Authors: Dylan Hicks
“I’ve heard about it,” I said. A copy of Bolling’s rare Beatles album, Wade said, wept gently in one of the boxes that once cornered my apartment, but I looked through those boxes with some thoroughness and never came across it.
“It’s hard to find. Folks treated that record like a joke, but I wanted to
sing
those songs. I’d been singing a few of them in Austin, and one night these two dudes came up to me after the show, a young, squirrely one and an older fat one. The fat one wore a knit necktie that didn’t even come close to his belly button. You think I’m fat?”
“You’re kind of fat.”
“Not compared to this dude. The squirrely one bought me a drink and said, ‘We want you to make a record of Beatle songs.’ He and his partner had a little record company. The next morning I had it all mapped out, side A to side B, who’d take the solos, everything. So they rented me a studio in Nashville for a weekend. My opinion was that we should just do it local, but they said, ‘Naw, we’re doing this for real.’ I hadn’t planned on doing it for pretend.” Bolling smiled. His eyes were small for his big potato face and their whites, to borrow a line from a Porter Wagoner tune, looked like a road map of Georgia. “They wouldn’t let me bring my own guys. The squirrely one said, ‘Don’t take this wrong, hoss, but your guys can’t play their instruments.’ Then the fat one jumps in: ‘If they could play their instruments, they’d be welcome to play on the record.’ They were a couple of a-holes, these dudes. My guys were by no stretch incapable. The drummer couldn’t exactly keep time, but he lost it in one direction, by which I mean he sped up. And people like that.”
“It’s an accelerating culture, they say.”
Bolling pointed at me: “There you go. Most of the guys they hired for the session weren’t first-string guys, but they were good. Good and in one case great, since they brought in the Goat, may he rest in peace, and he could make anything sound better. You know the Goat?”
“Sure.”
“No one played the steel guitar better than the Goat. Except Ralph Mooney and Speedy West. Once in the studio—this was years later—the Goat played me a solo that I’ll never remember.” He paused. “This solo was beyond memory, is what I’m saying.”
“Like the unconscious?” I said.
“I don’t know. Isn’t that beneath memory? This was
beyond
memory. That’s how incredible it was. It was only sixteen bars long, but every note was perfect, every space too. Lester Young would have loved that solo. That’s how I grew up, breathing Lester Young out of my mouth, Jimmie Rodgers out of my nose. You ever hear Lester’s speaking voice?”
“No.”
“It had that lilt, just like you’d expect. Fine and mellow, right? If Lester’d heard the Goat’s solo, he would’ve said, ‘Yeah, y’know, that’s about it.’ The Goat played that solo, and for good measure we did a couple few more takes, and then the Goat went home to his pot roast or what all. And that night the producer insisted on using one of the other takes. I said, ‘Ain’t you listening to that solo?’ He said, ‘It’s a good solo on a bad take.’ I thought we were turning our backs on humanity.”
Bolling emptied his glass, reached into the neck of his armadillo T-shirt to rub his liver-spotted shoulders. We were in what the Dog’s Bite Boozery called its green room. It was just a corner of the basement, but it had a loveseat, a chair, a low coffee table, a few ashtrays, an out-of-place copy of
Details.
Also in the vicinity were boxes of booze, boxes of toilet paper, bowling trophies, curling trophies, trophies that curled. I was stoned.
“You were talking about the chair,” I said.
“I’m leading up to that.” He paused again, this time for quite a while. “They made me put on overalls and stand on a pile of manure with a shovel, so they could call my Beatles record
Dung Beatle.
They brought me out to this farm, these record-company dudes did, along with a photographer, who looked to be the fat one’s cousin. They handed me a red jacket with epaulets and some cheap brassy stuff, made me wear that over the overalls. So I guess they weren’t even overalls!” We both laughed. He waited for the laughter to die and said, “If you look at my face on that record, you can tell I’m hurting. Have you ever seen a girl in a dirty magazine where you can tell she’s hurting?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And sometimes that hurting face is what makes you hard?”
“I’m not sure I’ve exactly—”
“So I was thinking about this chair, on one of those tours with your old man.”
