Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  Which reminds me. All that talk about the stooped-over voice, the colds, the bad hip, I’ve made him sound old. But when he really gets going, when he’s trying to explain to you how that racing schooner he boarded in Guam gathered up the wind and simply disdained the water, he drops the cowhand growl and just plain enthuses. And when he laughs—usually at a respectful distance following his own observations—it’s one of those half-and-half laughs. Half humor, half wonderment at it all. Like, can you believe this life?

  I’ll skip ahead. Tell you that Ramblin’ Jack never did get around to commenting on the album. About the time my tape was running out, he announced that Friends of Mine producer Roy Rogers had just tracked mud into the house. “Let me introduce you to someone,” I heard, and then Rogers was on the phone. I saw this for the opportunity it was and decided to make hay.

  We talked about how a man who has written fewer than five songs in his life has become such a universal touchstone. “He’s the link,” said Rogers. “He was really the last guy to hit the road with Woody, and he had such strong connections in Europe, where the Rod Stewarts and the Mick Jaggers saw him in English folk clubs and he turned them on to American roots music.

  “He’s not well known to the general populace, and they don’t understand how he knows all these people, or why they know him, but that’s the way things have gone in our cultural context. There’s all this division into musical camps. People don’t understand…Jimmie Rodgers was a pop artist in his day. I asked Howlin’ Wolf once, ‘Where’d you get that yodel?’ ‘I listened to Jimmie Rodgers on the radio comin’ outta Nashville,’ he said. Not to get too scholastic, but when we chose the songs for this album, we wanted them to be representative of Jack’s whole context.” The context is there, not only in the songs, and the singers, but in the sound of the album. Listen to Ramblin’ Jack singing Townes Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues,” and you hear Townes. Of course, listen to Townes, and you hear Jack. And while I may be trying too hard, when I heard Jack’s high harmony behind Tom Waits on “Louise,” my first thought was of Sara Carter. When he joins up with Jerry Jeff Walker on “Hard Travelin’” and “He Was a Friend of Mine,” you’re hearing music written by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but you’re also hearing how Ramblin’ Jack informed country’s outlaw movement. His take on Joe Ely’s “Me and Billy the Kid” plants him in the midst of the Austin scene. And so on, right through pop rock (for those of us introduced to Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe” via Rod Stewart), Nashville, and Deadhead land.

  “It’s just him, covering a lot of different territory in American music,” said Rogers. “But we didn’t set out to make a nostalgic record. He’s not a historical guy, he’s right here now.” And for the record, for all its musical cross-references, the album doesn’t come off as a look back. Even “Bleeker Street Blues,” a recent, rare Elliott composition, is set firmly in the present. The history is there, the whole Woody/Jack/ Bob thing, but in the end, the song is about context. The here and now, how we got here, how it looks, and what we yet dare wish for.

  Landlocked in dark Minneapolis, fitsing-and-startsing through the wet stoplights, Jack is telling the driver sea stories. He’s tiny in the front seat, all hunched shoulders and hat. The salt-spray hiss of the tires plays beneath the narration.

  “…He went out the yardarm, on the foot-rope. The halyard parted. The yard crushed him. By Way of Cape Horn, that’s the name of the book,” he says. “You should read it. It’s in the 917.8s.”

  He’ll talk about trucks. He’ll talk about ships. He’ll talk about the Dewey Decimal System, for crying out loud. But Jack…what about the music? What’ll I tell people?

  “Tell ’em my teeth are fallin’ out, I can barely walk, and they better hurry up if they wanna see me, ’cuz I may not be around much longer.” He’s chuckling.

  “But if I make it through this year, I’m gonna get me that 1947 Peterbilt and put another Cummins 220 in it, it’s got a five and four, a long wheelbase, I’m gonna put an old Airstream trailer on the back of it, and man, we won’t have to get on no god-damn airports any-more!”

  I giggle. It’s right there on the tape, completely unprofessional. But it gives Jack time to circle back along the yarn and come up with an answer.

  “Tell ’em I’m nineteen.”

  1998

  Steve Earle: Hard-Core Troubador

  Before you read this piece you need to know some things:

  Steve Earle has been married six times.

