Diamond in the Rough (25 page)

“The Sensitive Ones”—Jackson Browne, Shawn Colvin, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Hornsby—on
The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno, 1999

(Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images)

Me with Jackson and Lyle, 1990

(Photograph courtesy of Lisa Arzt)

Me with Mary Chapin Carpenter and Rosanne Cash at Bob Fest, 1992

(Photograph courtesy of Joel Bernstein)

Me and Neil Finn, London, 1992

(Photograph courtesy of Simon Tassano)

Me and Socks, the White House cat, 1993

(Photograph courtesy of Simon Tassano)

Me with Sheryl Crow and Bob Dylan, Grammys, 1998

(Photograph courtesy of Kevin Mazur, Wireimage/Getty)

Me and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Philly Folk Fest, 1988

(Photograph © by R Corwin, Photo Arts)

The road can be a fickle mistress. It runs from the sublime to the surreal. Take, for example, a gig I once did in Seattle. Or, more specifically, Federal Way, Washington. I ended up in Federal Way because I was the prize in a Gallo Wine sweepstakes. The people from Gallo approached me and asked if I would be willing to be the featured artist in a sweepstakes they would promote for the summer of 2001. At the end of the summer, the winner would be chosen, I would travel to the winner’s home for a private concert, and for this I would be paid. A lot.
Well, hell, nobody loses,
I thought. One of my ardent fans would be rewarded with my presence, and I would get some cash, and all for simply being the poster child for Gallo Wine for a summer. And so I said, “Of course.”

It’s helpful to know a couple of things up front here: One, ask yourself who enters a sweepstakes? Do you? I don’t. Two, I don’t always travel well. The panic is most likely to set in on the road when I’m alone and disconnected, and I never know when this is more or less likely to occur—it’s a crapshoot. For this reason I always have a little pill with me called Ativan. It’s the same tranquilizer that Steuart Smith used in his planephobia cocktail. Now, let’s assume it doesn’t help matters if I go to Seattle and immediately have a gigantic mocha latte, just because I’m in Seattle, home of Starbucks. So here I am, alone in Seattle and tanked up on caffeine, which for me is basically an anxiety attack in a cup.

I realize I’m about to go to a stranger’s home to perform. Up until that point, I’d made an assumption that whoever won the sweepstakes would want the prize. But when the Gallo people picked me up to take me to Federal Way, they looked sheepish and I sensed trouble. I got in the backseat of the car, shut the door, and began to think twice.

Who were the winners? I asked. Nice people. Did they know me? Sort of. Was it a nice house? Well, there were dogs. Oh, Lord. What had I done? My fantasy was that the winners would be overwhelmed at the prospect of having me in their home. Their home, of course, would be perched on a cliff somewhere, and the throng that gathered would sip pinot and query me on the meaning of my work. Now I was forced to consider otherwise.

I got that horrible, trapped feeling, like when your parents took you to see your weird cousins and you had no choice but to live in their funny-smelling house with the wrong food and the wrong pets and having to hear that prayer every night about dying before you wake. Well, I seized up. I was in a vehicle driven by strangers bound for the great unknown, and I suddenly had terrible misgivings and no time to consider them and no choice to change things even if I wanted to. My heart raced, my hands began to sweat, my head spun, and I couldn’t breathe. “Pull over,” I said.

I got out of the car at a strip mall and called a friend to shore me up. “I’m having an anxiety attack, and my head is leaving my body.” The thing about panic attacks is that in that moment you truly feel that what’s happening is a matter of life and death, that you may have a heart attack or go insane or disintegrate or do all three at the same time. My friend told me to take an Ativan. “But I have to play,” I said. “If your head is leaving your body, I suggest you take a pill.” She had a point. Understand, though, that I had not nipped this episode in the bud when I felt it coming on and was now in a full-fledged, paralyzing, peaking panic attack. That one pitiful little tiny white pill seemed rather impotent, given the circumstances. So I took two.

The folks in Federal Way were down-to-earth, lovely people with several Barcaloungers, and they had no idea who I was. The house was filled with doilies and ceramic frogs and Hummel figurines. I felt no pain when I finally got there to grace them with my presence. I said, “It’s your party, what do you want to hear?” A nice man mentioned that some Merle Haggard would be nice. So I played some Merle, exceedingly grateful to Buddy Miller at that moment. Next came a request for “Johnny” Denver. I stipulated that this was to be a sing-along, and when the chorus for “Take Me Home, Country Roads” came around, the Barcaloungers flew back in ecstasy and everyone joined in. And so it went. I don’t remember the drive back to Seattle, I don’t remember getting to the hotel, I don’t even remember going home the next day. The lesson learned here is this: Some of us don’t enter sweepstakes because we take them for a scam. I’m here to tell you, it’s not true.

Not long after Callie was born, I was invited to be part of a show in Orlando, Florida, at Disney World—thanks to the success of “Sunny Came Home”—for a Christmas special they were taping. One of the other acts was ’N Sync. I remember being at a press conference with Justin Timberlake—he must have been about twelve—and I’m pretty sure Joey Fatone was making eyes at me. We all did a finale together of a bouncy Donny Hathaway song called “This Christmas.” I wasn’t playing guitar—we had a great band, and acoustic guitar wasn’t necessary. I think I may have made mention earlier of the fact that I’m not particularly coordinated. This is another reason I play the guitar. During a ballad I can manage having nothing to do with my hands if I have to, but if the song is cooking along, I can’t resist dancing. And the finale song was a great, up-tempo, R&B-flavored tune. So here I was with this teenage-boy band, and they were kicking it. I couldn’t help it, I jumped up and down a couple of times—and from having just had a baby my pelvic floor got stretched out or something. I peed in my panty hose when I jumped during that song, which gave me the perspective in a very brutal way that I was a lot older than the boys in ’N Sync. I looked over at Joey, but he was done with me, off in another world. Now I keep my guitar onstage in my arms and my moves where they belong—at home.

Then there was the one and only time I played in Columbia, Missouri. It was summer, and the gig was outdoors—that’s all I knew. I don’t need much information about where or when I’m playing, as long as somebody can point me in the right direction at the right time. As I was being driven to the site, though, I noticed something rather strange: There was a large marquee bordering the grounds that read
FAIR
. Usually in the summer I play festivals or city concerts in the park. I barely had a chance to consider what “fair” might mean when I read the rest of the marquee. Next, in gigantic letters, was:

TRACTOR PULL
and underneath
that—
Shawn Colvin