2nd & 2nd, 2AM

A robust 'n' rollicking conversation with Jason Roemer.

I met Jason Roemer on May 20, 1996, on my first day at my first job after graduating from college. He was a writer, I was a graphic designer; you know how it goes, and we became fast friends.

In the last 27 years, no more than a few days have passed where we didn’t talk, laugh, collaborate and confide. This week, we decided to do so through nightly emails, which are collected below.

Jason and his wife Robyn live in Indianapolis; he’s a principal at Lodge Design and past-chair of the Indy Film Fest board of directors. 

This photo is from March 2022, after we saw Bob Dylan play the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN. 

The next morning, we hiked our way to Bucky Baxter’s old property outside Whites Creek, TN, listening for the hoot owl’s moan. 

Start your coffee, put up your feet, and join us—

---

Matt:

Jason,

A recent essay from Jeff Tweedy has Rick Danko on my mind. 

Rick is, of course, the late, great bassist and vocalist for The Band. 

Any time I find myself thinking about Rick, I eventually start singing Steve Forbert’s beautiful and moving Danko eulogy, “Wild As the Wind,” to myself. 

Quietly reciting that song this week led me to reflect on those halcyon days in early 2001, when you and I caught a bunch of Forbert shows, and he would play “Wild As the Wind” (then unreleased) song in the center of the set. 

Rick had passed away just a couple years earlier, making his way to the next gig, I suppose. 

Those Forbert concerts culminated with a memorable weekend in New York City. 

It’s fun to reflect on that time of life, before we all carried cameras in our pockets, before we documented everything so meticulously. 

With no photographic evidence, all we have are our memories. 

So how about we find out how they’re holding up? 

——

As a setup: 

In 1999, after more than seven years playing pedal steel, lap steel and mandolin in Bob Dylan’s touring band, musician Bucky Baxter left the group to focus on building and opening a recording studio in the hollow outside Whites Creek, Tennessee, north of Nashville. 

Around that time, I bought a 1964 Gibson B-25 acoustic guitar from Bucky. Over time, it was revealed to me and I came to accept that this guitar was lucky.

Baxter and I became friends and eventually collaborators, as I helped him in the early stages of marketing his still-unfinished Three Trees Studio. 

Bucky just couldn’t stay off the road, though. Especially when so many artists who held Dylan in such high regard, wanted just a touch of whatever mystical moondust the Buckman had picked up during those 750+ concerts he’d played with Bob. 

Two of the Bob-obsessed (“Bobsessed”?) songwriters who wooed Baxter back on the road were Ryan Adams, who was just then dismantling his band Whiskeytown and starting his solo career, and the journeyman singer-songwriter Steve Forbert. 

Here’s how I would describe the relationship those two artists (and so many others like them) have with Dylan: 

If Steve Forbert and Ryan Adams were having Thanksgiving dinner with Bob, and Bob picked up the salt shaker and gave his turkey three shakes, they’d muse to themselves, “Salt…three shakes…what does it mean, man?”

Then, they’d give their own turkey three shakes of salt. 

They wouldn’t even taste it first to see if it needed salt. 

And, goddammit, neither would I. 

I mainly remember two things about the Forbert experience in Whites Creek. 

First, the dream project that Bucky’s manager (Jim Tillman, salute!) wanted to produce at Three Trees was a Steve Forbert tribute album, with Emmylou Harris, Jim Lauderdale, Brian Setzer and more covering Steve’s songs, including Dylan himself doing “It Isn’t Gonna Be That Way.” 

And second, that Forbert had just released a terrific collection of early, unreleased work called Young, Guitar Days, and was putting together a band to tour in support of the record. That backing band—dubbed ‘The Destinations’—would feature Bucky Baxter on pedal steel and mandolin. 

We caught their first show, at 12th & Porter in downtown Nashville, before I joined the tour as it worked its way east.

(I had recently left my job at a medium-sized corporate marketing firm, and was doing my own thing under the d/b/a of “One Lucky Guitar, Inc.” Free of traditional workplace commitments—and not yet married nor a parent—I figured going on an East Coast tour of medium-sized rock clubs sounded like a great way to spend my time.)

I served as Bucky’s road assistant, as well as Forbert’s merchandise manager and best boy, and in the course of time, I think, friend and confidant. 

You and I—along with your wife Robyn and close friends Carrie and Matt Rhodes—reunited a few weeks later in New York City, for two shows at The Village Underground. 

Tell me what you remember about 12th & Porter.

---

Jason:

For starters, I saved your traveling/tour itinerary from that late winter, 2001. The tour started with rehearsals in Nashville on Monday, February 12 with some radio promos in Louisville on Wednesday before Thursday’s 12th & Porter show back in Nashville. 

Do you think you can recall the stops along the way to the two-night stand in NYC on March 2 and 3? Bonus: I also saved the hotel info with phone numbers, addresses, directions and room rates, so if you can remember those, too, you’re a damn savant.

---

Matt:

OK. As you know, I had a laptop fail sometime around 2005, and with it, I lost the entirety of my digital existence before then—gone are any digital photos of my kids’ first few years, gone is my early work with The Trainhoppers, gone are all of the files from OLG’s earliest years, which includes, sadly, most of my work and correspondence with Bucky Baxter. 

