Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  Great writing is great writing, whatever the subject—even a subject as dominated by mediocrities, chancers, scoundrels and buffoons as rock music. The works of the finest rock writers—an echelon, incidentally, of which I do not claim membership, being a dilettante in this as in all other realms of my trade—are, by any sensible measure, of greater worth than the output of 99 percent of all rock artists. This is a less provocative assertion than it might sound, once it is considered that 99 percent of all the CDs I’ve ever been sent have been useful only as emergency shaving mirrors—and that recent technological advances have made it easier and cheaper than ever for utterly talentless acts to inflict their hapless racket upon the commonweal.

  By the time this volume appears, my own band, The Blazing Zoos, whose unlikely gestation is detailed below, will have done exactly that—our debut waxing, “I’ll Leave Quietly,” should be generally available for virtual or physical purchase. To those who ostentatiously sneer at the scrawlings of even the best rock writers while reflexively genuflecting to the creations of even the worst musicians, I will concede this much: that attempting, after nearly two decades of writing about other people’s albums, to make one of your own, is an instructive experience. Though it didn’t cause me to regret any of the harsh—or, indeed, downright abusive—judgements I have passed upon various recordings over the years, it did inspire some previously un-thought thoughts, which is always a useful blessing. I observed—and, during some longeurs in the final mix stages, slept through—the lonely diligence of the producer, in our case Mark Wallis, who has worked with everybody ever, but most humblingly from my perspective, had made several albums with my favourite band of all time, The Go-Betweens. I marvelled at the process by which colossally gifted musicians—that is, everyone in the band except me—can take a half-baked, barely-composed, ill-considered notion and turn it into something with a tune you can whistle. Most importantly, I laughed quite a lot.

  Whether or not what we did is any good is a decision for others to make (I remember, during my time at Melody Maker, how we used to groan, and subsequently mock, whenever some gormless indie wastrel mumbled, “We just do it for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus,” but I kind of understand, now, what they meant). What I can say for certain is this. If, especially as a consequence of finding yourself unhorsed by some or other caprice of fate, you should find yourself entertaining ideas that you would normal consider unworkable, ridiculous or palpably insane, don’t dismiss them instantly (as long as, of course, they don’t involve taking automatic weapons to your school or workplace). Let your id run wild for a spell. You never know where you’ll end up.

  WE’RE BARRELLING DOWN the mountain in the dark when I start to worry that the wheels are coming off, certainly metaphorically and perhaps literally. For most of the day-long run south along the coast from Tirana, the driver piloting our minibus has, by Albanian standards, been reassuringly decorous—more or less slowing down for red lights, parking at less than thirty miles an hour, that kind of thing. Not now, though. Something has spooked him, sufficiently that planting his accelerator foot seems a reasonable course of action in circumstances which are more suited to proceeding gingerly in first gear, possibly with a chap bearing a red flag and a torch walking ahead of the vehicle. There are no streetlights up here, and the only mercy of this absence is that it’s impossible to gauge how far we’ll fall, and onto how many jagged rocks, if we part company with the poor and unfenced road. And we’re going faster and faster and faster and faster.

  The driver speaks no English. I don’t speak much Albanian, beyond the phrase “Nuk flas shume Shqip,” which means “I don’t speak much Albanian.” From my perch at the back of the van, I yell towards the only duoglot aboard, an emissary of Albanian youth activist organisation Mjaft!, who is clinging to the passenger seat up front. My enquiry, the essence of which is the expression of ardent desire for some sort of explanation of our sudden and potentially fatal haste, prompts a response as uncertain as it is unwelcome.

  “There are bandits. . . he thinks.”

  A tersely worded request for further elucidation yields little.

  “There was a car...”

  The narrative is punctuated by sharp intakes of breath and whimpers, some from him, others from the members of my band, The Blazing Zoos, who are all probably wondering, like me, if the bizarre and glorious pageant of rock’n’roll history contains an example of a group wiped out in a calamitous accident on the way to their first gig. If not, we may accomplish something this weekend.

  “. . . he thinks it might be following us.”

  This strikes me as unlikely, which I don’t believe is just wishful thinking on my part. We’re coming off the back of a vertiginous range overhanging our intended destination, the small resort town of Himare, where The Blazing Zoos are due to play at a festival on the beach. This part of Albania is generally reckoned relatively civilised (or so I’d assured my bandmates prior to embarkation). If we were negotiating the proper hillbilly country in the north, I’d concede that that driver had a case, but as things stand, it seems that the person most likely to get us all killed in the near future is in this minibus, not any of the other cars on the road—which might, after all, just be heading to the same event we are.

  “He thought he saw guns.”

  We’re in Albania, I mutter to myself. This is probably the only unarmed vehicle in a three-country radius.

  “I am going to make some calls,” yells our translator, shakily prodding the buttons on his phone.

