It’s a damp Delta night in January, and we’ve pulled into Lambert, in Quitman County, Mississippi, at one time a modestly prosperous cotton town, now reduced to a rather curious thing. The railway station—stripped down and operated in an only-one-man-needs-to-run-it kind of way—is still functioning as an agricultural freight stop, more or less as it always has, but it seems to be the exception. The town center consists of two rows of Main Street-like buildings, vaguely Victorian in design, relics of nineteenth-century antebellum cotton commerce, almost all of them abandoned. One of these would have housed the barbershop, or the bank, or the post office. Now they’re home to whomever, whatever, anybody, nobody. One was the Rexall drugstore. (The “x” in Rexall has broken off.) The feeling of the place is of impoverished improvisation, variations on a squatter’s theme, and Lambert’s empty buildings have been taken up by anyone who has the know-how to crack open a padlocked door and get the electricity turned on. As we pull in, flames leap out from a corner, the only light on a street without street lights: it’s a barbecue, the pit constructed from fallen loose bricks, right out on the sidewalk. The town seems to be deadly desolate, and yet, weirdly, it is also busy with people.
It’s Saturday night, and we’re in the heart of the heart of the Delta, the homeland of the blues. Our drive began in Clarksdale, near the birthplace of Muddy Waters, and continued through the very crossroads where Robert Johnson, seventy-two years ago, was supposed to have done his legendary transaction with the Devil, exchanging his soul for a satanic facility on guitar. And for half an hour we’ve been on county highways, all straight lines and right angles, cutting through plowed fields of cotton and soybean, seeing no other vehicles, no people, no lights except the distant dull blue of a farmhouse television, and then this explosion of busyness, in this place near no place, an embellished dot on a road map. We park, get out. Main Street is thrumming—a heavy, amplified bass coming from behind a number of boarded-up store-fronts. We pick a solid, thickly painted door, which gives after I push against it, and it opens up to the sweet, acrid smell of a woodstove, a smoky array of blue and green lights dangling from an overhead pipe, and, atop a stage in the corner, a sixty-year-old man in a two-piece suit and brown patent-leather shoes—Johnnie Billington playing electric guitar.
This is the first stop on a visit to Delta juke joints, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by that profoundly unmodern, unreconstructed feeling that you still find in the South. I’m here because of an interest in Lucinda Williams, the Louisiana-born singer and writer, and although she isn’t with me tonight (she’s in Nashville, singing with the North Mississippi All Stars—as it happens, a Delta blues band), the Delta has served Williams as a highly personal, emotional reference library, something she keeps coming back to in her music, for images or metaphors or, sometimes, for its famous twelve-bar arrangements and its flattened blue notes. Williams is forty-seven, and, obsessively working and reworking a small collection of tunes, has created a concentrated repertoire of around three dozen exceptionally powerful songs. For a thirty-five-year effort (Williams began playing when she was twelve), that works out to about a song a year, and it’s still possible to see a live show in which she gets a little carried away—and she always seems to be on the verge of getting a little carried away—and hear almost the entire œuvre, as was the case about eighteen months ago at New York’s Irving Plaza, when Williams’s encores went on longer than the act, and the audience emerged, after nearly two and a half hours, thoroughly spent, not only by the duration of the program but also by the unforgiving rawness of the songs. They’re unforgiving because they are so relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible fuckup of a man, who has got more charm and charisma than a civilized society should allow, and who never lives up to any of the promises he made when he was drunk, on drugs, in lust, in love, incarcerated, in pain, insane, in rehab, or, in some other essential but frustratingly appealing romantic way, unaccountable. He’s usually from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lafayette, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lake Charles, Louisiana (and a bass player), or maybe from Greenville, Mississippi (and a bass player), and the songs come across as both very Southern and also painfully autobiographical. Ouch! you think after you’ve heard Lucinda Williams for the first time, this girl has gone through some shit. Her songs are not traditional rock and roll, if only because they are more written, more preoccupied with the concerns of language and image, than most rock tunes. They’re not country, although there is an occasional twangy country element. They’re not folk, even though “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” her 1998 album (and her first commercial success), got a Grammy award for the best contemporary-folk record of the year. And they’re not blues, even though they are informed by something that might be described as a blues attitude.
This quality of being both one thing and another (and yet another) is at the heart of Williams’s achievement—thus the knotty, contradictory labels she gets stuck with, like the blackest white girl in Louisiana (or the white woman with a black man’s soul), or Raymond Carver with a guitar (because of her stark narratives), or a female Hank Williams. At some point, I started asking her colleagues to characterize her music and was met with a kind of stuttering bafflement (gruff-speaking Gurf Morlix, for instance, who worked with Williams for eleven years and wrote most of the guitar hooks on her songs, paused for a long Marlboro Man, spit-out-your-tobacco minute and said, “Shit, I never thought about it as anything except the music of a genius, but I don’t know what it is”) until I was rebuked for even trying by Hobart Taylor, a champion of Williams going back almost to the days when she wore a granny dress and sang on street corners: “Don’t even go there,” he said. “It’s a trap.”
Whatever this music gumbo might be, the blues remains one of its spicier ingredients—thus this visit to the Delta, where, after Johnnie Billington surrenders the stage to younger colleagues, including a teen-ager on bass who is hunched over in pain from what people are saying is a degenerative spinal disease, and a keyboard player so diminutive that his head disappears behind the piano, we wander out, get back into the car, and eventually find ourselves on a long dirt road, a shortcut to some place where, if we’re lucky, we might catch the last set of Robert Walker, another aging giant of the blues. The woman in the back seat with me is telling me that I need to be careful, that Saturday nights in the Delta are wild. There have been gang killings, and trouble between whites and blacks, and it might be advisable for me to stick close, because, she says, whispering in a tone that is meant to be reassuring, she’s got a loaded pistol in her handbag, and, you know, hey, shit happens.
After miles of empty fields, a church appears on our right, a white clapboard shoebox, resting atop brick stilts, nothing else in view, and then, a few minutes later, we turn, and, just before the town of Bobo, we come upon the Holmes Grocery & Diner, a square building with white bulbs draped across its awning like Christmas lights, a gravel parking lot, and a big barn of a room in the back.
When Lucinda Williams was starting out, she sang “country blues” (unlike the urban Chicago variety), the kind that would have originated in places like this Bobo juke joint, and her first album, recorded in a single afternoon in 1978, consisted only of classics by the country-blues masters—Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie, of course, but also an ancient shuffling geezer called Blind Pearly Brown, who used to play wizardly guitar sitting on a stool on a street corner in Macon, Georgia, on Saturday afternoons, when six-year-old Lucinda was a mesmerized member of the audience. And although the blues are no longer a feature of her concerts—with the exception of a slow rendering of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Come to Me, Baby,” which she performs as an encore, with a slippery sibilant last line (“Slide a little love in me”) that transforms a simple tune, sung originally by a man, into a womanly erotic declaration—they seem always to be present in some way. This Holmes Grocery & Diner in Bobo, for instance, is remarkably similar to the juke joint pictured on the cover of Williams’s “Car Wheels” CD, another shoebox in the country, with Christmas lights, looking utterly ordinary, pushed back into the corner of the photograph, behind a dirt road (in that inimitable Southern way, which finds its aesthetic not in what is pleasing or symmetrical or obvious but in the miserable thing that—indirect, off center, out of focus—is distinguished by its overwhelming authenticity).
