Diamond in the Rough

by Shawn Colvin

  Shawn Colvin Band—Jack O’Boyle, me, Dennis Conroy,

  and Brian Sandstrom—SIU campus, 1975

  Our repertoire consisted of the same material I’d done by myself, with the addition of some Bob Marley, a few of Jim’s songs, and a lot of the new incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. At this point wardrobe was becoming key, and between Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks I was getting my look down. One New Year’s Eve, I was booked to play Das Fass, and all I could think about was what to wear. On the cover of For the Roses by Joni Mitchell, which had come out a few years back, she was wearing a green velvet tunic with matching green velvet pants that were tucked into a pair of tall, blond Frye boots. I managed to find the boots, but the velvet situation was more challenging. Being Barb Colvin’s daughter, I had some sewing chops and went on down to Fashion Fabrics, where the only green velvet available was a bright Kelly green, not at all like Joni’s sage green outfit. What to do? I went with brown, deciding that Joni’s vibe on For the Roses was decidedly organic, donned the boots, and was set.

  All decked out, I went to do my gig, and between the first and second sets I got so drunk I actually could not play. This had never happened before. Looking back now, I can see it’s clear that my behavior was certainly alcoholic in nature, although I wouldn’t be able to make that determination for another ten years.

  Although I’d had anxiety my whole life, I’d always found ways to manage it, but I was at an age, nineteen, when, biologically, depression can really kick in. And although I felt at home onstage, emotionally I was starting to unravel. Drinking wasn’t enough to keep me grounded. Neither was singing or my guitar at the foot of the bed. For one thing, making a living as a musician was just not done as far as I could tell. I knew lots of people, including my parents, who loved music and had talent for it, but none of them made it a profession except for the father of my childhood friend Ruth, who was our church organist in Vermillion. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going that route, but I didn’t know where I was going. I felt fraudulent.

  That summer I’d been smoking a lot of pot, almost daily, which was just nasty stuff for me. It made me trippy and paranoid, but my older and therefore wiser boyfriend, Jim, was big on it, so we smoked. One night in August 1975, we got stoned and saw Nashville, a quintessential Robert Altman movie in which the heroine, a famous singer played by Ronee Blakley, gets shot. If pot makes you trippy, you most likely don’t want to be smoking and going to one of the typical seventies-era Altman films, brilliant though they may be, and this is particularly true if the singer heroine gets shot and you have visions of yourself as a singer heroine. When we left the theater, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the most pervasive sense of doom and terror. In an effort to feel safe, I made Jim take me to my parents’ house. But they didn’t know what was wrong either.

  That attack subsided, but never completely, and I had the nearly constant feeling during the next few months that something terrible was going to happen, a visceral sense that even the ground I was walking on wasn’t to be trusted as stable. At times the panic would begin to rise and I’d have to leave wherever I was and run outside to breathe.

  The bottom completely fell out that October when I happened to see a TV show about John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, called The Missiles of October. All that free-floating terror got sucked into a vortex of concentrated, specific horror: nuclear war. I became sure it was imminent. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I saw signs of the impending holocaust everywhere. For example, at that time a Simon & Garfunkel song called “My Little Town” was quite popular, and there was a lyric in it that repeated over and over: “Nothing but the dead and dying / Back in my little town.” One morning I turned on the radio and those were the words I heard. I was sure it was a sign. It’s one of the things that can happen when the brain chemistry goes hinky, and extreme anxiety is often a component of depression. My brain can get stuck, and terrible, catastrophic thoughts loop around in my head, rooting me to the spot, waves of icy terror shooting down my limbs.

