at you and I don’t have to.
Yeah, but look at me now, sweetbritches, I thought as I drove my 4Runner west on Caribou Road. I had added forty pounds since the night I met Charles Jacobs in Tulsa, but at six-one, a hundred and ninety looked good on me. Okay, so my belly wasn’t quite flat, and my last cholesterol count had been iffy, but back then I’d looked like a Dachau survivor. I wasn’t ever going to play Carnegie Hall, or arenas with the E Street Band, but I did still play—plenty—and had work I liked and was good at. If a man or woman wants more, I often told myself, that man or woman is tempting the gods. So don’t tempt them, Jamie. And if you should happen to hear Peggy Lee singing that rueful old Leiber and Stoller classic—“Is That All There Is?”—change the station and get some good old stompin music.
• • •
Four miles along Caribou Road, just as it starts to climb more steeply into the mountains, I turned off at the sign reading WOLFJAW RANCH, 2 MILES. I punched my code into the gate keypad and parked in the gravel lot marked EMPLOYEES AND TALENT. The only time I’d seen that lot full was when Rihanna recorded an EP at Wolfjaw. And that day there were more cars parked on the access road, almost down to the gate. The chick had a serious entourage.
Pagan Starshine (real name: Hillary Katz) would have fed the horses two hours ago, but I went down the double line of stalls anyway, giving them apple slices and pieces of carrots. Most were big and beautiful—I sometimes thought of them as Cadillac limos on four feet. My favorite, however, was more of a beat-up Chevrolet. Bartleby, a dapple gray with no bloodline to speak of, had been at Wolfjaw when I arrived with nothing but a guitar, a duffel bag, and a bad case of nerves, and he hadn’t been young then. Most of his teeth had gone the way of the blue suede shoe years ago, but he chewed his apple slice with the few he had left, jaws ruminating lazily from side to side. His mild dark eyes never left my face.
“You good business, Bart,” I said, stroking his muzzle. “And I just love good business.”
He nodded as if to say he knew it.
Pagan Starshine—Paig, to her friends—was feeding the chickens out of her apron. She couldn’t wave, so she gave me a big rusty halloo, followed by the first two lines of “Mashed Potato Time.” I joined her on the next two: it’s the latest, it’s the greatest, etc., etc. Pagan used to sing backup, and when she was in her prime, she sounded like one of the Pointer Sisters. She also smoked like a chimney, and by the age of forty, she sounded more like Joe Cocker at Woodstock.
Studio 1 was closed and dark. I lit it up and checked the bulletin board for that day’s sessions. There were four: one at ten, one at two, one at six, and one at nine that would probably go on until past midnight. Studio 2 would be just as stacked. Nederland is a tiny burg nestled up on the Western Slope where the air is rare—less than fifteen hundred full-time residents—but it has a vital musical presence out of all proportion to its size; the bumper stickers reading NEDERLAND! WHERE NASHVILLE GETS HIGH! aren’t a total exaggeration. Joe Walsh recorded his first album in Wolfjaw 1, when Hugh Yates’s father ran the place, and John Denver recorded his last in Wolfjaw 2. Hugh once played me outtakes of Denver talking to his band about an experimental plane he’d just bought, something called a Long-EZ. Listening to it gave me the creeps.
There were nine downtown bars where you could hear live music any night of the week, and three recording operations besides ours. Wolfjaw Ranch was the biggest and best, though. On the day I stepped timidly into Hugh’s office and told him Charles Jacobs had sent me, there were at least two dozen pictures on his walls, including Eddie Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Axl Rose (in his prime), and U2. Yet the one he was proudest of—and the only one he was in himself—was of the Staple Singers. “Mavis Staples is a goddess,” he told me. “The best woman singer in America. No one else even comes close.”
I had recorded on my share of cheap singles and bad