JMW Sure, sure.
WG I used to think that was a pretty funny show. I haven’t seen it in thirty years
JMW Yeah so did I. We watched it in my house when I was a kid. When I read that book by Tim Gautreaux I didn’t get into that book much. I felt like the main characters were raping the earth, clear cutting the old growth forests, exploiting their laborers as much as they possibly could without any conscience about it and the plot of it carried out that these guys, who were clear cutting the forest, were the good guys. They were clear cutting hundreds of acres of cypress and then the bad guys come in, and the bad guys were a bunch of immigrants, and then the good guys kill the bad guys, and that just didn’t play well with me.
WG To be honest I don’t remember much about that book. He wrote me a really nice letter after I gave his editor the blurb. I’ve been reading a book by a guy named John Wray, you ever read anything by him?
JMW Never heard his name before.
WG I read about him in the New Yorker, I saw a book by him a couple of years ago that was compared to Blood Meridian and the New Yorker had this long review for his new book. Low Boy was the name of it and it is about this bipolar sixteen-year-old who runs away from home and he is off his medication and he is in New York I guess and he and his girl friend just sort of elope and take off and it is all about what happens to him on his trip but the writing is kind of hallucinatory. The guy is a really good writer. There is a woman who runs a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina and she told me if there was ever any book I was interested in she would send it to me, so I called her and told her to send me Low Boy and she did. She started sending me stuff about Thomas Wolfe, anything that was published about Wolfe, she would send it to me.
JMW What about Sonny Brewer, is he coming out with anything?
WG Sonny has a book that MacAdam Cage is supposed to publish this fall. Sonny told me about when he married his first wife, she was a lawyer and Sonny was traveling with a rock ‘n roll band, he had a band that did Neil Young songs. But they didn’t make any money; they were really struggling. They would go on the road and they were trying to get a record deal. I have actually heard Sonny do a Neil Young song and he can sing like Neil Young. He said this woman was like trying to get him to settle down and get away from the rock ‘n roll band. So she wanted some kind of resolution and he said they were on the road one night and they were all in the same hotel room and they hadn’t had enough money that day to buy anything for supper and they hadn’t had any food and he was laying there listening to those people snore and he just got up in the middle of the night with everybody else asleep and drove back to Mobile and married that woman.
JMW Is there going to be anymore Blue Moon?
WG He thought they were doing one, of course that was MacAdam Cage too. I don’t know why they couldn’t do something like that; they were getting the writers to give them the stuff and nobody was getting paid anything for it. Tommy said Sonny was telling him about the new Blue Moon Café book and they were going to have a party and were going to spend eight or ten thousand dollars to put up everybody in Jackson at a big hotel and Tommy said if they had that kind of money it looks like they could give all the writers a couple of hundred bucks instead of doing this big party and Sonny got mad at him and didn’t speak to him for a while. Sonny was the editor for those things and he was the one talking people into contributing.
JMW Are you writing any articles now?
WG I got really interested in that Todd Snyder song, The “Thin Wild Mercury”, the one I played for you and I had talked to Marshall Chapman about him. She knows him and she had opened for him a couple of times or they had opened for somebody bigger. He has a new CD, so I had tried to talk Oxford American into letting me do some writing about Snyder and he said he had too many pieces on singer/songwriters and he wasn’t really interested in it. He has to answer to that college and the whole thing is about selling magazines; it isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I only enjoy writing when it is about something I want to write about and the idea of writing about Glen Campbell has no appeal.
Todd Snyder is an interesting guy. He is still plugging away, playing in small venues and still manages to put out albums and he had that deal with MCA and they paid him a big advance and then when the records didn’t sell he lost the deal and then he lost his band and went back to playing acoustic guitar and harmonica in bars and wherever he could get a gig. That seems kind of interesting to me, especially if you have talent. I think “Thin Wild Mercury” is a good song and he had a song on that same album about the Bush brothers. “You Got Away With It” was the name of that; it was a good song too. He is an engaging guy to watch, he is sort of charismatic but not charismatic enough to sell all kinds of records.
The record business is so damn fickle. The sorry stuff that is coming out of Nashville now, they ought to go hide their faces or something. The people the record companies are pushing are no good, and the new crop is even worse. Country music, like when Hank Williams was around, country music used to be real; I wasn’t that crazy about it, but it was real anyway. Now it is formulaic, cowboy hats and buffed up shoulders. They have some of the biggest tours in the country. That guy that married Nicole Kidman, his tours are some of the biggest things going.
JMW One last question before we have to go, I’ve noticed your characters aren’t religious; they don’t seem to believe in anything?
WG I’m suspicious of people who say they don’t believe in anything. I’m not religious but I believe in all sorts of things. I was at a reading and someone wanted to ask me what I believed in so I just quoted from a scene at the end of Twilight where Tyler comes up on these people who are digging up a grave of a relative so they can be sure the body wasn’t desecrated and he watches them for a few minutes and then turns to go and the man doing the digging stayed him and said that digging up his relatives was the least he could do for them, that he owed them that much. (He had a copy of the book beside his chair and he picked it up and read.)
I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?
What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silence.
JMW Well, I guess that about says it. The dark night, the long home.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTE: The “Bibliography” does not include all his shorter reviews, liner notes or other miscellaneous prose. Everything in the book, except for the excerpt from Lost Country and the “Interview”, has been previously published. The “Bibliography” indicates the first publication of each of the other pieces included in this book.