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USA 2007 Travel Journals 1-17

Added on 19 April 2008 at 01:12:43, by Charley

Journal 1- The Internet
My travel journal is getting off to a late start – I know you’re chuckling, saying “I told you so,” but it’s not my laziness. I mean, I certainly have that, but this time the fault lies in the stars.
It was nearly impossible to connect to the Internet on the Queen Mary and when you could, it was ridiculously expensive. And, for some reason, I couldn’t connect to my website.
When we arrived in New York City and booked into the Algonquin, the wi-fi didn’t work in our room. I went down to the lovely lounge, all dark and plush, where the wi-fi did work, and was soon ushered out by a firm but polite waiter; apparently, laptops don’t fit into that York of the Twenties and Thirties spirit. They do kind of glare in the murky ambience.
The next day we spent driving to Washington DC and by the time we arrived, My Lovely Wife was sick as the proverbial dog. (As it happens, my real dog is a bit ill as well, but that’s neither here nor there). Big fever, it is strep throat, so I spend as much time as possible out of the room. Which is fine, because the wi-fi doesn’t work in our room here either.
Finally, in the second day, the hotel has admitted the wi-fi doesn’t work and has given me an Ethernet cable, which does work. I am connected.
I still cannot, however, collect any email to my btopenworld address. BT says I do not have an account.
So any email to me must be sent to: monkeypa@clara.co.uk. I hate BT.


Travel Journal 2: SECRETS OF THE QUEEN MARY REVEALED!
August 29, 2007
The first thing that’s evident about the Queen Mary is, of course, that it is BIG. But we knew that; we didn’t know the implications. We live in a fantasy: there’s a gangplank, people stand on the dock waving hankies, while we, dressed like David Niven and Audrey Hepburn, smile between sips of champagne down at our own hankie-wavers. And they are standing on a dock that looks like a dock.
Sadly, no. The boat is so BIG that you can’t make out individuals on the dock. You can barely see their hankies, and they certainly can’t our little heads peeking over the deck sides.
There were only three hankie wavers on the dock. Most humans, apparently not acquaintances of mine, seem to have gained the understanding that the world has changed, it’s not a hankie-waving scene anymore. Not surprising, as the dock looks like a hazardous industrial area and, once again, the ship is so damn big one wouldn’t know where to wave the hankie toward. You could be waving at nothing. Kind of like praying.
So we sailed away trying and failing to make out our dock-bound friend. We never saw him, but knew he was there because we were talking to him on his mobile phone.
Another consequence of bigness: the boat is not a floating city, as writers, often describe it – that’s old-fashioned in itself. It is a floating shopping mall.
There are several restaurants – several in a “food court” – but they all use the same ingredients… if tuna is being offered in the combined China/Malaysia/etc Asian restaurant, you can bet it is on the menu at the Italian, the Carvery, the Britannia, and so on. The food is pretty good, though; much better then your average shopping mall. It’s a high class shopping mall.
Class is of course the underlying appeal of this voyage, especially to Brits, to whom it has the most meaning, along with the huge pull of yesterday, the Britain of the Fifties and earlier. And so most nights, if you want to eat at your assigned table in the proper restaurant, you must wear a tux or evening gown, whichever may be most appropriate to your gender. Otherwise, to the Food Court you go – where often the food is better anyway. A good lesson in class systems.
There are shops selling duty-free, lots of places to eat and drink, places to play games digital and analogue, but what really makes it like a shopping mall comes to two things: there are people milling about everywhere you go, and all things are geared to the superficial, a bit like that town that the Disney Corporation built in Florida
If it is a shopping mall, though, it is one without the poor, the working class who haven’t made some money somewhere. It is Bath without students, Oldfield Park, Twerton or London Road.
So you get a shopping mall with plenty of spots to sit down and you’re never too far from a loo.
But as someone joining this age group, I find being around all these over-60s disconcerting, and that’s putting it mildly. It’s not that I’m trying to hide my age, it’s just that I like my age in relation to younger people and don’t like it when it feels like a class I’ve just been elevated to. Paraphrasing Groucho, I don’t want to join a club I have qualified for.
You walk around constantly reminded of the way either you are, or about to become: balding, well-paunched, blemished in a thousand ways. Suddenly, dressed as I do every day in jeans and T-shirt, I feel embarrassed that I’m being seen as trying to dress young. I’d better run out and buy some Dockers.
I have to work to remind myself of who I am here.
The light in the stateroom bathroom doesn’t help either. It’s that fluorescent thing that brings out every spot, every wrinkle and every shade of unhealthy pallor. My hair never looked so grey.
This reminds me of a town in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland: Thanatopia, where all the residents are dead but don’t quite realise it, thus they hang around endlessly murmuring in coffee shops, grey and subdued.