The Holmes Grocery & Diner also calls to mind a song from that last CD, “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” a hymn to the Magic City juke joint, in Rosedale, Mississippi. (The title is written just as it appears on one of the juke joint’s walls.) Again, the tune is not actually a blues number but something inspired by the blues, and while it seems to be musically evoking the place it describes—starting off with a slow percussion, the stress in the back, in a syncopated funk style, the drum just behind the beat (in a way that musicians often describe as a Southern sound), laid back, very cool, very juke—what Williams had in mind was the way Beat poets performed their work, with someone on drums and someone playing a bass, and a guy in front reading a poem, singsongy but still spoken. The tune is a recitation, a series of images: the signs mounted around the place (“House Rules, no exceptions. No bad language, no gambling, no fighting. Sorry, no credit. Don’t ask”), the graffiti in the bathrooms, the gang rivalries (“June bug vs. hurricane”), and the essential amorality of a joint that’s an escape, beyond accountability, and where shit happens.
The next morning, the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I drive out to Rosedale, wanting to see the place that informed the song. Rosedale is built against the levee, the houses of the whites, west of the interstate, with driveways and lawns, and the homes of the blacks, on the other side, crowded, higgledy-piggledy, ramshackle, the timber of the porches and doorways disintegrating in the Mississippi air, an unchanged, unchanging picture that could have been taken any time in the last hundred years. This part of town is full of churches—the Gospel Temple, the Riverside United Baptist, the God’s People in Unity, the Assembly of God—and I stop at one, a garish thing with turquoise walls and pink window frames and a white steeple, a great cotton candy of a place. I decide to join the well-dressed families, rushing across the parking lot, late for the eleven-o’clock service, and as I step inside everyone at the back turns to stare. I feel I’ve transgressed, and leave, but as I walk back to the car it occurs to me that I’ve been composing a selective, romanticized picture in my head. I made notes the night before, describing the highly sexual bump-and-grind dancing at the juke joint in Bobo, but I wrote nothing of the fact that half the people were fat, no-neck whites—croupiers and kitchen staff from the riverboat casinos. I note that, when we walked in, the band was playing “Mustang Sally” but not that it got bored and suddenly quit mid-tune, in seeming disgust at its audience. I describe Robert Walker, sitting against a wall, tired, possibly ill, a tall man in a draping white suit, white spats, with a Little Richard bouffant hairdo, a shiny white guitar, and a long melancholy face, but not the two white people who were sliding around the joint, “inconspicuously” trying to get the good angle in order to take his picture—this Delta postcard shot—including the man whose camera had an elaborate fashion-photo attachment, with a hooded white canopy above his flash, plus all sorts of high-tech gizmos spread across his table. And even in Lambert I noted the cheap-and-cheerful assortment of chairs, the cracked floors, the New Year’s decorations that still hadn’t been taken down, but not the banner stretched across the back of the stage: “Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.”
DADDY-GIRL
I am in Lucinda Williams’s bedroom, and have been struck by a number of things. Above the headboard, and nailed to the wall, is a shiny, glitter-sprinkled, heart-shaped pink valentine from Jesus, who is depicted inside a diminishing succession of crucifixes, like so many Russian dolls, as pretty and effeminate, with a golden halo and dreamy blond hair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jesus as a blond. Even so, it makes you wonder: Do you want God above your bed? There is a matching valentine alongside; in this one, Jesus is a brunet. Hanging on the wall by the bathroom is a similar arrangement, this one devoted to the Virgin Mary, a shrine of sorts, including an image that changes shape as you walk past: one moment it’s the Virgin, and then—what do you know?—it’s the Son of God! This house seems perfectly normal, almost suburban, from the outside—a two-story brick-and-wood affair, set back from the street, in a birch forest, in a semirural district of Nashville (Emmylou Harris lives two doors down)—but inside it’s a floor-to-ceiling museum of Southern religious kitsch. There is a wall mounting of Jesus in a conch shell and another of Jesus inside a scallop; as you come up the stairs, you are met by a painting of exceptional ugliness, featuring an eye and a clock (the second hand pivots from a point in the pupil) and a piece of text, written in silver glitter, declaring that we love thee, O Lord, “at all times!” High on a kitchen wall is a cross that says “Bless Our Home,” and if you look closely you can see a tiny amplifier, which, when triggered by the vibration of the screen door closing, plays a blast of a choir singing “Hallelujah!” On the refrigerator are magnetized bottle caps with a minuscule likeness of Jesus painted inside, decorated delicately with tiny gold stars and red glitter.
There are snakes. One has such oily-looking scales that I can’t resist touching it. Several are rather abstract: stretched across the wall is a particularly crude thing that, in keeping with the governing aesthetic, is painted turquoise. (Many things in the house—including a Jesus night-light—are turquoise.) These are not actually snakes; they are serpents. Raving reverends, preaching the Gospel between bouts of gargling strychnine, walk barefoot atop serpents, not snakes. A joke, I assume. Or is it? Upstairs, in Lucinda’s study, I discover that serpent handlers are a special interest, and she has photographs and books about people whom I can only regard—forgive me, O Lord—as insane weirdos.
What is her attitude toward all this? I can’t tell; I’m not sure she knows. She owns photo collections of juke joints, hillbillies, cross-eyed Appalachian sharecroppers, rural pig guttings, preachers in a trance, the faithful showing off their fang scars, dumb-ass farmers displaying their guns, and Shelby Lee Adams portraits of sprawling families crowded onto buckling porches in places like Hooterville and Happy. At one moment, I wonder if she collects a certain kind of friend. During a five-day stay in Nashville, I meet a man named Dub Cornett, and then later both Lucinda and Richard Price, her boyfriend of nearly five years (and her bass player), whisper into my ear that Dub is from a family of backwoods hillbillies—“the real thing.” On another evening, I’m introduced to a young songwriter named Hayseed, who stays with Williams when he has business in town but still lives with his Pentecostal family. He, too, I’m told, is “the real thing.” I wouldn’t think twice about them except that later, going over a press file of pieces about Williams, I notice that Dub and Hayseed were trotted out to meet journalists on some of those occasions, too. Is a point being made? The eccentric friends, whose authenticity is in their extreme Baptist intensity; the serpent handlers; the poison drinkers; the turquoise Jesus; the glittery Marys. Is this another illustration of that odd, indirect Southern aesthetic of miserable originality? (It might be white trash, but it’s ours.)
