by Chris Price
Well that made a bit more sense. Shades of hippy free love maybe, but she was clearly just a nice person. Phew.
'And reading the stuff on your website I knew you weren't going to be weirdos. You can tell a lot from the way someone writes. In fact, being that I'm a girl and you're two guys, shouldn't I be the one with the serial killer concerns?'
She had a point, but I didn't want to ruin Chris' cool by admitting we were cowardly lime suckers who couldn't stash a body in the trunk even if we wanted to. Primarily because Chris would lock the keys in with the victim.
Charleston's age and pedigree were visible even in the dark. The houses were stately, well preserved and deeply varnished, with brightly-polished brass fittings on every door. Furls and detailing, elaborate drainpipes, columns and lintels on every building in the carefully preserved downtown spoke confidently of the city's 400-year heritage.
We arrived at Il Cortile del Re in the antique district and had a glass of wine at the bar while we waited for a table.
'I guess I was a little nervous about meeting you guys,' said Courtney. 'You've met some cool people in the last few weeks.'
'Like who?' I said nonchalantly, as if my life were just one long series of rock and roll encounters.
'Well Phil Kaufman's pretty cool.'
'I guess,' I conceded, reluctantly. Lacking the fascination that Chris and Courtney both had for the Cap Rock cremation story, I found it hard to see Phil as anything more than a slightly barmy old man we had a burger with.
'What was he like?'
'Short, fat, big moustache.'
'What did you talk about?'
'We talked about Gram, Polly, the body-snatching incident obviously. And how he likes to play elbow tit.'
'What's elbow tit?'
'Some sort of game that men play in bars.'
'I see. What are the rules?'
Courtney and Chris were going to get on just fine.
The next stop on Miss Connor's impressive itinerary was an agricultural equipment store turned live music venue by the name of Music Farm, where Texan space-rock three piece The Secret Machines were due to play. Our hostess generously bought both our tickets, as well as smoothing things over with security when at first they refused entry to Chris, whose steadfast refusal to assent to American social norms by carrying ID now threatened everybody's noses in the effort to spite his own face. Finally making it inside the venue, we bought a round of beers and waited for the band to come on.
Even in the absence of performers our eyes were fixed on the stage. We had very little choice in the matter because the stage was absolutely monstrous, and right in the centre of the room. A circular riser twenty feet in diameter was littered with amps, guitars and cables. Scaffolding poles around the circumference rose high into the air, on top of which sat a vast aluminium wheel festooned with lighting gimbals and strobes. It dominated the dancefloor, leaving barely any room for fans so that most of the audience were forced to stand, like us, at the bar.
How was the gig? Well, the band were ear-splittingly loud, the light show synapse-snappingly bright, and I fell asleep standing up.
Which is a something of an achievement even for a borderline narcoleptic like Harland. Not only did he fall asleep standing up while The Secret Machines – a band generally acknowledged as being one of the rockingest rock bands in rock music – assaulted our senses just metres from where he slumbered, he did so without spilling a drop of his beer. This was one tired fellow.
In his defence, I should tell you a little about how Charleston 'rolls'. The southern European influence is writ large all over town, not least in its approach to going out. Just as we Brits are draining the dregs from the last pint of the evening and heading home to fall asleep on top of our wives, the Spanish and Italians are readying themselves for a big night out. The same is true of nightlife in Charleston, where 11 p.m. is when most people start getting ready to go out. Any band still playing after 11 p.m. in London will very likely find themselves in trouble with the rozzers. Any band taking to the stage before 11 p.m. in Charleston will very likely be playing to the sound engineer and bar staff.
Which is why, when The Secret Machines struck the final chord of their final song and left the stage, it was getting really rather late for a man of Joe's delicate constitution. It's also the reason, when Courtney woke him up and suggested going to AC's, that a look of horror came over his poor little face when it became obvious that AC's was a bar and not some quaint Charlestonian euphemism for bedtime.
