Life [3]
But then all you had to do was cross the tracks and you’d get a real education. If we were playing with black musicians, they’d look after us. It was “Hey, you wanna get laid tonight? She’ll love you. She ain’t seen anything like you before.” You got welcomed, you got fed and you got laid. The white side of town was dead, but it was rockin’ across the tracks. Long as you knew cats, you was cool. An incredible education.
Sometimes we’d do two or three shows a day. They wouldn’t be long shows; you’d be doing twenty minutes, half an hour three times a day, waiting for the rotation because these were mostly revue shows, black acts, amateurs, local white hits, whatever, and if you went down south, it was just endless. Towns and states just went by. It’s called white-line fever. If you’re awake you stare at the white lines down the middle of the road, and every now and again somebody says “I need a crap” or “I’m hungry.” Then you walked into these brief bits of theater behind the road. These are minor roads in the Carolinas, Mississippi and stuff. You get out dying for a leak, you see “Men’s” and some black bloke is standing there saying “Coloreds only,” and you think “I’m being discriminated against!” You’d drive by these little juke joints and there’s this incredible music pumping out, and steam coming out the window.
“Hey, let’s pull over here.”
“Could be dangerous.”
“No, come on, listen to that shit!”
And there’d be a band, a trio playing, big black fuckers and some bitches dancing around with dollar bills in their thongs. And then you’d walk in and for a moment there’s almost a chill, because you’re the first white people they’ve seen in there, and they know that the energy’s too great for a few white blokes to really make that much difference. Especially as we don’t look like locals. And they get very intrigued and we get really into being there. But then we got to get back on the road. Oh shit, I could’ve stayed here for days. You’ve got to pull out again, lovely black ladies squeezing you between their huge tits. You walk out and there’s sweat all over you and perfume, and we all get in the car, smelling good, and the music drifts off in the background. I think some of us had died and gone to heaven, because a year before we were plugging London clubs, and we’re doing all right, but actually in the next year, we’re somewhere we thought we’d never be. We were in Mississippi. We’d been playing this music, and it had all been very respectful, but then we were actually there sniffing it. You want to be a blues player, the next minute you fucking well are and you’re stuck right amongst them, and there’s Muddy Waters standing next to you. It happens so fast that you really can’t register all of the impressions that are coming at you. It comes later on, the flashbacks, because it’s all so much. It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.
Bill Carter was finally tracked down to Little Rock, where he was having a barbecue at the house of a friend of his who happened to be a judge, a very useful coincidence. He would hire a plane and be there in a couple of hours, bringing the judge with him. Carter’s judge friend knew the state policeman who was going to search the car; told him that he thought the police had no right to do it and warned him to hold off a search until he got there. Everything froze for two more hours.
Bill Carter had grown up working on the local political campaigns from when he was in college, so he knew almost everybody of importance in the state. And people he had worked for in Arkansas had now become some of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. His mentor was Wilbur Mills, from kensett, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, second most powerful man after the president. Carter came from a poor background, joined the Air Force at the time of Korea, paid for law studies with