“A Tipping Up and Putting Down”
It’s the first weekend I’ve had in about two years. It’s not like the recent past has been one long party, but the days have had a tendency to blend together, Saturday being no different from Tuesday and that sad, depressing feeling on Sunday afternoons is something I’ve forgotten. I suppose tomorrow I’ll be getting in touch with it once again. This morning laying in bed was odd: it was just before seven and the voice of discipline was telling me, “get up you lazy bum, shower, eat and then head to the coffee shop and WRITE!” But then there was another voice that said, “wait, wait, wait, enjoy the morning, take your time, don’t hurry. You worked hard this week.”
Soon both voices collapsed into a cacophony of dialogue and argumentation, most of which was about the show I saw last night.
Darrell Scott played at the Cactus Cafe and it was one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s for several years now. I’m not sure what it is about his music that moves me and touches me so. I grew up decidedly upper middle class: my father is a CPA and my mother was an executive with the State Government. Early in life we lived on a farm, but as my father’s career took off we sold it and moved into the city. Of course, we never really struggled–sure after the divorce things were rough for a couple of years, but we never wanted for much. So, it’s odd that Scott’s songs of working men and women, bruised and scarred lives, filled with doubt, alcohol and disappointment capture my imagination the way they do. (Oh, there are more reasons for this, but reasons I’m not willing to disclose just yet. Disclose is not the best word here: it’s story I’ll tell in due time, just not yet.)
Perhaps it’s kind of like my attachment to Bukowski and his story as well. Singing songs and writing poems about the hard edges of life in modern America. I certainly think a lot of it is due to the fact that while I went to school in Austin as a child, I was bussed over to the East-side schools and I learned early on that I could relate to anyone; anyone’s pain, or joy for that matter. I learned early on in life to value all life as a triumph of experience over hope–that the simple act of enduring for many people is vindication enough, like Faulkner’s ‘puny, inexhaustible voice’ echoing loudly at the ‘last ding-dong of doom . . . still talking.’ And while hope is that most essential of ingredients to life, in my opinion, and I have much–ever the eternal optimist am I!–for many hope is luxury they can ill afford. It’s the divergences that make life so rich, so potent and so full of potential.
But, I digress, back to Darrell Scott.
I smiled most of the show. It was just Darrell and his guitar up on stage telling stories. About half way through the show Scott played my favorite song of his, called “Uncle Lloyd:”
He was not my father’s brother
But he wished that he could be
Told us kids to call him uncle
And we would be his family
He had a wife and kids in Fresno
The youngest one was twenty-four
Dad had brought him into our house
They didn’t want him anymoreHe helped us work the family business
Building fences in the sun
Worked just like a man of twenty
‘Til the working day was done
He and Dad would spend their evening
Sitting in lawn chairs in the yard
Where they’d drink a toast to Seagram’s
Seagram’s never went down hardWon’t you wake up Uncle Lloyd
Got a lot of work today
We’ll get Don to make the coffee
Load that truck and be on your way
Friday night you can drive to Vegas
Maybe this time you will win
Buy a trailer by the river
And you won’t have to work againHe was sleeping in the workroom
With a mattress on the floor
When one night I heard him crying
As I passed outside his door
He cried, “Rita, girl I love you
Rita, Darling please don’t go
I’ve tried hard to make you happy
I’ve done everything I know”Then I heard the bottle open
The tipping up and putting down
Heard the rustling of the covers
Then he did not make a sound
I thought of thirty years of Rita
Standing sternly by his side
All the years of hanging in there
All the emptiness insideThen I thought of how their children
Have children of their own
And how a man at fifty-seven
Winds up living so alone
In so few words Scott tells the story about a broken man, who finds solace in his friends and his friend’s family. The most potent single word in the entire song is “want: when they didn’t want him anymore.” It sets up the entire story, the fulcrum the song launches out to us from, for us to earn it, or own it or just drink away our sorrows with. Sometimes people just don’t want us anymore and we become discarded like things. It’s this human land-fill which Scott mines for his best songs.
The whole night was like this: a veritable story-tellers feast. He played his standards, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” and “My Father’s House.” But it was “Banjo Clark” which blew me and the rest of the audience away: it was the consummate skill with which Scott played the guitar, one of the most amazing acoustic guitar solos I’ve ever had the pleasure to listen to. It was rich, not limited to any single genre, a touch of folk here, a pluck or two of jazz, bluegrass spilling off the frets and then the ever present Scott mix of blues and country. There were moments between verses where he just got lost picking away at the guitar, strumming, picking, plucking, hands moving up and down the rosewood-fretboard like a man finding love between the steel frets and the mother of pearl inlay, dare I say he was making love to the guitar. There wasn’t anything self-indulgent about the music, at all: even while he was lost in the music he carried the entire audience right along with him. Seldom do I leave a venue with such a large smile on my face. I felt like I’d been in the hands of a master-story teller, or better yet, a Celtic bard in the Middle Ages.
If you ever get a chance to see Scott do an acoustic set don’t miss it. Trust me on this one.