But Joe, as you will have gathered by now, is a man of resolve and resources. At AC's we took a booth near the pool tables and were joined variously and intermittently by Courtney's friends in between games. Energised by his power nap, a shot of bourbon and a steady stream of American people to tell stories to, Joe valiantly went in search of – and found – a mighty second wind behind AC's generously proportioned and well-appointed bar. Tales were told and anecdotes recounted.
Out came the one about The KLF burning a million pounds of their own money, Bill Drummond's travails trying to sell a Richard Long photograph for $20,000 (and how thirty, dollar-sized pieces of it ended up hanging on my living room wall), even the one about his mum being a professional chocolate taster who counsels anorexics in her spare time. His audience was enraptured and he was playing to it, pulling out only his choicest yarns and spinning them out with hilarious asides and amusing bonus content. He was the funniest, most engaging person on earth.
As designated driver and seemingly the only sober person in the entire place, I was the least funny, least engaging person in the room. I was having precisely no fun at all and confess I was making very little effort to have more.
Courtney and her friends all had names like characters from The O.C. – all Jacks, Joshes, Tiffanys and Cary Anns. The boys were in regulation skinny jeans, Chelsea boots and short-sleeved check shirts, tattooed of forearm and styled of fringe. The girls were regulation impossibly attractive. They were young, cool, beautiful and hanging on Joe's every word. If this was an episode of The O.C., then I was Season One Seth failing to get with the cool kids. Or worse, I was Joe Harland scowling by a campfire in Thailand while Peter Total-Fucking-Tosh impresses the girls with 'Re-bastard-demption Song'. Tomorrow it would be my turn to have a few drinks and let my hair down. I would have to be very, very funny indeed. Either that or get my guitar out.
2 NOVEMBER
THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO CHARLESTON
I was having a lovely dream about flying a Harrier jump jet. Piloting a jump jet is not easy, especially when your co-pilot leans in close and licks your face with her tongue.
Another lick. I woke up to a chilly Charleston morning on a blow-up bed apparently determined to tip me onto the floorboards of a wooden house warped into a Riddler's lair by years of barometer-shattering humidity. Chris was asleep on the sofa, Courtney had left for work, and her dog, a sturdy but friendly Weimaraner by the name of Lily, seemed to want to go somewhere. Presuming that she needed the doggie toilet I took her downstairs, opened the front door and watched in horror as she whipped by my right leg and ran into the road.
'Car!' was all I could squeak as a red Nissan, sun-bleached pink, raced towards her.
Ohshitohshitohshitohshit. I'm going to have to te.ll our generous host that we're grateful for your hospitality, we've enjoyed your company, and we've killed your beautiful pedigree dog. (And while we're getting it out there, Chris is thinking about playing his guitar at you.) The car braked, the bonnet dipped, the rear springs rose, and with a nonchalance which said 'I know what I'm doing, you plum,' Lily skipped out of the way with so little time to spare that she left a sliver of drool on the bumper.
I ran over, unsure whether to chastise or kiss her. She must have thought I was going for the full snog, because she glanced left and ran like only big dogs can, out of sight in this city I didn't know.
Nononononono!
I ran in the direction she had, looking for evidence of four-legged intrusion –
upturned bins, startled children, that sort of thing. Nothing. I walked around, practising the conversation in my head. It was an improvement on the first scenario, but not a big one.
'Hi Courtney – there's good news and bad news.'
'What's the good news?'
'I didn't kill your dog.'
'And the bad?'
'I lost her. Do you fancy a go on my mate Chris?'
After nearly an hour of searching I slunk dejectedly home. There I would tell Chris what I'd done and we
would get in the car and go, leaving a note of apology on the door. I walked into the living room. Chris was
snuggled up on the sofa with Lily watching the Weather Channel.
'Been for a run?' he asked.
'Er, yeah, sort of.'
'It's going to be a beautiful day. Breakfast?'
'Yes please.'