  There’s clearly nothing for it but to hang on, hope and direct the same sort of water-testing entreaties to the God one usually disdains that one usually pleas when on an aircraft stricken by turbulence. Against this hypocrisy I offer upward the mitigation that my prayers are all on behalf of my bandmates, decent and reasonable people who have, unlike myself, sensibly chosen lives that usually necessitate little of being chauffeured at knuckle-whitening velocity by paranoid kamikazes and/or pursued by Kalashnikov-slinging ne’er-do-wells. Take me if you must, Lord, but. . .

  “They’re sending some people up from Himare to meet us,” informs the latest yelped bulletin.

  An all but two-wheeled lurch right, another one left, another one right again and we come to a rest in an impressively thick cloud of tyre smoke in a happily brightly lit service station forecourt on the outskirts of some species of settlement. The white sedan that was either carting malevolent brigands or blameless motorists sallies blithely past. Our driver recuperates. My bandmates dismount, swig water, swat aside the mosquitoes, and engage in conversation that amounts to variations on the question “What the fuck was that about?” Heart rates are beginning to return to normal when a black car, with ominously tinted windows, roars up the hill from town, screeches to a halt in front of us and emits, with all the exuberance and none of the panache of a showgirl erupting from a cake, a sweaty, bald apparition brandishing a pistol. His black t-shirt declares “Security,” so I assume that he’s nominally on our side (even in the Balkans, it would be surprising to discover that the local highwaymen have their own bodyguard service). I thank him for his concern, and make what I hope are gestures placatory enough to encourage him to holster his weapon. He misunderstands me.

  “I help you!” he announces. “I here for your protection!” With that, he strides towards me, ignores my warily outstretched hand, seizes the waistband of my jeans, tucks the pistol into my trousers, steps back and salutes. I return the courtesy, hoping as I have never hoped for anything that the safety catch on the automatic is engaged. It’s at times like this, when you’re standing next to a van containing two former members of a platinum-selling rock group and a cultishly regarded Shetlandic chanteuse in a remote part of southern Albania with a maniac’s gun barrel tickling your knackers, that one can find oneself asking: how did I get here?

  IT’S A FAIR question, which merits a frank and detailed answer.

  Forming a country & western band in one’s la
te thirties is obviously something one is only going to do in the deranged extremis of heartbreak, and indeed that’s why I did it. The reader may therefore wonder as to the identity of who is to blame, may be curious to know the identity of the spectre responsible for my decision to seize a guitar and set my sorrows to three chords. This seems an appropriate place to reveal it: Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

  I should stress that I didn’t break up with Colonel Gaddafi, as such: in fact, I’ve never met the man (I did once interview his son, Saif, and quite liked him, but he isn’t my type). Gaddafi’s culpability for the existence of my country band is, at best, tangential. It is apportioned only because at the point in the tiresome drama of having one’s heart torn from its moorings at which one would normally avail oneself of the recourse of drinking oneself to sleep, I was on assignment in Gaddafi’s capital, Tripoli, where alcohol is prohibited. This meant that I couldn’t drink, and this meant that I couldn’t sleep.

  Native Americans believe sleep deprivation useful. Extended sleeplessness often forms part of what they call a Vision Quest—a rite of passage during which the individual undertaking it wilfully subjects himself to decomposing hardships in order to connect with a greater power, and develop an understanding of his higher purpose on this corporeal plane. The quester traditionally meanders off into the wilderness for a few days, abjuring such comforts as food, company and sleep, that he might liberate his mind of its workaday clutter and focus his consciousness on what truly matters to him (my admittedly cursory research into the subject has, sadly, failed to discern what percentage of vision questers return from the woods determined that what truly matters to them are food, company and sleep).

  I do not, as a rule, have much time for traditional beliefs, or indeed any sort of empirically untested wisdom—we Sagittarians are very sceptical of such things. But there is something to be said for the potence of sleeplessness as a promoter of innovative thinking, though I don’t recommend it for air traffic controllers. Unhinged from the stabilising ballast of rest, the mind does not so much wander as stagger and flail unpredictably, with often surprising consequences, much like a drunk slaloming between barstools. Which is, of course, exactly what I would rather have been, but with that option unavailable, I spent several wretchedly awake nights gazing blankly into the Mediterranean night from my 21st-floor eyrie in the Corinthia Bab Africa hotel, or huddled in foetal communion with my iPod—which is, and has always been, a veritable Fort Knox of solid country gold. At some stage, I reasoned—though “reasoned” is an overestimation of the capacities of my mental mechanics of the time, which were in a similar state to those of an engine which has just been thrown from fifth gear into reverse—that, really, the only sensible (everything’s relative) response to my circumstances was to become a country singer. It is possible that I felt this course an appropriate submission to destiny. Just as the gluttonous Augustus Gloop in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory was punished for his chocoholism by being turned into fudge, so I’d been listening to country songs for years, and now my life had become one.

