Vexation Lullaby (38 page)

¹⁹
  Or so I believe. Over the years (yes, years) that he's been writing, certain facts have slipped out. Besides Neil Young, he also likes Nina Simone, Paul Butterfield, and a band called Goldenfloss. He's left-handed. Like me, he eats frequently at Subway restaurants.

²⁰
  After the protagonist of “Provisional Sunday”: “
Captain Bisquick sicced his black dogs / upon the suet necks of the geese.
”

²¹
  Typically, Cross has appeared at the Kleinhans Music Hall, a slightly larger and (I've always felt) colder space.

²²
  Some of the multiuse halls Cross plays are little more than food courts with stadium seating—they'll squeeze him in between a weekend of monster trucks and a home and garden show.

²³
  While Cross's earliest albums addressed political issues, his recent work has been almost obsessively personal. This shift has not gone unnoticed. A segment of his audience (as well as many critics) believe Cross owes them a post-9/11-Patriot-Act album. In '06 Cross went on CNN to promote a nonprofit that had started rebuilding parts of the Lower Ninth after Katrina:

ANDERSON COOPER
: You've been oddly silent about the war on terror. Is there something you want to say about that?

JIMMY CROSS
: Oddly silent?

A.C.
: For a person who got their start as a protest singer.

J.C.
: I got my start as an apple polisher.

A.C.
: You heard it here first, America.

J.C.
: Apple polishing used to be an honest job, but now they won't hire you unless you're a machine.

A.C.
: Let me back up a second . . . you first gained attention as a protest singer.

J.C.
: That's what I'm protesting.

A.C.
: Some people say that, like a politician, you've moved toward the middle, that you're afraid of offending your audience.

J.C.
: Who are these people?

A.C
.: Well, obviously, your critics.

J.C.
: My critics say I don't want to offend people?

A.C.
: What's your response to that?

J.C.
: A bumper sticker.

A.C.
(
nervous laughter
): Do you think we should end the war on terror?

J.C.
: I think we should escalate it.

A.C.
: Really?

J.C.
: Absolutely. Let's get to the end.

A.C.
: And how would you like it to end?

J.C.:
With a marriage.

²⁴
  She may be alluding to Mary Santos, Jimmy's second wife. Santos is an essayist and Eileen Fisher model.

²⁵
  The actual line is “
How come you let him stew at . . .
”

²⁶
  5/17/94 (Denver, Colorado). He never points into the audience. Most of the time, Cross hardly seems aware that he has an audience.

²⁷
  Which is why it hurts to see the CrossTracks community turn so quickly. At the same time, perhaps their anger should be viewed as a yardstick of the project's success. There is so much anger directed toward me because I have done so much! As Gabby says: Haters going to hate. If I were a purely rational person I might allow myself to view their response as a testament to my success, but it still stings.

²⁸
  Full disclosure: I am an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, and when I was twenty-two I couldn't get out of Pittsburgh fast enough! The city has improved mightily in the last forty years.

²⁹
  From “Painted Horses”: “
The mastermind of petty crime retires to his desolate oasis / after his second wife shacked up with his Minister of Finance. / Well the boundary of his realm retreats until he's no longer sovereign of his body. / And the Texas Rangers, on their painted horses, do vow to cross the river. / Yes they vow to wow the river on their lathered ponies.
”

³⁰
  Cross released “A.D.C.” before Allie's first birthday. He stopped playing it around the time Allie had his first run-in with the court. Maybe it seemed hubristic to celebrate Allie's recklessness in a song. Especially when songs are immortal, but people aren't.

³¹
  
That's what he says when he's pushing through a crowd. Is he the “big man” or is he referring to Cross? The ambiguity confuses people, which may be the point.

³²
  I'm thinking specifically of the opening verse: “
Sleeping on the Avenue de Montaigne in my borrowed mourner's suit / you pranced in with your motley crew and returned me what I'd lost.
”

³³
  Cross relies on Milton Fletcher, a mild-mannered Buddhist who, in his wilder days, reputedly rode a stolen pony into a Kroger grocery.

³⁴
  Pittsburgh might be his best show in a decade. And I was in the bathroom listening to Muzak.

³⁵
  He owes them precisely nothing.

³⁶
  With the exception, of course, of books on Cross—which is no small task. Last year there were five monographs, a new anthology of scholarly essays, a revised edition of his complete lyrics, and a two-volume graphic novel inspired by his seminal
Double Ditz
.

³⁷
  I don't think she was making a pun with my name.

³⁸
  I almost never listen to music, since a car stereo isn't so appealing when you're accustomed to a concert hall crammed with living sound.

³⁹
  The ones with the most remarkable voices, almost universally, have terrible personal histories that lend their voices a battered weight. I'm thinking of Etta James, Roy Orbison, Sarah Vaughan, maybe, to a lesser extent, Dolly Parton. Pretty people with pretty voices end up on Broadway.

⁴⁰
  It seemed a mystery at the time: later it came out in
GuitarStar
that he'd had surgery for a bone spur.

⁴¹
  When Cross took the stage at the Springfield Armory on September 16, 1994, Mark Washington sat behind Jeff Hickok's drum set. Deke Purcell replaced Owen Soppe at rhythm guitar and Fat Ronnie Hood—the Gospel Don—didn't return after the first set.

⁴²
  That majestic building now houses the utterly soulless Hard Rock Hotel.

⁴³
  Sutliff has a real voice and Albert can sing. Dom, on the other hand, sounds like he's testifying in a deposition—it's joyless.

⁴⁴
  The nicest thing any reviewer said:
No one will ever allege the younger Cross had help writing these songs
.

⁴⁵
  That no one thought to bring out a chair earlier suggests to me that the whole appearance is unscripted.