by KUBOA
BG: Did them. You’ve left a lot of people out, too, of course.
CM: Your influences go so far back, hither and yon. In this way, you’ve been compared to Presley, Dylan, as a conduit of disparate inspiration. You seem to take musical stimulation from so many, so many different artists.
BG: If you say so.
CM: Sorry…um, Jerry Lee Lewis.
BG: Well, the Killer, you know, Memphis guy, so, yeah. He scares me a little (laughs)—inferiority complex about Elvis, probably, but great on the 88s, right?
CM: Taj Mahal.
BG: Oh, man. If there was justice he’d be as big as the Stones.
CM: Uh—
BG: That’s enough. Right? Gimme one more.
CM: Van Morrison.
BG: Soul poet. Good, huh? Soul poet?
CM: Yeah.
BG: Alright.
CM: Tell me how you and Lorelei met.
BG: Hoo. Was that a smooth transition? Did I miss something? From Van Morrison to Lorelei. That’s a story, isn’t it, sweet? Um. It was at the Shell. Black Lung was playing, one of our first headlining gigs, I think. I came off stage after the encore, after we’d done a cooking version of “I Love my Aunt Jemima,” Skippy going wild like a man possessed, and maybe he was, man, maybe he was. This was Memphis, those things are real, man. No one looks askance at a little theurgy, you know, a little of that Memphis Mojo, that hoodoo that brought us everything from W. C. to Isaac to Booker to Big Star to Jism. I been playing rock, blues, jazz, ruckus, fife-and-drum, what have you, all my life. Call it what you want. Good music, man, always out of that town on the river. You think that’s just coincidence. Naw, man, that’ hoodoo. What was I saying?
CM: You—
BG: Yeah, yeah, Lor and me. So, I come offstage. I’m sweating, I’m tripping, I’m like zoned out. I always felt that way after soaring, you know? I fly when I play. I mean this literally. You read Castaneda? Anyway, there standing in my way, like fucking Lot’s wife, was this raven-haired beauty, and I had this strange idea, man, that we had conjured her, that the music had brought her into being. You can’t understand. Or maybe you can. You know Memphis. I really felt like here was a woman made of soul and blood and electricity and philharmonic, eldritch diablerie, you know? I thought she was fucking Terpsichore, man. And she was so beautiful—she IS so beautiful—that I was stopped like a clock. I was a man hit in the heart with a sledgehammer. She just reached out and took my hand. It was that simple, that profound. She was looking right into me, like I was a sideshow mirror, and maybe I was, man. Distorting images, throwing off suncats. She saw it all, clear as crystal. We went to her place that afternoon. She had this Midtown apartment—I don’t know if I can do it justice. It was the most filled room I’d ever seen. Clutter, but, taken as a whole, it all made sense. She called it Plat-Eye Manor, after her dog, Plat-Eye. Her three-headed dog. (laughs) That was some dog, used to sit next to me and fix me with its glassy eye, just sit there for hours, man, and I’d end up thinking we were talking. I can still remember some of the conversations I had with that damned dog. It was black and tan, mostly black—what was it, a mix, part Rottweiler and part hellhound. There was no place for the eye to rest, no blank walls, no white spaces. And this is like Lorelei herself, really, she is made up of so many parts, she’s a Steppenwolf, in the best sense of that word, a house of mirrors, each part of her reflects a different part of yourself once you get to know her or her you, you dig? Anyway, I spent a good half-hour just looking around, while she stood aside and observed me. I was spellbound, pixilated. It was a ramshackle, poor man’s Kubla Kahn. I walked slowly around her little apartment, which was like some chthonic art gallery, lit by phosphorous. She had art reproductions by Klee, Gironella, Motherwell, Picabia, Bacon, this weird Malcolm Morley yellow pages thing, Ensor, on and on. Twombly. There was a mandala on the ceiling, a pentangle on the floor, what you could see, through the album covers and splayed paperbacks and drawings. It was strange stuff to me, eye-opening, shocking in a way. That shock that comes from knowing something is important but not knowing exactly why. And she had in between all these great prints, torn newspapers, headlines juxtaposed against this great art, you know? And her own drawings, little line drawings of dwarves and headless figures and skulls and djinns. And poems, typed and tacked to the wall. I remember one, in particular, an Aztec poem, and it began, “Rejoice, rejoice, my flower king, you own many jewels—“ and I thought, wow, that’s for me, man. It was an egotistical reaction, I know. Where “Flower King” comes from. And there were these little altars she had constructed, with tiny clay figures and candles.
