Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  I demurred, voicing concerns that my guitar-picking and singing, such as they were, were not anything anyone was going to want to sit through for longer than five minutes, at most.

  “No,” Erion agreed. “But you could bring your band.”

  I explained that I didn’t have one. Erion, of course, had not got where he was by listening to excuses.

  “Then get one,” he said.

  I thought about this for a few days. On the one hand, it seemed easy. I had been writing about music and people who make it all my adult life, off and on. So I knew loads of musicians. On the other hand, it seemed an incredibly awkward proposition. I would be asking talented people, possibly with reputations to consider, to line up behind a part-timing parvenu of sorely limited abilities who had clearly taken leave of his senses. Again, I thought advice was required. I mentioned the opportunity of the Albanian trip to another friend of mine, Mike Edwards. I’d known Mike since the early 90s, when he was the singer in Jesus Jones, and I was a writer for Melody Maker: my first visit to the US, and my first MM cover story, had involved rendezvousing with Jesus Jones’ tour in Salt Lake City in 1991, when they were hovering about the top of the Billboard charts with “Right Here, Right Now.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Mike, instantly.

  I wasn’t sure he’d understood. I was asking for tips about recruiting. I wasn’t yet recruiting.

  “I’ll do it,” reiterated Mike.

  I was both grateful and astonished, but also struck by a number of potential difficulties, which I thought it best to mention up front. Most obviously, there was Mike’s attitude to country music. This fluctuated, judging by our wine-addled debates going back some years, somewhere between hostility and indifference.

  “I can learn,” he replied.

  Also, he hadn’t heard a note of any of my songs. They might all suck.

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

  Plus, and I wasn’t sure how to put this, Jesus Jones’ mostly electronic pop records, fine though they were, had hardly been all about the lead guitar. And a country lead player, I explained, really had to be able to cut it, especially if he was also carrying a rhythm player like me.

  “I’ll manage,” said Mike.

  Then, you know, there was the fact that Mike had, within living memory, headlined major venues, indoors and outside, in front of a group which sold records by the million, in places people had heard of. This would be a sideman’s gig buried down the bill in a band which could scarcely be more obscure in a country which didn’t even get around to joining the 20th century until about 2003.

  “It’ll be fun,” declared Mike. “And anyway,” he continued, sealing the deal, “Gen [Matthews, Jesus Jones’ original drummer] can play drums, and I’ve got a mate called Alec who’ll play bass.”

  That seemed almost suspiciously easy. I felt able to push my luck. I called Astrid, and asked if she’d like to come to Albania to play piano in my country band, and maybe sing a bit.

  “Okay,” she said.

  As the band now apparently existed, I needed a name. At the twilight of a long, liberally lubricated evening with another friend, someone mentioned a throwaway gag in a magazine column we’d both recently read (and the author of which, sadly, I have forgotten). Seeking to summon an image evocative of the chaos, hysteria, confusion and general shrieking nonsense that had apparently recently beset his personal life, the writer had likened the vexatious female he was bemoaning to “a fire in a zoo.” It was cruel and vindictive, certainly, and altogether inexcusable, probably, but it made me laugh at a point at which little else was, and so the last toast hoisted before the waitress started doubting out loud that we had homes to go to was to The Blazing Zoos.

  The next few weeks were, probably fortunately, necessarily too busy to ponder the folly of the enterprise. I stayed at Mike’s house in Cirencester for a few days while we recorded some more demos. I emailed these to the band along with some MP3s of suggestions of the sort of thing I hoped we might eventually resemble—mostly my alt. country favourites (Old 97’s, Robbie Fulks, Corb Lund, Todd Snider, Drive-By Truckers, Ryan Adams, Steve Earle), along with a few old-school throwbacks (Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Lynyrd Skynyrd, David Allan Coe, The Flying Burrito Brothers). After several raucous rehearsals in a reeking basement in East London, we sounded exactly nothing like any of the above—but, I thought, every so often, to the extent that I could concentrate on anything beyond not screwing up what I was supposed to be doing, we sounded okay. This was entirely due to everybody else: Gen and Alec were an instantly solid rhythm section, requiring no more, respectively, than suggestion of approximate tempo and the identity of the key we were aiming for; Astrid was, as I knew anyway, an almost indecently talented piano player, and blessed further with what I maintain is one of the half-dozen loveliest female singing voices ever recorded; and Mike was a revelation, every lick and solo sounding as I’d hoped, if not quite dared believe, that it would.