Anyway, I really thought deeply about this, and here’s what I’m gonna say:

• 12th & Porter, Nashville

• A venue in Louisville KY

• That old mobster’s house that became a venue in Newport KY, across the river from Cincinnati

• A venue in Pittsburgh

• Ram’s Head Tavern, Annapolis MD

• The Birchmere, Alexandria VA

• Stanhope House, somewhere in Jersey

• The Turning Point, Piermont, NY

• Village Underground (two nights), NYC

How’d I do?

Typing that out cued a few random notes:

• Forbert would not start the Louisville show until all the TVs in the venue (bar) were turned off. I admired that, and I tried to do the same with shows for the the band I was in (Go Dog Go) at Columbia Street West, here in Fort Wayne. 

  • I failed in that attempt.

  • After I failed, if I got bored around 1:30AM during Chris’s long solo in “I Want You to Want Me,” I sometimes got lost watching SportsCenter from the stage while we were playing the song. I mean, it was the NBA Finals, and the Kobe/Shaq-era Lakers were vying for a three-peat. A little grace, OK? It was a long solo.

• Forbert would record each show on DAT, and then play the show over the PA loudspeakers as we were loading in at the next venue, critiquing the performances. He was relentlessly obsessed with it, and I could tell it drove the band crazy. I thought back to Bruce Springsteen saying, “You join a band because you don’t want to work. That’s why it’s called playing.”

• The Newport venue is just the first mob-related part of this story. 

---

Jason:

VERY IMPRESSIVE. I can’t even remember what we had for dinner last week. Here’s exactly how you did:

12th & Porter, Nashville
Check.

A venue in Louisville KY
Check. (Technically, your itinerary didn’t specify the venue either. I’m choosing to believe the venue is called “Venue in Louisville KY”.)

That old mobster’s house that became a venue in Newport KY
Roger that. I just looked it up. The Southgate House was home to the inventor of the Tommy gun. If my memory serves, doesn’t Forbert kinda move/adjust his guitar on his hip like he’s cocking a shotgun? Maybe I’m thinking of Dylan.

FUN FACT: This is an email exchange from one of my first email interactions with Bucky Baxter for an article/piece we were working on:

What question do you wish people would STOP asking you?
BB: What’s Bob like?

Do you feel like saying that Bob is really a normal guy?
BB: No.

What’s the answer?
BB: If one wants to know about Bob, they should ask Bob.

A venue in Pittsburgh
You’ll arrive there on Sunday, February 25, 2001. Before that, you’ll hit Lexington for a Woodsongs radio show, Charlotte NC for a gig at the Double Door, Greenville SC for a gig at The Depot, and Philadelphia for a show at the Media Theater. Next stop?

The Birchmere, Alexandria VA
Nice recall on the venue name. You were at the Birchmere, supporting or headlining Buddy and Julie Miller. After that, you were off to Pittsburgh for that gig at the Rosebud.

Ram’s Head Tavern, Annapolis MD
Stanhope House, somewhere in Jersey
The Turning Point, Piermont NY 
Boy howdy. You had all the details right here, just a little out of order. In your defense your progression seems more geographically logical to me, but I’m not looking at a map. According to the schedule, after packing up your gear at the Rosebud in Pittsburgh, you drove to Piermont Turning Point, then headed to the Ram’s Head in Annapolis, before turning back north to the Stanhope House in Jersey. Then, of course, it was a weekend to remember in NYC.

I’ll send you the full itinerary with band member phone numbers, as well as hotel info and rates just so you have it.

Digging through some old notes and files, I found this email you sent to me on Tuesday, July 20, 1999:

It's too early to speak of how Forbert will fit in the overall scope of life, but I thought a lot about Nick Drake -- and the feeling of coming out of drowning water, that first gasp of air.

I mentioned to Jim [Bucky’s manager] that I had 'discovered' Drake and Forbert within 2 weeks of each other, and how that made me feel. He replied:

>>it is weird, one of my forbert net friends in italy, Marco, only listens to forbert, nick drake, and then some bob... he says "after forbert there is the desert and then there is Nick Drake and then there is more desert and then there is Bob, jjcale, and a few others"  I think if you change the order to Bob, Forbert, et al... it works for me.

By the way, Jim knows his shit about music.

It’s crazy how words can get punched into a keyboard, shot through the internet, then resurface years later on the other side as prophecy. Every simple action and idea leads to the next action and idea and on and on until it’s a lifetime that can be retraced back to its beginning. That’s how this era in our lives seems to me. We strung together a bunch of seemingly insignificant decisions to get out of our own way, take some chances, see where it took us. Poof. And here we are years later, with a million more memories from life on the road to somewhere new and another first gasp of air. 

OK, Ok, backing up to your original prompt:
Tell me what you remember about 12th & Porter.

Somebody order my round
’Cause I’m getting by
With a twelve pack from 12th & Porter with Billy
4:30 a.m. at night
’Cause Tennessee sucks, in the summer
What do you got that can put us under?

— Ryan Adams

Honestly, I don’t remember a lot from that first night in Nashville. I wish I did. Maybe I drank too much, got sloppy, or let my anxiety take over. It happens. I do, however, remember meeting up in NYC for the last stop of the tour. The line outside the club. The intensity of the set. The feeling of New York long after midnight riding from the Village Vanguard to the next blue-black bar hazy with cigarette smoke—we were still a year or two away from smoking bans. 

