by Chris Price
But more important than any of this is the fact that, post-Monkees, Nez released several albums of the most sublime country rock ever committed to tape. Three of them are of a quality most artists never manage once in an entire career, let alone three times in one year, as was the case with Magnetic South, Loose Salute and Nevada Fighter. And if Gram was the godfather of country rock, Nez was definitely the stepfather. If anyone can lay claim to having begotten the bastard child that was the Eagles, it's Nez. Have a listen to Ian Matthews' Nesmith produced 'Seven Bridges Road' on the 1973 Valley Hi album, then flip to the Eagles' so-called definitive recording of the same song seven years later. They're note-for-note identical.
'OK, he's interesting,' said Joe, 'but he's not beating-heart interesting, and definitely not two-hundred-mile detour interesting.'
'But maybe we could be on his ideas council!'
'We're not knocking on Michael Nesmith's door and asking if his ideas council is coming out to play. No. No way. Anyway it's enough that we're making a detour of nearly a thousand miles via a city I hate on the off chance we might be able to pop in and say hi to the ghost of Johnny Cash.'
'Don't you want to go to the Cash estate?'
'Of course I do. I just think it's a long shot.'
'But it would be amazing if it comes off.'
He smiled. 'It would be, to use the Bronx vernacular, "the shit" if it comes off. Let's hope Shilah comes through.'
Late in the afternoon we became dimly aware of the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley rising slowly in the distance, realising some time and several miles later that they were considerably larger and much further away than we had first thought.
I almost hesitate to describe them; aside from being robbed of both the breath and words to do so upon first glimpsing the formidable red bulk of the 'Mittens', two enormous, straight-sided sandstone plateaus bookending the desert view ahead of us, I'll wager you already know what Monument Valley looks like anyway.
No? Picture John Wayne on horseback contemplating the unknowable vastness of the Wild West; that monolithic stack of sandstone silhouetted behind him is the Totem Pole. Or think of any seventies TV space explorer teleporting onto the surface of a strange, uncharted planet. The red dirt at his feet is the Monument Valley floor. Or a Road Runner cartoon: the anvil with which Wile E. Coyote hopes to crush his lightning quarry is hanging from Ear of the Wind Arch. Yes, you've definitely seen the bizarre rock formations and lunar landscapes of Monument Valley before.
We had made a reservation at Gouldings Lodge just off US163, a motel which must surely lay claim to one of the most panoramic, most iconic and, if you'll excuse me while I put down my rhyming dictionary, most tectonic locations on offer for the guest in search of a room with a view. And what a consciousness-expanding, ego thwarting view he is confronted with: a wide, flat, landscape punctuated by vast, crumbling towers of red rock which pierce the endless blue sky and betray the millennia of desolation like headstones.
Joe was right about the Grand Canyon. It was wider, deeper and more deathly quiet than I could have imagined. But, impossible as it may be to compute the numbers attached to it – 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, 6 million years old – the average brain has no trouble with the general concept of a river carving a hole, albeit a comparatively small river and a very large hole, further and further down through the earth over time. It's what rivers do.
Harder to conceive of – and this I think is what gives Monument Valley its eerie, 'what-planet-have-we-just arrived-on' ambience – are features of geology which apparently do the opposite. Colossal, straight-sided red mountains appear to rise vertically from the vast, flat plains to heights of over 1,000 feet through shallow, sloping shale collars which seem to stretch the surface tension of the earth like tent poles poked through a flysheet. The ground just isn't supposed to do that – doesn't, normally.
And the numbers are even more stupefying: 160 million years of erosion and uplift over 2,000 square miles have sculpted a landscape more unsettling than anchovy cheesecake washed down with a marmite and tonic. What better backdrop for conveying the mysterious and unearthly frontiers of outer space and the wild Wild West.
