Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (23 page)

Why in God’s Name Am I Managing a Band? The Boris McCutcheon Story

In the spring of 2003 I went to a Mardi Gras party at the Somerville VFW Hall. These guys started playing. They sounded like a Confederate marching band set loose inside a New Orleans brothel. There were, by my count, only four musicians on the bandstand, but that seemed impossible given the clamor. The drummer kept capping his runs with a sharp clack on the rim of his kit and the result was a delirious urge to bump butts with the person next to you. The hall was sweltering, but the lead singer wore a Sherpa hat with the earflaps down. He had chubby cheeks and a slightly stunned expression. Strangest of all were his lyrics, which he delivered in a drawl of indeterminate origin.

It made no sense. Except that the melody was a thing of such unbridled goofiness that this final line, serving as a refrain, began to
infect the crowd, awakening in each of us the comic potential of our own self-pity, the conviction that we’d suffered some unprecedented romantic injury which our friends and family were simply dying to inspect. And thus whistles, shrieks, and hoots of “hurt!” started to rain down in the style of a tent revival. I spent the next half hour dashing around the party, trying to find someone who knew the band.

“That’s Boris,” this girl said.

“Boris?” I said. “Boris what?”

She shrugged. “He’s from the Cape, I think.”

Someone pointed me to a pretty blonde, the band’s manager, and I nearly tackled her. She happily supplied the singer’s full name (Boris McCutcheon) and a copy of the album his band was about to release,
When We Were Big
. I’ve tried many times to describe
WWWB
in the years since. I usually settle on something like “Sam Cooke fronting The Band.” This makes no sense, because Cooke had a silky tenor whereas Boris sings in a sandpaper baritone. The point of comparison has more to do with the commanding quality of each man’s voice, the immediate sense upon hearing them that you had better stop what you’re doing and listen. I’m also trying to get across that Boris is a soul singer, someone who draws on the traditions of gospel and R&B, even if the arrangements place him in the vast hinterlands of Americana. It’s like he’s found some hidden trove from the Smithsonian Folkways series and run them through a Motown filter.

And did I likewise, on that first night, assail the members of the band and buy them drinks and invite them back to my apartment to party until it was too late for Boris to drive back to the Cape so that he and his dog Pappy eventually passed out on a spare futon in my front room? I think so. Or maybe that was another night. There were a lot of them back then, because Boris and his backing trio—they would
later be called the Salt Licks, but for now had no name—were soon playing the smaller clubs around Boston and I was coming out to every show, with a variety of women (Erin being one) who quickly discerned that I was more interested in the band than in them.

There was, to take another example, the night the band and I constructed a chocolate Jesus in homage to the Tom Waits song. And the night Bones, the bass player, spent in panicked consultation with Poison Control because his dog Chopper had eaten one of my ant traps. Dogs were a constant in the Boris days, big friendly mutts who munched on poison or got sprayed by skunks or snarled at one another, doing their bit to add to the chaos.

The essential chaos, the human nexus of it, was Boris himself, Boris of the broken trucks and disconnected phones, of the lost capos, of the songs scrawled feverishly on the backs of receipts smeared with motor oil and stashed in the tackle box with his harmonicas. He spoke in a soft growl and dressed like a mestizo farmer; he had no fixed address. One week he was crashing on a farm in Woods Hole, the next he was with Bones down on the Cape. His pattern of employment was equally erratic. My friend Mitch likes to tell the story of seeing Boris play a Brookline pub and bumping into him the next morning, fixing a sprinkler on the Boston Common. He’d taken a post as an irrigation manager for the city, though he departed some weeks later, after dropping his key ring down a sewer grate, a blunder requiring the closure of a major road and the deployment of numerous city employees along with a giant scooper. He would later memorialize this episode in the song “17 Scoops.”

This was how Boris operated. The turmoil of his life invoked the refuge of music, where he found, if not quietude, at least an ordered universe. He knew which notes would produce beauty, how to arrange them, which details to include, the optimal tempo, how the song sounded in his head, and how to make it sound that way in the world—an act of scrupulous translation that is the essential
vocation of a musician. In this pursuit, he could not have been more disciplined.

And so for me there was really no choice but to see him play every chance I got, for the pleasure and inspiration, and because I knew this wasn’t going to last long, Boris was going to rocket to fame or explode into ruin or both. His band knew it too. But Boris was a genius, and genius establishes its own centrifugal force. They put up with a lot of shit on his behalf, cursed him regularly, and remained ravenous for his attention.

The band had just formed when I first saw them. Over the next year they grew into the sort of outfit you always hope is going to appear in your neighborhood bar but never does. They were fast, loud, tight, completely in synch and somehow, at the same time, able to project the aura of drunken pals just playing for beer. Some nights the lineup included a lanky tuba player, much favored by the ladies for his disheveled Teutonic beauty. Or a stray mandolin player. Where did these folks come from? Nobody knew. They just appeared, vomited whole from the Borisphere.

In early 2004, the band booked its first foreign tour—of Holland. I was sure this meant the band had arrived. I volunteered to ferry some equipment to the airport for Boris, but when I arrived at the apartment where he was crashing, nothing was packed. Gear and clothing lay strewn in a cyclonic tableau. Black electrical cord, miles of the stuff, snaked down hallways, over banisters, under sofas. Boris himself was red-eyed and muttering. He needed to burn two hundred CDs before sundown, to sell in Holland. It was four in the afternoon. It never occurred to me that this state of affairs might suggest a fundamental ambivalence in Boris.

