Oily in the Morning

I got my driver's license when I was 18, but my real driver's education came from using a stick shift. My father had an old 1981 Toyota Celica hatchback that was all falling apart except for the engine. I careened all over Massachusetts at record-breaking speeds, zooming from work to gigs, from home to rehearsals, and giving rides to other musicians when their cars were impounded for overdue parking fines.

The Celica ran hot. The only way to keep it cool was to run the heater full blast, even in summertime. I remember bouncing from pothole to pothole down a simmering, bubbling L Street in South Boston in July to rehearse with my friend Pete, a great guitarist and songwriter who lives in Nashville now. I adjusted the vents to blow all the hot air at my feet, which was not as uncomfortable as it sounds. I'd rather be too hot than too cold anyway. But I did a lot of stupid things like that when I was younger. Not like now, of course.

When I first started driving, I had to be "schooled" at the gas pump. One time I was giving a ride home to my old music partner, the late Butch McClendon. I was running on empty, so I pulled into a filling station and got five dollars worth of regular unleaded. At the time this was about 3 gallons. Butch shook his head and said,"Little girl, you don't know nothing. You can't go around putting five dollars in all the time." He took a ten out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. "Here. Put some more gas in your car." Butch hardly ever paid me for gigs as the band drank up the tab and usually ended up owing the bar money, but he believed in the value of a good education. I think of those days fondly now as we drive from state to state spending 50 bucks a pop at the pumps.

Before Paul and I became music partners, I would drive him out to his Wednesday night gig at the Sit 'n Bull Pub in Maynard, MA, where he opened for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. I was always late in picking him up, but felt confident I could make up the time en route. One winter there was a snowstorm every Wednesday night. I took a rural road for most of the 17 miles, navigating the sharp curves and slippery conditions with my left foot hovering over the clutch, my right pressing accelerator and brake simultaneously, as I palpated the horn every few seconds. I had become a topnotch Boston Driver.

Eventually my father traded me a red Acura for his beloved Celica, and from there I graduated to a Dodge and then a Plymouth minivan, better suited to larger bands and longer hauls. Paul and I had a gig at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, followed by a gig the next night in Burlington, Vermont. It turned out to be a longer drive than I had anticipated, and we would need to hurry to get there in time. We examined the map and made the mistake of believing that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The straight line in this case was a road called 9N that branched off from the New York Thruway and angled towards the Hudson River south of Burlington. 9N may have looked perfectly straight from above, but on the ground it was the world's longest, bumpiest Evel Kneivel stunt prop. We dipped in and out of the asphalt waves, surfacing among Adirondack Lake cabins. I can never forget the grinding sound as I gunned the engine to speed over those winding hills. The next day we had to drive over the Green Mountains on the way home. Finally, on Interstate 93 in southern New Hampshire, the car made a final growl and stopped responding. This is when I learned what a transmission was and why I needed a new one.

Of course, I eventually forgot all about it, until we got to Livingston, Montana last July. Livingston is a really cute town outside of Bozeman. We had a gig at the local Elks Lodge. I was worried we wouldn't have any people, as the entire town was plastered with posters for an upcoming show by "Sean Reefer and the Resin Valley Boys" which sounded like some kind of code for something. But we had a wonderful night after all, with a great crowd, and we want to thank John Taillie for putting it together. He and his girlfriend treated us to a delicious dinner and put us up at the best hotel in town, the Murray. The only odd thing about the Murray was that it had a century-old elevator that could only be operated by a member of the desk staff. The desk didn't open until 7:30, so the next morning we had to wait to load out, though we would ordinarily be on the road by 6:30 AM.

The Murray Hotel, Livingston, Montana. Across the street is a restored old railroad depot. You can't see the detail in this photo, but the circular rosette between the depot's second floor windows contains a red and black plaster yin-yang, an feature designed and installed by the original Chinese builders.

I thought that since we would still be in town when the local businesses opened, we might as well get the oil changed and the car looked over. John sent us over to a place called "Special Lube." You laugh, but it's the best damn place to take your car in the entire Mountain Time Zone. It's owned and operated by a group of idealistic, polite young people who aren't out to fleece anybody; they just really like cars. The guy at the desk wore giant tortiseshell glasses that were too big to fit on his nose and had slid down to just above the tip, giving him an owlish, baby-faced look like Al Wilson from Canned Heat. As he wrote up the bill for the oil change he informed us that the transmission fluid was brown and full of little burned-up pieces of the transmission. Apparently this is a bad thing. However, it would take them almost an hour to do a "Tranny flush" - stop laughing, it's auto mechanic's jargon - so we decided to take our chances as we had a long drive over the Rockies to get to Spokane by evening. Paul and I got in the car and had driven about a block and a half when we looked at each other with the same thought: "Take our chances? In the ROCKY MOUNTAINS?" What's an hour in Livingston, I realized, compared with the time we'd spend waiting for a tow truck to find us at the Continental Divide, or the incredible hassle of renting a car or looking for a new one for the remaining 6,000 miles of our tour?

Neither of us had said anything. I just turned the car around and drove it right back into the bay at Special Lube. We took our instruments out and sat at a picnic table across the street, playing for a couple of foraging prairie dogs as the freight trains rolled by behind us. I should have taken a picture. It was our only non-ludicrous "Americana Moment" on the tour. I'll get to the ludicrous ones eventually.

The Special Lube guy wrote up the final bill ($122 well spent!) and, with an air of sincere interest in the subject and no trace of sarcasm, gave me a few pointers about gear shifting in a car with automatic transmission. I really noticed the difference in the feel of the engine after the transmission flush. And I suddenly felt guilty about those hundred-mile-an-hour joyrides through the trooperless High Plains. I paid much closer attention to the tachometer after that and patted the dashboard with apologies and comforting words for the next several thousand miles.

Looking back on the trip now, I wish we had taken as good care of ourselves as we took of that car. But that's another story.

Paul in downtown Livingston





Inside the Elks Lodge with two of Livingston's finest. Everybody we met there was great, but these two made it happen.