Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  “ ‘I want a pistol.’

  “ ‘Well, you ain’t getting nothing then.’

  “He says, ‘You got a pistol.’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ she responded, ‘I’ve got a pistol, but I don’t run down the street going, ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ ”

  Not only that, Mama Rose doesn’t run down the street going, “No no no.” Despite all she’s seen, all she’s heard, all she’s endured, she still greets visitors at her small home, still sees it as a palace gifted to her by her gifted son. “I been all around, not just riding up and down the road,” she says. “Music—I’m like my husband about that. Music ain’t gonna lose nobody and it ain’t gonna find nobody. You got to find it, and if you don’t get it, that’s your fault.”

  Calvin and Mama Rose live in the present, haunted by the past. “The other day, Calvin brought me flowers when he come by,” Mama Rose says. “I sang, ‘Give them the flowers while they live / trying to cheer them on / Useless the flowers that you give / after the soul is gone.’ ”

  TOWNES VAN ZANDT

  In 1993, Doug Easley and Davis McCain got a phone call from a young German guy, Peter Schneider, who wanted to record some Memphis groups as the heart of a compilation called Love Is My Only Crime and then organize a European tour around the record. Easley-McCain Recording was by then a hub for bands that wanted a fringier Memphis experience than Ardent offered (Ardent is where Big Star recorded). Easley-McCain maintained vintage gear and offered the analog tape option when digital was all the rage, but also it was about the atmosphere. It had a large, high-ceilinged recording room that housed good ghosts who made the work easygoing. If anyone checked the clock, it was to see if liquor stores were still open or if it was time for Al Green’s Bible class.

  The call from Germany confirmed the studio’s growing reputation. They handled the recording and Peter and I coordinated the tour. We settled on a five-group bill, four from Memphis and Peter’s personal pick of Townes Van Zandt. Townes is the Cormac McCarthy of songwriters; he deals in stories of powerful desperation and desolation, along with the occasional commercial hit, like “Pancho and Lefty.” I traveled as the American road manager and became the show’s emcee.

  Davis McCain, left, and Doug Easley, with neighbors Eric and Chris Meyers. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  None of us had experienced Townes before. I met him in the hotel lobby that June morning in 1993, Zurich, Switzerland. He was the first one down, shaved, dressed, and ready to load out—a professional. He sat in a high-backed chair, staid and quiet, looking like an album cover. The next afternoon, after loading into the venue, I went to retrieve an item from the bus and found Townes standing in the aisle, one hand on his open suitcase and the other holding a quart of cheap vodka bottom side up. The next two weeks blurred into one of the most fun parties I’ve ever been to.

  When off the road, Townes lived in Nashville, two hundred miles from us (and a world apart). Over the two-week tour, bonds formed, and once stateside, he visited our wild bunch, sometimes to record, sometimes for the dance parties. Every visit was one for the books—which is why it must have been so hard to be him. (The most fun I ever had doing laundry was with Townes. We were dancing to “Kung Fu Fighting” in a German bar before eleven A.M. It gave a new meaning to “rinse cycle.”)

  Days before he died, he’d been recording at Easley-McCain. His road manager doled out vodka shots at a prescribed pace. You could hear the alcohol flow through him—the rush in his slur and in his giggle—then hear it diminish and fade. He’d fallen just before the sessions and was being pushed in a wheelchair. The situation deteriorated, the songs weren’t flowing, and producer Steve Shelley (drummer from Sonic Youth) terminated the sessions early. Townes was taken back to Nashville, and a doctor there determined he’d broken his hip and had not tended it for a week. He was a wisp of a man before surgery, but he likely would have survived had he not mixed some over-the-counter medicines with his prescriptions. The Memphis crew attended his funeral.

  In Germany, after a few days with Townes and his remote, sage demeanor, his ethereality, I began wondering if, rather than a human being, he was some kind of revenant. I grabbed my camera and snapped a few shots of him, knowing if he was a ghost, his image wouldn’t appear on film. That night, I lost my camera.

  All the Federales Say

  Mojo, March 1997

  At Townes Van Zandt’s funeral, his longtime friend and fellow songwriter Guy Clark stepped to the microphone and, adjusting a guitar around his neck, said, “I guess I booked this gig thirty-some years ago.”

