by Chris Price
'Shoplifting?'
'Hmmm, not sure. It's probably lying or something rubbish like that. Eleven fifty-six. He'll be along in a minute.'
'What are we going to do if he does turn up?'
'Well, I'm all right because I'm already a shit-hot guitarist.'
'True.'
'You know Steve Vai in Crossroads? Like that, only faster. Do you want some more chicken?'
'Ta.'
'Leg or breast?'
'You have met my wife, haven't you?'
'I'll leave the breast for you then. Hey – breasts! That's lust. So now we've done lust, we've done gluttony, we've done pride – or rather you did pride in a fairly fucking major way earlier on.'
'No, you did pride. You were too proud to admit that I'd actually spanked you at pool.'
'No, you did pride by being a smug bastard trying to pretend... Anyway we've been over this.'
'You had seven balls left on the table, and the eight ball. You cued up, missed every single one of them, and pocketed the cue ball. And I wasn't supposed to smile?'
'Maybe being shit at pool is the other deadly sin.'
'Well if it is you've got it nailed. It's two minutes until he arrives.'
And so it went on. We bickered like schoolchildren for several more minutes, waiting for Lucifer to arrive.
But the devil didn't show. Perhaps he doesn't like Church's Chicken. Or maybe he was hanging out with Morgan Freeman. Our brush with the Man in Black would have to wait until we reached Nashville.
29 OCTOBER
FALL OUT BOYS
What's the rarest commodity in America?
Irony? Nope. Subtlety? Nope. Environmental awareness?
No, the rarest thing in all of America is stamps. I wrote a postcard to Nicola and Noah on day six of the trip. It was now day twelve, and I had yet to find a single postage stamp. Not in hotels, not in pharmacies, not in liquor stores, coffee shops or gas stations, and not – you're going to like this – in the Post Office. We had tried three separate US Post Offices in three separate towns, but every stamp machine was out of order and the counters always closed. In Dodge I had stood in an empty postal building listening to the chatter of staff filtering through the air ducts. I shouted 'Wankers' and left. Clarksdale was similarly and infuriatingly bereft of stamps. At this rate I would be handing my wife and child a stack of postcards when I got home.
A breakfast of waffles and coffee and we were back on the road. Today we planned to traverse northern Mississippi and cross back into Tennessee by means of the Natchez Trace Parkway – a scenic, two-lane stretch of road we would pick up at Tupelo, the site of Elvis' birth, his twin brother's death and the subject of a song by Nick Cave called, fittingly, 'Tupelo'.
We drove past fields of harvested cotton – bales the size of static caravans, each one sprayed with lettering such as N-F6 or E4-E5. Either this was some form of harvesting code, or perhaps the cotton farmers of northern Mississippi were a group of sophisticated intellectuals engaged in a massive game of distance chess. Two hours of cotton, cotton and more cotton, and we arrived in the pretty conurbation that Elvis called home before Vernon Presley took the family north to Memphis.
Chris was hoping that Elvis' birthplace would be a normal house in a normal street, the only vacant abode in a run of humble but lived-in Mississippi homes, but the apparently limitless possibilities for generating money from the Presley name meant that even this tiny, two-room weatherboard 'shotgun house' had been turned into something of a theme park. In addition to Mr Presley Sr's handiwork (he apparently built it himself) was a visitors' centre, gift shop, story wall, Early Years Driving Tour and even an Assembly of God church that Elvis attended as a child, fully restored so you can experience worship just like the boy King. Lastly, a 'walk of life' – forty-two granite slabs, each one marking a year of Elvis' life – was apparently still a work in progress, as only the first eleven had anything engraved into them. Either that or the custodians of Elvis' birthplace just felt it all went downhill once he hit his teens.
The visitors' centre was closed, unfortunate as we were both in need of a 'comfort break'. So after hobbling the walk of life, crippled by our groaning bladders, there was nothing for it but to answer the call of nature in the woods behind the house, where presumably the young Elvis foraged for sticks as a child. Aware that this sort of behaviour could get us lynched in these parts – no doubt there were life-size replicas of Young Elvis Foraging Sticks available in the gift shop – we were quickly back in the car and heading for the Natchez Trace Parkway.
America is stuffed full of roads, from dirt tracks to twelve-lane superhighways and every possible permutation in between. Most are ugly utilitarian strips of blacktop transporting users from A to C without even so much as glimpsing B out of the window. The Natchez Trace Parkway is not like most roads. Two beautiful lanes stretch from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. No lorries are allowed on it, and the speed limit is 55 mph. It is impossibly quiet, and so densely populated with trees that driving it is like walking a tightrope through a forest.
We followed it for 204 miles. Imagine driving from London to Manchester with Kew Gardens licking at your windscreen all the way there. This was better. We had seen a weather report the previous day with a 'Fall Watch' feature listing the best places to see the spectacular reds, yellows and browns of the season as it crept south. According to that, by accident we were stumbling right into the heart of it. With the roof down, we trundled our way gently north with the contrast on nature's television turned up to eleven. It was an almost perfect moment.