Travel Journal 3: Washington DC
September 5
The US seems different since I visited, since I lived in it 14 years ago. Different in good ways – probably because you don’t see the foreign policy on the street – and different in inconsequential ways. In the US, it’s difficult to tell the difference between good and inconsequential.
Washington DC, as we know, is made up of a handful of temporary, powerful politicians, thousands of labourers in the bureaucracy, and a huge majority African-Americans ¬– the permanent residents.
Hanging around Dupont Circle (a Circle being, surprisingly, a roundabout; DC is full of ‘em) it seems the Afro-American population has been mainstreamed in my absence. The clerks in the Starbucks, the bookstores and fast food outlets, are mostly black; there are black students with laptops, black bureaucrats, etc. And all the clerks speak the Starbuck McDonald litany: How May We Help You? Would You Like A Dessert to Go With That? Have A Nice Day!
Is this reassuring or sad? It’s kind of like the Gays in the Military quest of a decade ago; it hurts to be excluded, but who would want to be in there anyway? At the time, I felt the only way forward was to exclude everyone from the military.
This visible workforce is the new service economy workforce, where everyone of any race, creed or colour (well, except for old people) may work for minimum wage. There is progress in other areas, to be sure, but skilled areas are not as democratic as the service economy. As I drive out of DC and hear radio reports of a white-owned apartment building in a black ghetto busted for 3000 – yes, 3000 all at the same time – health code violations, then of white students hanging a noose from a tree outside a black fraternity at a prestigious university, I think change does not come quickly.
Nevertheless, Washington DC is a very enjoyable town, cosmopolitan, full of variety, cheap eats, free museums, music, and Whole Foods, a great natural food store bigger than most supermarkets in Britain with a terrific deli.
DC: a good place to see America all at once, with the sublime Lincoln Memorial thrown in as well.


Travel Journal 4: Through Virginia
We leave Washington DC after 6 days, longer than expected because of the Lovely Wife’s raging Death Flu. I had a fine time hanging around DC trying not to do anything important so she wouldn’t feel left out and trying at the same time to stay out of the room, away from her little virus attack colony. So I didn’t get to write or practice music as much as I thought.
We plunge into Virginia with its unusual separated freeway system: local traffic and trucks drive on a freeway to the right of the flowing one. Thus we watch as our exit to the route we want passes by, inaccessible to us on the interior freeway. So, just a few hours of driving later, it’s Hello, Richmond, and a chance get back to our desired route via crossing over the Blue Ridge Mountains. This turns out to be an unexpected pleasure, though a hell of a lot of driving.
Virginia has a lot of trees; all the way down the eastern freeway that we didn’t plan on taking, we are surrounded by trees. But when we cross over to the western side, not only are there endless trees, but you can see them because of the spectacularly steep mountains stretched out behind you as you go up, up, up. It is beautiful.
Finally we turn south again on a high plateau; we are on the Appalachian Trail, where all those Scots–Irish Covenanters travelled to fill the South with hellfire, brimstone, whatever that is, the Stanley Brothers and both halves of Jerry Lee Lewis’ personality, all while killing the Indians and enslaving Africans. No wonder they think they are sinners. They are.
But I like their music and I remember the Pogo quote: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
We met the friends, too, even though they weren’t us: they were running the amazing Pink Cadillac Diner on Highway 77. A shrine to all things American from 40 years ago, it had and Elvis room, but oh so much more, including the food. It was a loving exercise in gauche and it was an excellent goodbye to Virginia.


Travel Journal 5: The Carolinas
We crossed over the Virginia-North Carolina border on Highway 77, which is quite near West Virginia and Tennessee too. This is Appalachia, where a large amount of American music comes from, various tributaries feeding into Nashville. We are still cruising down the high plateau with trees extending in every direction.
It is amazing how much of this land is covered with trees. It reminds one (that would be me) how much of America is in what at least looks like a natural state. They might be second or later growth forests, but they’re real trees.
The perception and proximity of wild nature in America shapes the culture in different ways. Running through American thought is the idea, either given to us by Amerindian culture or springing from the abundant land itself, that nature works best on its own, unaltered. This runs counter to the good ole Judeo-Christian concept, also very prevalent, that God put everything on earth for us to use. And then there’s the anti-alarmist response: with all these trees, why are those environmentalists complaining? Then you have to wonder how many trees there used to be and how many we need. Apparently, more.
We gradually descend from Virginia on through North Carolina until we are out of the mountains as we enter South Carolina. We’re heading for Camden, home of my father’s father’s family, the Dunlaps and where I’m picking up a Wechter Scheerhorn resonator guitar I’ve already ordered. Camden is in the north part of the state, so we don’t have far to go. It’s on the Wateree River just below the huge Lake Wateree. Camden is the oldest inland town on South Carolina, but it must have lost its economic base long ago. Its main purpose now seems to be serving holiday recreationist-boaters on the way to the lake.
The old part of town is lovely, gracious and stately big Victorian houses, Southern mansions with great columned verandas, big leafy trees making it shady and cool. That, however, is a very small part of town.
Most of Camden is flat, hot and a weary combination of tacky, tired and seedy. It spreads out in every direction, a mix of motels, fast food chains, auto part stores, warehouses, etc.
Mumbo Jumbo Guitars, where my dobro is waiting for me, turns out to be a model train shop with guitars as a sideline, operated by a guy from Preston – a Northerner!
He and his wife are very nice – he builds very good sounding and affordable guitars himself, selling them mostly on the Internet. My dobro sounds fantastic and I am momentarily a happy man.
Sadly, the Camden archive center is shut for refurbishment, so Lovely Wife doesn’t get to see the family history. So we flee this burg for the attractions of Charleston, the oldest city in South Carolina.