Williams is of modest height (five feet four), and slim, almost preternaturally so—“It’s the thing I share with my dad. I’ve always been a rake.” Dad is the Arkansas poet Miller Williams, the beanpole figure you might have spotted reading at Bill Clinton’s second Inauguration; his poems are hanging on the walls, including one written for Lucinda’s boyfriend when he turned fifty:
There’s a room given over to exercise equipment—a weight machine, a stair-climbing machine, a dual-motion cycle machine, a rowing machine, a Nordic-Track, an “abs-workout station”—but Williams seems not to use it. It’s both new and noticeably untouched. So much kit, however, betrays a certain unease. The unease is evident in Williams’s hair. It’s streaked. It was dark brown (almost black) when I first met her, before she performed on “Saturday Night Live” last year. I’ve also seen it blond. When I eventually leave Nashville, and am reminded that I’ve forgone Williams’s invitation to stay at her house (“You’d have been the first journalist to see me without makeup”), I suddenly appreciate how much time she puts into her looks. This is “the appearance thing,” having to come across as attractive and sexy, to be, as she puts it, “someone you look at and say, ‘Whoa, what a babe! I wouldn’t mind . . .’ ” It is a preoccupation of a forty-seven-year-old only now breaking into a business that, committed to discovering the next Christina Aguilera, considers twenty-seven to be getting on. “I know I shouldn’t be so bothered about this stuff,” Williams says. “Politically, I know I shouldn’t—what do I want to be, every guy’s sex fantasy? But when you’re in it, as I am, it’s hard to ignore.”
For all that, Williams’s politics seem a bit sixties-ish ragbaggy. A characteristic Williams statement was her reply to a question put to her by Rolling Stone last December about her hopes for the next millennium: Lucinda, expressing a loathing for the boom economy, called for a stock-market crash and longed for a Depression, a peculiar dream for a woman who only now—that is, in the past eighteen months, say—has money in a bank account. In 1998, when the filmmaker Paul Schrader agreed to make a video for Lucinda’s last album and flew down to Nashville to discuss possible ideas, he was struck by how badly this woman needed a break: here was someone in her mid-forties who was having trouble meeting the essential needs of food and shelter. (In the event, no video was made; no video has ever been made—another Williams tenet, MTV culture is a bad thing, although it’s unclear if this arises out of a loathing for television or a paralyzing anxiety about appearing on it.) And last year, when I joined Lucinda in New Orleans, it was evident that the money troubles weren’t quite over. We spent an afternoon shopping for old music posters—Fats Domino, for her brother, and Clifton Chenier, “King of Zydeco,” for her friend Margaret Moser, a Louisiana-born music journalist—only to have Williams’s credit card rejected.
In many of these things—the ethic of dissent, the anti-establishment stance, the ease of doing without—her father’s influence is unmistakable. Miller Williams, a man of indefatigable productivity, has twenty-nine books to his name, including twelve volumes of poetry. Lucinda has memories of his writing a poem every night after dinner, and he appears in the family photo albums very much playing the part, with an untrimmed beard and a black beret, flopped over a chair, writing verse on a yellow legal pad. Does a poet father make for a poetic, songwriting daughter? The answer must be yes, but it’s not so obvious. Miller Williams sometimes performs with his daughter—he reads a poem, she sings, then he reads another poem—but you would be hard-pressed to hear a genetic link in their diction. And while Lucinda submits the text of her songs to him before she records them—there will be nothing for years, and suddenly the songs start arriving in the mail—his editorial interventions seem to be modest at most: she cites his objection, for instance, to the phrase “faded blue dress” in the song “He Never Got Enough Love.” (She changed it to “sad blue dress.”) You get the sense that what she wants is not Dad’s advice but his approval, almost like a report card. Lucinda’s friend Margaret Moser finds the whole thing peculiar—“this Daddy-girl thing,” she calls it, this need to be patted on the back by a man who has nothing to do with the kind of rough-hewn, laconic cigarette ads for masculinity whom Lucinda has been consistently attracted to, although the disjunction that Moser describes is revealing in itself (and might well explain why so many of the Marlboro Men don’t work out).
In any case, the idea of Daddy as a benign patriarchal pedagogue isn’t a new thing; for much of Lucinda’s life, that was his role. In 1969, when Lucinda was in the tenth grade, she was suspended from high school more than once—the first time for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag—and her father eventually assumed the responsibility of completing her education. (He had already assumed the responsibility of her upbringing, having got custody of her and her two siblings after he divorced Lucinda’s mother.) His solution to her education was to give her a reading list of a hundred great books, from the Iliad to “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
When I met Miller Williams, on a visit to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he teaches at the university, I was interested in his account of Lucinda’s suspension, an episode that must have been distressing in the extreme. I was wrong. Dad had been delighted—“just tickled pink!”—and he pointed out how the showdown involving Lucinda’s refusal to pledge allegiance was similar to one of his own, twenty years before, when he was fired from McNeese State University for refusing to take the Louisiana loyalty oath required of state employees. But the parallels didn’t stop there. Just after Lucinda was kicked out for being a dissident, he quit his job at Loyola University in an act of protest. The university, unhappy about a piece he had published as the editor of a new college literary magazine (a review of Anne Sexton’s “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,” which included too many graphic quotes), had insisted that it approve the contents of future issues before they were printed. This was censorship and not something Miller Williams could tolerate. An out-of-work father, an out-of-school daughter—what a peculiar family it must have been, I found myself thinking, but Miller, also the child of a dissident (a socialist Methodist minister so committed to challenging the status quo that he eventually questioned the Resurrection, discovered that he could no longer conduct the Easter service, and quit), wanted me to understand that this was the Williams way. On the drive from the airport, he bubbled over with more happy showdowns involving his daughter, including her recent confrontation with the producers of “Good Morning America” after they asked her to cut a verse from the song she was about to sing, “Right in Time,” her paean to autoeroticism. The lines, Williams added, were not cut, and you could see him making a connection—her song about masturbation, his review about masturbation; like father, like daughter—and he chuckled merrily.
Lucinda never got a high-school diploma; for that matter, she never learned to read music, and although she later passed a college-entrance examination and was admitted to the University of Arkansas, she was bored by the rigors of formal education and was at a loss in harmony class. After one semester, she took her guitar and left Fayetteville, heading first for New Orleans, then for Austin, before settling in Houston—the folk scene of the early seventies.
When she returned, in 1977, four years later, it was under a doctor’s orders. She had been singing so punishingly, in smoky clubs, on street corners, busking for rent, straining the rough, husky, untrained, almost Janis Joplin-like voice that characterized her early singing—a sound so sandpapery that Emmylou Harris described it as capable of peeling the chrome off a trailer hitch—that she was in danger of losing it altogether. Nodules had formed on her vocal cords. She was twenty-four. She had a notebook of songs, but no demos, no deals. And that was when she met Frank Stanford, the first of the men who would end up informing so much of the music she’d write for the next two decades.
BEAUTIFUL AS THE SUN
Stanford, whose story still deserves a book (or a movie), was a precocious, original, highly accomplished poet, a huge personality, with an engine of charm and devastating good looks. “He was like Charlton Heston when he was a young man,” Miller Williams tells me, recalling that, years before, Stanford had been admitted to a graduate writing workshop at the University of Arkansas while he was still a teen-age undergraduate, an unprecedented thing.
“He was as beautiful as the sun,” the poet Carolyn (C. D.) Wright recalls when we meet to talk about Stanford. She ran a small press with him, the Lost Roads Publishers, and they were lovers, although Stanford was married to a painter, Ginny Stanford. “He had girlie curly hair and hazel eyes and big white teeth and a wide jaw and a wide mouth, which women loved. And men did, too. Everyone loved Frank. They couldn’t help it.” The writer Ellen Gilchrist knew him, she tells me, when I reach her in Mississippi, “very, very, very, very well,” and representations of him are scattered throughout her short stories. “To know Frank then,” she says, “was to see how Jesus got his followers. Everybody worshipped him.”
