by Shawn Colvin
The first time I saw James Taylor was at the SIU arena as well. He played solo. I had pretty good seats and the undeniable feeling that he would sense my presence and ask me to sing with him. It must have slipped his mind. If you had told me then that I would someday meet James Taylor, much less sing with him or kiss his cheek, for God’s sake, I would have absolutely died right on the spot, but then I wouldn’t have lived to meet Joni Mitchell and gotten to tell her about the necklace I made for her in 1974 and how I gave it to a roadie after her show in St. Louis with a note and express orders to deliver it to her. It was kind of endearingly naïve of me. I wouldn’t have gotten to ask her the question that had burned in me for years: Did anyone else notice, or was I the only one, that on the cover of Hejira her left arm looks like an erect penis? I had no sooner begun to mention it to her when she piped right up and said, “Oh, the cock!” So my mind could finally rest.
I also wouldn’t have gotten to sing with Jackson Browne or David Crosby and Graham Nash and Neil Young or Judy Collins or Bonnie Raitt. I wouldn’t have met Paul Simon or Elton John or Laura Nyro—or Paul McCartney.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There were a lot of miles to go before those dreams, like many others, stood a chance of coming true.
4
Get the Kids
High school, 1971
Hey everybody in the old schoolyard,
We took it all the way and we took it hard.
By the time I started high school in Carbondale, I had transformed my image from chronic truant to hip folkie girl with guitar. Music was my identity, and it served me well. From there I could branch out. And thanks to my earlier stint as a bag lady, my skills at sneaking out of the house were well honed. Plus, I had discovered boys, oh, yes, yes, yes.
I know there has been speculation that I might be gay, but listen, it’s just not true. I liked boys, period, and still do, although sometimes I’ve wanted to be gay, believe me. The summer of my fourteenth year, I had my first big crush on an older man, fifteen, who played guitar and thought himself to be all that and a bag of chips. I thought so, too. He came to my open window in the middle of the night (they weren’t nailed shut anymore) and beckoned me come hither. I promptly crawled out the window and walked to his house with him, where I lost my virginity in the basement. Good, now that was done. Onward.
The next boy I liked was a dreamboat named Mick, a true bohemian and absolutely adorable. For some reason I wouldn’t go “all the way” with him. I guess I wanted to learn the finer points of sex, like foreplay. I had to ride my bike to and from his house, where I would crawl up some latticework to his bedroom window. Some of my fondest memories are those rides, before and after the clandestine thrills with Mick, in the still dark when everyone else was asleep and the streets were mine, with not a single sound except the whir of my bicycle tires.
Rollie was my first real boyfriend, my best boyfriend. I don’t know what it says about me that I chose best when I was fifteen. I guess things were inherently easier in a way, with all of us still living at home and being pretty carefree for the most part. Rollie was good stuff, a good man. He came to our high school my freshman year from Minnesota and was an army brat who hailed from too many places to count, including Australia, which gave him great mystery. He told me he cared for me the day school was out my freshman year, the same year Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died, the year the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel broke up, the year the movie Woodstock came out. My life changed overnight. I had a true companion. We became inseparable. We were friends and lovers. We took care of each other.
There was one particular night that Rollie had dropped me off at home when after I got into the house I went to the front-room window to watch him drive away. He must have seen me, because he backed up, sat for a moment, and pulled away again. I didn’t move. He backed up again, sat in the car, drove away. And again. Over and over. I don’t know how many times that night he did this dance with me, but I’ll never forget it.
My parents found out that Rollie and I were having sex. I guess we started that about six months into the relationship. It was a big step for us and well planned for. I got birth-control pills from the free clinic. My mother discovered them. The shit hit the fan. Rollie was summoned over, and my father had a private talk with him in his office. One of our friends came to pick him up at some point, and he was ushered out the door in tears. I’m not sure why my parents were so upset. I wasn’t going to get pregnant. And they loved Rollie.