Gouldings Lodge is named for the man who brought all of this to the notice of Hollywood, and by extension to the world. Harry Goulding was the first white man to own land in Monument Valley. In 1925, Harry and his wife Leone, to whom he referred affectionately by her fabulously come-hither pet name 'Mike', packed a truck with all of their belongings and some merchandise to trade with the Navajo Indians, and trundled off into the wilderness to start a new life together. Decades later their prospering trading post had comfortable cabins and running water. By the time we arrived it had been turned into a modern motel with air conditioning, a gymnasium and cable TV.
We checked in with just enough time to be on our balcony as the sun set behind us. The iridescent red sandstone of Sentinel Mesa – a rectangular, titanic island mountain rising vertically from the flat plains on top of a sloping, stratified bedrock – turned brushed-steel grey from the ground up as the shadow of Olijato Mesa behind us crept slowly skywards like a fish tank filling with water. I could hardly get to sleep fast enough to watch the whole spectacle in reverse the following morning.
24 OCTOBER
VAIL TO NO AVAIL
I was having a perfectly lovely dream about hovercrafts when the skirt on my vessel made an alarming 'zzzzzzpp' sound. At which point I realised it was Price opening the curtains of our slightly shabby motel room to reveal the not-remotely-shabby view of Monument Valley. He hopped onto the balcony to take some shots, then raced back in. 'Quick, where are the car keys? The view will be better on the other side of that headland.'
Put a camera in Chris' hands and he will constantly dart into awkward spaces to get arty shots, run off in search of better light or simply stand still, incapacitated by the artistic options in front of him. I was relieved to get him out of the Grand Canyon alive, as there was every likelihood his search for the perfect shot would involve leaning just that little too far over the edge and tumbling, cheap-sitcom-style thousands of feet into the Colorado River. Except with added death.
Ten minutes later he marched disgruntled back into the room and threw the keys on the bed: 'Fucking missed it.' In the time it had taken him to drive to the perfect spot to watch the perfect sunrise, the sun had risen and the magical moment was lost. Me? I watched it from my bed. It looked very nice.
Hollywood showed the world how to make westerns. Monument Valley showed the world how they should look, and the stationery in our motel room bore the name of the man responsible. Harry Goulding grew up in the Rocky Mountain gold rush town of Durango. Having scrapped, scrabbled and hustled a living from the hills for twenty-five years, and later moved out to the plains of Monument Valley, in 1938 he did what millions of others were doing and headed for Hollywood. But Harry wasn't looking to settle under the bright lights of the big city. He wanted Hollywood to come to him. Having heard that Tinseltown was looking for great locations in which to set their westerns – and believing that the valley in which he lived was just what they were looking for – he had a series of photos taken and set out for Hollywood.
Harry parked up outside United Artists and went inside to try and charm the receptionist while Mike waited in the car with her knitting. Exasperated by his refusal to leave or make an appointment, the receptionist summoned a location manager to provide a more authoritative flea for his ear. Goulding was about to be thrown unceremoniously from the building when the location manager spotted the photographs. He showed them to director John Ford, who was in pre-production for Stagecoach, and in that moment Monument Valley started its journey towards becoming cinematic shorthand for the Old West.
Stagecoach was Ford's first valley effort, starring a B-movie-swagger-for-hire by the name of John Wayne. He followed it with My Darling Clementine which, for my money, makes best use by far of Monument Valley's towering crags. In the romantic showdown between Wyatt Earp
and Clementine Carter, each of the actors is positioned before a silhouetted stack of sandstone. Clementine is framed by an appropriately feminine slither, while Wyatt gets an altogether more massive eminence. As the romantic tension builds and the sense of longing becomes more palpable and intense, the camera dollies downwards so that Wyatt's 'rock' appears to grow. John Ford: king of the western, prince of geological knob gags.
But Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the one that we were interested in. When I first saw it as a child I liked it so much I watched it another three times straight afterwards just to check it was as good as I thought. 'When I grow up,' I resolved, 'I'll go there, ride where they rode, talk their talk and walk their walk.'