Travel Journal 6: Charleston
Charleston is an odd place, a collection of settlements on the assorted dry spots in a vast, swampy delta where two rivers, the Cooper and the Ashley, meet the sea. Charleston proper is on solid ground and it reminds me of Bath in England, a small collision of old money and new tourism.
Like Bath, It is old, though not that old,. Of course, we count Roman history but exclude Amerind and how right is that? Charleston is very Georgian, with most of the buildings in the old town dating to 1700s and early 1800s, some to the late 1600s.
There is a curious Charleston architectural style: the old houses have a typically Southern veranda, often with faux-Greek columns, but it is on the side of the house. The houses seem sideways.
Because Charleston is semi-tropical, the gardens are lush with sinister vegetation, vines and fronds that hang down like twisted curtains, strange shaped and huge leaves that look like man-eating plants. The wetness keeps everything in a permanent state of decay; very Tennessee Williams.
There is another aspect of Charleston that seeps through like the decaying moisture in the buildings: class, as in social class. Another parallel with Bath and just as repellent.
We check in to our B&B (somehow, a motel didn’t seem appropriate), owned by a gracious black woman, and walk down to The Battery, a park on the seafront, grey waves lashing at the seawall. There’s a hurricane out there in the Atlantic that will later land in North Carolina. The presence of the sea is appealing, the houses are lovely and interesting, the town is sedate even with throngs of tourists poking around everywhere.
Lovely Wife is still suffering from post-flu syndrome, and wants a salad for dinner. This is not as easy as one might think; we are in the South, resolutely meat and fish eating, deep fried everything. We chance into an Italian restaurant that looks like a huge bar, dark and cavernous, with booths for dining. This would have been out of the question when smoking was allowed, but it’s not, so we are ushered to a booth. This seems like the upper class eatery of choice. It is filled with fifty-somethings, sunburned in polo shirts, golf duds, the women well-dressed, attractive but not sexy. And white, the place is full and monochromatic. The salads are good, my designer pizza is not, the bill is big. A costly meal; we feel we’ve paid mostly to join a private club for a night.
There’s a jazz singer with a duo setting up but we don’t stay.
The next day we drive out, stopping at the Magnolia Plantation, which turns out to be a very unimpressive house (the original burned down many years before) with a very interesting garden. It’s on the river, the Ashley, and 18th century formal gardens were replaced in the 19th c. with, uh, informal gardens designed and built by the owner, John Drayton, and his longtime plantation superintendent, of whom we heard much mention in the house tour. We noticed an early photo of the super in the house; he was a black man. The gardens look like the set for Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort, lush and swampy. I’m on the lookout for snakes hanging from the trees..
With mixed feelings about Charleston, we hit the road for Atlanta and a friend we know from his frequent visits to Bath.


Travel Journal 7: Atlanta
We are driving to Atlanta to meet Russell, who has a house with a guest room and has offered to take us out to dinner. Charleston isn’t too far from Atlanta, so we expect to arrive mid-afternoon with time to sightsee. We have forgotten to take into account the time to get from the east to the north of Atlanta, where Russell lives. This turns out to take as long as it took to get here from Charleston.
Atlanta is enormous.
It’s like Los Angeles, but newer and with a lot more skyscrapers. It is just monolithic. You think you’ve driven past the high rise downtown area then you go over a little crest to find another entire skyscraper downtown area. They must look like pustules from above the earth.
The freeways, all fresh and new, have so many lanes you can’t count them and there are multitudes of them joining, separating, soaring over, shooting under you. The buildings are so huge, shiny and new, with new shapes. I can’t imagine what all those people could possibly e doing in there.
There used to be a cartoon of a man on the Empire State building looking down and saying, “They look like ants.” Now we don’t need to have a lookout from a great height to tell us we are ants; we can feel it on the ground.
After hours of driving, mostly through Atlanta, we roll into Russell’s suburban home just in time for dinner – if we were dining in Spain.
We admire Russell’s spotless home, 6 years old in a 6 year old subdivision, its fabulous massive entertainment center with fabulous Bose speakers and giant television, his spotless two – or was that three? – car garage, we head off to dinner in Russell’s new Mini Cooper S, also spotless and very cool.
We are driving just short of a half hour on the massive Atlanta freeways to get to Russell’s choice: Cheesecake Factory, a chain eatery that looks like it was built to bury a pharaoh in. If it goes under, the Air Force can buy it for an airplane hangar. They’ve probably already made the deal.
Cheesecake Factory is amazing. Fabulous fresh foods, a menu like a small magazine, huge portions and prices less than half of what they would be if you were in Britain – if you could even find it on offer.
Russell, who travels a lot, knows chain restaurants like mere Euro-mortals know restaurants. Cheesecake Factory is high on his list, as is J.R. Christopher’s, where he takes us for an equally fab breakfast, not just big, but good. He tells us the places to avoid; he is a connoisseur. The idea of what a restaurant is has grown, like Atlanta.