But that’s actually very shortsighted of me. In retrospect, this certainly defines not only the core of my own disconnect with my parents but perhaps the alienation of my whole generation. I was just a little bit shy of the Age of Aquarius, but its principles seemed sound to me—all you need is love. Rollie and I had love, we were hurting no one, we were responsible. But, of course, this came smack up against the morals of my parents’ generation, which dictated that premarital sex was wrong. Isn’t it always the case? These days I’m stunned when my daughter tells me, “It’s chill, Mom,” after I hear Snoop Dogg rapping about squeezing Katy Perry’s buns. I grew up in the era of the generation gap. Naturally my parents were the enemy.
In addition, there was something personally askew between my parents and me. Today I can look back and understand the challenges I presented to these two very young people who were fantastically underprepared to raise a rebel, an artist, a depressive. Today I can see that so much of life is timing, that my folks and I are more alike than any of us could have imagined. Both of them are artists who chose other paths. My father also rebelled as a young man, and my mother waited until she was a grown woman and knew her enemies, which were and are the systems that threatened her rights and those of her children, of all children. It’s true that perhaps my mother has never taken a mental-health day in her life, but Dad takes Prozac and has phobias like me and my sister. Back then, though, all they could detect was nonconformity and trouble, and all I could sense was that my very self was somehow just wrong.
So they told Rollie and me that we couldn’t see each other anymore. There was not a worse thing they could have chosen to do to me. Rollie was such a balancing force in my life. He got along with Mom and Dad, so I could, too. He was a Christian Scientist, and I was a hypochondriac. He used to tell me, “Shawny, there is no spot where God is not, for God is everywhere.” And my stomachache would subside, my heart would stop racing.
I woke up the next morning, after we’d been separated, and a storm was blowing in. I’d also been grounded in order to minimize the chance of our seeing each other on the sly. My windows might just have been nailed shut again. I went out to our backyard and sat on top of the picnic table. I sat and watched the storm blow in, and I can’t explain it, but somehow I knew, deep down, that it would be all right.
I felt stripped and shaken, but I also felt the solace of what I would call the power of love. Because Rollie and I loved each other. It was no one’s to take, it couldn’t be stopped, no matter what.
Eventually my parents let Rollie back in. We promised not to have sex anymore, a promise we never intended to keep. I think everyone knew this. And from age fifteen to nineteen, I loved Rollie Carlson, and he loved me, and the world was safe and good and promising.
Me and Rollie, prom night, 1972
There was a custom at Carbondale Community High School whereby a junior or senior girl would be paired with a freshman girl to mentor her for her first year. The older girls were called Big Sisters. Mine turned out to be Anna Baker, the real big sister of one of my best friends, Mandy. Anna was the stuff of prom queen and bohemia combined. She knew how to traverse both realms, was a total stunner, and for this we all looked up to her. Tall, tan, a body to die for, and a personality to match—irreverent, supremely confident, bigger than life, really. I was hers. The first thing she did, being a woman of solid priorities, was teach me how to smoke opium. I already knew how to smoke cigarettes, so this was not a leap. We sat on the shag rug in her parents’ living
room with her connection, Leah, whose dad traveled to Indonesia a lot, and I got high. I never did figure out if Leah’s dad actually brought the opium over—it seemed logical and certainly exotic—or if it was the more likely scenario in which Leah herself procured it from someone in the rich 1970 drug land of our large university town. Either way it was fine stuff.
The Baker girls were also revered for their talent for high drama. We all participated in Speech Team, where one could compete by reading prose or acting out a scene in a play either solo or with partners. I myself did prose as well as a duet acting stint from Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, in which I played Frankie. Mandy tried her hand, with much success, in a scene as both Stella Kowalski and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. Her final lines, and I can vividly remember her impassioned and desperate delivery at age fifteen: “I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you? In bed with your—Polack!” She won every time. Naturally this kind of thing leaked over into our everyday lives, and Mandy was quite proud when, after being picked up late by her gentleman caller, Scott, she coolly responded to his acknowledgment of his tardiness by snipping, “You are very observative.”