Four days later an edition of BBC1's Holiday programme featured a package entitled something like 'Dreams of the American Old West' featuring scenes from Butch Cassidy and other westerns. The host rode horses up escarpments, gazed contemplatively upon widescreen sunsets and ate beans from a billycan by an open fire. At the end of the piece, a graphic totted up how much a holiday like this would set you back. And, cards on the table here, I cried. I cried because it was so beautiful. I cried because it was so much money. I cried because I knew I'd never convince my parents to take me there. I cried because I was ten years old and confused.
But here we were, looking out onto those very vistas, and my eyes misted at the thought of it. Millions before us had sat and contemplated the view we now saw through the windscreen of the car. Like us, many of them will have had their own romantic reasons for being there. 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps. Thelma & Louise. Forrest Gump. Or the cover of the biggest-selling 'best of' of all time, the Eagles' Greatest Hits. I'll wager I'm the only person who can say he was inspired by seventies TV host Cliff Michelmore.
We continued east along US163 past Mexican Hat, which I eagerly added to the list of 'geological features resembling headgear' that I had been keeping since Cap Rock, now pleasingly doubled in length. We made a brief detour via Four Corners to experience the thrill – fleeting, expensive but unmissable – of being able to stand in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah all at the same time. Joe opted for the civilised 'heels and toes' approach, while I resolved to get my three dollars' worth with an ungainly but enthusiastic face-down star jump, pushing off from feet planted in Arizona and New Mexico onto hands in Utah and Colorado. This technique afforded the additional (if admittedly adolescent) gratification of disproving Joe's earlier assertion that we would not set foot in New Mexico. I derived extra value for my dinner money by giving him a dead arm and a Chinese burn.
Just over the Colorado state border we rejoined US160 heading for Durango, the southern end of a stretch of railway as scenic and spectacular as any in the world – the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The 'D&SNG' steams and woofs for forty-five miles across viaducts through the San Juan Mountains, whose silver and gold ore it was built to carry to neighbouring towns in the late nineteenth century. It has been running continuously ever since. Threading a similar path through the Rockies is US Highway 550, which we planned to follow to the opposite terminus at Silverton. US550 is known as the 'Million Dollar Highway', possibly because it cost a million dollars to build in the twenties, or maybe because the grit and hardcore used to make it was mined from such gold rich environs that the tarmac on which we now drove had a higher gold content than an Elizabeth Duke clearance sale.
As the road began to climb, the grass on the roadside became wilder and paler, then grew jewels of ice around its tips, and soon disappeared completely beneath a slim ermine of snow. The trees became sparser, the air cooler, the fuel tank emptier and petrol stations fewer and further between. In his perpetual and admirable quest for music to match the scenery, Chris rifled through the CD wallet. He pulled a CD out, thoughtfully held it up to the light as might a wizard a new potion, and then loaded it. A distinctive Canadian falsetto cut through the speakers.
'Neil Young, right?'
'Yup,' said Chris. 'Fan?'
'Not so much.'
'Give it a chance.'
Track one, 'Out on the Weekend', passed me by. I was too busy concentrating on the twists and turns of the climb, and the fuel gauge as it yet again sped ineluctably towards empty. Track two, 'Harvest', didn't particularly register either, lost under the approaching snowdrift forcing two lanes of traffic into one, as well as the sudden and repeated braking required to avoid ending up under the wrong end of a concrete mixer nearly two miles up.
By now we were looking down on mountain peaks which had towered over us only a short while before. The air was not just desperately cold but also, on account of the nearest open water being something in the region of a thousand miles away, almost impossibly dry. As we approached the ten-thousand-foot-high brow of Coal Bank Pass, the CD moved onto track three. A delicate piano chord chimed like an icicle, and over it a mournful, almost unbearably poignant voice began singing about life's unsettling twists and turns.
