In 1980, my last good rock ’n’ roll band didn’t so much break up as we just ran out of steam and coasted into the station at the end of the line. Back then in South Carolina, you were either idle rich, a sweeping-up boy at one of the cotton mills, or a drone in DuPont’s atomic bomb factory. (Some career. If they don’t drop the bombs, you’ve wasted your life. If they do drop the bombs, you’ve wasted your life.)
There is no comfortable niche for a rock ’n’ roll player between gigs. This has been proven with actual government paperwork. It happened like this: My buddy Greg Wilson, who’s made his living playing saxophone since college, was on his way home from a gig one night when a cop pulled him over. As he filled in the blanks on the ticket, the cop asked Greg for the make and model of his car, along with his address (to make sure he hadn’t stolen the driver’s license with his picture on it). Eventually, he got around to asking, “Occupation?”
“Musician,” Greg said.
The cop wrote: Unemployed.
Greg might as well have said he was Captain Marvel.
Now, it was just this kind of thing that convinced a whole bunch of us musicians that we needed to get out of that part of the world. My good friend Steve was the first of us to head for Nashville. He found steady work playing the blues and singing the high harmony on beer commercials.
Steve cashed his first check and rented a house between I-65 and the Radnor railroad yards, bought some big pieces of foam from Turrentine Salvage, threw them on the floor, and pronounced them beds. Then he set about calling all of his musician buddies back in South Carolina and Georgia and inviting us to come up to Nashville and live at his house until we could get situated. Over the course of a year, he’d moved about a dozen of us up here.
Brenda and I moved up and bought a house in 1981. My first official act as a Nashville musician was to invite my old bandmates up—one came. Hop, the bass player in my burnt-out band, lived with us for six months, then he and his wife moved into their own house.
For years, Hop and Steve and I, along with the other buddies from home, wrote songs together, played demos together, built mini-studios, traded gear, loaned money back and forth, and called each other from all points of the globe whenever we heard a good joke. I was the only one who didn’t find full-time music work. It had something to do with the fact that I’d rather have my spleen out than play a note of country music.
So far, I’m the only one of the back-home buddies to quit the music biz outright. Twelve years ago, I started writing how-to-fix-houses articles, and that led me to start my home-inspection business. All the rest of the pals are still gigging, or selling gear, or writing songs, or repairing amplifiers.
But two years ago, Steve just got fed up with hat acts and went back home to Augusta, Ga. He joined a band, but he broke them up within a month. Seems he told them they were playing the wrong chord voicings in “When a Man Loves a Woman.” They’d been playing it that way for almost 30 years, and to have somebody walk in from Nashville and tell them they had the C in the wrong place in the A-minor chord was just more than they could take. They all just quit and got day jobs. Now Steve rents sound equipment.
Two weeks ago, my former bandmate, writing partner, and tenor-to-my-baritone Hop told me he’s leaving town. Like the rest of the back-home guys, Hop’s versatile, but he’d rather shovel up road kill than play country on a daily basis. He’s moving to Virginia, where a swell new job awaits his wife.
I know, compared to those star nurseries recently photographed by the Hubble space telescope, that this is a pretty small thing. But for me, it’s like one of those sci-fi parallel-universe stories where a guy wakes up one morning and finds out that while he was out, a cosmic force changed history for everybody but him.
Any blues or R&B bands out there with a one-night-a-week gig in need of a rusty old guitar player? I need to check in to make sure I’m still living in my own skin.
Visit Walter Jowers’ Web site at http://www.nashscene.com/~housesense/
