by Chris Price
His life, he said, fell loosely into two phases: 'drugs' and 'post-drugs'. Drugs Jack, whom he referred to in the third person, had been a lying, cheating, womanising drunk. The Jack sat before us now was addicted, he assured us, to nothing stronger than Starbucks Doubleshot. He smiled readily and often, and was disarmingly eager to please. The zeal with which he opened up every detail of his chequered life story – the drug dependency, the string of failed relationships, the issues with his kids – was terrifying and weirdly reassuring at the same time, like being pinned down by a St Bernard and licked to within an inch of your life. By day he sold cleaning products to businesses in the area, and by night he worked as a talent scout for John Carter Junior's production company.
'You're gonna love the cabin,' he smiled, wiping ketchup from his beard. 'Oh and John Carter's gonna be there. He wants to meet you.'
Get. In.
Get. The fuck. In!
The visit to the Cash estate in Hendersonville, just to the north of downtown Nashville, was planned for Monday night. Today was Sunday, so we had time for a get-to-know-you night out with Jack. But first we needed to go back to the hotel, freshen up and post the day's bloggings to the website. I let Joe have first dibs on the computer, waiting to see if he would post the blog about Gram Parsons being music for truckers.
'All yours mate,' he said, clicking 'post' and standing up from the dresser. 'I'm gonna jump in the shower. Have a read.'
I sat down and scanned his latest posting. Stockholm Syndrome… swearing in church… there it was: 'I just don't find songs about eighteen-wheel trucks engaging.' Absolute… fucking… fucker.
The shower clunked into action in the bathroom. Then singing:
'… Billboards and truckstops passed by the Grievous Angel…'
Christ, he was even singing it in the shower!
'… Twenty thousand ro-oh-oads I went down, down, down…'
Bit rich, don't you think mister? Blogging that you don't get it and then singing it in the shower?
'… And they all led me straight back ho-oh-ome to yoooou…'
Don't like trucker music, huh? This'll show him.
I pulled up my secret blog:
'A common argument levelled against country music often runs along the lines of "I just don't find songs about eighteen-wheel trucks engaging." That's a fair point. I wouldn't find that interesting either. I have no interest whatsoever in heavy-goods vehicles. In fact vehicles generally just aren't my thing. Music of any genre with an exclusively automotive theme isn't likely to float the boat of anyone but the most ardent petrolhead.
So what's the appeal of these songs then? Darned if I can work it out. But I'll give it go.
"Return of the Grievous Angel" by Gram Parsons, for example, does appear to reference articulated transportation of some sort: "Billboards and truckstops passed by the Grievous Angel." HGV fans hold your hands aloft and sing hallelujah – this is the song for you!
But wait a minute – what's this line here at the end? "Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down, and they all the led me straight back home to you." It jars somehow with the other lyrics in this eulogy to eighteen-wheeler heaven. What on earth could it refer to? Some allusion to loneliness and longing perhaps, to the feeling of coming home to a loved one after a long time apart, possibly on the road.
But if that's the case, all this other stuff about truck stops and billboards just doesn't make sense. Maybe, just maybe, there's another level of meaning in the song – what the literary boffins refer to rather impenetrably as "metaphor". Can it be that all this talk of long journeys is in fact a clever means of illustrating some other, more deeply felt emotion than a love of trucking?
I'm just not sure. If it were, surely that – along with the beautiful melody, fine harmony and instrumentation – would make it a pretty wonderful song? If in fact the song weren't actually about trucking at all, but about – I don't know – that sense of comfort human beings derive from knowing there's someone out there who will always represent home, who will always be there no matter how far your travels take you away from them, well, what a wonderful song that would be. Anyone on a long journey, far away from their loved ones, would find it incredibly comforting I'm sure. [This line was a particularly cheap shot, given how much Joe was missing Nic and Noah.]
"Grievous Angel" is no more a song about trucking than "Wichita Lineman" is a song about the wonders of telecommunication, or "A Man Needs a Maid" about Neil Young's inability to look after himself without home help. It can be a little hard to tease these things out sometimes, but if you really try – I mean really try – you'll get there in the end.'I was about to hit 'post' when Joe emerged from the bathroom amid plumes of steam.
