Diamond in the Rough

by Shawn Colvin

  At a bar with Mom and Dad, 1978

  (Photograph courtesy of Marti Cruthers)

  I gained sixty pounds in three months and looked like a whale. I was twenty-two and fat and drunk and living with my parents, a far cry from the girl who just a few years back had seemed so full of promise. To top it all off, I got a job taking care of rats in the university vivarium—the place where they kept animals for experimentation. I needed money to get myself out of town to go somewhere, anywhere. I would wake up in the morning and put on the only things that fit—a pair of ratty sweatpants and my dad’s T-shirt, and head out to clean up rodent shit. It was a low point, to be sure. But something was coming alive in me, because I would sneak off from rat duty and write little tidbits of lyrics. These weren’t the musings of a teenager attempting to imitate a hero. I had grown up a bit and had something to say about it.

  No one ever said it was easy.

  I’ve always been along for the ride,

  Thinking there would always be

  Someone to take the wheel for me,

  But I was helpless sitting passenger side …

  Not exactly brilliant, but it was me speaking, reflecting, trying to get at something. It was new. But it would be many years before I started to believe I could really write.

  7

  Out There on Her Own

  Like I said, fat and drunk, 1979

  I am weaving like a drunkard, like a balloon up in the air.

  I am needing a puncture and someone to point me somewhere.

  Having cleaned up enough rat shit to last a lifetime, I finally had enough money saved to try leaving home again. This was the real thing, do or die. My old boyfriend, Jim Bruno, had moved to Berkeley and loved it. Armed with my guitar, my protective layer of fat, and a daily ration of alcohol, I headed out for the San Francisco Bay area in the spring of 1979.

  I moved into a large, rambling, run-down house in Berkeley with Jimmy and a few other misfits, in an attic room with a skylight. Many were the nights that I drank a six-pack of Coors and crawled out onto the roof from where I could see out across the bay to the lights of San Francisco. I remember precious little about my yearlong stint in the Bay Area, because I was drunk most of the time. I call it my lost weekend.

  Most of my roommates were Deadheads. They didn’t drink Coors; they ate watermelon laced with acid. Let me say right now, with all apologies, that I never dialed in the Grateful Dead. You either get it or you don’t, and I am not among the converted. To me my roommates were what I imagined vintage San Franciscans to be, all Haight-Ashbury and free love and you better wear some flowers in your hair. One morning I was in the kitchen and one of my roommates, Julie, a lanky, wire-rimmed, long-stringy-haired, peasant-skirted, pit-hair-baring, sandal-wearing gal, stumbled in. As I was pouring myself a glass of orange juice, she said, “Hey, man, can I have a hit of your smoothie?”—assuming, naturally, that it was spiked with something.

  The first order of business was getting a job, naturally, but that took some time, and in the interim I developed a ritual. After recovering from my morning hangover, I would scan the classifieds and make feeble attempts toward employment. Then something divine happened.

  The documentary about the Who, The Kids Are Alright, came to the local cinema. I went to see it one afternoon and fell head over heels in love with the band. My musical leanings had veered from a well-balanced overview, and due to my unbending allegiance to the Beatles I ignored what I thought to be lesser bands like the Stones, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, among others. I went again the next day. And the next, and the next. Some days I just sat in the theater waiting for the next show and saw it twice. I have no idea how many times I saw that movie but it was a lot.

  At night when I was going to sleep, I fantasized about meeting them, just as I’d done with the Fab Four when I was nine. I was twenty-three! Never mind. I was in love. Yes, of course I’d seen Woodstock, but I’d passed over them in favor of Crosby, Stills & Nash and Joan Baez. Now I finally got it. Only four guys and three instruments. One guitar player—and what a guitar player. Pete, Pete, Pete. There he was in his white jumpsuit, lovingly bent over his ax with bloody fingers, or windmilling and leaping for all he was worth, like a punk ballerina. Oh, I wanted to be him. Let’s not even mention his songwriting. The mind boggles. And of course Roger, god of six-pack abs and mike-whirling finesse; the stoic, solid John Entwistle on bass; and the one-in-a-million carnival ride of a drummer, Keith Moon. But finally the sad day came when I got a job, and my secret afternoons with The Kids Are Alright had to end.

