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By Root 918 0

— like Mother Earth. Her dad, though, was a hard-scrabble guy, weather-beaten face, always unshaven — wore a hunter’s cap, had calloused hands…nice enough when he’d been working, but when not, you’d have to look out. You’d never know which mood you’d catch him in. The kind of guy that’s always thinking that somebody’s out to take advantage of him. When he wasn’t working, he’d be drinking and get wrecked and then things would turn evil. He’d come into the room and mutter something through locked teeth. Once he ran me and a friend of mine off with a shotgun. He shot at us in the dark down a gravel road. But other times, he could be considerate. You just never knew. One of the reasons I liked going there, besides puppy love, was that they had Jimmie Rodgers records, old 78s in the house. I used to sit there mesmerized, listening to the Blue Yodeler, singing, “I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.” I didn’t want to have to work, either. I was looking at all the guns up at Ray’s place and thought about my old-time girlfriend, wondered what she was doing. The last time I’d seen her, she was heading West. Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did.

There was other stuff in the room, other delights. A Remington typewriter, the neck piece of a saxophone with a swanlike curve, aluminum constructed field glasses covered in Moroccan leather, things to marvel over — a little machine that put out four volts, a small Mohawk tape recorder, odd photos, one of Florence Nightingale with a pet owl on her shoulder, novelty postcards — a picture postcard from California with a palm tree.

I’d never been to California. It seemed like it was the place of some special, glamorous race. I knew that movies came from there and that there was a folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove. At the Folklore Center I’d seen posters of folk shows at the Ash Grove and I used to dream about playing there. It seemed so far away. I never thought I’d ever get out there. As it turned out, not only did I get out there, but I bypassed the Ash Grove entirely and when I finally did arrive in California, my songs and my reputation had preceded me. I had records out on Columbia and I’d be playing at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and meeting all the performers who had recorded my songs — artists like The Byrds, who’d recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Sonny and Cher, who’d done “All I Really Want to Do,” The Turtles, who recorded “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Glen Campbell, who had released “Don’t Think Twice,” and Johnny Rivers, who had recorded “Positively 4th Street.”

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me.

It would be a few more years before I’d reach Sunland. I stared around the room, looked over towards the back window and saw that twilight was coming. Ice was stacked up, thick, all along the fire escape rail. I stared down into the alleyway and then up to the rooftops from tower to tower. Snow was beginning to fall again, covered the cement covered earth. If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn’t seem that way. It’s not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all