We’d recently read Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, do you remember? There was a line in that book that described the city of Chicago as being magnanimous. When I first read that line, I didn’t fully grasp what it meant, but boy did I love the sound of that word (we used it a lot that year if you recall). I remember thinking about that word again that night in Manhattan and somehow it clicked. I knew exactly what Exley meant.

Magnanimous.

NOTES FROM MARCH 2001:

The tour has zig-zagged its way across the Midwest towards the East Coast where eager audiences have descended on local bars and clubs to get another taste of Steve’s sermon on the stage. With Bucky Baxter on Steel, Clay Barnes on guitar, Gary Solomon on bass and Bobby Lloyd Hicks behind the drums, the band has spent the better part of February on the road, visiting old friends and playing to anxious ears and pounding feet. New York is the end of the line. The Village Underground, the last stand. Not a second after 9:30pm, the band takes the stage. Bucky’s the last one out and enters stage left leaping over his amp, pulling up a stool behind the pedal steel. The crowd loves it. With fresh bedhead, Bucky grins and nods to Steve as if to announce he’s ready to play and with that, Steve leads into a new opener for the tour, Honey, don’t lie to me. This is what the people came here for. This is why they always come.               

Magnanimous, indeed.

---

Matt:

Exley! Yes. That book was so important to us. (And we should consider revisiting it.) His description of Frank Gifford as “that smug son of a bitch” has always stuck with me. And after the Trainhoppers broke up, Dan and I briefly had a band called Magnanimus [sic], though we never played a gig.

Anyway, yes: I can vividly recall Bucky racing into the club and onto the stage that night. 

Everyone was so stressed about where he was, or rather where he wasn’t; this moment was the pièce de résistance of his role as the jester on that tour. 

With The Village Underground sold out and full, and start time approaching, Steve came to me and said, “Matt, where is Bucky? This is the most important show of the whole run.” 

Forbert was saving some costs on the routing by not hiring a tour manager; he TM’d it himself, and as the days went by and the gigs piled up, I could feel the toll that responsibility placed on him. (I tried to help.) At the time, Steve’s twin boys back home in Nashville were wily teenagers. I got the sense that raising them was a lot easier than the ‘father’ role he was playing on tour. 

Late one night, at a Red Roof Inn outside Pittsburgh, Steve announced to us that he was going to sleep in the next morning, and that we should all get breakfast without him.

Forbert had told me he likes to be able to see the tour van from his bed, and therefore only stays on the ground floor, in motels with doors that open to the parking lot. So funny and great to see how that tour itinerary you sent me reflects that. 

The rest of the band and I walked to get breakfast, and we got back to the Red Roof after checkout time. 

We expected to find Steve behind the wheel of the van, eager to get back on the road, but he was nowhere to be found. 

I saw a housekeeper and asked if she’d seen the man from room 112. She gave me a puzzled look—English was clearly her second or third language—before replying, “I knock. He sleeping.” She shrugged. 

With Forbert as tour dad and Bucky playing the fool, our crew was rounded out by Bobby (warm and friendly, generous with a laugh), Clay (shy, introverted, never not nipping from a flask), and Gary (young, self-serious, and not amused by Bucky—in fact, if I was writing a novel about all of this, I’d just call him “that smug son of a bitch”). Me? I was the wide-eyed kid who’d read too many Rolling Stone articles, and imagined rock and roll tours took place in jet airplanes and tour buses like the ones in Almost Famous—a movie that would be released in cinemas later that year. 

Bucky was Bucky: mercurial, flighty, loose and relaxed. A shimmer behind his eye.

He approached life like slow food. 

I suppose it’s possible that he acted the same way on the Dylan tours. But it felt to me that he was feeling free from the rigidity of that operation, free from the megalomania and genuflection that surrounded Bob, and had returned to living with a “What’s the worry; what’s the rush?” mindset.

Indeed, this Substack is named after one of Bucky’s favorite phrases: “Most likely, no problem.” 

Forbert had identified the show as the most important of the tour, because it was Saturday night in New York City, and his long-time supporter and advocate Bill Flanagan was to be in attendance. 

Flanagan wrote for everyone—Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and so on—and at the time was an EVP at MTV, in the midst of creating VH1 Storytellers and CMT Crossroads.

Sidebar: Flanagan was also editor-in-chief of Musician during its heyday, including the magazine’s (in)famous 1989 cover story that proclaimed The Replacements as ‘The Last, Best Band of the Decade.’ That article prompted Jon Bon Jovi to write to the magazine, “How can The Replacements be the best band of the 80s when I’ve never heard of them?”—which is pretty much my favorite quote ever. 

Forbert had broken onto the scene in 1977 with his excellent debut, Alive on Arrival. Steve had been marketed as a “new Dylan,” right alongside John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, Loudon Wainwright III and others. 

It strikes me that Alive on Arrival was released 23 years before the tour we’re talking about, and it’s now been 23 years since that tour. (And also: in 2001, we were about the age Steve was when he released his debut, and he was the age we are now. Funny.)

The lead track on Young, Guitar Days was an Alive on Arrival outtake called “It’s Been a Long Time.” 

