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.