North Carolina

Memories of my start in music

Driving home from an overnight DJ shift at WNCW 88.7 Spindale I saw the full moon start to rise against a brightening southern morning, and I hung a fateful left onto US 77 north. This became part of the birth story my wife Sally and I told our dear Frenchie.

But this is not that story.

Years earlier I was passing Mount Airy, driving the opposite direction on US 77 south, the window down and the head and tuning pegs of my guitar dangling out the window as my fingers picked out notes on the fretboard, my VW on cruise control with my knee doing the steering, tiny points of warm orange evening highway lights spread out and winking at me far below my vantage point high above the Piedmont, signifying a transition from the colder, bluer lights of the receding north. That several mile stretch of sloping US 77 in later years always felt like the place where The South re-enveloped me from wherever I had been into its welcoming, protective fold. I never understood that there was, in fact, a change awaiting me there until I lived in the south for 7 years. I was a skinny 23-year old Michigan boy searching for my song, starting the long, slow descent into life in the southern United States.

In July of 2024, I swapped my western summer and home for a family visit with my Carrboro-based sister Susanne and several days of music and southern reconnects at Merge Record’s 35th anniversary party, coincidentally (according to Linked In) also my 20th anniversary of doing digital music service licensing work for that same Durham, NC-based record label.

I remember signing up Merge at South by Southwest in Austin, 2005. My digital music marketing company, Toolshed, was three years old. I had managed to connect with Laura Ballance, a co-founder of the label and also of Superchunk, who played SxSW that year. We concluded our business deal to take on digital marketing and digital licensing for Merge Records, and we were assigned our first two projects. The first was…Richard Buckner! WOW. I was floored. Richard was on Glitterhouse when Cheralee Dillon was also on the label, I was a huge fan, and had met him a couple years earlier when SxSW was one block of clubs (today it encompasses a good part of the downtown). FANTASTIC. “Who’s the other band”, I asked. “This new band we’ve signed, called Arcade Fire”.

Arcade who?

One of these releases broke our servers when we hosted a promotional download for Neighborhood #1. The other did not.

On this day of the trip I was driving further east to see Penny, the booker for the Milestone Club, and Deanna from the band Violet Strange. It had been years since I’d seen either of them. The populated southern towns of the Triangle had given way to the ubiquitous red clay soil easily visible under more rural land closer to the ocean. A wall of southern humidity hung close, fed by torrential rains of the last several days, quiet and heavy, with distant black clouds warning of yet another downpour, the sullen air inescapable and pressing even as I moved the air conditioner switch to “Lo”. Drives to this beach years earlier for performance gigs always included this gauntlet of prominent, sticky sweet field tobacco smell from farms bordering these roads. By 2024, the predominance of vaping had replaced that ubiquitous tobacco with cornfields. I turned down Deep Bottom road feeling the slow, inescapable eyes of the south turn to gaze upon this northerner, questioning my credentials, before accepting the years I spent here. The South’s gaze shifted elsewhere, the air grew just slightly less sticky, and I pressed on.

I was 28, and we had been drinking Chivas. We often drank Chivas when we played guitar, sitting on the wooden kitchen floor of the foreclosed house the bank had not yet repossessed, that had no furniture, alternating playing songs to each other. Chivas was my happy drink, and she was here now; the rest of it faded away, music and a musician had found me, and all was right with the world. We drove downtown and parked a ways down the street, and now we were standing next to a dark ivy-covered brick wall, looking for a place to climb up and over and trying mostly unsuccessfully to be quiet. After moving to Charlotte in the late-80’s I had taken a job at a Patagonia outlet store and soon was regularly heading down to Crowder Mountain with my climber gf to learn to top-rope. But tonight I wasn’t with my girlfriend. Glove thrown, challenge accepted, up I went. I did not know what was behind this wall. Deanna told me it was worth it, that it was something magical, and here I was on the top edge of the wall reaching down so she could catch her footing and join me. I jumped down into soft earth, she came next, and Winghaven wrapped its seductive after-hours midnight arms around us, beckoning. And what we saw…was fireflies. Thousands of fireflies. The soft glow of the city skyscrapers directly above - and maybe also the moon - partially lit the flower and plant-filled sanctuary of renowned garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence, an unlit city block of classic southern garden surrounded by brick in an old neighborhood hidden in the shadow of downtown Charlotte.

We climbed out and walked back to the car in semi-silence. “That was beautiful”, she said. “Could you believe it?”. When we got home, I pulled the partly finished bottle of Chivas out of the cabinet, we got our guitars, and sat back down on the wood floor of the kitchen, and I knew it was on.