Steve wrote it with wisdom uncommon for a young man, and finally felt comfortable releasing and performing it as a middle-aged artist:

It’s been a long time
I look around, I’m getting older
Remembering fun
And trying to find it again
Lookin’ in through doorways
And talking to strangers
It’s been a long time
It’s been a mighty long time

Flanagan had been in Forbert’s corner since the early days, and I think Steve was hoping to impress him at this show. 

And indeed, the band started the tour in excellent form, and had only gotten better as they grew more comfortable as a unit over the subsequent weeks. 

You may recall that we sat right next to Flanagan at the show. 

And you may also recall that the band made more mistakes at that show than any other—including getting absolutely l-o-s-t in the middle of the song Forbert dedicated to Flanagan, “Real, Live Love.” (As the band tried to grind and power through, each playing a different part or section of the song—simultaneously—I just grimaced.)

So anyway: with Bill Flanagan seated, the sold-out Village Underground full, and start time approaching, Steve came to me in his Mississippi drawl and asked, “Matt, where is Bucky? This is the most important show of the whole run.” 

I had no idea where he was. 

I couldn’t keep up with Bucky in Lexington, Kentucky, much less in Manhattan. 

I gave Forbert a puzzled look—like English was my second or third language—and could only think to myself, “I knock. He sleeping.” I shrugged.

After the show, the touring party was heading to a Best Western in Nyack, NY (“first floor requested”), before heading back to Philadelphia to wrap up the tour by recording an episode of World Café. But this was it for me—the New York shows were my last. 

We’d watched Steve bid Flanagan so long, before we loaded the trailer with all the gear, and said our own goodbyes on the sidewalk outside the club. 

Steve was warm and grateful. We agreed we’d see each other down the line, and eventually, we did. 

Everyone hopped in the van. Well, almost everyone.

Because the thing is, Bucky Baxter didn’t want to go to Nyack. 

Not on a Saturday night. 

Not in New York City. 

Bucky said he’d find his own way to Philadelphia.

You, Robyn, Carrie, Matt and I stayed in the city, too. 

For early March, Manhattan was unseasonably warm. 

It was just past one in the morning. 

And the night was young.

---

Reader: This is the halfway point in this conversation.
Maybe it’s time to warm up your coffee?

---

Jason:

That 2AM stroll through the Lower East Side looking for a steel door near 2nd and 2nd with a number and no sign on it (that’s the entrance to Frankie Splits’ “bar” we’re told) began with a visit to the top of the World Trade Center and a trip on the Staten Island Ferry.

PAUSE.

Before we get to the star of the show—Frankie Splits­—and the real reason we’re here, let’s go back five months to the fall of 2000 when we spent that weekend with Bucky Baxter in his Nashville cabin and saw Steve Forbert at a different 12th & Porter show (Bucky was with us, just not playing on stage).

INITIATE FLASHBACK.

Friday, October 27, 2000.

Last weekend Matt and I were fortunate enough to spend another few days in the “hooterville holler” with Bucky Baxter and the wise old owl of the woods. This was our second meeting. Nearly a year ago, we’d met at a bar to talk about his new solo album Most Likely No Problem. This was more of a social visit; a chance to spend some time with the man we’d only seen on stage with Bob Dylan, from South Bend to Atlantic City and back again.

When Matt and I arrive on Friday night, we find Bucky behind the cabin inside the framework of what will be the Three Trees Studio lounge, playing his fiddle under an evening sky. Smoke rises from the chimney like ribbons, wrapping up the Nashville wind like a gift. Bucky seems happy to see us again, and gives us a quick once around the place, pointing out each room in the studio and enumerating their eventual contents. If my grandfather were with me, he’d no doubt ask Bucky about the A-frame construction and the wood he used in the cross beams. As it was, though, I just smile and listen as he walks into the middle room and points out where the piano will be, and tossing his head back and stretching out his long arms, plays a few air chords, laughing a little laugh. At times, he seems like an ornery teenager.

Located on an even more vague strip of road than the one that tapers off the interstate, the Three Trees compound where Bucky lives and works faces a ridge of hills that form a small ravine sloping into the back door of the studio where Bucky and a neighbor, songwriter Larry Jefferies, work tirelessly through the afternoons, pounding nails and pouring concrete. Tall trees line the ridge and if I had the copy of the Audubon Journal of Common American Trees I saw sitting on the Bucky’s kitchen counter, I could tell you just exactly what kind of tall trees they were.

Having enjoyed a walk through the surrounding woods, we follow Bucky back to the cabin for a vodka screwdriver, something to help us “unwind after our journey.” Along the north wall, a rickety old wood stove opens up into a room full of music, with stacks of records and no record player, hundreds of CDs and no changer. Looking around main room of the cabin, I try to forget about the pictures of Bucky with Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia. The anthologies of poems and lyrics. The B-25 Gibson and ’59 Fender amps. Even the glimmering Wurlitzer and mounds of fingerpicks and ear plugs. I try to forget it all and focus on finding the source of all this sound, which can be traced back to the bones of this man whose towering frame forces him to duck as he passes from room to room, careful not to crack his head against the woody crossbeams. I sense we’re standing in the presence of a real artist. Like Charlie Parker or Roscoe Holcomb, his gift possesses him. J.D. Salinger once said, “It was the point in Beethoven’s life when he ceased to be encumbered with a sense of hearing.” Sitting on Bucky’s futon waiting for him to bring us those vodka screwdrivers, it seems Bucky is unencumbered by the day to day that the rest of us deal with.