Mandy wasn’t the only one who was challenged grammatically. Our friend Liz, upon going on one of her first dates ever, was sure to tell the waiter she didn’t want “scrotums” on her salad, when obviously she meant to say croutons. Liz was another one who could seamlessly ride the line between cheerleader and bad girl, even if being bad meant nothing more than sneaking cigarettes behind the back of her protective older brother, Steve. Only Liz could pull off smoking with elegance, though. She was the most feminine of all of us, petite and blond and buxom. It took her an hour to do her makeup and hair, which was naturally curly at a time when straight hair was the way to go. I was the total opposite of Liz, and this attracted us to each other. I didn’t wear makeup at all and wouldn’t have been a cheerleader if you’d paid me. Whereas Liz was prim and well mannered, I veered toward the crude and obscene. I farted and burped freely, talked about sex explicitly, and generally delighted in grossing her out. She disapproved but really couldn’t tear herself away.
Jane was more on my level. We had a certain lack of sophistication. It was Jane and I who gave pet names to all our friends’ breasts. Liz was “Modest Mounds” for obvious reasons. Mandy was “Baby Nips,” Jane was “Smashed Bananas,” I was “Airplane Nose,” and our Vietnamese pal, Pat, was “The Good Earth.” Jane had delightful sayings like “Oh, balls!” and “You ain’t a-woofin’, honey!” and called everyone “doll.” She suffered no fools. Jane and I also had the corner on musical obsession. She didn’t play an instrument—that role was reserved for Joanne and me—but Janey and I swooned over our idols, something Joanne was far too cool to do. It was Jane and I who took on the arduous task of recording our own James Taylor interview. We got out a cassette player and would record a question: “James, we heard that you woke up in the night screaming....” Then we would cue up his response from one of his albums, and this particular answer was James singing “just a bad dream …” from “Blues Is Just a Bad Dream” on his first record. This was vinyl, remember, so it required a fair bit of work to drop the needle in the exact right place. Another one of our questions was, “James”—we loved this, just saying his name—“James, what are the lyrics to your new song?” We delighted in our clever answer, from the very end of “Blossom”: “La laaa la la la la laaa la la la la la la, la la la LA LA LA.”
On New Year’s Eve, the older Bakers always went out, leaving us to fend for ourselves in that fabulous house. My folks were teetotalers, while the Bakers showcased a complete liquor cabinet and had their five-o’clock highballs every evening. Mandy’s aforementioned Scott came over one New Year’s Eve, having been drinking before he got there and with plans to go on drinking after he left. Before he left, though, he needed to puke in the downstairs bathroom, and I guess he wasn’t particularly neat about it. This was news to us when Dennis, Mandy’s father, got home in his cups and used the bathroom. His wife, Donna, was in tow, her wig turned halfway around her head, giving her a sort of Liberace–meets–Louise Jefferson effect. After seeing the mess downstairs, Dennis interrogated Mandy, who could think on her feet and blamed the dog. Dennis paused as we all held our breaths and finally said, “Mandy? Mandy? Did you give that dog scotch? You know he was raised on gin.” God bless Dennis. He got sober the same year I did—1983.
With my guitar on one side of me and Rollie and my good friends on the other, I coasted through high school. These were some of the most wonderful, grounded times of my whole life. I made decent enough grades to get by, although I recall precious little of what I learned in school, save for how to write a check and how to type. From Larry English I learned the words “twat” and “snatch.” From Todd Stephens I found out what a great friend a guy can be. Oh, and I remember learning about tectonic plates and that flushing the toilet wastes water. Overall, life was simple and full. After I graduated from CCHS, though, things weren’t so clear anymore.
5
Small Repairs
Eighteen years old, 1974
(Photograph courtesy of Jim Bruno)
I wasn’t born, I got spat out on a wall,
And nobody knew my name.
The sun hatched me out, cradle and all,
On the corner of First and Insane.
I couldn’t wait to get out of The House. I took summer school for two summers straight in order to graduate from CCHS a year earlier than my friends, to graduate in Rollie’s class. We had a fantasy of living on a remote shore in Australia after he got a degree in marine biology, and attending SIU together was a good start. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, I packed myself up and flew the coop with Rollie to the Thompson Point dorms, which were all of maybe three miles from Norwood Drive.