  Our party of six—the band, plus Astrid’s guitarist Dan Burke, who would be joining her for her own set at the festival—flew via Ljubljana to Tirana. I had no idea what the rest of them were thinking, and even less of a clue what I thought I was doing. But I clearly felt I was keeping some sort of appointment with destiny. Clearing passport control at Mother Teresa Airport, I was genuinely disappointed when the customs officer behind the desk neglected to ask the purpose of my visit. I had been looking forward, with peculiar intensity, to replying “country singer.”

  Outside the airport, we were chivvied aboard a white minivan, whose panelling was extensively and inexplicably decorated with pictures of The Teletubbies: it would have been an undignified vehicle to die in. On the drive down the coast, we played those games that musicians confined to each other’s company do: coining, according to a preordained theme, puns based on song titles. We did geography (“Hungary Like The Wolf,” “Ice Iceland Baby”). We did London Underground stations (“Sexual Ealing Broadway,” “Solid Gold East Acton,” “Theydon Bois Of Summer,” “Rotherhithe Ho Silver Lining,” “Wouldn’t It Be Goodge Street,” “Paint It Blackfriars,” “Been Earl’s Court Stealing”). We did foodstuffs (“We Could Send Lettuce,” “I Fall To Pizza”). We did fish (“Hake, Rattle & Roll,” “I Don’t Like Barramundis,” “Baby You Can Drive My Carp”). We did, briefly, the pornographic variant, but only got as far as “Fisting By The Pool” before Astrid told us all, quite rightly, to shut and/or grow up.

  And then was when I noticed we were going too fast. And that’s how I got here.

  HE DOESN’T LEAVE his gun in my trousers long, and our journey to our lodgings, in a hotel snuggled in the hills overlooking Himare, proceeds without further incident. A late meal of excellent seafood and interestingly atrocious local wine takes the edge off the day’s excitements. Mike plunges the table into internecine rancour with an assertion that no great records feature a saxophone. With characteristic steadfastness, he refuses to retreat from this position even when the forces opposing him mention “Born To Run.”

  Everyone emerges late the following morning to learn that we have a view: the hotel commands the heights overlooking Himare from the south, offering a vista of untidy scrub-country and half-built holiday homes trundling down towards a sea as radiantly blue as the sky. There being nothing else to do in the immediate vicinity, we pass the time before our ride arrives with an unplugged rehearsal on the verandah. The decision is taken to shanghai Dan and his acoustic guitar into The Blazing Zoos, in exchange for which Astrid claims Gen for a couple of songs in her set: Gen practises his parts by tapping the edge of a table with his drumsticks. Bemused holidaymakers gaze down from overhanging balconies, and are kind enough to applaud at the end of every song.

  The road down to the festival site is the most precarious track we have negotiated yet, its perils illustrated by the crucifix memorials planted at what were apparently the last corners ever attempted by unlucky or imprudent motorists. The stage, when we find it, is gratifyingly large. On
the right-hand side, the festival sponsors have inflated a tethered hot air balloon. On the left fester examples of Albania’s distinguishing national landmark: a few of the countless concrete igloos built all over the country to ward off non-existent foreign predators during the bizarre dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, the paranoid dingbat who walled Albania off from the world from the end of World War II until his death in 1985. The beach, I notice, is one of those ones made of rocks rather than sand. If the crowd take agin us, I worry, this could get messy.

  As befits our lowly status, The Blazing Zoos are the first act to soundcheck (the headliners on this, the second day of the festival, are German electronica collective Chicks On Speed and gloomy Austrian pop outfit Mauracher). For the rest of the band, soundchecks are a chore they have discharged times beyond counting: as such, they don’t screw about untowardly, though Mike reels off the opening riff of “Right Here Right Now,” possibly by way of reminding himself that he wasn’t always an accessory to a friend’s brainmelt. I, by way of contrast, have never had the opportunity to plug my beloved candy apple red Fender Telecaster into a sound system of these dimensions, and make the most of it to a degree which may be excessive: though I feel my solo surf rock medley of “Pipeline,” “Wipeout,” the theme from “Hawaii 5-0” and The Pixies’ “Cecilia Ann” is appropriate to the seaside setting, Mike does not bother, as he dismounts the stage, to make his disconnection of my amplifier lead appear accidental.

