After Bathing at Baxters: Stories by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor [Taylor, D. J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504015240
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Looking for Lewis and Clark

Truth to tell, we didn’t even come from Seattle. I know all the music papers used to write us up as part of the Seattle Sound, and maybe we played with Nirvana and Pearl Jam one time – I don’t rightly remember – but you ever hear of a rock band out of Bozeman, Montana? Isn’t nothing there but steers and cowboys in ten-gallon hats. So we figured it might as well be Seattle. Same thing with the country gear. I know they put us in buckskins for the cover of the first album, and Jimmy did that Wrangler ad a while back, but none of us ever been on a horse in our lives. Closest any of us got was Curtis when he worked for a vet one time, out on Vosper Mountain. As for the others, Jimmy now, he went in the meat-packing plant when he was sixteen. Errol was a college kid – you know, processed hair and a windcheater, kind of kid you didn’t see around too often. Me, I just collected my welfare check. So no horses, or cattle neither. And from Bozeman too. Anybody back there get to hear about it and I wouldn’t show up in town in a hurry, no.

Sure, the place has changed. I was back there last year in the Fall and they had a longhair record shop, and Mudhoney were supposed to be playing the local sports hall. Hollywood actors buying vacation homes out by the lake too. Wouldn’t have had that fifteen years ago – now if Jane Fonda had strolled down Main Street when I was a kid and told a few ranchers she planned on reintroducing the wolf, someone would have torched that bungalow down and never thought twice about it. Same thing with fashion. Clothes I’m wearing now – you wouldn’t reckon on people being pissed off by a T-shirt and a pair of K-Mart sneakers and a ponytail: I seen a Warners executive – guy who signed us – in a ponytail. Well you couldn’t have worn that stuff in Bozeman back in ’75. I was in a two-dollar diner one time when a kid came in with an afro and leathers and someone smacked a pool cue over his head. Now they got an AIDS clinic and the congressman don’t know one end of a steer from another, so I reckon the kid won the deal.

The first time I saw Jimmy wasn’t long after that. All on account of the only job I ever had. They were building the new freeway then out towards Livingston, and taking up the asphalt the old-timers said had been there since Lewis and Clark, and anyone who wanted to shovel tar could get eighty dollars a week for doing it. Evenings after work we used to hitch a ride back into town and fetch up at Mother McKechnie’s. You ever catch the scene in The Blues Brothers where the band gets to play at Bob’s Country Bunker? Well, Mother McKechnie’s was like that, and then some.

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