And the floor—what there was of it (laughs)—like I say, was awash in album covers and books. Books stacked in these tottering towers. Names I’d never heard of, at that time: Kis, Malcolm Lowry, Svevo, Madame Blavatsky, Fludd, Dee, Goncharov, Bruno Schulz, Philip Wylie, Whatsername Yates, Blake, Maturin, Borges, Marie-Louise von Franz, a book called History of Secret Societies, one, I think called On the conjuring of angels. It was mind-boggling. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. I felt like I was in a secret underground lab, a lab for the soul. It was trippy, a mindfuck, you know, but beautiful. And this woman, this witchy, beautiful woman embodied all this stuff, she was her surroundings, her home, her personal halidom. And she stood there, as silent as the grave, watching me, and, finally—I was dizzy—I turned back to her. And she looked like the answer to every question I’d ever had. Her breasts seemed, particularly, to invite me, to suckle there, to be born again.
Do you want me to continue? You want the rest here? Lor?
LE: Tell the truth, sweet.
CM: Sure. Um, yes, continue. If it’s too private—you decide. We can always edit later. I’m, uh, intrigued.
BG: Well, obviously, we ended up in the bedroom that first evening. I think she walked over to me and simply whispered, fuck me. I think it was that straightforward. There was no bullshit about Lor—there still isn’t. We ended up on her bed, which is a story in itself. Sixteenth century bed, bedclothes like in a harem…I felt like I was returning to the womb—the bed was that enveloping, that warm. Oh, man. I don’t know if I can tell this. When we were naked—she was like some preternatural creature, her body’s every curve fit me like a new skin. When she pressed her breasts against me I was gone, man. And I had this erection, it was beyond human somehow, hard as anthracite—you could hang your coat on it (laughs) and she worked her hand around me like a necromancer casting a spell. Just her fingers over me were like cool water. Jesus. I can’t. Let’s just say, that after the preliminaries, which took hours, days maybe, she sat on me, and I entered her, and she was hot like sulfur, like a volcano. Tophet. Her cunt was hot, and I fell so deeply into her that I haven’t come out yet. Can you dig that? I haven’t come out yet. In a way, we are still in that first fuck, that first joining. Lorelei was my salvation. All that stuff about me going awry is such bullshit, if you could see it the way I see it. So much nasty stuff has been written and said about Lor—Crafty, shit I can’t forgive him—and she’s handled it all with such grace. But, in a very profound way, I am still inside her. My dick, my soul. I don’t know. Maybe we should erase all this. What do you think?
LE: It’s beautiful, Bud. Let it lie. Let it be.
CM: Your song, “The Ballad of Buddy and Lor”—is that a parody of Lennon’s “The Ballad of John and Yoko?”
BG: An homage. While at the same time being the true story.
CM: You begin that song, “Standing on the dock of the bay…”
BG: For Otis, yes.
CM: Did you ever meet Otis Redding?
BG: Briefly. I was a kid. He wouldn’t remember.
CM: And he’s dead.
BG: Even worse.
CM: “The Ballad of Buddy and Lor” was released as a single but never appeared on an LP, am I right?
BG: Partly.
It appeared on an Atlantic LP of uncollected gems, along with some of Felix Cavaliere’s solo stuff, an Aretha demo, stuff like that.
