A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music

12. Jim James: The Ghost of Jim James past

Jim James The Ghost of Jim James Past Memorial Coliseum is electrified tonight, and it’s not just from the guitars and keyboards and monitors that crowd the rectangular stage in the back of the basketball arena. No, there’s a current in the air that everyone in the audience senses, a power surge from the 5,000-strong crowd gathered on the black tarpaulin–covered gym floor that pulses up the side steps and into the bleachers. Mostly University of Kentucky students, they are savoring the cool spring night in Lexington after a hard winter. And with finals only three weeks away, the end is in sight, and that fact alone calls for a celebration. They are in awe of the charismatic man onstage singing into the microphone, and when he wraps up the song, they yell and throw their arms in the air, clapping furiously. He is one of them, they believe, someone who has walked in their shoes and speaks their language. And they are right. After a quick gulp of water, he points to his right, down the Avenue of Champions. “I worked over there at Fazoli’s scraping shit off bread pans. I’d come home to Holmes Hall all covered in butter and grease and sit down in front of that four-track [recorder] and sing.” But that was before—before the hit records and appearances at Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, before the Grammy nomina192 12 193 Jim James tion and the listing in Rolling Stone as one of the “20 New Guitar Gods.” That was the mid-1990s, a lifetime ago, when the man in the black polyester suit was a struggling UK art student named James Edward Olliges Jr. Now he is Jim James, and tonight he is here with his band My Morning Jacket. Jim James. (Photo by Matthew McCardwell) 194 A Few Honest Words The audience applauds wildly, and a stagehand slips out from the wings carrying a black cape and drapes it over Jim’s shoulders. As he leans into the mike, left hand raised above the crowd, the cape’s red silk lining shimmers under the stage lights. Part ringmaster , part Elizabethan actor, he flings his transformative tenor high into the rafters, higher than any of the glassy-eyed students in the audience. They are one with the music, bobbing their heads and moving their hips, swaying in place and mouthing the lyrics —“have you seen my smokin guns?”—channeling the hazy reverb of the electric guitar and steady high hat of the drums. After a few more songs, Jim still can’t get the image of his younger self out of his mind. Throughout the day, he has encountered the person he was fifteen years ago, living in the dorm and dreaming of jamming for a living. Looking down at his guitar, he offers a few words of advice: “If you pray hard enough and listen to those ghosts, they’ll really help make your dreams come true.” Then he laughs, almost to himself. “Lexington is a really, really fucked-up dimension.” Earlier that afternoon, Jim bounds off the stage, leaving the rest of the band to run through the sound check. They are flailing away at “I’m Amazed,” a muscular rocker from their 2008 album Evil Urges, electric guitars and drums inhabiting the empty arena. Jim pauses to converse with a sound engineer, his mouth right up to the hipster’s ear to be heard over the music. Then, with a grin and a quick pat on the back, we are off into the bowels of Memorial Coliseum, happening upon an open locker room that turns out to be the dressing room of Ben Sollee, who will be opening the show. Ben is not here yet, so we help ourselves to his couch and steal a couple of bottles of water from his stockpile. “All I did when I lived here was dream,” Jim explains, leaning back into the couch. “I worked at Subway for a year, and I 195 Jim James worked at Fazoli’s right down the street. I just walked around and dreamed and wrote songs. I’m trying to let the gods know or whoever that I’m really thankful ’cause this town, Lexington, was like one big dream for me.” One of his earliest performances, he says, was at an openmike night at Common Grounds, a funky coffeehouse just...