We met the Allstars’ tour bus at dawn, Dickinsons, Burnsides, Turners, stage crew, film crew, and a Mississippi lawyer on the road to Bonnaroo Music Festival. We were two races and three generations met in brotherhood to rob the train. R. L. Burnside, godfather of the Hill Country blues, was in good spirits, wearing a ball cap that stated “Retired” instead of his usual “Burnside Style” slogan. His wife, “Big Mama,” was ready to party. Across the state of Tennessee our Silver Eagle flew the backroads, avoiding the traffic of 95,000 souls descending on the little hillbilly community to celebrate life and music.
Mid-afternoon the bus parked at Motel 6, and we shuttled to the festival grounds, parting a sea of humanity, and chilled backstage until showtime. In the hospitality tent a retro-hippie girl came up and asked Mary Lindsay if she was really Mountain Girl. Mary Lindsay thanked the girl for the compliment as her stunning white curls blew in the Tennessee breeze. We were treated like royalty. The festival promoters had constructed a wooden throne with a red velvet seat and and padding for R. L. Burnside to sit on stage as we played. My sons’ band, the North Mississippi Allstars, joined by R. L. Burnside, his son Duwayne on guitar, three other Burnsides, four surviving members of Otha Turner’s Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, keyboardist Jo Jo Herman from jam band giants Widespread Panic, and myself on keyboard. We stomped ass. We rocked like a La-Z-Boy recliner on the back porch of some backwoods double-wide. This was my son Luther’s vision realized. A traveling Dream Carnival of Southern culture and lifestyle evolved from the Memphis Country Blues Festival of the sixties, the punk rock/blues fusion of the nineties, Otha Turner’s goat Bar-B-Q picnics, and Sunday nights at Junior Kimbrough’s Juke Joint, joined on stage by Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes as a shadow of things to come.
Chainsaw guitars scream in the night and church organs moan like a fat country girl in love. Drums thunder-roll like the circus from Hell is coming to town. Sounds echo like two freight trains trapped in the same tunnel, running head-on for Doom’s Day. Phantom riders patrol the darkness, sabers drawn. Trembling in their ancient graves, the Confederate dead lie restless for Revelation’s final conflict.
The set was like Mudboy on steroids. Field drummers and Hill Country rappers mixed in gumbo jam of Jujuka warriors at the rise of the full moon. The audience snake-danced in full-trance bond—like a huge, sweating reptile god, undulating to the magic of the cumulative song of the South—beyond time and space. Song from my own musical past handed down father to son in the way of all true knowledge in culture.
Later I was told the temperature reached 140 degrees on stage. I hid behind Cody’s drum riser on one of the trio songs and smoked a joint, trying to hang on. I made it through the insanity of “Snake Drive,” the encore, and staggered off stage like a drunken sailor on sea legs. I stumbled into one of the courtesy tents and that’s when the lights went out. As Philip Marlowe once said, “A black hole opened up at my feet and I fell in. There was no bottom.”
When I semi-woke up, Luther and some of the Turner crew were dumping me into the back of a pickup truck. Luther knew not to take me to the festival medical tent, which was full of brown acid and ecstasy O.D. victims. Thank God.
“I’ve been carried out of better places than this,” I told my son. They took me back to the motel room. I drifted in and out of so-called consciousness. A bottle of water and a fat joint later I thought I might live. I lay there with my wife watching me like a mother hawk protecting her nest. We were supposed to meet Bob Dylan at his stage after our set. Sorry, Bob. Not today.
Ghosts floated around the bed. Time shifted and swirled together in a milieu of past memories. Laughing phantoms circled me like the trinity of Christmas spirits that haunted Scrooge, both Ebenezer and McDuck. Alec Teal was there dressed up for a funeral or a Saturday night craps game. My mother and father joined together in the eternal night of death. Randy Moore danced by singing, “Once in Love with Amy.” The organ grinder and his tireless monkey with Two Ton Baker playing a piano on bicycle wheels. Froggie the Gremlin, “Li’l music box is running down. KERPLUNK!” Captain Midnight trying in vain to decode the chaos of my gradual return to so-called reality. “What’s the matter, Dickinson? Can’t you take it anymore?” They chanted in unison. “Getting old?” Charlie Freeman drifted by wearing his sunglasses, headed for the vocal booth to pass out. Time passes and people change. Junior’s Juke Joint has burned to the ground. The world of Otha Turner is passing away, but it will not be gone. Like images scratched on the back wall of some prehistoric cave, the reverberations communicate with the future—immortality—an act of communion. I have stared into the void of the pit, like Knox Phillips at Mark Unobsky’s funeral, looking down into the empty grave. What if anything waits on the other side of the closed door?
As the Allstars’ tour bus rolled back to Mississippi on what seemed like an endless journey, I was afraid to sleep. Afraid of not waking up. It seemed to take forever to skirt the perimeter of Memphis, the ancient City of the Dead.
Finally at dawn my wife and I walked up the driveway too narrow for the Silver Eagle, up the gravel path to our two-trailer home in front of the red barn studio compound. I felt the weight of my history pressing down on my aching body. Our basset hound greeted us with tail wagging and huge ears flapping, asking, “Where have you been?” Where indeed? Glad to be alive and home, I slept.