The moment I stepped out of the shower Chris closed the laptop. Which meant he was doing something on the computer that he didn't want me to see. Which for most men would be porn, but for Chris would most likely be pedantry.
'What are you up to?'
'Nothing,' he protested, hands caught in the cookie jar.
'Let me see.'
'It's nothing, really.'
This called for more aggressive tactics. I loosened the towel and started to dry myself in what, for the sake of decency, I'll describe as 'a distracting manner'.
'Is it for the website?'
'Maybe.'
The elusiveness pointed either to guilt or embarrassment or both. Irritated, I adopted the 'parent talking to infant' voice. 'Was it about the itty-bitty apostrophe?'
This was intended to annoy Chris into telling me what he'd been typing. It was only half successful.
'It isn't actually. But I still think you should care more about grammar if you want to be taken seriously as a writer.'
'And you should care more about being less of a condescending wanker.'
By now I was completely dry and had to stop towelling for fear of looking like I was rubbing myself over punctuation. Neither of us was going to let this descend into a playground fight over the computer, so as the shirt and trousers went on I tried silence as my next tactic. He opened the laptop. 'Have a read if you want.'
I read the blog. Something about me being too intellectually feeble to appreciate the majesty of the things that he liked. 'What the fuck's this?'
'Just letting off a little steam. I'm pissed off with you.'
'Well that makes two of us.'
'Don't be so hard on yourself,' sneered Chris.
'No, I'm pissed off with you. Wanker.'
Silence.
'I called you a wanker.'
'We need to meet Jack,' said Chris, ignoring my attempt to initiate an air-clearing slanging match, and with that we went to the car and drove in silence to meet Jack.
Jack took us first to the Texas Roadhouse for dinner – 'They do great steaks there, and I'm kinda sweet on one of the waitresses' – and on into downtown Nashville to take in a few clubs. He wanted a 'second look' at a band he was considering for recommendation to John Carter.
We ducked into one of the numerous music venues on Broadway. Silk & Saddle – a troupe of three girls on fiddle and mandolin, accompanied on guitar by a teenage boy curiously endowed with the facial hair of a middle-aged professional beard-wearer – played bluegrass to a raucous and appreciative crowd. The mandolin player had the bored and studied nonchalance of a Victoria Beckham or Paris Hilton down pat. She was also possessed of a figure that either of them would be happy showing off to the paparazzi on the Croisette in Cannes. That she was happy to give us a good look at it in a pair of barely-there hot pants and a skin tight, cropped leather jacket, was an unexpected treat. She'll go far.
At Tootsies, a little further along Broadway, we went into an upstairs room where a younger, fatter version of Tim McGraw belted out country standards and twangy versions of rock and pop favourites. (Perhaps he was attempting to emulate the career of Ronan Keating in reverse – millions of record sales based on the simple formula of removing the twang from tried and tested country hits and then flogging t
hem to an unsuspecting British public.) Fat Tim's set included, to the delight of a gaggle of middle-aged Winconsonian women vacationing without their husbands for the first time in centuries, a rousing interpretation of Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar on Me'. This he delivered from the top of the bar, allowing the Witches of Wisconsin to position themselves beneath – and be photographed uproariously pointing at – the singer's bulging appendage immediately above their heads. When he returned to the stage to join his band, they turned their attention to Jack (possibly Joe and I looked a little unattainable), who promptly suggested it was about time for him to be in bed, and we left.
It was a relief to have spent the evening watching live music. It lessened the need for conversation, which in turn disguised the fact that Joe and I, as polite and effusive with Jack as he was with us, had barely exchanged a word all evening. Perhaps that, and not the Witches of Wisconsin, was why Jack couldn't wait to leave. A night on the town in Nashville watching country music with two petulant Englishmen, one of whom hates Nashville and country music, both of whom hate each other, possibly wasn't his idea of a fun night out.