Now dressed in an old sweatshirt and sock hat, Bucky grabs his keys and we set out for a night of drinking and carrying on.

When we arrive at the first club, a young, beautiful woman blows past us to greet Bucky with a hug and the two talk for some time while Matt and I draw up two stools at the bar and motion for a drink. In Nashville, everyone is waiting for something. Someone to call. A contract to be signed. A single to be released. A song to be written. We simply wait for two draft beers.  

Bucky finishes up at the front door and joins us at the bar and hunches his tall frame over the bar like a cat ready to pounce. We talk at length about the role and mission of Three Trees Records while waiting for Steve Forbert to take the stage in the back room. Still hunched over the bar, Bucky rants and raves about the problems with the industry as a whole, and what could be done to fix it.

It’s nearly 10:30 when we head back to the show where Forbert’s taken the stage. Bucky chooses to view the spectacle from a vantage point in the balcony, while we settle in beside the sound board and a tattooed engineer. We agree to meet up after the last set, and all jump headlong into the world of Steve Forbert willingly and alone, which is really the only way you can appreciate this strange man from Mississippi. 

After about 25 songs, we spot Bucky coming down the stairs with a few new friends, including Henry Gross from the Sha Na Nas. By 1:30 in the morning, Bucky is just hitting full stride. 

On our drive back to the holler, we listen to the Columbia Records Anthology of the Stanley Brothers and he’s reminded of playing with Bob. “I’ve got to listen to more of the Stanleys,” he admits before going into a story about knowing what you’re good at. He talks openly about his new foray into singing. “I’m really just discovering my voice, I think. But I know I’m good.” This is said with more humility than it sounds. And it’s true, too. He says, pointing to his heart, “Inside, you know it. No matter what people say. I’m sure the same’s true with painting, even writing I suppose. Who knows if it’ll last. By the time you find that out, you’ll probably be dead. You just have to keep moving forward, putting it out there. I like writing these new songs, lyrically, which is something I’ve always relied on others to do for me. It’s really a challenge, but I’m learning more every day I sit down to play.” Bucky says all this without once looking up, like he knows this has all been said before. Like he’s merely contributing to dialogue that’s been going on for centuries.

“Yeah, I think that’s probably true,” I reply as we pull into the holler and drive up to the cabin. “I think you’re probably right,” which is for the most part an honest answer.

A few days before this weekend, Matt had gotten his hands on some demo tapes Bucky had laid down in which a few of his own songs were recorded with fellow Three Trees man Larry Jefferies. “Hoot Owl and Me” stands out as a testimony to what Bucky’s trying to tell us now. His gravely sweet voice is a testament to a lifetime spent tracking down the sound and I’m tempted to thank him for it but don’t.  And with that, we call it a night.  

Saturday morning greets me like an unhappy friend and I have to drag myself from the sofa and make my way to the front door to see if the sun is shining. It isn’t. The cabin is quiet for the time being and I enjoy the solitude and utilize the time to jot down some notes about last night. Already, some of the details are beginning to fade from memory like Bucky said they would.  

Bucky wakes up and makes coffee and we sit at the kitchen table, watch the rain and talk about his cabin in Nova Scotia and some of the characters he met there, including a few he gave guitar lessons to. “It actually helped my own playing,” Bucky admits, then pours another cup of coffee and we pick up where we left off last night. “Teaching forces me to re-examine my own technique and allows me to gain more perspective about the music.” He remembers driving his old Suburban out to the dock with one of his friends and whistling a new melody he’d had in his head for some time. “When I first come up with a new melody, I usually start to sing nonsensical syllabic sounds just to get a feel for where the melody can be drawn and how far I can carry it. It’s not really until later when the song’s starting to take shape that I force myself to sit down with a pencil and write.” 

Bucky’s life and work are, for the first time, beginning to take on a shape of their own in my limited vision of the way things work for a musician, and what he was saying seemed more grounded than I think it would have if I heard them yesterday when we first arrived. I know he’s played and collaborated with just about everybody and yet all of that doesn’t seem to matter one bit as we sit here over coffee and discuss the roots of songwriting and the creative process as it unfolds. 

It’s a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.  

It’s now nearly five in the late afternoon light and some of Bucky’s friends are already starting to arrive for a chili dinner and what’s become known as a Saturday Night Pickin’ Party. As the last of the chili is scooped out of the pot with an old ladle, the guitars and fiddles and mandolins leap from their cases. It’s only 50 degrees, although it feels warmer than that. Chester, a Brittany Spaniel Bucky rescued from an abusive home last summer, flanks my rocking chair as I sit here scribbling notes, trying hard not to miss anything.

With a bellyful of three different kinds of sausage, beans and onions (Bucky’s secret chili recipe), I close my eyes and picture a porch somewhere in the Appalachians and a family gathered just after dinner to hear the stories and music of a home they’ve never known. A young friend of Bucky’s sits on a wooden chair and tears at the mandolin, while Bucky (on fiddle) and Larry Jefferies (on guitar) move within that wall of sound, making it wider than all of Tennessee. The fire cast an ominous light on the trio as they move on and on, further and further back, forcing the music to a breaking point of some sort that never quite cracks.