CM: What was it called?
BG: Uncollected Gems.
CM: Worth seeking out, for collectors, for completists.
BG: If you say so. My song was a gift to Atlantic because Ahmet and I were friends. Much of what’s on there was crap.
CM: Yet, you never recorded on Atlantic.
BG: Well, that’s all that business bullshit again. Ask Crafty, ask fucking Tony Hudson, he’s a lawyer. They screwed me, plain and simple. Well, plain and simple, except I don’t understand it all. All I know is that all that old Black Lung stuff—the stuff they know is mine (laughs)—that’s all tied up somehow. Ask Pete, my lawyer. He’s working on it, as we speak. While we sleep. Pete is tireless, a true mensch, a force. He’ll straighten out those fuckers. Meanwhile, I’m on Hounddog Records, ironically, an L.A. outfit. I guess the name drew me or was created for me. Lorelei would say the label was there for me when I came out here, that it appeared when I appeared. Literally, I think there was some stuff they did before my two LPs, but, you get the idea, right? Hounddog’s done alright. Hell, we had a #1 with I Was a Child and then, the Grammy, of course. Can’t take that away from me. It’s done, you know, for all time. I won that damn Grammy. Still the best song I’ve written, for Lor, she’s the muse. Maybe she really is Terpsichore. Maybe she is.
CM: Do you have any regrets about leaving Memphis?
BG: Well, I guess I knew you were gonna ask me that. It’s a bullshit question. Sorry, Creole, but, damn man. Regrets? Look at what I’ve done out here. Have you listened to the fucking albums?
CM: Still, many say, it isn’t Black Lung.
BG: (long pause) Creole, you’re a friend, man. We go way back. Be careful, ok? Saying it isn’t Black Lung, you might as well say, it isn’t Rubber Soul, it isn’t Sinatra. It isn’t what it isn’t. That’s true. I’m not what I was. Are you? Is anybody? Does anybody need another “Turntable Poison?” I don’t. I fucking don’t. What I need is to keep moving—I’m repeating myself—but all this nostalgia shit, man, it’s for people who are dead. What did Dylan say? “Something’s going on here but you don’t know what it is.” That’s it, man. When he plugged in he changed music, but he can’t plug in again, you know? And he went backwards after that, because he’s the jester, man, and by going backwards, like Merlin, he was going forward. Dylan’s always been a bellwether, though he hates that thought. I don’t want to be anyone’s bellwether, either. Bob told me once, he said, “You never play your old stuff. Man, I wish I could get away with that.” See, he’s sick of “Like a Rolling Stone.” He’s trapped, he feels trapped. In a way, in one way. In another it’s part of him so he can’t deny it, like you can’t deny your arm, or your soul. No, I’ll never play, “Young Avenue Blues” again, though it’s a great song. And I won’t let anyone else play it like it’s theirs. Fucking hell. That’s why I got Pete around. He’s a demon man, he’s a fucking Cannibal Spirit. (laughs) Stay out of courts, man, that’s my motto. Better stay away from those that carry round a firehose. (laughs) Keep a clean nose.
(garbled)
CM: Um. Pete is Pete Holder, your lawyer. And Hudson is Tony Hudson. Tell the readers who he is.