Travel Journal 8: Selma
My father was born in Selma Alabama in 1904, the son of a displaced upper middle class South Carolinian and the gentlewoman daughter of a Confederate army doctor. His parents had moved out to San Francisco but his father sent his wife back to Selma so that my father “would be born on Southern soil.”
He needn’t have bothered.
Selma is one of the most depressing places I have ever seen.
Selma was the first inland town in Alabama, built toward the beginning of the 1800s exclusively as a center for wealthy planters. As such, it has many antebellum houses, from stunning manses like the Sturdevant House to graceful two storey, veranda-fronted homes, to the small but perfectly formed White-Force Cottage where my father was born.
This is the Historical District, and, though my family cottage and the adjacent Sturdevant House are well cared for, many of the houses are sagging a bit, in need of paint, in need of a bit of money.
But not nearly as much as the miles of little tract house bungalows that surround the Historical District in every direction. This houses the African-American population, some 60-70% of Selma, and something the original denizens of those lovely white houses never bargained for – though they created the cause, then fought to maintain it.
Street upon street of cheap little houses of varying age, most in varying states of decrepitude, are constantly interrupted by equally dilapidated fast food and car parts shops with garish, worn and corroded signs, all baking away in the hot, treeless and humid air.
With no disrespect to the inhabitants, it is like a sad suburb of Hell. Our friend in Atlanta expounded over the economic miracle of the South built on cheaper labour and freedom from regulation; this is the flipside of that coin. But, not to worry, when we run out of Third World countries to exploit, we can always turn to our own.

The food in Selma is terrible, so much so that I finally concluded the best and safest place to eat was Pizza Hut – the best restaurant in Selma! I suffered gastric distress for two days after eating at a Chinese buffet in search of a vegetable. We went to a highly recommended and very crowded downtown café for a lunch. It was big and it was packed, almost all white people. My tuna salad was a mound of canned tuna mixed with mayonnaise, resting on a wilted, mottled brown piece of lettuce with two pieces of Velveeta cheese-like substance and a pile of frozen French fries – which were still called Freedom Fries. When the Lovely Wife asked for milk for her coffee, a couple of packets of Cremora were tossed down. Iced tea comes pre-sweetened – with, I’m guessing here – about a half pound of sugar.
They do like things sweet in the South, also deep fried, and American as Hell.


Travel Journal 9: Selma, Part II
The trouble with Selma is not too complicated: there’s not enough money. There are a few small factories and it has undeniable tourism potential, but that’s potential, and the town is so far behind the economic eight ball it is doubtful it can get out.
Most of the tourists are African-American, coming to visit the birthplace of the modern American civil rights movement, the Edmund Pettis Bridge the site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s march to Montgomery (which is an impressively long distance, showing real commitment, not PR). Selma is also where the historic Voting Rights Bill originated and where the first African-American was elected to Congress at the close of the Civil War.
This is dying for good old American exploitation: theme parks, good quality affordable family restaurants, neighborhood beautification, entertaining history tours, big museums. and some extensive tree planting sure wouldn’t hurt.
As it is, Selma functions as another kind of museum, one which shows the sad karmic justice brought to the temporary benefactors of slavery while also showing that the civil rights struggle is far from over. Selma could, and should, be the shining example of the happy ending to a glorious struggle; instead, it reeks of failure.

Travel Journal 10: St. Stephen
When we leave Selma, it is only minutes before the landscape becomes beautiful. Tree-dotted rolling hills with horse ranches grow slowly into dark green thickly forested mountains and valleys. Birmingham is in the middle of this and is a lot more attractive than its English namesake. The mountains subside into big hills as we get near the Tennessee border, through the Florence-Muscle Shoals area, which is dominated by the huge Tennessee River and its dams and lakes. We search for Muscle Shoals and its famous recording studio, but the area is such a bewildering succession of shopping malls that we finally give up.
We are heading to The Farm, a nearly 40 year old commune in the hills of southern Tennessee, midway between the Alabama border and Nashville.
The Farm was begun by Stephen Gaskin and a multitude of followers, exploding out of the Big Bang of San Francisco in 1970, fuelled by hallucinogenic drugs, marijuana, the kindness of strangers and the overwhelming desire to make the world a better place. Steve, as we knew him then, was the original Space Cowboy and remains the most intelligent person I have ever been in the same room with.
Of course, Dr. Edward Teller and Henry Kissinger were highly intelligent too, so that doesn’t mean all that much. But Steve is and has been a good person, a positive force in the world.
We are met at the Farm gate by the tall, stick-thin figure of Stephen, looking simultaneously the same as ever and like an old man (this duality happens a lot when you grow old). When we emerge from our car and greet, Steve does appear alarmingly frail.
A little history: I met Steve first in 1965. He was teaching English, a protégé of the great semanticist S. I. Hayakawa at SF State; my roommate was his teaching assistant. We rode our motorcycles over to his flat one night, where there were several later-to-be-notable people, and I smoked pot for the first time. I desperately hoped I was doing it right, then rode home and ate a jar of cherry preserves. I subsequently have given up cherry preserves.
Steve was an early experimenter with LSD, back when it was made by the Sandoz pharmaceutical company and introduced at Stanford University, now home of the Reagan Library. He saw aspects of our existence previously unrevealed and pursued them like a true explorer. His brilliant and studious mind gave him the tools to synthesize these realizations with Einsteinian physics and Eastern religions and make sense out of it for the rest of us. He was also extremely articulate, with the then-rare awareness of the subtlety and nuance of language; he was, after all, a semanticist.
Speaking of those subtleties, I am realising the use of the past tense suggests he does not have these qualities any more. My mistake: he still does.
Which is part of the problem. As we settle into conversation, Steve is as sharp and astute as ever. I feel like my dog must feel when he watches me at the computer. But I want a conversation, a dialogue, I don’t want to be an acolyte, I failed at that 40 years ago. So I try to contribute to the conversation, but it’s not working.
The Lovely Wife says I’m being competitive. Maybe that’s true; I’d be the last to know. I think there’s another aspect. Steve was so influential on the way I think, talk and interpret, that we collide. I make the same comparisons, I extract meaning in the same ways, I make parallel allusions. It reminds me of the Chick Corea-Herbie Hancock acoustic piano album, two brilliant pianists getting in each other’s way, being over-busy, making terrible music. They lost the groove, and we have too.
The next morning it’s better. I make a slightly pathetic effort to explain myself. I realise how large Steve loomed in my life back then, how much I love him and love his influence on me, but I’m bothered by his strong identification with a particular blip in time and history, the Hippie days of San Francisco.
I am reminded of, many years afterwards, visiting the house I grew up in; it seemed so much smaller than I remembered.


