Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 6)

Sunday

My first terrifying thought is that it is Sunday morning in Mississippi, and we have failed to plan appropriately. There is one more day of blues, the Crown is gone and the liquor stores are closed. Beer is plentiful, but at this point in the journey it might as well be hops-flavored Kool-Aid.

Technically the festival is over, but we’ll still have a full day of music. We start with the blues brunch at Ground Zero, Morgan Freeman’s club (above). It’s the nicest joint in town. They have several comfortable, well-used, mismatched couches on the broad front porch, facing the train station, where we sit in the morning sun waiting for the doors to open.

We’re among the first to be seated as the Reverend KM Williams, a Texas hills country bluesman sets up. The Reverend is dressed in a very sharp black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hat with a white band, and black and white wing tips. He tunes his mirror-finish, stainless steel guitar and wears a harmonica rack around his neck. An amplified porch board rests at his feet for rhythm. His drummer is a white man named Washboard Jackson. “Wash” wears a sleeveless white dress shirt, a skinny black tie, and cut off dress pants. He has little metal pieces taped to his fingers with which he plays his drum kit and cymbals – he does not use sticks or brushes. They are one of the best acts we hear all weekend. Turns out the Rev spent 17 years working at the Twinsburg Chrysler plant outside Cleveland before taking a package and returning to the south to play his music and preach.

We take McRik to the Greyhound Station after the show. He has to return to Hong Kong – something about his collateralize rice futures swaps being upside down. I don’t understand, but we convinced him last night to ride the dog back to the Memphis airport so we could keep the Imperial for the remainder of our trip. He tells us that if he can unload his rice swaps on the Saudis we can keep the car for good. Sweet.

Buzzard and I slide over to Cathead Records for the afternoon mini blues fest. Cathead is a very funky retailer of blues music, memorabilia, Mississippi folk art, and is a general cultural clearing house for Clarksdale and environs. It was started by an ad guy from St. Louis and his wife who visited Clarksdale ten years ago and decided to move there. The wife is gone but Cathead endures.

There’s a couple hundred people hanging around under the marquee that extends from the storefront into the street. At this point in the weekend we recognize half the crowd. The other half move away as we move in. Big Red has his double smoker out front firing ribs. We ask Red, and everyone else we talk to, if they know where we can get some corn liquor, but we have no luck. There are several interesting looking women walking around taking pictures and shooting video.

It’s another great show. Bilbo Walker, a Chuck Berry look-alike, duck walks through his set. Honeyboy Edwards plays. I have no idea how old he is but he learned to play guitar from Robert Johnson, and his skin looks like black parchment.

The best set is Big George Brock. Red hat and a suit of vertical, shiny and matt-finish, red stripes, finished off with red shoes and red silk stocking. He blows the horn with the energy of a man half his age, and his voice has the soul of someone older than God himself. His sideman on guitar is Lightnin’ Malcolm, and Big George’s much younger wife contributes some powerful vocals. Add the bass and drums and this is the biggest band we’ve heard since Jack Johnson Friday night, and they rocked.

All these people and yet no one could tell us where to find some corn.

It was a full afternoon of blues and we are hungry, so we fuel up at the no name Mexican restaurant where our waiter, fresh from Jalisco, tells us how much he loves the blues – especially Los Lonely Boys.

Sunday night and the only game in town is Red’s, where it is open mike night. The joint is mobbed. I can’t deal with the congestion but Buzzard plows in while I join the scene out front, which is plenty active and offers lots of amusing drunks even at this early hour, including our friend Ho-Fo-Sho.

I strike up a conversation with Jackie and her pals, a group of locals who are content to party in the warm spring evening out on Sunflower Avenue. Jackie tells me how she hopes to join her daughter in Atlanta soon, as there is just no work in Clarksdale. She’s drinking something from a clear plastic Coke bottle that is clearly not Atlanta’s home town brew. I inquire, and am delighted to discover, it is the longed for corn liquor. Jackie offers me a pull, but warns me that she has “sweetened” it. “With what?” I ask. “Gin” she replies. Wow. Well, nothing ventured…so I take a pull and am pleasantly surprised at how smooth it is.