  As showtime nears, I surprise myself by failing to feel even slightly nervous. This is, I suspect, at least partly a reflexive vote of confidence in the abilities of the five people sharing the experience. It is also, I’m certain, due to the fact that the situation just seems too peculiar and improbable to take seriously. Eight or nine months previously, before it became clear that Cupid had not so much struck me with an arrow as planted a landmine in my path, I’d had some fairly firm ideas about how I hoped the immediate future might pan out. The spectacle of this group of people tuning up, copying out a setlist of my songs and shrugging themselves into recently borrowed or bought western shirts in a dimly lit tent behind a stage on a beach in Albania would have ranked low on my list of likely scenarios, probably in between being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics and growing a beak.

  Our introduction is not, with all due respect to the festival organisers, seamless. Ideally, the compere would have plied the few hundred bemused-looking people standing in the general vicinity of the stage with some sensational lies about our prowess, at which we’d have bounded on and hit the first chord of our opening number. While he does offer a lengthy peroration, the precise content of which is a mystery to me, being in Albanian and everything, the PA system subsequently refuses to transmit my initial A-flat, forcing us to stand sheepishly about for some minutes while a repair is effected. It is a humblingly impotent feeling, standing in front of a decent-sized crowd of people holding an electric guitar rendered incapable of broadcast. A little, I imagine, like reporting for firing squad duty with a pop gun.

  After an interval long enough that I begin feeling certain that I can discern hair growth among the crowd, a shriek of feedback alerts us—and any passing shipping—to the restoration of power. My first swipe at my strings produces a satisfactorily belligerent clang, and we’re away, starting with “I Didn’t Have The Material (Before Now),” a song written as battle cry, statement of intent and ardent embrace of Harlan Howard’s dictum that country music is “three chords and the truth”: it’s a Johnny Cash-style chugger whose lyrics announce the the late-blooming liberation of a performer whose ambitions of country stardom have been hitherto thwarted by a succession of lovely and fundamentally sane girlfriends who gave him nothing to write about. We all finish at more or less the same time, and the crowd respond with what even the most hostile witness would have to concede is applause.

  Hubris meets nemesis with disconcerting rapidity, however. Our second song is one I wrote after the Albania show was confirmed, conceived as a frankly oleaginous act of populist bone-throwing: called “Like Tirana,” it is a whimsical (and, for what it may be worth, altogether heartfelt) declaration of fondness for Albania’s strange and engaging capital. While I don’t seriously expect anyone, in this setting, to keep up with the arcane local references and excruciating puns that riddle the lyric, it’d be nice if they had the chance: the vocal microphones cut abruptly out somewhere during the first chorus, thus depriving all present of my brilliantly wrought allusions to Tirana’s fabulously eccentric mayor, Edi Rama, and 15th century vanquisher of the Ottomans and Albanian national hero Skenderbeg. I look around at Mike, much as Lord Cardigan might have consulted a reliable sergeant-major as the Light Brigade first realised that their plans had been overtaken by events. “Just keep going,” he yells back, much as one of Cardigan’s NCO’s might have suggested, if only in the hope that the chap out front will stop most of the shrapnel. We do: the song is, at least, great fun to play, and while it may not be quite so amusing to listen to, the crowd is, if anything, growing. Whether motivated by appreciation or curiosity I cannot say, and don’t much care. This is fun.

  With vocals restored, we attempt “Anywhere But Here,” an upbeat shuffle inspired by—yet sounding in no way like—Buck Owens. It provokes actual dancing on the pebbles, which doesn’t even taper off during “Waiting,” a half-baked Green On Red pastiche whose clodhopping dreariness does not become fully apparent to me until approximately 15 seconds into this very rendition of it. Though barely three minutes long, it feels like strumming interminably along to a 45rpm recording of “Freebird” played at 33: it is a song whose first public performance will coincide with its last. Stupidly, I’ve chosen to follow that with three medium-pace-to-slow ones in a row, but the crowd is still building, dancing and cheering. Four possible explanations strike me: i) the guy playing in the DJ tent further up the beach really sucks; ii) the Kanun of Lek, a sort of Albanian bible of clan law, mandates the assembly of truly overwhelming force before chasing foreign interlopers into the sea at pitchfork-point; iii) the local beer is unusually potent; iv) we’re doing okay up here. I decide to focus on the latter.

