Front Men Are Forever

1. Million Dollar Bash

So without any help from radio or MTV, Candlefingers went gold, and Rising magazine named it the Breakthrough Album of the Decade, and we recouped our advance and were suddenly seeing royalties, and the label was chomping so hard to get us back into the studio that they agreed to renegotiate our contract. Remember, this was 1998: in rock music, even in our tiny alt-country corner, you could still earn a living making records. We felt like in five years’ time we’d be playing on the moon. It was like how we imagined the sixties were, except better—no wars, no assassinations, no hippies.

Laurel and I had been separated for more than a year, and I was living in this extended-stay efficiency, and when I wanted to see the kids I had to go over to the house, which was weird now, just being inside it. So it was my suggestion to the band that we get out of town to write and arrange and start tracking the next record. We rented this busted-up old mansion called Collingwood in southwestern Virginia—heart of the Blue Ridge, total Carter Family country—and leased a bunch of gear. The label paid for all this on top of our advance (recoupable, of course—everything was recoupable), and when it came time to pick a producer, instead of assigning one, our A&R guy Rusty asked us: “Who do you want to work with?”

We were giddy.

To help with all this label business, our manager drove down for a few days. Wilbur Price was fifty-three and had been some kind of gonzo journalist in the seventies. He wore these leopard-skin sneakers and was balding except for this long braided rat’s tail. He stood there in the grand foyer, scowling at the crumbling arches, and he goes, “Rock ’n’ roll cliché number one: crass decadence.” He was an LSD refugee but he talked like a movie drill sergeant, and he was jumpy as hell. Since we’d moved in, some mining company had started dynamiting the top off the next mountain over, so every couple hours—BOOM—the whole house would rattle, and Wilbur would leap out of his skin and shout “Jesus shit!” and falling plaster dust would settle on his pate, and we’d all die laughing. He went on these tirades about strip mining, how shortsighted and ungrateful these miners were, blowing up their own ecosystem. “It’s like Fuck you, mountain, here’s some C-4!” He stayed at the Holiday Inn in Roanoke, just refused to sleep in the house, which, by the way, the guy who’d built it—he was some fin de siècle apple baron, no kidding—he died in a shipwreck, not the Titanic but another one, and his wife lost her shit and hanged herself, right there in the house, their kids locked up in the nursery. Wilbur goes, “Rock ’n’ roll cliché number two: the haunted house studio. One of you boys wanna sign up to choke to death on your own vomit?”

So we got one of those oversized tablets they use in office meetings, and we made a list: ROCKNROLL CLICHES. We hung it on the fridge, which was art-deco old and made noises like a car throwing a rod. Clark had this fussy diet, and he brought down these organic plums and a carton of goat’s milk, but the milk only kept for like two days in that fridge, and one day Wilbur, thinking it’s milk milk, pulls it out and takes a swig, and when it hits his tongue he makes this face like Don Rickles mugging the camera, and he sprays sour goat’s milk all over the place. He throws the carton out the back door, and this huge owl flies out of the orchard rows and swoops down onto it. We were all stoned, and it was the strangest, funniest thing we’d ever seen, and Wilbur told us to go fuck ourselves, and Clark...