(Scott Huler)
Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city’s eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as Backpacker, Fortune, and Child. His award-winning radio work has been heard on “All Things Considered” and “Day to Day” on National Public Radio and on “Marketplace” and “Splendid Table” on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and sometimes serves as guest host on “The State of Things” on WUNC-FM.
No-Man’s Lands is his fifth book; his work has also been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.
He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence; they have a son and another child on the way.
Backsliders
I did not go see a one-night reunion of the Backsliders last winter when they played in downtown Raleigh, so I have to figure that a chapter in my life – and in the life of my town – has ended. I’m told that Chip Robinson, the onetime frontman of the Backsliders, is now mostly a bike messenger in New York. I had kids. I’m not sure what happened to Raleigh. But the missed reunion made me remember a time when a Backsliders show was the capital of everything Raleigh ever was, or could be.
My love affair with the Backsliders reached its apex during a chance meeting on a windless summer afternoon – a Saturday, closing in on dinner time. Not too humid, but hot enough that shorts and a t-shirt were all you needed, and bordered on more than you wanted. The sun angled low, dipping the fronts of the neat millhouses across the street into shadow, but the sky remained an electric blue that seemed not to reflect light but to fairly glow. Traffic died, silence deepened. The kind of moment that makes people want to live in Raleigh.
I sat on the porch steps considering my station, and it wasn’t going to wreck my day if it took two or three cigarettes to decide what to do next. Then, music.
From somewhere – south? maybe westish? – I heard the opening riff of the opening song of the Backliders’ “Throwing Rocks at the Moon,” the CD that never left my carousel that summer. Motivated, I began walking toward the sound, figuring I’d meet a neighbor with some good taste in music. Maybe we’d have a beer.
One of the delights of living in a small city, though, is that everything is kind of mixed up together. In one direction, five minutes’ walk carries me into the city’s richest neighborhood. In another, five minutes puts me among renters barely out of school. Head south – maybe westish – and I’m among warehouses and cement plants, rail yards and welding shops. Following the twang of the guitars I turned down a gravel road toward the train tracks and found Dan & Bill’s Automotive (sign: “For Dan & Bill’s Automotive, use 2d gate. If 2d gate is closed, so is Dan & Bill’s automotive”).
The second gate was open, and twenty or thirty people milled around in denim and cotton, smoking cigarettes, gripping sweating longnecks, and kicking up a little dust as the evening deepened. And that wasn’t some Backsliders CD the neighborhood was hearing – that was the Backsliders, grinning in the dirt parking area in front of the loading dock, playing for those thirty people like they were their thirty best friends. They may have been – Chip knew a guy who owned a little company that shared space with Dan & Bill, and it was that company picnic I had wandered into. I asked somebody if I could hang around, and I watched Robinson sing, play guitar, and dance his two-year-old son around the loading dock for the better part of two hours.
This was a new experience for me. I had had favorite groups before, but they had always been someone like Sheryl Crowe or REM or Talking Heads – people you see on TV or hear on plastic disks. People selling you something.
But not the Backsliders. The Backsliders were local. I saw them at the bar and at the bookstore, at parties and on the street. I heard when a member was sick. I knew that the oddly titled “Number 5” took its name from being the fifth song they played in their live set. They made their music from the same raw material we all shared in Raleigh, and somehow it reached me in a way that only local music can.
The Backsliders came from Raleigh, an utterly uncategorizable mixture of Southerner and transplant, of sweet tea and Jolt, of Bourbon and beer. Sleepy Southern capital with big-city pretensions? Emerging New South hotbed hamstrung by antebellum restraint? Or maybe just a good place to get a barbecue sandwich?
Hard to say. And certainly very few, whether recent transplant or fourth-generation Old Raleigh Baptists, simply take it for what it is. Everybody seems to want it to be something else – Charlotte, or Atlanta, or Austin, or Seattle, or San Jose. It can be frustrating keeping up with what a small city, growing larger, thinks it is, or thinks it might be. And the Backsliders entered my world at a time when Raleigh wasn’t the only highly confused element in my life, which was skidding into the dirt with a surprising amount of momentum. My friend David surveyed the chaos for a while and then said, “There’s a band you need to go see.”
