We Are Only Riders

We Are Only Riders

By Calum McCallion

It has taken me years to get round to this, but I thought I would have a bash at this writing lark like my old mate Gary Shand used to do back on the late ‘nineties. I often wonder what happened to him after I was transferred to Dundee, as we lost touch as folk often do, you know how it is, people move on, time passes, those who leave workplaces become memories, subjects of anecdotes which develop arms and legs with the passage of time. So, I thought I would write a sort of memoir, a fictional one about Gary Shand and his writing, it might work, maybe not, I can only but try, as I someone I once knew once said.

In the ‘nineties, I was more into carving out a career as a wannabe folk singer, a troubadour like a lot of my favourites from the ‘sixties, guys like Robin Williamson, Donovan, you know the ballpark. Now that I have retired from my civil service job, I have a lot more time on my hands, so I can devote my time to both music, and writing. My wife ran off with a younger man a few years back, so I have no interruptions to my creative endeavours, which I suppose is a good thing, though it would be nice to have someone to bounce my ideas off, someone to read my poems or stories to, or play my songs to. I see my daughters Anna and Kirsten every now and then, but they always seen to be too busy climbing their respective career ladders, as I suppose I did in my own way, when I was working.

Anyway, I was a friend of Gary’s, and a work colleague at the time, and recall how things were. I must say that I was amazed at his talent for writing poetry and prose, it was very impressive, as many folks told him, he was wasted doing office work!

I am really surprised that he never took his writing further, looked at getting his work published by a major publisher rather than a back street operation, working out of a flat above a run-down pub, with an antique ‘Xerox’ machine, a primitive form of photocopier which some of you might recall from your youth.

I remember that work was getting busier and more stressful for all of us, stress being a word that was more widely used these days than it once was. Gary had been signed off, as they said, by his GP, and had what really amounted to a paid holiday from the workplace, being paid was good, as he still had a mortgage and bills to pay. This allowed him more time to write and cultivate a new persona, that of a slam poet, he attended a lot of open mic nights around the city, in the less salubrious parts of town. Being a ranting poet in a downtown dive had never been on his agenda in life, well not since the ‘eighties, when he was really in thrall to the work of Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison. I was from an earlier era, the ‘sixties, and introduced him to the Beat Generation authors, and folk bands like the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, also singer songwriters who were effective poets, like Leonard Cohen and Roy Harper. In this period of ‘down time’ , which was down in more ways than one, he  told me was revisiting a lot of books and music from his days  in the ‘80s, his ‘back pages’, his ‘Bad Memory Lane’,  when he saw himself as ‘Bound For Glory’, music from the likes of The Doors, Patti Smith and  The Gun Club, who , according to him, were a great band, who sounded like an unholy marriage between the blues and punk rock , not a million miles away from a new band he also liked called the White Stripes, (who to me sounded a tad like early Led Zeppelin),Gary thought that the Gun Club’s first three albums were awesome, and classics of the era and genre. He had written a tribute to their singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce, on a website online, under his open mic name of ‘Adam.’

I have copied this into my memoir so you can read it; he intended this for a blog page which never materialised. (I think he would have made a good music critic, but he never took that suggestion too seriously

My favourite records at the time were Iggy's "TV Eye" and Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures," these along with the Doors and Velvets, provided the soundtrack to my later teens /early twenties. Listening to these bands often involved sitting in a dark room, alone with a head full of angst. The volume would be cranked up so loud that the neighbours would feel the full power of these primal rock bands pounding their walls to a fine rubble.
I watched programmes like "The Tube" in the early 80s and was utterly blown away by an appearance of Iggy himself, a manic wildman unleashed onto British TV!.
I began hanging out with various friends at various clubs in the city. I never got into the Goth scene. I wore black, yes, but that scene was brimming with pretence, and it did not appeal to me. I learned to drink to excess then and acquired a taste for Guinness, Jack Daniels and Tequila, my musical horizons were widening all the time. I started listening to all sorts of music then. It was if I had just found out what 'eclectic' meant, and was going about proving it in my choice of music.
The list went like this: Motorhead, ZZ Top, free jazz; taking in the likes of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, blues, folk stuff, alternative rock from the States ; Dream Syndicate, R.E.M, Long Ryders, many of who, years later were big league contenders in the world of corporate rock.
One of my all-time favourites were (and are) the Gun Club. An L.A. based punk band with blues influences worn on their sleeves, they were a considerable influence on my tastes musical and literary.
Their singer, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a peroxided Marlon Brando lookalike, was a drunken poet/singer similar in style to Jim Morrison. His lyrics were great and reminded me of the best poetry I had read, and the best punk lyrics. He often stated in interviews that he was an avid music fan, often dropping names of rockabilly singers, rappers and jazz players like Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra into the conversation.
The Gun Club's "Las Vegas Story" affirmed this eclectic fandom with idiosyncratic covers of Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now" and Sanders "The Creator has a Masterplan". The horn section on this LP was named "The Synanon Reeds" , which is likely a reference to the sax player Art Pepper and his sojourn at the rehab centre of the same name.
The Gun Club and Jeffrey Lee laid the foundations for my years long quest for the perfect African American music which I later discovered in artists like Charlie Parker and Robert Johnson. Both individuals lived their lives on the edge of the switchblade and were eventually destroyed by their own talent. The intensity of their lives was evident in the intensity of their music. The same was true of Jeffrey Lee.
Pierce was also a writer. He performed spoken word gigs with the likes of Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, and William Burroughs. Looking back on things, I started writing myself in the eighties inspired by Pierce as well as books like "1984", "Naked Lunch" and "On the Road”!