There’s something special that happens when someone walks off a stage and ceases to be the man in the black hat who makes legendary music and becomes the man in the red slippers who makes you chili.

And good chili at that.

FLASH FORWARD.

---

Matt:

Jason, this is all picture perfect, crystal clear and true. Thank you. 

Just a few notes from me, and then we can flash forward…

Before that October 2000 concert, Forbert hadn’t played Nashville in a spell. (I think when you live in Nashville, you don’t play there all that often. At least, not a ticketed, promoted show. It’s more of a show-up-and-sit-in town.) 

What I remember most about that show is that when Steve walked on stage, he shielded his eyes from the spotlights, squinted toward the audience, and said, “Okay…so who’s here? Alright.” I’ve always wondered who he was looking for. Bill Flanagan, maybe? 

12th & Porter plays a significant role in Lucinda Williams’ recently released memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. And not just the club: the entire cast of characters, everyone you hope and expect and doubt will show up and play a role, they all actually show up and play a role. And they’ve been drinking. 

Finally, I wonder if that was Teal who played mandolin at that pickin’ party? I bet so. I’m pretty sure it was a different trip when Ketch Secor (from Old Crow Medicine Show) and Bobby Bare Jr. got going on fiddle tunes around that firepit. You say “Big Scotia,” I say “Big Sciota.” 

Another time; another story. 

Those were memorable nights. 

——

So, back to March 3, 2001. 

Steve and the band departed The Village Underground, their taillights becoming lost in the city’s radiance, reflecting and drifting and blending into the city’s sea. 

We stood in silence on 3rd Street, watching them vanish, before circling back toward each other. 

Bucky had something he wanted to share. 

It was an invitation. 

---

Jason:

2ND & 2ND @ 2AM

Like I said, the entrance to Frankie Splits’ place was just a steel door with a number on it. After the show at Village Underground, we hooked up with another magazine writer that Bucky knew (not Bill Flanagan, I’ll just call him Magazine). We followed Magazine from Greenwich Village to the Lower East Side to the place he knew about. A place with mob connections. Remember that magnanimous city?

Moving down 2nd Street towards 2nd Avenue, we stopped at every non-descript steel door (there are a lot of them), until Magazine stopped at one in particular and announced that this was it. We slowly pushed open the steel door, then wandered down a few halls to another door that opened into Frankie’s place. From the street door to this second door, we had somehow managed to get in front of Magazine and when Frankie saw us walking into his club, he kinda freaked out—What the fuck are you doing here? This is a private club! Magazine jumped to the front of our pack and assured Frankie that it was okay, we were cool, we were with him. It was very touch and go for a second, considering Frankie may or may not have been a mafia hit man. Frankie let us in, but for a few long minutes seemed very suspicious—not what you want from your run-of-the-mill Cosa Nostra club owner.

Frankie Splits’ bar (actually, he calls it a private club so I will call it that from here on out, too) glowed like a jack-o-lantern. To be fair, the club itself looked neither like a club nor a bar, but rather a dingy basement hang-out of a high school drug dealer. The refrigerator was well-stocked with bottles of Heineken (the only beer he sold), and Frankie offered his “members” a wide selection of illicit drugs (the night we were there, he had all the bases covered with an assortment of chicken powder, chochos, chalk, bumblebees, cartwheels, and pills of every color). Tacked to the walls (and maybe even the ceiling) were hundreds of Polaroids featuring Frankie with his arms around women of all ages (he insisted on taking a photo with Robyn and Carrie, which given the circumstances seemed like a bad idea to not go along with—I couldn’t dodge the feeling that this could really be the last time we were seen alive—our bodies discovered later in the trunk of a late model Cadillac somewhere near the East River). And as for Frankie? Picture a mobster. Got it? That’s what Frankie looked like. Right down to the brown suit, cream shirt, gold chains, and gold-accented glasses, with a long nose, beady eyes, and a narrow pinched face. Straight from a movie set. I can’t tell you if there was music playing, but if there was, I imagine it sounded like an old Lindsay Buckingham record. That was Frankie’s place, err, I mean club.

Fortunately for us, Frankie was a talker—bordering on class clown. He asked us if we wanted any cocaine or company, which Magazine took him up on then disappeared somewhere into the back of the club. Frankie hauled an armful of Heinekens out of the fridge for the rest of us and proceeded to tell us about how he came by this place. In fact he was very proud of the fact that he’d spent four years in “college” for something he didn’t do, and never told anyone who did. And for that loyalty, he was given this bar at 2nd and 2nd in the Lower East Side. He loved that part, the respect.

Now that we were beyond suspicion, Frankie invited us to look around the club a little. There was a tiny courtyard out back surrounded by apartment windows, and filled with old lawn chairs and a tattered bamboo fence for added privacy. Aside from a naked woman (presumably the “company”) incoherently shouting at us from one of the apartment windows above—I think Frankie might have owed her something by the gist of it—we had the courtyard to ourselves.

