by Chris Price
It's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't play guitar precisely what it feels like to pick up an instrument as beautifully crafted as a Martin D-35. I can only say that it's a little like falling in love. Though I had spent two hours trying her out – yes, her – at Guitar Center before finally getting my wallet out, in reality it was a fait accompli from the first note. Love at first sight.
Yes, it had been an impulse purchase, but she was more than just a holiday romance. For one thing I would have to seriously improve my playing if we were to have any kind of future together, and that would take time. Seven Lemonheads songs and a few Gram covers were hardly worthy of a $2,000 guitar. With the sun on my face, I picked out the chords of 'The Outdoor Type' and pictured blissfully happy times ahead.
'"The Outdoor Type", I love that song,' said a voice behind the porch door. Courtney was home.
'Hey, how was work?' I chirped, putting down the guitar.
'Don't stop,' she said, joining us on the porch. 'It's nice. Work was OK. Did you go downtown?'
'We did,' said Joe. 'It's stunning. Easily the most beautiful city of the trip so far.'
'Isn't it? I'm very lucky to live here.'
I finished playing. 'You most certainly are.'
Courtney's eyes widened suddenly. Perhaps it was my guitar playing. 'Oh my – the trash! Let me take it out. I can't believe you've been out here with the stinky garbage all this time. I'm so embarrassed.'
'Hadn't noticed!' said Joe.
'Hey, I need to walk Lily,' said Courtney. 'She hasn't been out today.' Joe and I looked at each other. Yes she had. 'Wanna go to the beach?'
'Sounds great,' said Joe. 'Let's go.'
We jumped in the car and headed for Folly Beach, overlooking the Atlantic just outside Charleston, where Courtney could walk Lily and we could dip our toes in an aquatic bookend. We were travelling coast to coast for a multitude of reasons, the first being that if you hire a car in America and have more than two weeks to kill, then driving from one side of the country to the other is really the only thing to do with it. There is of course the $500 financial deterrent levied by all car hire companies called the 'One-Way Drop-Off Fee', but other than that… well there's no reason not to is there? No one ever fundraises by pogo-sticking from John O'Groats to Wolverhampton. You can't regale your drinking friends with stories of the time you walked from Lands End to Paignton. And Route 66 may be remembered as the quintessential rock and roll highway, but one of the reasons it has disappeared from America's travelling agenda in recent years is that it runs, not as many believe from LA to New York, but from LA to Chicago. From the Pacific, 2,488 miles all the way to… a lake. That ain't coast to coast. It isn't Kerouac. All the way west to all the way east is the only option.
And all the way east was where we were. What with the sand fleas, the dead horseshoe crabs and the sun setting in the west when we were looking east, Folly Beach wasn't the bromantic conclusion we'd had in mind, but at least there were no syringes in the surf. Job done, time for some Charlie Daniels. A strobing lava flow of brake light snaked ahead of us into the blackness of the South Carolina night. Red lights turning from dim to bright and back again, the shunt and chug of cars making their way slowly to the Coastal Carolina Fair.
'See – I told you Charlie Daniels was popular,' I boasted.
Chris was in the back seat. 'I don't think they're all here for Charlie… Are they?'
'No, they're here for some classic Southern entertainment,' Courtney jumped in. 'And maybe a bit of Charlie.'
We sniggered. Because we're childish.
To pass the time, and to get us in the mood, I put Charlie Daniels' Super Hits on the car stereo. Charlie sticks to a well-worn and successful formula: over fast and furious country hoedowns he layers densely-packed, staccato rhyming, delivered exactly halfway between singing and rapping, with a nursery rhyme simplicity which is easily imitated by a car full of excited children on their way to a funfair. Charlie is especially good fun, of course, when singing about selling his soul to the devil.
But not so awesome when he's singing about beating up gays. Track eight, 'Uneasy Rider '88', appeared to be some sort of queer-bashing anthem. This was a particular surprise to us, as I imagine it was to many of Charlie's fans when in 1988 he decided to re-record his 1973 novelty hit 'Uneasy Rider' (about being attacked for having long hair and liberal attitudes at a Mississippi bar), but with lyrics updated for more enlightened times. And what better subject than beating up on some ho-mo-sex-y'alls that came onto him and a buddy when they stopped at the Cloud Nine Bar & Grill.