  I was hired by a stained-glass store in Oakland as a salesperson. I learned how to cut and handle glass, but not without a few minor accidents that put me closer to emulating dear Pete at his bloody best. I made fast friends with a woman named Shelley Arrowwood. She was amused by the way I put down our insane boss and decided that this kid was all right.

  Shelley had taken on her last name when she grew tired of changing it every time she got married, which was fairly often, so she legally became “Arrowwood,” nature lover to the core, for good and always. I called her “Arrowhead,” and she called me “Shufflefoot McQueen”—I’m not sure why, although I think it had something to do with the fact that I shuffled like a downtrodden subordinate every time our drill-sergeant boss commanded me to make coffee, muttering under my breath as I inched toward the coffeemaker.

  We had a quick, easy, shorthand of a friendship, and I spent lots of time with her and her then-spouse, Richard. Shelley was a football-loving, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed little thing, and Richard was a refined and professorial die-hard feminist. One night as we were watching TV, an ad came on for what was then a revolutionary development in sanitary napkins—the three adhesive strips. Richard took this in and suddenly erupted in outrage. “Jesus! Look at what they put you through! This is unbelievable!” Shelley and I stared at him blankly for a minute until we finally understood—Richard, in his hypervigilance to root out the atrocities done to women, was under the impression that one took the sticky part of the pad and applied it directly to the crotch. Ouch.

  Shelley

  Musically I was keeping things strictly acoustic—no more bands for me—and found a home at Laval’s Subterranean in Berkeley, yet another basement bar. Jim was still writing songs, and I was finally getting a clue that doing original music might be a good idea. I did a lot of his tunes, plus material by Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. Covering songs by men was a good trick I had discovered—sometimes the simple fact that a woman was singing the song would give it another dimension. It was during this period that I taught myself to play “The Heart of Saturday Night” by Waits and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” by Dylan. For the first time, I felt that there was something special going on with my interpretations, and ultimately both those songs made it onto my third record, Cover Girl.

  Me and Jim Bruno, Berkeley, 1979

  (Photograph courtesy of John Palme)

  Although I still didn’t write my own songs, it’s worth noting that I was always fooling around on the guitar, and from time to time I would compose little ideas here and there:

  I’ve been sleeping fair,

  Lately I could swear I’m thinking

  Clearer and clearer,

  And I’ve been working hard,

  Looking at my punch card and

  My mirror, my mirror …

  I went back to this tidbit years later and finished it, called it “Ricochet in Time,” and included it on my first record, Steady On. It’s a song I still love to perform, because it describes being a musician on the road. In fact, it means a lot more to me now than it did when I wrote it.

  I don’t know how long I might have stayed in the Bay Area, but a year after I moved there, fate intervened when I got a phone call that set the wheels in motion to significantly change the rest of my life, both personally and professionally. The Big Apple beckoned.

  8

  Dry Is Good

&
nbsp; The Buddy Miller Band—Karl Himmel, Buddy, me,

  Larry Campbell, and Lincoln Schleifer—NYC, 1980

  You’re shining, I can see you.

  You’re smiling. That’s enough.

  I’m holding on to you

  Like a diamond in the rough.

  New York City, just like I pictured it. I had visited there exactly once, and it had made me dizzy with its immensity. I would never have possessed the nerve to move to Manhattan without a single connection, but Buddy Miller tracked me down in California and asked if I would join his band. I knew Buddy from my days in Austin, and he’d gone up to New York to hop onto the bandwagon of what became known as the great country scare of the 1980s, what with urban cowboys, Gilley’s, electric-bull riding, and two-stepping. All the things I’d already seen and heard in Austin were now trendy in New York, and Bud went there to see what could be done about enlightening the Yankees to a bit of homegrown, honestly-come-by, grassroots, serious-assed country music. Never mind that Buddy was a Jew from New Jersey. God didn’t get the right memo about Bud.

