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the Hackensaw Boys in Los Angeles
Friday, June 15 2001
It was another one of those hangover workdays. Like most such days, I was amazingly focused and productive. When it comes to the relationship between hangover and productivity, there seems to be a sweet spot somewhere on the continuum a few notches above misery & cognitiviely-addled and a few below comfort and cognitively-adept.
Last night Nikolai (the former-Charlottesville musician & artist who now lives in Los Angeles) called me to tell me that a Charlottesville band had come to town, and that this band included Dave Sickman, former musical wunderkind of the Charlottesville phenom "The Ninth." Always interested in things Charlottesville, tonight I decided to go to Silverlake to see this band, whatever they were called, perform at the club called Spaceland. My transportation of choice was, naturally enough, the Punch Buggy Rust. It was around 9pm when I parked the car a block or so to the east of my destination.
The band's name was The Hackensaw Boys and they were milling around in front of Spaceland with nothing much to do. I immediately recognized Dave Sickman, whom I hadn't seen since 1998. He looked exactly the same as he had before, just a little more haggard from having spent the last three weeks living with eleven other musicians in a beat up old tour bus. Linda had seen the bus last night and described it in such a way that I thought it might actually be "the Swedish bus" that had once been at Deya's parent's place, a bus upon whose engine I had once worked. But, though this bus (like the Swedish bus) had come from the small town of Scottsville, it was an old municiple bus, not an old school bus.
The Hackensaw Boys had been rescheduled for 1:00am and there weren't any customers in the club, so everybody was bored and smoking cigarettes.
Then, among the musicians, I recognized the unmistakeable Phil "the Rogue" Ginini. Though he didn't look like he'd had a good night's sleep since I'd last seen him in 1998, I was pleased just to see that he was still alive.
A group of us, including Phil, Dave, Nicholai, and several of Nicholai's bandmates sat for a time in the tour bus smoking pot and talking about this and that. Dave had a copy of Woodie Guthrie's autobiography and he was recommending that we all read it. I was intrigued by the stories Dave related of Guthrie's childhood growing up in the rural South. The place of Guthrie's childhood sounded almost medieval, which shouldn't be surprising; there isn't really much difference between an isolated rural town in the American South and a medieval village.
Then Dave told a series of tales about Sydney, the little old man who busies himself sweeping the streets of Charlottesville with a broom. Sydney is a semi-autistic gentleman but he has a fondness for performing music. Dave, who counts himself among Sydney's best friends, told of the occasions when Sydney joined him on stage to sing and play harmonica. Sydney's song list is short and the lyrics are usually simple. Nikolai's favorite of Sydney's song titles (as related by Dave) was "The Cat Came Back But the Dog Didn't Come Back." After he stopped laughing, Nikolai urged us all to be quiet for a moment out of respect for the profundity of any song bearing such a title. Other titles include "Dead Groundhog in the Trashcan" and "Walking the Dog with Lydia and Allie."
The Hackensaw Boys had plenty of odd tales from the road. They'd been in Houston during the floods (sent by a wrathful God to punish the state responsible for California's rolling blackouts). They'd been to Nashville and received some words of advice from a respected club owner in town. "You boys are good, but you need to get yourself a routine. One of you need to point at the other and make like you're talking in another feller's ear, and then start laughing. Folks like that stuff!"
I'd forgotten how proud of his music Dave is; he was sounding almost old-school Los Angeles as he described its potential to break loose upon the scene and take over the airwaves. I agreed that pop music was poised for a shakeup, saying simply, "I hear the Backstreet Boys aren't doing so well."
When I saw Julian and Linda milling around in front I went outside and joined them. Since the band I'd come to see weren't going to be playing for awhile, we three decided to go visit one of Linda and Julian's friends on the other side of Silverlake, a guy named Scott. He was playing some sort of dungeon-scenario PlayStation videogame when we arrived, but once in the role of host, his apparent maturity veered to the opposite pole and he served us wine out on his porch. The one topic I remember from our many discussions was Breatharianism, a supposed dietary system in which people neither eat nor drink yet somehow remain alive. There are even a number of Breatharian gurus who claim to have survived for many years without consuming anything at all. Obviously, of course, all such gurus are frauds; it's impossible thermodynamically to survive without calories. Yet they somehow command a following and the curiosities of the naïvely open-minded, people like Linda. I couldn't believe it when I heard her say something to the effect that it might be possible to live without eating. The realization that among my few close friends in Los Angeles there exists someone so painfully deluded reminded me of something. I hate Los Angeles, nay, California. Where are my people in this place?
At around 1:00am, Linda and Julian dropped me off once more at Spaceland. Amazingly enough, Nikolai had actually put me on the guest list (the first time he's ever carried through on a promise to do so). I went inside and ordered a whiskey and talked on two separate occasions with the upstairs "de facto smoking area" bartender. Everything tonight was coming up Charlottesville; the bartender had worked for a time at the Tokyo Rose.
I'd heard The Hackensaw Boys billed as something of a punk rock speed bluegrass band, but when they got to playing they didn't exactly sound revolutionary to my ear. Indeed, I wouldn't think them out of place were they to appear at the Grand Ole Opry. But they were fast and they were good, if you like that sort of thing. There were quite a few people in the club and they were even dancing a little. Since Spaceland mostly features indie-rock, bluegrass was a refreshing novelty for the crowd.
After the show, I hung out with the Hackensaw boys and a couple of female groupies in the tour bus. This girl Jennifer who handles Spaceland booking and scheduling realized that one of the bands tonight had failed to discover the cooler full of beer that was promised to them as part of their contract, so she went and fetched it for the Hackensaw Boys. The beer (and it was microbrew) came at precisely the right moment. The party continued for a time in and around the bus, but then it had to leave, to head north to the next California gig. Those of us remaining in Los Angeles waved them goodbye, the groupies hailed a taxi, and soon it was just me, Nikolai, Nikolai's girlfriend with the impossible-to-remember French name, Jennifer the booking girl, and some guy Jennifer had to take back to his car in Beverly Hills. I was sort of impressed with Jennifer's power (I have a thing for powerful women), so I was flirting with her overtly. Just like me, she had a gap between her two top front teeth, and I ran my long pinky fingernail through it several times. She told me she'd like to hang out with me but she had to take that guy to his car. At this point I started playing up how drunk I was and that I couldn't possibly drive home and could I maybe ride with her when she took what's his name to his car?
So that's how I ended up going with Jennifer back to her place in North Hollywood. "This is fun" I said at one point, and she agreed.
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