From the Top (11 page)

Welcome back to
Tent Show Radio,
folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin' …

Y'know, I'm just sittin' here listening to Rickie Lee Jones and considering the idea of what it is to be cool. What it is, and how to have it. How to get it. Cool is ineffable. Cool is about presence as much as action. You can't force it, you can't fake it, you can't chase after it. Because, well, that wouldn't be cool. Maybe you can earn cool, I'm not sure. I know you can own it.

Willie Nelson is cool. Willie Nelson is cool because he can wear braids and running shoes and play golf and still be cool and that is a powerful cool indeed. I bring up Willie a lot when I get in discussions about cool and the difficulty of remaining cool. For instance, for a moment back in the 1980s David Lee Roth was cool. No, seriously—put aside your bald jokes and your perpetual failed reunion tours—but at some point the spandex tights have got to go. Whereas Willie's deal is still cool because he makes it seem as if he's just ramblin' along, and you can ramble when you're sixty or seventy or more whereas the scissor-kicks are harder to come by.

Aretha Franklin is cool. Nina Simone was cool. Julia Child was cool. Joan Jett was and is cool. Sade is cooler than cool. Emergency
room nurses are by and large cool. Cool transcends occupation, although tonight I'm leaning heavily on music.

Ray Charles was cool. There's a shot that Ray Charles was the coolest of the cool. For all time, really. Ray was cool right into the grave. (Although perhaps if you talked with a Raylette or two you'd discover that even the coolest cool is a matter of perspective, or distance. Cool should not be confused with good behavior.) There's a moment in Ray's version of “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” when he sings the words
melancholy jailer
and his delivery of the word
jail-ah
has enough cool in it to last me three years if only I could pull it off. And that's the other intangible element of coolness. Part of being cool is knowing when you're not cool and just letting it ride. You know—it's okay to sing along with Ray when you're alone, but shame on you if you think you're gettin' anywhere close to Ray. There's this moment on a Ray album I own when he's singing “America the Beautiful” and he breaks it down a little, prefaces the chorus by saying, “
And you know when I was in school we used to sing it something like this here … ,
” and every time I hear that part, all I can think is,
Oh, Ray—you went to a different school than I.

Cool doesn't admit confusion. Cool brooks no uncertainty. So, I mean, that's me out. I'm a bundle of self-doubt and contradiction. That doesn't mean I'm unhappy or ungrateful, I'm just not cool.

I do think you can be temporarily cool. I've been cool a couple of times. It usually doesn't last more than ten seconds, usually until I shut my seatbelt in the door or realize I have my T-shirt on backwards. The second I start feeling cool, I check my fly.

My all-time record for being cool is about three minutes. I was backstage at this deal and a very famous lady walked up and stood beside me. We were a good distance from the stage, and it was quiet enough to have a conversation, but I could still hear the sound of thirty-five thousand people out there screaming to see her. She seemed to be enjoying her teensy little pond of solitude, and in the moment I figured the coolest thing I could do
was let her have an interlude of nobody tugging or talking at her. We just stood silently shoulder to shoulder, two people watching the show prep go on around us, right up until the second she was whisked off to resume being capital V, capital F, Very Famous.

Well, of course I'm not gonna tell you who it was.

Wouldn't be cool.

The history of Steve Earle begins back in Texas when, as a teenager, he hit the road in search of a musical life and found it. Under the tutelage of folks like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, the young Steve Earle established himself as a songwriter who blended poetry, story, and grit in a way that made his work instantly recognizable, whether sung by him or stars like Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris. For a while there he was country music's headlining big deal, and then the road forked like the devil's tongue and there were some years spent more in the ditch than on the road, but the man came roaring back, and whatever the state of his situation, the state of his art has never wavered: unapologetic, uncompromising, and managing to contain both the diamond
and
the rough.

Now and then he plays in the big blue tent. This is from one of those nights.