Stanford was a Mississippi-born illegitimate child, abandoned at the Emory Home for Unwed Mothers, near Hattiesburg, a “convenience” run by one Sister White for politicians and businessmen. He was adopted by Dorothy Gilbert, who subsequently married Albert Franklin Stanford, an older man, a gentlemanly, worldly embodiment of the Old South. Albert Franklin Stanford built the levees along tributaries of the Mississippi, and this was where the boy passed his summers, alongside his much older “father,” spending nights in tents on the levee, sitting in on the campfires the black laborers made, listening to their stories. The experience had a practical consequence. Stanford was working as a surveyor when Lucinda met him, in the spring of 1978, a quiet, enchanting figure who avoided cities and cultivated a manner of strangeness, appearing suddenly, unannounced, from out of the woods, smelling of earth, in suspenders and leather work boots. The experience also informed his poetry, and by then he had published nine volumes, and had just completed the four-hundred-and-fifty-page narrative poem “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” a surreal account of a clairvoyant eleven-year-old’s crusade for racial justice, with cameo appearances by movie stars and boxers (“I saw Sonny Liston crying in a short-order café”). Stanford’s poems are distinguished by their easy, appealing voice—an intimate, companionable, please-stay-and-have-another-drink kind of voice—and a language that is local and highly vernacular, and that often features the speech of Mississippi blacks. “He evoked the Delta in his poems,” Ellen Gilchrist recalls. “His poems were the Delta.” There are images of women by campfires, of peas being shelled, of fingers smelling of backwater, of escaped convicts and people called Ray Baby and Born-in-the-Camp-with-Six-Toes. And there is Stanford’s own half love affair with easeful Death, who appears in various guises—as a cool hipster in shiny loafers and a Cadillac, as a man in a bow tie running a hotel. Stanford was irresistible to the young singer, and she fell heavily in love.
Or so Lucinda concedes, more than twenty years after the event, embarrassed, awkward, in the company of her boyfriend, Richard Price, who has been, on every occasion I’ve seen them together, a paradigm of understanding, but who is unnerved by the Stanford story. “I just can’t believe you fell for it,” he says, the “it” being the easy charm, the good looks, the dark Byronic act. “I mean, you’re so smart. How could you be so stupid?”
“It was just a fling,” C. D. Wright tells me of Lucinda’s relationship with Stanford. “And,” she adds, sounding a little testy, “only because I was out of town at the time.” But Stanford was having a lot of flings—more, it seems, than will ever be known, a frenzy of philandering. He was living with C. D. Wright while promising his wife that they’d get back together. (“He’d stop by every week,” Ginny Stanford recalls in a piece published in the New Orleans Review, “to tell another lie.”) And, by Wright’s own count, he was making the same promise to six other women (a writer, a potter, a poet, a sculptor)—actually, maybe there were seven, if you include “that intense thing he was having in New Orleans.” Well, who knows how many? “In that last month,” Ginny Stanford recalls, “he was seeing lots of people.” Frank Stanford, Wright says, was one of the greatest liars she has ever known.
He had spent two weeks in Louisiana. This was in June. On the day he returned to Fayetteville, he sent flowers to Lucinda, who was out, and her father accepted them. Stanford went home and discovered there was a problem: for ten days, the woman he was living with and the wife he said he was returning to had been together, dismantling his lies. “There was a scene,” C. D. Wright recalls, “and I’m not sure Frank had been rejected before. Suddenly, he wanted to go to his office. I didn’t know why. We were all upset.” The two women accompanied him and waited in the car. They learned later that he’d gone to pick up a pistol. They drove home. Then he went into the bedroom and shot himself three times. “That deadly duet,” his wife recalls, of the gun and the moan: “Pop. Oh! Pop. Oh! Pop. Oh!”
Miller Williams got a call, asking him to help. “There was blood all over the bed and on the telephone,” he says. “When you’ve had that much to do with someone’s career, and someone so promising, and then to be asked to clean up after him—well, it was pretty tough.” When he returned, exhausted, unspeakably sad, he found Lucinda waiting—she’d put the flowers in a vase. She hadn’t heard the news.
At the funeral, she and her father stood back, out of the way. “And then after everyone had left,” Miller Williams recalls, “and the coffin was lowered, and we were all by ourselves, we walked up to the grave, and Lucinda picked up a handful of dirt and sprinkled it across the coffin.” (The act echoes a line in one of Stanford’s last poems.) “And I remember thinking, Oh, Lucinda, God bless her, and I felt she was just going to disappear from the pain of it all. And, as we walked off, we turned, and there was a girl of about eighteen, very pretty, who had stood even further back—we hadn’t seen her. And she then walked up and picked up a handful of dirt and threw it over the grave.”
Lucinda Williams wrote several songs about Stanford’s death. “Pineola,” an example of what her friend Hobart Taylor calls her documentary songs, is a heartfelt, angry rendition of the thing, more or less as it happened. There isn’t much that was changed—Pineola for Fayetteville, Sonny for Frank, and a Pentecostal burial instead of a Catholic one. The song describes how Lucinda got the news (“When Daddy told me what happened”); her own flattened response (“I could not speak a single word. No tears streamed down my face. I just sat there on the living-room couch, staring off into space”); and the funeral, where Stanford’s mother stood baffled by the hundreds of strangers who had shown up to mourn her adopted child’s death. The song ends with a refrain about the handful of earth thrown onto the casket. Like several other Lucinda tunes of this time, “Pineola” is in what might be called a country style, reminiscent, say, of Bobbie Gentry’s old AM radio favorite “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s the song that hooked the novelist Annie Proulx, who heard it for the first time on the CD compilation accompanying the Oxford American Southern-music issue, and who described it as “the best alternative country song I’d heard in years.”