BG: Shit. Think Boogie Man. Think Pazuza. He’s the antichrist. He broke up Black Lung, not Lorelei, not me. The minute that raincloud in a suit walked into our studio—our fucking studio, where we made magic, man, where it all happened—the minute he walked in, in his appropriate sharkskin suit, we were fucked. Crafty brought him in, of course. He was Kim’s father, as you know. Crafty’s fiancé, since wife, since ex-wife. Kim was alright—you know, she had that mane of golden-white hair, she was beautiful, goddamn beautiful. We all wanted her. That’s ok to say, Lor? We all wanted her because, hell, she had that skin, you know, translucent and freckled and white like yonder waning moon. But, she was Crafty’s, sort of. It’s funny. Everywhere they went men hit on Kim, no one could help it, and Crafty was so insecure, you know? He hated it. He hated going out with her. Maybe it led to the divorce, I don’t know the details. But, Kim we loved. Back then. It was her father, man. He was a cunt. And he started manipulating Crafty and then us, through Crafty. And he would have these fits, like epileptic fits, like anger that couldn’t be dammed. He was out of control. I think he’s still trying to worm his way into the music business—I don’t really know. But he didn’t know a fucking thing about music or the business and he wanted a part of Black Lung, because it looked like we were the next Cream, the next Experience, the next Mountain. Whatever. He just wanted a slice of the pie, man. And I was like, I throw my hands up, just let me record and keep me away from the jackals, you know? But, well, eventually, I had to get Pete. Pete was Jim Dickinson’s friend. Jim’s a pure soul, a force for good, the Wise Man of the Forest, you know? He told me once, “Watch out for that shithead, Hudson. Just be careful.” And then he said (laughs), “But, damn, isn’t that Kim a piece of work?” (laughs)
CM: You describe Dickinson as the Wise Old Man, what do you mean by that?
BG: You know, Creole, you know the man. Wise One, in, I think it’s Navajo—no Apache culture, maybe it’s Navajo, too--he was the younger brother of Killer-of-enemies, part of a holy pair. That’s Sid and Jim. (laughs)
CM: And you ever hear from Tony Hudson?
BG: Naw, fuck man, that’s Pete’s gig. I know sometimes Pete talks to him—I can tell from some things I hear—but he’s so sweet to me, he keeps me out of it. Tony Hudson—he screwed The Airplane, too, from the story that I got—that’s part of the West Coast myth of the guy—he thinks part of his cachet, you know? But Pete’s—
LE: He’s family.
BG: Exactly. He’s my brother.
LE: And your father.
BG: True. I have many fathers. Including my real father, who has left the earthly plane, as they say. Yet, he’s with me every day. Every day.
CM: And your mother, she’s still alive?
BG: Still living in Memphis. Well, Bartlett.
CM: Do you talk to her often?
BG: Often, no.
CM: Why is that?
BG: Nothing Freudian, Creole. You know, we live in circles, they keep turning, sometimes the circle includes someone and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it turns back around and involves that person, you know? Right now, my circle is me and Lorelei. And my music, which is a manifestation of us. A reflection.
CM: You mention mirrors often, are you aware of that?
BG: Do I?
CM: Do you know why that could be?
BG: No.
CM: It seems that Black Lung was breaking up from the very beginning. In its beginnings is its end.
BG: Everything perishes from an excess of its first principle. I forget who said that. But, that’s right. We were dead the day we formed. But that’s right, that’s process, that’s life. Read The Upanishads. But, see, I was Black Lung. Black Lung was me. I could have had Bozo the Clown and My Favorite Martian backing me, it didn’t matter. I wrote the songs, I played those hot licks, I sang the fucking songs, right? You can dig that. It’s not ego, man, it’s just what was. That’s what’s so sad about Crafty—I mean, what would he be doing if I hadn’t formed Black Lung? He’d be fucking pumping gas, man, he’d be dealing. He’d be selling Krystals. Because he ain’t that smart. But, yeah, we were cracking up even as we rose. Maybe rising causes dissolution, right, you can dig that. Like Icarus. Or, it’s like Adam and Eve, you know, paradise is full of apples, full of snakes. We were in paradise briefly, as we cut that album, made those songs happen, we had it all, chicks, drugs, some money—though they screwed us of course. We should have been bigger, gotten better contracts. I don’t care about that. But, I do care about my songs, man, my damn songs. I wrote
‘em and they’re mine and no one can ever take that away, turn the clock back, rewrite history. I was Black Lung. I was “Blues for Wendy Ward,” “In Real Time Nothing Happens.” And, you know, in the end, it’s as a songwriter that I will be remembered.
