“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
jawn one.
On the deck of a hotel we are set out in the Texas sun listening to Steve Earle moving through his own voice like a fire in the house of mirrors. Hundreds of versions of him emerge at once, each of them burning larger than life… as it ought to be when you meet your heroes, I guess.
Earle talks a lot and I’m hung over, sipping orange juice and coffee from the lobby coffeeshop, and much of what he says is missed by me because of the strangeness of it all. As a teenager, I’d been transfixed and lifted and changed by Guitar Town, his 1986 major label debut. Now here we were in the late Austin morning, people noticing him/ him ignoring them but bathing RomanEmporerStyle in their fixed gazes. He talks about our band some and I’m here to admit that I forget everything he said. It was all too much for me. I think, if I’m not authentically autistic, that I have been autistic at times. I don’t say that lightly or insensitively either. My brain isn’t what I’ve always thought it was/ I’m starting to see that all this time later. At some point I do recall that he said we were “like a literate AC/DC.” I suppose that was enough really. Earle had been to prison. He’d flipped cars and been scalped by the road. He’d written songs that made me, even at a young age, feel a deep resonating voice in my guts. His music was more than music. I never cared about music as much as a lot of musicians, anyway. I cared about something else, something much different than albums or whatever. Steve Earle and me didn’t meet out on the windswept plains of songwriting or whatever. I never came close to him and frankly, no matter who you are, neither did you. Where I touched the same sun-streaked window as a Texas troubadour was somewhere in the amalgam of our respective trips to this particular place at this particular moment in time. No matter what anyone says, and bless their little tricked hearts, but I was a fake musician in most of the ways except one. My abilities and skills were practically nonexistent as was the punk ethos people assumed you had if you were playing rock/roll even in 1998, as the late stages of its lifespan rusted the iron lung keeping it alive. Earle was all the things/ the real deal/ the mad savant who smoked and didn’t smoke at the same exact time. I’ve since seen him go in to the original Primanti’s and show me and my brother how to order the sandwich with fries on it and what the fuck was happening at that moment? I still don’t know. He was ineffably human. Raw. Insane. Genius. Cocky and sweet and maybe lying at times, I never could tell. It didn’t matter. I was hungover that first time he came around at SXSW and tried to woo us to sign with his little record label, E-Squared. We had killed the night before. Or maybe we hadn’t, I don’t remember that either. I only remember bumming him smokes and watching the sky reflected in his sunglasses as he rambled on and on about people. He would say shit like, “And one time in Nova Scotia, Kris gave me his copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s first book which no one else has ever read but me and Kris and he looked at me and said, “Boy, you need to eat something,” as he passed it over.” And then he’d giggle like a kid. And if you didn’t understand that he was talking about Kris Kristofferson and that what he was saying might have happened or it might not have (50/50) and that by calling Kris Kris he was kind of fucking with you and your head, then that was all on you. Or on me, as it turned out. And after that morning, I went back to my room feeling as if I’d been given the key to something by someone who had it for real. Now I see that the thing we shared in this world wasn’t music at all. He had me outgunned from every angle with that. What we shared, I think, was a lovely kind of nervous energy which makes other people suspicious of you or maybe want to fuck you or stab you in the throat. I felt as Steve Earle was talking to me by talking right through me. Which he was and which he did. But he was him and I was me. And by us standing together on account of our band, I was lifted from my old life and set down in this other. Where I was an imposter, I guess. I think Earle knew that. But here’s the thing. He never said a fucking word to anyone. He could have, but he didn’t. And that, to me, is the greatest gift I think I ever got.
jawn two.
In a motel in Athens, Georgia, we are set to play the 40 Watt Club with Blue Mountain. We have driven here from far away. We are from Philadelphia and this is far from there/ another world really. The dirt is the color of dried bloody nose. The air is thick with slavery to us. It feels like every gas station and every pawn shop is where some Civil War skirmish was fought once. We had two rooms, I think. For four musicians and Paul, our sound guy friend. Later, Patterson Hood from Drive By-Truckers (who we hadn’t heard of yet) will be the stage hand at the club. He is kind and gentle says nice things about our performance. He wraps cables as he talks. For now though, we have a motel sink full of ice and Coronas resting in there like we think we are supposed to. Drinking hours before a gig will fall away from me rather quickly as I soon learn that it doesn’t help me at all. I gradually move towards taking my first sip of beer right when we are about to take the stage. But for now, we are young and green and we have played maybe four or five gigs outside of our hometown so here we are trying to be like the bands we have read about. The Replacements would have been drinking by now, I tell myself. Keith Richards would be having a few sips at 4 pm. So much of what we do when we are trying to be artists that matter is to imitate other artists that matter more. It seems ridiculous in retrospect but I probably drank a hundred drinks in the sunshine of the day, standing in the open doorway to some cheap motel room in some far flung town, more because I felt like I had to rather than because I actually wanted to. Plus there’s the boredom and the uncertainty of the life. No one could explain to you how you are supposed to handle these things, those heavy slow lost afternoon hours right before the internet. Down in the south. Like a fish out of water. Poor. Lonely. Excited. Radicalized by American culture. If you had spun through that lot that day you would have seen transient construction workers sitting on plastic chairs by their room doors. Half in the sunshine, half in the shade. Sipping cans of beer. Why weren’t they at work? What was happening here? It was like the start of a magnificent theater production about to kick off on Broadway. But it was real and I was starring in it and there was no audience, no paying customers. Just the lady at the front desk down the lot, behind the glass. Probably looking at me smoking another cigarette and wondering why I was even there at all. A million miles from any reasonable excuse to be wandering around like some old timey preacher, she probably saw me as I really looked that day. Small. Pale. Fragile. Dumb. Like a Philadelphia Cream Cheese someone unwrapped over by the dumpster.
“The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.”
— Jesse Owens
jawn three.
Everything for the longest time was dependent on the atlas. I had gotten us one of the nicer ones, the so-called Trucker Atlas you could find at Borders for like $20. In order to use the atlas you had to do one of two things and that was all there was to it. You either looked up where you were headed in the morning before you hit the highway or you handed it over to someone else in the van and hoped they would be able to help decipher things before exits flew by and mistakes- hard to correct- came down. The Trucker Atlas was bent and squeezed by many hands. It became stained with splashed coffee. Great Lakes had brown spots. Plops of dried out Horsey Sauce painted themselves over legendary mountain ranges and sometimes people would scribble things on the borders of Oklahoma or Nevada or Massachusetts. Load In at 6:15. Or Call Dickman. Or Matt H + 1 for L.A. Sometimes I would take the atlas into the motel room with me in the evening. I did all the driving for the entire time I was in Marah. This was partially so that I felt safe, but also very much so I could avoid the dire anxiety that comes over me when someone else is driving. In the bathrooms, I would turn on the hot shower and let the steam jam the room like mountain morning trapped in a phone booth and I’d pick through the pages and stare down at the places I had been to, or the places we were headed. It is one thing in this world to look at St. Louis on a map and wonder what it would be like to see her, but it is something entirely different to look at it and understand that tomorrow, for the very first time and maybe the only time in your life, you will steer the van right through her on your way out west. Like Lewis and Clark, I’d tell myself. Serge and Dave. Lewis and Clark. Over and out. Up, up and away. That book of maps was something magic. But never again.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
