WG What sort of stuff did you see?
JMW The best of it was large sandstone statues that are very famous in the Cumberland Valley and some guy in Celina had a really nice one. Of course lots of common arrows. Some guys had some big fakes. They are weird looking flint pieces called slave killers and the archaeologist immediately called them fakes. The old Indians just didn’t make shit like that.
WG There is a guy In Hohenwald who has a lot of that stuff. The old dentist. I was working on his house one time back when I was painting, remodeling and that sort of stuff. Some of the brick were flaking off and he wanted me to rebuild the brick, so I got a bunch of different dyes and then made up different mortars and got them to match the colors on the house and I went around with a ladder building up the bricks all over the house. But he was going to a meeting where everybody brings their stuff and trades it or sells it and he let me look and he had a big box in the bed of the truck and he had really interesting stuff. But I think that guy dug up stuff. It was all years ago. I don’t think he does that any more.
He is an interesting fellow and one of my favorite people in Hohenwald. He is in Provinces and he knew it too; he recognized himself. I did a thing at the library and he turned up and came up and sat down with me and he said, “Hey Speedo, what ya doing?” That is a line from the book and what the Dentist calls the character in the book. It is kind of neat that he took it well, but he comes off, there is nothing bad about him. He is giving me magazines and giving me books, which he actually did; he gave me a lot of magazines.
There used to be a magazine called True and when he had accumulated too many magazines he would stack them up and give them to me and there would be several issues of True and I kind of liked that magazine. It usually had articles about UFO’s and government conspiracies to keep you from knowing about UFO’s and that kind of stuff. That was before the days of men’s magazines being what they are now. There was always good stuff to read in there. I remember seeing an issue back in the 70’s with this woman on the cover and it looked like a shoddy imitation of Playboy or Penthouse and all it was was fifty pages of tits and ass. They were trying to survive but it wasn’t working and there isn’t any True Magazine any more. I have a couple of real old issues from the 50’s.
JMW Do you remember a magazine called Argosy.
WG Oh yeah, John Keel used to have articles in Argosy and there was a magazine called Saga and John Keel had a column in Saga for a while. There were good magazines when I was a kid. There was Saturday Evening Post and there was Colliers. I never liked Look because there wasn’t that much to read in it and Life was the same way. There was a magazine called The American Magazine that used to run Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe novellas.
JMW Did you read Reader’s Digest when you were a kid?
WG If I didn’t have anything else to read. I hate Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. They were completely worthless. And with Reader’s Digest even when I was young I could divine that what I thought didn’t exactly jive with what they thought. It has always been a conservative magazine.
JMW I read it for the jokes.
WG Yeah the jokes were good like “Life In These United States” and “Laughter: The Best Medicine.” There was a lot of funny stuff in that magazine. Fate magazine used to be a good magazine back in the day. Magazines have to undergo changes to compete, so they don’t always work.
JMW So what do you read now?
WG I still read Rolling Stone but it is more out of habit than anything else. I read Fortean Times because I’m always interested in that weird stuff. The New Yorker is probably as good a magazine as there is around. I read Oxford American; that’s a good magazine, not as good as it used to be but it is still good. I used to read Harper’s and Atlantic but I don’t read them much any more. I like to read No Depression but they are kind of hard to find. It’s roots music, really good articles; it’s not as flashy as Paste, it doesn’t try to grab your eye as much. It has more reviews; they don’t try to cover the whole field. Paste covers movies, video games and books. They call it popular culture. No Depression doesn’t cover anything but music.
JMW That phrase “No Depression”, didn’t that come out of a song that is on the Harry Smith Anthology?
WG There is an old Carter family song called “There Will Be No Depression in Heaven.” It was pretty sharp of somebody to pick up on that phrase and name a magazine after it. I thought I was going to write another piece for Paste but somehow it didn’t work out. I was going to write about Tom House. I interviewed House twice and felt like I knew pretty much all there was to know about Tom House that he was willing to tell anybody. The magazine kept calling, calling me all the time. Then I went and did the Southern Festival of the Book and this guy from Paste was there.
He called me the next day when I got back home and he said, “Did you know that guy from No Depression magazine was stalking you”. I said, “What do you mean stalking me?” And he said, “That guy was following you around wanting to talk but he was afraid of you.” So I said, “Why the hell was he afraid of me?” and he said, “He told me you had a sinister wine-ravaged face.”
I was sorry not to do the piece on House. He was a nice guy. I kind of like his music. The more I listened to it the more of a downer it was. I thought maybe he should have a little humor every now and then. For a while he made his living just going around to bars and places and saying that he wanted to play and picking up gigs. He was a poet before he was a song writer and he lived in North Carolina and he had a cousin who made it really big in the country music business as a song writer so he came to Nashville and tried to fit in but he was too much of a poet. He had too much integrity. He had a lot more integrity than his cousin and they had a falling out. He said he got drunk one night and told his cousin, “Why do you write this crap?” But in the meantime they were in this guy’s basement with a pool table. He lived in a big mansion up in Nashville and he had won an award for some song Kenny Rogers sang.
Paste has a policy that they want the issue of the magazine to be in conjunction with the issuance of the CD so it would be like cross-pollination. So that was why the guy was bugging me. He needed my piece to match up with the release of the CD. I wrote about half of it. It would have been a pretty good piece because House was so interesting; he was interesting to me so maybe it would interest people who buy those types of magazines. The guy is strange looking with orange carrot colored hair. I think he was like a misfit in his family. They more or less threw him out because the guy was different from everyone else. He wanted to be a poet and in the background where he came from that was not one of the choicest options he could take.