THE LEGEND OF SEASICK STEVE
I would not normally cross the road to see an old hobo blues-man. In fact, I would probably duck into a doorway to avoid him.
I am not interested in how his dawg upped and died while he was working on a chain gang. I have enough problems of my own, and I do not go around bothering homeless people about them.
But Seasick Steve, a Californian-born, Tennessee-raised drifter who once hopped freight trains across the United States, plays wild-eyed, straggly haired country blues as if he were rattling with amphetamines and the stage was on fire. He yowls and wriggles and struts and yells, while all the time tearing from his guitar the sounds of duelling zoo animals strafed by mortars.
Seasick Steve - aka Steven Wold - is hysterically popular in the UK, where his first solo CD, Dog House Music, has sold 150,000 copies, and his second album, I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, debuted at number nine in the charts. Earlier this year, I saw 5000 adults of every age - but mostly the middle one - packed into a sold-out Hammersmith Apollo, dancing like drill bits, and howling back when Wold barked like a dog. It was like a revivalist meeting full of epileptic dentists.
When Wold came to Australia last year to play the Byron Bay Bluesfest, the crowd greeted him like they'd been waiting all day for a greybeard granddad with black tattoos to fingerpick songs on a one-string guitar while sitting on a chair. He returns to Byron next month, backed by enough record-company money to build a small hostel for the homeless, and his label, Warner, flew me to London to show me why.
I came away unsure if Wold really is that much of a hobo bluesman - or even particularly old - but certain that it does not matter either way: his music is as real as the knockout punch that comes from nowhere, or the lover's touch that breaks your heart.
The thing about old hobo bluesmen is that they are a limited resource. The last genuine cotton-picking, tobacco-chewing, moonshine-brewing hobo was probably minted around 1940. One day, quite soon, no one with the blues in them is going to "wake up this morning" again, because they will all be dead. Nobody rolls from town to town hopping freight trains when they can make use of substantial discounts offered on advance-purchase tickets on the net. And no one is going to write a song about that.
So it was a bit of a surprise when London DJ Joe Cushley discovered Seasick Steve - who is, according to Warner, "in his 60s" - perfectly preserved, from the rat's tails of his beard to the scuffed toes of his cowboy boots, in 2004, in Norway. It was a particular surprise to me, because I remember the affable, erudite Cushley from university, 25 years ago, and he never discovered much then.
I am looking forward to catching up with Cushley again at tonight's concert - he was an old bluesman at 20, rolling around the dancefloor, blowing his harmonica like an air raid siren, in the student union bar - but first I meet Wold for coffee in the lobby of his Kensington hotel. He is limping a little, wearing a battered John Deere cap, a western shirt with pearl snaps, an Indian nickel on a bootlace, a silver dollar on his belt buckle, and washed-out Levi's with patches over the patches. A wispy curtain of white beard is drawn across his face, hiding everything but his laughing eyes. He looks like a Zen master turned petrol-pump attendant, but he does not look much more than 55. He speaks in a honey-coloured voice like a lullaby: southern, soft and as warm as bourbon. He says if it were not for Joe Cushley, none of his success would've happened. I ask if Cushley still lives in a houseboat on the Thames.
"I think it sank," says Wold.
I would imagine this might confirm a seasick man's natural wariness of water, but it turns out Wold once owned an old motorboat.
So does he really have a problem with the sea?
"I can be on a lake," he says, "and I love swimming, and I can surf. But you put me on a boat on the ocean - even on these ferry boats - then you're gonna see someone who dies. I puke. Even on a bus, I have to take pills. I get carsick real bad." But "Carsick Steve" does not sound particularly romantic, and there is not much traction in "Motion-sick Steve", either.
I notice Wold's shirtsleeves are rolled over tattoos that look faded at first glance, but in fact were never coloured in. "They ain't nothing," he says.
They are quite new, though, aren't they?
"This one is fairly new," he admits, pointing to dice on the underside of his forearm, "but I had this one [a seahorse] done over again." Under the seahorse is a legend in Norwegian that translates as "the sea is my shelter".