620 Pecan Avenue

On my flight back west after Merge Fest, I sat next to a manager from Union Pacific. We talked about his job replacing railroad ties on the lines that go along the Columbia River. This reminded me of my house from the early 90’s on Pecan Avenue and my friend Kevin who wrote for the local music rag, Creative Loafing. We lived 30 feet from an active railroad track, and when the nightly 3:20a went past - and since we also lived at an intersection - the train blew its horn in addition to gently shaking my bedroom. Some nights the engineer seemed to consider that a simple half-throated breath of the airhorn would suffice for the mostly non-existent traffic there, but other nights they’d lay on the horn and keep on it all the way through the intersection. Once the engine was past, taking its dull diesel roar with it, I’d fall back to sleep to the gentler shaking of following train cars clickety-clacking past our little house.

Years later my oldest daughter and future wife / soul mate would visit here, but this was not yet that time.

Kevin and I shared a small office in the room across from mine, with a flat wood door laid across concrete blocks for a desk. My half of of that desk was a music management office. Kevin interviewed artists for Creative Loafing from there. Sometimes I’d go in and he’d have left a phone number for Tom Waits, or Joey Ramone, on the door-table, and I’d dutifully copy it into my address book to have for the future when I would be a major music manager and those artists would take my calls too (editors note: Joey’s number is still in my address book, he’s long since passed away, and I never did get around to calling him - but at least I did get to see him and the Ramones play, the one and only time I dropped acid, at the Pterodactyl Club in Charlotte, with my friend Jill. I remember thinking that it wasn’t doing anything to me. At one point I noticed what looked like a bird floating near a skylight near the ceiling. I looked harder at it…and at some point realized I’d been looking at it for ten minutes.)

We stayed up all night, playing guitar until early dawn.

620 Pecan hosted its share of parties. Bands were frequently in and out, invited by me or by Kevin. We’d see a show at the Milestone club, meet the band after, and have them stay over, which often involved playing guitar or music until late. This is how The Cows ended up staying at our house, after a late night stop at Krispy Kreme. We went out to breakfast the next morning, a bunch of decidedly un-conservative musicians not fitting in amongst a decidedly conservative bunch of families at a morning breakfast at our local eggs benedict joint.

At this point I had quit a sales job selling thread to Levi’s, and hadn’t yet come upon my second act doing contract training for computer software programs including Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. So I was broke and racking up credit debt, buying a Paul Reed Smith dove-fretboard guitar on 28% credit terms from Reliable Music, managing and booking 5 local bands and just starting to do some tour management. Somewhere in this window, 3 important things happened that moved the music needle for me…

First, through a roommate in the local band Thurn & Taxis, I met their manager Michael Dixon, I made a trip to Nashville to help him set up his Macintosh, and he made some calls and set up my first visit to help set up an accounting system at the Buffalo offices of a rising young independent musician, Ani DiFranco, and her new label Righteous Babe Records.

On that trip I stayed with Ani and Scot. We drove to her house in her “art car”, a car with a customized dashboard full of action figures and toy soldiers encased in papier mache. She went out to a recording session, and I stayed at the house. Sometime around 10p she came back, fresh from the studio. She lit a candle, and asked me if I’d like to hear what she’d been working on? She then proceeded to play me an early take of Tamburitza Lingua, a thumb-piano tune which made its way onto Revelling / Reckoning.

After tour managing a European tour for my Glitterhouse-signed artist Cheralee Dillon, along with Bob Wiseman and Don Kerr, Michael set me up to tour manage his new artist, Ron Sexsmith. Interscope paid $750/week. I thought I was rich (until I got stuck for several months with the bill for phone calls on tour). We flew to Seattle, got in a car, and started crossing the States on a shed tour (generally 4000-seaters and above), opening for Sarah McLachlan across the US. Sarah was dating her guitar player on that tour, and then partway through started dating her drummer. There was some drama. Halfway across the US, Ron and I joined Don Kerr and BJ Cole (Elton John’s slide guitar player on “Tiny Dancer”) and continued driving from city to city, opening for Sarah. We played Jones Beach on Long Island; partway through a lightning storm approached across the water, and the power went out, but Sarah stayed on stage and sang “Possession” just her and her piano and a hushed audience of several thousand.

When we played Ravinia in Chicago, Sally came by train from Ann Arbor and joined me to stay at the rock ‘n roll Acme Hotel, and in a cab en route to Shaw’s Oyster House she proposed :)

Meanwhile, my new management client June was filling clubs in Chapel Hill and Charlotte. We played an anti-Jesse Helms rally with Archers of Loaf and many other regional acts, where I met Shawn Rogers, Archer’s manager, as well as Eric Bachmann (who played at Merge 35 this year), and we did a couple dates opening for them. Shortly after, the band signed to Beggars Banquet, and if you met me through music you know much of the rest, because that’s when my family moved to NYC.

I saw Kat again at Merge 35 this summer.

Eric Bachmann played this summer at Merge 35. We had breakfast together before this show, along with his manager Shawn.

Shawn Rogers - a couple of indie music guys.

Is there any wonder I love music?

That’s enough for this one.

xo-dh