  I was to replace Julie Griffin, one of the deepest, purest singers and songwriters ever. She was Buddy’s girlfriend at the time (and is now his wife) but had had enough of bars and bands and brawls and vans and boys and smoke and sawdust and beer, and she went back home to Texas. I accepted the job and moved to New York in November of 1980.

  Buddy must have been really bereft when Julie left the band. After all, he left to join her less than a year later. He never showed it, though. Our band was close, but we didn’t confide in each other. Our private lives were private, or as private as they could be while we were living out of a van together. I knew that Bud liked Chinese-Cuban food and had the most extensive record collection of any of us. I knew he could sing and play the guitar like a maniac, there being a complete disconnect between this gentle soul and this ferocious player.

  I saw Bud now and then over the years after he left New York. He and Julie came to visit and showed up at my gig at the Lone Star Cafe. Buddy managed to record my set off the board and still talks about it. That’s Bud, the archivist. He joined Emmylou Harris’s band, and I happened to see him in Memphis around 1995 while both Emmy and I were there. Over the breakfast table, he took out a bootleg CD and pushed it across the table to me. “Listen to this,” he said, and I looked at the disc. Patty Griffin. It was the first album she’d recorded with a producer, and it never saw the light of day, but upon first listen I was completely blown away. And now I’m in a band called Three Girls and Their Buddy, with Emmy, Patty, and Buddy. This is evidence of good karma, surely.

  How do I explain Buddy Miller? He is made of music. He is made of light. He’s like your best big brother and your sweetest child. There is no one kinder. He once gave me a book called How to Torture Your Children. It was Buddy who recently turned me on to Some Kind of Monster, the Metallica documentary. On tour he gifted us with plush monkey toys that flew and screamed. He reveals little about himself but steps up to the plate as a producer, something I’m about to be witness to, since he’s going to produce my next record. Buddy and Patty just won a Grammy for the gospel record he produced for her. Bud has religion, but he doesn’t preach it, he lives it.

  We almost lost Bud in 2009. Three Girls and Their Buddy were touring. In Baltimore, Buddy confessed after a show to having acute indigestion, but Carolyn, our tour manager, thought it was more than that. She carted him off to the Johns Hopkins ER, where it was determined he was having not acute indigestion but a massive heart attack. He was stabilized—only barely, though. By early the next morning, the surgeons opened him up and performed a triple bypass. It’s notable that instead of having three major arteries going into his heart, as most people do, Buddy possesses four. He has a special heart. This fourth artery was not completely blocked, and it, along with Carolyn and Johns Hopkins, saved his life. It’s a good thing, too, because once God did get the memo on Buddy, I can assure you he broke the mold.

  But back to 1980. The Buddy Miller Band consisted of its namesake, myself, Lincoln Schleifer on bass, Karl Himmel on drums, and Larry Campbell on everything—guitar, pedal steel, fiddle, and mandolin. Years later, when the movie Dances with Wolves came out, Larry’s wife dubbed him “Walks with Instruments.” Buddy found Karl in Nashville, I believe, and knew of his work with Neil Young. Larry and Lincoln were young New York City boys ripe for the picking, and Buddy sniffed them out somehow. I have been in a lot of vans with boys and should know more than I woefully do about how men operate. I recall things like the time Lincoln was snoring in the backseat. I tape-recorded him and called the piece “Mammals of the Bronx.” The only thing I can say with certainty is that given enough time and alcohol, most of them tried to sleep with me.

  We played several pseudo–country joints in the city, most notably City Limits on Seventh Avenue. I remember other places, like Home and Spaghetti Western, but our main haunts were City Limits, and the Lone Star Cafe. Buddy’s band also played a circuit of bars up through New Paltz and Albany, New York, hazardous undertakings given that we all drank. On Larry’s birthday, in fact, between sets we were all downing kamikazes, which consist of equal parts vodka, triple sec, and lime juice, and in an effort to be one of the guys I confidently offered to drive us all back to the city. At some point during that drive, I lost consciousness, I guess for only a second or so, because when I came to, we were still on the road.

