I was at a loud bar in Buenos Aires, Argentina watching a three-piece klezmer band along with a bunch of new friends when one of them, Freddy, turned to me after some thought and said:
“Imagination is experience.”
I think that’s what he said. It was really loud in there. Maybe he said, “Experience is imagination,” or maybe he said something completely different. English wasn’t his first language. When he said the words to me, though, they made perfect sense. I don’t know what he literally meant, but I imagine he was saying that you can create your own experiences through your imagination. Or that thinking about things is the same as living them. Or that the more experiences you have, the better your ability to dream becomes.
But I’m trying not to think about Buenos Aires, because what I intend to talk about here is the Southeast of the United States. It’s just that I’m still here in Buenos Aires, and the weather is hot, we flew here standby and all the flights home are full, so we are here indefinitely, and the ice cream is tasty, and you can get a delicious steak for less than eight dollars. This city is on my mind, in other words. But perhaps it’s a prism through which we can more clearly see the past. (Do you see things more clearly through a prism? Did that make any sense? Have you noticed when you try to learn a foreign language that there’s a period of time when you get worse at your own language?)
I’m trying to remember a time, just a month ago, when I was in North Carolina and touring around in a little van with my bassist William and my good friend Gill. The tour was for just a week. It began with me and William flying to Asheville and it ended with us flying back to Seattle for a gig that had already been cancelled. Seattle was covered in snow by that point, and we had a difficult cab ride from the airport with a driver from Africa who didn’t speak much English and a co-passenger from Eastern Europe who also didn’t speak much English. After an argument about why we couldn’t go where I wanted to go and exactly how much I owed him for getting me to nowhere in particular, the cab driver ultimately left us at a taqueria, where nobody spoke much English either.
Anyway, that was the end. The beginning was in Asheville. Gill lives there and so we stayed at his house for a few days. He has a large piece of wooden furniture that doubles as a 78 player, and he has crates and crates on the floor full of heavy lacquered discs from bands like Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. You put a record on the turntable and close the cabinet doors and it sounds like the Skillet Lickers are right inside there, a little hobo band playing for you on their rusty instruments.
On Gill’s kitchen table there was a little cardboard tube with a long metal spring attached which rattled like a mini-thunderstorm when you picked it up. I read the outside of the box that the toy came in and found it to contain a fair amount of hyperbole:
It said:
“THUNDER TUBE!
The THUNDER TUBE needs no batteries. It’s all in the WRIST and the PALM OF YOUR HAND!
Is it a STORM approaching? ALIENS communicating?
Swamp gas?
The Big Bang?
A LION?
The ghost of Uncle Joe?”
Which was going a bit far. Would anybody really hear the sound from this little tube and think they were hearing the Big Bang?
We played a show in Atlanta and drove back that same night to Asheville. On the three hour-ride Gill drove, as he always did, and this particular time told me and William a good part of his life story, including the part when he was fifteen and sold acid in Lake Charles, Louisiana and his friends got arrested and went to jail for twenty years for the same crime he was committing, but Gill himself was never caught and therefore didn’t spend the bulk of his life in jail and was instead free to play music.
From Asheville again we drove to Tennessee and had lunch at a Cracker Barrel in Lebanon. The Cracker Barrel is a place where at least half of what you are there for is to listen to the waitress’s accent as she asks you if you want vinegar for your mustard greens. You’re so intoxicated with how she forms her vowels that you at first decline the offer of vinegar, then you take a bite of the greens and almost gag and call her back to ask if you could still get that vinegar, please? And then you bathe the greens in vinegar and still the taste of it makes you gag and you just put your napkin over the bowl so that the waitress doesn’t see that you didn’t know what you were getting into when you ordered mustard greens.
We played in Nashville a couple nights later and there was a distinct moment, when Gill had several guest musicians on stage– some of whom were in bands that had sold out multiple nights at the Ryman Auditorium, and some of whom weren’t– and they were all diligently and ego-lessly trying to play along to Gill’s songs because he had called them up onstage, even though they didn’t know the chords and two of them both played mandolin and there’s nothing good that can come from two mandolins on stage– there was a point in the middle of all that when I fell in love with Nashville, a city I never thought I’d fall in love with, like finally falling in love with the husband that your rich father forced you to marry. It was a nice surprise. The town had always struck me as an industry town full of strivers, but I realized that night that it was like Portland in some ways, just a town with an unusually large amount of musicians who just want to play music somehow, somewhere, even on a Monday night to no one.
From Nashville we drove down through Alabama, ate at another Cracker Barrel, this time with an Asian waitress, then at two Waffle Houses late at night (“At two in the morning, anything tastes good” as Gill’s girlfriend Leslie noted.) We drove through Mississippi, where we started to run out of gas in between cities and literally coasted the last few feet to the only gas station for miles. Like you see in the movies, except the van actually ran out of gas as we got to the pump. “That could’ve been really really bad.”
