All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  And without the music there really isn’t much left of Memphis. The local visitors’ magazine recently challenged a group of travel writers to come up with the things that made Memphis truly unique (their italics). Apart from Graceland, their list included the following:

  Chucalissa Archaeology Museum, where Spanish conquistador Hernando do Soto first spotted the Mississippi and called it Espiritu Santo. (Well, actually, even the museum admits nobody knows where that was but it must have been somewhere around here. They have a few pottery shards.)

  Mud Island. (Exactly what it says on the label: a muddy sandbar in the Mississippi, with a bit of a park on it.)

  Sun Studios. (The only tourist attraction that has to bribe people through its doors.)

  The Lorraine Motel. (A monument to a murder, and possibly a miscarriage of justice.)

  The Pyramid. (An empty sports arena awaiting demolition.)

  The Peabody Hotel Ducks.

  Okay, I have to give them the last one: if only on the grounds of trying. The Peabody itself is an architecturally nondescript 1920s monolith of plush luxury hotel rooms. Sometime back in the 1930s the general manager returned from a hunting trip with some live tame decoy ducks which began frolicking in the lobby fountain to the amusement of guests. The incident turned into a tradition of duck-keeping on the hotel’s top floor and a daily routine, worked up by a circus animal trainer, of taking them down in the lift and rolling out a red carpet to the fountain for them to have a splash. This being Memphis someone decided the lobby band needed a musical accompaniment and broke into the ‘King Cotton March’.

  Bear in mind that the ‘King Cotton March’ is remarkably similar to its composer John Philip Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell March’, which became globally famous as the theme tune to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and you can see why this bit of choreographed surreal circus has become such a hit. We Brits are supposed to love such meaningless traditionalised wackiness – look at the House of Lords – but I can’t help seeing this as less of an eccentricity and more of a marketing gimmick. Especially now that other Peabody hotels in Orlando, Florida, and Little Rock, Arkansas, have adopted the ‘tradition’. That’s right, folks, you can tell it’s a Peabody by the marching ducks, just like you can tell a McDonald’s by the golden arches.

  The Memphis Peabody does have one other claim to fame: the fact that it was the setting for a crucial scene in John Grisham’s bestselling thriller The Firm. What they don’t boast of quite so much is that when it came to making the movie, they kept the name but chose another location for the shoot: one with a better view of the river than you can get from any of the Peabody’s rooms.

  Where were we? Oh yes… there’s one more item on the list:

  The Gibson Guitar Factory.

  I also have to give them something here: there are few guitar makes more famous than the Gibson, and in particular the iconic Gibson Les Paul. Les himself, however, comes from Wisconsin where he was born in 1915, and was the man who designed and built – back in 1941 – perhaps the world’s first solid body electric guitar. In terms of men who changed the world, you’d have to put old Les – 92 in 2008 and still playing – right up there on the list. No less than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has paid him the following inimitable compliment: ‘We must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash little punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets.’

  Les of course never had much to do with the guitar that bears his name. He simply signed a contract in 1950 that allowed them to use it. Apart from a minor tweak he had no input whatsoever in design. Les just sat back and took the royalties, while Gibson went on to sell the guitars all over the world. I should also point out that Gibson is in fact based in Nashville, Tennessee, not Memphis, and that the factory here is a recent addition. But they do make guitars and if factory tours are your thing… But I’d had enough at Harley Davidson.

  Right now I’ve got other things on my mind, food for example. Deprived of my peanut-butter-banana heart-attack special, I’m going to try another local treat that in the long term could probably be just as lethal but in the short term sounded a sight more tasty: ‘Memphis famous barbecue ribs.’ In Memphis uniquely ‘ribs’ are always pork, and the best were reputed to come from the Blues City Café, where else but on the corner of Beale Street. The tables are spartan, diner-style, the chefs behind the counter smiling round-faced black men who clearly enjoy their work, the waitress a sour-faced white girl who clearly hates hers. She takes my order with the thinnest-lipped smile I have ever seen on someone with even the remotest hope of getting a tip – perhaps it’s my accent. We Brits – our reputation goes before us. But within just a few minutes she comes back with a cold beer and the finest, largest plate of melt-in-your mouth pork ribs smothered in just slightly smoky spicy sauce it has ever been my good fortune to survive.

