Diamond in the Rough

by Shawn Colvin

  Stokes nursed me through months of torment—hell, maybe years—with my first real adult boyfriend, John Leventhal, staying on the phone with me for hours. He drove a cab during the day and stayed up all night writing. So if the panic attacks came in the middle of the night, I would hightail it over to East Sixth, where he would have a small paper bag ready for me to breathe into to stop the hyperventilating. That’s love. Then he’d let me sleep in his bed until early morning, his bedtime.

  After I stopped drinking, Stokes was at the ready to handle the strange fallout from the void. I remember days when I would robotically go downstairs to the corner deli and buy one Diet Pepsi at a time, drink it and chain-smoke, toss the can in the trash, and head back down for another. Back and forth. I was like Paula Prentiss in The Stepford Wives after she gets stabbed in the gut by Katharine Ross and her mechanics go haywire, causing her to retrieve teacups from the cupboard again and again. Turn, drop them, go back, turn, drop, all the while repeating, “Oh Joanna! My new dress! How could you do a thing like that? Just when I was going to give you coffee! How could you do a thing like that? I thought we were friends!” Nobody stabbed me, but my machinery was broken and had switched to an out-of-order autopilot. By putting his hand on my arm, Stokes could stop the loop, and then he would rub my shoulders. Human contact. I stopped. I felt. I wept. I needed a witness; it was too frightening otherwise. Stokes was one of my witnesses.

  Nothing was too out there for Stokes and me to discuss, from sexual perversions and experiments gone awry to the lowest in fart and shit humor up to and including our own ghastly moments of scatological mishaps, my favorite being a bus ride Stokes once was on in Missouri. As he took a poo in the back restroom, he discovered the lock on the door to be broken and so had to hold it shut. The bus then rounded a tight corner, launching poor Stokes out of his throne and into the aisle as if to wave a quick, pants-at-the-ankles hello before the bus turned in the other direction and set him back down on the toilet. And these weren’t every now and then whispered and giggled confessions—this was dinner conversation. It still is.

  Me and Stokes, NYC, 1983

  What I loved about New York wasn’t just having Stokes in the neighborhood. Even the music community seemed small and tight-knit. If our band didn’t have a gig, we were usually out seeing someone else’s, and it was totally copacetic to be in more than one band. Soozie Tyrell, who fronted a group called High in the Saddle, had a revolving door of girl backup singers that included Elaine Caswell, Lisa Lowell, Patti Scialfa, and me. We’d play in duos, trios, whatever got us hired, and Soozie was a master at sniffing out work. They all could sing anything—Elaine killed on Bacharach & David, Lisa wailed on Wanda Jackson, Patti channeled Ronnie Spector and Dusty Springfield, and Soozie—she played the hell out of the violin and sang absolutely everything with the most joyful, gigantic, shit-eating grin and a toss of her fiery red hair. Not only that, she hand-beaded bustiers for all of us girls in her spare time and could drink every one of us under the table.

  Lisa Lowell, me, and Soozie Tyrell, City Limits, NYC, 1983

  (Photograph courtesy of Tucker Scott)

  And we drank. Did I mention we drank? Well, I shouldn’t speak for anyone else. No—no, on second thought I will. Given any provocation, from celebrating New Year’s Eve to nursing a hangnail, one or all of us was bound to be completely shit-faced drunk.

  9

  Wind Is Better

  You can sing Hallelujah,

  You can fly like a bird,

  You can cry like an angel

  When there are no words.

  Ah yes, the drinking. I myself was a cheap drunk—beer was fine—and a pleasant one, too. Also extremely consistent. Alcohol use? Check “daily.” Basically I was self-medicating. While imbibing, I just got happy. But at some point after I moved to New York, I had to admit I had crossed that invisible line. I wasn’t drinking because I chose to. I was drinking because I had to.