As ridiculous as the blog showdown had been, it felt as serious as a fist fight. OK, so we didn't come to blows. We're not come-to-blows types. When Joe gets riled he's more apt to dent inanimate objects than people – the Radio 1 music library still bears the toecap-shaped scars of the time he was nanoseconds off the beat segueing two records during a Jo Whiley comfort break – and I apparently turn into a brooding, sulky teenager more prone to private bursts of anguish than flying fists of fury.
And it was the first time, beyond the refereed confines of the Radio 1 playlist meeting, that Joe and I had had a proper, meaningful disagreement about something. That it should happen three years and several thousand miles into a journey aimed at deepening our friendship was one part ironic to three parts catastrophic. Right now our relationship couldn't have been any deeper; it appeared to be several feet below ground under a headstone marked 'Bromance is dead'.
30 OCTOBER
A BOY NAMED JOHN
I was still pretty narked with Chris, and also a little frustrated with myself. Not about punctuation, but about music, specifically my inability to play a note. The only hope of fixing this was to actually buy an instrument, which in turn meant confronting, head-on, a long held prejudice.
I believe that you should never, ever trust a man carrying an acoustic guitar. A man carrying an acoustic guitar is only ever a millisecond away from whipping it out and playing it at you. Another thing that life has taught me is that when said gent pulls out said six-string, the chances are he's about to play some Bob cocking Marley.
Nothing against the man personally, it's just that I've lost count of the number of beaches or hostel fireplaces I've sat around whilst some tool with an educated accent, dust in his ringlets and faux-ethnicity henna'd all over his wiry frame shits on the 'Re-bastard-demption Song'. And the girls sat around, oh how they love it. Why wouldn't they? They're on holiday without Daddy for the first time since they wintered in Klosters and he nipped off to Paris for two days to nail the au pair, and this lad in front of them is actually playing music and singing! So Peter Total-Fucking-Tosh gets laid whilst my friends and I (all right, yes, just me) sit on the periphery of the group, scowling.
Which is the reason that, when we devised this trip and decided that we should sing a song at the end of it, I elected to try and master the ukulele. It was all part of the quest. That and the whole figuring out American music thing.
Somewhere in the world Gavin Rossdale was celebrating his birthday. Singer and guitarist for Bush, Rossdale fronts a band which had the same problem as me, but in reverse. For five years in the mid-ninetie they hurtled around North America selling out arenas and guesting on innumerable TV shows, but in the UK they just didn't connect. Worse, they were held as something of a joke. For a band formed within drumstick-throwing distance of the BBC's Television Centre, their inability to get a slot on British TV must have been painful. Gavin understood the lyrics, the riffs, the poses and the quotes that America wanted, but to his frustration the Brits didn't think much of Bush, if they thought of them at all.
I have nothing whatsoever in common with Gavin Rossdale, but at that moment I could appreciate his predicament. By this point we had travelled two thousand miles, crossed mountains and canyons, rivers and plains and all to a soundtrack that felt like homework. There is an ocean between Britain and America, physically and musically, and there was still seemingly nothing the tufty-lipped man to my right could do to bridge it.
But back to the ukulele, or (phonetically) ooh-koo-lay-lay. That's how it's pronounced you know. It was, oddly, the Chili Peppers' Anthony Kiedis who corrected me on my pronunciation, citing that it was the only instrument he had managed to master to any significant degree. Having as few strings as it's credibly possible to have, as well as being portable and favoured by the singer in one of my favourite bands, this was clearly the instrument for me.
In my youth, various instruments were foisted upon me by parents eager that my mind and soul be nourished by the healing benefits of music-making. The piano clearly had too many notes and pedals for my eight-year-old mind. Three subsequent years of learning the flute still didn't get me to a level where I could take an exam. (When even your music teacher accepts that after thirty-six months of practice it would be taking the piss to make anyone other than themselves listen to your toils, then you know that this isn't the instrument – and possibly not the art form – for you.)