Isn't that a strange motto for a seasick person?
"Well, I love the ocean, though," he says. Right.
Seasick Steve has quite a complicated relationship with the sea, anyway, but it is not as if he calls himself "Hydrophobic Steve". His disadvantage might not compare with those of Blind Lemon Jefferson or Cripple Clarence Lofton, but it is marginally more serious than that of the great bluesman Sleepy John Estes, or the recently deceased Homesick James, whose affliction was really just a state of mind.
This is the tale of seasick steve, told over and again in story and song. His father was a car salesman who played boogie-woogie piano. His mum kicked his dad out when Wold was four, and took up with a Korean War veteran, who beat her son with a belt "because he didn't like hurting his hands on a kid". When Wold was 13, his stepfather threw him through a window. The next day, Wold stole the pearl-handled pistol from his stepfather's drawer, and waited to shoot him when he came back from work. Before he returned, however, Wold decided to leave home, instead.
"We lived by a railroad," he said, "so I just went and got on a train. I just had to leave or kill that motherf...er."
He often slept rough, but says, "I wasn't a homeless person. I worked."
Did his mother ever come looking for him?
"F... no," he spits. "Ha, ha."
He says he has done "every nasty job there is", from sewage-tank sander to steel galvaniser. "I joined carnivals lots of times," he says. "It was very easy to get jobs, along with all the other criminals. I liked it because I got to meet kids my age. I wasn't a troublemaker, but I got into heaps of trouble just from having nowhere to live." He says he was arrested before Christmas five years in a row - mostly for non-payment of fines - and generally did not get out of jail until after his birthday in March. "I stopped going to jail eventually," he says. "I got the point."
In about 1981, he met his second wife, Elisabeth. He has three sons with her, and two by his first wife. His youngest boy is 20, the oldest 35. He says he does not have much contact with his older children, that they "live in America somewhere", but his son Paul Martin is playing percussion with him at the Hammersmith Apollo tonight.
Wold gave up hopping freight trains in his 20s, but he and Elisabeth have lived in 59 houses in 27 years, he says. "And that's me being completely settled down. I couldn't hold a job. I get, like, so antsy." He laboured on building sites, mostly as a carpenter or plumber, and worked as an ambulance paramedic. When pressed, he admits to stints as a professional musician in the 1960s and 1970s, but will not say what he did or with whom. He lived in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, and he knew Janis Joplin. The word is that he played with Joni Mitchell. He says he was a journeyman bassist, and a lowly lounge musician, strumming Feelings to two drunks in the bar of the Holiday Inn.
He learned sound engineering, he says, and "collected old junk, so I set up my own studio from old valve and tube gear and stuff like that". He moved to Olympia, Washington, near Seattle, because his wife wanted to live somewhere in the US that "looked like Norway". He says he was startled to find a raucously vital punk/indie scene around what he remembered as a redneck logging town, and he recorded "80 or 90" albums with local bands in his studio.
He would occasionally mention his early life on the road, "but nobody was ever interested in that", he says. "If I ever did start to talk about it, I could clear a room out. 'Oh, there goes Steve again, about his wandering days ...' But over here [in England] I understand it's seen as more of a romantic thing, and I can't seem to write about much else, because when I pick up a guitar, my brain, for the most part, goes back there, rather than working on a construction site, or being a plumber."
There is not a rich vein of songs about being a plumber.
"Not for me," says Wold. "I didn't like doing it."
In about 2000, Elisabeth and Wold moved to Oslo. He formed a blues band, Seasick Steve and the Level Devils, and they released a CD, Cheap, in 2004. A Swedish radio listener recommended the band to Cushley.
"I emailed Steve's website and this guy called 'the Skunk' replied," Cushley tells me later. The Skunk sent Cushley Cheap. "I thought it was stunning," says Cushley, "brilliant. I was astonished by it. It wasn't, obviously, some hick hillbilly straight out of the backwoods, stomping into a studio and laying it down. There was intelligence behind it."