  If you are used to counting either calories or cholesterol, you need not so much a pocket calculator as a Cray supercomputer in Memphis. Other delights on offer include the fattest ‘French fries’ I have ever seen, ‘southern fried catfish’, deep fried burgers (!!), much of it washed down – if you can call it that – with thick milkshakes. Some of the food, like my ribs, is undoubtedly genuinely delicious, but all of it – and I am no gym-going vegan health fanatic – is potentially as lethal as Glasgow’s very own deep-fried Mars bar. And I bet that as soon as they discover that on Beale Street, they’ll be adding barbecue sauce and claiming they invented it.

  By now the weather was turning colder again and the drizzle was as incessant as ever, making me wonder if I’ve somehow become a rain god, as Douglas Adams would have put it, dragging a wave of atmospheric depression and persistent precipitation in my wake. Now I know why Marc Cohn’s lyric has him touching down in the Land of the Delta blues in the middle of the pouring rain. Maybe this weather is more common than I’d thought. Cohn may have been ‘blue as a boy can be’, but I don’t even have a first-class ticket.

  Time to pay Memphis’s music scene a final visit. I wander out onto Beale, stopping briefly to cross the street to the bizarre anomaly that is A. Schwab’s ‘variety store’: est. 1876, motto: If you can’t find it at A. Schwab’s, you don’t need it. Well, it might have been true in 1876 and maybe for half a century or more afterwards, but nowadays it ought to read ‘If you can find it at A. Schwab’s you probably don’t need it’. Bare boards, goods piled in cardboard boxes, Schwab’s looks wholly unreconstructed: a place to pick up a pair of overalls, a mop, an odd button or some out of date underwear. By which I mean underwear that is past its sell-by date: long johns or fleecy knickers. Schwab’s is so unreconstructed that you just know somebody has gone to an awful lot of trouble to unreconstruct it: almost certainly the same somebody who orders in the mojo candles and the Beale Street souvenirs that you can’t help suspecting sell more than the knickers. Schwab’s nearly closed in the 1970s when Memphis was at its lowest ebb and just beginning to rethink itself. It might have been better if it had closed; it would certainly have been more honest. The conservationists succeeded, however, in preserving it, right down to the ‘nickel candy machines’, which will still spit out a (very small) piece of gum in exchange for a five-cent coin. It’s still owned by a Schwab – third generation which in US terms makes them almost a historic dynasty – but again I couldn’t help feeling he was, like the shop, preserved for the tourist industry rather than for any more practical purpose.

  Back outside I crossed the road to the first bar with a band playing a little place called The Blues Hall with a long wooden counter and a small quartet knocking out a few passable tunes on acoustic instruments at the end. It was only when a door opened in what I had thought was the wall and I was blown away by a replacement wall of sound that I realised where I really was: back in the Rum Boogie Café. The Blues Hall, it turned out, was effectively the same place as the Rum Boogie next door, linked by internal doors. What looked like a series of independent bars competing with one another in a vibrant music scene, I wa
s beginning to realise, is really just a rock’n’roll theme park.

  A conversation with the barman in The Blues Hall revealed that they have been joined at the hip for years. Or what seems like years. The Rum Boogie has in any case only been going since 1985, so in part answer to my earlier question, if its collection of signed guitars is in any way genuine, it can only be because the owners have collected them rather than been given them in homage to any legendary reputation. Carl Perkins, incredibly enough, may still have been going strong in 1985, but both Elvis and Sid Vicious had plucked their last string years earlier.

  More than a slight disillusionment has crept into my mood here that even a couple more beers and a more than adequate standard of music – in both bars – can’t quite compensate for. I feel surprisingly sorry for Memphis. It’s a city that’s outgrown itself, in the way a wild but winsome teenager might settle down to become a boring middle-aged suburbanite. It’s worse than what happened to Elvis as he became a podgy ballad-crooning travesty of the weasel-hipped rock’n’roller: as if he’d survived and gone on to be a sad old man stripped of the glories of his past and then in his declining years some nostalgia wave had swept back to buy him a nice new rocking chair and say, ‘Never mind, granddad, you’re a national icon now.’