CM: Really, rather than a guitar wiz?
BG: Yeah, yeah, the songs. That’s what I care about. That’s why my new stuff is so important to me. Lor, is that right?
LE: Yeah, the songs are immortal. They are footprints on the moon. You understand?
BG: Exactly, they’re the marks I’ve made against the creeping of the reaper. Kill me now, but forever, they’ll hear my voice, forever those words will be out there, battling against philistinism, against commercialism, against Moloch. Ok?
CM: Um, drugs. Did drugs play a large part of your creative process?
BG: No. Well, I mean, it was the sixties. Drugs were everywhere. In the air. When the Beatles dropped acid, when Leary made his famous pronouncement, I mean it was so public. Blame it, LSD, on Cary Grant. (laughs) At first legal—when I started, Dad, though soon illegal, which is weird. I think acid was illegal. Is it legal now? No, no, it’s not. LSD-25, specifically, you know, I mean, everyone had it—it came to Memphis from Frisco on sugar cubes, I think. It was at the Bitter Lemon, you know, and I’d go there—I was, shit, I don’t know, 16 or something. Man. Anyway, did I use it to write? Some, I guess. It opens doors, if you want to do that. Huxley, you know. If you want to do that, you have to be prepared. It’s not for everyone—I think Zappa insists on being straight, which is his record label. And which is weird cuz he’s so weird, at least, in his vision. “Brown Shoes,” that’s a great song. “Monster Magnet.” Um, what was I saying? Yeah, acid, sure I used it some. And Coltrane—everyone wanted to play like Coltrane, who credited acid with some of his wilder stuff—the stuff that was so influential. Pretty soon it was right there on albums, you know—psychedelia, via the laboratory. Psychedelic rock was just acid put to music, you know. Suddenly there were drug songs. “White Rabbit.” “Amphetamine Annie.” “She Said She Said,” supposedly. Everyone thinks “Open Channel D” is about turning on, man, but, no, no, you get the reference. I mean, sure, open your mind, yeah, that’s psychedelia’s code-word. I wrote “Strawberry Fields for a While” on acid, appropriately. I mean, I did it on purpose. I wanted to answer John, send him a valentine as it was, and I thought, well, I should be tripping because that’s such a trippy song, you know? So, I did that. I used grass a lot, still do. Can you print that? (laughs) Can they arrest me if you print that? When I was with other musicians, I mean, it was something you just did. At the bed-in, I mean everyone was tripping.
CM: John and Yoko’s Bed-in for Peace?
BG: Do you know another Bed-in? Yeah, there. Tommy and Lennon and I, I don’t remember, someone had some sugar cubes. It might have been Donovan. Was he there? I can’t remember. (laughs) Yeah, I did drugs. Ok, I wrote “Burn my Bridges” on speed, which is an angry drug, and it’s such an angry song. I don’t know, it’s not one of my favorites now, even though it’s newish. I wrote it one night—I think Lor and I had had a fight, a rare fight, and she had gone to a girlfriend’s house and I just thought, fuck it, I’m gonna do speed and stay up all night. I didn’t plan on writing. I thought, I’ll just speed and watch late night TV—there was some John Agar movie on—You dig John Agar? No? Don’t know him? Anyway, I was sitting there and there was a legal pad on the coffee table because earlier in the day I had tried writing a song about my mother—don’t ask—and it was sitting there like an invitation and I was speeding like a hell-rooster, man, and I just picked up the pad and this big fat marker, I mean I was writing these huge thick letters on the page (laughs) and I just started, “You were mean to me/Leave me alone, let me sit in my tree/You were a snake, I needed you then/you were like bad heroin.” And I ripped the whole thing off in about an hour. And I recorded it that night in my living room, fingers tearing over my strings till they bled, I was playing so hard, like Richie, and that song, that was recorded in my home—it sounds like it. But it was born of anger, and so, well, it’s not one of my faves. Lor came back about dawn and I was still up and I was crying, just sitting there crying with the guitar in my lap, and she put her arms around me, and that’s the story of that song. Last time I took speed.
