Do you remember in the day
All our crazy summer ways
And those guys that were our friends?
The red and yellow windy falls
When we seemed to have it all
And it was never gonna end
The girls we loved that came and went
All the idle time we spent
Playing records that we’d borrowed
Now it kinda hurts to think
Every time I take a drink
That this would be tomorrow
—“In the Day” (Thornton/Davis)
STARTING IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, A LOT OF MY FRIENDS WERE BLACK. I was fucked with at school about hanging out with them, but music is where I connected with the black kids. I was in a band that formed from a band called Blue and the Blue Velvets, which was all black except for me. It was a band called Hot ’Lanta, which was about half and half. Actually, all through high school—up until I was about twenty—I played in either all-black or part-black bands.
We lived near downtown, in the white part of town, which was just a main street with a Western Auto, an Otasco, and a Ben Franklin. Unlike the black neighborhoods, the white neighborhoods weren’t named. You just lived out on Highway 9 or you lived “in town”—unless you were a doctor or a dentist or something like that. Then you’d live with your family in our one rich neighborhood, Reedwood. You might look at one of these Reedwood houses today and say, “I could set that goddamn house in my kitchen,” but back then we thought the houses in Reedwood were fucking mansions.
I tried to get every Reedwood chick I could. For some reason rich chicks always liked me. I guess to them I seemed like some kind of rebellious, edgy guy. I was an innocent kid in a lot of ways, but I was also the kid who got into fights.
We were poor people who lived pretty close to the tracks in Malvern, near the black neighborhoods. There was West End, East End, a neighborhood called Cross the Creek, and Perla, which was out by the brick plant. I fell in with this group of black cats who lived in East End, which I’m going to write a movie about one of these days.
East End was the heavy-ass neighborhood. That’s where you went if you wanted pretty much anything. There was even a bootlegger there, a big black woman who shall remain nameless. When it was cold, we’d warm our hands by a fifty-gallon drum with a fire in it. Kind of like the doo-wop guys would do in New York City. The sign that someone was a bootlegger was that they had a pop machine on their front porch. And by bootlegger, I don’t mean moonshine. Moonshiners lived outside of town. Bootleggers were people who sold beer, whiskey, and wine, but they sold it for twice the price it would cost at a liquor store.
We lived in a dry county, so the bootlegger was for people who didn’t want to drive to fucking Hot Springs a half an hour away and get in a drunken head-on collision on the way home.
Hot Springs, where I was actually born, is a resort town—sort of the Miami of Arkansas. It has a colorful history: Jesse James hid out there; Al Capone had a house there. There were a lot of Jewish people, too. They even had a couple of synagogues. We had one Jewish family in Malvern, but we didn’t know they were Jewish, we just thought they had a weird last name.
I was playing in a band with black cats who mostly lived in East End. Now, the difference between a white band and a black band, at least in my town back then, was, if you were a white band, your biggest trouble was if the parents of one of the guys in the band had some other shit they wanted them to do that night, like go to the Old West dinner theater in Little Rock to see a play or something. Even if the gig was scheduled and you were about to get in the car to drive to Batesville or Fort Smith or Memphis or wherever, then you didn’t have a guitar player that night. The biggest problem with a black band was, when you were supposed to get together and rehearse, usually at one of the guys’ houses or out at the barbershop—there was this old black man in East End who owned a barbershop and would let us rehearse in there sometimes—you could never find any of them. Like, even if the last time you saw them you said, “All right, Wednesday night at eight,” and they said, “All right, man, see you then.” Without fail, I would wind up in my ’67 Buick Wildcat with bucket seats and a factory eight-track tape player, driving all over the fucking town trying to round these guys up. I’d try the barbershop, and they wouldn’t be there. Then I’d go to one guy’s house and his wife would say, “I think he’s over in West End.” Then I’d get back in the car and drive over to West End, check around, and they would say, “I think him and a couple of guys were going over to Hot Springs.” It wasn’t beyond me to drive to Hot Springs to look for them.
You have to understand, all I wanted to do was play music or listen to it, one or the other. I couldn’t wait. That was the highlight of my day, every day. I even went to pick up one of the guys one night and he was in a fight with his wife, and she shot at him with a .22 pistol and hit the couch about a foot from where I was sitting. He and I ran out the front door and hid down a bank across the railroad tracks. I said, “Do you think we can make it to the car?” which was between us and the house. And he said, “We better not. She’ll cool down in a little bit. Besides that, my bass is in the house.”
From the ditch we watched her go back inside the house. We waited around and waited around until she finally came out and started cussing at him. He kind of came up from behind the tracks and started yelling back. They cussed back and forth a little bit until, finally, he went up there. They talked calmly on the porch and then went inside. He came out after a little bit with his bass, like nothing happened. We got in the car and left.
Now, in itself that may not be that interesting a story, but this kind of thing happened all the time. Not the getting shot at part, necessarily, but it was never “we’re going to rehearse at eight” and everybody would be there.
Nevertheless, they were the most interesting, fun, talented sons-of-bitches I ever met, but they were the kind of guys who were scared to leave home. There are people in little towns in this country who are so much more talented than any of the people we hear playing in bands today, but they grew up the old-fashioned way. They’re terrified to leave their little town. You get a job over at the ball bearing plant and you know you better keep it.