Blood On The Tracks
Time and the grindstone and the knife of God
--Robert Lowell, New Year's Day
Every day when I wake up, every morning when I stumble into work, every time I get in the car, I expect to hear some terrible, terrifying news --not the usual terrible and terrifying news that I can mutter over in the daily paper, but the bigger, more sinister and inescapable news that we're being promised by the hour. The media is zealously promoting paranoia and certain, looming calamity as if whatever it is that's on its way is going to be the Olympics of suffering, and when the hammer falls that's exactly how they'll cover it. You know damn well they've already had war logo and attack logo meetings, and they've probably already made their choices. Fox News may as well prop Jim McKay up in the studio to give the thing the proper treatment.
I can't stand it, any of it, it being everything at the moment. Is there anything more heartbreaking than finding your wife's catastrophe stash hidden away under the basement stairs --the cases of water and canned goods, the rolls of duct tape and packages of batteries, the whole sorry works? It tore the guts right out of me, and as I stood there staring at the sad spectacle I knew right then that this really is a lousy world.
I'll get over it, believe me. I'm a pretty optimistic guy as a rule, or at least a master of repression. But, Jesus, every day any more seems to bring another visit from the Teeth Kicker. I found out this morning that Gordon Grace, one of the formative influences on my early life, had died of some kind of meat-borne illness in a detox center in Iowa. Or something like that. The details were pretty murky, and the friend who called me with the news was likely roaring on methamphetamine. I can't doubt, however, that Gordie is dead; I've expected this news for years, ever since the day in the mid '90s when he donated his entire record collection to some church for a rummage sale. And this was an unbelievable record collection, a lifetime project and labor of obsessive love. I'll bet there were more than 10,000 records and CDs, and if I'd known Gordie was even contemplating such a move I would have killed him or had him committed. And then, a month or so later --it was Easter, I remember that much-- my mom calls me and says she saw Gordie on the local news. The church rummage sale business, it turns out, was no weird coincidence; my old mentor had found religion, and was apparently going to rollerskate from Mason City to Rochester with a cross on his back. He was at the time 57 years old, and in absolutely no condition to rollerskate period, let alone with a cross on his back. This news was disturbing, but also nonetheless amusing. My mom called me again a couple days later and said she read in the paper that poor Gordie hadn't even made it to the Minnesota border. He made it only 18 miles in fact. His skates broke, my mom said. It was just such a classic thing for Gordie to do, and the relgious kick wasn't really terribly surprising; Gordie was a guy who took things farther than the average guy. Everything. I remember he called me up one time in the middle of the night and said that he had started scratching in his sleep and had injured himself. "I'm fucking bleeding all over the place," he told me. "And I think I've seriously damaged one of my eyes." Thing was, I didn't doubt him. I never doubted Gordie Grace. He was crazy, but he was never a liar. He was also endlessly entertaining.
When I first met him Gordie was a lot older than me. He was an old hippie, for lack of a better term. He hated that word, and would take serious issue with the characterization, but it was the truth. This was the late 1970s, and we were both living in a small town, and Gordie was this dirty freak with long hair. A hippie. There was no other term for it, not at the time, anyway. I can think of other terms that would work now --fucked up, for instance. My mother called him different, which, believe me, was no kind of compliment. One thing you for double damn sure didn't want to be in that town was different. This was a rough little place where everyone busted their nuts for a living and folks around there didn't have a whole lot of patience for anybody who didn't have a work ethic and didn't like to cut their hair, which meant that Gordie was screwed. But he didn't care, and he hung around there regardless, and that was part of what was so beautiful about the guy. For about two months he tried to open a head shop downtown --The Soviet Embassy, he called it, and he put all sorts of his old mother's money into the place. He had a big, ridiculously bright sign painted, with a peace sign and a hammer and sickle, and he had all this funky thrift store furniture around the place, and stuff like Bobby Sherman (he was fiercely ironic well before his time) and Captain Beefheart and Moby Grape posters on the walls. He sold incense, of course --in that, as well as much else, I believe, he was something of a pioneer around there-- along with the usual weed paraphenalia: power hitters, rolling papers, screens, bongs. There were also tee-shirts, I seem to remember, and I think I might actually still have an old Evil Knievel shirt I bought at the Soviet Embassy. Gordie was essentially shut down almost from the beginning; turned out he didn't have any of the necessary permits or licenses or whatever it was he didn't have. He ended up taking all his inventory out on the road to county fairs and flea markets and setting up a little pirate shop on a blanket. They'd run him out of every town, but he eventually managed to unload all of his inventory.