It would take another year for me to start to see things clearly, and I spent as much of that year as I could with Boris and his mates. I was
doing other things too, such as teaching and writing and falling in love with Erin and breaking up with her. She loved Boris, too, and accepted that there were going to be some nights, many nights, actually, when I found it necessary to party with him and the boys until dawn.

That spring, Boris invited a bunch of us down to Naushon, a small, undeveloped island just off the southern coast of Massachusetts. His mom held the august title of the island’s Livery Stable Manager and Chief Shepherdess, and her home had become Boris’s crash pad of last resort. Naushon was like something out of a brochure for Ireland: low stone fences, green hills dotted with sheep, hidden coves. There were thirty-five homes on the island and no roads. Boris took us on a winding hike to a house on the remote western end. He had something to show us.

We found the place by late afternoon. All the doors were locked. Austin, the guitar player, spotted a screened window and we hoisted him up and he shimmied through and crashed to the floor. The air inside was thick with mothballs. Boris led us to a tiny parlor containing his surprise: a miniature keyboard that appeared to have been played last during the Spanish-American War.

“What is that?” I said. “A harpsichord?”

Boris seated himself and began pumping the thick pedals under the keyboard.

“Pump organ,” Bones murmured.

Boris set his hands on the keyboard. For a second, we heard only the clack of the yellowed keys and the soft thud of the pedal beneath. Then notes began trickling out of the pipes. None of us recognized the tune; it was something he made up on the spot I suspect, a boogie-woogie by way of Aaron Copland. He closed his eyes and his face tilted slightly up, then his voice joined in, majestically, and the particulars of the song seemed absorbed into something larger, an ancient feeling like jubilation.

This was life with Boris. Music lay at the center of everything. He
had led us astray and risked the injury of his lead guitarist, but now, as the sun set over Buzzards Bay and golden light flooded the room and dust motes made wild circles around his head, we stood behind him swaying and nobody said anything for a long time.

Later there was dinner and booze and pot. Boris busted out his guitar and played a few new songs. He was writing all the time, between gigs and travel and the jobs taken and not quite kept. We all waited, in those months, for what he would write next, our desire being not a greed for proximity or ownership, but for particular forms of beauty and what they might reveal about ourselves.

I remember the night, a few months later at my place, when Boris pulled out his mandolin. (I didn’t even know he owned one.) We were sitting on the green couch in my sunroom. His bandmates were scattered around the place, passed out amid the homemade bongs and stinking curs and puddles of chocolate goo. My future wife, a figure of possibly masochistic patience, lay curled in the bedroom.

Our throats were raw and our souls were wired; they always were in those days. Boris began plucking at the strings absently, coaxing himself toward sleep. But the notes resolved into something more solid, a chugging minor-key progression. Then Boris began to sing in his burred baritone and I felt the holy shiver. The song was built around a single line, chanted like an incantation:
The green wish is here
. Such a phrase! I figured he’d nicked it from Isaiah. The song ended and Boris grinned shyly. The mandolin lay in his lap like a polished stone.

“‘The green wish,’” I said. “What’s that?”

“Spring,” he said softly.

And then there was the time Boris asked me to help him write some lyrics. See, he had this one swampy blues song called “Chicken Man”
that he sometimes played at the end of shows. But it needed a couple more verses, which I supplied within twenty minutes of his request. This meant we were coauthors if you wanted to get technical about it, which I certainly did.

A few months later, at a concert I’d organized for Boris called (I kid you not) “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life,” the band started playing “Chicken Man” and Boris stepped to the mic and mumbled, “Hey, I can’t remember the words to this one. Is Steve Almond here? Let’s get Steve up here to sing this one.”

Wasn’t this what I’d wanted all along, what every Drooling Fanatic longs for, the chance to be born again? Here it was! The crowd let out a whoop. Only I was scared to death, in the same way I’d been scared as a kid whenever I wanted something too much. I would forget the words or hit a flat note or, most likely, I’d get up there and do my best and people would applaud my Drooling exuberance, then it would be over and Boris would take back the mic and everyone would look at me with the minor pity of this recognition.

Or worse, maybe they wouldn’t. For a second, I saw myself seizing the microphone with snarling brio.
What a voice!
everyone would say.
We’d thought he was a writer. But really, he’s a rock star!
This would explain why, for instance, I was so miserable, why, though I was putting books into the world and occasionally reading from them in public, I still hated myself and hated what I did, the stupid precious intent of all my decisions. Maybe I
would
lose myself in the song. Maybe I
would
produce the beautiful roar I suspected lay hidden inside me, and thereby confirm my true calling—and then where would I be? I’d be Joaquin Phoenix, basically, minus any possible hope of success.

And so I stood there in a queer paralysis of desire and dread. My friends turned to me. Someone tugged at my shirt. It was like one of those scenes from the movies where time slows down and everyone’s face gets really big. Boris was staring at me, too. But I couldn’t speak.
Instead, I watched my hand rise up and begin to flutter, as if to brush away his kind offer. The Chicken Man had made his debut at last.

Oddly, this realization did not crush me. On the contrary, it came as a relief. I was now free to focus my fervor on promoting Boris. I started booking gigs for him, and sending ardent letters on his behalf to my “contacts” in the music business.