There was a pause. An all-female percussion ensemble echoed from the stage, through the walls and over the free-beer table towards where I was sitting backstage. I coughed. There was another pause.
“I have a hard time saying no when it’s late at night. It’s like, ‘I’ll just sleep tomorrow, a few hours before the gig.’ But you never do, you know?”
“I do know,” I said. “Then the nerves start to feel like a live wire. You can feel the platelets scrape the vein.”
“Right? But then you have to know the blues to sing the blues.”
“What?” I said. “Come on, that’s cliched.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s true.”
“But I guess writers do it to. How many have called it quits? Just run that razor’s edge for as long as they could and then put their brains in the orange juice.”
“You have to put yourself out there. It’s my story, it adds originality to it,” he said. “I did something terrible, I experienced it and now I get to express it to somebody in maybe a perspective that no one else thought of.”
“And isn’t that the bitch of it though, that many times you have to suffer for what you do. You have to hurt to write a love song. Look at Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’ or half of Bukowski’s work. They went all the way down and once they’ve gone all the way down…”
“That’s the thing, I think a lot of musicians do this, I know I have. It’s almost like you sabotage your own life on purpose. Sometimes you sabotage yourself so you can do that.”
I turn the tape recorder off. It’s an old interview, from last August, from the days before the road. From before this bar counter and this frozen Pennsylvania winter on the river.
I wave to Phil. He peels himself off of his forearms and away from his paperback. He pours me another pitcher and leaves the barroom. Hopefully to get my chicken wings. Breakfast.
The notebook next to me is a bloodshot diary of those August days on the road. A scatterplot of scenes, ideas, scraps of conversation. Interviews. Notes on this interview that I am listening to. Old coasters and napkins with ink-bled scrawlings poke out of it. The back cover is torn in half. I pour myself another and look at the page in front of me trying to decipher the original ideas so I can match them with the conversation on the tape recorder.
I’m trying to piece together a story of a ghost out of what had been flesh through this beer haze. It’s day thirty-six of this and I’m tired.
The chicken wings come into Applejack’s bat cave of a bar. This subterranean lair of dirty lines of ice blue speed done by bikers in the bathroom, of pool cue hookers and weekend warriors down from New York City trying to say they ride. Last week, a couple on a brand new Harley in brand new leather chaps got off their bike in the lot as I smoked a cigarette. The woman riding bitch had her nose taped up with a new nose-job. She didn’t order the wings.
But they’re good wings and looking at the grease stains tattooing the open page of the notebook I am reminded of the barbeque that made them. I had it in August at the blues festival outside of Baltimore. It was good barbeque and I didn’t have much beer in me; I had work to do.
I arranged the interview with Old Man Brown’s lead singer months earlier from Kuwait. It was February and I had endured nearly a month of sandstorms, bootleg date-rum madness and the sad eyes of the Chinese hookers that hung out of the windows behind my apartment. Any good traveler knows that if you stay in one spot for too long, the initial euphoria gives way. It changes to a dark pockmarked madness that feels something like walking down a steel tunnel as its sides are beaten with bone clubs. Hemmed in, hurting, I took solace in the few albums I brought along for exactly that type of time. But one began to get played more than the others, edging them out slowly, making its mark as a part of my daily routine. Old Man Brown’s Return kept buffering the walls of defense against the tunnel. It provided some kind of salve to the blasted wounds of the night.
Return was recorded in 2006 in Nashville at Johnny Neel’s home studio. Done in ten days it was inspired session work. Neel, the former Allman Brother and current leader of the Criminal Element, heard about Old Man Brown through a friend and invited the Baltimore band down to Nashville to record their first album. Neel couldn’t have been a better match for the band, as their Allman Brothers-and-Bill Withers-bastard-child sound dovetails nicely with Johnny Neel’s penchant for soulful and funky roots music. Old Man Brown cut their record then cut their teeth on the road in the DC and Baltimore area with Neel joining them on keys at times. They made waves in the area and their album got decent local airplay. It got damn good reviews. “Return” made its way to me through my brother who had stumbled across Old Man Brown playing at an old hotel in the Fells Point area of Baltimore.
