible, inexpressible longing we’ve ever felt, and he’s nailing it, every teensy blue note twist and gutbucket moan so dead-on it’s like they were cut from your own heart, and you think, Yes, Ray, yes, that’s it, that’s exactly how I feel, and here, let me help you with that a little bit, lemme take a verse … and what follows may feel good but it is the musical equivalent of strangling a chicken.

  I heard Ray Wylie Hubbard talking about the late Lightnin’ Hopkins the other day, and how Lightnin’ played the twelve-bar blues … and the thirteen-bar blues … and the thirteen-and-a-half-bar blues, Ray Wylie’s point being, Lightnin’ went to that next chord when Lightnin’ was good and ready, and right there is why with just one single uh-huh Lightnin’ Hopkins can put me on my knees. It’s why Hound Dog Taylor can make me feel like a hound dog. It’s why he can sing “my baby’s gone” and I know he’s really talkin’ about my baby. It’s why when he runs that slide up and down the fretboard he might as well be running it up and down my spine. It’s why Koko Taylor can make me—a stoic post-Calvinist stiff-upper-lip Scandihoovian paint-by-the-numbers three-chord roots-rock mumbler—squeeze my eyes shut, throw my hands to the sky, do a little altar dance, and say, Yes, Sister Koko! PREACH, Sister Koko!

  And right there is the most glorious mystery of the blues: how deeply we can feel them as opposed to how poorly we can express them. Sometimes we don’t even know that stuff is in us until it comes out of someone else’s mouth. You’ve forgot about how wrong you was done until a man like Charlie Parr or W.C. Clark bends just one note and bends it just so and suddenly you are all amen and hallelujah. You’re feeling those blues to your bones. And yet, if you say, Here, W.C., gimme that microphone, lemme back you up on that, well, everybody involved is in for a big disappointment.

  It’s a sad truth: for most of us mere mortals, there’s really only one blues song we’re qualified to sing, and I’m already working on it. It’s a twelve-bar number, maybe twelve and a half, a little thing I like to call “I Got the I Can’t Sing the Blues Blues.” So far I’ve got half a verse and the chorus. I figured I’d test it out the other morning when I was feeding the chickens. “Listen here, you birds,” I said, “lemme sing you the blues,” and then I laid it on ’em blue as I could blow it. When it was over, half of ’em got the flappin’ cackles and the other half just stood there giving me the ol’ goggle-eyed blinkies. As pretty much any audience would.

  LOCK UP THE CHICKENS

  “Well, that’s farmin’,” my farmer father would say whenever things went wrong. In fact, in our family all of us—even the nonfarmers—still use that phrase in the context of bad news. But sometimes when the corn sprouts on time or the chickens really fill the egg basket or I catch my daughter slopping hogs while wearing a ballerina outfit, I say, “Well, that’s farmin’.”

  And I say it with a smile.

  ASPARAGUS

  Back home on the farm the last of the asparagus has been picked and the remainders are going all frazzled. Lilacs come and go pretty fast, but once the asparagus calls it a day you know summer is running full bore and spring is filed solidly under “Memories.”

  I cherish that asparagus patch—for the asparagus, sure, because I like asparagus. If you’d have told me when I was fourteen that I would like asparagus, I’d have said you needed to get your brain recalibrated. I used to view it with suspicion when it appeared each spring between the two silos out behind the barn, and with low-level dismay when it appeared in a bowl on the kitchen table. But now I can’t wait for that first shoot to break through. I like to study the emergent green fuse knowing in a matter of twenty-four to forty-eight hours it will be pickable and edible, a sign that the subterranean frost has given up its grip. And the greenness of an asparagus spear when steamed! It is a flat-out rebuke to winter, even if the poor little guy was poking up through snow.