  Steve Earle has poor driving habits.

  Steve Earle took a break from the making of music through the mid-1990s in order that he might increase his consumption of regrettable substances, live in real bad parts of town and break a few traffic laws. Then he had a nice rest in jail.

  Steve Earle is bigger than I and has more tattoos.

  Steve Earle wrote and recorded “My Old Friend the Blues” long before the Proclaimers were proclaiming.

  Steve Earle sings country music without the aid of a Stetson, a belt buckle or a cute little butt.

  Steve Earle is the real deal.

  I like Steve Earle. Of course I’ve never had to ride with him. Or marry him.

  CADOTT, WISCONSIN, 1994. Country Fest. Notebook in hand, I stand in darkness as six lovely boys who missed the White Lion reunion tour casting call get thirty thousand drunken cheeseheads in a cow pasture to hoist their thirty-fifth beer of the day to the night sky and scream “God Blessed Texas!” It occurs to me that something is drastically wrong.

  GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, APRIL 27, 1996. Country Jamboree at the Palexpo. I was warned, and it’s true: Many Swiss country music fans show up dressed in period clothing, including toy pistols, sheriff’s badges and even a headdress or two. As a Confederate general prices felt cowboy hats in the lobby, his petticoated daughter stumbles over his dangling sabre.

  CANNOCK, ENGLAND, APRIL 30, 1996. Since I was here last, seven years have passed. The coal mines have shut down. The surrounding farmland has disappeared under a mitotic profusion of two-story brick duplexes; meadow and gorse have been subdivided by tarmac strips dubbed Meadow Way and Gorse Lane. The traffic circles are jammed with young professionals fleeing the decay of nearby Birmingham, but crime is hitching a ride. The town council responded by filling the old town center with tulips, bandstand gazebos and cobblestoned doses of “quaint.” Still, the council is under pressure to do more: Surveillance cameras—“like the ones in Birmingham”—are on order. And then, the bad news: While hiding out over coffee and a buttered scone at George and Bertie’s Tea Room—one of Cannock’s surviving links to the past—I hear the waitress tell the cook about her plans for Friday night: American line-dancing lessons. Seems it’s the rage in England at the moment. And to think they’re all worked up about Mad Cow Disease.

  The day I left England for Switzerland, my English friend Tim rose early to take me to the train, leaving him no time to make his usual two sandwiches. And so, at lunch, he went to a greasy truck stop near his work site. A big ugly trucker was just finishing his chips; Tim asked if he could have the trucker’s newspaper. The trucker grunted and pushed it Tim’s way. Somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere pages, a tiny concert notice caught his eye. Steve Earle and the Dukes, Birmingham Town Hall. Having endured my raves about an Earle show I’d seen in March, he got on the phone immediately and secured a set of tickets.

  I knew nothing of this as I walked home from George and Bertie’s, heavy laden with thoughts of how the Nashvirus, no longer confined to U.S. cow pastures, has infected Boot-Scootin’ Brits and Swiss cowpokes. When Tim called, he asked if I’d be interested in seeing a band called the Dukes, with some guy named Steve Earle. The wry British sense of humor, you understand. He picked me up at six, and we headed for Birmingham, against the nocturnal flow of subdivision-bound escapees.

  BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND. The Town Hall looks more like the Parthenon than a town hall. Steve Earle lumbers on-stage and renders the point moot: within six bars of “Feel Alright,” the joint’
s a roadhouse. Next, he rocks through “Hard-Core Troubador,” and further stomps all over the notion that rehab and living in Nashville may have deadened his muse. Indeed, each of the eleven songs he performed from the twelve-song I Feel Alright album (the second since his infamous “vacation in the ghetto”) stand as proof of his artistic survival. His penchant for diplomacy has survived, as well: Explaining why none of the I Feel Alright songs will be released as a single in England, he quips, “It’s because…well, it’s because we’re sick of kissin’ [BBC] Radio One’s ass.” Cheers all around. Curmudgeonry is replaced with a twinkling eye, however, when he grins over the opening chords of “My Old Friend the Blues,” and says, “Here’s an old Proclaimers song.”