Turns out she got it from Dale, the 300 pound drummer from Jack Johnson’s band, for whom I had bought a beer on Friday night. Amazingly, he remembers, and promptly fetches me my own 12 ounce “Coke” from the back of his Ram van, which he has driven down from his home in Scranton, PA. He comes to Clarksdale about once a month to gig with Jack, and always brings some his finest, which he distills in his basement.

Unfortunately his gift comes unsweetened and goes down like turpentine laced with ground glass. It does, however, do the job. The key is to take a pull from your beer both before and after the corn.

I meet a man who offers to wash my car for $5. He tells me how he can’t work since his wife stabbed him in the back with a fillet knife. He lifts his shirt to show me a 15 inch scar, which runs mysteriously from his left nipple horizontally down to, and beneath, his beltline. I tell him I don’t have a car but give him the five.

Buzzard returns, drags me inside, and plops me onto a barstool he has saved for my lazy carcass. The music is good, but I’d have preferred the pros. Harmonica Bean MCs and does yeoman’s work managing all the wannabees, and keep the band, more-or-less, on some kind of track, all the while performing crowd control, as the human mass is constantly spilling onto the stage – which is an imaginary line to begin with.

Bean turns away head-butt boy, who wants to play his harp tonight, but inevitably the music deteriorates anyway as the night progresses. It’s OK – we need to be eased down a little somehow if we are ever to return to polite society. We decide to try Anniebelle’s but we are too late. And just like that, it is over.

Buzzard and I head over to the train station, find a comfortable bench, and light cigars. He a Rocky Patel maduro, and me a Montechristo white label. We replay the weekend and make plans for the rest of the trip. There is more of Mississippi to see – Holly Springs, Oxford, Natchez, Biloxi – and then on to New Orleans. But that is another story.

For now we are content. We have been purified in corn and Crown. We have accepted the sacrament of pork. We have transversed the Crossroads from four directions and kept our souls. We have harvested our ids from the Delta loam and African rhythms. We are blues infused.

Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 5)

Late Saturday night

On to Tricia’s Italian Restaurant, the name being more of a goal than a reality. At the moment it’s a gutted storefront with bright overhead lighting, a few card tables, and some folding chairs. Tricia is selling home made pies up front and hoping to get the full restaurant open soon.

Somehow it’s the perfect venue to hear L.C. Ulmer, who is nearly 80, and gets more sound out of a guitar than most trios. He is fast and wild. We can’t tell if the music is from the earliest days of the Delta, or avant guard and innovative -- we’re lost in an acoustic tornado. I love it. We share a piece of “jess pie” on the way out. McRik says his first wife made jess pie. Buzzard said his second wife made hash brownies until the sheriff raided his apartment in Pittsburgh.

The momentum of the Crown-soaked evening and the Devil’s music inevitably drives us back across the Sunflower River to the black side of town. We are in no mood to be around the suburbanites at this point, and most of them stay on the white side of the river, especially at night. We hit Messenger’s Pool Hall and catch a little of Big T. and the Family, then RL Boyce at the Club 2000, where I am transfixed by a dancing woman I think is about 30, but could be 50. Her 90 pound body and complete lack of teeth make it hard to tell, but she is a perpetual motion machine. She wears out one partner after another. I am tempted, but I think she might be a friend of the Devil, and I am too afraid of her to get that close.

It’s getting late. There’s just one place left to go -- back to Annie Bell’s, where Junebug Jefferson plays a unique style of blues suited perfectly for this crowd; kind of Muddy Waters meets James Brown. I cant explain it, but I can dance to it. Some of our new friends from last night are there. Again, we are the only whities in the joint. It’s fun, festive, and friendly; like a good wedding reception between two families that don’t really know each other, but aren’t going to let that get in the way of a good time.

And to make a good wedding reception, the food has to be right. Tacked on to the side of Annie Bell’s is a small room big enough for a grill, a counter and maybe three customers. A hand-painted sign out front identifies it as “WOP’s” – home of the WOP burger. (above on left end)Open from 5 pm to 5 am. daily. We get three and take them across the highway. We stand next to the Imperial, using the hood for a table. The WOP most closely mimics a Big Mac, but the meat is broiled, the bread is fresher, and WOP’s secret super soul sauce is unique.