  So yah, I like asparagus. But I like that asparagus patch even more, because it is one of multitudinous reasons I love my wife. When we moved to the farm Anneliese said she wanted to get an asparagus patch going right away, because it takes three years before the asparagus really comes on. I was busy running off to do one thing or another and didn’t really get after it. Part of the problem is that I am the king of instant gratification and just couldn’t imagine planting something today so we could enjoy it three years down the road. You will understand now why I am not in the orchard or wine business, and possibly also why my retirement fund could use some attention.

  Sometime after she asked, I did see some six-by-sixes (the kind used in landscaping) advertised on Craigslist not so far away, and I headed over to pick them up. My idea was they’d make a good raised bed for the asparagus over along the side of the old granary. But then I had to hit the road again, so a buddy of mine framed them up and put in the raised bed, and my wife started the asparagus while I was gone.

  And then whammo three years were gone, and then six, and each spring through the rebirthing earth the asparagus comes up plump as Jolly Green Giant fingers. We steam it, we sauté it, we pickle it, we make it into soup, and we even had to wait for our premiere batch this year because the six-year-old got there first and ate the very first arrivals raw, right there in the patch. I caught her at it and didn’t say a word. Why would I? She was eating chlorophyll beneath the open sky, a sure-fire long-term antidote to all things electronic and stuffy. On the other hand, when my wife caught the chickens in there the other day, they were lucky to escape with their giblets.

  It’s miraculous stuff, asparagus. Most miraculous is the apparently impossible rate at which it grows. Take a nap, turn your back, and you’ve got another batch. And I suppose we appreciate it even more for its cyclic spirit, expressed through brief presence and extended absence. By the time it comes back, we’re hungry for it with more than our stomachs.

  This year the steamer basket was full from late April through late June, and every single time I snapped off a fistful of spears on my way back from the morning chicken coop chores I considered my wife and how sometimes the best thing she does for me is press ahead on her own so that later I may have the joy of catching up and rejoining her.

  UNFARMER

  Because I have written about pigs and posed for pictures while holding chickens, I am often introduced as a farmer. Out of respect to the farmers who raised me and those still struggling to pay the banker, let me say that calling me a farmer is like calling a guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer a brain surgeon. We do have a bunch of chickens, and I have been in the hog business for a few years now. First year I had two pigs. Second year I doubled the size of the operation. Got four. Economy of scale, that’s where yer profit lies.

  I shall never forget the day I got my first pair of feeder pigs. While the farmer and I were lifting the first one into the pickup, I detected a profound pain in my left rear buttock. Upon closer examination I discovered that the
farmer’s gigantic coon dog—no doubt assuming I was stealing the pigs—had gone stark raving bonkers and was actively masticating a Double-Whopper’s worth of my backside.

  I’ll say this for that dog: he was profoundly dedicated to his task. By the time he turned me loose I felt like my backside had been run through a laundry mangler. Later when I got home I went into the bathroom and dropped my drawers to view the damage in the mirror, and what I saw on my hinder was a hematoma the size of a personal pan pizza, framed by four angry red fang marks. First thing I thought was, Man, I gotta show somebody! So I hollered for my wife and told her to bring the camera. You get festooned up with an injury of this caliber, you want some documentation for the grandkids.

  It hurt to sit and it hurt to walk, but I wanted to get those pigs turned out before the rabies hit, so I backed the pickup over to the paddock I’d set up and turned them loose. I took them out of the back of the pickup, and it was really neat to see them hit the dirt. They started snuffling and snorting and rolling around. My daughter Amy, seven at the time, was watching them and then all of a sudden she said, “Oh, Daddy, they’re so cute! I’m calling that one Wilbur and that one Cocklebur!” I said, “Well, honey, that’s okay, but you have to understand that in October we’re going to turn the pigs into food.” I wasn’t sure if she really got it. But a few weeks later we had some cousins visit from the city. Amy took them down to see the pigs while I fetched the slop bucket, so I got there a little late. Just as I walked up she was pointing at the pigs. “That one over there is Wilbur and that one’s Cocklebur,” she said, “but in October that one’s Ham and that one’s Bacon.”