Neil Young's 'A Man Needs a Maid' was as cold, bleak and desolate as the world outside the windows. It's a remarkable song – the perfect keening poem for grizzly, cabin-dwelling mountain men to cry their lonely eyes out to. Three-quarters of the way through, as the back wheels of the car skittered on the ice along to the piercing crescendo of the London Symphony Orchestra, every part of my body flashed, flickered and flared. As we reached the highest point of the pass, my heart shattered into a thousand tiny shards. Then, lifting my foot off the accelerator, we freewheeled down through steep hairpins towards Durango.
The overall appeal of Neil Young still eluded me, and the universal acclaim accorded to 'Harvest' is still a little confusing I must confess, but 'A Man Needs a Maid' had won me over a thousand times. If you ever find yourself navigating your way through the freezing temperatures and imposing scenery of Coal Bank Pass in western Colorado, I heartily recommend you bring Neil Young along with you for the ride.
On the face of it 'A Man Needs a Maid' does sound a tiny bit misogynous. On first hearing perhaps you can understand why some women were offended by the idea of a young man, now famous in his own right and rich from platinum-selling albums with Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, singing about hiring in some help to cook his meals, ease his loneliness and then go away. Maybe you can sympathise with anyone upset by the apparent implication that, in substituting a lover for a maid, the role of lover is reduced to cleaner and cook.
But if you really listen – not just to the words, but to the doleful opening piano chords, the cinematic orchestral arrangements, the heart-rending chimes and lilting oboe of the middle eight, the piercing flute and racing violins that signal the final chorus – you realise it's about something else entirely. On second listen you hear the fear and confusion of a man for whom wealth and fame had brought the inescapable truth of no longer knowing who to trust. You hear the desperate longing of someone in search of love, but too frightened to go in search of it.
Joe didn't need a second listen. He got it in one.
And then we were in Silverton, terminus of the narrow gauge railroad, which had special significance for many reasons. Chief among them was that it was where several key scenes from Butch Cassidy were filmed, including the Hole in the Wall Gang's repeated ambushes of the Union Pacific Flyer. And as Butch Cassidy was the birthday card which started all this, he was pretty central to the plot of our road movie too.
The real Butch, from all anecdotal evidence given, was the most charismatic gunslinger of the era, to the point where even the law were taken in by him. At the beginning of 1896 Robert LeRoy Parker (as Butch was then known) was in jail in Laramie, Wyoming, serving time for racketeering and that most quintessential of cowboy crimes, horse rustling. The story goes that the governor of Wyoming, William Alford Richards, went to visit him and said that he would release Butch on one simple – and you have to say quite reasonable – condition: that he stop breaking the law. Butch gave this a moment's thought before offering the governor a deal of his own. He couldn't promise to stop breaki
ng the law, but if he were released he wouldn't do it in Wyoming any more. And with that Butch walked out of jail, across the state border and back to his life of crime.
Maps are an unnecessary luxury for visitors to Silverton. There is only one proper road, and it winds down from such a dizzying height that the entire town is laid out like a perfect model village. From the dense pine woods to the east, the Durango & Silverton steam train billowed in, puffing cotton wool from its smokestack. I half expected an enormous hand to reach down and change the signals. We cruised down from the mountains, turned off the main road and bumped across rutted frozen earth, stopping so close to the parked steam engine huffing impatiently alongside us that it made our cheeks glow when we stepped out of the car.
In its prime, Silverton was a one hundred per cent, bona fide, spit and sawdust, take-your-pardner-by-the-hand old-time Wild West town. The mining boom of the 1860s had brought hundreds of workers from across the world to the San Juan Mountains, and Silverton sputtered into life almost by accident. The layout was agreed in 1874 (and with just one main road it was, I imagine, a very short meeting).
How wild was Silverton in those days? Well, by 1883 it had acquired two banks, five laundries, and twenty-nine saloons. In that same year there were 117 indictments against lewd women. Today the cemetery testifies to the harshness of life in the time of the gold rush: the crumbling headstones tell of 161 locals who died from pneumonia, 117 in snow slides and over 200 who passed away in mining accidents. The number of men whose bodies were never recovered will never be known.