This may be the most delicious thing I ever ate. We are tired, drunk, excited, hungry. The night is perfect, warm, breezy, clear, fragrant. The setting is lean, stripped of all hype, a parking lot, a highway, a car, some pals. We eat in silence for a while, savoring the best meal of the trip. And then we see her. She isn’t exactly dancing, but it is more than a walk. Her gaunt body and toothless, sunken mouth are unmistakable from a 100 yards. It is the Devil’s mistress from Club 2000 -- and she is headed our way.

She dips and sways in time to some unheard rhythm. Is it emotional expressionism, or just corn liquor messing with her nervous system? We stand and stare. I can’t resume chewing until she passes us by, 10 feet away without so much as looking up, down State Street toward the crossroads. Relief rolls over me. Are we lucky, or do you have to engage the Devil and suggest a wager before he speaks to you?

Fear & Loathing in Mississippi (part 4)

Saturday night

Saturday night requires more planning, and the first priority is upgrading the liquor. “I can’t drink anymore of this shit,” Buzzard declares as I pass the Kentucky Tavern. If McRik’s feelings are hurt he hides it well.

A mess of ribs are cooking in the Uptown parking lot. Buzzard tosses half of the last bottle of KT into the fire, which nearly immolates a Chicago biker dude who’s staying next to us in the motel. (The Uptown doesn’t really attract the Dockers crowd.) Biker dude laughs and says, “dump the rest in the sauce, man.” Buzzard complies. Instant Ribs Sunoco.

We replace the KT with a quart of Crown Royal. It’s Saturday night after all. You need the right beverage and you gotta dress sharp. I go with my magic shirt -- a gift from Buzzard that he picked up at the Super Soul Shop last year. It’s royal blue with gold sparkly appliqués representing a Crown Royal logo, some brass knuckles, a Cadillac logo, a Hummer grill and a few other lifestyle-appropriate images, and my new lid. I look superfly.

Buzz and McRik elect to dress like two guys hanging out at the sports book at Caesars Palace, but hey – I don’t judge.

We also need an itinerary. During the day it’s easy to just wander around outside from act to act, but tonight there are indoor venues – mostly juke joints – where the headliners will perform at set times, and we had people we definitely wanted to see. Fortunately Buzzard has been to the fest a couple times before and knows his way around.

We make a plan and set off for Hopson’s Plantation where Muddy Waters drove a tractor until he split for Chicago. They have three music rooms and we head in to hear Terry “Harmonica” Bean. He plays a great set in which he gives little 30 second blues history lessons between songs, and plays the same harmonica riffs the way James Cotton, Little Walter and then Sonny Boy Williamson would have done. Terry has mucho charisma.

Next comes Cedric Burnsides, grandson of R.L., playing drums, with Lightnin’ Malcolm on guitar. Cedric looks like Dwight Howard, only blacker. He’s wearing a white wife-beater and punishing the toms with a furry. Malcolm, a big white, farm boy is more Hendricks than Hooker. This is the younger generation of bluesmen and they are whipping the crowd into a frenzy. It’s Malcolm’s little sister’s birthday. She jumps up on stage and dances like no one is watching. Nobody is having more fun than her.

We go back into town to My Brother’s Sport’s Bar to hear 84-year-old T. Model Ford (above). T. did time at Parchman for murder as a younger man, and was a big player in the resurgence of blues the past ten years. He can still bring it, although he let’s his partner “Stud” control most of the set.

We keep moving. The Crown goes down easier than the KT would have if we’d mixed it with Bosco. We are vibrating to the beat, in synch with the crowd. It’s a happening. We’re like lemmings at a party, but with no cliff in sight. I contemplate why I love this music so. I read once that the foundation of the blues are rhythms that come from a specific West African tribe with no tradition of signing; they instead used drumming to express emotions. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure makes sense. You can’t listen to the blues and not move it.

The blues also make you feel good because no matter how bad things are for you, you probably have it better than whoever is signing. He ether just shot his old lady, got shot by his old lady, had his boss cheat him out of his money, caught his old lady cheating on him with his best friend, is running from the police, hiding from his landlady, drinking too much to ease his pain, or gambling to win money to feed his babies.

On the other hand, he is almost certainly getting laid more than you, so there is a chance you might learn something useful. In the end, it’s just as John Lee Hooker said: “I got it in me and I gots to get it out!” But it's only midnight.