Lily looked up at me with a mischievous glint in her eye, and growled a little growl that sounded disquietingly like a laugh. We jumped in the car and drove into historic downtown Charleston.
Charleston had existed for precisely 111 years longer than our West Coast jump-off point, but Los Angeles had done an awful lot of catching up in the 225 years since, growing to three times the size of its older cousin and a whopping thirty-two times the population. While LA generates $800 billion every year for the American economy, exporting Californian culture to every corner of the world, Charleston subsists largely on tourist dollars, being one of few American cities with a history longer than the sideboard in grandma's front room.
All of which makes Charleston sound rather slow, which is precisely and gratifyingly what it is. Los Angeles, like its puffed-up Muscle Beach body-builders straining to press another ten pounds for the passing crowds, is a city with a point to prove. Charleston, by contrast, strolls past in deck shoes, khaki slacks and a seersucker blazer, oozing old money confidence and eccentric society charm. LA is the Eagles; a supergroup formed for the express purpose of shifting albums by the squillion. Charleston is Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing 'Summertime' to an audience of twenty in a sweaty downtown jazz club. And LA is still in a hurry to get somewhere; Charleston arrived long ago and is relaxing on the porch with the papers and a gin and tonic.
What a pleasure it was then, after a week overnighting in cheerless hotels outside dreary, identikit towns, to know we had at least one full day to explore an ancient, beautiful city which time had forgotten, to borrow the opening line of DuBose Heyward's Porgy, upon which Charleston folk opera Porgy and Bess is based. What cheer, after a string of Nowherevilles with no-go downtowns overrun with banks or robbers, at the thought of a lazy amble among the densely-packed antebellum houses of the Charleston peninsula. What novelty, accustomed as we now were to driving from hotel to restaurant across one highway and two enormous car parks, in ditching the car and exploring on foot. And what an unexpected relief to step off the music trail for a while and enjoy a place simply for what it was, and not for who recorded, overdosed, sold their soul or bought their groceries there.
Courtney had left a hand-drawn map to get us started. We followed it the length of Rutledge Avenue, which delivered us onto the Battery, the southernmost tip of the peninsula where, as Charleston carriage tour operators love to joke, 'the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet to form the Atlantic.' This is where Charleston's most prestigious homes can be found – palatial, plantation-style white villas whose double and triple-height verandas, elaborate column work and immaculate gardens trumpet the city's colonial past and place it so strikingly at variance with virtually every other city in North America.
We parked the car, breakfasted on pancakes, and then walked them off in the sunshine along Broad Street and the surrounding network of lanes and boulevards. Being narrow, occasionally curved or – just as uncharacteristically for America – named after people, places or wars rather than numbers, they were pleasingly conducive to getting lost, which we delighted in doing for a couple of hours.
Further from the Battery the houses were smaller but every bit as pretty. An eighteenth-century frontage tax imposed by the British Crown resulted in the Charleston crush of tall, narrow properties whose deep porches run perpendicular to the street, creating a tantalising sense of mystique as well as frequent opportunities to peer into people's front rooms as we walked by.
Joe's perpetual quest for stamps took us to the imposing main post office, which a friendly Charlestonian dog walker directed us to on Meeting and Broad. (The American convention of dropping the words 'street', 'road', 'boulevard' and so on was hardly new to us, but I still found myself occasionally double-taking when asking for directions and apparently being told the state of play in an American football game: 'It's on 3rd and Long.' 'That's great, but where's the train station?') The opulent interior of the post office made The Wolseley look understated. High coffered ceilings above marble columns on brass attic bases echoed the squeak of trainer on marble floor. Post office boxes, decorated with elaborate brass trim and mounted into carved mahogany, took up every inch of wall.