Chris poked his head between the head rests. 'And this is the guy we're queuing up to see?'
'Oh yes,' said Courtney.
'Do you think he'll play "Uneasy Rider '88?"'
'Maybe. And what's worse is it'll probably be one of his biggest crowd pleasers all night. This is the South, don't forget.'
The Coastal Carolina Fair takes place during the first week of November in Exchange Park, ten miles outside Charleston. Run by the National Exchange Club, and lighting up the South Carolina social calendar since 1957, it is an altogether different experience to the fairs that pitch up with their tombolas and coconut shies on village greens around Britain every summer. At a British fair there might, if you're very lucky, be a Medium Wheel to delight the kiddies and shake up their elder siblings' alcopops. In South Carolina, as so often when it comes to comparisons between Britain and America, they just do it bigger. There are the regulation haunted houses, bumper cars and merry-go-rounds. Then there are towers, coasters, flumes, motorbikes, chair-lifts, even helicopter rides if the vertiginous thrills of the Mega Drop aren't sufficiently vertiginous or thrilling. Sweets in a jar it ain't.
We parked in the long grass and made our way into the fairground. Exchange Park also plays host to events such as the Land of the Sky Gun Show and the Low Country Coin Show, but the Coastal Fair is the jewel in the calendar. Over the course of a week, 200,000 people come to get their annual fill of thrills, spills and snack foods so high in saturated fat and so devoid of nourishment that they can cause obesity and malnutrition at the same time.
A family of four with matching paunches went through the gates ahead of us, dwarfed by the enormous chicken legs they were cramming into their greedy faces.
' Jeez Courtney,' I marvelled, gesturing towards the Squatzenheimers. 'How big are your chickens?'
'They're not chicken legs, look.' She pointed to a nearby food stall with a red and yellow sign shouting 'Donnie's BBQ Turkey Legs'.
'Is that a thanksgiving thing, or greed thing?'
'Neither – turkey legs are pretty popular. You gonna try one?'
'Think I'll skip that. I sort of have a policy of not eating anything wider than my own neck.'
The best thing about Donnie's was that all the servers wore a 'BBQ Turkey Leg Tour' T-shirt. And when one of them turned around to heave another bucket of limbs from the back of the shack, it revealed a month-long list of the fairs, rallies and rodeos that Donnie and Team Turkey would be appearing at. They were the rockstars of fast food.
'Do you think they get groupies?' I wondered.
'Probably,' said Chris. 'Really fat ones.'
Never has the American credo 'the same, but bigger' been so artery-cloggingly apt as when applied to fairground snack foods. Take funnel cake, guaranteed to quicken your pulse even if the turkey legs or Haunted House don't. Perhaps, as I have, you have stood in line for doughnuts at a funfair or music festival and watched transfixed as small, perfectly formed rings of batter plop gratifyingly from a hop into four sizzling rows of four below. Now imagine all sixteen of them deposited in a single swoop through a similar funnel the size of an industrial hoover attachment, brandished by a toothless redneck tracing repeated, overlapping pentagrams approximately the size of your head. The resulting criss-cross of batter resembles a bird's nest just large enough to accommodate an American bald eagle. Garnish with icing sugar, or – if your fancy takes you – strawberries and
whipped cream, and you have in your hands that quintessentially American delicacy, funnel cake.
The search for novel ways to get fried dough into your face has become something of an art form in America. If funnel cake doesn't do it for you, there are always elephant ears, doughboys, beaver tails, frying saucers, whale tails – all variations on a theme – to get your cholesterol rising. Or my favourite – the corn dog, which is a frankfurter coated in cornbread batter and deep fried on a wooden stick, thereby obviating the need for a bread roll and leaving a spare hand to hold either your tummy or the side of a rollercoaster. All of them are perfect fodder for throwing up over yourself later when your insides have been hoisted and dropped, flipped and flopped by a succession of stomach-churning fairground rides: cheap, tasty, and double the fun as you enjoy them in both directions. Those resourceful Americans think of everything.