  I’m pretty confident about “Do You Have A Sister?”: it’s the one I played at the Bluebird, a trundling ballad in deep inspirational hock to Robbie Fulks, in which a defeated, dispirited lover, unable to swallow his frustration that the apparently perfect object of his affections wasn’t quite what she appeared, asks his vexatious paramour the eponymous, desperate question. And it sounds great. Astrid’s sweet backing vocals take the edge off its essential poison, and Mike’s solo is fantastic—so much so that I make what I guess is the rookie’s mistake of enjoying it, and by the time he’s halfway through I have no idea what I’m playing, and have to hope that by now the guy mixing the sound understands us sufficiently to bury my guitar appropriately. Still, everyone hits the key change for the coda, and as the last chord dies away I understand why people—like the ones on stage with me, for example—want to do this sort of thing so much.

  The last four are a delirious blur: “This Isn’t Love,” a sort of anti-gospel tune, the lyric of which is a narration of everything said by an embittered wedding guest from the moment he answers the priest’s request for any objections to the point at which he’s heaved down the church steps; “Kumbo Prison Blues,” our only happy song, an obvious Johnny Cash homage recalling my mercifully brief and altogether farcical imprisonment in Cameroon the previous November; “Boys Of Summer,” the Don Henley mid-life crisis lament recast, probably not entirely convincingly, as Tom Pettyish southern-fried country rock, and inserted in the set in hope of eliciting some cheap Pavlovian ardour; “My Heart Won’t Be In It,” a sarcastic rant whose calamitously overloaded verses are intentionally sublimated in overwhelming squalls of Skynyrd-eseque guitar.

  And we’re done. I treat myself to a vainglorious fling of my plectrum into the crowd. A ferocious, clawing, eye-gouging struggle for ownership fails to ensue. But there is a quantity of clapping and cheering I�
��d have signed for gratefully before we went on, and I climb down the stairs at the back of the stage suddenly slicked with an apparently suppressed surge of nervous sweat, harbouring a heart hammering like an octopus’s drum solo and yet on the whole strangely calm, suffused with the relieved serenity of having got away with it. We’ve been playing for, I suppose, 45 minutes, give or take. It seems to have skipped by in seconds.

  A few celebratory beers later, I head out onto the beach to watch Astrid’s set. En route, I pass by the merchandising stall. There are festival t-shirts for sale, and our name is among those listed on the back of them. I buy one in every colour.

  UPTOWN TOP THANKING

  Acknowledgements

  PROPERLY THANKING EVERYBODY who has commissioned, permitted and encouraged a trove of journalism stretching over nearly two decades would require the printing of a separate companion volume. So, with due apologies to the shortly-to-be-disregarded legions who’ve helped along the way, I’m going to attempt to keep this brief.

  The first incarnation of Rock and Hard Places was published several centuries ago by Virgin in the UK. Thanks to everybody there who worked on it, especially Ian Gittins, who commissioned it, and Kefi Beswick, who ran the publicity. This second coming has been made possible by Soft Skull, and so thanks to everybody there as well, especially Anne Horowitz, Sharon Donovan and Denise Oswald. And neither version would have been possible had an assortment of editors not seen fit to send me off on these misadventures in the first place. I’m grateful to all of them, but in this context indebted more than most to Andrew Tuck at Monocle, Allan Jones, John Mulvey and Michael Bonner at Uncut, Caspar Melville at New Humanist, John Doran at The Quietus and Rahul Jacob at The Financial Times. I’d also like to thank P.J. O’Rourke, Bono, Patterson Hood and Bill Carter for their generous endorsements on the cover.

  Observant readers will detect a theme of atrocious puns serving as chapter headings. These are not exclusively my fault. If memory serves, Simon Price, Maria Egan and Brendon Fitzgerald contributed several to the first edition, back when such things were done over a few drinks. In this bold new modern era that allows us to maintain human relationships without ever having to actually spend time with people, the periodic headline-writing challenges issued on my Facebook page were answered with greatest distinction by Matthew Dupuy, Sean Kemp, Ariane Sherine, Terry Staunton, Ian Watson, Holly Barringer, Shane Danielsen and Stephen Dowling. Another brisk, manly handshake must also be offered in the direction of Neal Townsend, who coined the book’s title some while before the idea of writing it had ever occurred to me.