Horizons Are Meant To Be Crossed
This story is true. It is as true and hard as the sky that greets you when you drop off of I-80 onto I-57 and then into the deep and gracious skies of central Illinois. Skies that run into a clean and sharp green horizon made from the uniform growth of cornfields. Skies that shelter every conceivable dream and nightmare of man, every conceivable yearning of the flesh and the senses, every possible combination of living and dying. All the gasps for air, all the nights that descend like hawks upon the soul, all the days that unfold themselves amongst the metallic scratch of diesel brakes with short loads in the recession. All the days and nights of the heartland like so many others and like none but themselves. Days and nights that I had set out into the center of to watch three men lose themselves on the stage night after night in the desperate and successful attempt at making magic, at finding that special voodoo of the soul that makes us each unique. A voodoo that screams across the void to be heard and that when heard gives us all a little piece of ourselves back.
Gibson City, Illinois was the second load-in in as many days and I knew that Johnny Lawless’ arm was nearly shot, his rotator cuff torn. J.B. Beverley’s throat was sore, perhaps infected, and his picking hand had seized up on him as we got to the hotel the night before. Dan Mazer was fine physically, but they, J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters, had been on the road a long time and when you break through that many horizons in a year if your body doesn’t begin to fail you, something in your soul breaks just a little.
The late afternoon sun in Gibson City came at us clear and sharp and warm as J.B. pulled his guitar cases out of the back of the van. I had a moment of guilt, thinking that I should help them unload, but I was busy shooting photographs, trying to capture that half-lonesome and hollow echo that spreads itself outward from the empty concert hall towards the performers as it waits to be filled. The night before in Cleveland, J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters had played on a small stage beneath posters of old bands, old singers, dead singers, history drifting toward itself in a yellow mist, that fine yellow mist of old newspapers and the streets. They had run the sound down to a special point then and had left me sitting at the bar taking notes and photographs, thinking that what they were doing was less of a paying homage to those old giants than an outright stealing of the torch and brandishing it as their own. But here, after the clear and special Midwestern light had died off and night had taken its place, would they be able to find that spot again; that “magic spot,” as J.B. Beverley likes to call it? I knew that they had the ability to, that they could, but would they? Would they shake off the pain, the frustration and the miles and find it? Would they risk it all one more time for the crowd?
J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters had been together as a unit for ten years, this incarnation of it six. Dan Mazer, the banjo, mandolin and dobro player had been with J.B. for eight years, Johnny Lawless joining the two of them six years ago. And from what J.B. had told me backstage in Cleveland, barring “them leaving me flat on my ass, this is the group that is going to stay.”
“That’s right,” Dan had said. “If you see nothing else in these next few days I hope that you see that we have a deep and common respect for each other.”
“These are guys I’d lie to a judge for,” J.B. said. “These are guys that have been through the best of times with me to busking on street corners.”
“But look,” Johnny Lawless interrupted, “if you are going to do something, you go at it. Go at it.”
Go at it. Johnny Lawless had joined the band after running into J.B. one night at a Joe Buck concert in Baltimore. He knew that J.B. needed someone to play doghouse bass. He didn’t give J.B. another option.
“I told him that I was his new bass player and that I had a van,” he told me. Later that first night, somewhere near the dawn, he had turned to J.B. and said, “We’re going on the road and the angels are coming too.”
Dan had met J.B. at a songwriter’s showcase in Virginia and heard something in his songs that had kept him as the lead player for all this time now.
I had come to see how they made it work. To see how Johnny, a former Marine sniper and Baltimore police officer, J.B., an old train riding hobo and GG Allin’s replacement in the Murder Junkies, combined with Dan, a music theory major at George Washington University with nearly forty years experience on the banjo, to make a single sound, that special and self-reliant Wayward Drifters sound, night after night after night on the road. The road, which may very well have been the mother of that sound as well as its threat, its inspiration and its calling.
