18. Big Ears In Knoxville
The Year of Paying Attention
[March 2017.] Daughter Lizzie turns 27 today, making this the first day of her 28th year. My wife Sarah told me her father figured his age the way one does a horse — a thirteen-month-old colt is a two-year-old. I sang Happy Birthday into my phone and sent it to Lizzie. After awhile I sent another text — did she like it? Time passed. I sent a third — did she hate it? I noticed I was stalking her, and stopped.
When I’m alone in my apartment, I talk aloud to myself. Not continuously, but regularly. When I mentioned this to two friends, one said, “You do?” as if I were demented. “Don’t you?” I asked. The other smarter, more attractive friend said, “I do that all the time!” I don’t believe the first “friend.” Everybody does this all the time — I bet you do. It’s okay. You needn’t confess. A few days later I caught myself doing it and instantly texted that superior friend: “As I wander around amusing myself aloud alone in the apartment, I remember you may be doing the same thing.”
“Ha! I most certainly was. Basking in the feast of one’s own imagination is a sign of profound sanity! (I hope…),” she texted right back. Last night I told Sarah about this and she said, “You do?” like I was demented. “What do you say when you’re talking to yourself?” I said I couldn’t remember. I told her I would start writing it down. A few hours ago, I noticed I was speak-singing along to a Bob Dylan song. I made a mental note, and realized this self-monitoring changed the experience. Not long after, I lost track of a cup of tea, and began quizzing myself in Spanish: “Donde esta mi té? Yo no se! Yo no se donde esta mi te! Ah, bueno –il te es aqui!” Finding the tea in out-loud Spanish had improved the whole experience. But noticing my behavior put a damper on it. Why was I butting in on a private moment with myself?
Not long after, I was studying a hand-tinted photo of my parents on their wedding day, my father John in his Army uniform, a nice young man who could have been an entry-level hire at my last job, and my mother Mary, holding roses, in a smart suit and a hat decorated with feathers. My parents are in their 20’s. Mary Warfield is probably around the age of my daughter today. Alone with my dead parents, looking for a new spot to put the picture, I started singing a little made-up song, using their names as the lyric. Nobody thinks it odd when a three-year-old makes up a little song on the spot, about a favorite stuffed animal. So you can shut up. And I’m done with this self-observation, noting my mildly looney behavior. No doubt I inherited this from my father, who regularly acted crazy to amuse his grandkids, or my mother, or me or my sisters, and always himself. If Lizzie the birthday girl calls me back, I’ll ask her if she’s been singing to her cat or talking to her vacuum cleaner, because we may well share a genetic trait, traveling down the DNA highway towards our ecccentric future.
***
I really love New Orleans, but this year I’m not going. I was not yet forty the year I moved to Illinois to work for The Oprah Winfrey Show, and that spring I flew for the first time to New Orleans for Jazzfest, properly called The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. I mostly hated my job in Chicago, working for a cruel psychopath who reported to Oprah. I sorely missed my friends in New York, a group of whom agreed to meet me in the Big Easy. Native son Don Jefferson was going to find all of us a great place to rent for the long weekend! Back then I was still drinking, so there’d be plenty of that! And that first trip I had a great time, as far as I can remember, and so I kept going back, every year, even after I quit drinking. Being in New Orleans was still great, frankly better without the booze, because I wasn’t killing myself.
After a decade, I started visiting New Orleans outside of Jazzfest, usually for work, and discovered I love the city even more when it isn’t teeming with tourists like me, jamming the restaurants and trying the patience of the locals. From my first visit, I fantasized about living here. A quarter century later, this wish feels urgent — I’m healthy, my schedule is my own —and how long can that last? All that said, I’m trading Jazzfest for something unknown.
Which is why, instead of landing at Louis Armstrong International, Sarah and I were picked up from the McGhee Tyson Airport, named after a lost WWI pilot. Our driver told us he was new to Uber, and to Knoxville, where The Big Ears Festival attracts fans of new and experimental music for a jam-packed few days. Our driver shared his tale of adversity and triumph — the job he lost in Louisiana, the anti-nepotism rule that kept him from working alongside his father-in-law, the reversal of fortune when the old man retired, and the second about-face when new owners took over. He told us definitively that the people are nicer and the weather better in Knoxville than in Baton Rouge. When we pulled up to our motel, he stayed behind the wheel, not helping us haul the luggage out of his minivan. Pulling her bag to the reception desk, Sarah asked, “Is that an Uber thing? They don’t take your bags out of the trunk?” I suggested that maybe he didn’t want to appear pushy, like he was trying to get rid of us.