Travel Journal 11: Nashville
Nashville, one of the best-known cities in the world, turns out to have the friendliness and casual pace of a small town.
Though not a metropolitan giant, it is a big city with big multi-storey buildings, big multi-lane motorways winding around them, the predictable traffic jams, and has more going than the music business. Still, the music business, along with the tourism industry it has spawned, drives the city, with Vanderbilt University, its medical school, hospital, and legions of students the other great force.
Everyone is friendly in Nashville. It is remarkable for a city constantly overrun by tourists. Of course, this may not be so if you happen to be an aspiring member of the music business, but I have no evidence, happily no longer aspiring to be a member of anything.
Music is everywhere. You walk down the main street, filled with bars, every one of them with some variation of a country band, a singer-songwriter, or some variation of a bluegrass band playing. It’s free ¬¬– there’s a tip jar by the stage – and no one hustles you to buy a drink. The performers may not all be top quality (a relief, if you were thinking you’d better hide unless you played and sang like Brad Paisley) but the good thing is, they are earnest, the music is true; they are trying to make it.
Aside from bars and the inevitable gift shops, Nashville’s main street has Ernest Tubb’s record shop and George Gruhn Guitars, two respective Holy Grails. George Gruhn’s simply has great guitar, old and new. I play a $5000 dobro and an inexpensive Beard Goldtone to compare with the Wechter Sheerhorn I’ve just bought in South Carolina. I end up quite happy with mine. The clerk is the most fun, though, a country guy who plays trumpet and turns out to have a Martin Committee, same as mine.
Ernest Tubb’s turns out to be very cool, loads of albums, vinyl and digital; everything you might have been looking for and not seen, even on the internet. And it’s friendly: the woman at the counter takes the trouble to find out who’s playing, phoning to see if we need reservations (we don’t) and telling us how to get there.
The first night we go to the Station Inn to see dobro master Rob Ickes playing in Three Ring Circle, his trio with Ricky Skaggs’ mandolin player, Andy Leftwich and session bassist Dave Pomeroy. They are unbelievably good; I want to take my dobro out, carefully put it just behind my, then back over it. They are so good, so musical, that even Lovely Wife loves it and they don’t even have a singer. There are about 30 people there sitting at long tables perpendicular to the stage and the pizza and beer is good. But the music is the best.
The next night we go to a club on the edge of town called 3rd and Lindsley to see Billy Joe Shaver, one of the last left of the Outlaw Country guys. Billy Joe is known most for his songwriting – he wrote all the songs but one on Waylon Jennings’ best album, Honky Tonk Heroes – and he really has a way with words. My favourite: “The Devil made me do it the first time, the second time I did it on my own.” He can sing fine too, and the crowd all seem to know him (“Hey Billie Joe, honey, Ride Me Down Easy!”). He’s got a crack little band with a guitarist that can do anything and make it look easy.
There’s a lot of emotion under the surface here: Billie recently lost his wife of many years, just after his son, who was also his guitar player, died of a heroin overdose. And he reportedly just shot a man in Austin – but it don’t mean much cause he was kin.
And that’s what I love about country, it’s family.