“Sweet Old World” is a different kind of song—more ballad than short story—and its qualities are at the heart of the difficulty involved in articulating the value of any piece of music, which exists first as something in time, as sound and not as text. The difficulty is compounded with lyrical-seeming songs, if only because one part of their achievement is in language, a language that, once separated from the melody, can look banal. “Sweet Old World,” written in the second person, is addressed to a suicide. Musically, it is characteristic of Williams’s later songs. The more obvious, “pretty” harmonic elements are in the background (those sad, mournful Gurf Morlix licks, echoing the melody, played on guitar and violin), which allows Williams’s voice to stand out up front, full of rough feelings and an abrasive sadness. The lyrics are a list of what the dead man is missing (“See what you lost when you left this world”), and consist of simple images arising out of the things we feel, see, smell: dancing with no shoes, the sensation of being touched by another’s fingertips, the sound of your name called by a beloved, a train at night, the feeling of slipping a ring on your finger, the tingling of being kissed, the act of breathing. But because the song’s images are of the senses it has an intimacy, even a seductive eroticism. This is perfectly understandable, given that it’s being sung to a former lover, but was not something I appreciated until I saw it performed at an outdoor evening concert in Oxford, Mississippi, last year, when the air was swollen from a day of heavy thunderstorms. As a result, the music was rounder-sounding, cushioned, and the notes seemed to linger. There was a crowd of about five thousand crushed into the square. They weren’t restless, exactly, but, having spent a day inside, amid reports that the concert might be cancelled, they had a pent-up attentiveness. The stars were coming out, but there was no breeze, just this heavy stillness, and then this tune, with its hip-rolling beat, which was about a suicide, after all. Slowly, people began dancing, everyone swaying, and hands were holding hips, and hands were slipping down trousers, and boys were kissing girls, and girls were kissing girls, slow, wet, slow-dance kisses, and, over to my left, just above Square Books, a couple were undoing their jeans, and, over on another balcony, just above the bar Proud Larry’s, two women were holding each other so melodically that their embrace was virtually a sexual act. (“The shit we see people doing when we are onstage,” Richard Price tells me later.) That night was the second night with the band for Greg Atticus Finch, a keyboard player who has since been dropped; he still remembers the tune that evening. “ ‘Sweet Old World,’ ” he said—in a burst of generosity remarkable for a person who has been banished from a band—“that song is simply the best ballad ever written. No one could write a better ballad than it. No one has written a better ballad. It just doesn’t get any better.”
Williams began writing both “Sweet Old World” and “Pineola” in 1979, the year after Stanford died. She had to wait thirteen years before they were released.
Why so long? “Because,” Williams says, “my career has been distinguished by other people, who have always been men, telling me what I should sound like.” (To be fair, her first album consisted of all those blues numbers, and none of her own compositions, because that’s what she thought the male producer wanted.) “Happy Woman Blues,” her next album, was produced in 1980, and features “Sharp Cutting Wings,” a mournful love tune (inspired by yet another poet) that has a characteristic Williams line: a series of love fantasies—of flying off with her poet lover, of being with him in a foreign country, of wanting no one to know them—that ends abruptly with her need for a small loan of “about a hundred dollars” (and there’s something very exacting about that “about,” as though it’s just enough to pay last month’s phone bill, score a Diet Coke and a turkey sandwich, and buy a Greyhound bus ticket). On the last day in the studio, the producer took it upon himself to introduce drums to Williams’s string-band mix—not a bad sound, she felt, but it wasn’t what she would have done, and wasn’t something she was asked about. It was immaterial; the album made so little money that it’s legitimate to ask if it was ever sold.
But no record made her any money, despite the fanatical efforts of so many people, including Hobart Taylor, who came upon Lucinda’s playing at Anderson Fair or the Full Moon Café, and then embarked on a mission to make her known to the rest of the world. Taylor, a Houston journalist before he abandoned his career to promote Lucinda, helped her with the rent, paid for meals, and spent a modest inheritance on putting Lucinda up in the Chelsea Hotel in New York and producing a demo of ten songs, “Pineola” among them. Taylor failed to get a record company to take it. So, too, did David Hirshland, another dreamy disciple, who, like Taylor, abandoned his career (as a booking agent) so that he could throw himself into the cause. The result was another demo, this one paid for by CBS, whose executives then dithered, before confessing that they didn’t know what it was and had no idea how to sell it: it was too much like country, according to the rock-and-roll executives; too much like rock and roll, according to the country executives. Williams, meanwhile, was working at a B. Dalton bookstore in a shopping mall near Glendale, driving a beat-up Saab that had a party trick of breaking down on the Harbor Freeway. When, four years later, she was finally taken up by a major record label, RCA, which was then run by Bob Buziak (who understood that Williams’s music was neither one thing nor another and needed to be left alone), Buziak got fired, putting her into the hands of a producer who secretly believed she was a disco babe, a secret he didn’t share with Williams herself until he had taken her already recorded songs and remixed them, adding a big bass here, a heavy drumbeat there, which, again, was not necessarily a bad sound, but it wasn’t hers, and, this time, wasn’t something she was going to put up with. She walked out on the deal, even though she was broke. She turned forty and was still broke when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered one of her tunes, “Passionate Kisses,” and made it into a Grammy-winning hit. In many ways, it’s the Lucinda Williams theme song, asking that essential question: I’ve waited so long, why can’t I have everything now, dammit! Why can’t I have a comfortable bed that won’t hurt my back, and food for when I’m hungry, and clothes for when I’m cold, plus some pens that don’t run out of ink (a poet’s daughter, after all), and some quiet thinking time, and a big house full of friends, and a rock band, and a regular supply of passionate kisses?
WEEPING FITS
I’ve been studying Lucinda Williams’s face—a youthful face, soft skin, few wrinkles, a face so much younger-looking than her age that waspish peers whisper that she must have submitted it to the surgeon’s nip and tuck. (She hasn’t.) Its dominant quality is its changeableness. This is a face full of weather—or, maybe, more accurately, it’s akin to a weather report, a forecast of the personality you’re going to see next. Now, the two of us in her living room, in the evening (Williams is an early-afternoon riser), her face is relaxed and expressive, and yields easily to a teasing, cackling laugh—a laugh that makes you feel appreciated and enjoyed. In concert, she has another face, and one that rarely gives up so much as a smile. It firms up, reveals little, and is at odds with the expressive songs she sings. It’s a matter of control. Upheaval makes for these songs, and upheaval goes into the writing of them; she often works herself into such a state, reliving some awfulness, that she’ll end up in a dark depression (Williams’s depressions are legendary; “Am I too blue for you?” is the refrain of one song devoted to them; “When I cry like the sky like the sky sometimes, am I too blue?”), and these moments can be marked by weeping fits that go on for days. Williams now believes that the songs she writes when she has reached this therapeutic, unprotected rawness are her best, and that she has to go through this kind of trauma in order to write. But then these songs, once made, are performed with a fanatical sense of self-government; and that’s what her face conveys then: discipline, containment, control.
She cried for days while writing the ballad “Little Angel, Little Brother,” about her younger brother, an exceptional talent on the keyboard (“I see you now at the piano, your back a slow curve, playin’ Ray Charles and Fats Domino while I sang all the words”), who has never realized his promise, owing to unhappiness or drink or that old Louisiana gift for self-destruction: “I see you sleeping in the car, curled up on the back seat, parked outside of a bar, an empty bottle at your feet, Little Angel, Little Brother.” The song evokes some of the anguish of Lucinda’s upbringing, among family members who were distinguished by their artistic ambitions but were held back or frustrated in some profound, soul-destroying way. Her brother also had the makings of a poet. (At fourteen, he’d voraciously read and reread all of Shakespeare.) Then, more disturbing, there was her mother, Lucy, who still had dreams of being a concert pianist when she met Miller Williams, but abandoned them after she quickly had three children, and struggled to bring them up, until, owing to mental illness or depression or something the family is uncomfortable talking about, she yielded her place to a nineteen-year-old undergraduate/housekeeper/caretaker/savior, whom her husband brought in to look after his confused offspring and whom he would eventually marry. (In a domestic ceasefire, the two women lived in the same house for five years.) And there was Miller Williams himself, who, for all his robust confidence, had spent years in an intellectual wilderness. By training and education, he was a biologist, but he had no aptitude for the sciences and kept moving from job to job, unable to secure tenure, until he abandoned both the university and his family and went to New York to work as a junior editor, sending home paltry sums set aside from his paltry salary.