LE: “Strawberry Fields for Only a Little While.”
BG: What?
LE: The full title. And you re-recorded “Burn my Bridges” in the studio, which is why it sounds sweeter than you think it does.
BG: Right. (laughs) She knows better than I do, I swear she does. She’s my historian. Here’s let’s switch places, Lor, You sit here.
(garbled)
CM: You said somewhere that you could make your guitar speak. Explain that.
BG: Well, yeah, I can make my guitar speak, it’s secondary if I can sing lyrics or write lyrics, you know. My guitar does a lot of talking. Like Zappa’s “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama.” (laughs) But, sure, I’ve made it talk, talk for me, if you want that spin on it.
CM: Like on what songs?
BG: Well, shit, all the Black Lung stuff. That’s what those ridiculous solos are about. I love ‘em man, but, I wanted more than that. You understand. That guitar bit on “Mr. Handy and Hakel-Bärend,” it’s great, I mean, it’s fucking soaring, isn’t it? I was talking then, telling my audience things that maybe only other musicians, artists, painters understand. I was talking through my sweat, man, through my blood. You dig? But, I can’t play that anymore. I can’t talk with an electric guitar anymore, man. It’s dishonest, somehow. I want more direct contact. I wanna sit down with you and talk about life, man, because it’s hard, you know? In the dark, in our closed rooms, it’s hard. That’s what I’m saying. Lonely’s ok when you’re seventeen, but, man, we’re not seventeen anymore. I wanna talk about that. I mean, I love performing, but I also gotta spend time just playing for me, just me and the guitar, so I learn the message, so I understand.
CM: Let’s backtrack a little. I wanna talk about “Turntable Poison,” in particular some of the things that have been written about it. Some analysts of the record see things in it, which I’ve heard you deny, yet, there does seem to be something underneath the surface of these songs, something darker. Dave Marsh described it as “Mansonish deviltry mixed with Buffalo Springfield lyrics and Cream jams.” It’s this Charlie Manson element that I’d like to hear you talk about, this school of thought that the record is some sort of coded message, a hint of what was to come, a gateway to the Apocalypse, according to Crawdaddy.
BG: Is that a question?
CM: It’s a whole area of question. It’s a school of thought—surely you’ve heard or read some of this. But I’ve never heard you talk about it.
BG: I dropped out of school, especially schools of thought.
CM: Um--
BG: You got kids playing records backwards, you got kids hearing drug references in everything, from “Lucy in the Sky” to “In Real Time”. You got academics plumbing rock music now for the kind of meanings they dug out of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Everyone’s in there digging around, rooting around. Man, all you gotta do to be plumbed is write gibberish, this is proven, these guys they love obscure. You know? They live on obscure. I don’t want any part of it. Why I stripped back, not just my instrumentation but my lyrics. I got simpler. Some people, some back-biting curs, I might say, said I got stupider, that my two “California” LPs represent some kind of nadir for rock music, right up there with Self Portrait and “My Love” and Satanic Majesties Royal Request or whatever the hell that thing is called. I’m here to tell you, you got one person, man. When you’re a writer, you got one person. As close as I am to Lorelei, when I’m in there, when I’m at the typewriter or guitar or keyboard, I’m all alone, man, a chilling kind of alone, and I’m conscienceless, ruthless. You write because you’ve
got to man, because it’s your guts that are hurting, your guts that are in need of something. And you’re gonna find that thing, even as it keeps receding from view, even as the more you go forward the farther away it gets. You ever been to the beach man? Seen those little clams, tiny little fuckers, that dive as you dig around them. They just keep burrowing downward, and the faster you dig the deeper they go (is that a Beatle’s line? something like that) (laughs). Anyway, those little fuckers defy your best efforts, they’re almost always gonna be quicker than you. That’s what writing is, man, it just keeps going farther into the sand, the thing you’re looking for, the thing that’ll make it all alright. It just stays beyond you, just out of your grasp. And that’s how it should be, man, because otherwise why would you keep digging? Why keep looking if it’s easy to find? What were we talking about?