  I found a Buddhist reading once that spoke of the eighty-four thousand different delusions. I even wrote a song about it, because it bent my brain. It refers to the idea that our very lives are just delusions, but I can’t get my head around that. I worked too hard to fulfill this dream that so caters to my ego. The attention of an audience is still paramount to my well-being, and my only consolation is that the songs I write and the music I sing and play might move someone. I like the term “moves,” because it indicates that one is actually taken from one place to another, a literal journey of the soul, and I believe that art can do this. There is a line in a song of mine—“If there were no music, then I would not get through”—and surely at my best I’m expressing something approaching purity of emotion. So perhaps there is hope beyond my base concept that ego alone drives me.

  Certainly the most pointed delusions in my life have been my addictions, although there aren’t quite eighty-four thousand of them. Close, though. I don’t know how you get any more deluded, to succumb to something that tells you that as long as you use it, you will feel better, when in fact the whole cycle of getting high, coming down, and getting high again is a form of insanity and slow death. How does this happen? I’ve always thought it’s the lethal combination of a general lack of maturity, specifically the inability to delay gratification, plus an inherited predisposition toward addiction in general and, in my case, a little clinical anxiety disorder and depression thrown in for good measure. It didn’t help that I made my living in bars. I couldn’t control my intake of anything. If having a few drinks or cigarettes or some cocaine was good, then more was absolutely better. (By the way, I never tried heroin, mushrooms, crack, meth, Ecstasy, speed, or anything else I can think of.... Oh, except opium.) Some of you know the drill: The morning after brings hangovers and feelings of self-loathing along with a physical withdrawal that’s assuaged by more drugs, and invariably the cycle starts up all over again. I remember one night in particular when I had no plans—nothing to do, no one to see, and no place to go. It made sense to stay in and take a break from the party. I couldn’t do it. I went to the downstairs deli, bought a six-pack of Budweiser, went back upstairs, and drank it all. Alone. This stands out because I remember being ashamed that I literally couldn’t do without alcohol for twenty-four hours, and as far as I was concerned, I had no choice.

  Drinking started out great back in college but quickly became a vicious circle of blessed inebriation and the inevitable aftermath. The hangovers were deadly and probably turned out to be my salvation. I first felt suicidal when I was hungover, the effects of alcohol ultimately worsening the depression I was trying to keep at bay. In the midst of one crushing morning after, I realized that this is who I turned out to be—a drunk. I saw my future bleakly laid out before me, and I wanted to die.

  I had a friend named Constance. We were drinking buddies. I remember watching a PBS show with her one Saturday morning while we both nursed brutal hangovers. The program was about gazelles and their proficiency for leaping, and we were quietly taking in the relative absurdity of watching a creature so wild and free as we sat there all bruised and broken at our own hands. As the gazelles bounded and frolicked, we heard the narrator ask, “But why are they jumping over nothing?” Constance’s eyes met mine, and we literally fell over each other in hysterics. I think I remember this so vividly because what made the whole thing absurd had entirely to do with our wretched hangovers juxtaposed with the purity of a nature program. It’s a fond memory, but with a bite.

  A relative of Constance’s, a once-raging lush, didn’t drink anymore. This was amazing to me given the fact that I was incapable of going a day without drinking. It could be done, but how? One day I asked. Constance told me her relative went to AA. AA is Alcoholics Anonymous. By the dictates of the Eleventh Tradition, I am not supposed to tell you that I got sober in AA. I am supposed to set an example of sobriety and let those in need seek me out, at which point I can direct them to the Twelve Steps. By breaking my anonymity here, I let myself become a representative of the progr
am, which could damage the chances of an alcoholic in need from trying AA simply because he or she doesn’t like me personally. Or let’s say someone does like me and reads this and decides to try out AA, and then I go out tomorrow and get drunk. What is that person supposed to think then? But statistics for those who stay sober after entering rehab are very poor, about 18 percent. So I am gambling on the notion that my twenty-seven years of sobriety and how it came about might do more good than harm. I’m not promoting AA. I won’t wax rhapsodic on its methods or philosophies. It is simply the way I got sober. I really don’t care how other people get clean, as long as they’re willing to believe that it’s possible.