Their latest album, Watch America Roll By, had been in constant rotation with me after I returned back to the United States following a year in the Middle East, a year that saw me log nearly 75,000 miles of my own in the air. Their first album, Dark Bar and a Jukebox, had gotten me through some hard times; losing a girl and a job on the same day with nothing in sight. And it had gotten me through some wild and free nights where age means nothing and time is but a memory. For me, the difference between the two albums seemed to have been the road. Watch America Roll By is filled with the sounds and themes of the road, though none less poetic and sharp as their first album is. In a market inundated with songs written in corporate boardrooms by staff songwriters their albums ring out as a clear call to anyone left chasing the muse, anyone left with the guts to dream.
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?
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.
Johnny Lawless, J.B. Beverley, Dan Mazer. Three As One.
Johnny Lawless walked to the far side of the room and stepped up onto the half-darkened stage. He bent quickly to pick up his bass and pulled it towards him, settling it between his legs, centering it towards his body. Dan walked onto the stage next. He picked up his banjo and put his fingerpicks on with a deliberate care. No drums. Just a doghouse bass, banjo and acoustic guitar. Just the razor moment, the night and the sound. Everything.
The red and blue spots on the stage went on and the band picked their instruments to check the sound in the monitors. J.B. gave a thumbs up to the soundman in the back of the room and stepped up towards the microphone.
“Good evening, Gibson City. If you like honky-tonk, rockabilly, rock and roll, bluegrass and everything that the radio doesn’t play, then you’re in for a hell of a time tonight. I’m J.B. Beverley and we are The Wayward Drifters,” he said. He stepped back from the microphone, turned to Dan and said something, his words lost to me on the side of the stage in the applause. He stamped his cowboy boot down hard on the wood stage, driving the first point of the rhythm. His right hand slashed down across the six strings of his guitar, Dan jumped right into the fray in a machine gun of banjo, Johnny threw a concussion wave of bass notes in triplet across the room and they were off.
Visible as a tear on a new widow’s cheek the long drives, the motels, the bad food, the cigarettes and the whiskey dissolved into the sound coming from the stage. There was no former Marine, no former Murder Junkie, no former music theory major up there. Three individuals had given their selves over to the search and met as one. The search that they were willing is the search that we all face, though only some hear. It is a search that once all the influences, environments, cities and lonely moments that fall upon the mind as it drifts off to sleep have faded leaves only the exposed core of the self. In that exposure, that illuminated and isolated core the individual stands, their selves raw and naked. It is a self that is at once unique and at the same time a part of a larger sweeping dynamic that fuels us all. The musician, the artist in any right, leaves the core exposed to accept what is around him, to become antennae for that dynamic, a lightning rod that funnels the voodoo back down into the earth, into the ears and hearts of those that choose to listen. It is acceptance then by all. Acceptance by the artist of his place and of the releasing of the egos and an acceptance by the audience of the sound that is given to them. In that accepting all may be transformed, a transformation that separates us from other animals because other animals can’t sing the blues.
I watched Dan’s fingers crawl across his banjo like spiders on the run and thought of what he had told me earlier about The Wayward Drifters’ sound. “When I was playing bluegrass only, I was really worried about technical virtuosity, since so much of bluegrass is about that. Being in this band I don’t worry about that; not in the same way at least. What I worry about is making it simple and perfect. And it can be simple and perfect.”
“It definitely can be,” J.B. had added. “It just has to be honest and we have to play it well enough and people will listen. It has to be honest. Even if I change the lyrics of a song we’re covering a little, I have to be true to what that song is saying and be true to myself when singing it. That way, in the end, it all stays part of The Wayward Drifters sound.”
As a band they were all seasoned musicians, capable of lengthy expressions of the mind, but they chose to make songs that were short, tight as anything ever created and ‘simple’ enough to burn down dance floors everywhere. It is one thing to play music; it is another to play music that is tight and funky. How much easier it would be to unleash a torrent of notes across a room, to show off skill and speed and use the rhythm section as a backdrop for that only, than it is to reel in the virtuosity and attempt to clarify and simplify the ideas until they show brightly and clearly and for all. It is one thing to stand apart from a band and solo, it is another to solo within a band as a part of it, part of a larger sound, just trying to make it simple and perfect.