Backstage, at the end of a concert last year at the House of Blues in New Orleans, I witnessed a Louisiana family reunion, which included Lucinda’s mother, who had just moved back to the Crescent City (“Come see me,“ she told me, in a whisper. “I’m so lonely”); her brother Robert, who was also now living in New Orleans, driving a long-distance truck (and who was apprehensive about speaking to a journalist—his having been made the drunken self-destructive subject of “Little Angel, Little Brother” was plenty of attention, thank you very much); plus the much-loved Uncle Cecil, from Sulphur, Louisiana. As a child, Lucinda had seen so much of Uncle Cecil that she asked her mother if they’d lived in Sulphur, too, along with Lake Charles and Macon and a half-dozen other small college towns in the South. “No, no,” her mother said, tellingly. “You’re thinking of Iowa”—another town in Louisiana—“your grandmother’s, where we went so often because we had no money for food and used to go there to eat.” Lucinda’s childhood was one of testing difficulty, and it is, she admits, an element in why she writes her particular songs of loss and neediness, some of which is touched on in “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” her account of being a five-year-old in the South, with lyrics that evoke a time of tense domestic hush-hushness: of neighbors watching (“Pull the curtains back and look outside. Somebody somewhere don’t know”); of parents’ squabbling (“There goes the screen door slamming shut. You better do what you’re told. When I get back the room better be picked up”); of a family’s having a secret that others don’t know (“Low hum of voices in the front seat. Stories nobody knows. Got folks in Jackson we’re going to meet. Car wheels on a gravel road”). When Lucinda’s father first heard the song, he sought out his daughter and apologized.
At one point, backstage, I felt I was seeing a comparably real-life illustration of the Williams first-person principle—the notion that her more serious fans engage with her music on a deeper, weirder level than they might with other songwriters’ songs, because Lucinda’s are believed to be so autobiographical. I’d seen the principle expressed in her fan mail, which I’d spent an evening reading in her company (“Miss Williams, did you ever get your heart stomped on by a guy named Alex? I figure you must have—or by an evil twin of his—since about every damn song in your incredible new album nails me straight in the heart”), and which featured confessions of exceptional pain that was either relieved, or relived, by a Williams song. (As the night wore on, and Lucinda kept failing to find a specific letter, one written by a d.j. who was committed to playing something by her every night, because “Sweet Old World” had stopped him from killing himself, you could see her face grow progressively darker—Weather alert!—as she skimmed confession after heartfelt confession, knowing that she got this kind of mail because of the kind of song she wrote, and she wrote that kind of song because she went through Hell living a hurt or humiliation, and then went through Hell reliving it when she wrote about it, and she hadn’t written a thing now in three years, and she was dreading what she was going to have to go through again—Hell was beckoning.) There at the House of Blues, a fan, the cheerfully named Trish Blossom, had slipped past the tight security, with a husband in tow, and had fixed on Lucinda. Trish Blossom was blond and tall and pretty, and came from the backwoods somewhere in Louisiana—she told this to me, adding that she didn’t leave the woods ever, not for nobody, and she had come to New Orleans to see Lucinda, and here she was, and did Lucinda know that Trish Blossom never comes out for nobody, which all seemed a little nutty, but not threatening, I thought, until I glanced over at the husband and saw a face that had an unmistakable look of panic. (“Do you realize,” he whispered, “how serious this is?”) “She just needs love,” Trish Blossom was saying, in a kind of trance. “Can’t you see that she needs love? Nobody has loved her, and she has so much love to give, and I have so much love, and I will give her the love she needs.” She eventually reached Williams, who handled the encounter expertly—this was a regular exchange. (The most recent involved a man who rushed the stage with a dozen roses, screaming “I love you, Lucinda!” before he was tackled and carried off, shouting, “I am not John Hinckley!”) Lucinda gave Trish a hug, which became an embrace, but she came back for more (“I just can’t let go”) until Lucinda let herself be kissed on the lips, and reassured Trish that, yes, she was right, she just needed some love, and she was pleased that Trish had some to give her.
I’m not sure why first-person narratives—in songs, like Williams’s, or even in fiction—invade the sentimental nervous system so effectively, but they provided me with a strategy for understanding Lucinda’s music. It yields insights into a number of songs—the ones involving Frank Stanford, say, or something like “Drunken Angel,” which was inspired by the death of Blaze Foley (“Blood spilled out from the hole in your heart, over the strings of your guitar, the worn-down places in the wood, that once made you feel so good”), a fellow Austin musician. (Foley was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound subversive, antic, ferociously anti-commercial poet of folk rock—he celebrated the self-righteousness of his poverty by decorating his jeans, jacket, cowboy hat, and guitar with the same duct tape that held his boots together—who threatened a youth for stealing his own father’s welfare checks until the boy shot Foley in the ribs, an act so enragingly pusillanimous that Foley chased the youth and eventually bled to death. You can see why Blaze Foley would appeal to Lucinda’s accept-no-compromises world view. But it makes you wonder: Doesn’t she know anyone besides bass players and dead men?)
The strategy is even more interesting in relation to Clyde Woodward, probably the most important love interest in Lucinda’s life. Clyde, another bass player, who almost came from Louisiana, seems to have informed a dozen songs. But this is where the autobiographical approach gets complicated.
I’m sitting in Lucinda’s house in Nashville, going through three meticulously organized volumes of photographs. Clyde appears regularly, a big fleshy man with a flap of dark hair and round cheeks and a barrel chest. Lucinda points out Clyde’s characteristic pose—arms thrown out wide, a come-join-the-party look. There are pictures of the two of them in Austin. “That,” Lucinda says, “is when Clyde persuaded me to pawn a rare twelve-string guitar so we could get food and beer” (whereupon the pawnshop burned down, a typical Clyde touch of fortune). There are pictures of them in New York; Clyde had come along ostensibly to be her manager, although he was jealous of her talent and was always getting in the way. (Clyde, in Lucinda’s descriptions, comes across as a passionate, possessive, pig-headed, pugnacious sensualist—jealous and headbutting, but high entertainment.) There is another of Clyde helping her father build a porch in Fayetteville. “That was when we really had no money and nothing left to pawn.” And another of Clyde in a kitchen, making gumbo, throwing a party, knocking back a beer, and suddenly Lucinda cries out, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Clyde is dead. And Frank is dead. What a thing. All my old boyfriends were in love with the idea of Louisiana, and they’re dead!”