Cushley rustled up gigs for Wold, told everyone he knew about the old hobo bluesman with the filthy punk sound, and became, says Wold, "the manager by default, because no one else was interested in doing anything with us". He was booked to play a summer of festivals. "Then I had a heart attack," says Wold, "and that was the end of that."
He says it felt like a spear in his chest, "then two elephants sitting on each side, squeezing that spear in. It was the worst pain I could ever imagine." When he came out of hospital, "I was basically sitting around my house, looking out of the window every day, waiting to die."
Elisabeth encouraged him to take up the offer of a gig in Ireland, saying, "These people really want you to go, and if you're gonna die, you're gonna die anyway. You might as well go standing up."
He went and he played "and everyone freaked out", he says. Afterwards, his wife asked him to record some of the tunes he had been playing in the kitchen for years. Cushley kept calling, too, eager to hear new material.
Wold played an After the Heart Attack tour in the UK, and the driver of the support van, Andy Zammit, offered to release his CD, Dog House Blues. Unfortunately, Zammit did not have any money and his label, Bronzerat, had never put out a record. "This record company was in his bedroom," says Wold. Zammit borrowed money from his sister's disability fund to finance a first pressing of 1000 copies and the day the CD came out, Wold was confirmed to appear on the Annual Hootenanny UK television show on New Year's Eve 2006, where he howled out Dog House Boogie.
After Hootenanny, "it was just crazy", says Wold. He played more festivals in the summer of 2007 than any other act in Britain. He got a record deal with Warner, where, he says, former label head Korda Marshall was the only person interested in signing him. "Above him, they were, 'What the f... do you think you're doing?' " says Wold. " 'Why would you want to sign some old f...er who's just had a heart attack?' But they couldn't deny that I was starting to do real good, and we didn't even have a record company hardly, other than what was in his bedroom."
The week Wold's second solo CD, I Started Out with Nothin ..., came out, Warner did not renew Marshall's contract, and also got rid of the head of A&R. Neither was replaced, and the plans for the release ended up in chaos.
"Then Steve started kicking up because they hadn't supported him," says Cushley, "and post-Christmas they have, a lot more: (a) because they're making more money; and (b) because they're making more money."
"It's crazy," says Wold. "It's like I'm on drugs. I had no idea all this was gonna happen to me. It's like a miracle. Two years ago, I was on welfare in Norway, and my wife was working in an old people's home for minimum wage. We was f...ed."
How old was he when this began happening? "That ain't none of your business," says Wold, "or no one else's either. Nah," he says. "After I had that heart attack, I don't talk about how old I am any more. I got superstitious. Something snapped in my little brain. I thought, 'If you don't talk about how old you are, maybe you're gonna live a little longer, Steve.' "
Does he wish success had come to him earlier?
"Sure," he says. "We've been struggling most of our lives. I've raised five children. It's been tough. But I have this bad feeling that I'd've been an idiot if someone had given me money. I was kind of an idiot anyway ..."
Outside the Hammersmith Apollo, a crusty busker with dreadlocks like curtain pulls badgers me for my backstage pass. He wants to get into the show to thank Wold for the £20 note he dropped into his guitar case. Joe Cushley meets me outside the venue's production office, looking almost the way I remember him, and it occurs to me I have probably only ever seen him under artificial light.
The crowd cheer like football supporters and whoop like partygoers as Wold sits on a wooden chair, flanked by percussionists, in front of a washing line strung with fairy lights and hung with cowboy shirts and Levi's, and a neon Budweiser sign. It is the stage dressed as a trailer park, and it looks very odd indeed. But he is a scorching performer, a surprisingly agile showman who can coax his limp - the legacy of a back injury - into a kind of sliding duck walk, and stroll among the crowd strangling his home-made guitar, while Jim Sclavunos, Nick Cave's drummer from the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, waits in the wings (literally, as it happens) to guest on the song Just Like a King, which features the Bad Seeds on the recording.
Cushley introduces me to Andy Zammit, who cannot shed much light on Wold's wilderness years.
