Here Comes Everybody by James Fearnley

Author:James Fearnley [James Fearnley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Pop Music
ISBN: 9780571253968
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

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Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs had been released the previous month. It was never off the bus’s cassette player. We loved Waits’s cantankerous voice, half lover’s whisper, half carney’s barking. The clanks of the banjo we loved too, along with the ventilation of the accordion, the bonks and crashes of the percussion, the respiration of the pump organ and harmonium, the wailing of the musical saw, the booms of the parade drum, the clonks of the marimba. The otherworldly grating, creaking and thumping sounded throughout the bus. It was as if we were truly on board a ship with the straining of timbers and the constant motion.

We were already familiar with a couple of Waits’s previous records. Jem had played us Heartattack and Vine and Swordfishtrombones in the past couple of years, but it wasn’t until Rain Dogs came out that we knew that, if any record pointed the way towards what we wanted to do, this was it.

We waited for our favourite bits to come up, to point them out to one another. We would stare into each other’s eyes waiting for a choice phrase or sound. We delighted in spotting ‘Chim Chim Cheree’ in one of the verses of ‘Diamonds and Gold’, and Frank Sinatra’s ‘Witchcraft’ in the melody of ‘Rain Dogs’. We groaned in wonder at the brutality and spontaneity of the playing: Marc Ribot’s angular guitar, Michael Blair’s bonkers percussion, the thumb-heavy banjo on ‘Gun Street Girl’.

We relished Waits’s imagery – as American as Edward Hopper and as fucked up as George Grosz. Along with the brutality of the music came a zoetropic parade of slaughterhouses, roadhouses, shovels, whiskey, pistols, umbrellas, tumours big as eggs, Cincinnati jackets and paladins’ hats. The procession of images was as protean, as crystalline and as haggardly illuminated as in Shane’s songs.

When we weren’t listening to Rain Dogs, we were watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America on the VCR. Along with Tom Waits’s music, Morricone’s – the minor chord and semitone dissonance of the opening strings, the pan-flute of the title melody, the violins and soprano of ‘Deborah’s Theme’ – became the soundtrack of the tour. Not only did the music weave itself into the fabric of our day, but the dialogue too.

‘Noodles!’ Spider shouted.

‘You coming? We’re going. You coming?’

‘You dancing? You asking? I’m asking. I’m dancing.’

‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’

‘You’d be better off you stayed in the Bronx.’

‘Woulda been better for you, too!’

In the Raststätten we pulled into, one or other of us would be sure to stir his coffee for minutes on end, in homage to Noodles’s sixty-three seconds of spoon-turning in the film. It wasn’t long before the joke wore off.

Contrarily, the long journeys were inspiring. The sequestration, the physical proximity, the boredom, the fatigue, the constant motion seemed to imbue everything with a prodigiousness that drove me to write in my journal whenever I could. Andrew, when he wasn’t gazing out over the forests, drew. I could hear Jem at the back of the bus playing a mandolin.

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