  Memphis has been saved from total decay at the cost of its heart and soul. It has suffered the same wasting disease as so many other American cities and not even such shiny nostalgic prosthetics as ‘the trolley’ can substitute for the loss of vibrancy and purpose. On top of this, like a replica rhinestone cowboy’s cape, its musical history has been dusted down and Disneyfied, Beale Street resurrected as Mickey Mouse’s Main Street. The music is still here but it’s being played rather than made. Memphis has become a tribute act to itself. If that isn’t enough to give you the blues, I don’t know what is.

  MEMPHIS VIA NEW ORLEANS TO WASHINGTON DC

  TRAIN 1: City of New Orleans

  DEPART MEMPHIS: 6:50 a.m.

  ARRIVE NEW ORLEANS: 3:32 p.m.

  DISTANCE: 406 miles

  TRAIN 2: The Crescent

  DEPART NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: 7:10 a.m. (Central Time)

  via

  Sidell, LA Greenville, SC

  Picayune, Mississippi Gastonia, North Carolina

  Hattiesburg, MS Charlotte, NC

  Laurel, MS Salisbury, NC

  Meridian, MS High Point, NC

  Tuscaloosa, Alabama Greensboro, NC

  Birmingham, AL Danville, Virginia

  Anniston, AL Lynchburg, VA

  Atlanta, Georgia Charlottesville, VA

  Gainesville, GA Culpeper, VA

  Toccoa, GA Manassas, VA

  Clemson, South Carolina Alexandria, VA

  Spartanburg, SC

  ARRIVE WASHINGTON DC: 10:10 a.m. (Eastern Time)

  DURATION: approx 27 hours

  DISTANCE: 1,152 miles

  21

  Ghosts in the Machine

  IT WAS 2:20 in the morning when I woke to find a large Cuban prodding me gently in the backside and saying, ‘Excuse me, ma’am.’

  I get this a lot. I think it’s to do with the hair, which was probably all he could see given that I was sprawled across two seats with my eye mask on and blanket pulled up over my face. He wanted to sit down. On top of me, apparently. Or at least in half the space I was occupying. The train had been full enough when we set off and I had a shrewd idea it was going to get worse, when I saw the conductor coming round and counting empty seats. But I knew there was one carriage at the rear of the train that was totally unused for no obvious reason and hoped that by feigning unconsciousness – or possibly death – I could persuade anyone from attempting to sit next to me, especially if they were large and female. I had by now developed a healthy paranoia – or you might just call it a survival instinct – about huge women with arses the size of Ecuador squeezing a small proportion of them into their allotted seat and the rest over me. It wasn’t the way I wanted to go. I didn’t want to be squashed by some outsize bloke either but on this train it was the ladies who were carrying all the weight.

  The Cuban was actually quite petite as travellers on The Crescent go – he only needed a seat and a half – and he was clearly no more enamoured of having to sit next to me than I was to him. What had happened to the idea of underused American railways? By now I was coming round to seeing the advantages of flying. Getting from Memphis to Washington DC isn’t easy by train: it means either going back up to Chicago or back down to New Orleans. I had opted for the latter. Part of my original plan had been to continue all along the Gulf Coast and maybe even down into Florida, but since Katrina that has been impossible: even three years later the tracks along the coast have not been repaired.

  So instead it was back on the City of New Orleans, which wasn’t such a chore – initially – as this was, after all, the train that inspired my whole odyssey, ever since my first hearing of Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo’s evocative rendering. The train itself was, regrettably, less romantic than I had envisioned, there only being two Amtrak models and I was more than used to both by now.