The rest is a little bit of a blur—I imagine the mix of beer and the adrenaline rush of thinking you might be killed at any second causes a level of anxiety that throws a safety blanket over the observational powers of your brain at some point. What I have held onto from that late night excursion into the depths of Manhattan are these few mental snapshots, with a handful of never-in-my-life flashes I imagine will stick with me forever. At least I hope so.

Speaking of, I wonder if that photo of a grinning Frankie Splits with his arms around Robyn and Carrie is still on the wall.

I’m choosing to believe it is. 

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Matt:

You’ve got a clearer, more detailed memory than me, Jason. 

It’s all a surreal haze to me, with three crisp memories:

1. Seeing the naked woman above and across from us in the courtyard. 

2. The refrigerator being tightly filled, side to side and bottom to top, with “green lizards”—bottles of Heineken. One out, one in.

3. Thinking to myself, “Oh, my mom would be so upset with me right now.”

It’s funny to think back on Bucky so effortlessly working his way through that space, just like there was nothing to it. 

And to imagine—to know—that he was welcome and comfortable in haunts like that all around the globe. Literally, all around the entire globe. 

Because the thing about Bucky was, he was never, never, never not comfortable.

“What’s the worry; what’s the rush?”

This is a man who dated Uma Thurman, introduced her to Ethan Hawke, and remained best friends with each of them.  

The man who forgot the dress code for the Johnny Cash tribute.

The man who was late for the performance on the Oscars.

Most likely, no problem. 

The next morning, we found a dive-y diner. It was a dreary Sunday, and a dreary Sunday is a dreary Sunday whether you’re in New York, New York or Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

You ordered the oxtail soup. 

I can’t tell you where we slept the night before. 

And I’m not sure how we got back to Indiana. 

I’m guessing you all flew.

And I’m guessing I drove—out of New York, a short stretch in Jersey, the Pennyslvania slog, across Ohio, finally Indiana. 

One hand on the steering wheel, the other massaging my temples.

Taking deep breaths, counting slowly to five, exhaling, and wondering if the previous few weeks had actually happened at all, or were some marvelous hallucination. 

Steve’s lyric, “It’s often said that life is strange, oh yes. But compared to what?” leaving my lips. 

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Jason:

As always with Bucky, there’s so much to mine. I have books of journal notes, emails, and ephemera from those early years with Bucky (Three Trees Records-era to the Forbert tour to the year with Ryan Adams to ten days in Israel, and on and on and on). Looking back now, there was a magic to those moments that I don’t think I truly appreciated then, as if life would always be like this. In an email I wrote to you that following October (subject: Red Roof Awesome Deal!), I’d written about the life of living on the fringes of fame. About knowing famous people and the occasional melancholy that sticks to that kind of life (I called it the good-n-sad):

Monday, October 1, 2001

I don’t think I’ll last making sad stories, But I can try. Stories about crack-head recording engineers living off friends in Nashville, and trying to make it to 12th & PORTER just one more night. People who aren’t famous but have had the fortune or misfortune, depending on how you look at it, to acquaint themselves with famous people—whatever that means—and are caught somewhere between a dream and a life of missed opportunities, never quite belonging to either world.

Bouncing back between Indy and Nashville, bunking at the bunk house and getting to know Billy Mercer and documenting every second of it. “Hooooo wheeeeee, what do you see, what a strange dream I’m living in the holler so far from the sea. Good and sad, good-n-sad.”

What a weekend. We drive away, and stay awake for days and then return home to this other life where I take down all my notes and pretend that this is what I love to do.

Go go go, gotta do more more more. Plenty to do. Always.    

“Turn on the faucet and let the tub overflow.” — Ryan Adams

For a short time, we lived on that fringe I suppose. Chasing something that was just out of our reach—but a pursuit that would steer us both down a new path to a life that wouldn’t have been possible without the thrill of that  chase.

Or maybe it’s more honest to say, without Bucky.

Do you remember all the artifacts we discovered inside his cabin on one of our first visits? The photos, instruments, notes, and all the fishing gear! I remember two pieces in particular that he was eager to share. They were two walking canes. One was a gold cane with a strange inscription on it—a gift from Bob Dylan. The other was a cane with an intricately molded woman’s head carved into its handle—Bucky had found that one in NYC and took to the Grammys for Time Out of Mind, I imagine.

The canes are intriguing. As much of a mystery as he was in life sometimes. He didn’t need a cane. He didn’t use one to get around the woods surrounding the cabin. Or to hoist himself into that old Suburban he drove. Maybe he just carried more than his fair share of weight for the world—always the life of the party, always eager to introduce you to something new, to ferret out some hidden secret in the strings of another instrument he’d pick up and play as if he’d been doing it his whole life, to always opening his heart, life and home—even to two kids from Indiana. Maybe the weight of just being an artist made the idea of a cane, of something supporting him for a change, such an appealing thing to possess for whenever the day came that he’d need it. 

After all, he had just carried us from Indiana to a mobbed-up club on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. 

All I ever wanted
Was a walk down the road
With you there holding my arm
But the hoot owl moans
For me all alone
Tell me pretty baby
Are you really gonna break my heart?

Has it all been a lie
No I can't believe that
Tell me what I hear isn't true
Is the owl in the oak tree
The only one here with me
Tell me pretty baby
Are you really gonna break my heart?