  Townes was a man of glorious self-destruction, full of life and talent and scared of both. He’d been drinking cheap vodka for more of his fifty-two years than he hadn’t, and when he died on New Year’s Day of a heart attack following hip surgery, two days after his final recording session, he was as skinny and frail as Hank Williams exactly forty-four years earlier. Like the federales in Townes’s song “Pancho and Lefty,” made famous by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Emmylou Harris, among others, death only let Townes “live so long / out of kindness I suppose.”

  To be around Townes was to laugh and have fun; to hear Townes’s songs was to face desperation and dark beauty. He told hilarious stories—about his former shock therapist, about botching record deals, about talking his way out of trouble—and he sang piercing songs. From “Lungs”:

  Breath I’ll take and breath I’ll give

  And pray the day’s not poison

  Stand among the ones that live

  In lonely indecision.

  In the song “Marie,” one of his saddest, a rambler settles down with a woman for whom he can’t provide; she dies in the cold, pregnant with his child. Other titles: “Waiting Around to Die,” “Nothin’,” “For the Sake of the Song.”

  “Living on the road, my friend,” is how “Pancho and Lefty” opens, and it became a credo of sorts for Townes. He toured constantly and extensively, throughout America and Europe, laying himself bare with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, plagued by stage fright but comfortable spinning yarns backstage with strangers. When he hit his full stride, Townes was going slow enough to make music of the space between the notes.

  Townes liked to tell jokes. One, fitting, was: An Irishman in the countryside caught a leprechaun and was granted three wishes. He said, “I’d like a glass of Guinness that never ends.” Ping, a full pint appeared. Glug glug, and when he set it down, it was full again. “Well,” said the leprechaun, impatient, “What else?” The farmer said, “Wow, I’ll have two more of those.” (Courtesy of Ebet Roberts)

  “He said that every song had to work as a poem on paper first,” songwriter Susanna Clark remembers. “That was a Townes rule.” (When she’d tell her friend that he drank too much, Townes would say, “Hey babe, there’s sober people in India.”)

  The personality with which he invested his songs had widespread influence. In 1968, Joe Ely was driving outside dry Lubbock, Texas, to get beer. He saw a hitchhiker with a guitar and knew the guy was lost. Joe drove Townes to the proper highway, and Townes reached into his duffel bag and gave Joe a copy of his brand-new debut album. “The bag had no clothes in it,” Ely remembers, “nothing but copies of this album.” At rehearsal that night, Ely played it for his bandmates in the Flatlanders, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, and Texas music hit a twist in the road.

  Others who have recorded his songs include Nanci Griffith, Don Williams, and Steve Earle.

  Wealth held no attraction for Townes Van Zandt. He preferred the company of laborers—miners, fisherman, and others who gathered in groups and exchanged stories, lore, and gambling debts. I think he wanted to perceive his own work—songwriting and playing—as a form of manual labor, but it came too natural for him. Sometimes songs wrote themselves, Townes merely the vessel, and profiting from that made him feel guilty when others had to swing a sledgehammer so they could afford Hamburger Helper. Other times, Townes handicapped himself with drink, crippling his skills to even the
playing field. At all times, there was more to Townes Van Zandt than we’ll ever know, and I’m sure he had his own explanation for the need to kill himself drinking. As Guy Clark’s statement implies, being his friend meant accepting that he would die trying.

  Townes was a wise and funny man from whom a person could learn a lot about a lot. His self-destruction was a part of him, such that all his happiness was shaded by some sadness, and all the jubilation he created around him was tempered by some pity.

  JEFF BUCKLEY

  Memphis allows you a great freedom. On the street, you don’t encounter stars of today’s charts, nor a world of less-heavenly bodies—agents and publicists and managers. There’s no mill expecting fresh grist, nor even is there much of a culture-seeking audience; there’s better towns for higher culture. You work at your own pace, you develop in public as much as you’d like, then you take it elsewhere to sell—either in a van with a guitar, or through one of the cities of industry, or from your bedroom on the Internet. We are a hole in the wall—some call it a city—for artists, so having the factory two hundred miles away in Nashville seems just about perfect to me.