  Sick of being hungover, Constance and I attended an AA meeting in my neighborhood sometime in the summer of 1982. It was kind of like the Split Rail—every possible type of character was in there: Bowery bums, guys in suits, East Village bohemians, drag queens. A middle-aged woman went to the front of the room and for half an hour told her story. I cried through the whole thing. And then I went out and got rip-roaring drunk. I cried because that woman had told my story, and I got drunk because I didn’t know what else to do. But the seed was planted. I sat in a room full of people who didn’t have to drink anymore. I attended meetings off and on for a few months with the notion that I could manage my drinking. I would sit in those meetings, not bothering to get to know anyone, feeling rather smug since maybe I’d gone a night or two without getting drunk. I could control this thing, I figured. I wasn’t that bad.

  Then the following winter, early in 1983, there was a blizzard. I had a stupid fight with a guy I’d been dating and stomped off through the snow that night in a huff. I decided to see the movie Frances. You know—Jessica Lange plays Frances Farmer, surely a depressive alcoholic woman with fire and smarts, who ends up having a lobotomy. I guessed I was all right compared to Frances, and after the movie, at the Cottonwood Café, I drank exactly four beers, hardly enough at this point to even get a buzz, but I woke up the next morning completely desperate: suicidal, scared to death, and out of excuses. I said to Constance, “There’s a meeting tonight on Perry Street.” She said, “Yes, and you are going to it.” It wasn’t my worst hangover—it hadn’t been my worst drunk—but I was finally at the end of my rope. I sat paralyzed for the rest of the day just waiting to go to the meeting. The one time I attempted to go out that day, I slipped on some ice and fell on my ass. It seemed fitting. I had hit bottom, literally.

  I went alone to Perry Street that night—Constance didn’t get sober for another year. I approached the speaker at the end and could only tell her, “I’m scared.” She said to me, “Keep coming back,” and that’s what I did. I clung to those words. Keep coming back. It seemed so simple. I kept going back, every day to lots of different meetings, and I began to have one sober day after another.

  One night I went out with Constance for Mexican food and didn’t understand how the hell I could eat it without a beer. I had a miraculous thought: Today I can try it. Tomorrow may be another story, but today I’ll try it. So I had my first Mexican meal without beer, and I survived.

  Once sober, I still did my gigs. I played in bars, but I had some kind of a force field around me. I just was not tempted. All I knew was that my main priority in life was not to drink, because I’d had the revelation that I didn’t have a life if I kept drinking. Everything was unmanageable, off track. Up until February 12, 1983, the only thing I’d done with assuredness was drink. I sang because I didn’t know what else I could do. I was continually warding off chronic terror. I was unable to have a relationship with a man. I had no real spiritual or moral guidelines. I coped by drinking. It was the constant in my life, the thing that kept me tethered to sanity until it made me insane.

  10

  Go On and Do It

  John Leventhal / Me and John, NYC, 1982

  We both had to see what it means

  Whenever two worlds collide.

  With my drinking in remission, by far the most important thing that happened to me after I moved to New York was meeting John Leventhal. Buddy Miller left the band in 1981, so I became the front woman by default and necessity. Without Buddy, though, I was minus a lead guitar player. Our bassist, Lincoln, suggested I give this guy John a call.

  John was raised in tony Scarsdale but was now living in the Village. Did I call him? I can’t remember, but someone did, and we all met up at Lincoln’s Bronx apartment for a rehearsal. Larry Campbell was there, along with our drummer, Karl, and myself and John. We were all still in our twenties, and even then John was a somewhat imposing figure.

  He showed up with his Telecaster. He was a beautiful, unique guitar player, and we hit it off musically right away. I know there was one thing in particular that I played that caught his ear—it could have been “The Vigilante” by Judee Sill or “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” which I pitifully tried to tease out of my instrument as though I were Andrés Segovia. John played, and he sounded like Ry Cooder and George Harrison and Hank Williams rolled into one. No matter what we learned that day, when he played, I was moved and transfixed. Every note and chord sent me to the moon. He was fabulous. Whatever we threw his way, he could ace, from country standards to the Beatles. Especially the Beatles. He got the job.

  In a way I was already in love. When I think back on the years we spent together as a couple, my strongest feelings about him still have to do with the music. This is the deepest part of what we shared. Something about what we offered each other artistically carried so much more weight than words could communicate. My favorite photograph of John is one I took in Central Park in 1982. He’s standing in front of the bandshell, wearing his father’s overcoat, next to a portion of some words engraved in the stone surrounding the stage. They say MUSIC LOVER.