Almost. Something was simmering between Joe and me. And it was about to boil violently to the surface. They say that sometimes it's the smallest of things that friends fall out over. In our case it couldn't have been any smaller.
Chris was driving. I blogged:
'They call it "Stockholm syndrome". Kidnap victims are deprived of human contact for so long that they fall in love with their captors. Sophie Marceau suffered from it (along with a wretched script, a five-foot love interest and the worst Bond theme ever) in The World is Not Enough.
It can happen quickly too. Hitherto non-violent publishing heiress Patty Hearst was famously kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974, and was robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco on their behalf by mid-April.
So I had rashly assumed that a musical version of Stockholm syndrome would have taken over, and by now I would be running up to strangers and forcing them to listen to country music at gunpoint. The truth is that after almost two weeks of indoctrination I am still of the opinion that only a gun to my temple will get me through Gram's canon.
The Red Hot Chili Pepper's early work for example is widely accepted not to be their best, but in my teens I loved the image so much I listened to nothing else until I started to like it. And it worked. I imagined this would be the case with Gram, too: a couple of weeks of nothing but the Byrds and Flying Burritos and – hey presto! – I would see what all the fuss was about. Sadly 'tis not the case.
This is a fairly guilty confession, as I know that Gram is the tie that binds this trip together, and saying that his music doesn't move me feels like swearing in church. The bald fact is I don't find songs about eighteen-wheel trucks engaging. And while I know it's only one song from his canon, it's symptomatic of the problem I have with country music generally. Today is Sunday. I've got until Tuesday to get it. From here on the in-car listening will need to be like aversion therapy. Not that I'd say I'm Gramophobic, but nothing's cut through yet. And the clock is ticking…'
Things between us had reached a pretty low ebb. The pool game argument in Clarksdale and crossroads replaying of it had been light-hearted on the surface, but a definite undercurrent of 'fuck you' was flickering on both sides. We were either bickering like children or not talking at all; hardly surprising given that by now we had spent nearly two weeks with nothing but each other for company virtually twenty-four hours a day. By day we occupied the sam
e tiny space – the increasingly Grievous Angel, now starting to resemble a pressure cooker rattling perilously eastwards – and at night we shared a hotel room, occasionally even a bed. It was beginning to take its toll. With no outlet for our frustrations other than blogs – public domain, so hardly the forum for letting off private steam – we were bottling them up with what would turn out to be disastrous consequences.
What made things worse was that all bloggings were saved in a single, steadily growing Word document on a shared computer, which meant that we both had visibility on what the other was writing. It was standard practice by now that upon switching driving duties the new occupant of the passenger seat would glance over what his driver had just written before putting fingers – or, in my case, finger – to keyboard and continuing the narrative.
We stopped on the Alabama state line to switch over. Joe took the wheel while I settled into the passenger seat and began to read. Two things struck me about his latest blog.
'You've put the apostrophe in the wrong place after Chili Peppers. It should go after the "s", not before.'
'What difference does it make? To normal people of the non-perfectionist variety, I mean.'
'It makes a big difference, Joe. How many Chili Peppers are there?'
'I'm not playing along with your silly little games.'
'How many?'
'Four.'
'Exactly, four. If the apostrophe is before the "s" it makes it one Chili Pepper. Singular.'
'And your point is?'
'My point is it's important to get this stuff right.'
'No, the point is that nobody else in the world apart from you actually cares about "this stuff". They're more worried about real things like their job or their wife or whether they've fed the cat than whether an apostrophe is in the right place. Why do you have to be so pedantic all the time?'
'It's not being pedantic. It's just doing things properly. Luckily most people know there are four members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But if you were writing about "my sisters' children" say, and put the apostrophe in the wrong place, you could be writing at least one sister and several children out of existence in one fell apostrophe. It's life and death stuff.'
'Now you're just being stupid.'
'No I'm not. And if you really wanted to be taken seriously as a writer you would care about it.'
'Well I don't.'
'Well you should.'
'Well I don't.'
'Well you should.'
This was going nowhere. I returned to his blog. The second thing that bothered me – and I confess that the issue of an errant apostrophe was rather clouding my judgement by now – was the admission that he still wasn't getting the music. He was feeling guilty, he said, because of the pressure he felt to love something I held so dear, to come around to the 'tie that binds this trip together', and it wasn't happening. Which is a lovely, sweet, warm-hearted thing for him to feel. It makes me feel very guilty about what I did next.
The line I objected to was how he failed to see the attraction of 'songs about eighteen-wheel trucks', and how this was symptomatic of the problem he had with the music. 'Well if you think that's all it is,' I seethed silently in the passenger seat, 'then you're clearly not trying hard enough. You of all people are supposed to be open-minded about music – all music. It's your job. And what's Johnny Cash if he isn't country? After everything we've done together, the miles we've travelled, the times we've shared – Christ, this was your idea – and you're not even trying!'