It was warm out, in the 70’s at least, and I was getting phone calls from back in Portland from my band that our show in Seattle the next night would have to be cancelled. If the venue wasn’t going to do it, then as a band at least we’d have to drop out, as it was getting dangerous and perhaps impossible for everyone to drive up the I-5. It was hard to believe that there could be snowstorms anywhere in our immediate future as we drove into New Orleans on a beautiful warm night, but I took their word for it and cancelled the show.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that there are many similarities between Buenos Aires and most of the towns in the Southeast U.S., but New Orleans is a town that actually does have a lot in common with Buenos Aires. I lived in New Orleans off and on for a couple years and always loved it, but thought of it as a rare jewel in the world, just some strange anomaly of a place that had somehow cultivated a slow pace, a unique collection of local customs, and a lot of broken stuff. Traveling more through the Southeast, I realize now that some of those traits are in other towns as well. Those towns might be more mainstream, in that they have allowed Chili’s and TGI Friday’s to dictate the cuisine landscape, but you can still sit in a little bar in Huntsville, Alabama and feel completely like you’re in your grandfather’s basement, that everything is okay, and that you’re not being judged by the clothes you wear (unless you happen to be wearing something GAY of course. Don’t do that.) And now being in Buenos Aires has shown me that there are many other places in the world where things move slower, where people are more receptive than afraid, where lots of stuff just looks cool because it’s old and dirty and broken. Sure, this city has the inexplicable TGI Friday’s and Hooter’s down on the riverwalk that could be any river walk in the world (and why would you go all the way to Argentina and eat at a Hooter’s, you may ask– well, just keep on asking that question until you get a good answer, because I’d like to know too)… BUT… well, there is still a higher proportion of REAL THINGS here… blocks and blocks of territory that the modern world has overlooked. And sure, the teeter totters in the park are squeaky and need oiling, and there are too many feral cats wandering around, but those are all things that make the heart leap a little bit, in some way. TGI Friday’s has never made anyone’s heart leap.
So, what I’m saying is:
The Southeast of the U.S.
+
Buenos Aires
=
New Orleans.
Being in New Orleans for just that one night, though, was like being a prisoner on the last night out on parole. We played in the tiniest bar in the world. Fifteen people maybe were there, but no empty chairs. The air was thick, that below sea level air that leaves you choking sometimes on your own spit. It seems like it’s easier to make music come alive in New Orleans. I’ve often thought that that’s why jazz started there and not in, say, Denver. The people involved were important, sure, but the thickness of the air molecules had to play at least some part in that, right? I mean, sound is just vibrating air, and if the air is thicker and more interesting doesn’t that make a difference? But, like I was saying, last night on parole, walking down Royal Street with my friend Meghann, going to Mimi’s for some food at two in the morning, knowing the cab was coming at five a.m. to take us to the airport and back to the frozen North, but not caring. Trying to make it all last, as Tom Waits says, squeezing all the life out of a lousy two-day pass.
Alas, you can’t change your fate, especially if airlines have any say. I had to fly to Seattle even though I live in Portland and our Seattle gig had been cancelled. We got stuck in Salt Lake City for five hours, watching planes depart for Portland as our Seattle-bound flight got delayed again and again. “Can’t I just get on THAT flight? That’s actually where I live…” I asked the gate agent. “Sorry,” he said, “9/11.” That’s always the argument ender. You can’t ever say anything after someone says, “9/11″ or you’re just being a dick.
We eventually got to Seattle and were snowed in for 24 hours there, and then we skidded down quickly to Portland and got snowed in for a good week there.
It’s all hard to imagine now, here in Buenos Aires. It’s summer here, for one thing. Sara and I walked down the street in the San Telmo neighborhood the other day, both dressed in black. I had just bought a new black shirt and was breaking it in. She usually wears all black. It seemed like we were overdressed for the hot upside-down summer, but then we found an enormous old church with some beautiful voices spilling out of it. We walked in quietly and sat in the pew closest to the door. It was the kind of pew that is as easy to kneel at as it is to sit in. At the far end of the enormous building the pastor was giving his sermon, but even if it were in English I don’t think I could’ve understood it, because we were at the back of the church so far away from him, and all the reverberations were hitting my ear before and after the original waves of his voice came to me. And then someone with a guitar started to sing, at first just verses by themselves, and then the choruses where everyone joined in and sang along. The echoes of voices blended in with the voices themselves to create a sound that I hope God would be pleased with, if he has any taste at all. At one point I felt a tug at my eye, like a dagger of a tear was making its escape. I looked down at my body and noticed that my black clothes were flecked with white dots. I looked over at Sara and it was the same with her. She pointed up at the ceiling, which was made of plaster that was slowly peeling. Every few seconds another tiny piece would fall on us. And we would turn to the other with a look of, “Are you crying?” “No, just plaster. Are you crying?” “Plaster.” Piece by piece this wonderful church in San Telmo was crumbling on us and its own parishioners. How much can the ceiling fall apart until you can’t live under it anymore? We stayed for one more song and then walked out, brushing the dust off our clothes as we left.