  My parents tried their best to comfort me. I was extremely needy. I would call on them at all hours, when I felt like I was just going to lose my mind. At any given time—and it was fairly constant by this point—the terror was paralyzing. Their house felt like the safest place I could be. If I could get there, I could take up residence on the family-room couch, where I would sit for hours, but I couldn’t always get to their house. I recall being at my apartment once, and I was unable to get from my room to my car. I was too scared. I called home, and my dad answered. There weren’t any cell phones then—can you imagine? I mean, the last time I went to the ER, I took an ambulance and texted my friend Robin the entire time. (As I grew older, I learned to take my panic when necessary to the ER, but when I was nineteen, my parents were the ER.) I called my father, and he walked me theoretically out of the kitchen and to the front door. The plan was to get to the car just outside. We hung up. I got stuck in the kitchen. I couldn’t move. I didn’t understand how. I called back. This time I actually walked to the front door, but I had to walk back into the kitchen to hang up. I got stuck again. I called back. I remember talking to him and staring at my stacks of record albums on the shelves, the comfort of music a distant memory.

  What the hell was going on? No one knew. I felt hideous. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was immobilized. Finally my parents took me to a psychiatrist, who first killed the anxiety with a tranquilizer so rad that I didn’t care if the world blew up right then and there. Next he started me on Elavil, an antidepressant in the tricyclic family that is now old-school, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t work exactly in the time predicted—three weeks. Three weeks that I spent getting blurred vision and dry mouth and listening constantly to The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell’s new record. It was 1975. One morning I woke up and the dread was gone. Gone. I was better.

  I should have stayed on medication from then on, but one of the frustrating things about depressed people—and there are many, lest you think we don’t know—is that feeling better tends to convince us that there was nothing wrong in the first place. Like childbirth—you forget. But it’s unlike childbirth in that you want to deny that anything ever happened, so after a few months I stopped taking the Elavil with seemingly little consequence, but as I look back at the ensuing years of alcoholism, it seems likely that I was, at least in part, just trying to medicate the depression.

  My confidence was badly shaken by what was really my first mental breakdown, and whatever had gone wrong neurochemically was to be my shadow from then on—sometimes worse, sometimes better. We didn’t call it depression; we didn’t know what to call it. I was barely nineteen, but already my mood disorder was such that I was a slave to it, and although my band was gaining some momentum, it felt to me like a burden.

  We were getting bookings up in Champaign-Urbana and Chicago. I convinced my father to cosign a loan and bought a sound system and a van. By the time we’d taken just two trips in that van, I was ready to sell it to the guitar player. The trips made me horribly anxious, and I was overwhelmed by my responsibilities as bandleader, which entailed booking the gigs, making the travel arrangements, and keeping track of the accounting. A mere six months after I’d started the Shawn Colvin Band, I disbanded it.

  In addition to everything else, I’d basically blown out my voice trying to sing rock and roll. I’m not a rock singer; this much I’ve learned. I can’t wail. I wish to God I could. I love rock and roll and blues and soul. I can sing country and folk, and it took me years to realize that I was the quintessential lass with the acoustic guitar meant to be warbling romantic sonnets.

  I was told I had nodules on my vocal cords, which are basically calluses. The cords can’t vibrate together properly anymore; the nodes get in the way, and too much air is forced through, making the voice sound hoarse. There are two options for treatment—vocal rest or surgery—and I couldn’t face either one. The Dixie Diesels were a Carbondale country-swing outfit à la Asleep at the Wheel, but
they were short a girl singer, and their new fiddle player, Willy Wainwright, was short a girlfriend. Bingo. I snagged myself a boyfriend and a band in one fell swoop, abandoning my own band, retreating instead to the relative safety of the Diesels, where someone else was in charge and I didn’t have to sing as much. Then the Dixie Diesels decided that in order to make it, they’d have to move. To Austin. What the hell. If I was ever going to get out of Carbondale, this was my shot.

  6

  Walking on a Wire

  The Dixie Diesels—Brad Davis, Charlie Morrill, Radar Hurst,

  Mike Potter, me, and Willy Wainwright—1976

  (Photograph courtesy of Nancy Morrill)

  I go to the trouble like a magnet.

  That’s where I’ll be.

  Trouble is just a place to sing.

  It’s what you need.