Travel Journal 12: Memphis
Memphis is not what I expected. It is an unsightly city, spread out like Los Angeles, hot and flat, warehouses and boarded-up buildings mixed with retail shops. Memphis is huge, always and still the largest city in Tennessee. Though places of interest are spread all over the sprawling town, there is a current attempt to create a downtown with a resurrected trolley connecting the more central areas. Near one end is Beale Street, the one-time hub of early jazz and blues. Now it is a hub of cheap gift shops and blaring blues-rock bands.
At the other end is another little hub that is home to the Arcade Diner, a historic eatery, still resplendent in its 50’s Formica, leatherette booths and great food. There are a couple of jazz/blues clubs, a modern espresso café, and if one rounds the corner, something ominous: the perfectly preserved Lorraine Motel, looking exactly as it did in all those news photos of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. It is part of an extensive civil rights museum now, yet another of Memphis’ great museums.
Memphis has the best musical museums and it has the best music for museums. The Memphis Rock n’ Soul Museum is far better than it sounds. Part of the Smithsonian, it thoroughly details the remarkable hybrid vigour of this city, starting W.C. Handy and Beale Street. Memphis was the first stop for jazz as it travelled up the Mississippi River; Handy was one of the first to codify jazz and blues and compose it with European-based composition and theory skills. What followed through the 20th century was an amazing cross-pollination that gave us black and white performers like BB King, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Charlie Rich, thousands of others and, of course, the giant among men, Elvis.
In an outlying urban neighbourhood, Sun Studio was the cornerstone of this black-white music explosion and – amazingly for a city that has routinely ploughed its history under – it is intact. The energetic, informal little tour is great and you can stand in the spot where Elvis sang – it is marked with an X on the floor. Bob Dylan once walked in, got on his knees, kissed the spot and walked out. Only slightly younger than Bob and never an Elvis worshipper, I still feel the same reverence.
If Sun was the first focus of musical miscegenation, Stax was the second and the more complete, The Stax Museum is one of the most amazing and heartening experiences you will encounter; it makes me proud of America. Created by white brother and sister Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, it was located in a black neighbourhood, used almost all local musicians (what a neighbourhood!) with the white musicians coming from a nearby high school. The result: house band Booker T and the MGs, the BarKays horn section, a stable of great songwriters, and hundreds of great singers coming from all over to join the Stax family. If this were the Catholic Church, Jim and Estelle and all the MGs would be saints. The country sensibility overlaid on essentially African-American music set a template, one that was quickly copied in other studios, namely Fame in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but none more successful than Stax.
Jim and Estelle were wonderful, colour-blind people, successful as humans but far less as businesspersons, and Stax stumbled along putting out great music on a shaky financial foundation that shook to bits after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Not long before that, Otis Redding had died, a huge blow in itself. You find that Otis commanded the kind of reverence and respect that jazz players give John Coltrane, a pure spirit and complete musician - even having the horn parts in his head when he wrote a song. He would sing the parts to the horn players – The Fa Fa Fa Song was so named because that was Otis singing the horn parts to the band.
Dr King’s murder brought to an end the creative partnership of Stax; white musicians no longer felt welcome on McLemore Avenue, Stax’s home. The prodigiously creative natural musical family that was Stax could no longer remain colour blind. A lot more than Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968.


Travel Journal 13: Graceland
We were leaving Memphis, in a hurry to get on to the next stop and I wanted to skip Graceland, home of Elvis. But it was on the way out of town and the Lovely Wife insisted, so to Graceland we went.
After Beale Street, I expected the Mother of All Souvenir Shops, and in that I wasn’t wrong. You park in a huge car park behind not one, but two huge gift shops. After passing Priscilla’s private jumbo jet (tour available) you wend your way through the shops and book your Graceland tickets.
Is there nothing that cannot be created in the image of Elvis? We found a lovely Elvis sink strainer, the perfect wedding present for the girl who has everything. For the suicidal, there were a couple of Elvis favourite food cookbooks. Imagine anything, anything in the world, then put a pink Cadillac or the word ELVIS on it and, voila, you are in the Graceland gift shoppe.
From the gift shops, you board a small shuttle bus that crosses the highway, goes through hallowed gates, and drops you at the front door. Then my personal transformation begins.
Graceland is small. Surely this must be a Spinal Tap dream I’m caught up in; a little Stonehenge soon to be clattering at my feet.
It’s not actually that small, but it is just a two storey home that perhaps a doctor might have – a GP, not a consultant, at that. Even a weakling such as myself could throw a rock from the front door over the not very large gates on to the highway, though Elvis would never have dreamed of doing something so wantonly destructive.
The tour of the house shows us pretty normal digs: a living room with baby grand piano, not particularly large, his parents’ smallish bedroom, dining room, large kitchen that was the heart of the house, always something cooking, always with the TV on. There’s another room off the kitchen, what we called a “rumpus room” in another era; it’s where he jammed with his musical mates.
There’s another living room in the basement, this one with mirrored ceiling, which he may well have had done because it was a low ceiling rather than for vanity. You don’t get to go up to the upper floor where his bedroom was, where his really private life was. The other floors were for friends and family.
The thing that is striking about this is that it was truly his home and reflects Elvis’ modesty much more than his extravagance. It wasn’t a Liberace-esque showplace, a trophy house. He bought it as soon as he made some money and never left it. He had his family and his friends there with him, he lived there as much as possible, he died there, and he is buried there. That’s home.

There’s a postscript to this. In one of the outbuildings, a handball court he had built that cost more than the original house, we see videos of Elvis in Las Vegas – you know, the white jumpsuit era. He looked fantastic. He was trim and fit, singing just as great as ever, possibly greater. It becomes clear that the overweight leading to death was just in the last couple of years of his life. You also realise that Elvis was always the master of his musical ship. Colonel Tom may have dominated on the business side, but he never set foot in the studio. Elvis chose all his songs, he chose his musicians, his arrangements, singing them like Otis Redding to the writers. He was his own producer and every record he made sounded the way it did because he intended it to.
Like any religion, the followers have got it wrong: he could use a lot less adoration and a lot more respect.


