Money is tight again. Money is always tight. The interview is in a couple of hours. Roar of the northern line and the shine of the shoes to Kentish Town, nod nodding—mouth slack and wide—a relaxed kind of autumnal mood. The leaves are turning and covering the ground in yellows, browns, and oranges, masking the dog shit and the used condoms and the crushed cans of Tennent’s. The city is almost beautiful.
His name was Brian Stoker. An old, overweight man who huffed and puffed through his nasal passages as if it were a kind of tick or nervous habit—like he was trying to dislodge some particularly persistent mucus. The office of the magazine was in his terraced house in a suburban North London street, and it seemed as if the place had not been cleaned or redecorated in some years. The carpets were brown and threadbare. The computers used to produce the magazine where cumbersome and outdated. There was a composite smell of mothballs, stale tobacco smoke, mildew, and ancient jizzum in crackling yellow Kleenex. I shook his hand, and he offered me a seat.
He regarded me silently for a while. I had made sure not to get too high before the interview so I could remain alert and enthusiastic about this new employment opportunity. Our money was low. We were facing the choice of heroin or rent this week, and I wasn’t looking forward to being homeless again.
“Do you like country music?” he asked me eventually.
“Oh sure,” I lied. “I like all types of music.”
“I mean real country music. Not the shit that they’re peddling in Nashville these days. The real stuff. Bluegrass. That kind of thing.”
I started to warm up. I have an amazing ability to bullshit potential employers when my back is against the wall. My father went through a period of listening to old country. The Irish like country; they even have their own horrible “country” bands who play an unholy genre known as country and Irish—watered-down country standards mixed with Irish folk, usually performed by a perma-grinning fool in a tuxedo, wielding an accordion like an instrument of musical destruction. Suddenly my mind was able to pluck out a few of the names my father had mentioned.
“Oh sure, I know what you mean. I can’t stand new country. The stuff I know is Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Charley Pride…those kinds of people.”
“That’s right!” my potential boss enthused, warming to me. “The new stuff is nothing but pop music! Real country couldn’t get played on Nashville radio these days!”
“My father is a big country fan,” I carried on, “so that’s the music I listened to growing up.”
Although not strictly a lie, this was a tremendous exaggeration. My father’s country period lasted a year or two. At heart my father didn’t really like music any more than he liked any of the arts. I recall him visiting a cinema once in my childhood, a trip to see a matinee of E.T., and even then he left halfway through to get a beer next door before returning for the credits. My father can proudly say he has never read any book apart from instruction manuals and how-to books. And music was just something to be on in the background when there was nothing to watch on TV.
Brian was asking me, “So you just got back from America, you say? What took you over there?”
“Work,” I told him, the lies falling from my mouth effortlessly. “And an urge to travel. I worked at a music magazine in Los Angeles. It was a fun time, but I missed London. It was time to come back.”
Brian got up, excited, and put a CD on. It was possibly the most excruciating music I had ever heard. It was a 1920s field recording of the “world-famous” yodeling cowboy Chip McGrits. I grinned and bobbed my head enthusiastically. Brian sat down and half-closed his eyes, dreamily listening to the crackly recording of the old dead bastard yodeling over fiddles and banjos. I was hit with the revelation that if funk was the logical conclusion to black music, then here was its white counterpart. After suffering through a couple of songs Brian informed me that I had the job and could start straight away.
I was employed for the first time in years, and it did not feel too great.
The hustle was this: Stoker produced a magazine that had various reprinted (without permission) articles from American country magazines and a few slim efforts penned by himself and some of his other wheezing, gray-haired friends in the London country scene. But the main body of the magazine was taken up with advertisements and reviews. It was my job to call people up and get them to advertise. I made a base salary, cash in hand, and a percentage of the advertising revenue.
Even for this kind of hustle it was despicably small-time. The only money the magazine made was in the reviews. Every day piles of CDs would arrive at the house for review in the magazine. The only people who bought the magazine were people who were reviewed in it. However, we would review anybody as long as they took out an advertisement in the magazine to peddle their wares. No advertisement, no review. The bigger the advertisement, the more enthusiastic the review. It was pathetic.
I spent most of my time in the bathroom shooting up. The lime-green tiles, the noise of Stoker’s music, and my blood flooding into the barrel. Then, full of drugs and good feelings, I would swagger into the office and start hitting up people for money on the phone.
After two weeks I was moved out of the office and into Stoker’s garage. He called it the “back office” but it was just a garage, a damp storage space piled high with unsold copies of the magazine in rotting brown cardboard boxes, a meager strip of carpeting, some electrical outlets, and a phone. I didn’t mind so much. It was good to be away from the music.
I was obviously better at selling than most of Stoker’s previous employees. I knew that I could make at least two sales a day—to keep him happy—and the rest of the time I could nod out in the back office, with the portable radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The voices of the reporters lulled me into very gentle space. Some of the people I called from Stoker’s decade-old list screamed abuse when they heard my voice. One in particular started yelling hysterically when I said I was from Traditional Country Music Monthly.
“Stop calling here!” he yelled. “Every two weeks some new idiot calls me from your magazine asking me to advertise. I advertised once three years ago and it did nothing! I do not want to advertise with you again! Remove my name from your list, idiot!”
This guy’s deal was accordions. He repaired them, sold them, reconditioned them. I didn’t like his tone so I made a point of calling him at least twice a week and acting as if it were the first time I had ever called him, and I had no idea that he didn’t want to be solicited anymore. Eventually a woman started answering the phone and I lost interest, as I couldn’t provoke her into yelling abuse at me.