  Midway through the show, the Dukes vacate the stage, leaving Earle to solo with an acoustic guitar and harmonica. As he did in Minneapolis, Earle performs “State Trooper,” from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, introducing it as a song written by “a hillbilly from New Jersey.” He introduces “Valentine’s Day” with the humorous tale of how the song came about as a result of his being legally deprived of the right to drive. Earle’s habit of bracketing lyric lines with audible breaths is powerfully emotive in an acoustic setting; during “Ellis Unit One,” written for Dead Man Walking, the effect is positively chilling.

  As the Dukes rejoin him, Earle tunes up for “Billy and Bonnie.” “How y’all doin’?” he asks the crowd. A few “al-rights” are heard, but from my darkened back-row balcony seat, your humble reviewer inexplicably bellers, “All the way from Wisconsin, man!” Earle stops dead. “Wisconsin! Damn!” Next, I devolve completely from objective concert critic to blatant panty-tossing teenie-bopper fan mode: “Woooooo!!!!” Earle plays the opening riff, then stops again. “Wisconsin! I thought I was a long way from home. Man, you’re lost!” By this time humiliation and the fear of being beat up by the main attraction has enabled me to shut up. The rest of the show is like blastin’ down a back road in a badass hot rod; things just keep gettin’ faster and louder. By the time we scream into “Guitar Town,” the English have stormed the stage, and my buddy Tim has sung himself hoarse. I find myself desperately wishing all those Little Texas fans could be here. I want to fly in the Swiss family Confederate, get them vaccinated against the Nashvirus for life. I want that tea room waitress next to me pistoning her fist to “Copperhead Road,” thoroughly purged of the need to ever again hook her thumbs in her belt loops.

  But nothing’s worse than a proselytizer; they gotta get it on their own. So until they do, lemme preach to the choir: The coal mines are gone, but Steve Earle is back. Lordy, is he back. Makes me wanna holler.

  1996

  P.S. From the moment I heard “Guitar Town,” Steve Earle had me revved up to run. I remember standing on the deck of a John Deere B, raking hay with the throttle wide open and Exit 0 on the headphones, my heart impatient, the highway on my mind. His work has driven me deep into many a night. Whatever the state of his life or politics, his music has never once wasted my time, and indeed, has influenced my work on the level of my favorite poet, Dylan Thomas. Despite my hard-core fan status, in 2000 I wrote a review for No Depression magazine implying that Transcendental Blues, the album Earle released that year, probably wasn’t going to do much for his career. It became his best-selling album ever.

  Regarding the state of mainstream country music, it remains largely bad pop music, but I have learned to stop being so snooty on the subject.

  IV. The Body Eclectic

  Scarlet Ribbons

  The man in the small room with me is a convicted murderer. He is immense and simple, looks as if he was raised on potatoes and homemade biscuits. I’d lay money that before he wound up here, his clothes smelled of bacon grease. He knows I am uneasy. I know he knows, because he looked me square in the eye, grinned, and told me so. Still, The New York Times Magazine has given me an assignment, and although I may be edgy in this prison, in this room with concrete blocks close all around, with this bulky killer two feet away, I must complete it.

  I am to determine if the prisoner is happy.

  The first person to whom I ever administered an intramuscular injection was a cheery wee granny. I see her still, seated on a hospital chair, flannel gown hiked up to expose her left quadriceps, head fluffed with a blessing of fine white curls, smile as sweet and warm as a batch of sugar cookies. The steel needle is cocked an inch from her skin, and she chirps: “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Oh yes,” I lie. Brightly. Smoothly. Never breaking eye contact.

  Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice. Jorge Luis Borges said time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures—that we choose one alternative at the expense of all others. We can never be who we set out to be, but will always be who we were. I went to college to become a nurse. I became a writer. We spring from a thicket of tangents. I remember the exact moment I decided to become a nurse. I was reading Sports Illustrated in the high school library. I was supposed to be in World Literature, but the university recruiter was in town, and we were allowed to skip class to catch her pitch. I signed up, but once in the library, headed straight for the magazine rack, lolling through People and Newsweek while the rest of the students joined the recruiter at a long table. Late in her presentation, I overheard her reciting a list of majors: “Biology. Business. Economics. History. Nursing.”