“You have to check this band out,” my brother said. “They’re incredible. Funky, man. Funky. And they can tear the roof off a place when they jam. We’ve been looking for this for a long time.”
He was right. I couldn’t stop listening to Return after I got it. Everything that I love about music was falling out of the notes and songs. The lyrics were well crafted and hit home in all the right places. The arrangements were intelligent yet organic, the solos phenomenal. It moved me, there’s just no other way to say it. And, I could dance to it. They cut a groove fault line deep.
I packed Return with me as I headed to the desert and I dug it out in the depths of something I was having a hard time shaking off in February. The sandstorm winds shook my apartment windows and filled the roach-shit littered floors with a fine pink dust. I fought that immersion with Old Man Brown’s music. Good, soul music from a great band. Aside from freedom I don’t need much more.
You can hear all the influences in Return but you can also hear a band making good on them. They take what’s been given to them, what they’ve absorbed and make it their own. They nod to the past, turn their head and move on. And coming at a time when so much of rock music is bloated and so much of “soul” music is anything but, Old Man Brown seemed to spearhead a desire to raise Southern soul music up from the ashes of Wilson Pickett’s grave and drive it to someplace new. Even if they were the only ones doing it.
And they could. With tightly written songs and a twin guitar and organ-driven front that could kick out the jams with the best of them, Old Man Brown had the goods to drive that spear wherever they chose.
Trapped in the desert my brother would write me updates of what he was seeing Old Man Brown do amongst the night of Baltimore, the same night that once devoured Edgar Allan Poe. His letters burned with the changes nightly playing had brought upon the band; now with a horn section and a new drummer.
“Tighter than ever,” he wrote to me. “They covered Sam Cooke’s ‘I’m a Pilgrim’ and it took me out. The whole place was grooving away. Hard. They have also been burning up a cover of Doyle Bramhall II’s ‘Problem Child’ with their guitarists sending the solos right through you. Damn man, they just can’t get better right now. And that horn section….”
But Kuwait is a long way away from Fells Point and there were no tapes to be traded from across the ocean. No new videos were popping up on the internet, so I was left to imagine the new developing sound every time I put “Return” on.
Then the letters shifted. Adam, Old Man Brown’s lead singer, organ and keys man as well as main songwriter, and I began exchanging emails. We were trying to set up a way to do an interview from that distance. It looked like there was going to be a new album out come that May and they were willing to send me a rough mix of it so I could listen to it, generate some questions and do a correspondence interview. They were recording the album themselves over a greater span of time than the first and using the technology that allows bands to separate themselves from costly studios.
May passed into the heat of June and there was no album. It was put off to save money for a small tour of England. By that point we had worked out a time to interview after their set during the Hot August Blues Festival, an interview that looked like it would dovetail nicely with the album’s pushed back release date of early September.
I’ve gone through another pitcher of beer and feel that August far off. The snow is beginning to fall and the electricity to the jukebox is shot. The wings weren’t enough but I don’t have money to both eat and drink. I’ll just drink. The river will still be there when I’m done.
It’s nearly noon and the sky is gunmetal. I can hear the river. Phil is in the kitchen laughing with the cook. James left an hour ago, his shot glass is still on the counter. It’s sitting in a small puddle of whiskey. The notebook is still next to me, as indecipherable as ever. It is as if the nights between August and now have sent the ideas to corners I can’t find with a compass. Or, it is that the words have found a mortuary only the clean can enter. The tape recorder lies cold and silent next to my pen. I haven’t written anything in months. A short story of mine came completed and final in the contributor’s copies from San Francisco the other day. But seeing my name on the index felt foreign and vague. The story itself felt used, just as a snake’s skin must after the shedding. People keep asking about the novel and I keep saying spring. When the snow melts.
