Time Done Been Won't Be No More (22 page)

I know a record I would like to play for you, my daughter drove me up to Columbia to go to the Doctor for a check up. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said to take me over to the sound shop and I was looking for this record called “I'm Not There” and they had it on sale. It is the soundtrack to the movie and boy is it good. I figured it would be a bunch of really crappy covers of Dylan songs but not so, it was good versions of the songs with a bunch of relatively famous people and then it had more obscure people that you don't hear all that often. It must have twenty-five songs, plus it has Bob Dylan's version of “I'm Not There” which has heretofore been available only on bootlegs on the
Basement Tapes
.

I don't think I get it. I read a book by Greil Marcus one time, you probably read it, called
Invisible Republic
where he talks about that song and goes on and on about it. So I listened closely to that song to try to hear what Greil Marcus heard and I like the song, it is an ok song but I don't hear all the significance, which is not to say that it's not there.

When we go by Barnes and Nobles I want to pick up a copy of
Best Mystery Stories of 2009
. It might have a Joyce Carol Oates story in it. It seems like forever since I bought any magazines, I subscribe to some magazines but I am hardly ever where they sell magazines, I want a copy of
No Depression
and see what kinds of CD's are with the magazines. My subscription to
Fortean Times
is out but I won't buy one of those, they cost over $11 on the newsstand and they aren't that big anyway.

Mark Smirnoff of
Oxford American
is making noises about me writing something. We had a little falling out over my Dylan piece. (Smirnoff wanted him to cut the piece significantly and he refused and instead sold it to
Paste
who made it the cover article and printed it in full.) He has been calling every now and then. Sonny Brewer told him I was sick and his girlfriend called and then he called from Little Rock. He wants me to do something and I want to do it. I like being in there, they still have me as a continuing writer. Anyhow Sonny is coming up for a reading next month. He will stay over and then carry me up to the reading and then stay over again that night. He is on a never-ending tour.

He told me a story about his dog. I've been down there a lot and had seen the dog so he has written a memoir of the dog and he calls it
Cormac
, which of course is the dog's name. He really thought the world of that dog and the dog comes up missing and he goes to all kinds of efforts to find it; he even hired a private eye, and the private eye discovered that the dog had been kidnapped and to make a long story short the dog eventually turned up in Connecticut and he tracked him down and he had a lawyer to get the dog back and prove that it was his dog. The dog had been neutered but it was still his dog.

He told me this long story and I said “Damn Sonny, you ought to write about your dog.” So he wrote a whole book about it. I've seen it in bookstores. There's one called
A Sound Like Thunder
and I tried it. He has been everything and no telling what he may do; he may be a movie producer or director or anything.

JMW   Is there any news about your movie?

WG     You know
No Country for Old Men
is being released as a movie.
Paste
magazine had a big review and it is a rave. I haven't seen a bad review and everything is saying that the Coen Brothers are at the top of their game. This is the first movie for a long time that I have actually considered going to the theater to see. When it opens in Columbia we might drive up there and watch it. We went and saw Shrek III not too long ago.

My least favorite actor in the world is Adam Sandler. I don't like Jim Carrey much either but I like him better than Adam Sandler. There is something weird about that guy. I kind of like that movie
Dumb and Dumber
. Tommy Franklin, down in Oxford, had all these guys hanging around together and they started going over to each others' house on Sunday night and it would be movie night and all these guys were semi-intellectuals and they were showing arty type independent films and when they came over to Tommy's house he showed
Dumb and Dumber
but they didn't really get into it. I think there are some really funny scenes in that movie.

JMW   I have never seen it.

WG     It was made by these two brothers and they were good when they started out.
Something About Mary
, was their movie, but it (
Dumb and Dumber
) is really crude.

JMW   Can the kids watch it.

WG     Well it has bad language in it. But most of my grandkids they get to watch anything they want to watch except when they are over at my house and I won't let them watch anything with an R rating, but that is just me. I never let my kids watch everything that anybody else got to watch.

JMW   I just saw you are going to be a fellow with the United States Artists foundation this year.

WG     They are making the announcement later this month and they have been calling me wanting me to fly out there and they are having an award ceremony at Paramount Studios. They wanted a picture so I took care of that but I don't want to fly out there.

I need to quit smoking like I quit drinking. That would be really good. I've got patches but I just haven't used them yet. I should have checked into this stuff, I've never had any interest in disease or health for that matter. I have always been healthy and I never went to doctors. I have never been seriously sick; it is a little disquieting to have to face all that. I knew I was feeling really rotten all last year. I probably had high blood pressure for months before this deal happened. (He recently had a heart pacemaker installed.) It was probably an accumulation of things like a lot of stress over the kids' situations and worry about that dog. Then my heart just said, “Fuck it, I'm not putting up with this crap no more”. It was time to go to the house.

JMW   Yep, the long home.

WG     When I heard that phrase used I knew that would be a book title. I heard it at my Uncle's funeral; it's a quote from Ecclesiastes. My editor didn't like the title and we fought over that. That was one of the few fights I won. He wanted to call it
The Pit
.

JMW   Sure glad you won that one.

WG     One time I was with this guy who runs a writers program over at MTSU and he was trying to get a program going for Tennessee writers and I said that I hoped Tennessee would treat its writers like Mississippi or Georgia. Alabama and Mississippi have these awards like Writer of the Year and as far as I could see Tennessee doesn't have anything. (William became the first recipient of the Tennessee Writer of the Year in 2009.)