Like Stanford, Clyde was fascinated by death, but for Clyde death was an opponent in an elaborate game of combat, the only thing getting in the way of his kamikaze, nothing-can-stop-us approach to life. But Lucinda wasn’t interested in dying; she had a career in mind, and so they broke up after four years. And then Clyde did die, more or less just like that, forty years old, jaundiced, anemic, skeletal beyond recognition, in a hospital in East Texas, trying to get back to Louisiana before his liver packed in—from excesses of all kinds. Clyde’s last hours were spent with Lucinda’s friend Margaret Moser (Lucinda was on a plane trying to reach him), as Moser read to him from a journal about Louisiana, which she had started compiling when she was living far away and feeling homesick. The journal had been Clyde’s idea. Moser is from Louisiana. Clyde wasn’t, although he was obsessed with the place and used to preach where to find its values: not in its open-air rock concerts, for instance, which you’d find anywhere, but in its parish dances, which you find nowhere else. Or in the dance halls along the road between Eunice and Opelousas. (“Inside, you’d be the only whites, and it would be packed shoulder to butt.”) Or in its out-of-the-way crawfish farms, and its cockfights, and its gnarly French Catholicism. Or in odd things, like zydeco, which Clyde played. Or in its gumbo—for Clyde as much a metaphor as a food (“He saw God in a bowl of gumbo”): the spicy Delta hot pot that said, with its cayenne and its crawfish and its other crustaceans, this place and no other.
When Lucinda was growing up, Louisiana meant “backward.” It was “country,” and people made fun of her father’s accent (even though, technically, his was not Louisiana but northeastern Arkansas), and he sometimes tried to disguise it. (My Louisiana father buried his accent deep, and told me once that much of his life was lived to prove that he could be more than a “hick” from a north-woods Louisiana paper-mill town, and I was struck by how the word “hick,” very much his word, like “boon-docks” and “sticks,” was already dated and without force.) Clyde appeared in Lucinda’s life when the perception of the place was shifting—in the way of these things, its hick, redneck ways are now the half-rebel expression of an inexplicably charismatic, bad-boy code of excess—and he helped her to recognize the shift. And she repaid him by writing a song about Lake Charles, her birthplace and his fantasy home, and where his ashes are now scattered. The song is the only one in her repertoire that affects her in unpredictable ways, and when she performs it she sometimes breaks down.
GOOD LIARS
The South has a history of mythmakers, and at the heart of the Southern myth is a love affair with loss. It’s what underlies the myth of the good Southern family; or the notion of the Southern gentleman, of honor and Old World grace and hospitality; or the filthy romance of the Confederate flag; or the sugary fables of “Gone with the Wind.” These myths—still current, even if anachronistic, even if (like débutante balls and the languid luxury of a south-Georgia accent) always anachronistic—are among those cited by Edmund Wilson in “Patriotic Gore,” in the pages of this magazine forty years ago, and offered up as examples of how the South is seen to have retained something that modernizing America no longer has. These were also illustrations of the way people from the North liked to think about the South then, units in the elaborate calculation to compensate for a place that was, when Wilson was writing, still synonymous with defeat and self-righteous pride and a kind of nationalized nationalistic bad judgment. In forty years, the South has changed, but mythmaking remains a habit of mind. I’m not sure that the myths Southerners fashion today are even necessarily that different—less obvious, sometimes subtle to the point of obscurity, but fundamentally founded on the principle that the South has got something that the rest of America doesn’t have anymore. Some of this is in Lucinda Williams’s songs (“I’m going back to the Crescent City, where everything’s still the same”), although the myths she makes are more sophisticated and of her own private order—it’s a vision in which Jack Kerouac meets Robert Johnson and General Robert E. Lee, and they form a blues band, singing lyrics dashed off by Eudora Welty, and after a blow-out, never-to-be-repeated concert they disappear at dawn on their Harleys, where they all die, driving far too fast, in a terrible accident. Like her Southern accent and her sense of “country,” it’s a vision built on her possession of uniqueness. And it was, I now realize, what drew me to the Delta on my own, and to Rosedale, looking for a juke joint that may no longer exist, and then, afterward, heading down Mississippi State Highway No. 1, the river always on my right, the railroad tracks running parallel somewhere on my left, and the sky big and endless, and nothing else in view, except, every few miles, a white church, an adornment on the flood-flattened Delta horizon, surrounded by cars, having mysteriously drawn a crowd from a land that seemed to have no one on it.
What was I looking for? Something else, something personal, some remembered connection to a place, now lost, farther down the Delta, in Louisiana, in an oppressive, sulfur-stinking Civil War paper-mill town that, when I got there, later that day, would be proudly flying the Confederate flag on the birthday of M.L.K. It was where my family came from, and not all that far from where I was born, and in this I recognize now that, like Trish Blossom and the obsessive letter-writing fans, and like Lucinda’s father, I’d personalized this woman’s music—I had been tempted by its complex first-person, identify-with-me inducements—because in fact the songs that arise out of this landscape are not necessarily autobiographical at all; they merely seem to be so; they invite us to think them so. Good mythmakers are good liars. When Miller Williams sought out his daughter backstage, after listening to “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” and apologized for her upbringing, he surprised Lucinda. (“Why, Daddy—that song’s not about you!”) And while “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” her tribute to the Magic City juke joint in Rosedale, is a recitation of juke-joint images, it is also a jumbly catalogue of all kinds of things you’d never see in such a place, including a man writhing around outside, claiming that he has decided to take up serpents and strychnine. What’s he doing there? This is one of Williams’s Pentecostal weirdos—an unlikely visitor to the wrong side of the tracks, even if the crowds inside now include no-neck white fatsos. In the same song, Robert Johnson (dead long before Lucinda Williams was born) is playing guitar in the corner, when, suddenly, an odd singsongy digressive poem pops up right in the middle, a non-sequitur remembrance of a self-destructive lover:
Who is this person in love with death and what does he have to do with the Magic City juke joint? This is Clyde, the Lake Charles obsessive, and he has nothing to do with Magic City (both the key and the tempo change to accommodate his visit), but he enjoys a rightful role in a work that, I now understand, is more poem than song, a surrealistic invocation of Southernness not unlike the kitschy religious shrines and turquoise serpents and bottle-cap Christs in Lucinda’s own house. It’s a bit of mythmaking, by a poet of loss, about a place that’s receding from experience, and that might never have been there in the first place. And Williams knows this. She has never been to Rosedale, Mississippi. She’s never seen the Magic City juke joint, except in a picture book. For that matter, she’s never been to a juke joint.
IN A MOOD
Lucinda is in a mood. Margaret Moser warned me about these moods. (“She gets all hinky and starts honking like a mule, and then folds up her arms and presses her lips together, and won’t look at anyone, and you can stare at her for the longest time and won’t have any idea of what the fuck is going through her mind.”) Her road manager, Paul Monahan, warned me about them, too, pointing out that he had been her manager for only the last part of her tour, seven months, and in that short time half a dozen people had been fired (including two bus drivers), until the final week, when the remaining band members were let go, too. (“She is the sweetest, most thoughtful, kindest person you’ll ever meet. And then, suddenly, the pressure will freak her out, and she doesn’t know why it’s freaking her out, and she can see she’s freaking out but can’t do a thing about it.”) I once saw the early warning signs of a tempest in the making, after a concert, as everyone was piling into the bus, preparing for the all-night journey ahead, an early-evening show at a festival in Dallas the next day, when Lucinda said she was unhappy with the mix that night, very, very unhappy—something wasn’t right, the guitarists were too showoffy, the drummer was too much on top of the beat, something, whatever it was (“What the fuck is it?”), it wasn’t working—and was short-tempered and unapproachable, a sudden change in personality that Richard, her boyfriend, recognized and adapted to, not getting too close, finding things to do in another part of the bus, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing, knowing that her questions didn’t need answers, until he felt he could make his excuses, and, with relief expressing itself across his face, slipped out for a drink before the bus left.