We went to the Brewery on Hillsborough Street, a filthy dim room with brick walls, where people stood around sweating and drinking beer from cans. The Backsliders’ opening cry of “Howy’alldoing’we’reth’BackslidersfromRaleighNorth Carolinathankyouf’rcomin’out’n’seein’us” seemed promising, but it was their advertised Hard Core Honky Tonk that caught me. First, they were loud. Second, they were good. Hard core honky tonk, as promised: if you were going to film the story of almost any Lucinda Williams song, these would be the guys playing in the bar. Beyond that, like Raleigh, they were hard to categorize: rock beat, yet country blues in every note; vicious guitar, yet a never-forgotten acoustic sensibility, along with the musicianship to carry everything off. The Backsliders gave that smoky, noisy bar the opportunity to be nothing but what it was: a smoky, noisy bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, on a hot summer night. Nobody there wanted to be anywhere else.
David was right: the Backsliders spoke to me. I listened, and I was saved. The live EP they cut soon thereafter at the same bar – I was there, of course – put a beat in my chores for an entire season. After a while my controlled slide of my life further decompensated into a genuine wreck, and when I found myself bloodied, dazed, and wandering around, holding the metaphorical steering wheel of my metaphorical car, there were the Backsliders, with “Throwing Rocks at the Moon,” which had the song “Crazy Wind,” which I played twenty times a day and which saved my life. If the Backsliders were the band from a Lucinda Williams song, “Crazy Wind” was the song that the guy in “Desperado” would have sung. Since in my broken meandering I felt like I might be that guy, I liked that song a lot.
The Backsliders, as I said, never left my CD carousel that year. But better than that, they never really left my life. If I went to see another band, there was Chip, at the back of the room, listening. I would bump into the lead guitarist at the supermarket, the bass player at the bar. My neighbor’s friend married the rhythm guitarist. The Backsliders were just a part of my life. Not my music life – my life.
This doesn’t sound like much, but if you look a little closer it’s everything. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, a few years too young to be part of the support for the James Gang and Joe Walsh, but I know that when I hear one of those songs there’s a sound, a way they pull a string or rip a chord, that just says “Cleveland,” and I’m inside. With the Backsliders I’m a little older, so I can identify more. All over “Throwing Rocks at the Moon” train whistles blow, and I remember lying in my bed during some of those awful sleepless nights and realizing: those freights I heard bumping and rumbling in the yard half a mile away, down by Dan & Bill’s Automotive? Those were the same trains Chip heard when he wrote songs. And when in “Crazy Wind” Chip talked about throwing the pieces of a broken radio into a boxcar, he spoke to me of my train yard, my boxcars – the pieces of my broken things. No surprise, then, that when I needed to get rid of some objects too painful to hold onto I walked down to the hard and dumped them in a boxcar – “and let them ride to Mexico, until the truth comes drifting back on a crazy wind.”
I got over it – one usually does – and the Backsliders broke up, came back, and then broke up again for good, with the exception of the very occasional reunion show. Their mixture of rock, country, and r&b still defies categorization, but somehow that just makes them more so. More what they are, and more Raleigh.
The Backsliders for a while put out a sticker, one of which is on the back of my truck now. It looks like a Heineken label, and apart from their “Hard core honky tonk” motto, the label bears some excellent fine print. “This ain’t Nashville,” their old bumper sticker says. “This is Raleigh.” At least it was then. Since then Chip has gone to New York. Raleigh has picked up a Stanley Cup, a new Convention Center, and a basket more positions on national “Best place” lists but isn’t the slightest bit closer to understanding itself. As for me, I’m so dug into familyville that I’m getting a station wagon; I’ll have to sell the old pickup truck. And that sticker won’t come off.
But the message, like the music, remains. If nobody else does, for a moment at least the Backsliders knew where they were. And I thank God they did. Because maybe if I follow them I’ll find my way too.