You need to know the blues to sing the blues. But the blues are everywhere. They’re that empty and lonely feeling on New Year’s day when you’re the only one out driving around. They’re in those half-moments between phone calls and arguments; what happens before the tumbler gets filled up. They aren’t the tumbler itself. That’s just the end, the end to a derelict sky. The blues are already there, they’re around us all the time, so knowing the blues is just a matter of getting down into the essence of things, into it actually, of tapping into what we already are. Those that can tap into it can sing it. Those that can’t, can’t. There’s no in between. But there are those that don’t realize they already know the blues and spend their lives chasing a phantom of them, all the way down into the pit. To cop the Black Crowes’ line, “Blues is Blood.” A line, used to name a tour—a moving life—that echoes back to Robert Johnson’s “The blues is a low down achin’ heart-disease.” A disease that originates in the heart and spreads outward in blood. It is blood then and blood is life. The blues sustain us, lift us up, are us and can poison us.
The blood migrates outward from the heart, cycles to the vital organs and migrates back. Arcing across the cells, through the vesicular tunnels, it proves a cyclical course. The cycle forms a circle, a circle man projects outward everywhere: look up at the top of the dome on the inside of a mosque or a synagogue and see inevitably the circle represented there. The circle is a representation of the oneness of the universe, the oneness of god. Dig through books on culture, ritual and myth and you will find a picture of the ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. What drives our hearts then, what flows through us on a level away from thought and more towards emotive feeling, illuminates our world. We create its essence in symbols to show our cognizance of it, we sing about it in order to confront it. The blues are already there.
Echoes of Rexroth’s words, coming up from The Cellar in 1957 with Ferlinghetti waiting in the wings to go on after him:
All over the world/ The same disembodied hand/ Strikes us down
I tilt the beer towards my lips and think about Rexroth’s lines. It’s my hand that brings the booze to me. It’s my hand that strikes the words across the page. It’s easy to blame the unseen hand, it is everywhere. And it is a bit tougher to blame the disembodied one because it could come from anywhere. Coming, even then, from myself. With so much right here, right around us, it seems to be an act of will to fall, instead of the reception of a blow we did not want.
I open the notebook to the late-August pages, now taped with pictures I took of the big-open Maryland skies, of retreating roads bisecting soy-fields. Telephone poles run down the side of the road, moving out of the foreground and passing infinitely through the focal point in the background. A farmhouse. A single tree in the field. Battleship clouds hang overhead. How small are we walking beneath that sky? Down that infinite road? What would a man sing walking down that road toward the horizon, not knowing what’s next, each moment shifting underfoot? The blues?
And what is this moment now? This moment sitting in a cavern bar drinking, broke and scattered, nearly unable to write, deadlines looming and passed. It may be just another moment in a long series of them, shifting underfoot and aching like a heart-disease.
I flip back to the notes on Old Man Brown. Left an email with Adam. Date: 9/30. Need further information, details. There has been no reply. Since September shows have been cancelled, updates stopped. Emails left unanswered. No new album. Like a cipher of smoke that disappears with the wind, the promise of Old Man Brown seems to have begun the slide into memory. “Return” with each playing takes on a different color, a different tone now. It’s shaded differently than it was when I knew that they were at the end of my own road, just down the street from the gutter Poe died in, at the beginning of the night.
But why do we listen to the blues? Why if they are so close do we draw them closer and let the teeth bite? Is it like what the old man in Poe’s “Descent into the Malestrom” says: ‘You must get over these fancies,’ said the guide, ‘for I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned – and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye.’”
