Walking In Memphis

I only played in Memphis, TN once. I think it was 2018; it’s hard to keep track of the time. All of my photos from those years (and I was taking a lot of them back then) are on a laptop on which the touchpad no longer works. I was going to refer to it as a mouse pad, but I guess that’s an accessory for desktop computers with old-fashioned mouses. Mice. When I was 16 and my family bought our first computer, we had a Marvin the Martian mouse pad. I don’t know why. Marvin was not a particularly meaningful character to any of us. Home computers might have been treated with more whimsy in those days. The touchpad on my old laptop no longer works because the battery inside has swollen and cracked the frame of the computer in the area of the pad. It’s my understanding that this is not a positive development in the life of a laptop. 2018 or not, it was well after I’d written a song about Memphis. Maybe not about Memphis, but Memphis was in it. In fact, the idea was for two Memphises to be in it. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to it.

The night before my show in Memphis, I’d played in Nashville to a small but friendly crowd: ‘friendly’ in the sense that I knew almost everyone in the audience. They were my “friends.” One of the people I didn’t know was a record label A&R rep. I was told she might be there; and though I didn’t know beforehand what she looked like, I was pretty sure I spotted and identified her from the stage during my set. I was right. Nerves got the best of me during a song of mine called “Monroe,” and I forgot the last two lines. Generally speaking, the last two lines are some of the best to forget, if you have to forget any. At that point in the song, you don’t have to scramble to try to remember anything else, to try to find your place and get back into the song. You just end it. In this instance, I knew in the seconds between the third-to-last line and the second-to-last line that I didn’t know what was coming next. This is a terrifying feeling. It’s best neither to know or not know what’s coming next but just to sing it without knowing. When those seconds had passed and I reached the point at which I was supposed to sing, words did come out. I forced them to. Better to sing something than to leave an awkward and clearly unintentional silence. I have no idea what words I actually sang, but I do remember I managed to make them rhyme: a fact that I used to try to console myself in the aftermath. I received compliments about that song in particular after the show. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you sing.

I met the A&R rep shortly after I finished my set. She was very kind, and she wrote some very kind things about me online later that night. It was the closest I ever came to getting a record deal, and it was not particularly close.

When I arrived in Memphis the next evening, I had time to kill, so I sat in a Starbucks for a few hours. I didn’t explore cities and find local spots as much as some other musicians I knew did when they were on tour. When I had down time, I just needed a chair and reliable wifi, and Starbucks was often the easiest place to go to find both without having to think about it. I started receiving secondhand reports while I was there about how much the A&R rep enjoyed the show and liked my music. I was riding high. I played that night in Memphis to an audience of three disinterested patrons who sat as far from the stage as the physical layout of the venue would allow. But that wasn’t about to bring me down. I was used to that.

There wasn’t much action at the merch table after the show (there was no action and no merch table), so I got out with a lot of time on my hands and nowhere to go. So I went to Graceland. I’d go back the next day and take the guided tour with narration by John Stamos, but on this night I just stood outside. Stood at the famous gates. Marveled at how small it seemed. I don’t remember if it was December or January, but it was close enough to Christmas that there were lights and decorations on the lawn. I was glad I went at night and saw it all lit up. What surprised me most, other than its size, was how un-isolated it was. There was a neighborhood around it. A hot wings place steps away. A Walmart right down the street.

The Walmart might have been why I saw Graceland that night. I was sleeping in my car most nights while on tour in those days, and Walmart parking lots were very often where I parked to do so. I don’t remember which was chicken and which was egg that night: if I stopped at Graceland because I came upon it unexpectedly on my way to the Walmart or if I set Graceland as my destination and conveniently found the Walmart nearby. Seeing Graceland from a distance and Elvis’s jet, which is parked across the street, through a fence does not merit a long visit, but I’m sure I hung around taking pictures for quite a while, both in hopes of actually getting a decent picture in the dark (I probably didn’t) and because there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. At best, I’d been alone since I left that night’s venue. Really, though, I’d been alone since I left Nashville earlier that day. But when I parked and hunkered down for the night, with no distractions, would be when I’d really feel alone. And that night’s feeling of aloneness was heightened by the wild dogs. Maybe ‘stray dogs’ would be more accurate. But ‘wild dogs’ seemed right at the time. Once the Walmart parking lot had cleared for the night, the dogs arrived to pick and scrounge whatever there was on the ground to pick and scrounge. There were probably fewer dogs than I see now in my mind’s eye, but there were certainly more than a dozen, and that’s enough. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I haven’t seen anything like it since. Of the many times I slept in my car, this was one of the few when I felt I might be in danger. In danger of what? A stray dog crashing through my windshield? Sometimes the feeling doesn’t make sense, but you still can’t shake it.

I was not attacked by a dog that night. I took the Graceland tour the next day. Boarded the jet across the street. Saw the Jungle Room. Felt sad because I didn’t know he’s buried there and that the tour ended at his grave. Saw his misspelled tombstone. I visited Sun Studio that afternoon. Later on that trip, I went to the shotgun shack in Tupelo, MS where he was born. None of these stops were planned in advance, but they made sense at the time. I was never an Elvis fanatic. When I think back on it, what plays in my head isn’t any of his music but the Paul Simon song, a song that I love even though I don’t believe there was ever a girl in New York City who called herself the human trampoline.

I’ll be sharing a new song soon. It’s not about St. Augustine, but St. Augustine is in it.