Johnny caught me looking around the room. I asked him about the road.

“Yeah it wears on you. How many gas stations can you shit in in a month?” he laughed. But it was a knowing laugh, a laugh that knew that each gas station was both something that took a little away from him and gave to him, since the road was where his living was. “Being on the road, living out of a van_ is_ living abroad. After six or eight weeks you don’t even know who you are anymore and you’re never alone so when I get home I get depressed, a post-tour depression that lasts for three or four days. I just need to be by myself and that creates problems with my woman so then I have to deal with that.”

And then there’s the bad booking agents, emptying your bank accounts to support the first tour, the bad deals and no payouts but they’ll cover your bar tab for the night. But how do you cover gas?

I looked into Johnny’s eyes. They were lit hard from the inside, from someplace that I thought I knew, that only he could know and the skin around the eyes looked slack, as if time were fighting the fire and trying to pull them down into sleep.

He rose slowly and wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin. Dan was still on the stage playing to himself softly, smiling inward at the space where he would have to draw his solos from. J.B. was outside standing with his back against the front door’s frame, smoking an American Spirit and looking into the dusk. Though I couldn’t see his face I knew that his eyes carried the same look I had seen for two days running. It was a long stare, one that simultaneously looked across the open space in front of him and deep within. It was a look that thinks while it sees, that reads constantly, an alertness born of the search. The night, the show, wasn’t far off and these were the few moments away from the load-ins and sound checks, the motel keys and the miles.

I stood when Johnny did and walked back to my notebook and camera. He stopped next to me as I sat down and looked at me. “ This is grassroots, Brother,” he said, drilling his index finger on the table. “Forget that political shit. This is starting at the bottom and building, building slowly. This is paying your dues. I love it.”

Paying your dues. But with what?

I stayed in my seat, the anticipation building as the room began to fill. Into the space of the Legion hall came veterans, young adults and couples out on dates. A small group took seats at a table across the hall from me, drawing their chairs to the front of the table and facing them towards the stage. They had a camera bag and gave the immediate impression of being fans settling in for the expectations and the rhythms and the smiles that come with the receiving of both.

J.B. came in from outside and stepped onto the stage, rising above the crowd and taking his place at the center. He bent over slowly and picked up his Martin guitar, checked the tuning and plugged it in. He strummed slowly, feeling his way across the fretboard and the strings. Guitars have miles too. Dan and Johnny were introducing themselves to the crowd, getting names and beginning to remember the faces that they would make it a point to speak to and hang out with between the sets and after the show.

As we had sat backstage in Cleveland, that night’s show over, I had asked Johnny about the hardest part of it all. “It might be entertaining all the time. All the time you have to be on,” he said. He spoke quickly, as he does, emphasizing the words that meant the most, that carried the most weight to the ideas pouring out of him. “It’s who we are. We entertain on stage. Then, when we step out into the crowd to talk to fans or people who have come to see us and not known about us, we entertain again. The breaks are so infrequent you’re just on all the time. All the time,” he said. Dan had been sitting next to me then and nodded carefully at Johnny’s words. He turned to me then added, “He’s right. That’s who we are. It’s our nature and part of the reason why we play music.”

“What’s the other part?”

Dan looked at me and cocked his head.

“I mean, why do we do it? Why do we write, or paint, or act, or play music when it may mean us going dead broke, breaking up marriages or losing girlfriends, when it might make us completely mad?” I asked.

“Because we have to. We absolutely have to. It’s a need. Maybe that need comes from wanting the applause, maybe that need comes from wanting acceptance. But maybe that need also comes from something else, wanting to be yourself,” Dan said.

“Right,” J.B. said. “Think about it this way. Why would I be grinding it out like I am when I could be at home with my girl? That’s fucking crazy, you know? But there’s no other choice.”

It is that lack of a choice that is at once so beautiful and so dangerous. It is the reason they stay out on the road, why they do it. And yet it is the thing that may very well wound them the most. It is an honesty like a bare knuckle in a world where so many bands have fallen before. So many that when J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters climb onto the stage every night they are climbing on the ghosts of the fallen in the attempt to rise above the failures of others and of their own hearts. They climb out of what has been done before and into something so much like their own selves actually, something new, crossing the horizon that only they can see but that we all can hear.

The Gibson City night had descended and the room had filled with the noise of a crowd. The air became as taught as a bridge cable, ready to burst. It was the bursting that began to pull at me, that made my skin feel as a cobra’s must after the shedding. A moment where anything could happen, that fine line between utter failure or glory.

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