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Farrar - Falling cars and junkyard dogs : portraits from a musical life

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Book:
Falling cars and junkyard dogs : portraits from a musical life
Author:
Farrar / Jay
Publisher:
Soft Skull Press
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2013
City:
Berkeley, United States
Rating:
4 / 5
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In this collection of beautifully crafted autobiographical vignettes that encompasses everything from the people Jay Farrar has met and the places hes journeyed over 20 years as a traveling musician, to his formative childhood experiences, to his parents cultural identity as Missouri Ozarks. As a child, he marveled at the eccentric habits and mannerisms of his father, though it has taken over 40 years to fully appreciate his guidance. Recollections of Farrars father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the. Read more...
Abstract: In this collection of beautifully crafted autobiographical vignettes that encompasses everything from the people Jay Farrar has met and the places hes journeyed over 20 years as a traveling musician, to his formative childhood experiences, to his parents cultural identity as Missouri Ozarks. As a child, he marveled at the eccentric habits and mannerisms of his father, though it has taken over 40 years to fully appreciate his guidance. Recollections of Farrars father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the

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Table of Contents

PORTRAITS FROM A MUSICAL LIFE

To Monica and Mother D for making the world go around.

Special thanks to Jane Ganahl, Charlie Winton, Kelly Winton,

Barrett Briske, and Susan Clements.

Ozarks

MAR 1954

AUX ARC REDS

I guess you could say I had Ozark Commie parents, at least thats the way my dad tells the story.

I returned to Potosi, Missouri, in 1957, on leave from the Merchant Marine. I was just hanging out with nothing to do when someone suggested I should meet a new teacher at the high school who was causing a stir by standing up for communism, so I asked a friend to introduce me to this communist sympathizer, and we hooked up after that.

Of course neither of my parents were really communists; this was the McCarthy era after all. Extolling any virtue of communism couldnt go unnoticed, especially out in the hills of Washington County, Missouri.

The political beliefs of my father could probably best be described as Libertarian... where the far right meets the left and the far left meets the right. It was a murky political landscape around my father, whereas my motherwith a four-year college degree and a teaching jobfell more in line with the collegiate worldview of the times. These two alternately copacetic and conflicting ideologies played out in interesting ways.

We were married about six years when we realized we had fundamentally differing views and allegiances when it came to discussing the Civil War, said my mother. We almost divorced over it. So the residual dichotomy of the American Civil War conflict manifested in my childhood family dynamic. In retrospect, I see it all clearly now.

One of my earliest childhood memories of my mom is of walking into her bedroom and seeing her standing on her head. She was into yoga and the good earth, and her guru was a guy named Euell Gibbons who wrote a book on horticulture. Once as punishment for taking a hatchet to a tree, my brothers and I had to read the chapters of Euells book that explained how to concoct natural salves and medicines and apply them to the tree woundwhich we did.

Contrast that with memories of one of my fathers hobbiesbasically stabbing at moles with a Spanish American War era cavalry sword. Since Stabbing the Mole involved smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, my father would do it for hours on end, sitting silently on a stool with sword in hand, waiting for the mole to make a subterranean move. He was contemplativeyet ready to kill. Occasionally he got the mole. Ultimately though, the payoff was simple. Quiet time with old friends: coffee and cigarettes.

VELMA

Velma smoked a lot and lived in a trailer. Velma also disliked kids. This predilection and aversion presented a problem for me when I was kid and Velma was my paternal grandmother. Velmas three sons (my father and uncles) would stop by to visit Velma for half-day coffee-and-cigarette sessions, so my brothers and I would often go along to see grandma.

Seeing grandma meant venturing into the trailer where she sat in an easy chair while a thick smoky haze blanketed all available breathable airspace except for one foot of clear air at floor level. This untenable circumstance would last until we boys would start coughing and laughing at the absurdity of all the smoke. Velma would thereby tell us to get outto her way of thinking, cigarettes were sacrosanct and laughing at smoke was not.

Getting yelled at by grandma was good for brotherly camaraderie, but we were forever thereafter on the bad side of Velma. We didnt know of the hardship Velma had faced as a fifteen-year-old mother who eventually raised six boys and a girl during the Depression in a remote hollow of the southern Ozarks that she dubbed Lost Vegas.

Velmas funeral was held in the Ozarks, and after her casket was in the ground, those folks who had come to pay their respects piled into cars and formed a caravan with destination unknown. (My immediate family and I were the city folks, and we didnt know where we were going or what was about to happen.) The post-funeral procession drove for a few miles and then pulled into an empty field. Before the engines were off and the dust had settled, the banjos and guitars were out and the post-funeral bluegrass celebration was full on...

DESICCANT

Jim! Jim! What are you doing? screamed Chun Ae. Very good, delicious Jim... no!

Well now honey, youre not supposed to eat itthese packets keep the candy dry, replied my father, as he threw the packets in the trash bin.

The year was 1952, and James Farrar had been drafted at the age of twenty-two into the U. S. Army and was stationed at Inchon, South Korea, for the duration of the conflict. My father kept a black-and-white photo of his girlfriend Chun Ae in his wallethe said he almost married her but instead returned from the conflict to his hometown of Potosi, Missouri, and married the local high school English teacher (my mother).

Before meeting my mother in 1957, however, my father signed up for a two-year expedition to the South Pole. Many of my childhood years were spent as a captive audience to 8 mm movies of the South Pole expedition, wherein narrative stories of penguins, seals, and the finding of Ernest Shackletons outpost on the mainland were the order of the day. He brought back souvenirs from Shackletons hut, like hinges and doorknobs. This stuff didnt resonate till years later when I read about Shackletons adventures and learned of the resilient perseverance and quixotic hardships Shackleton engaged in and endured.

As a kid what I found most curious and odd about my father was his method of working on old cars while resting on his haunches. My brothers and I all tried it and laughed when we fell backwards, as we were unable to do what our aging father did effortlessly. He had learned the stance from Korean mechanics during his stay at Inchon. A successful cultural exchange, Id say, in the midst of all the bloodshed, in the form of a beautiful woman wearing a Kimono in a faded photograph and a man resting on his haunches, at peace with the world.

BREACH OF PROMISE

The first breach of promise lawsuit of the new world was brought about in 1622 by a Rev. Greville Pooley, who made the assertion that any consent of marriage between my ancestors, William Farrar and Cicely Jordan, should be considered invalid.

Cicely was born in England around the year 1600, presumably as an orphan, and immigrated to Jamestown, Virginia, on a ship called The Swan in 1610. The early arrival of Cicely to Virginia made her one of the first European women to reach the new world, and the resultant reality of supply and demand would factor prominently in later events that shaped her life.

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