  I could make John laugh. John’s laughter was a joy, an unabashed eruption and fairly easily come by. He loved to laugh, and, try as I might, I could never compete with the guy humor he shared with his pals Zev and Rick and Wells and Donald and Marc. If he was tickled, he would have to stop what he was doing and revel in the hilarity. He’d be laughing so hard he’d be unable to breathe for a minute, doubled over and contorted until his fit had passed.

  John was loud. He had a lot to say, and he was confident and passionate and determined, and his style was to speak forcefully and with volume. I could hold the phone a fair distance from my ear while talking to him. One of my favorite memories is of when we were making our first studio album, Steady On, and Bruce Hornsby asked John to speak more softly. And for a minute he did.

  When he would speak to me about his young nephew back then, he would nearly always choke up, practically unable to contain the longing he had for that little boy’s happiness and mourning the intimacy that had been lacking in his own childhood and that he so yearned to give his nephew. It was always clear he wanted children, and with his wife, Rosanne Cash, he’s been blessed with his own boy, Jake, his biggest dream come true.

  When I met him, John was in a band called Mr. B, one that did original material. John wrote the music, and their lead singer wrote the lyrics along with John. I dubbed their style “horn-rimmed pop,” since John was tall and nerdy, wore glasses and loved Steely Dan, the coolest geeks around. When I heard Mr. B, I wanted to throw out the singer and take over the band, which is pretty much what happened eventually.

  John was responsible for my becoming a songwriter. We needed each other. He had trouble with singing and lyrics, and I had trouble with writing in general. I had come up with a few things while drunk in Berkeley but had quit trying. Co-writing seemed like a good idea. I desperately wanted to write songs. My heroes were songwriters. I just wasn’t a natural at it—I’m still not. It made sense to him to let me try my hand at writing some lyrics to one of his pieces. I needed a push, and horn-rimmed pop seemed like just the ticket.

  In the very early days, we did some work at John’s old place on West Fourth Street, but it was later, in John’s own basement apartment on East Twelfth Street between S
econd and Third avenues that we started nearly every song we’ve written together. The apartment was dark and ugly, but it had some square footage, and this was important to John; he needed some space for all his instruments and recording equipment. Not only did John write, but he was an exceptional producer, even back then. Before drum machines existed, John could make a simple track swing with finger snaps and reverb, as was the case with a song called “Nothin’ on Me,” one of our first efforts and maybe the only early one that survived. It ended up on a record we made called A Few Small Repairs.

  The apartment had a couch and a chair that John had picked up from home, and we’d sit there, him with a guitar and me with my black-and-white-spotted-cover composition notebooks that I still use to this day. He was a generous, patient, encouraging co-writer, mostly because, I think, there was nothing he would rather have been doing. Most of the time I’d prefer eating glass to trying to write, but for John it was soul sustenance.

  The first song John and I wrote was called “The Things She Says,” lyrics courtesy of me.

  It shot like an arrow going straight to my heart,

  I’d waited so long for that music to start …

  Argh! It was miserable! On my part anyway. Mr. B did the song, and I had become a songwriter, of sorts. We continued, penning such classics as “Strange Feeling,” “Lucky Girl,” and “There’s No Love Like Our Love.”

  Naturally, with such brilliance afoot, John and I fell in love. We’d been doing both pop and country-band gigs together and had become friends. I was really attracted to him—tall and lanky, loud and cocksure, and handsome, with dark curly hair and green eyes. Of course, when he played that guitar, the heat quotient soared. He asked me out fairly soon after meeting me, but I turned him down because I was hung up on another musician, a doe-eyed songwriter who, as it turned out, was quite the ladies’ man. This guy visited me in New York and said he’d write me from across the pond—he was going on tour in Europe—but the letters were not exactly pouring in. John tried to cut to the chase one night after a bunch of us had stayed out until dawn. It was wicked hot outside, and John had air-conditioning in his apartment, an unheard-of luxury, so he offered me a place to sleep.