Fast Forward to 1996.
It's Wednesday.
I have had a shit day at work and I pick up a copy of the NME on the way home for old times' sake.
Opening the paper, I see an article saying that Jeffrey Lee has died.
I feel sad and remember the times I associate with his music and its continuing influence on me and my writing.

Fast Forward to 2001.
I am in town.
It is Sunday and lots of shoppers are buzzing about.
I seek refuge in a bookstore and discover "Go Tell the Mountain,” The complete lyrics/writings of Jeffrey Lee. It is published by Henry Rollins' 2.13.61 imprint.
I hand over my money and read.
The fire still burns, even in the 21^st century.

Aside from the music I have mentioned, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Henry Rollins were included in this revisitation, along with books by Jack Kerouac, Alexander Trocchi, Hubert Selby Jnr, and Niall Griffiths, who he thought to be the Welsh equivalent of Irvine Welsh! The name ‘Adam,’ as well as being reference to the first man in the Bible, was also a reference to ‘Young Adam’ the book by Trocchi, which Gary liked a lot. A Beat novel by a Scottish author, so he said, how good was that? A pseudonym, a new identity was a perfect way to forget the miserable life he was leading, like Rimbaud said ‘je suis un autre,’ that is to say, ‘I am another,’ I am someone else. He told me once that he wanted to be more than just an ‘office drone,’ in the hive of activity that was our place of work, and this would get him to the mythical ‘somewhere,’ which we all search for in our lives. Some want to attain the top rung of the career ladder, others playing a gig in the Edinburgh Playhouse, we all have our goals, I was never sure what Gary’s was, he did not either.

I recall one stunning performance by him at the local open mic night in Aberdeen, which proved to be his last appearance there.

Gary was in mourning for the closure of his favourite record shop which had been a big part of his life since he was in his teens. He had, in his words. ‘Cobbled together,’ a poetic tribute to the place which was heavily based on Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote to Howl,’ and Patti Smith’s take on it from her ‘Peace and Noise’ album from 1998. He namechecked the staff and characters in the record shop in this poem, the music played, the times enjoyed there, and at the end of this , he flung a carrier bag from the shop into the audience , sadly of just twenty or so folk, and began to tear his poem into pieces before throwing its fragments, like confetti into the air with wild abandon.  

It was an impressive performance, quite unlike the sociable guy I knew from work, he had really taken on this persona in a big way, the act had become real. He wore a black leather jacket, jeans and Doc Martens boots and looked almost cool, which you could not have said about him in the office, with his worn suit, and Paisley pattern ties which were in vogue back in the ‘eighties, when Yuppies walked the Earth.

 Once he had finished, he grabbed up the microphone and rasped ‘Thank you, Aberdeen’ as if he were someone in a rock band, he then sat down next to me and necked back a full pint of lager, which was not his, with no apology to its owner.

He then left the bar, to a round of applause from the scant audience.

It was a cold November night when I left the place, sometimes crawling, sometimes walking, as the song goes, it had been a boozy night.

I never saw him for years after that, as he never returned to the office or indeed the department in which we worked. Some said he had been admitted to a local mental institution, others said he was a famous author in London, writing under a pseudonym, making heaps of money, and living the life of Reilly. Folk would tell me that they had seen a shambling figure in Aberdeen’s Castlegate drunk and begging for money, who looked like Gary. The rumours were legion.  It was like I said earlier, the memories of folk you work with become the subjects of anecdotes which develop arms and legs with the passage of time.

It was not until I picked up the mail one morning in 2020, the year the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. In my mailbox was a Jiffy bag from the USA, no sender details included thereon.

Gary was never one for social media, so had not been in touch by e-mail, Facebook, or any other ‘app’ that is going now.

The words ‘The Journey is Long, and We are only Riders’ were scrawled in black marker pen on the front, along with my name and address. I recalled Gary going on about the Jeffrey Lee Pierce tribute album ‘We are only Riders’ many years before, this was a quote from Jeffrey’s lyrics and this package could only be from Gary, living in the United States, and writing.  I tore the package open, and a bunch of scribbled notes fell out, along with two books, one of poetry, the other of prose, he had succeeded by becoming another, taking on a new persona, an alias, whatever. He always did talk about living a quiet life below the radar and was clearly doing that. My dilemma was what would I do, would I tell the world about this great literary giant, post about it online or would I just leave things as they were. I decided that Gary was best left alone he was obviously doing what he wanted, and after all as the lyric went 'the journey is long and we are only riders'. I would let Gary ride his journey, and return to my life of retiral leisure and artistic endeavours. 

( This is a companion piece to ' Calum At The Festival', for those who have read it- markp)