Deep into their first set J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters had fastened themselves to that magic spot and were grooving a set that had the backbones in the room wiggling like jellyfish sex. They cut into a cover of Chuck Berry’s ’30 Days’ that had the bottom end of the song opening wide up like a chest wound. They dug into the chord changes deeply, a pocket more like a crater and they took it low and slow. Johnny Lawless’ slapping hand was playing the bass like it was a conga, the deep notes rippling across the room in waves, punctuated by a staccato flurry of upper register notes and slaps that made him sound like a one-man drum line and bass factory. J.B.‘s right hand kept a hard rhythm right along with him, his voice crying Berry’s lament for his woman across the room, each word falling in all of the right places. His voice carried all of the weight of his time, of his losses and the tattered edges of his heart. Dan’s banjo filled out the groove, going from stank scratching like a DJ filling in the breaks to runs of notes that had people screaming at him from the back of the room. As Dan took his solos, J.B. stepped back towards the solid center of their space, the pocket itself, and lowered his head, concentrating solely on the moment. That drawing back drew their sound together and anchored it from some place that only the three of them could know.
From the center of the crowd that had gathered in the middle of the room to listen a legless vet in an electric wheelchair drove himself out onto the dance floor in front of the band. He spun the chair once, his 82nd Airborne sticker showing proudly across the chair’s back. He stopped and faced the band, smiled and then used his chair to dance him around the floor. There were people dancing already and there were people that had latched onto the band’s sound, but this vet cut the floor to pieces around them. His eyes closed, his chair circling and weaving, turning sharply, and coming back he danced harder than them all, leaving me on the side of the stage awash in sound and sight and feeling like the walls were made of smoke.
Here they all were, brokedown and busted in the middle of what they love. But what they love creates the wounds and the only way to patch them up is to play more, to get on stage and let go of yourself to something else, to break more, to grow more and expose the core. The process was clear and it was only here, out on the road, that it could happen. In order to find that core they had to cross the horizon, but when the horizon is crossed there is still much that is left behind. That is the risk they face every night and every mile, but there in the middle of ’30 Days’ they asked the crowd and the legless vet a simple question: If you’re not willing to risk it all, why try?
The song ended at the same moment the crowd burst into applause. J.B. raised his right hand in thanks and unslung his guitar, laying it gently on top of the case behind him. Dan unhooked himself from his banjo and fingerpicks, Johnny put his bass to rest. The set was over and they needed a break. They came off of the side of the stage towards me.
Johnny Lawless and J.B. Beverley. Running the Voodoo Down
J.B. got to me first and shook my extended hand hard. We looked at each other. His face, the muscles especially, were radiating from the inside. He was still open in that spot where the sound came from, where the three of them connected. That spot where he became himself. He told me that he had to go talk to some people and I nodded, knowing that this was his time to feel out the crowd and begin to figure out where to guide the night next.
Dan and Johnny came towards me right behind J.B., both of them grinning and sweating. We laughed together. I told Johnny that the groove that the band had found was so heavy people were getting impregnated in the back. Even in the joke, the inward smile, the inward connection never faded from the two of them.
They are among us in that moment, that spot, but also in a place that only they can know. It is a place that means communicating on a plane with each other as one, a place a bit more in tune to the varied rhythms of the world. The next night, in Galesburg, again near the dawn, Dennis, before he went to sleep, would say to the band that he felt that he had no rhythm in his own playing.
“That’s bullshit,” Dan said, angry for the first time in days. “You’ve got a heartbeat, you’ve got rhythm.”
And maybe that was it. They had let the egos and the layers of self peel away on stage to reveal that heartbeat. A heartbeat rhythm riding right through the stage lights and the isolation.
J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters took their set break amongst the Gibson City crowd. They took the thanks and the handshakes and the kind words in stride, silently memorizing the faces and names for the next time that they came into town. They had a little more of Dennis’ smoked meats, the fuel for the night. I sat on the side of the stage against the wall drinking a beer slowly, still feeling that special contentment that comes when you know you’ve heard something beyond normal, when you know that you are swimming in the magic.