A couple of years pointlessly learning bass guitar further endorsed my world view of music being a discipline for geeks, nerds and, fundamentally, show-offs. I say the bass was pointless as this was the age at which many are forming bands, jamming, covering their favourite songs and exploiting the rare opportunity of being both parent-tauntingly loud and parent-pleasingly musical.
The key to it was the forming of a band. Sadly, my school year was sorely lacking in the diverse musical skills required to do this. Of one hundred and twenty students, there were but three lead guitarists, one bass player (me), and a particle-physicist-cum-piano-prodigy who knew Bach but not It Bites. So, enamoured as I was of the musical stylings of Iron Maiden, I spent two years practising the playing style of Steve Harris alone in my bedroom. With no one else to rehearse with, my efforts were wasted. When I realised that signing up for design and technology classes meant being able to play for hours with welding equipment and weapons-grade petroleum products, the bass guitar and musical ambitions were consigned to the cupboard.
Fast-forward eighteen years and I resolved to have another bash by buying a ukulele. The plan had been to pick one up in Los Angeles to allow for maximum rehearsal time, but we never made it into a music shop. Same story in Denver; same again in Memphis. So on meeting Jack at the Waffle House, Chris had asked him to recommend somewhere we could purchase a reasonably-priced uke and guitar. When he said 'Guitar Center', I feared another embarrassing replay of yesterday's waffled arrangements – 'What's it called?', 'Just Guitar Center' – but by now we were wise to the naming conventions. We arrived late in the afternoon.
Just as the Waffle House serves up more than waffles, at Guitar Center you can get more – much more – than guitars. From the outside it looked like B&Q. On the inside an infinite world of musical possibility hung on the walls, stood on stands, was stacked and racked in enormous rooms, each dedicated to a particular instrument. In the electric guitar room a colour wheel of Gibsons, Fenders, Gretschs and Washburns covered every available inch of wall. The drum room resembled a percussion laboratory filled with every conceivable size, weight and colour of drum, stand and cymbal.
There weren't, it's fair to say, a lot of ladies in the shop.
We were here to buy a ukulele, about which I knew very little, but Chris owned a couple and had enough knowledge, he thought, to tell good from bad. Entering the store, he glided straight past the 'stringed folk instruments' section as though on a tractor-bea
m and walked to the glass door of a wood-panelled 'Acoustic Room' where… he fell in love.
She was three feet tall with a curvaceous body and perfect complexion, and her name was Martin. She was, with wearisome inevitability, a guitar. Without blinking, he picked her up and started to strum. I apparently was no longer in the room. For the next ninety minutes I tried out a range of fiddly little four-strings on my own before deciding to splash out a whole $100 on a beautiful Mitchell specimen, light tan in colour with pearlescent ivory trim around the body and sound hole. Pleased with my purchase, I flicked through a book of chords while Chris continued to pick and pluck in his soundproof booth. This was a serious infatuation. Or a thinly-disguised ploy to avoid talking to me.
After two hours of strumming, two minutes of negotiation with salesman Dave 'Mad Dog' McGruin, and two thousand dollars later, he left the room. That's five times what I paid for my first car. For about $1,950 less he could have got a blow job. Back at the hotel, several more hours of picking, stroking and cooing ensued, until I prised her from his loving arms and suggested it was time to meet Jack for the Cash Cabin visit.
Ever since I was a child there has been an inextricable connection in my brain between old men, country music and the musty smell of alcohol and grooming products.
When I was a boy, my grandparents would visit often for Sunday lunch. At around midday my granddad would disappear to the pub to play dominoes and drink several gallons of pale ale while my mum prepared a roast. After lunch he would retire to the living room to let it go down. Sitting bolt upright in his favourite armchair, he would open the newspaper, turn to the sports section, and fall asleep. His head would slump backwards, hoisting his capacious nose towards the ceiling to reveal arched, cavernous nostrils above his now gaping mouth like darkened church windows over an open portico. He slept for most of the afternoon until, stirring sometime around 5 p.m., he would wake up with a start and brusquely inform my nan that it was time to go home.