Down South Again

“Heaven is pals.” — Barry Hannah

For my fortieth birthday I gave myself the gift of going to Memphis to see my friend David. I wanted to eat ribs and sit on his front porch.

David’s wife Annelise picked me up with a bouquet of flowers from the Memphis airport and we ate homemade salsa and had margaritas and she gave me a tour of her garden. David came back from work and we had some porch beers and it rained while the sun was shining and then a rainbow came out and this guy Billups Allen showed up. Billups is one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever met in my life. He gave me a copy of his excellent new book I Exhibited Films for a Year. I Lost Money but I Think I Made My Point, which is about exactly what the title says it’s about.

I wanted barbecue and Billups was down, so we met Annelise and her friend Kendall at Bar-B-Q Shop and I got ribs and baked beans and coleslaw and barbecue spaghetti. All of it was great, but the barbecue spaghetti almost killed me. Afterwards we had a porch sesh and passed the phone around and played music until bedtime. This has always been, almost more than anything, my favorite way to spend time. Go one for one, song after song, and follow the conversation wherever it wants to go. I’ve been doing this regular since I was twelve, and it never fails. You can build a whole life out of something like that.

Saturday Annelise went birding and David drove me to the Crystal Shrine Grotto, which is one of the sickest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Then we went down to Oxford for the annual Double Decker Festival. Water Liars was playing, and I hadn’t seen those guys in something like five years, so it did my heart some good. I was thinking how me and Bill first saw Water Liars at the Blind Pig in 2012 or 2011, not having a clue who they were, and just getting our jaws ripped off. That’s one of the happiest memories of my life. While I was waiting for the band to go on, I happened to bump into Tommy, Beth Ann, Andy (AKA St. Andrew of the Blood and Guts), British James and Nikki, Cristi, Bobby Rea and Jorge, Lucky, Katherine, Caitlin, and a bunch of others, just around the square. My pal Ace showed up with Jack in tow, which I couldn’t believe. I saw my dear genius friend Clay, snarking hard at the record store. It was almost dizzying, being with all these people in one place together again. I kept having to sit down.

Back in Memphis, and I do swear this is going somewhere, we jumped over to old school homey Gabe’s show—I can’t even remember where I met Gabe—and I saw filmmaker Josh and a bunch of others. The opening band was great, and I recognized this guy Zach on drums, whose band I used to go see when he was a freshman in college. But now Zach was thirty-two, and his band Late Night Cardigan kicked ass. It was kind of wild, seeing that guy after ten years, still banging away, better than ever.

The next day I met my friend Bethan and her Prince Mongo-obsessed husband Drew and three of their four beautiful kids at the Memphis Zoo. David, Annelise, and I had lunch with Pete, and that was about as good as it could be, before he drove off to Arkansas to be back with his wife and son. I will never understand why Pete isn’t famous. Maybe he’s just too sweet of a guy. On Monday, I got to guest DJ David’s radio show on WYXR, and he let me play both Fred Neil and my favorite my favorite Jesus and Mary Chain cover, so that was a bonus. Again, I sort of couldn’t believe it.

My last night in Memphis was maybe the best. We grilled out with new friend Nate, then David and I sat on the front porch, listening to the night. We heard an owl in the big tree right over David’s house, and we both scrambled into the yard to see if we could get a look. Then we heard another owl across the street. “There’s two of them,” David whispered. Then another owl behind us, and another in the neighbor’s yard, and another down the street. That’s when David and I realized we were surrounded. Owls everywhere. We sat on the porch in silence and listened to them hollering back and forth to each other for hours, the only other sound occasional gunshots.

I started this post with the Jimmy Buffett song “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” which is without a doubt one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and I will hear no argument about the matter. It was on my mind because Annelise had been driving around in her Tacoma listening to it on a Jimmy Buffett cd box set. “A Pirate Looks at Forty” is one of the great songs about aging, facing a life that was tremendous but maybe didn’t matter so much. It’s self-mythologizing, sure, but what’s so wrong with that? You have to be a little bit of a romantic if you’re going to survive.

All this to say, the other night when I was catching up with Zach after his band played—we hadn’t spoken in over a decade—he showed me all the Memphis bands on his tape-only record label. I bought a copy of everything he had. I was stoked. But then there was one last tape, called Hidden Mississippi. When I asked Zach about it, he got kind of sheepish and handed it over.

Turns out, it was a compilation of all our friends bands, circa 2012. He’d put it together years ago. So many of the pals were on there, a crew long dispersed, friends I keep up with mostly on the internet. But when I picked up the tape, we were all back together again. Zach had been selling it for years, and he seemed almost apologetic about it. I didn’t understand why. It was a record of a beautiful time in my life, and he had kept it alive. Hidden Mississippi.

In fact, there were only two copies left, one for me and one for David. It will be forever one of my most prized possessions.

Thanks, Zach. Thanks, everybody.