Blind Lemon and the Hook Man
stand face to face and fight it out
face to eyeless face
misty formless ghosts of the early greats.
The campfire flickers spinning shadows into the dark.
Ghosts whisper.
Too briefly trapped in the moment, we struggle to understand
In Faith we sing
play your song forever
no surrender–no defeat
As surely as the dawn there comes another night
Reach out in the darkness
In the Coldwater bottoms, prowling panthers scream like a woman. Secret bones of ancient outlaw phantoms stir in the thick, red mud of the riverbed, as grandfather catfish circle silent in the green water. Evening rain has left the air thick and steam rises from the dark, mossy earth, bubbling up from what unknown caverns. The sun bobbles like a fishing cork, as it sinks into the cypress trees along the levee and finally slips below the horizon. It’s showtime.
Time, the River, and Death—
The river moves in mystery, carrying unknown substance beneath the surface, under the level of perception. Perfectly as the patterned maze of night sky moves, destruction, creation, and infinity, ordered to filter out never too much or too little, retaining the balance like the river secrets deep in the mud, order is kept below the currents. Meaning moves noiselessly, slowly without wave. Time is around us, singing, and behind us pushing, the past urging us on.
Deep down in the earth in each place the old has lost its battle to the invader change. Every tribe builds its monuments to fall; its fortress for the fight each has lost in turn. Graves remain where the new stand on the old. Each old thing not gone, built on another’s foundation, deep down in the earth. Change is slow.
Time passes like the river, moving and flowing the same muddy way. Out across the night, there is no past. Everything is still. The ghost of time walks infinitely and settles in the about-to-happen. The same unending path. No one can tell when the present slips into the past. Each man is alone within himself for a brief life, as every father before him. Each holding a piece and passing it on. Each the possessor of time, only that long within his soul-skin. Coming to the end, stained and broken, he will wring out the life with his own hands, with no answers given. The heart breaks from the not-knowing.
Below the stream of all that time, I was carried along slowly, barely moving, time swirling all around. There under the shift, order carries us, not too fast or too slow, until death comes on wings of crepe and performs its endless ritual duty.
The body feels the pain, but it is the soul that cries out. What I have tried to express—the output—music, painting, theater, written experiences …? Has it all in the long run only added to the frustration? Still looking for the outlet. The point of departure. There have been moments. Long passages with Mudboy or with Cooder and Keltner. Nights on stage with the phony Mar-Keys or Sleepy John Estes. Recording with Dylan or the Stones. Shouldn’t they add up? Or do they subtract? Is there less every time rather than more? Where does the payback come from? What recharges the battery? Is rebirth the miracle of nature or just another trick to keep you going until you finish the game? Winning? Nobody wins. It’s not a race. Things you accomplish fade out into the horizon, to a point in space that becomes unperceivable, nothing. Fate, Karma, God’s plan, dumb luck. Call it yo’ ol’ Mama if you want to. It’s like looking for meaning in the stars. Surely it’s there, but no one understands it. Chinatown. To read the secret message you must know the code, have a decoder badge. Three up and four down. Major triad over an octave. That’s the only place I know to start.
It’s not that I know; it is that I no longer wonder.
Long is the road to the true Negro bebop. Unending is the search for Blind Lemon. Out there somewhere some sad kid pours his broken life into a three-chord pattern. Some white kid discovers Howlin’ Wolf. Some black kid finds the Doobie Brothers. Keith Richards goes to Switzerland to change his blood and snort the ashes of his father up his nose. You got to finish the set. If it comes down to it, what better way to go than the Country Dick Montana exit? Teenage Steve saved the bass sax for his last note. I have taught many a young musician—my sons included—to play every note like it’s your last one because one of them will be.
Life and love are short and sweet with a long reflection
Pour some on the floor for fallen friends and heroes—
Soldiers of the Cross. +
Chariots a comin’ to carry us home
or is it the hoodoo wagon
the drinks are on the house
I still dream about music. Every morning I wake up with a different song in my head. I used to relive my gigs in dreams the night after the job. My dreams have become more abstract. I have a recurring ending that fits into always changing dreams about a Mar-Keys gig. It takes place downtown on what is now South Bluff. It is in the early sixties and Charlie Freeman and I are walking across the old Red Ball Truck lot toward Hopie Brooks’s orange “A” frame by the Illinois Central train tracks down by the river. Sometimes Packy is with us. We are looking for something. We are distracted by a fat gypsy man with a bullwhip who is chasing two runaway elephants. The gypsy has a black handlebar moustache and looks like one of the Mario Brothers. The elephants look like Dumbo’s mama. The gypsy chases the elephants to the railroad bridge north of the Harahan. He is yelling curses and laughing. The fleeing elephants climb up into the steel girders of the old bridge, wild-eyed and trembling in fear. I wake up hearing “I Remember You” by Charlie Parker.
Message from the last of the great barbarians:
The world of Otha Turner will pass away but it will not be gone. Like the scratches on the rock wall of some prehistoric cave, the recordings we leave behind are our immortality, our means of communicating with the future. This is an act of communion between you and us. Though we are separated by time and space as you listen, we are together.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the Hills …”
Psalm 121