Welcome back to
Tent Show Radio,
folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin' …

Back home on the farm somewhere down in the pole barn there is a box and in that box is a nonfunctioning cassette tape with the name of the album displayed across the j-card in the form of a big green-and-white highway sign. For years I thought the sign said Exit Oh, but then one day I heard the man who made the album say it “Exit Zero,” and I thought well, of course, and
added this incident to the infinite list of times I've been a little slow on the ol' uptake.

I got started on Steve Earle thanks to
Guitar Town,
and even tonight I was eager to hear the staccato poetry of the title song—
I got a two-pack habit and a motel tan
—but it was
Exit 0
that really set my feet to itching in every sense. I remember standing on the deck of a John Deere B, raking hay on my dad's farm with the throttle wide open and
Exit 0
on the Walkman headphones, my heart impatient, the highway on my mind.

In short order I became a hardcore Steve Earle fan and proselyte, able to recite his albums in order and name his touring band and all of his five or six ex-wives, and I once found myself so moved by one of his performances in Birmingham, England, that I became
that
guy and hollered, “All the way from Wisconsin!” and “
WOOO!!!
” while he was tuning. “Man,” said Mister Earle, “yer lost.”

I've never—even at the peak of fandom—been a hero worshipper. I remember my dad getting grumpy with me when, like so many of my age, I discovered the Beatles only after John Lennon got shot. I went around plaintively crooning, “All we are saying …” but even then the farm-booted church-boy part of me had a firm grip on the idea that life requires more heavy lifting than a pop song can provide. And so it was with Steve Earle. I knew I had to do my own work, I knew it wouldn't likely change the world, but it was his songs that built a fire in my belly. Or at least beneath my butt.

• • •

In 1991 Steve Earle recorded a live album called
Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator.
He was on a grungy downhill slide and sang like a man forcing up crushed glass. Right near the beginning of track 10 some audience member hollered something and Steve responded with a simple, declarative “Doin' fine.”

He wasn't, of course. As a matter of fact, right around the time I was listening to that album he was likely in jail, or under a
bridge, or in a pawn shop in East Nashville. But he survived all that and came back.

The albums have stacked up now, the cassettes became CDs, the CDs became digits, and I've been grateful for every bit of it, even the stuff I didn't quite get. But for me it will always come back to
Exit 0,
because what I heard above the pop-pop of that John Deere was music that suggested folks from small towns and unpolished circumstances might try their hand at art as well, and that there was a life somewhere between low-down and uptown, and although I'm never quite where I want to be and certainly never where I ought to be, I am where I am because Steve Earle put up that big green exit sign.

I don't feel the need to scream “
Wooo!
” tonight. I'm just content to kick back and listen to good work by a guy still standing in his own boots. Steve Earle. All these years. And y'know what?

He's doin' fine.

I wrote this monologue for a Big Top show that featured me with my band, the Long Beds.

Sometimes I drag out a guitar and work on a song. Things never get too complicated. Oh, every once in a while I toss in a busted fourth or a jazzy clam just to keep it real, but things never stray far from 4/4. I call it the clodhopper beat.

I grew up singing in church. Again, it was nothing fancy. No choir, no robes, you just sat in your chair and tried to find the notes. Sometimes my brother and I worked out simple harmonies, and once in a blue moon someone might play piano, but it was all basics, no boogie-woogie, lest the devil get your toe tapping off toward the path of wickedness.

Mom had a record player—a phonograph—in the house, and one of those big boxy Reader's Digest music collections, each vinyl disk tucked in its own sleeve, and there was a song on there us kids just loved called “A Boy Named Sue,” sung by Johnny Cash. We learned all the words to that one, and it's a wonder we didn't scratch it right off, we picked the needle up at the end and dropped it back at the beginning so many times.

After Johnny Cash I skippity-doodled around listening to pop music for a while, then one day in Wyoming my boss and I were bombin' along in a four-wheel-drive ranch truck when we hit a hidden irrigation ditch and went airborne. When we landed, everything inside that truck was jarred loose and out from beneath
the seat flew an eight-track tape. I picked it up, looked at it, looked at my boss, then asked, “Who's Waylon Jennings?”