  Over the next few days, I scrawled furiously by night, or quivered by day over coffees in the cafes of Green Square and the Medina, humming to myself and frowning at my notepad: the locals steered well and sensibly clear. I returned to London with red eyes, encroaching caffeine psychosis and about half a set’s worth of completed songs. I bought a beautiful new acoustic guitar, and kept writing. In between executing more prosaic techniques of processing heartbreak—sitting in dark rooms, removing hair by the fistful, boring supernaturally patient friends to the brink of self-immolation, wailing pleas, and eventually threats, at a patently indifferent God—I cultivated dreams of a country album to file alongside George Jones’ lachrymose classic “The Grand Tour,” or Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel.” I’d construct a rueful and reproachful, yet poised and dignified, meditation on love and the loss of it, possibly to be titled “Cram This In Your Pipe And Smoke It, You Demented, Ungrateful Harpy.”

  It’s still difficult for me to account for, or quite believe, the sequence of events that subsequently unfolded. It is possibly just that the universe reacts to the endeavours of a person clearly at the edge of their wits much as a householder would upon answering the door to a burly chap clad in a hockey mask, a Homburg hat and a bloodstained ballgown revving a chainsaw, i.e. with a somewhat nervous invitation to take whatever they want. Planets lined up. Tectonic plates shifted. Inexorable cosmic forces brought themselves to bear. A magazine commission enabled me to make my live debut at the legendary open-mic night at Nashville’s Bluebird Café.

  As is proper prior to embarking upon any serious or entirely ridiculous undertaking, I sought expert counsel. Just before I left London for Nashville, I was asked by a magazine to interview Elvis Costello. The inexorable cosmic forces were clearly at play again: it had been Costello’s 1981 album of reverent country covers, “Almost Blue,” which had sparked my long-burning passion for the genre. I asked Costello what he’d advise a Nashville naif: “Go to Katy K,” he replied, referrring to the celebrated western outfitter, “and buy a new shirt” (This I subsequently did, along with a complementing guitar strap from Gruhn Guitars, another Nashville institution). I asked my friend Astrid Williamson, a songwriter of no mean genius, for tips on playing live. “Visualise the performance,” said Astrid. “Imagine yourself doing everything you’re going to do.” I spent the flight to Nashville, via Chicago, trying, but could only imagine myself cowering beneath a hail of empties, before being compelled under armed duress to re-enact key scenes from “Deliverance.”

  “That’s unlikely,” said Amy Kurland, the Bluebird’s owner, when I visited the night before my debut. “It’s a polite crowd, because the crowd is mostly each other. It’s 40 people showing up wanting to play, they bring a couple of friends, that’s your audience.”

  I was, I told Amy, under few illusions about my abilities. As a guitarist, I’m a semi-competent hack, and I’m a better guitarist than singer.

  “Don’t worry,” she laughed. “The open-mic is like Russian Roulette with a full chamber—it’s spinning the barrel and hoping you’ll hear one decent song all night.”

  I solicited further guidance from Nashville-based singer-songwriter Billy Cerveny. He struck me as a smart choice of mentor not just because I liked his current album, “AM Radio”—a gorgeous, melancholic record in the John Prine/Steve Earle mould—but because before he was a musician, he was a journalist. Billy’s elegant yet pugnacious way with words was embodied in the t-shirt slogan of his band, The Nashville Resistance: “Because the ass ain’t gonna kick itself” (a sticker bearing this excellent advice has adorned my laptop keyboard ever since). In my room at Nashville’s uproariously opulent Hermitage Hotel, I played Billy the MP3 demos of my songs. To my astonishment, Billy didn’t emphatically proclaim these the worst things he’d ever heard. “They’re rough,” he said. “But they sound real, and that’s what matters.” I suddenly felt calmly, possibly foolishly, confident. I remembered that when I’d asked Amy Kurland how many open-mic contenders were certifiably delusional, she’d replied, “Oh, everyone’s delusional. But sometimes, delusions come true.”

  That Monday night at the Bluebird, I was the fourteenth of the night’s wannabes summoned to the stage—and, all things considered, it seemed to go pretty well. Nobody was thrown at me, nobody was injured in any unseemly stampede for the exit, and a couple of the more venomous zingers in the lyric promoted appreciate banging of bottles on table-tops. I was certain, during the climactic chorus, that I perceived an honest-to-goodness “Yeehaw!”, though this may have been Billy being polite. I just wasn’t sure, upon return to London, what—if anything—to do next. As it turned out, I didn’t need to give it much thought. The inexorable cosmic forces were not done with me yet.

  Robert Johnson famously became a blues singer after having his guitar tun
ed by Satan at a Mississippi crossroads. My country band owes its existence, possibly more prosaically but really not much less surreally, to being offered a gig by an Albanian politician in a London cocktail lounge. Shortly after I returned from Nashville, I went for a drink with my friend Erion Veliaj, then leader of a youth-oriented civil activist movement called Mjaft!, who was visiting from Albania. I’d met Erion in Tirana a few years beforehand, and entirely failed to conceive a lasting and violent dislike to him despite the tiresomely apparent facts that he’s exactly eleven years younger than me, a dozen times smarter, a hundred times better looking and will almost certainly be prime minister before he’s 35 and Secretary-General of the United Nations by 50. I told him about my recent escapades in Nashville.

  “Mjaft! are putting on a festival in July,” he said. “You should come and play at it.”