  Arlo Guthrie of course didn’t write the song that became his greatest hit. The music business mythology, which Guthrie has propagated, says he was having a drink in the Quiet Knight bar in Chicago in 1971 when one of the regular performers, a singer-songwriter called Steve Goodman, came up and asked if he could play a song for him. Guthrie, who got pestered like this all the time, said Goodman could buy him a beer and he would listen to him sing for as long as it took him to drink it. It was the best beer of his life. Goodman’s nostalgia-tinged poignant elegy to the American railroad era moved Guthrie so much he asked to record it and the result was an instant hit that won him two Grammy awards, and secured his financial well-being for the rest of his short life. Goodman had been diagnosed with untreatable leukaemia in 1969 and died in 1984, aged just 36. In notes on a posthumous collection of his work his wife Nancy praised his ability to ‘extract meaning from the mundane,’ precisely the magic trick performed in ‘City of New Orleans’, with its references to freight yards and rusted automobiles. It has since become an anthem not just for the train but the city too, played by Guthrie among others at fund-raising events for the victims of Katrina, a piece of good magic Goodman could not have anticipated.

  But it’s the second side of the triangle on this journey that is starting to get to me. The Crescent service up through the old south, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, is the most packed train I have been on outside the south London commuter network. And this trip is overnight and over a thousand miles long. And I’m stuck next to a large Cuban playing salsa music at 140 decibels on his iPod.

  By now I’m getting annoyed by this big empty carriage at the end of the train, and storm down to see if there is still space. There is. All of it. Still empty. With an eye to a showdown I find the conductor who must have seen me coming because he’s wearing protective glasses over his spectacles.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I try, using my best newly learned American polite warm-up. ‘Could you tell me if there’s any reason why all these seats are still empty.’

  He looks surprised. ‘Yessir. It’s because we’ve got about another 60 people getting on this train.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, still wondering if he was trying a flanker, ‘and when’s that supposed to be.’

  ‘Starting at Lynchburg,’ he replied without a blink behind his doubly protected eyes. So that’s that.

  I return to my seat and a new round of eardrum-threatening iPod wars: the shuffle god blesses me with Joni Mitchell singing ‘Woodstock’. I can only pray to God there won’t be half a million more boarding this train.

  Just as I’m nodding off the conductor comes to check our tickets, and the Cuban tells him – for no other reason I can imagine than to evoke my sympathy – that he only has one lung. It works too, even if I can’t understand why the product of a lifetime puffing Partagas Coronas means I have to spend the night listening to a tinny second-hand rendi
tion of ‘Guantanamera’. I get up and go to sulk myself to sleep on a bench in the brightly lit, noisy café car, thankful at last of my eye mask and the artificial fibre mock-Indian blanket I’d picked up on Albuquerque platform.

  As a result by the time we crawl into Washington DC’s – yes, you guessed it – Union Station, I’m all but wrecked. More than 10,000 miles on trains around this vast inland empire is an experience both exhilarating and exhausting. By the time I’ve caught the metro to the university district south of Georgetown where I’ve booked a room, all I want to do is make immediate use of its bed.

  But it’s incredible what 15 minutes’ catnap in a room that isn’t crammed with other people and shaking from side to side can do, and before I had dared hope I’m ready to take on the world, or at least the White House.

  Not that you can. Not these days, at least. It used to be possible with little more effort than an hour or so of queuing and the self-control to stand behind the braid rope rather than run over and bare your buttocks on the big desk in the Oval Office. But the ‘war on terror’ has put a halt to all that – no bare-cheeked terrorists here – just as the IRA long ago put a halt to small boys being photographed on the doorstep of Number 10, Downing Street. Necessary security, you understand, nothing at all to do with the self-important hubris of one George W. Bush.

  Instead, like the natives, I am reduced to staring through the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as are the hordes of visiting American school kids. This is a pity because I have done what they no longer can – when I was their age I was in there (though my parents wisely kept me in line and my trousers on) – and instead they are reduced to sitting on the steps of the monument to General Sherman (the man the tanks are named after), while their earnest teacher gives them a lecture on the history of the White House, focusing – to my amusement very largely on ‘when the British burnt it down’. This was a long time ago – 1814, to be exact – in a war the Americans confusingly call the War of 1812, even though it lasted from 1809 to 1814; it is a big factor in their history, although British readers will almost certainly scarcely be aware of it, as it was little more than a few minor colonial skirmishes in the much greater conflict of the Napoleonic Wars.