“Son,” he said, pointing at the eight-track player in the dash, “you need to jam that thing in there.” And of course I heard the boogety-boogety and the whoop-whoop-whoop and was hooked forevermore.

I'll stop right there, because if you start listing influences it can sound as if you're claiming some sort of equivalency, and I'm under no such illusion. I'm a typist who is now and then allowed to hang his words on a D chord and perform them aloud. I stand onstage with my poor patient guitar like some musical Walter Mitty, surrounded by true musicians who bear me carefully along while I just stand there and sing from my boots. My band is called the Long Beds but I've often said they should be called the Bowling Bumpers, because the song is a bowling lane, and I am a lumpy bowling ball, and I start rolling along and kinda veer off to one side or reverse verses or maybe get to thinking about whether or not I remembered to jiggle the handle on the toilet before I left home, and gently as you please the band nudges me back into the lane and keeps me rolling along until finally I get to the end of the song and knock down a few pins and then they smile at me like it's the best anyone could hope for.

Early on I'd get real nervous before we played. Then finally one show came along when we walked out before a decent-sized audience and I found myself more eager to play than nervous to play. I strapped on that ol' Larrivée acoustic with the International Harvester decal on it, began boldly strumming a hefty open E, and strode toward the mic. At the last minute I turned back to survey the band. I wanted to make sure everyone was set to go, but I also wanted to make sure they saw in the eyes of their leader that there was nothing to fear. I noticed one of the fellows, a young man who would go on to Grammy-winning fame, jerking his head at me in a “c'mere” sorta way. And so, still strumming—I was feeling professional, after all—I walked back and leaned in and put my ear down where I could hear him, and he said, “Hey—plug in your guitar.”

I had my guitar out the other day and was noodling around on it, playing a very complicated riff constituted around plucking a D chord over and over and not much else, when Jane, my youngest, climbed up on my lap and started singing made-up lyrics along with my stumblebum strumming. The first verse had something about a dog and a princess, so you know there was some potential there. I threw her a G chord then, and she went with it, which seems like a good sign, like she's got a sense of pitch. Life goes better if you have a sense of pitch. You know, so you can sing along, but also a sense of pitch so you can get a read on folks, maybe figure out if you want to sit in with 'em, kinda try and match their groove—or maybe you wanna move along and hum a different tune.

When her sister, Amy, was the same age, we used to do this very same thing—I'd just strum at nothing in particular, and she'd sing. One day we were noodling along when she stopped, turned her face up to mine, and said, “I want to sing and play with you for all my life.” I suppose she wondered why all of a sudden Dad's eyes got all shiny.

There are a lot of reasons why you might wanna learn to play a guitar. I've heard many guys—famous and not famous—say their main reason for learning was so they could get girls. I know Townes Van Zandt said he got his first guitar because he decided it was the shortest route to get girls and Cadillacs just like Elvis got. Of course you don't need a Y chromosome to play six strings.
I'd like it if my girls learned to play guitar sometime, because one thing I've noticed about women who play guitar is that they don't tend to suffer fools. And if they do suffer a fool, why, they put him in a song and run him out of town forever.

I'm afraid my girls won't learn much about playing guitar from their old man. I didn't learn my first guitar chord until I was in my thirties, and when it comes to workin' the ol' fretboard I'm about as clunky as they come—I often say I play guitar with all the nuance of a guy cuttin' brush. But there we were, my younger daughter and I, just easin' along, me going D-A-G, and her going along verse by made-up verse, when—just like her sister all those years before her—she stopped and looked up at me and said, “Daddy, when I sing, my heart feels colorful.”

Of course I went all shiny-eyed again.

Nobody's ever gonna plunk down their cash to hear me play guitar solos. Nobody's ever gonna give me a Cadillac for my finger-picking. But twice in my life now I've played just well enough that my daughters said something so pure-hearted that it makes my eyes shine up even this very moment. To all you fellas out there playin' your guitars so you can get girls, eat my dust—I've got two of 'em now. And someday they will be together recalling their childhood days, and one of them will say, “You remember how every time Dad played guitar he'd get all teary? I know he wasn't all that good, but jeepers …”