  I think that’s why Jeff Buckley came to Memphis—to be free from the factory’s heat. He came to experience people who don’t care about Manhattan or Los Angeles, don’t think of meetings there in the course of their day. In Memphis, the rent is cheaper, the days are slower, the narcissism less tolerated. You can afford to dig deeper, to hew the piece one time more before the forge.

  Unlike the others in this book, Jeff Buckley had fame and came here to lose it. Obscurity wasn’t his problem. He is, in a way, the anti–James Carr. He came to Memphis for what many residents complain about: the isolation. He wasn’t leaving the grid, just resituating himself on it. On the road in the 1990s, he’d befriended the Grifters, Memphis’s finest alternative rock band, and he came to see if this town and its indie studio were all these enthusiasts proclaimed. That’s when I met him.

  ’Nuff said. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  I was leaving Hi Records drummer Howard Grimes’s house with some photos he’d given me for the Al Green boxed set Anthology. I had to show someone and I knew Doug Easley and Davis McCain would appreciate the finds; their studio was on the way home. At Easley-McCain Recording, there was an energetic kid checking out the studio who paced as he talked, moving like Gumby with a wire through him, and he shared the excitement. We didn’t exchange names.

  Jeff booked studio time and returned—twice. In Easley one night he mentioned moving here and I told him about a house for rent on my Midtown block. It was owned by the couple across the street from me. They were simple country folk in the city. They had performed their wedding vows at home in front of their favorite Sunday morning TV preacher. (When my wife first entered their living room, she exclaimed to the husband at the TV’s size. He missed not a beat, answering, “There’s only one bigger.”) They had a menagerie of pets and raised rats to sell for snake food. They were casually anti-Semitic and rabidly born-again. For me, their life was a reality TV show that ran loudly and without cessation. For Jeff it was a world that had to be explored. He’d walk down with his guitar, compose songs by letting their German shepherd’s nose push his hands around the guitar neck, and pick up lyrics from their dialog as he watched them cook dinner.

  He also took up a residency on Tuesdays at the punk club Barristers. The gigs weren’t announced, but word spread plenty quick. He’d try out material, do fun covers, and run a stream of bebop stage patter like Neal Cassady, as much stand-up comic as songster. During the breaks, he’d shoot pool with challengers. Memphis allowed him a giant step backward, a chance to be a pretty regular guy.

  Days before Jeff died, we began discussing a music video. He wanted to model it on The Party, starring Peter Sellers. I watched the film and the reasons for his affection were obvious: Sellers was a dapper, daft nerd and a mimic, a stranger in a land of facile, graceful performers who wreaks havoc obliviously and continuously. I looked forward to dressing Jeff in a white three-piece suit and choreographing the stunts. But it was not to be.

  Jeff Buckley, left, and Andria Lisle at Miss Ellen’s Soul Food on N. Parkway. Legendary johnnycake. (Courtesy of Lely Constantinople)

  From Jeff’s Memphis recordings, I’m a sucker for “Everybody Here Wants You.” The writing is dense but Jeff’s in no hurry, his voice soaring like silk in a pleasant breeze. He’s slinking over to Al Green territory, cathedral-like and yet so intimate. And while I know it’s a love song to a woman, I can’t help thinking that the central line is a recurring thought after his quick success in New York, in Memphis, and in every room he was in: “Everybody here thinks he needs you.”

  Northern Light

  Oxford American, August 2000

  Thirty-six hours before Jeff Buckley died, I saw him standing on a quiet Memphis street corner. A sheriff’s car had pulled over and the beige-suited federale stood towering over him. Jeff was my neighbor and friend, so I turned my car around to see if I could extract him from this tangle.

  The incident ended before I got there, and Jeff was walking away. Rain began. I pulled up next to Jeff. He didn’t like strangers stopping him and he kept his face forward as I drove beside him. He didn’t look up until I spoke, and when he heard my voice he stormed into the car, furious that the deputy had stopped to ask who he was. Jeff thought the lawman recognized him from his videos. I tried telling him their paths happened to cross at a spot notorious for drug activity, but he wouldn’t hear it.