“Wade’s probably not my father. I mean, he might be, but …”
“Well in any case I was thinking about this chair,” Bolling said. His havelock was on the coffee table; he had hair on the sides of his head but only a few long, doglegged strands on top. “John Lennon said the Beatles couldn’t play the chair in the same way as maybe Son House could, ’cause they was from different houses”—Bolling laughed at his own pun. “So they had to build their own chairs. I was thinking about this chair. To me it was an armless wood chair, painted yellow but maybe a bit chipped.”
“Yeah, I can picture it,” I said.
“Now they have chairs that come chipped. I saw one in a catalog. So I put that chipped chair into a room, and also in the room is a little tape deck on a clear plastic table. One of those desktop tape recorders with a microphone built in. And a big
Play
button, and a smaller
Record
button next to
Play.”
“Sure,” I said. I was excited to be in the basement with Bolling. I thought it was a kind of achievement to be talking to him, or listening to him, in what seemed to be so natural a fashion. He’d made some beautiful things; I’ll never forget how good “West Texas Winds” sounded when Wade and my mother Marleen listened to it through the screen on the stoop while I sat on the sofa watching their twilit heads, drums and guitars loping and floating all around me. But also I was getting tired. It was nearly two a.m. Soon the bar’s owner would ask us to leave.
“And if you press both buttons at the same time,” Bolling said, “it records whatever’s happening in the air.”
“Omnidirectionally,” I said.
“So someone comes into the room with a guitar. That’s how I picture it, but it wouldn’t have to be a guitar. My daughter plays the turntable.” Bolling smiled. “She’s a turntabl
ist
. I tease her. I say, ‘You sure did toast that toast in that toaster. Are you a toasterist?’ I do that with all the appliances. So you walk in the room with a guitar and you sit down on the chair. You push
Play-Record
and you play-record your song. You didn’t really write the song, the song wrote you, or it was already kicking around, but you put your name on it. When you finish, you lean over, and maybe the mike catches you knocking the guitar with a belt buckle or a wedding ring or something, and you push
Pause.
And then after a while someone else comes in and plays his version of the same song over the next stretch of tape. And this keeps happening. It’s a ninety-minute tape, forty-five minutes per side, and eventually someone’s song gets cut off in the middle, when the A-side ends. Someone else comes in, sits down on the chair, flips the tape over, and plays his version of the song. Some people, before they play their song, they listen to all the songs up to that point, and then they play their version. But other people, they just push
Play-Record
straight off. Either way, lots of ’em will walk out the room with stars in their eyes saying, ‘I just played a whole new song, or played an old song so brilliantly it may as well be new. I don’t know
where
it came from. Maybe from God. A gift: I have one or am one. But it’s the same shit, of course, the same song. By this time folks are crowding the halls waiting to shove into the room, while inside the room the tape keeps getting flipped over, songs layered on top of songs, and it starts to wear out. Maybe at first it was a tape like the one that swept back that dude’s hair in the Memorex commercial. But now it sounds like one of those no-case, normal-bias tapes that hang in long packs at drugstores, on those hooks they stick in those gaps in the wall—”
“Slatwall.”
“Slatwall. And then it starts to sound like a really old version of one of those shit tapes. The little tape player, its little microphone, the little tape—all o’ that’s been distorting the songs from the first, but now it’s distorting them nearly beyond all recognition. So some people finish their song, they give it a listen and get all excited ’cause they think they’ve distorted the song into a whole new song, while other folks try to play in the pure old way, just how it was supposedly meant to be played. But that comes out distorted beyond all recognition too. And some folks forget to hit record, so their song isn’t quite there, though at the same time it is, you see. I thought about all this while we were driving, and I told Wade about it. We talked a lot on those tours. This band you saw tonight, they don’t talk much. Sheila just looks out the window and smokes; Danny smokes and looks out the window. Sometimes we’ll drive for nine hours and say as many words: ‘Gotta pee,’ ‘Wanna stop?’ ‘You fading?’ ‘Here it is.’ Maybe that’s more words than nine. I don’t know how you count words like
gotta
and
wanna.”
