We’re driving East on an interstate somewhere in Tennessee, I-40, drawing a straight line betwixt Memphis and Nashville – big name places where we play little name places. Coffeehouses and simply houses. Both places see us staying with old, old, old friends, old old old romantic interests back when breakups were the end of the world and back before Lives really got entangled enough that such overwrought emotions were warranted.
It’s an interesting comparison – but probably not one that I’ll delve into terribly thoroughly on a public forum, but high school romance is definitely squirreling around in my head, because all my exes Live in… Tennessee!
The air is humid and thick despite the beauty of yesterday – it seems all the breezy beauty of Thursday is long gone and we’re just swimming through soup-like, blood-like air. I’m reading the history of Fort Pillow as we pass it and it’s not nearly as humourous as the moniker of Bedford vs Fort Pillow would imply. Of course, the he-said second-hand 150 year-old hearsay reportage means you have no idea what really happened, but any way you cut it nothing that happened with the Civil War was pretty. It’s still unimaginable to me that so much blood has been spilled on our soil.
My friend Meg is, was and always will be a dragon. Dragon paintings, dragon sculptures, she’s loud and fiery and has a dragon begonia in the front window, a plant that I can find nowhere else and is presumably a proprietary breed because it THRIVES under her care. Her backyard is absolutely aggressively organic with massive trees overgrown by massive vines and hidden swings and iron lawn furniture threatened at all sides by the encroaching greenery. I spent some time getting band work done surrounded by the churring sound of insects, the keening of alien birds, the sweet whisper of rising winds, windchimes and the drama of distant thunder. It’s idyllic and primordial and feels only marginally under control, and you can imagine the house being consumed in a matter of days without constant anti-vegetable vigilance.
Memphis is one of those central cities with a huge lineage, sitting right on the Mississippi River, right on the Mississippi Blues Corridor, that we’ve never really explored. We’ve driven through ONCE but last night was the first time we managed to play anywhere and even that was just an exploratory open mic prod. Though the open mic itself was much more coffeehouse / poetry-oriented we met a couple of people that’ll probably really give us that little chink into Memphis that we need, and the neighbourhood itself, Cooper-Young, was amazing. I mean – two used bookstores (one of which was EXCLUSIVELY sci-fi and fantasy!), a place to adapt a whole chowder of cats, a comic book store, a wonderful coffeeshop, at least three places audibly hosting Live music, a HUGE drum store PLUS sushi and soul food all in two blocks? This is heaven on frakking EARTH.
If global warming / politics / dinosaur incursion / rising cost-of-Living leads to us abandoning the coast Memphis is one of the top-ten cheapest places to Live AND it sure seems amazing. At least within these two blocks. The old-time religion in the area even seems a little relaxed… like… the local Christian bookstore seems to have lowered their profile becoming “just” “Christian Bookstore” rather than it’s former more provocatively evocative branding of “Ram In Bush”.
It was interesting, sitting in the local soul food diner spot, watching numerous same sex and mixed-race couples filter past, thinking about how this seems a lot friendlier and broad spectrum than back home. Yeah, it’s just one neighbourhood but it sure feels like how things OUGHT to be. Some old grizzled guy jamming out “Little Wing” around a fire pit, a little three-person band playing “Sultans of Swing”, the coffeehouse insisting on originals only but with that awesome spread that only a coffeehouse open mic can have with a teenager worrying that her poem about suicide is “too dark, I mean… trigger
warning I guess?” adjacent to an old man with a gravelly blues voice and some guitar chords that I didn’t even recognize pushing out an anti-gun violence tune… a traveler from Georgia, a child so hyped up on caffeine and chocolate that I feared for her parents’ safety … a tiny bathroom made even tinier by at least a half inch accumulation of posters and fliers and pinned notices on all sides. I’m eager to start working on the next tour, eager to have Memphis be a part of it.
We’ve got one last musical excursion on the docket, and we’ll be rolling into my friend Whitney’s place in the next hour and a half to start putting that together. House concert in Nashville with our friend Josh Gray and then tomorrow Kristen and I just start wending our way home. We’re going to make a long haul on Saturday to position ourselves for a more leisurely drive on Sunday and Monday – literally packing into Saturday what would ideally be a two-day drive so that we can stretch would could be a four drive over a luxurious 2 day spread. Skyline Drive shall well and truly be driven!
And then we get to be home for about 96 hours before heading back out to Erie, PA…