CM: Uh…some people see in your “California” LPs a kind of return to innocence, a willful perspective that is more Edenic, or childlike. Would you say that you are seeking innocence with your recent work, that you are moving toward artlessness?
BG: You would say that. I think you just did say that. Artlessness? Hm. I wouldn’t have used that word, but I like it. Yes, strip off the artifice, cut off the fat. Too many rock lyricists—you can think of them as well as I can, say, that guy with Procol Harum, or that Emerson Lake and Palmer shit, or some of Jim’s stuff, which, to be honest, I can’t stomach, all that lizard king shit—they’re purposely making with the lit-rock attitude, you know? They want you to study their lyrics. I mean, “An idiot reigns in the ancient trees of the night,” or whatever the hell he says. Shit. What I’m saying, in a song like “Love for Lorelei” or “The Golden Apples of the Song”—new stuff, you haven’t heard it yet-- is that, here are my words, man, here’s my life in words. What I’m saying is what I mean. If I sing “I love you” over and over, that’s truth, man, that’s where I’m coming from, because I mean it, because I’m singing to Lor, and I love her, there’s no secret to it, there’s no murkiness, no florid touches, it’s just raw, like art should be, raw, simple, full of emotion. “I Want to Hold Your Ass While You Move”—I wrote that after a particularly beautiful night of lovemaking. I don’t care, you know. I don’t care if people think it’s too personal, too open, too—what?—minimal or plain and straightforward. I mean, some people don’t like that in their art, they can’t take that. It’s like Pop Art, which Lor turned me on to. What these guys are saying is, it’s simple, man, art is all around you. It’s soup cans, it’s goats, it’s flags. Take another look. Look around real good, man, because the world is full of beauty and it doesn’t have to be heavy and obscure and arty. You can just say what you mean. So, yeah, in that way, artlessness was what I was going for. Which, in the end, is the ultimate art. It’s a paradox, in a way, isn’t it? Ask Lorelei.
LE: Art is good, simple, pure. Like Rain and Other Distractions.
BG: Thank you, sweet.
LE: That’s what you’ve been saying. Some people listen. Others don’t.
BG: Right.
CM: Or “Train Tracks and Junk Tracks.”
BG: Well, yeah, ok. That’s actually a re-working of an old Skip James song, but, yeah, I was talking about junk, about some of those we’ve lost. Myself. I’ll say it here. I was talking about that road, which is so easy, so out there for the asking. And I took it, because, at the time, it seemed another way to go. I’m off the junk now. Off it for good. Or, Lor would kill me. (laughs)
CM: We’ve been over the drug thing…
BG: Right, right. Let’s leave it. It’s done to death, so to speak.
CM: (laughs)
(garbled)
CM:…and the hometown thing. Memphis still counts you as one of its own, yet you don’t talk about it much.
BG: Creole, you know Memphis. It’s like this great soup of soul and funk and blues and rock’n’roll and you never get it out of your blood. A gumbo, an olio. It’s fucking invasive. I didn’t leave Memphis behind. I’ve never said that. That cool, brown water is still in my veins, that under-the-surface groove that only that city knows. You know it. You’ve got it, too, right? the Memphis Jones? Yeah, yeah. It’s just a city, in some ways, just another stop, but, in other, more profound ways, it’s like a spell, a magical place that conjures music and feeling and, oh, what? a sort of inbred homegrown soul. But, its’ the inbred that’s dangerous, right? Like a cancer, or like unrequited love. All angels are dangerous, Rilke said. Memphis is an angel, a city of angels. I miss it.