Tonight, I’m not sure what it is. It’s late and Lucinda hasn’t eaten (“God damn it, I let my blood sugar fall”), and she’s unhappy with Nashville—not to mention Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, and, especially, New York (“I fucking hate fucking New York,” she says, eyeballing me provocatively, knowing that I live in the city, and when I don’t reply she repeats it, “I fucking hate New York,” and when I still don’t respond she says it once more)—but it doesn’t matter what subject we happen to settle on as we drive into town for a late dinner. Whatever it is, Lucinda is going to attack it.
We’ve reached the Sunset Grill, an upmarket Nashville music-business hangout, and have been joined by two friends, Vicky, a neighbor, who sits beside Lucinda, and Dub (“the real thing”), who “does something with Steve Earle,” and there is talk of other musicians appearing later, and, nearby, the tables are filling up with sidemen arriving from a session with Merle Haggard. Lucinda’s state of mind—the blood-sugar level modestly fortified by a bread roll—might now be described as more attitude than mood. She was in a similar way the last time she was here—again, that exhilarating capacity of hers, this tightrope shuffle, of always being on the verge of losing it—when she started ranting about the spinelessness of Nashville music, and, getting more and more worked up, and oblivious of the shushing noises her friends were making, flapping their hands, trying to make her shut up, went on to denounce the overproduced formulaic country sound of Faith Hill in an outburst that culminated in the cry “Oh, fuck Faith Hill”—the allure of those alliterating “f”s proving irresistible—only to realize that an unfazed Faith Hill was sitting at a table right behind her.
Tonight, though, it’s anything, everything, the cost of living, the high price of rented accommodation, the yuppies who are driving out the artists, the Southern obsession with guns, the racks of them in the backs of pickup trucks, the nut-cases who collect them (including the stepfather of her boyfriend), leading to a repellent horror of the things (“I wish they were all outlawed”), and sliding, somehow, into a denunciation of the Second World War, in which, Lucinda says, the United States should never have got involved, a sentiment that enrages Richard, and, before I realize it, the two of them are in an argument of considerable passion—with Lucinda insisting that she is not an existentialist but a nihilist and doesn’t care about the future of unborn children. I’m feeling awkward and not quite wanting to listen too carefully when Richard, having worked himself into a seeming rage, tells her to fuck off. Just like that. “Lu,” he says, and takes a breath for effect, “fuck off.”
Vicky, the neighbor, sitting opposite, freezes with her mouth open, her fork of food suspended over her plate, staring at Richard with incredulity, and you can see she’s about to ask him if he has just said what she thinks she’s heard, when her question is rendered redundant because Richard repeats the imperative, with a second-person variation for stress, “Fuck you, Lucinda.” Vicky takes a breath. “Richard Price,” she says, using his full name in that scolding-mother way, “how dare you—” but she’s shut down once more when Richard tells Lucinda that she’d do him and the whole room a great favor if she simply fucked off. And then he adds, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” What are any of us to do? Vicky’s hands are fluttering. You can see that she wants to walk out, but she can’t do that because she’s upset on behalf of her friend—she can’t leave her here with someone who is telling her to fuck off, even if he’s the man she lives with. In fact, Vicky’s indignation has mounted in this way because, in the distress of the moment, she is looking at Richard and not to her side, where Lucinda is sitting. Lucinda, I am surprised to observe, is not upset. All night long, she’s been oppressive company—relentlessly whiny and confrontational and negative—until finally she has provoked her boyfriend into being a bad-ass (“You can’t fucking mess with the Hombre,” he is saying now, punctuating his declaration with the inevitable refrain, “so fuck off, Lucinda”), and Lucinda is loving it. She is beaming. Vicky is telling Richard that he can’t get away with this, when, against my better judgment, I interrupt her and say, “No, no, you don’t understand, they’re liking this, this is actually the way they are together, didn’t you know?” and I look over to Lucinda and her eyes are glistening—they’re shiny with pleasure—and she’s looking at Richard with an unnerving intensity. Then she starts cackling, that rhythmic Lucinda laugh, easy and warm and deeply sexual.
What I find myself doing—inappropriately, of course—is rooting for them. The two of them have been seeing each other for nearly five years—the longest steady relationship in Lucinda’s life—and, as a member of the audience witnessing the theatre of their being together, I’ve learned something of the trickiness of being Lucinda’s guy. (It seems to work by inverting the conventional roles, so that Richard, for all his bad-ass Hombre attitude, is the patient one, the don’t-worry-I’ll-run-out-and-get-it one, the beck-and-call guy; in this household, there’s no doubt who is wearing the trousers.) I saw them openly fighting once before, a tiff of a different order. This was in New Orleans, late, in a voodoo bar on Decatur Street. After a night of drinking and reminiscing by the river, Lucinda was suddenly in a mood. She was anxious, at two-thirty in the morning, that she hadn’t written a song in three years. It was a curious time to be anxious, if only because, with concert dates booked for the next six months, there wasn’t a lot she was going to be able to do to relieve her distress. The problem, it seemed, was that she was too happy. Richard didn’t believe that this was a problem—happiness, he thought, was not a bad thing. But Lucinda wasn’t listening. She was speaking longingly of her melancholy “Silver Lake period”—the time when, fourteen years before, living in a downtown apartment in Los Angeles and, having just broken up with Clyde, alone, emotionally wounded, with little money and few distractions, she was focussed and wrote some of her best songs, one after the other: “Crescent City,” “Passionate Kisses,” “Changed the Locks,” and “Side of the Road,” a song that, describing a lover’s need to be apart from her beloved (“I want to be alone . . . I want to see what it feels like to be without you, I want to know the touch of my own skin”), was starting to seem uncomfortably apposite. Richard persisted. You didn’t need to be unhappy to write, he was saying: it’s possible to be both creative and personally fulfilled—to have good food and good wine and money and good sex and write good songs. But Lucinda wasn’t buying it (and was impatient with him and thinking something like, Oh, shut up, Richard, what do you know? You’re just a bass player), and, again, I found myself wanting both of them to be happy, please.
I’m wanting her to be normal. But Lucinda isn’t “normal.” On some level, the person and the persona in her songs are related, as though her volatile character—this capacity for not knowing how to stop—is a manifestation of the same unguarded personality who can’t stop herself from falling wholly in love, over and over again. Or, perhaps, another way of thinking of it: this woman, who has never held a job for any time, doesn’t get up in the mornings, is routinely three or four hours late to appointments, who walks out of studios because she doesn’t feel like singing that day, and has a knack for both tantrum and wonder, achieves a childlike intensity of emotion in her songs because on some level she isn’t, even at the age of forty-seven, quite an adult. And I am probably not the only one who isn’t in a hurry to see her to grow up.
And then, wholly in character, persona and person still intertwined, last month Lucinda and her boyfriend decided to live apart, and Lucinda made plans to move into an airy loftlike apartment in downtown Nashville, not all that different from the airy apartment she once had in Silver Lake, and, alone now, with lots of space, and few distractions, she has started writing again. That happiness thing, who needs it? ♦