JMW   I got a grant once from the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities. I set up a program called Prehistory of the Cumberland Valley. They gave me $3,000 in a grant and I got the state archaeologist and the leading archaeologist from the University of Tennessee and gave them a stipend and travel expenses and they agreed to come and then I got the High School gym and advertised in the paper and invited everyone in the local counties to bring their artifacts in and the archaeologist would talk to them about it. It was really popular. I couldn't believe it.

WG     What sort of stuff did you see?

JMW   The best of it was large sandstone statues that are very famous in the Cumberland Valley and some guy in Celina had a really nice one. Of course lots of common arrows. Some guys had some big fakes. They are weird looking flint pieces called slave killers and the archaeologist immediately called them fakes. The old Indians just didn't make shit like that.

WG     There is a guy In Hohenwald who has a lot of that stuff. The old dentist. I was working on his house one time back when I was painting, remodeling and that sort of stuff. Some of the brick were flaking off and he wanted me to rebuild the brick, so I got a bunch of different dyes and then made up different mortars and got them to match the colors on the house and I went around with a ladder building up the bricks all over the house. But he was going to a meeting where everybody brings their stuff and trades it or sells it and he let me look and he had a big box in the bed of the truck and he had really interesting stuff. But I think that guy dug up stuff. It was all years ago. I don't think he does that any more.

He is an interesting fellow and one of my favorite people in Hohenwald. He is in
Provinces
and he knew it too; he recognized himself. I did a thing at the library and he turned up and came up and sat down with me and he said, “Hey Speedo, what ya doing?” That is a line from the book and what the Dentist calls the character in the book. It is kind of neat that he took it well, but he comes off, there is nothing bad about him. He is giving me magazines and giving me books, which he actually did; he gave me a lot of magazines.

There used to be a magazine called
True
and when he had accumulated too many magazines he would stack them up and give them to me and there would be several issues of
True
and I kind of liked that magazine. It usually had articles about UFO's and government conspiracies to keep you from knowing about UFO's and that kind of stuff. That was before the days of men's magazines being what they are now. There was always good stuff to read in there. I remember seeing an issue back in the 70's with this woman on the cover and it looked like a shoddy imitation of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
and all it was was fifty pages of tits and ass. They were trying to survive but it wasn't working and there isn't any
True Magazine
any more. I have a couple of real old issues from the 50's.

JMW   Do you remember a magazine called
Argosy
.

WG     Oh yeah, John Keel used to have articles in
Argosy
and there was a magazine called
Saga
and John Keel had a column in
Saga
for a while. There were good magazines when I was a kid. There was
Saturday Evening Post
and there was
Colliers
. I never liked
Look
because there wasn't that much to read in it and
Life
was the same way. There was a magazine called
The American Magazine
that used to run Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe novellas.

JMW   Did you read
Reader's Digest
when you were a kid?

WG     If I didn't have anything else to read. I hate Reader's Digest Condensed Books. They were completely worthless. And with
Reader's Digest
even when I was young I could divine that what I thought didn't exactly jive with what they thought. It has always been a conservative magazine.

JMW   I read it for the jokes.

WG     Yeah the jokes were good like “Life In These United States” and “Laughter: The Best Medicine.” There was a lot of funny stuff in that magazine.
Fate
magazine used to be a good magazine back in the day. Magazines have to undergo changes to compete, so they don't always work.

JMW   So what do you read now?

WG     I still read
Rolling Stone
but it is more out of habit than anything else. I read
Fortean Times
because I'm always interested in that weird stuff.
The New Yorker
is probably as good a magazine as there is around. I read
Oxford American
; that's a good magazine, not as good as it used to be but it is still good. I used to read
Harper's
and
Atlantic
but I don't read them much any more. I like to read
No Depression
but they are kind of hard to find. It's roots music, really good articles; it's not as flashy as
Paste
, it doesn't try to grab your eye as much. It has more reviews; they don't try to cover the whole field.
Paste
covers movies, video games and books. They call it popular culture.
No Depression
doesn't cover anything but music.

JMW   That phrase “No Depression”, didn't that come out of a song that is on the Harry Smith Anthology?

WG     There is an old Carter family song called “There Will Be No Depression in Heaven.” It was pretty sharp of somebody to pick up on that phrase and name a magazine after it. I thought I was going to write another piece for
Paste
but somehow it didn't work out. I was going to write about Tom House. I interviewed House twice and felt like I knew pretty much all there was to know about Tom House that he was willing to tell anybody. The magazine kept calling, calling me all the time. Then I went and did the Southern Festival of the Book and this guy from
Paste
was there.

He called me the next day when I got back home and he said, “Did you know that guy from
No Depression
magazine was stalking you”. I said, “What do you mean stalking me?” And he said, “That guy was following you around wanting to talk but he was afraid of you.” So I said, “Why the hell was he afraid of me?” and he said, “He told me you had a sinister wine-ravaged face.”

I was sorry not to do the piece on House. He was a nice guy. I kind of like his music. The more I listened to it the more of a downer it was. I thought maybe he should have a little humor every now and then. For a while he made his living just going around to bars and places and saying that he wanted to play and picking up gigs. He was a poet before he was a song writer and he lived in North Carolina and he had a cousin who made it really big in the country music business as a song writer so he came to Nashville and tried to fit in but he was too much of a poet. He had too much integrity. He had a lot more integrity than his cousin and they had a falling out. He said he got drunk one night and told his cousin, “Why do you write this crap?” But in the meantime they were in this guy's basement with a pool table. He lived in a big mansion up in Nashville and he had won an award for some song Kenny Rogers sang.