“Hey,” Chevette said, indicating the bottle-blonde man with the belt buckle, “this girl gets molested in the dark, tells ’em it was a mesh-back did it. ‘Well,’ they say, ‘how you know it was, if it was dark?’ ”Cause he had a tiny little dick and a great big belt buckle!'”
“What’s a meshback?” Tessa tilted back the last of her beer.
“Redneck, Skinner called ’em,” Chevette said. “It’s from those nylon baseball caps they used to wear, got black nylon mesh on the back, for ventilation? My mother used to call those ‘gimme’ hats. .
139 “Why?” Tessa asked her.
“‘Gimme one them hats.’ Give ’em away free with advertising on them.”
“Country music, that sort of thing?”
“Well, more like Dukes of Nuke ‘Em and stuff. I don’t think that’s country music.”
“It’s the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat,” Tessa said, “barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America. Or that’s what they’d say on Real One. But we have that joke about the big buckles in Australia, except it’s about pilots and wristwatches.”
Chevette thought the man with the belt buckle was staring back at her, so she looked in the other direction, at the crowd around the pool table, and here there actually were a couple of the meshbacked hats, so she pointed these out to Tessa by way of illustration.
“Excuse me, ladies,” someone said, a woman, and Chevette turned to face directly into the line of fire of some very serious bosom, laced up into a shiny black top. Huge cloud of blowsy blonde hair a Ia Ashleigh Modine Carter, who Chevette thought of as a singer meshbacks would listen to, if they listened to women, which she wasn’t certain they did. The woman put two freshly opened Redbacks down on their table. “With Mr. Creedmore’s compliments,” she said, beaming at them.
“Mr. Creedmore?” Tessa asked.
“Buell Creedmore, honey,” the woman said. “That’s him over there getting ready to do the sound check with the legendary Randy Shoats.”
“Is he a musician?”
“He’s a singer, honey,” the woman said and seemed to look more closely at Tessa. “You A&R?”
“No,” Chevette said.
“Damn,” the woman said, and Chevette thought for a second she might take the beers back. “I thought you might be from an alternative label.”
“Alternative to what?” Tessa asked.
The woman brightened. “Buell’s singing, honey. It isn’t like what you probably think of as country. Well, actually, it’s a ‘roots’ thing. Buell wants to take it back, back there past Waylon and Willie, to some kinda 140 dark ‘primal kinda heartland.’ Kinda. Thing.” The woman beamed, eyes slightly unfocused. Chevette got the feeling that all of that had been memorized, and maybe not too well, but that it was her job to get it out.
“Randy, he was teaching Buell one earlier, called ‘There Was
Whiskey and Blood on the Highway, but I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray’
That’s a hymn, honey. Very traditional. Give me goosebumps to hear it.
I think it’s called that, anyway. But tonight’s set is going to be ‘more
upbeat, electric.'”
“Cheers,” Tessa said, “ta for the lager.”
The woman looked puzzled. “Oh. You’re welcome, honey. Please do stick around for the set. It’s Buell’s Northern California debut, and the first time he’s actually sung with his Lower Companions.”
“His what?” Chevette asked.
“‘Buell Creedmore and his Lower Companions.’ I think it’s a biblical reference, though I can’t quote you chapter and verse.” The woman
pointed her straining bosom toward the stage and resolutely followed it in that direction.
Chevette didn’t really want another beer. “She bought us these because she thought we were A&R.” She knew about that because of
Carson. A&R were the people in the music business who found and developed talent. – – Tessa took a pull on her beer and watched the woman, who’d stopped to talk to one of the boys from the pool table, one of the ones
who was actually wearing a meshbacked cap. “Do people like her live here?”
“No,” Chevette said, “there’s clubs in the city for this kind of thing, or sort of like it, but I’ve never seen a crowd like this out here before.”
The sound check consisted of the man with the squashed cowboy hat playing guitar and the man with the belt buckle singing. They