Johnny Lawless, The Bass, The Dying Sun
I put my camera away and let the guilt take over. I reached in and helped Johnny draw out his stand-up bass, passing it to him carefully, knowing full well how little he likes help in carrying it. I peeked over the front seat and tried to read the odometer.
“How many miles this year?” I asked.
“Over 90, 000 on this van,” Johnny said. “We had put over 120,000 on the other before we had to put her down.”
He leaned the bass, taller in its deep black case than he is, against the back of the van. He reached into his jeans pocket, drew out a crumpled pack of Marlboros and lit one. The exhaled smoke faded into the sky.
“This whole last album was written in the back of the van,” he said.
A whole album written in a van crisscrossing the country, born on the road, while its authors paid for it with their souls, a bit of madness and time. All while their women waited for them at home, while they waited on the phone call, waited on the break, waited on the sunrise, waited on the paycheck, the gypsy and the night. The smoke.
J.B. came out of the American Legion hall where they were playing, cool on the inside in its lack of light, holding its own on a corner of North Sangamon Avenue. He slapped me on the shoulder and looked at Johnny. Johnny went inside to join Dan in setting up their gear.
“Come in and watch us set up,” J.B. said to me. “We can talk then. And you can see something you can put in your article: we’ve never had a rehearsal.”
I knew from the night before that they didn’t use set lists either. J.B., while standing ten inches above the crowd on stage, just high up enough for him to see the back of the room, looks out over each show and reads it in the moment, gauges it, feels it and adjusts the songs accordingly.
“I have a friend who has gotten so used to a GPS system that he no longer knows how to use a compass, let alone let the stars guide him,” J.B. had said when I asked him about their lack of set lists. “I can’t do that to our audience. Besides, when someone calls out a song they want to hear and I want to give them the best show possible it’s like, ‘Fuckin’ right, let’s do it.’ Look,” he had continued, “when it gets to the point where you can predict our setlists and we’re up there just going through the motions, that’s when I call it quits. We try and find what I call ‘the magic spot’ every night.”
Beneath that Gibson City sun we each lit a cigarette and walked into the half-dark hall.
Johnny Lawless was on the stage, his bass in his hands, the tips of his right index and middle fingers were taped, playing slowly, staring out of the window behind him into the late afternoon light. Dan was across the stage from him, his dobro on his waist and parallel to the floor, sliding a rhythmic pattern to John’s walking lines. They were speaking to each other, their mouths were closed and the long highway was behind them.
J.B. went to speak to old friends at the back of the hall and I took a seat at a table close to the stage, spreading my notebook and camera out in front of me. I put my cigarettes next to my camera and stretched my feet out on the carpet. I let the sounds of John and Dan’s jamming come to me, come at me, through me and closed my eyes thinking of that great big Illinois sky that had taken me by such pleasant shock just hours before.
The sky had wrapped itself around the cab of my truck and stretched itself for endless miles in all directions, flat and green. The horizon was sharp in front of me and driving, I knew that it was a horizon I would cross in ten minutes or ten miles and then would be given another one. All of it blinking in the light of the big clear sun and the air like a pedal steel. Gibson City of silos like ice, Gibson City of the highway in the sun flat and straight in the heat, the mirage melting like mercury pulling away. Gibson City of the Downtown Cafe and Cindy’s sweet smile as she told me about being raised to trust her neighbors, to share phone lines and the simple joy of writing letters on a typewriter. Gibson City whose truckers aren’t pulling large loads but the boss is finding small ones to keep them afloat. Gibson City of mortgages and kids and the weight of the bills of them both, the collapse so near, the pitching-in so essential. That great and clean air of Gibson City that makes one smile in the sun of it all, in the boundaries and the echoes, the half-dreams and barstools and the devil in a corner with the neon painting the sidewalk. Gibson City with its American Legion hall and its stage waiting and ready amongst the quickly growing palpable buzz of the crowd.
“Go get some food. Out on the road you try and eat when you can, you never know when you might not be able to,” J.B. said coming up to me, waking me from my revelry.
I walked towards the back of the hall where a small table was set up with potato chips, plastic dinnerware and a crock pot full of meat. Johnny stood next to the table and introduced me to a tall man who if I hadn’t known better I would have taken to be Gregg Allman.
“This is Dennis,” he said. “He was really responsible for bringing us here.”
I reached out and shook Dennis’ hand. He smiled carefully and waved his left hand towards the table.
“Eat up,” he said, “I just got done taking the meat out of the smoker.”
For two days I had been living off of truckstop food, cigarettes, sunflower seeds and beef jerky. Home-smoked meats at this point were a gift from the magi. And they didn’t disappoint. Dennis’ food fell off of the bone, the meat still dripping juices at the center, all hickory smoke and time. I tried talking to Johnny, to get more of his background, but the questions were useless; we were both face deep in the meat. As I washed it down with a beer I thought about an old Rasta co-worker of mine when I was a lumberjack. He had impressed upon me that the food we put into our bodies is the fuel that feeds the mind and the light. What would the smoked meat do then? What would it help to burn?
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