Note: This memoir of a crazy band in a crazy time was recently published in "Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas" (Novello Press, edited by Ann Wicker). The book's available online at:

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Notes-Carolinas-Ann-Wicker/dp/0615159699


The Glory Road - By Woody Mitchell

Of all life's mysteries that have crossed my screen so far, the most elusive has been this: Why was the one-legged man hopping across the tobacco field at gray dawn trying to bash the mad cello player with his artificial leg?

Maybe it's just one of those insidious pranks youth plays on the aging mind. Boomer angst takes on many forms as we wrestle to reconcile who we were then with who we are now. We fancied ourselves so clever, so bulletproof, so immune … only to find age laughing in our faces.

The sixties were shouting their last hurrah in the mid-seventies in parts of the Carolinas, but cowboy hats had replaced Nehru jackets as the uniform of the day. Journeyman rockers who refused to succumb to the Disco Virus took to the outlaw-music trail, infusing country roots into barroom rock and generating an under-the-radar culture that slips through the cracks when that era is chronicled.

In North Carolina, this ferment spawned a band called Loafer's Glory. Based in mountainous Yancey County, the band started as a weekend lark for musically inclined back-to-the-landers. Dick Webb (now known as Iron John), from the Tennessee Plateau, fronted, picked rhythm and sang lead vocals. John Dalbeck (guitar) and Pete Stevens (drums) migrated from the LA area, where they'd played together for years.

When they offered me a job in 1975, they'd been building their act for a year or more and had recently recruited Ron Cheek, a superb bassman from Boone. They were ready to take the band on the road and were looking for another lead guitarist to punch up the sound.

It was a no-brainer for me. The burning desire to master electric guitar had fueled my will to live during a year as a boonie-rat in Vietnam. I wound up in San Francisco, playing in garage bands and occasionally cracking the bill at Fillmore West jam night. But as the psychedelic scene degenerated into cocaine, heroin and other destructive trends, I bailed for Carolina, looking for the roots I'd glossed over in my cosmic fervor.

Joining the Loafers was like getting picked up hitchhiking in the Mojave Desert by a vanload of hippies with a full cooler. Their ragtag, hell-bent delivery appealed to me, and they were a goodhearted bunch. Plus, they introduced me to western swing, throwing some jazzy seasoning into the country-rock stew.

Music was the lifeline that kept me off the dark path so many of my fellow vets wandered down, and road life provided the adrenalized postwar lifestyle I craved– a warrior in a less deadly sort of war. I unleashed my country Inner Beast and signed on for the extended trip that led to that morning in the tobacco field out in the sticks of Eastern Carolina.

As we developed a twangy twin-guitar attack, a sound began to jell – the blend of Bob Wills, Willie & Waylon, Jerry Jeff shitkickers, good ol' Rockytop and a growing body of originals generated a following who showed up expecting an experience. No stars or virtuosos, just five guys driving one mind and having a real good time at it. Wherever we landed, it was party time.

Younger musicians often give me the fish-eye when I regale them with tales of a time when you were surprised if the house wasn't packed, when people showed up early to get a good table and were still hollering for more at last call. Some urgency was afoot in the zeitgeist then. Live music was more than an entertainment option –it was a community experience, like a Dionysian town hall meeting in a pagan church.

Along with SuperGrit, Laryat Sam, Tumbleweeds, Sutter's Gold Streak and other Carolina bands, we developed a circuit from D.C. to Atlanta, East Tennessee to the Outer Banks, traveling in an old church bus we gutted to install bunks, Greyhound seats and a card table. We left the 'Christ Is The Answer' sticker on it as protective camouflage.

And man, did we need it. That old rustbucket was a rolling bust. We warded off road anomie with herbs we grew and plenty of beer. The need for rest stops was alleviated by cracking the bus door and peeing out the slipstream, and we could change drivers in-flight -- one guy climbs over the aluminum rail and slips into the driver's seat while the other guy slides out past the gearshift, holding the wheel steady and keeping the pedal to the metal until the new driver's ensconced. Gotta keep truckin' on.

But we were no longer footloose young men. The median age was pushing thirty, and we had families, keeping up homesteads in the mountains. Several of us heated and cooked with wood, so an inordinate proportion of our home-time was spent with a chain saw, ax and go-devil.

We thought we'd arrived when we hit the fifty-dollar-a-man-per-night pay level (never dreaming that in 2007, fifty dollars would still be the wage floor for many bar gigs). The Loafers mojo felt so strong that prosperity seemed all but inevitable – the muse willing. But in the meantime, we had to make ends meet and feed the chillun.

Isolated in a rural setting, we didn't have a hometown where we could hunker down and do local gigs for a week or two – Asheville was the nearest city, forty miles away, and at the time it had no clubs that welcomed our kind of music. We had to get creative about augmenting our income.

Now and then, we'd wire up an old tobacco barn up on Jack's Creek and throw a barn dance that lasted all night – five bucks a head, no hassles, no law, just a good throwdown, then roll out your sleeping bag and bunk in the barn.