It was kind of a case of the emperor’s new clothes. I was hell-bent for leather on becoming independent, but I really didn’t have a clue about what to do next. The only reason I attended college at all was spite—I’d been told so many times by my high-school teachers how hard college would be that I had to prove a point, I suppose. I took refuge in required freshman courses like earth science and algebra, and as far as I could tell, they weren’t any different from high-school classes except that they were way bigger and the teachers gave less of a damn.
One of my electives was modern dance. Don’t ask me why, because I’m one of the least graceful people on the planet, and our first assignment was to make up a solo piece about something we did in our everyday lives. I painfully recall trying to “be” a shower; let’s just leave it at that. Truly, I was a buffoon with regard to the whole undertaking of SIU, now that I had a choice in the matter. I had absolutely zero interest in studying anything that I can now, in hindsight, imagine I might have enjoyed. Music theory, no thanks. Philosophy, poetry, religion, art history, even the drama department didn’t feel right, and here’s the reason: My sense of balance was built on pretty thin ice, and without the confines of home, which afforded me something to rebel against, I was lost and extremely insecure. I’d never thought realistically about my vocation—it seemed to me that the world of academia, so revered by my family (my father had his Ph.D. by then, and Geoff was at Harvard on scholarship), was a drag, and I just always figured I’d do something “fun” like acting or painting or singing. Well, I was a mediocre actress and an even worse artist.
However. I could sing. And where does one go to sing in a college town that likes to party? Right down to Illinois Avenue, the “strip,” to any dive that would hire me. My first official paying gig was at a bar called the American Tap, an old house converted into a bar. Colonial decor. For thirty dollars I played four forty-five-minute sets consisting of songs by Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Bonnie Raitt, Judy Collins, CSN&Y, Jackson Browne, Judee Sill, and, of course, the Beatles. I loved it. I felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. I entered my sophomore year at SIU but rarely attended
class. Too embarrassed to drop out formally, I just let it go.
Either I was playing somewhere or I was sitting in with someone else who was, more often than not, getting drunk in the process. I let Rollie go, too, and started dating a local musician named Jimmy Bruno. We lived the nightlife, closing down the bars and heading to whatever party ensued after that. Then we’d end up at Denny’s for a predawn patty melt to soak up all the beer we’d consumed. With the money I was making, I bought a turquoise-and-coral bracelet, a pattern that continues to this day—I love jewelry and clothes and shoes. I may have mentioned that my mother is partially to blame. I share her love of fashion but, alas, not her sense of frugality. I make the money, I spend the money. I have a wardrobe my daughter envies, which is just as well, since it will constitute the bulk of her inheritance.
I started attracting a local following and thought I was hot stuff. We had a strong music community in Carbondale, and as I got better, I performed at other clubs in town. There was Gatsby’s, a basement joint next to a pool hall whose owner sported a bad comb-over. Gatsby’s had a proper stage, free popcorn, and the coldest draft beer in town. Up the street a couple of blocks was Das Fass, a German beer house of sorts, decorated with steins and wooden kegs. Das Fass had an outdoor stage, an indoor stage, and a downstairs room that resembled a bunker, where I played solo for a while, until I got the bug for company and more sound.
I decided to broaden my horizons and add more players to my little scene. Jimmy could play the bass, and he’d made friends with a drummer named Dennis Conroy who had been in a group called the Cryin’ Shames. Dennis also played the tablas, which are hand drums originally from India. Let me just say right here that tablas are a bad idea. They have a distinct ring when played, and the ring can and needs to be tuned for each song key, which requires the pounding, up or down, of small wooden blocks on the side of the drum to adjust the tone. And Dennis was a perfectionist. Who would ever have thought that endless amounts of time could be spent between songs waiting for the drummer to tune? I took a major leap and went electric, hiring Jim’s friend Jack O’Boyle on lead guitar, which ultimately meant putting Dennis on a real drum kit, effectively ending the infernal tuning of the tablas. We were the Shawn Colvin Band. Rock ’n’ roll!