  I wish I could remember a set list from Buddy’s band. I was so drunk. Bud picked out a song for me called “Runnin’ Wild,” and he and I did a duet called “Rock, Salt, and Nails” that he’d done first with Julie and would later record with her. Larry turned me on to a song by his friend Roly Salley, called “Killin’ the Blues.” I did that one, too. And, of course, the “Orange Blossom Special.” Buddy used to call out the set list to us, song by song. He decided on the fly what to play, and he always needed to tell us what key the next song was in—we knew so many that the rest of us would forget, although he never did. Always he would announce each song to us like this: “Okay, ‘Silver Wings’ in the key of G … like a little baby goat.” Or “‘Six Days on the Road’ in E … like a tiny egg.”

  After mooching off each band member for a place to stay over the course of a few weeks, I finally found an apartment in the East Village, a true shithole for two hundred dollars a month on East Third Street between First and Second avenues, known as the Hells Angels block. I was ecstatic to get it. It was a studio in a six-floor walk-up with crumbling plaster, rotting linoleum, a bathtub in the kitchen, sporting the luxury of its own toilet in a little cubicle near the tub. The ceiling literally fell from that cubicle one day and made a nice pile of plaster and drywall inside the toilet bowl, upon which, luckily, I was not sitting at that moment. The apartment was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. Water was leaking from the ceiling into my room one day, and I discovered, after knocking on his door, that the guy above me was a hoarder and had stacks of newspapers four feet high everywhere. He had no idea his radiator was leaking, because it was practically impossible to see, let alone get to.

  East Third Street, 1981

  I fell in love with New York. The geeky, neurotic weirdo I’d always felt like began to seem downright normal compared to some of the things I witnessed every day! And I loved the feeling that no matter the time of day or night, New York City was open. The Bay Area always felt too spread out for me to get a grip on, but New York was laid out on a simple grid that made it feel small. No matter what I needed, it was just around the corner. There were the Ukrainian diners where I’d buy a quart of split-pea soup and a loaf of pumpernickel bread and live off that for a week, and the electronics store on the corner was where I bought my first television, a thirteen-inch black-and-white. I didn’t have to sweat not having a car; the subway was all I needed.

  And I met Stokes.

  He just showed up at one of my gigs. I think it was at the Other End. I know there was an introduction, but I don’t remember it. H
e wasn’t in my life, and then one day he was. Roy Stokes Howell. He was called Stokes. He could talk to anybody about anything. You meet Stokes and he already knows you. Then the next time you see him, you just say, “Well it’s Stokes, of course,” and there you are. He’s your friend.

  Stokes and I are kind of the same person, except that he likes for rooms to be hot and I like them to be cold. We are both attracted to insanely wrong lovers for ourselves. In some way, shape, or form, we contemplate suicide daily. We think Waiting for Godot is one of the funniest things ever written. We would be lost without fart and shit humor. I watched Silence of the Lambs like five times, and Stokes accused me of being sick, but he watched Blue Velvet at least five times. He also reads a lot of books about serial killers and shark attacks. We love the line from Shadow of a Doubt where Joseph Cotten asks his innocent young niece, “Do you know the world is a foul sty?” This means a lot to us. We not only like but can also relate to the film Repulsion. We love Huckleberry Finn.

  Stokes grew up in Missouri; he’s a small-town boy. I grew up in South Dakota. Small-town girl. We both became New Yorkers so as not to be seen as strange anymore. We were Romper Room compared to most of our neighbors in the East Village. Stokes studies Buddhism. Buddhists really do believe that the world is a foul sty, but Stokes and I come by that point of view naturally; it’s in our bones. We are both kind, honest friends, dedicated and passionate and open in our work. In fact, Stokes, a writer, is so open in his work that one of his friends declared his first book of short stories “a cry for help.” You would want us on your jury if you did it but didn’t mean to. We understand. He lived practically just around the corner, on Sixth Street between Avenue A and First Avenue.