Is it death or livin
That scares me the most
Or is it just plain bein’ alone
Seems I'm always alone
When that hoot owl moans
Tell me pretty baby
Are you really gonna break my heart?

Don't call me, don't write me
And I'll leave you alone
So we can forget what we had
The owl can console me
With his midnight tune
But I don't think I've ever
Felt so sad

— The Hoot Owl and Me, by Bucky Baxter

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Matt:

Jason, there’s a lot unsaid about our old workplace, but I’ve always been grateful for two things: That they took a chance on a dummy like me and gave me the opportunity to learn so much (bad and good), and, always and forever most importantly, that we met there. We have a thousand stories like this one, each with a thousand tangents, and it’s made my lifetime so much more fulfilling—more than I ever could have dreamed—to do it together. Thank you.

Final loose ends:

I went back to New York City with Bucky that October; less than a month after 9/11. I blinked and we were backstage at Irving Plaza drinking wine from the bottle with Ryan Adams and Elton John. Another story, for another time.

——

I’ve seen Forbert probably a half-dozen times since March 2001, and even did a little design work for him.

The first time I saw him in concert after the Young, Guitar Days tour was a couple years later, at a solo-acoustic show at a club in Kalamazoo, MI. 

He walked on stage, shielded his eyes from the spotlights, squinted toward the audience and, in his inimitable Meridian, Mississippi drawl, said, “Okay…good evening. Who’s here…?” 

And then, a moment or two later, our eyes locked. “Matt? Is that you?” 

More than a decade after that, Forbert twice played at The B-Side at One Lucky Guitar, a small, listening room venue I managed. 

——

At that same venue, we welcomed Rayland Baxter in June 2014, and twice more after that.

Rayland is Bucky’s son; we’d met him up in the holler, when he was just 17. 

In the middle of that 2014 set at The B-Side, Rayland said, “Let’s try one we never play live…” and went into his dad’s song, “Hoot Owl.” 

My own parents were in attendance. In fact this is the third-to-last memory I have of my dad before his stroke.

As Rayland worked his way through the song, time stood still—slow-motion and frost, silence and fire, a scene broken only by my beating heart.

Later, Rayland told a story about a dream he had, where a voice spoke to him: 

“Son, when you are given the light,
you take it.

And when you are finished with it,
you give it back.”

After the show, I grabbed the lucky guitar from the back room, and Rayland started playing it. 

If you’ve met Rayland, you know his spirit is much the same as his dad’s—ethereal, earthly, gentle, wild.

Those two, and the kaleidoscopic shimmer shared in their eyes. 

And there, in the One Lucky Guitar, Inc. office, Rayland is fingerpicking that very 1964 Gibson B-25, and says, “Wait, wait, wait. I bet dad did this…” 

And he starts this little noodling run and riff that was so shockingly Bucky in sound and motion and soul, that it was as if the previous 15 years had never happened, and we were all back around that fire pit, picking on folk songs from Nova Scotia, wondering what the future held and having no idea, but just pretty sure it wasn’t something we should ever let happen to us. Because we had received an invitation for it to happen with us.

——

And finally, speaking of those Saturday night picking parties. 

You mentioned Bucky’s dog, Chester. That big-hearted, beautiful boy. 

Chester got his name from the song “The Weight,” by The Band. 

If you go back and listen to that song, Levon Helm sings the first three verses. But he cedes lead vocals for the fourth verse:

Crazy Chester followed me, and he caught me in the fog.
He said, “I will fix your rack, if you’ll take Jack, my dog.”
I said, “Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man.”
He said, “That’s okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can?”

The voice on that verse is plaintive, mournful, sometimes thin and wispy, distinct, unpredictable, beautiful, and just as wild as the wind.

You know who sings that fourth verse?

Yeah. 

That’s right. 

It’s Rick Danko.

---

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Bucky Baxter made his way to the next gig on May 25, 2020. 

This patio outside Grimey’s in Nashville is the spot where Jason and I had our last in-person conversation with him, on June 10, 2016.

——

Steve Forbert is pretty much always on tour, and so is Rayland Baxter.

If one of them is playing a concert near you, we recommend you go.
They’re each excellent live performers, and highly entertaining.

After the show, stick around, and if you get the chance, ask ’em for a Bucky story.

And then—especially if you’re with Rayland—plan for a long, late night. 

---

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After Bucky’s passing in 2020, I offered up this memory on Instagram:

I never really knew what a ‘twinkle in your eye’ meant until I met Bucky Baxter. He’d smile, tilt his head, wink, and you’d lean forward, to fall into an entire galaxy refracting around his iris. He, more than anyone I’d ever come across, struck me as a magician, irresistible in his charms, his illusions, his belief that it’d all work out, because it already had, and it always did. He was of the earth, but not grounded—weightless and unbound, dreaming and restless. He’d welcome you with affection, casting his long arm wide, toward a path up and into the holler, and the air glittered as it moved through his fingers, an effortless sound, musicality in every gesture. Then the smile, the head tilt, the wink, and you’d lean forward, to hear him whisper, “Let’s go on a journey.” And off we went, believing it’d all work out. Because it already had, and it always did. RIP Buckman.

Photo by Michael Weintrob.