We listen because it is told to us, so that we get the best possible view of it, of the hole, the black vacuum like a collapsed vein. By looking up close, what’s right under our noses, we seek the reminder and a little bit of light. Then choice becomes informed and our steps from that moment on should be ones made knowingly. And yet man keeps making the same mistakes, falling into the same cliches. Is the blues singer warning us that he’s “goin’ down” giving us a frame of reference for our own degradation? A reminder of what lies just beneath the skin. A reminder of what soul is.
Turning the tape recorder back on I hear myself ask Adam what soul was.
“It’s that part of music that finds that consistent part of everybody. There is a spiritual side to everybody that can only be fulfilled musically and to me, soul finds that part and satisfies it. It’s about playing with conviction, about trying to celebrate being human.” I pause the tape and Kuwait comes back to me. A country where public demonstrations are banned and thus any type of gathering, live music included. Government permission only. I turn the tape recorder back on and hear the interview, an interview at times drowned out by the festival on the other side of the wall, thousands of people gathered to listen and dance. They, and all the bands that day, tried to reach every single one.
“But it’s a learning process man,” Adam said. “We’ve been doing this for 8 or 9 years now. So I think where we’ve gotten to that point where it’s about how much you’re willing to go that extra mile for your shit, for our shit. Our plan from here, now that we’ve got this new album we’re working on, man it’s going to be killer, a full horn section, not just the sax and trumpet you saw today, but flugelhorn, flute, a lot more. You know, the plan is to finish it, it’s taking awhile, then press like 3000 CDs and take it to college campuses and just give them away for free. Let the word spread from there. Word of mouth because you gotta know the name to look for it on the internet. And we’re not about the scene you know, we’re just about the sound.”
It is a sound that those of us lucky enough, now in retrospect, to catch Old Man Brown work that sweaty magic in the Full Moon Saloon or at the Hot August Blues Festival, anywhere, can reflect back on and smile with. We can look back and hoped they tried to follow Ian McKaye’s words: “If you play it long enough, hard enough and honest enough eventually some one will listen.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Adam said after I quoted his line to him. “It’s harder than that. But I do have faith in the general American public. There’s still enough people out there who know their shit, who listen. And with no one making money anymore record companies will eventually have to start investing in people like they did back in the day: based on talent.”
And listen we do. From across the trans-national, trans-govermental boundaries of the internet, from the pockets on the wings of a stage, from beer can littered festival fields, from the concrete slab dance floors of general admission, we listen and hope that each time the performer gets on stage that they’ll light the night up with that seamless groove and find their own pocket amongst our heroes and the fallen. That after the stage lights rise and the buzzing in the ears begins that they’ll climb back into the van and head out down the road for another gig. Another attempt to tighten the sound, the feel of it, another chance at finding the right words, so that somewhere down the line they’ll capture it on wax for history. And in capturing it for history they beat the devil just a little bit.
Because we have to wonder how much of what is captured is a reaction against a certain time period. How much of Old Man Brown’s organic sound was a reaction against the commodified advertisements and tabloid fodder passing as music for the past twenty years?
“I think….well it’s a tough call because we just do what we do because that’s what makes us feel the best,” Adam said. “I’m glad that it is counterculture and I am glad that it is counter to what is going on in this industry for the most part right now. But I’m glad I am a part of the forces that are trying to put roots music back to people. Music has a history and we’re at a point where there’s the shit you hear on the radio and then there’ the shit that has evolved from the music that has come before. There’s music that doesn’t rely on the roots and then there’s people who know what’s going on, who know the roots. It’s sad in a way, but at least it’s not completely dying out.”
The end of the converstaion. Tape recorder silent: notebook at my side making about the same amount of sense as it did months ago, when I first got the feeling. The Full Moon Saloon is gone, Edgar Allan Poe is gone. The night spreads itself out over the ghosts of both and looks in the window across the bar from me and levels its eyes with mine. The shot glass is as empty as my pockets. The jukebox is still dead. The blues never left. I hope this isn’t an elegy. We need good soul music or music for the soul now more than ever. I need it.
It’s snowing.
It’s cold.