No rides for us just yet however. We were running late for Charlie's scheduled stage time of 7.30 p.m., trotting briskly to the 2,000-capacity grass and concrete amphitheatre. We arrived to find the great man, still favouring the beard of Jesse Duke and the fashion sense of Colonel Sanders, cantering through a set of middle-of-the-road country to the polite applause of the assembled masses. When a brief between-song chat about his key seventies album Fire on the Mountain drew rapturous cheers, it was obvious that, like me, everybody was waiting for just one tune. Sure enough, as his allotted hour drew to an end, Charlie and his group of mild-mannered demons channelled for Ol' Horny and served up an impressive medley of his hit, 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia'. Standing on tiptoe on the grassy periphery stood a man with a stupid great grin on his face as he shouted along to every word. Reader, that man was me.
By now we were rolling four deep – me, Chris, Courtney and her friend Jack, a Stroke-a-like about town who looked like he could comfortably front any US indie band from the last five years. Which is to say his style and demeanour said 'Whatever you're into, I was into it before you.' He described himself as a metrosexual redneck, which is such a splendid and accurate description that I'll not try to better it.
We headed back to the funfair. Briefly tempted by the MTV Fun House (sadly not a life-size replica of Chris' office, just a regular fun house festooned with bad likenesses of Britney Spears and Michael Jackson), we passed the Big Drop (self-explanatory), the Big Wheel (ditto) the Really Big Wheel (really ditto), and dozens of others before arriving at the Scrambler.
Chris magnanimously suggested he escort Courtney, leaving me to cosy up behind them with Jack.
'Y'know, I'm not a big fan of fairgrounds,' he drawled as we waited for the thing to start.
'Why's that?'
'Well, my daddy told me he used to come here as a kid and help set these up.'
'And?'
'He said that once they finished building all the rides, there was always a big pile of bolts left over that they couldn't figure out what to do with.'
And with that the music started and we were catapulted into a series of figure eights like a Kaleidosketch on G-force ten. We span. We squished. We shared a modicum of DNA. We panicked because a small part of us believed the story about the bolts. Getting off, we held our stomachs and went in search of snack foods made out of fried dough.
Now let me ask you, what's the worst job you've ever had? Abattoir assistant? Head of bedpans at an old folks' home? Whatever it is, at the Coastal Fair we saw something that tops it.
Past the food stalls lurked a collection of what can only be described as freak shows. There was 'The World's Smallest Horse' (overheard from one visitor: 'Dude, that shit was a pony.'), 'The World's Smallest Woman', and lastly but most intriguingly an attraction promising, in ghoulish font above the entrance, 'The Head of a Real Girl with the Body of an Ugly Snake'. Alongside this was a painting of an armless brunette boasting scaly breasts, a long curly tail and a remarkable resemblance to Celine Dion.
Pride stopped me from going in. Jack had no such scruples. Two minutes later he came out, laughing and holding his stomach, saying it wasn't real. Disappointed, we went on our way.
An hour later we passed again. This time the intrigue gnawed at me. I went in. In a large wire cage sat a bed of straw. On the straw was a table, and on top of that – specifically poking through it – was the head of a girl with a snakeskin ruff and a stuffed snake's body attached to her neck. She was trying hard to smile, but rolled her eyes as people paraded past asking 'Are you really a snake?' or 'What do you eat?' Some buffoon barked 'It's fake!' – you don't say – and walked out. I followed.
I'm sure that poor lady didn't plan on a career as an ugly snake girl. Surely she had other plans for her life, her education, her career. But no, for fair reasons or foul her passport, if she had one, said 'Occupation: ugly snake girl'. If your job sucks, you can always dream of moving on. If it isn't quite as exciting as you'd hoped, you can at least take pride in doing a dull job well. No such luck for ugly snake girl. I suppose she could always do some moonlighting as a Celine Dion look-a-like.
She wasn't real, so it wasn't a genuine freak show, but I still felt a pang of guilt at the exploitation of the poor love. Moments later Jack practically fell out of the tent, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. He said the head belonged to a different girl to the one he saw earlier. He was still chuckling about this in a Charleston bar four hours later.