About this time we hooked up with audio maven Mark Williams and recorded our only album, Hotel Carolina, amid dense clouds of smoke and stacks of beer cans. Thanks to Mark, it came out pretty well, so we had product. But our backer insisted we release it on 8-track cartridge tape, rather than the emerging cassette technology. Our run of 200 sold at a trickle, and we used the proceeds to print up some T-shirts. But it still wasn't nearly enough to shore up our revenue shortfall. After two years on the road, we were barely breaking even, and some of us were under domestic pressure to bring home a little more bacon.

Making a living at any art is cruel, and electric music may be the worst due to the travel. All that time away from home in unsavory environments runs up costs that don't come due til years later. As an artist, you never quite feel alive unless you're playing. But if you're not the artist – a spouse, or a child – that may not mean much. Unless, of course, the artist is bringing in six figures.

We weren't, and a lot of money went into keeping the bus roadworthy. Once when we had it in the shop, our mechanic's daddy pulled out a jug of liquor about the color of Cuervo Gold and had us taste it. He wondered if, in our travels, we might know anybody who'd be interested in such traditional mountain products.

He fixed us up with twenty one-gallon jugs, which we stashed under the bus bunks, charging us ten bucks a jug. We passed it on for twenty. Only much later did we realize that if anything had gone awry, we were looking at a federal rap. It's crazy what folks will do with the wolf breathing down their necks.

Folks think of moonshine as liquor, but in reality it's far beyond that. Firewater is what it is, burning open crazed recesses in the brain to unleash a howling storm. With exceptions, it's a guy thing … few women are inclined to burn their guts out while turning into a wild beast, and many hate it for doing that to their men. But there it was, under the bunks, and we were rolling down the road.

It was a devilishly smooth concoction, smooth and cool as 120-proof blends go, almost too easy to glug down. We nicknamed it the Amber Current, after the line in the Willie Nelson song "Whisky River." Folks liked it and it kept us in running money so we could take our pay home.

It worked so well, we restocked before our next three-week trip. Typically, if we were traveling far afield, we'd book the weekends at places we were established, try to grab a new venue on a weeknight or two along the way, and barnstorm between stops on off-nights. Quite a few times we'd walk into a joint cold, ask them if they wanted a band that night for tips and free beer – if they did, we'd set up and play. That way, we could afford a motel room and everybody could get a shower … one of the road's tender mercies.

The second Amber Current run culminated in Greenville, North Carolina, where we played a double bill with a band called Plank Road. Their manic bassman actually played a cello, strapped over his shoulder like a giant guitarron. We hit it off with those guys, and the one-legged man seemed to just sort of materialize backstage. An affable guy in a planter's hat, he invited both bands to party after the gig out at his place, deep in the grid of Pitt County farm roads.

After buying up all the Amber Current we had left, he opened his big old farmhouse to us for an all-hands jam. Moonshine-stoked, we raved on for two or three hours, the crazed cello player thumping himself into a lather, his Greenwich Village cabbie cap flopping like Jell-O, and I don't recall a cross word. Eventually, deep night descended on me and I went out to crash on the bus.

Probably not much over an hour later, I'm hearing this ruckus, cuss-fighting … cracking my inflamed eyes through a blinding hangover out the bus window, thinking this bizarre chase can't possibly be happening … the one-legged man hopping like a madman, brandishing his prosthetic leg, actually gaining on the cello player, who's stumbling over every tobacco row with his ungainly instrument strapped to his back. Curiously, both still had their headgear on. Obviously some sort of flashback, I figured, much more than I could process right then, so I collapsed back into stupor.

Afterward, half-awake and mobilizing for travel, I asked Iron John if that had really happened, and he said yes. Why, I asked? He looked at me flatly in stark morning daylight and said, "Cause he pissed 'im off."

I suspect the Amber Current was a factor. But that vivid flash has haunted my memory as the mile-marker where our freewheeling way of life began to Go Wrong. Iron John was the first to leave, and we recruited my old pal John Wicker to take his spot, keeping the band alive for another year. But the Glory Road was petering out, a victim of changing times.

At this point, it's evident that the counterculture died of self-inflicted wounds. The world didn't change as expected, and everybody was scrambling to catch up with real life, which was leaving us and our families in the dust.

Nowadays, at this balancing-the-books point in life, I'm looking back and wondering what we have to show for the costs we incurred. The lore, of course – enough tales to keep the old-folks home entertained even if we live to see eighty. Some firm friendships that have lasted through the years. Stage savvy that enabled us to make extra dough playing after being forced to pursue other occupations.

And, oh yeah, the music. Around 2002, Mark conjured up an 8-track copy of "Hotel Carolina" and jacklegged some gear to miraculously produce a digital remaster we re-released on CD, with sales skyrocketing into the dozens (mostly to friends, old fans and family).

We celebrated with a reunion mini-tour, rehearsing a week in the mountains for three appearances in Asheville and Charlotte. We still had the mojo, and, as was our legacy, we nearly broke even on the venture.

But the real payoff was realizing that magic never dies – it's just a lot more work to conjure up. As experiences oxidize into memories, a hazy glow suffuses them: it's hard to tell where the bounds of reality stop and start. Resurrecting the band after 25 years for that brief glimmer affirmed that the Glory Road, in a world that no longer exists, was as real as the one-legged man and the mad cello player.