  Nursing, I thought. That sounds interesting.

  I filled out the necessary paperwork, and reported for class in the fall.

  Nursing is so easily caricatured by white skirts and chilly bedpans. Pills and needles. Shots. But this is like saying painting is about paint. Practiced at its best, nursing is humane art, arisen from intimate observation and expressed through care. Again and again our instructors reminded us that every patient is a point of convergence, an intersection of body, mind, and spirit. We were trained to obtain quantifiable data with stethoscopes and sphygmomanometers, but we were also warned not to ignore intuition. We learned to change sheets without removing a bedridden patient, we learned how to prevent decubitus ulcers by monitoring pressure points, we learned to stick lubricated feeding tubes up noses, but we also learned to seek eye contact, perceive nonverbal communication, and establish trust so rapidly that within five minutes of meeting a stranger we could quite comfortably inquire after his bowel habits. Facilitate, reflect, and clarify; employ empathic response. These are the interviewing tools of the nurse. Also eminently functional, as it turns out, in the service of interviewing murderers for The New York Times. Every time I filled a syringe, I was filling my writer’s pen with ink.

  Heraclitus also said we are never being, but becoming, and in between clinical rotations and classes on skin disease, all nursing students were required to enroll in humanity courses. This rankled me. I have never been taken with the concept of a liberal arts education. The idea of lounging around dissecting Tom Jones when I should have been dissecting piglets always struck me as mark-time dawdling along the road to employability. I’d change out of surgical scrubs and hustle off to badminton class, Econ 110, or The United States Since 1877, or Introduction to Film, or Introduction to Creative Writing, or Folk Music in America. I expected the Chemistry 210, the General Zoology, the Developmental Psych and the Survey of Biochemistry, and willingly submitted to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory assessment designed to reassure the beehived matron at the helm of the nursing school that I was unlikely to bite my patients or develop perverse affections for iodine swabs, but a .5 credit course in relaxation? What did these things have to do with nursing? Peering into the thicket of tangents, I saw nothing but obstruction.

  Early one morning during a summer O.R. rotation, long before most people had finished their first cup of coffee, a surgeon inflated and deflated a lung for me. It pressed out of the patient’s bisected chest like a greasy trick balloon, then shrunk back and retreated into a cheesy lump beside the patient’s writhing heart. The mechanics were fascinating. Here was the corporeal
gristle revealed. We tote our organs around not even knowing them. There is nothing abstract about a glistening length of intestine. But by drawing back the curtain, the surgeon managed to reframe the mystery. Now that I had peeked behind the liver, eyed the discrete lumps of organ, I wondered where the spirit might lie. It’s one thing to speak of the heart as a center of emotion, quite another to see it lurching between the lungs like a spasmodic gray slug. We were as deep in the body as you can get—exactly where did they keep the soul? The finite, meaty nature of it all blunted my ability to imagine the body as a place for spirits.

  When I was a child, my father, a quietly eccentric farmer, would sometimes come in the house after the evening milking, rustle up his blighted trumpet and play “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby.” We sat at his feet, and he swayed above us, an overalled gnome, eyes closed, gently triple-tonguing the wistful passages. The notes twined from the brass bell in liquescent amber, settling over our hearts and shoulders, wreathing us in warm, golden light. Many years later I found myself standing at a meds cart in a surgical ward, sorting pills into cups, chafing in my polyester student nurse smock, short of sleep and overwhelmed by my patient care assignments, desperately trying to sort out the drug interactions before my instructor arrived to grill me on the same, when “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby” came seeping from the speaker in the ceiling. I was swept with a desperate melancholy. I have never been so lonely. And try as I might, I could not see how the path on which I stood could be backtracked to the feet of my trumpeting father. In more dramatic circumstances, I might have stripped off my smock, gobbled the meds and run off to join an agrarian brass band, but my instructor appeared and began to ask me if there was any danger in administering diazepam and clonidine in tandem. I fidgeted, answered hopefully and resumed forward motion.