To convince Sarah to come to Big Ears I added a brief tour of the American South to the itinerary, Mississippi and Alabama after Tennessee. A couple years back I’d dragged her to Jazzfest, and discovered Sarah didn’t share my enthusiasm for trudging from stage to stage for countless hours of live music. Truth be told, Jazzfest is challenging. Since my first Fest in 1991, it’s grown increasingly crowded, booking big-name performers to promote ticket sales. In recent years I’d find myself schvitzing and fed up with the dense Saturday afternoon crowd, fidgeting on an endless line to a nasty port-a-potty, while some stadium-rock band blared from the main stage. That’s it, enough, I’d decide on day three, no more, I’m too old for this. But the one year I stuck with my decision to skip it, I read a newspaper article by my friend Marc (he of the Women’s March), describing all the performances I’d missed, and I thought, that’s it, I blew it, I can’t miss that again, what’s a little mob scene and a smelly plastic toilet when there’s also the Gospel Tent and Zydeco Night at Rock ’n’ Bowl?
Big Ears promised to cancel out my NOLA FOMO, and offered a smaller, weirder experience (although I knew the food would be inferior.) I’d convinced my friend Peter, the artists book guy who listened to even more avant-garde music that I do, to drag his artist wife Julie to Knoxville, and the four of us would have a great time marching from venue to venue for a lot of strange, acclaimed, unpopular music.
While we waited for the New Yorkers to arrive, Sarah and I found a Japanese restaurant crowded with musicians and groovy looking individuals, eating and chattering, clearly in town for Big Ears, toting instruments and pulling wheelie bags. Looking around I felt a little wistful — that was me, 30 years ago. I still shared their excitement, and the food turned out to be excellent. Who needs New Orleans?
***
I love everything about Carla Bley, and have since I was seventeen, when a multi-record box set called Escalator Over The Hill came out, with a few musicians I knew (Linda Ronstadt, Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin) and a lot I didn’t. It was strange and great. The last of its six sides ended in a spiral loop-the drone that concluded the record never ended. Back then Bley had a super-cool haircut, a deadpan affect, and she composed, arranged and led bands with the hippest musicians in New York. In the beautiful, gaudy Tennessee Theater, there she was again, with her super-cool haircut, now in her late seventies, her long arms and legs terribly thin, conducting a pickup big band with a couple of ringers — her musical and romantic partner, electric bass player Steve Swallow, and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, members of her long-standing trio. During the show Bley told the audience she was so happy to be at Big Ears, her first time (me too, Carla!), commended the orchestra (“Pretty good, right?”), and introduced a composition which had been inspired in part by the music of The Salvation Army bands.
“We were happy to learn that some of tonight’s players have performed in Salvation Army bands. They’re comfortable with this music,” she said without irony. I watched Steve Swallow gazing at his musical and romantic partner as she directed the orchestra, rising from the grand piano, her stretched-out fingers shaping the sound she wanted. The music was witty, and it got dark and brooding as the show went on. The last, long piece ended on a quiet, held chord, unresolved, like the ways things are these days.
An hour later in the smaller, funkier Bijou Theater down the street from The Tennessee, a guy who looked to be around my age (early sixties, but how can that be?) was wearing a cardboard hat he’d constructed from beer six-pack carriers. He was excited to catch me up on his Big Ears experience, both this year and last. He raved about the artist we were waiting to hear, a singer-songwriter-guitarist named Shara Nova who performs as My Brightest Diamond. He didn’t think much of Bley’s performance (wrong), and had scrambled to another venue for some Philip Glass music. He was a bit manic, and did I mention he was sporting a six-pack hat? I thought, am I like this guy? Am I a crazy guy too? He wandered off.
My Brightest Diamond turned in a riveting performance, and before she left the stage, Nova said she was heading to the last show of the night, so of course, I too was going, despite it being well past my bedtime. Sarah and I slogged to the next venue, to discover there were no seats, just a crowd standing cheek by jowl around the performers, and I was done, done standing, done listening, done anything but sleeping. My dogs were barking all the way back to the motel, where I curled up next to a conked-out Sarah to read a few pages of Peter Guralnick’s Feel Like Going Home, a forty-five-year-old collection of essays, just the book to read in Tennessee, about country and city blues and Sun Records and the musicians who mesmerized the author from an early age.
Next week: The Chill-Out Tent In Hades