"He knew Joni Mitchell," he says, "back when he was living in a van somewhere in California, and I think that he jammed with her and played bits of recordings with her. But, to me, none of that stuff is of any importance. I just give a shit about what he's doing now. I think that's the f...ing story. In fact, it's to my chagrin that the hobo thing has become such a selling point for him. I can understand why people are interested in it, because it's exotic, but it wasn't pre-planned or anything."
When Wold plays Dog House Boogie, prompting all the crusties and dentists to wiggle their hands in the air like they are doing Incy Wincy Spider, he precedes it with a monologue about his stepfather beating him and his decision to go on the road. The audience cheer his resolves and clap in time as he segues into the song. They love the story, too.
The next morning, I am back at Wold's hotel, ready to get down to the tough questions. Does he have a beard-care routine? "No," he says. "I just cut it once in a while, and I get it out of my mouth."
It's not a very large beard for an old hobo bluesman.
"I used to have the whole thing," Wold says, "but it bothered me a lot when I slept at night. It'd get under my arm and things, and pull. I also looked like some animal. But I'm low-maintenance, man. I walk by the mirror just to make sure I'm still there."
When I arrived at the hotel, Wold could not come down immediately because he was having breakfast in his room. I imagined silver service, and perhaps he senses that, because he is quick to assure me that he was actually cooking oatmeal on his burner. I do not know if this is a Crocodile Dundee moment, like when Paul Hogan pretends to shave with his Bowie knife but is actually using an electric shaver, or checks someone's watch before telling the time by the sun, but it is hard not to laugh.
Does he actually carry a burner around everywhere?
"I got a burner, yeah."
Can he take a burner on a plane? "That's the one problem," he says. "I have, but understood it's not a good idea, so I don't do it no more. When we go on this tour, I bring it everywhere, and when we go over to Europe, we'll have a van taking equipment, so I'll put my burner in the van."
I am not sure whether you could cook oatmeal in a hotel room without setting off the fire alarm, but I am never going to try so I am never going to know. I ask him why his audience wriggle their fingers.
"I was trying to make them howl like a dog," he says, "and that was just me giving them directions when to howl. I don't know why they were doing it."
I wonder what it's like walking through the crowd.
"I got pinched on my butt 10 times by girls," he says. "I think it's a little bit rude, actually. If I was to do it to them, I'd probably go to jail. It's incredible. They would never do that if I wasn't playing the guitar. They see me walking down the street and girls go on the other side."
Wold knows there is some scepticism about his story, but says, "People don't pay attention when you're talking, partly, but some of the stuff people write is just dead wrong. I rode trains when I was young. I stopped back in the early '70s. And then they write, 'Steve was living under a bridge two years ago.' I never said any of that. They pick up on 'I used to be a hobo', so I was a hobo last year. And then people read, 'He produced [indie band] Modest Mouse', so how can he be a hobo? He must be a f...ing liar."
Journalists get suspicious about the way he is reluctant to talk about his years as a professional musician. Cushley, who is no longer Wold's manager but works for Bronzerat, says, "He's told me he lived in France, he did bits and bobs in the music biz. I know he was on an album by a band called Shanti. I dunno why he's reluctant. I think part of it is he doesn't want to name-drop, and part of it is he was brought up not trusting authority and having to live outside the norms of society. It's almost as if he wants to keep a secret because maybe someone's on his tail. It's the looking over your shoulder syndrome, I suppose."
Wold is a friend of his beard-sake Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. "He knew him back then," says Cushley. "I think they ... yeah, he knew him then. He met him along the way." He also played bass for the great bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins on a west coast tour. The surname "Wold", like Wold's wife, Elisabeth, comes from Scandinavia. I ask if Steve used to go by another name. "Yes," says Cushley, then I leave the subject alone.
The night before I fly out of England, I have a drink with Cushley and other old friends in an East End pub. We talk about the old days, lovers lost and chances missed. We sentimentalise and mythologise but, at their heart, the things we say are true. The next morning, I wake up still drunk, with a muffled sadness and a jangling doubt, feeling like I am always on the move, leaving something behind. But I guess that is why they call it the blues.