“I think it’s fair to call them—”
“I didn’t really mean for us to discuss that. Someday,” he went on, “the tape’s gonna snap. That’s what I realized. Or it’ll get caught in one of the spools. And no one will want to splice or untangle it.” Bolling looked up through the basement ceiling to the stage. “So I wait in the hall, I go in the room, I sit down, I play-record my song, I leave, and I wait my turn to go back in. What I figured out is that I’m hoping that someday I’ll be the one the tape snaps for. Have you ever been to a chiropractor?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t work all that well, but you always want one crunch to drive all the pain away in a flash. Now part of me knows that if I’m around to see the tape snap, it won’t really be me who snapped it; it’ll just have snapped with me in the room. But some nights, I start to think I
will be
able to snap it. I’m not talking about Uri Geller and what all.”
“No, I think I follow you,” I said.
“I’m saying that I’ll play the song so well, or it’ll play me so well, that I’ll become the tape; I’ll become the tape and destroy myself for the sake of the song.”
“Right, that’s it. I want something like that too.”
For a moment he honored me with stretched, vulnerable eyes. “You say Wade’s working as a deejay these days?” he said.
“As far as I know. In Berlin.”
“No kidding? I miss Germany.”
“Sometimes I think about visiting him,” I said, “but it’s too expensive. I haven’t seen him now in almost eight years. I told you how he visited me back in ’91?”
“You mentioned it,” he said.
“Well, I think he got this friend of mine pregnant back then. I think he meant to, I think he meant to father a child when he was here, so that maybe I could be the kid’s stepdad and have the family Wade could never have with me and my mom.”
Bolling squinted. “Well, it’s hard to say. Most of the time these things aren’t really mapped out like that.”
“I know. But it’s just this feeling I’ve had.”
By then the bar owner was indeed hovering around us. When Bolling rotated his neck in response, the owner nodded and said, “Yep.” We walked upstairs, Bolling holding the railing with one hand, resting the other above his left knee. We walked through the bar, now shiny and disinfected, the mustard vinyl booths sparkling like my first bike’s banana seat.
Bolling’s rhythm section was waiting in the van. He took out a sheet of paper, a list of songs labeled “Second Set.” It was strange that he had a set list, since that night he’d called out the songs on the fly, and when I studied the list later, I couldn’t remember having heard any of the scheduled material in either the first or the second set. “Y’all hungry?” he’d yelled at the start of the show, and then he and his taciturn rhythm section barreled forth, no frills, no solos, few concessions to pacing, no fear of playing five consecutive train-beat songs in G. The set list was a photocopy; some of the longer song titles disappeared into the sheet’s right side. Maybe Bolling just carried a bunch of these set lists around to distribute as souvenirs. He held the list to one of the van’s windows and signed his name under the words “Encore (if demanded).” Two pieces of wrinkly duct tape were attached like teddy-bear ears to the sheet’s top corners-earlier the list must have been stuck to a monitor or something, or the tape was there to lend the souvenir more authenticity. The tape left faint marks on the window after Bolling handed me the list. I hadn’t asked for an autograph and don’t like to have or keep them, though Bolling couldn’t have known that.
B
Y DUMPING OR ABANDONING THINGS I DIDN’T NEED or couldn’t carry unassisted, I was able to cram all my stuff, including my mother’s unwieldy pink-and-blue easy chair, into Maggie Tollefsrud’s van, whose remaining benches I’d removed the night before. The van was Ford’s second-largest model and I’d used all but a few square inches of its cargo space, but I felt proudly Franciscan all the same. It was just after four o’clock on a bright Monday afternoon in ’99, the last day of May. Wanda or Maryanne would meet me at my new basement apartment in the late afternoon, or so we’d agreed about a month earlier. I would have called to confirm the plan, but had lost Wanda’s unlisted number.
I should have tried harder to track it down, because when I got to her place no one was home and the doors and windows were boarded over (naturally I thought of “Boarded Windows” from Bolling’s songster-for-hire days). The boards had been nailed unevenly, I noticed, and there were several nails on the ground, their shanks curled and bent, pointing to a particularly inept carpenter. Taped to the door was a thin sheet of printer paper labeled “Notice”; under this heading were the sort of sentences once used to test typists and typewriters: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country,” and so forth. I pounded on one of the windows, pointlessly, then grabbed a warm bottle of diet soda from the van’s cockpit and started walking to the UCC church I’d mistakenly parked near on that afternoon a month or so earlier. Church secretaries, I’ve found, are as a rule more generous with their phones than shopkeepers.