Travel Journal 14: The Road toTexas
We leave Memphis and Graceland much later than we planned, but it was worth it to hang around Elvis’ home and then spend an hour looking for the tackiest souvenir. We were going to drive down Highway 61, the blues trail through Clarkesville, Mississippi (the real home of the blues), Greenville and on down through other famous song title towns but we take the freeway instead. Even at that, we only get to Jackson before it’s dark
We get lost exiting the freeway, eventually finding our way to an acceptable motel, though not an acceptable eatery. We are, after all, in the South, where it seems beyond human ken to make food without toxic additives, loads of sugar and a deep-fryer. Getting a fresh vegetable is comparable to getting an egg for breakfast in France.
In the morning, we hit the road straight away. Having given up on New Orleans, we turn right, cross Louisiana about two thirds of the way up the state, pass through Shreveport, much bigger than we expected (well, we hadn’t been thinking about it that much) and enter East Texas.
You can actually tell the difference between these states from the terrain. Even in semi-northern Louisiana, the ground is flatter, lower, almost marshy after the rolling hills of Mississippi. When you get to Texas, it suddenly becomes hilly again, but dry. Not desert dry – that would be West Texas – but oak tree dry. In fact, it is lovely, with lots of wooded glens and more rivers and creeks than I would have thought. As we get further west, it does become flatter and drier.
In Rockdale, a big what would be called market town in England, we make an inspired stop. We have been longing for some real Mexican food since stepping off the boat, getting only chain restaurant burritos so far. I notice a featureless, slightly decrepit freestanding building proclaiming “Cocina Familia.” It looks perfect to me: too poor to be anything but a real, individually owned Mexican café. We are the only customers in a big, plain room with Formica tables and metal chairs, a cold cabinet full of beers and Cokes and a n excellent Mona Lisa beaded curtain. We both have huevos rancheros. The tortillas are hand made, also the salsa, the brown Tex-Mex kind, and it is mouth-wateringly delicious. Turns out to be perhaps our most satisfying meal of the entire trip. And the least expensive; I wanted to leave a 100% tip.
We are aiming for Austin, but realise it is going to be quite a stretch to make it. On the map, the town of College Station looks close enough and has many motels so we head there.
The best laid plans… College Station is a million miles out of the way and once we find it we can’t find the motel we want. It is a huge, endless suburban sprawl of chain stores and shopping centers. It is also the home of Texas A&M, a big university with a big football team playing the next day. By the time we luckily find a room, we could have driven to Austin.
We eat at a chain Mexican restaurant where it is impossible to get a small (read that as normal) portion of anything. I order a lemonade, am brought a huge glassful and when I finish it, another is placed before me, gratis. And another, and another. The chille relleno is like nothing I’ve ever seen before; caked in a thick, crispy batter, it is enormous, the size and shape of a small armadillo. And there are two of them (can’t order just one, it’s not on the computer) plus lots of rice and beans. I can’t come close to finishing it and I still feel bloated as I waddle out.


Travel Journal 15: Austin Texas
Like every city we visit, Austin is bigger than we expect. By now, we actually expect them to be bigger than we expect, so we aren’t surprised by the intertwining freeways and endless industrial foreplay.
It seemed to take forever to get to Austin, but once there, we sail right into downtown and into an older area with music shops and venues: our part of any town and we recognise this one from the movie Slacker. We go into a saloon, get a coke and ask about places to stay. It turns out the nearest place is right by the state capitol, a beautiful building looking very much like the national capitol. We find out later that it was modelled after the DC Capitol, but made a foot larger in every dimension. We’re in Texas!
It turns out Lovely Wife has a long lost cousin, Jim, in Austin and he takes us, along with son Aaron, to a vegan restaurant followed by a lovely walk along the river at night. He is vegan and has modified his car to run on vegetable oil, which he collects from restaurants. This is the thing about America: it may be the biggest world polluter and consumerist economy, but it is full of people actively trying to do something about it.
Jim sets the tone for Austin; it is a hip city. We eat our next dinner and breakfast at a Mexican restaurant that makes enchiladas with tofu, uses organic ingredients, and has a large gay clientele – sure signs of civilisation. The city is full of music of every kind and some great record stores as well. It is the home of the Whole Food Market, a nationwide chain of huge natural food supermarkets. This original one in Austin is the size of an airplane hangar. We are in Texas.
We are happy to meet up with old mates from Bath, James and Austin-born Hannah, who have a fine UK band called Venus Bogardus. Everyone in Britain always asks us “Why’d you move here from California?” and now we find ourselves asking James and Hannah “Why don’t you move your band to Austin?” It seems so much more active here, loads more gigs to play, more open attitudes to music, not the concern with what style you play or what your social group might be.
The last night we encounter a wholly different kind of music. Back in the 70s we knew, played some gigs with, lovely Wife even sang backup on a record by… The Cornell Hurd Hot Pants Orchestra. Now it’s the The Cornell Hurd Band and they’ve been a fixture on the Texas scene for decades. This is a Bob Wills-style roadhouse boogie band, nine or ten people up there on stage and they burn. It is a tremendous band with great pedal steel, great piano, great fiddle, great lead guitar from Paul Skelton, and a great rhythm section that includes a rub-board player.
Paul Skelton has been with Cornell since those 70s. He was a blazing country picker then and now he is a blazing country picker with taste and judgement; he’s like a Miles Davis of the Telecaster. Turns out he idolizes Bert Jansch; if I was Bert, I’d feel very proud to have helped create Paul Skelton.
The Cornell gig is a reminder of what music is for. It’s a dancing gig and the room is full of people who came to dance, country-style. They’re listening too, and the players make sure there’s something great to listen to. It’s not music for the music industry or for critics or hypemeisters – and all those would be me at one time or another. But I like to dance too.
Cornell was amazed to encounter us, we were amazed that he remembered. It was a good night in a good city.



