Working the Spanish Steps with John Anderson

Highlight of my "honeymoon" was draining Heinekens with Mr. Wild and Blue

Alcohol doesn’t get enough credit for the good it does. Yeah, it can kill you, but it can also save your life. My sad Italian honeymoon in March 1993 felt like I’d been diagnosed with a serious disease, until I was cured by an afternoon of beer on the Spanish Steps, listening to a cassette of John Anderson’s Greatest Hits (MCA 1984) over and over again on my Walkman. Like Audrey Hepburn on the Steps in Roman Holiday 40 years earlier, I was on a getaway from a stressful situation. Remember what her doctor said when he gave her a sedative? “Best thing I know is to do exactly what you wish for awhile.”

My spot was in the shade, close to a guy with a cart on Piazza di Spagna selling 16-ounce Heinekens for the price of … who gives a fuck? Just take some of this funny money and keep ‘em coming! Anderson’s perfect country album is only 29 minutes long, times five or six listens, so we’re looking at about eight or nine Heinekens that afternoon. Heroin addicts talk about that full-body euphoria of the first time they shot up, and their descriptions sound a lot like what I was feeling that day, getting wonderfully sloshed to pure country music with soul. Would you catch a falling star? What bliss it was to hear the dignity of defeat, making me realize that even though my life had become undesirably complicated, I could take whatever’s thrown my way. I was headed for certain divorce, and all that was left… was everything!

How does the music always know what you need to hear? I still had love in my heart, down there somewhere.

When I went back to the hotel, my new boss was also returning. That alcohol has a bad side, too, became instantly apparent. She was already pissed at me, hence the “let’s spend the day apart,” but a sloppy drunk gave her a real reason to tee off. Marriage is the worst buzzkill.

But it was worth it. Nothing could take away that spiritually galvanizing John Anderson listening experience, where I learned you can make authentic roots music and still sound like no one else. I didn’t even need marijuana, which has always made music sound better.

I sure needed a lot of pot in my first year as the country music critic of the Dallas Morning News, having to listen to such dreck as Oak Ridge Boys, Alabama, Little Texas, Billy Ray Cyrus, etc.- but Anderson, from the swamps of Florida, was the saving grace. He was on a huge comeback with 1991’s Seminole Wind, with the everywhere single “Straight Tequila Night” hitting #1 my first month at the job. Before that, I had only known him through “Swingin’” and “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal,” the Billy Joe Shaver cut. I was catching up on the Spanish Steps with a hits package of material that was almost all new to me. Every track was my theme song of the day, to be replaced by the next one.

The Spanish Steps were made even more beautiful by a Heineken cart.

I was in Rome with a beautiful woman who was my wife, but I could see how different we were when we visited the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. After the two-hour wait, I was rolling my eyes- another tourist trap- and she was dabbing hers with a sleeve, so overcome with emotion. I don’t get art, but it was her life. She would soon start running the brand new McKinney Avenue Contemporary gallery in Dallas.

What I was interested in was art criticism. On our first date I asked her about a big, framed photo of Clement Greenberg on her wall, and she explained that he was an art critic whose essays, such as “Avant-Garde and Kitch” (1939 Parisian Review), had a profound impact on the abstract expressionist movement (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, etc.). Could you imagine a working music critic influencing the way records are made?

I tried to dazzle her with my insight into Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” which had been piped into the Colosseum during our visit, but as soon as I stopped talking about the song’s power of simplicity, using my hands to mime ascending melody, she pulled out that fucking art map and we were off to another church to see more Madonna with Child paintings.

The honeymoon wasn’t all bad. We started liking each other again on the train to Venice, where we shared our compartment with Frank Zappa’s “Indian of the group” Jimmy Carl Black, and his wife. We had a pair of empty seats and I recognized him, looking lost in the aisle, from Austin, where he drummed and painted houses with Arthur Brown (Black & Brown Painting: It’s a crazy world!) “Have a seat!” Jimmy Carl was shaken, and said it was because he’d just had a run-in with some racist teenagers, who made an issue out of the interracial couple. Jimmy Carl said, “I shoulda kicked their asses!” but his wife patted his arm and said, “no, you did the right thing.”

Jimmy Carl Black (white scarf) and the Mothers of Invention.

After he finally calmed down, he started telling us about his time in Italy, where he fronted a blues band that would sometimes draw a couple thousand people. As an original Mother of Invention, he had a name in Europe. Back in Austin he had been playing with pickup bands at the Hole in the Wall. He told us stories about the ‘60s rock scene, and for the next couple hours it felt good to be in my world and not hers.

In Venice, it was night and the sky drizzled just for us, as we danced on the sidewalk, love reborn. But, sorry to say, I have no photos of us in Italy. After a big fight in Dallas she ripped them all up and threw them in my lap. “Here, you missed one!” I said, finishing the tearing of a photo of us at dinner. That was no honeymoon, just like what Willie Nelson does on the Fourth of July is no picnic.

Back in Dallas, I was soon moved from the country to pop beat at the “Morning Snooze,” and went about my Clement Greenberg fantasy by writing a 2,500-word essay about how the most exciting new bands like Oasis, Stereolab and Ween were pastiche bands, combining the best pieces of the past. Alas, the “collage rock” movement went no further than the Thursday lead of Life & Arts.