  At the corner, instead of turning toward our street to go home, I turned away. An anger I hadn’t seen in him flared. He demanded to be let out and opened his door while we were moving. The rain was hard, heavy, and dark. He did not want to know that I was only going one block out of the way. To calm him I told him I’d take him home directly. Fuck it, if he wanted to act like a rock star, I’d indulge his fame, don my chauffeur’s hat, take his assholiness home, and then do my errand.

  If he’d not died, the incident would have meant nothing. I see my happening onto him right after a cop as proof—if he was seeking proof—that he could not take a walk and be alone. He had owned Manhattan and walked away for just that—a place he could be alone.

  He leapt out of my car, was immediately soaked. “I’ll walk,” he said. “It’s nice out.” It was not nice out. Is this what he had to say to find solitude?

  One day a couple weeks earlier, Jeff had rung our doorbell at six sharp. “Look at this,” I told my wife, leading Mr. Clean into the kitchen. We’d invited him for a home-cooked meal. He wore a frilly green three-piece thrift-store suit, two-tone black-and-white shoes, and a wide-brimmed hat tilted forward over his face. I assumed a matching green Cadillac with fake fur steering wheel was parked out front. He said, “I like to dress for dinner.”

  He and I drank red wine outside in the presummer heat. Our four-month-old daughter cooed at him, he cooed back, and they both laughed. After dinner, he wanted to retrieve a notebook he’d left at the downtown club where he had a weekly gig. “Sure they’re open,” he said, “live bands seven nights a week.” We walked to his house where he got the keys to his rental car. Before leaving the house, he put on a Dead Kennedys CD and left it at top volume. In the driveway, I could hear every thudding beat. An Avon lady lived next door to him. I didn’t ask questions.

  He drove like his verbal riffs: all over the place. The club was, of course, closed. But his outfit was glowing, we were half-lit, and we hit a Beale Street beer hall that had a pool table. He laid two quarters in line for a game and steadily pumped the jukebox.

  In Memphis, Jeff could play at anonymity: a dangerous, green-suited pool hustler running Beale. The bartender found his Grifters selection too noisy and pulled the plug. Jeff leapt onto the pool table and demanded not only that the machine be turned back on, but that he be given his money back so he could play the song again. A pretty girl recognized him and between pool shots handed him a menu and asked for an autograph. He was polite.
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  Usually, we left Jeff to his work up the street. He kept his blinds drawn. One evening I stopped by on my way to the neighborhood bar and he joined me. He talked about his dad that night, also a singer with a clarion voice. Tim Buckley was twenty-eight when he found a packet of powder and, mistaking the heroin for cocaine, laid out a fat line, snorted, and died. Jeff was eight at the time. He lived with his mother, her husband, and his half brothers, and back then his name was Scott J. Moorhead. Then he’d entered his old man’s business, and though he didn’t know him (he’d only spent a week with his dad), he was feeling the weight of his father’s shadow. Dead at such an early age, Tim Buckley would be forever young. “The only way I can rebel against him,” Jeff told me, “is to live.”

  You don’t go swimming in your boots without some kind of intent somewhere. Jeff was thirty when he drowned in the Mississippi River. I don’t imagine that his father’s specter ever left him, but I do believe life must have refracted through the ghost differently during Jeff’s last couple years. My wife’s father died when she was a child, and she speaks of the mixed feelings she had when she passed her father’s age. Survivor’s guilt ringed with survivor’s triumph: “It didn’t happen to me” becomes “it couldn’t.”

  People like me who write about musicians have a relationship with celebrity that is either symbiotic or parasitic, depending on the perspective. Jeff and I had met by happenstance. It took an effort by me to suppress the opportunism presented by his fame. We never discussed doing an interview, though I took notes for one. He often covered an Alex Chilton song, “Kanga Roo”; Chilton plays a significant role in my first book, It Came from Memphis, but we never discussed that either. He’d never before played his fame card until that day in the rain, and then my own willingness to oblige made me painfully aware of how my friendship with him could shade into fandom, and fandom into servitude.