I had a look around and took pictures while Joe went in search of stamps. Browsing a postcard carousel, I picked one out listing the South Carolina state symbols. State motto: 'Dum spiro spero.' ('While I breathe, I hope.') State bird: Carolina wren. State dance: the Shag (and not, disappointingly, the Charleston). Further down they read less like state symbols than a ten-year-old listing his favourite things. State reptile: loggerhead sea turtle; state insect: Carolina mantis; state snack: boiled peanuts. I half expected to see a favourite colour or state Pokémon. South Carolina even had a state hospitality beverage (tea).
We later discovered that twenty-six other states had a favoured hospitality beverage and, to our utter astonishment, that Nebraska's was Kool-Aid. We also learned there were such things as state soils, state crafts, state swords and state 'prepared foods' such as muffins, doughnuts, desserts and cookies. Oklahoma even had several of its own state 'menu items', including barbecued pork, chicken fried steak and biscuits with gravy. ('Well if Texas gets chilli con carne then I'm having chicken fried steak and barbecued pork.')
Further along Broad Street was Berlin's clothing store, which had been decking out the city's gentlemen folk since 1883, and where Courtney had worked to pay her way through college.
Charleston fashion is as vibrant and unique as its architecture. A more flamboyant, Southern take on the traditional American preppy look, it combines linen and seersucker jackets with button-down shirts and chinos in a rainbow of pastels to match the weathered hues of the city's street frontages. Nantucket Reds, showy trousers by most standards, are embroidered all over with sporting marlins, sailing boats, ducks or criss-crossed tennis racquets, worn just above the ankle over slip-ons ('weejuns') or boat shoes, always without socks. True eccentrics mark themselves out with a bow tie. I was tempted to make a purchase, but fancied that this kind of flair, against the dreary backdrop of London, would look less sartorially eccentric than consummately unhinged.
We returned to Courtney's apartment. We had some rehearsing to do.
After two weeks of dedication, hard work and sheer grind, the moustache was in fine form. The same could not be said for my musical skills. The failed attempt to put me on the Satanic fast track left me no option but to learn to play the bloody ukulele properly. This meant practice, and practising a musical instrument is not something I was cut out for. I quickly regress into a despondent teenager if I'm not playing note-perfect Chopin within the first hundred seconds, with a tendency to throw said instrument into a corner, forever to gather dust.
But Chris was confident he could do what previous music teachers Miss Shepherd (piano), Miss Tysen (flute), Mr Michaels (recorder) and Mr Spears (bass) had failed to do. He really believed he could teach me a song. We sat in the sun on the twisted beams of Courtney's sloping back porch, ukulele and guitar in hand.
'We're going to learn a Gram Parsons song,' said Chris.
'OK.'
'It's very easy.'
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'It'll need to be.' Petulance rising.
'"Grievous Angel" has only got five chords: G, C, D, A and B-minor. I've transposed it to make it easier on the uke. This is a G.' He held down three of the strings and strummed lightly, effortlessly conjuring the sound of a warm luau. 'Now you have a go.'
Looked easy enough. Fingers go here, here and here.
'Like this?'
'Yep.'
Ker-thumpf. It sounded like a sausage being dragged over chicken wire.
'I told you I couldn't do it!' I huffed triumphantly, like a child determined he'll never ride his bike without stabilisers.
'Try again.'
Sausage on chicken wire once more.
'And again.'
Sausage on violin.
'And again.'
Fingers on violin.
'And again.'
Fingers on ukulele!
'There you go!'
Wow. Check out Christopher Miyagi. It wasn't Chopin, but it was, for the first time in my life, a proper chord. The other chords quickly followed and before an hour was up, I could play all the bits necessary for 'Grievous Angel'. I couldn't play them in time, at the right speed, or in the right order, but I had all the components, and that was a start.
Another hour and we'd have nailed it. But my student had achieved a lot in his first session, and he really needed to put in some hours waxing the car and sanding the floor of the dojo before moving up a grade. Besides, there was a Martin D-35 acoustic guitar calling to be taken out of her case and strummed. While Joe perfected his B minor, I set about the task of getting to know my latest clinch.