  Austin was a revelation. I expected Texas to be flat and dry, like the movie Giant, but Austin is hilly and green and lush and lovely. You know how some places just feel good, something about the smell of the air and the nature of the light? Austin is like that. Willy had lived in Austin before and couldn’t wait to show me around. Our first night there, we went to the now-defunct Armadillo World Headquarters, a terrific music venue, where we saw Ry Cooder and I was introduced to nachos with jalapeño slices, something Willy insisted was a necessary initiation. We stayed that first night in the still-thriving Austin Motel on South Congress Street, whose marquee usually boasts the slogan “So Close Yet So Far Out.” The Dixie Diesels consisted of me on vocals and acoustic guitar, Willy on fiddle, Mike Potter on bass, Brad Davis on vocals and rhythm guitar, Rusty “Radar” Hurst on lead guitar and pedal steel, and Charlie Morrill on drums. Radar was so named because he looked exactly like the character in M*A*S*H.

  Our regular gig in Austin was at the Split Rail on South Lamar, a total dive with an asphalt floor, loved by all, a major hangout. Everybody went—hippies, conservatives, radicals, politicians. We all danced and sang and got drunk together on Shiner beer, gathering at wooden tables that had been carved up over the years.

  I sang a fair bit of Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, some of Chris O’Connell’s songs from Asleep at the Wheel, like “Space Buggy,” and a whole lot of Emmylou Harris, whom I adore. It was my boyfriend, Willy, who introduced me to Emmylou via Gram Parsons. Our band did everything from Merle Haggard to duets between Radar and Willy by Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, and some originals thrown in, too, like Brad’s “My Car Has a Mind of Its Own,” a song about drinking. I’d say most of the material we did was about drinking.

  The group didn’t play just in Austin. I spent nearly two years on the road with the Diesels doing a circuit of dance halls all over the Southwest, where the two-step, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, and the schottische were the order of the night. We’d head over to West Texas and El Paso, into Santa Fe, then up through Evergreen, Colorado, and back to Austin. I remember our having pet names for one another in the Diesels based on the nature of our farts. Brad, for example, was “Seepage,” his famous line being, “Was it me? I don’t know!” It was all scatological good fun, and such is the stuff of living in vans with guys.

  Our gigs generally lasted for about four or five hours, and we had to do “Orange Blossom Special,” a fiddle instrumental that got faster and faster, like a runaway train, inciting the dancers to go absolutely mental. Timing was crucial with the “Orange Blossom Special,” and we played it at the end of about the third set. If it were played any later, people would be too drunk and fall over. Sometimes they fell over anyway.

  Not only was I given a major tutorial in country and swing music in Austin, I got to hear a whole passel of great Texas songwriters like Butch Hancock, Gary P. Nunn, Willis Alan Ramsey, Joe Ely, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Uncle Walt’s Band with Walter Hyatt, Champ Hood, and David Ball. I still do a song by Uncle Walt’s Band, called “Don’t You Think I Feel It Too,” taught to me by my friends Paul Glasse and Gary Hartman,

  We stayed in rank hotels and on people’s floors and paid ourselves twenty-five dollars a night. The rest was for gas, van maintenance, hotels, and travel expenses. We drank too much beer and ate too many burgers and pieces of pie in greasy truck stops. I miss it all. Once when we were in Evergreen, I stopped in a store and bought a pair of Levi’s 501s, the good kind, when they were still shrink-to-fit and felt like cardboard until you washed them. I remember that day and the smell of pine and warm morning sun and the satisfied feeling of being carefree in the mountains and on the road and getting a new pair of jeans. I still have the jeans and have put them in a trunk for my daughter.

  The Dixie Diesels had such an influence on me. I would eventually settle in Austin. I learned scads about great music I’d never been exposed to before. I met a man named Buddy Miller in Austin, and he would reappear in my life down the line and ultimately change it. But after two years of hard road work, the Diesels hadn’t really gotten any further than eking out a living, and my voice, while improved, wasn’t really getting better. I still had nodes, and I was going to have to do something about them. The thing was, I just thought I’d always be able to sing. There wasn’t really any space between who I was and the fact that I sang; they were one and the same. My vocal range was getting whittled down to just a few notes, barely an octave, and I’d always thought I could sing anything. Now that notion was toast, and that’s where more trouble began.

