Rock and Hard Places (54 page)

“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 late 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 tuned 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.”

I demurred, voicing concerns that my guitar-picking and singing, such as they were, were not anything anyone was going to want to sit through for longer than five minutes, at most.

“No,” Erion agreed. “But you could bring your band.”

I explained that I didn’t have one. Erion, of course, had not got where he was by listening to excuses.

“Then get one,” he said.

I thought about this for a few days. On the one hand, it seemed easy. I had been writing about music and people who make it all my adult life, off and on. So I knew loads of musicians. On the other hand, it seemed an incredibly awkward proposition. I would be asking talented people, possibly with reputations to consider, to line
up behind a part-timing parvenu of sorely limited abilities who had clearly taken leave of his senses. Again, I thought advice was required. I mentioned the opportunity of the Albanian trip to another friend of mine, Mike Edwards. I’d known Mike since the early 90s, when he was the singer in Jesus Jones, and I was a writer for
Melody Maker
: my first visit to the US, and my first
MM
cover story, had involved rendezvousing with Jesus Jones’ tour in Salt Lake City in 1991, when they were hovering about the top of the Billboard charts with “Right Here, Right Now.”

“I’ll do it,” said Mike, instantly.

I wasn’t sure he’d understood. I was asking for tips about recruiting. I wasn’t yet recruiting.

“I’ll do it,” reiterated Mike.

I was both grateful and astonished, but also struck by a number of potential difficulties, which I thought it best to mention up front. Most obviously, there was Mike’s attitude to country music. This fluctuated, judging by our wine-addled debates going back some years, somewhere between hostility and indifference.

“I can learn,” he replied.

Also, he hadn’t heard a note of any of my songs. They might all suck.

“I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

Plus, and I wasn’t sure how to put this, Jesus Jones’ mostly electronic pop records, fine though they were, had hardly been all about the lead guitar. And a country lead player, I explained, really had to be able to cut it, especially if he was also carrying a rhythm player like me.

“I’ll manage,” said Mike.

Then, you know, there was the fact that Mike had, within living memory, headlined major venues, indoors and outside, in front of a group which sold records by the million, in places people had heard of. This would be a sideman’s gig buried down the bill in a band which could scarcely be more obscure in a country which didn’t even get around to joining the 20th century until about 2003.

“It’ll be fun,” declared Mike. “And anyway,” he continued, sealing the deal, “Gen [Matthews, Jesus Jones’ original drummer] can play drums, and I’ve got a mate called Alec who’ll play bass.”

That seemed almost suspiciously easy. I felt able to push my luck. I
called Astrid, and asked if she’d like to come to Albania to play piano in my country band, and maybe sing a bit.

“Okay,” she said.

As the band now apparently existed, I needed a name. At the twilight of a long, liberally lubricated evening with another friend, someone mentioned a throwaway gag in a magazine column we’d both recently read (and the author of which, sadly, I have forgotten). Seeking to summon an image evocative of the chaos, hysteria, confusion and general shrieking nonsense that had apparently recently beset his personal life, the writer had likened the vexatious female he was bemoaning to “a fire in a zoo.” It was cruel and vindictive, certainly, and altogether inexcusable, probably, but it made me laugh at a point at which little else was, and so the last toast hoisted before the waitress started doubting out loud that we had homes to go to was to The Blazing Zoos.

The next few weeks were, probably fortunately, necessarily too busy to ponder the folly of the enterprise. I stayed at Mike’s house in Cirencester for a few days while we recorded some more demos. I emailed these to the band along with some MP3s of suggestions of the sort of thing I hoped we might eventually resemble—mostly my alt. country favourites (Old 97’s, Robbie Fulks, Corb Lund, Todd Snider, Drive-By Truckers, Ryan Adams, Steve Earle), along with a few old-school throwbacks (Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Lynyrd Skynyrd, David Allan Coe, The Flying Burrito Brothers). After several raucous rehearsals in a reeking basement in East London, we sounded exactly nothing like any of the above—but, I thought, every so often, to the extent that I could concentrate on anything beyond not screwing up what I was supposed to be doing, we sounded okay. This was entirely due to everybody else: Gen and Alec were an instantly solid rhythm section, requiring no more, respectively, than suggestion of approximate tempo and the identity of the key we were aiming for; Astrid was, as I knew anyway, an almost indecently talented piano player, and blessed further with what I maintain is one of the half-dozen loveliest female singing voices ever recorded; and Mike was a revelation, every lick and solo sounding as I’d hoped, if not quite dared believe, that it would.