Fear and Loathing in Mississippi (part 3)

Day 2: Saturday

The first thing I hear on Saturday morning is a rolling thunderous, piano-playing, one-man band, Theo D., who is set up in front of Wade’s Barber Shop – right across the street from the pig races.

I walk past a double-smoker in front of Delta Furniture and think, “I want 'em but I just can’t eat a plate of ribs at 9:15 in the morning,” so I keep walking to hear Theo D., Wolfman Belfour, Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Bloodshot Eyes, Gearshifter Youngblood and more – all before noon.

The music is raw, primal, and real. It is truly the Devil’s music, and adults are required to have an open container of alcohol at all times on the streets of Clarksdale, and we -- Buzzard, McRik and I are nothing if not good citizens.

I reconnect with McRik and Buzzard late that morning and I am a little surprised to learn they’d made a final stop at Ground Zero (Morgan Freeman’s club) after dumping me at the Uptown last night, and that McRik is now engaged to the 17-year-old bass player for Super Chikan and the Fighting Cocks. (Unfortunately she leaves town shortly after the gig and takes Mic’s watch and ring with her.)

So the music – there’s nothing like it. Here are some sample lyrics from Pat Thomas, son of Son Thomas, as he plays this morning at Sarah’s Kitchen:

I’m goin’ uptown
Gonna buy me a new plow lead
Gonna beat that woman with it
‘til she agrees with me.

Not all of it is that poetic but it all comes from the heart -- you know?

As the sun rises high I regret leaving my new Panama behind in New York, so I hoof over to Yazoo Street and into the Super Soul Shop. As the brother next to me at the front counter selects appropriate socks for the three primal-colored suites he is buying, I search through stacks of hats until I find the little beauty you see pictured above – a black straw fedora with a multi-striped band. El es muy bonito, no? I need it badly because all the music is outdoors Saturday, and 9 beers and a pint of KT will only keep you so cool in the Mississippi noonday sun.

So back to the music: Loose Bruce, Blue Mother Tupelo, Daddy Rich, Mr. Tater the Music Maker, Tullie Brae, Hambone, and lots more. It’s all good, and if it isn’t you just move on to the next corner, backyard, storefront, vacant lot, or flat spot in the street where someone else is pouring out their soul the way the first African inhabitants of the Delta did a couple hundred years ago.

No breakfast. Liquid lunch. A long night ahead. We’re in the Blue’s Café backyard listening to David Coen. Buzz and Mic get a huge pile of Cajun crawfish served on a cardboard box tray, but it actually requires more calories to peel them than is gained in the eating of them, so I go searching for an alternative.

The Lord provides. I turn a corner and there is Delta Furniture, and the ribs I’d passed on this morning. Just as I get my platter the sky opens and it starts to rain hard. Inside, a 40ish white man sits on one of the 200 crashed velvet couches the building holds. He has his leg in a huge brace, propped on a matching ottoman. He waves to me: “Come on in here boy and sit you down. You can eat your ribs in here,” he says pointing to a new settee, upholstered in beige ultra suede. I lick the sticky, sweet, red sauce from my fingers and park it.

Jimmy Littlejohn’s granddaddy opened the store in the ‘50s. It can’t have changed much. Jimmy, the four black men who work for him who are selling the ribs, and I, sit there watching the rain, talking NFL. One of the black men is a Stillers fan – but I like him anyway? Buzzard and McRik run in looking for cover. They enter the conversation with ease. We pass the ribs, and the flask, and talk about the blues. It is nearly Saturday night.

Fear and Loathing in Mississippi (part 2)

Friday night

Big Jack works the crowd like a snake charmer. He boogies us up. He mellows us down. He swings us sideways and back up again in little steps you hardly notice until you feel your backbone vibrating. We drink with the rhythm. The Kentucky Tavern tastes like gasoline – but with oaky undertones and a just a hint of carbona at the finish. My cough is gone by midnight.

I want to dance, but the women are wearing mom jeans and there is no room to move. Some big old white man takes exception to Buzzard laughing at his wife. Buzzard head butts him. Ho-Fo-Sho, a 300 pound, gap-toothed, Refrigerator Perry look-alike we met earlier in the evening, takes the opportunity to dump approximately 3 liters of beer from the world’s largest fishbowl down the front of the dude’s Tommy Bahama, and into the crotch of his Dockers. It’s time to go. McRik pulls the Imperial up front, we jump in and roll to the promised land.