  I decided to stop singing. I signed up for speech therapy and got a job as a salesgirl at a boutique in Austin called the Bizarre, the place to go if you needed edible undies. Willy stayed with the band and kept touring. I now lived alone for all intents and purposes, for the first time in my life, and wouldn’t you know I didn’t have the first idea how to do it. The main problem was feeding myself. I’ve never been any good at cooking (ask both my ex-husbands), and I was so used to eating with Willy that I couldn’t figure out how to cook for just me. And I was lonely. And bored. So two things happened: I took up running, and I ate less.

  I was lean anyway, and young, and before long I looked like Frank Shorter. I liked it. As I lost weight, I noticed that clothes looked better on me, more like the way they looked on models in magazines. I had body issues, of course. If you grow up female in our culture, you just do. For whatever reason, “it” took hold of me. I became obsessed with losing weight, with buying smaller clothes. I stopped at the local supermarket every day, because they had one of those large scales you could put a nickel in and weigh yourself. I was 115. I was 110. I was 105. And so on.

  Anorexic 1978—Kay, me, Clay, and Grandpa Colvin

  A girlfriend of mine diagnosed me right off the bat when I told her I had counted the number of peas I ate at Luby’s Cafeteria. “Oooooh, anorexia!” she said, but I didn’t care. With no singing to give me identity, this newfound talent for becoming thinner took over. Nothing was more important. The more I lost, the better. I felt supremely in control, but really I was losing it, figuratively and literally. I lost the job at the Bizarre and a couple of other jobs after that. I would binge-eat and -drink once a week or so and then not show up for work out of remorse.

  I returned to Carbondale and moved back in with my parents, with the idea that I would study fashion. The truth is, I couldn’t take care of myself. I had failed at living away and alone and needed to go home, but an academic plan sounded so much better. And I probably I wanted someone to see I was sick. But you couldn’t tell me anything. You couldn’t make me eat.

  Breakfast was half a container of yogurt. Lunch was an apple. Dinner was a broiled skinless chicken breast and a tomato. My mother made that for me every night, because I would eat it. As we sat down at the dining-room table, my mom and dad at either end, my sister and brother on one side, and me on the other, they would all tuck into their lasagna or pot roast while I picked at my pathetic little meal.

  I rode my bicycle to school, jumped rope, and ran. My favorite class was tailoring, because we had to make a suit precisely fitted to our
own body, down to the last inch. Mine looked like a little boy’s outfit. I bottomed out at eighty-six pounds. Minor cuts wouldn’t heal. My hair was falling out. I don’t know how I beat it, I really don’t. I like to say I was hungry, unlike a lot of anorexics, and that was a big part of it. I was hungry and all I did was think about food.

  Fortunately, my parents found me a psychiatrist, an infinitely kind man named Anthony Berger, who assured me from the start that he would not try to take my thinness away from me, that he knew it was too important. I have no idea if anyone was thinking of hospitalizing me.

  The whole episode lasted about a year. I don’t know why I was so lucky that it didn’t last my whole life. The major crisis passed, and I was no longer starving, although whatever issues were underneath the anorexia weren’t really dealt with. I began to think about singing again, and I suspect that was the ticket. My voice had healed, although it was quite weak, and I got a couple of gigs around town. I began to eat. And eat. I made up for lost time. At any given sitting, I could consume an entire box of cornflakes, an entire large pizza (Quatro’s, the best deep-dish in Carbondale), a half gallon of cheap ice cream, or a loaf of cracked-wheat bread, toasted, with butter. A six-pack of beer was not a stretch either. And this is when I fell in love with alcohol, really and truly. So, basically, I traded one problem for another.