Travel Journal 16 West Texas/New Mexico
Since even before the beginning of this trip, this has been the daunting portion: getting from Austin to Albuquerque, something like a thousand miles of desert, divided into two 500 mile straight lines. If ever there was a place to fall asleep at the wheel, this would be it.
This was the birth of my new appreciation for the desert. Growing up as an Anglophile Northern Californian, going to the country meant going to mountains and rushing streams with lush green forests offering plenty of shade from the hot sun.
Then I met Los Angelenos, who would say they were going to the country then would venture out to some God-forsaken expanse of unbearable heat with tufts of brown grass, an oak tree in the distance, and plenty of rattlesnakes. I thought, if they only knew…
I have now discovered “the desert” is a relative term. My dad used to say these things are like Chinese opera: it all sounds like noise unless you’re Chinese. Driving from Texas to Albuquerque has made me at least half-Chinese, then.
The West Texas Hill Country was the first revelation. Rolling hills with oak trees breaking into jagged, multi-hued mesas and dramatic, clearly glaciated desert scenery was endlessly fascinating. Of course, we are driving a smooth 80 miles an hour with delightful air conditioning instead of sixty with a water bag hanging in front of the radiator and all the windows open (that’s the past, for all you young’uns). This is the way God meant us to travel and allows us to see the beauty.
Fredericksburg is a charming small town on the way. There are banners proclaiming an organic food festival and we stop at a coffee house that roasts its own beans right there in the room with the javaphiles. It was originally a German settlement and for the most part still is.
It is when we make the big right turn and start heading north that the scenery changes to what I’ve always thought of as desert. This is northwest Texas and, boy, is it awful, just one big, completely flat plain with a few tumbleweeds, the occasional cactus and, well, that’s all. Except for the oil underneath.
The towns that are near but not on our route are Lubbock, Midland and Odessa. Lubbock was the home of several country songwriter/performers and as Jimmie Dale Gilmore explained, that happened because it was so awful there you had nothing to distract you from playing music.
Midland is where George W. Bush grew up, a town apparently built to house millionaire oilmen and their families. Odessa is only known to me as the home of the teenage girl (Hayden Panettiere) on Heroes. None of these were reason enough to visit, so we drove on through to the New Mexico border. Clovis, New Mexico is near here as well, the home, along with Lubbock, of Buddy Holly. It all seems like a great place to be from – they used to say this about Detroit too – except George W, who we wish had never left.
Very gradually, the desert vistas begin to change after entering New Mexico. There are some hills – now we’re in Carlsbad, home of the Caverns we don’t go to. We do stay overnight in Carlsbad, though, where we check into a motel with “free high speed internet access” except that it doesn’t. Nor does it have mobile phone reception, because high winds the day before had blown all the masts down. We also have a really horrible and unbelievably expensive Mexican dinner at a small family restaurant recommended by the hotel clerk. We now hate Carlsbad.
Roswell – a must-see – is next and it doesn’t disappoint. We are still in flat, no-grow territory; it’s amazing that people would ever decide to live here. Roswell has an exceptionally good-natured cheap souvenir shop scene going on. There are aliens everywhere: alien Beatle dioramas, big alien statues on the sidewalks, alien cafes, alien wedding cakes. It’s hilarious, and they know it. Later, I meet a guy on the train who rants on about the military secrets of Roswell and I think he’s like those Americans who think 221 Baker Street is a real place. I find a cool Roswell T shirt, buy it, and feel like this is the way it’s supposed to be.



Travel Journal 17: Albuquerque
I fell in love with Albuquerque.
Albuquerque is a human-sized city marked by a casual grace that makes it seem particularly liveable. This may be a characteristic of its Hispano-Mexican-Indian culture, but art in all its forms seems incorporated into life here, rather than stored away in museums, galleries and concert halls. This partly has to do with the Southwestern architecture, seen in little suburban houses and multi-storey high rises alike, and in a profusion of public art (that some people told me was due to New Mexico having an excellent Governor). But the sense of art does go deep, and it is a good feeling.
There are a lot of neon signs in Albuquerque and they look strangely beautiful in the crystal clear night air, not garish, not even self-consciously postmodern..
The city centre is a small collection of high-rise buildings in the midst of storefronts, banks and movie theatres left over from the Fifties. Suburbs of various economic levels immediately surround this smallish centre. Industry, mostly light, is removed to areas further away, leaving the impression that Albuquerque is a smaller city than it reallly is.
It is not a precious showplace like Santa Fe, full of rich people, designer adobe homes, tourists and gift shops, or like Taos, a smaller version of Santa Fe with worse traffic problems. Albuquerque has shops that sell practical things and it has several museums where you can actually learn real information. We, unexpectedly, spent most of an entire day in the natural history museum which was endlessly fascinating – and free. It even had an excellent café.
The University of New Mexico, which occupies the southeast quadrant of the town, is big, beautiful and a very good university.
There looks to be a healthy music scene as well as strong strains of environmentalism and Native American culture.
Surely there are negatives to Albuquerque; there’s probably a gang culture, there are probably those lowrider cars that bounce up and down, and one wonders where they get their water and if there will be any left in a few years. The Rio Grande flows through it, but it is rather sickly-brown and certainly not very grand.
Still, Albuquerque’s greatest appeal is that it looks like a place you’d like to live in, and that makes it a satisfying place to visit.

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