They played another two sets in that Gibson City night, leaving the stage after three and a half hours of playing with just two ten minute breaks. During the second set Johnny Lawless’ father joined them on stage for the first time in Johnny’s life. Johnnie Ray Carroll, Sr. is a fantastic singer and guitarist in his own right, and when he stood on stage next to his son there was the sense in the room that the old had accepted the new. His father sang ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ with all the dark corners and murder that Cash intended, the band never releasing their hold on the tight sound that they had found. He left the stage after the song and the band kept it right up, playing through covers of Social Distortion, the Rolling Stones, Earl Scruggs, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Red Bow, Hank Williams and Jimmy Martin in those three and a half hours. They also loaded the sets with their own songs and never once sounded anything but like themselves.
Three men on a stage over a thousand miles away from home and their women, losing themselves for a war they chose to fight, a war that they know they can win, no matter how much they have to give up in the process. A war that I saw stretched out in the veins of J.B.‘s neck as he craned his head away from the microphone while belting out a note. A war that I saw in all of their faces in that shadowy light of the stage. I could see the bad women, the broken glass, the empty paychecks and the street corners come out of their skin, each note redemption, each mile salvation.
The show ended and J.B. walked right off of the front of the stage towards Dennis, who had come from the back of the room to greet him. He stepped off quickly and into an audible silence, that split second pause of a crowd knowing they’ve seen something special before they erupt into cheers and whistles. His face was losing the inner highlights the show had brought to him. He no longer had to read the crowd and make spilt second decisions on the songs. He no longer had to hold their attention from the stage. The night was fading from his skin, his shoulders carried the weight of it all as they curved inwards, releasing.
“I gave it all I got,” J.B. said to Dennis as the room exploded. Dan and Johnny were drinking water on the stage, putting their instruments in their cases. The cases closed with a metallic click and they stepped off of the stage into handshakes and smiles.
The last note had died off and the applause quieted down. I looked towards the empty stage and saw the lights fade. The echo and the sustain were gone then, nothing on the stage but a half-finished water bottle on an empty plastic bag. The jukebox in the corner came on to fill the empty space, to sustain the light.
The next morning, before heading to Galesburg, Dan and I were on the roof of Johnny Bridgewater’s house. Bridgewater is a singer and songwriter who had just finished recording an album at J.B.‘s Rebel Roots Studio not long before we hit Gibson City. The sun was warm and clear and clean. There were few people out walking the streets that early in the morning. We were talking about the blues and how they had spread across the world. As the conversation turned towards Little Richard, a freight train’s whistle cut the air and drowned out what Dan was saying. I sat on the lip of a concrete wall separating Bridgewater’s roof from his neighbor’s, trying to make out what Dan was saying, but the whistle was high, sharp and close. I turned and looked at the freight over my shoulder. The train kept moving through the day, and once the engine was far enough down the track to quiet the whistle’s blowing, I turned to Dan again.
“Is it a high lonesome sound?” I asked.
Dan turned and looked at the freight. He closed his eyes in the sun and hummed along with the train’s whistle, trying to match the pitch of the note.
“It is,” he said. “It is.”
“Is it lonesome because the person hearing it has been on the train, on the road before, and now knows that he can’t go, or is it lonesome because he knows that he can go and things will be left behind?”
Dan thought.
“For me it’s memories,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the memories that make it lonesome. It might be that way for him. That he wants what he can’t have or wants what used to be.”
Perhaps then this is the road, the musician’s, the artist’s life. It stretches out before us as the freight trains do, blowing a high lonesome sound through the day. The sound calls to us and draws our memories out, our memories of what we wanted, what was done to us, what was said just before the door closed. It calls out to us and reminds us that there is a horizon in front of us and that the horizon can be crossed. In the crossing we might never be the same, we might never look back and have to leave things behind, but to stay is to sit and watch the train roll on by, roll on and blowing its whistle through the potential and the time. Staying means that we’ll never know what’s over that horizon or whether the whistle blows for us or our memories alone. Staying means that they never walk up onto the stage and leave their selves behind for a night to try and let the song play through them. Staying means that the three of them never grow into one in that magic spot, that sweet and dark voodoo of the soul.
Their story might not be a new one, but it is one that J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters have to keep telling night after night. It is a story with the breath of a rattlesnake and the skin of a dragon, forged deep within and released for salvation. It is a story that will continue to echo through the ripples of time, from across stages, bandstands and jukeboxes. And it is a story we’ll hear only if we’re careful enough to love.