Annie Bell’s, (above) situated on the edge of town, evokes a more modern vibe than the rest of Clarksdale – it's a near-urban, funkadelic, 1975 disco kindda thang. I think there was even a disco ball hanging from the ceiling, but it could have been the KT playing tricks on me.

As we walked from the Imperial, Shawnté (like enchanté) -- a very tall, very drunk, young lady, asks me if I’d like to buy her a drink of corn. I say “sure, I’d like to try some myself.” I assume she means inside Annie Bell’s, but she steers me toward her car for “a short ride” to get some. I decline, and she asks “what do you think is going to happen to you?”

My mind reels as I consider the possible answers to that question, but I decline anyway. She needs $7.50 for the corn. I give her a ten and catch up to Buzz and Mic inside. Ours are the only three pale faces in the joint. Annie Bell’s is a local hangout and not on the blues tour, but they have a good sound system and a hyped up DJ. Annie Bell’s is for dancing.

I take the stage first, joining about eight women and one other dude, while Buzz and McRik get some beers and chat up the bartender and a couple patrons. I wasn’t aware I could line dance, but apparently I can if properly fueled. Soon two of the brothers at the bar insist that my boys dance with their dates. Incredibly, they do. It’s a kind of an “Animal House,” with a reverse-role racial thing goin’ on. Soon all three of our fat white asses are shaking in approximate time to some music we’ve heard that night – if not the current offering. We made many new friends. Shawnté does not return with the corn.

The next thing I remember I’m in my room at the Uptown. I know that’s where I am by the absence of hangers, and the 13” TV. Soon it will be Saturday morning and the festival will begin.

Fear and Loathing in Mississippi (part 1)

Day 1: Friday

We arrive in Memphis. Buzzard rode the dog – 4 days over the mountains from Oakland and across the plains with a ¼ pound of Mendocino county home-grown taped to his thigh – just below his new hip. McRik flew in from Hong Kong with a case of Kentucky Tavern in the trunk of his cousin’s red ’62 Imperial convertible, which he had picked up in Little Rock. I flew in with a nasty cough, my Wayfarers, and golf clubs. It was going to be a long, difficult trip.

We met in the parking lot of Soulsville and took a quick tour. They have the invoice for the charter flight that was Otis Redding’s last trip, the Hammond M3 that Booker T. played when he recorded “Green Onions,” and Isaac Hayes’ gold-plated ’72 Eldorado. Graceland is for pussies.

We loaded the Imperial and headed south on Highway 61. (cue music.) We quickly drop to sea level as we track along the big muddy and enter the Delta. I’d always thought Kansas was flat but the sunken loam of the Delta seems to flatten even the tree and buildings that rest on it. It is sucking us in.

The Imperial braked from 80 as 61 crossed Highway 49 entering Clarksdale. Robert Johnson sold his soul on this spot. We hoped to get through three days still in possession of ours – if, indeed, we still had them.

We checked into the Uptown Motor Inn; your basic 1960, one-over-one, motel. The clerk was behind Plexiglas and all rooms face the parking lot, which was already a tailgate blues party at six. McRik broke out the KT. I filled my sterling hip flask. It was going to be a long night and I would need plenty of whiskey for my cough.

Clarksdale is not another place. It is another time. I’d say 1962 -- perfect for the Imperial and perfect for our mood, which is old school verging on primal. We needs us some blues, so we go to Red’s.

Red’s is on the edge of town in a low slung red brick building that looks like an abandoned feed store. (above) There are ribs cooking out front in the double smoker and only a hand-lettered bed sheet tacked at the end of the wall to tip its identity.

Inside, Big Jack Johnson and the Cornlickers are pounding a beat. Tearin’ it up in a room that is smaller than the average CEO’s office. A couple of old couches, a few tables, some miss-matched chairs, and a half dozen bar stools hold the crowd – a mix of black locals and middle aged white folks in town for the Juke Joint Festival that has drawn us to the Delta. The festival starts tomorrow, but tonight we belong to Red. Beers are $2. The only liquor is what you bring with you, and we are well armed.