So I opened a new document (this was my most serious crime, now we had secrets) and, quietly smouldering while Joe kept his eye on the road, started typing. Vitriol and sarcasm tumbled over the keyboard. I fumed about his unwillingness to make an effort, raged about his lazy dismissal of Gram's music as being for 'truckers and cowboys'. I didn't want him to post the blog – really I didn't – but if he did, I would be ready. I would immediately post a watertight defence and win the day. Closing the laptop, I felt better for my private little spleen-venting session.
The sun slouched out of view to the west and immediately the scenery changed, like a Super Mario Kart race track reset from 'country' to 'city'. We were spat out into unpretty Nashville, where we would meet Jack Fripp, the Cash Cabin guy that Shilah had put us in contact with. Chris had arranged a meeting place.
'Where shall we meet?'
'At the waffle house.'
'Great – what's it called?'
'The Waffle House?'
'Yeah, what's the name of it?'
'Just Waffle House.'
We rolled into the car park with five minutes to spare.
Peering through the grubby windows we saw brown booths and menus wilting forlornly on chipped Formica tables. The enormous waffle-shaped sign twenty foot above us told cars on all four highways around us that this was indeed 'Waffle House'.
As we waited for our man, something about the phrase 'Waffle House in Nashville' nagged at me. It wasn't a lyric or a movie quote or an old advert, but deep at the back of my memory, somewhere amidst a thousand stand-up routines learned whilst making in-flight comedy programmes in the nineties, those four words were reverberating.
'Does the phrase "Waffle House in Nashville" mean anything to you?' I asked Chris.
'Other than that it's where we're standing?'
'Yes.'
Chris looked confused. 'Well, no.'
And then it came to me. Of course.
At one time we had even considered going via his home town of Houston as he fitted the brief of the trip – being both rock and roll, massively influential and, importantly, dead.
But we hadn't. And yet it seemed that in a manner of speaking he had found us.
'Got it!' I barked.
'Go on then.'
'It's Bill.'
'Drummond?' said Chris.
'Nope.'
'Clinton?'
'Nope.'
'Er… Oddie?'
'Hicks.'
'Really?'
'Pretty sure, yeah. You know how he used to talk about reading a book in a restaurant and the waitress comes over and says "What you reading for?"?'
Almost as though he we were holding it in his hand, Chris continued the script: '... and the trucker in the next booth comes over and says "Lookee here – looks like we got ourselves a reader."'
'Exactly. That was in a Waffle House in Nashville.'
'This one?'
'Maybe not. But then again, maybe.'
The only person who could confirm whether or not this was the exact Waffle House died of pancreatic cancer in 1994. We stood on the cooling tarmac drinking in exhaust-flavoured air, smiles creasing our faces and toying with the satisfying thought that maybe, just maybe, we were standing right in the middle of a routine by the greatest stand-up comic of all time – Bill Hicks. Bill, and I use the world advisedly, fucking Hicks.
Our Nashville contact, Jack Fripp, worked with the man now at the helm of the studio since the demise of the Man in Black, Johnny's son John Carter Cash. A telephone conversation with Jack the day before had begun with a check of my credentials. Evidently there were people trying to get hold of him that he was in no hurry to speak to – debt collectors, attorneys, nothing serious I'm sure – and he wanted to be sure I wasn't one of them. This and the fact he possessed a voice not unlike the growl of a grizzly on a Harley Davidson created an image in my mind of a giant, rugged bear of a man. The kind of guy you don't fuck with.
So when a Harley roared into the car park of our Waffle House meeting point and deposited a bearded Hell's Angel, leather-clad and sporting bear tattoos across biceps bigger than both my legs combined, he wasn't difficult to spot. He pushed the door open, stepped inside and paused to scan the restaurant.
'Hey, Jack,' piped a waitress. 'What can I get ya?'
'Hey, Tiffany. Get me a bacon double patty melt, a side of grits and a coffee, black and strong.' He winked. 'You sure look purty today. You seen two English guys come through here?'
&nb
sp; Tiffany flicked her thickly mascaraed eyelashes in our direction. Bear man padded over.
'Which one of you is Chris?'
'Er, hello Jack,' I simpered, standing up. 'That's me. How do you do?'
My hand felt puny as it shook – and disappeared into – his wrecking ball of a fist. Noting a thicket of goatee dangling several inches below his Desperate Dan jaw, I felt suddenly and excruciatingly aware of the feeble excuse for a horseshoe moustache perched sheepishly on my upper lip. 'This is Joe.'
He smiled broadly. 'Great to meet you. Shilah told me all about you guys. I've been lookin' forward to showin' you around. Tiffany – get these gentlemen somethin' to eat, would you darlin'?'
I felt a sudden, inexplicable warmth towards the man, a mixture of relief and gratitude for not being the big nasty monster I supposed him to be. It was a feeling I last experienced at the age of eight when feared school bully Duncan Farnley spared me a punching because he fancied my sister.
As he worked his way through several plates of fried food and half a dozen refills of coffee, Jack told us all about himself. With the immediate candour so typical of Americans but frightening to most Brits upon meeting them for the first time, he told us everything.