3 NOVEMBER
PIANO MEN
Dus'ter, noun 1.cloth for dusting furniture etc.
Dus'ter scale, noun 1. standard of measurement by which to judge magnificence or intensity of a gentleman's cockduster moustache, ranging from 'Prince' (discernible) to 'Leatherman' (formidable).
My to-do list had but one entry on it – grow a formidable moustache – and it was not going well.
I had last had a complete shave the day before flying to LA. Bearded Joe had handed down the moustache directive on the flight. Thanks m'colleague. On day six – through Joshua Tree and Grand Canyon to Monument Valley – I shaved the horseshoe in for the first time. Joe, who of course had started way past 'discernible' and was by then approaching 'respectable', didn't notice.
Five days and six states later – through the Rockies and across the seemingly endless Kansas plains, over the Mississippi Delta and into Tennessee – I had another go. Definite signs of life this time – rather as though a slug had crawled across my face while I slept, and after briefly contemplating my nostrils, turned for home.
By Charleston, on the East Coast, I had begun to elicit a few looks from people, possibly because of what they imagined to be an unfortunate birthmark, but at least it was attracting attention. Joe's moustache was definitely admirable if not actually formidable by now. That he seemed to have skipped the moustachioed rock god stage – difficult to pull off when you're carrying a ukulele – and was now careering headlong into Village People territory, was a consolation, as I also appeared to have all the camp of Leatherman without any of the attendant bushiness.
And there was another problem.
Have you ever had choose between friends? Pick bridesmaids or a best man maybe, or godparents to your children. Or worse – the most deserving recipient of your free introductory gym membership. It's a horrible position to find yourself in.
So when, a few days before setting off, Joe had said 'I've got tons on, you pick the music for the car,' I was more than a little aware of the pressure to bring the right people along for the ride. The trust placed in me was akin to a bride letting her future husband take care of the wedding invitations while she got on with ordering the flowers. It was a huge vote of confidence, but a tremendous responsibility, and in the end the trust turned out to be entirely misplaced. Barring a handful of old friends whom I knew could be relied upon not to make a scene – Neil Young, Jeff Buckley, Johnny Cash – my guest list featured several total strangers who either failed to bring anything to the party or, in Gram's case, threatened to spoil it altogether.
The thinking was this. I wanted, over the course of three-and-a-bit weeks an
d 4,500 miles, for us jointly to discover one record which would become the 'signature' album of the trip. The soundtrack to a road movie which years later would recall the people, places, scenes and faces to far greater effect than any photo album, scrapbook or journal. Tried and tested 'old familiars' never work – they are already laden with nostalgia for other times and other places. We needed blank disks on which to save the raw data of new experience.
It had worked once before. On a trip in New Zealand a few years previously, Nada Surf's just-released Let Go had turned out to be the perfect complement to the remote and dusty roads of the South Island, becoming a daily fixture on the car stereo and a near obsession both for me and fellow traveller Hannah. To this day the opening chords of 'Blizzard of '77' deliver me onto the shores of Lake Tekapo more instantly than the Starship Enterprise transporter. Five seconds of 'Killian's Red' and I'm listing through the unsettling green tussock of Lindis Pass amid minor progressions in the late afternoon of autumn 2003. I ration the number of times I listen to it for fear of overwriting those memories with new ones. I wanted Joe and me to have a Let Go of our own.
And I came close. In fact our Let Go almost ended up being The Letting Go, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's new album of gothic Americana whose 'Cursed Sleep' ('cursed eyes never closing') was apt but effective during the first unsleeping nights of the trip. But once sleep finally arrived it seemed to have served its purpose, both for me the insomniac and Joe the victim of it. Thomas Dybdahl's plaintive One Day You'll Dance For Me, New York City had perfectly scored the drive back from Cap Rock through a twilit Joshua Tree National Park, and received further spins over the next week before the scratched CDR fell foul of a temperamental CD player. The Shins' latest album, Wincing the Night Away, failed to float Joe's boat to anything like the extent it floated mine.