At any rate, Gordie's real claim to fame --at least in my book-- was that he was a local music legend. He was really it, in fact, so far as a local music scene went. For as long as I could remember Gordie Grace had fronted one band or another in my old hometown, and he gigged pretty relentlessly, playing local bars, bowling alleys, weddings, high school dances, and VFW halls. He'd venture pretty far afield as well, and had a regular orbit around southern Minnesota and northern Iowa and maybe even over into Wisconsin. He was actually a pretty good guitar player, and an interesting enough song writer, but his real mark of distinction was the fact that he played anything and everything, and constantly changed line-ups, styles, and, especially, names.
I once did an interview with Gordie for a little zine, and I remember he told me that he was petitioning the Guinness Book of World's Records for recognition as "like, the guy who's been in the most bands."
"There's no way anybody out there has me beat," he said. "Nobody's even close. I can't even really keep track, but I'm pretty sure I could document at least 200."
This claim was, of course, specious on many levels. Gordie really had played in only one band --his-- but it is true that that band had a number of different line-ups over the years. And incarnations, shall we say. The thing was that Gordie had gotten in the habit of changing the name of his band for virtually every gig; eventually, in fact, he did change the name for every gig. It became his trademark. He always managed to attract young local musicians who were just learning to play, and he was incredibly demanding of their time, and equally tight with his money. I played with him for awhile, and I think he'd pay me maybe five dollars for a show. I didn't really care, of course, and nobody else much did either. We were all just happy to be playing in a band. It wasn't so great, though, to have to constantly rehearse and learn entirely new sets of songs --in often enough entirely different styles-- from week to week. Over the years Gordie's bands were often wildly experimental, to the extent that he was always losing whatever local following he had managed to build up. He would inevitably respond to these wholesale betrayals by reconfiguring his band once more and playing nothing but popular top 40, country, and classic rock fare for a few months. Gordie really did have an amazingly deep pool of songs to draw from --thousands of covers as well as a ridiculous number of originals that were all over the map in terms of style.
To his credit, Gordie was an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate music fan, and he always did his homework and kept abreast of new stuff that was coming along. He was also quick to embrace new styles; "Not because they were fads," he claimed in that old interview, "but because I considered them authentic."
"I have played punk rock," he said, "and I don't suppose there are many guys my age who could make that claim [Gordie was at the time, I think, 55]. And I don't mean that I've just played punk rock songs, but that I've played punk rock. There's a difference there, right? I have been a punk rocker."
I really think he was telling the truth. He could be genuinely original, even at his shittiest. I remember one time he enlisted this fat kid who couldn't have been more than 15 to play saxophone with his band. The kid seriously couldn't play, and I remember when I pointed this out to Gordie he said, "That's exactly what I want him to do. I want a guy who seriously can't play." During this mercifully brief phase, the band would all just pound away while this kid blew serious noise through his horn. I once had an old board tape of this particular incarnation absolutely destroying "King of the Road," and in the quiet sections --Gordie at the time said "this band's gonna have a lot of space, and then we're just gonna keep blasting rockets off into it and blowing them up"-- you could hear the drunks at the bar bellowing at the band. Another time, with an entirely different line-up, Gordie spent a couple months playing some particular Rush album in its entirety, which actually, I believe, went over just fine with the locals.
The business with changing the band's name, though, was, as I said, Gordie's real stroke of genius. I was too young to really appreciate the brilliance of it at the time, and nobody down there ever seemd to pay much attention to it, but when I sat down and did my interview with Gordie I was amazed at how much thought he had put into the whole thing.
"I always did that on purpose, to a certain extent," he told me. "There are just so many good names, and it's always been a hobby of mine to sit around and make 'em up. When I first started a band I was like 16 years old and I had this list of something like 100 names, and I could never quite make up my mind. So for a long time we would just go down the list and try a different one once in awhile. They were all such great names, and I kept coming up with more, until eventually we started changing it with every gig. We were always just playing around here, so it really didn't make much of a difference. The locals didn't seem to care, and sometimes it may even have benefitted us to a certain extent; it kept people guessing, and when we played out of town we might actually draw people who didn't realize they'd seen us before."
I told Gordie that someone had told me that he had recently played a gig as "Kool and the Gang."
"Yeah, that's true," he said. "Except we used the correct spelling; we were 'Cool and the Gang.' I actually thought of the name before I'd ever heard of 'Kool and the Gang.' It was on my first list. We were 'Flock of Seagulls' one night as well."
Somewhere I have a long list of some of the band names Gordie has used over the years, but after I got the phone call this morning telling me he was dead I spent a couple hours digging around in my basement but couldn't find the damn thing. Off the top of my head, though, here are some of them:
Mamster. Gunilla Hutton. Sneaky Beano. Fudge Riprock. Mammy. Shitsicle. The Dog Creek Deacons. Kennesaw Mountain Plowboys. Will Diddley. Butt Cheek Hickey. The Dayglo Dickey. Pardon Me. Rubber Gal. Champion Pig. Pardon My French. Pardon Me, Amy. Spatula. Count Spatula and the Spooks. Dad Says. Bluto Rangen. Nestor and the Barbecue Gods. The Devil Randy. Orestes. Rump Roast. Party Barge. Keg Tramp. Shrook. Dick Eagle and the Apes. Sergeant Who? Poseidon Adventure. Blind, Crippled, and Crazy. Ed Asner. Slime Trumpet. Schleimtrompeten. Fantasy Island. Hollywood Squares. Pumphouse. Blood Sausage. Divining Rod and the Rack-Em-Ups. Petticoat Munchkin. Step On It. Ouch, That Smarts. The Barrow Show. Don't. Won't. Can't.
I asked Gordie if there was ever any thought about settling on one name, and he said, "I can't say that there was." When I wondered if there was one name out of all the names he had used that was a personal favorite, he allowed that such a question would be impossible to answer. I also asked him if he really believed that simply changing the name of his band made it a different band.
"Oh, no question," he said. "Of course it does. Let's say you're in a band called 'Rush Creek,' and you change it to something like 'Shitsicle.' Do you honestly think for one minute that that band is going to think, act, or play the same? Sometimes from one night to the next just changing the name of the band would take things in a completely different direction. There was one time --this was before I started changing the name for every gig-- where we were calling ourselves 'Garden Variety,' or some damn thing like that, and it was strictly a moldy-oldies deal, a complete snooze; we could literally sleep walk through the sets, but the money was good and we were getting lots of gigs. But I got bored one day and changed the name to 'Muffalo' and we totally caught fire and became an entirely different beast. That was probably my all-time favorite band."
For the last couple years every time I'd go back down to visit my parents I'd check the local paper to see if maybe Gordie was playing someplace, but he pretty much disappeared after he got religion and sold all his records. I'm told that he lost touch with God a short time after his rollerskating debacle with the cross, but he apparently never found his way all the way back. I don't know how this sort of thing happens to people, but it seems to happen to a lot of people I know. I heard some years ago that Gordie had moved to Mason City permanently. He had a sister who lived there, I know, who sold real estate, and his mother had moved down there as well before she died.
I didn't do a very good job of keeping in touch with Gordie after I left town, and I've always felt sort of bad about that. I certainly never properly conveyed to him my gratitude for all the ways he helped to point me in new directions, and he really was instrumental in shoving me out of town. There was no way, he always said, that he was going to let me stay there and become one of those people. Not more than a few months ago I was going through some books and I found an old dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch that Gordie had given me back in high school. I never really did make much of the book, but I always liked to page through it to see Gordie's enthusiastic notes in the margins; on virtually every page he had scrawled stuff like, "Wow!" and "Far out!" and sometimes just a string of sloppy exclamation points. I pulled that book out this morning and sat down on the couch and turned its pages once again. On the bottom of one page Gordie had written, "Too far is never far enough!" Fuck, that made me happy, even as it was breaking my heart.
2:40:04 AM 
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