#VENI VIDI VICI ENGLISH FREE#
Now, we both were ready for our free birthday shots of whiskey at the Ground Zero Blues Club down on Delta Ave. Walked in, sat down, ten minutes later, clip, clip, I was a new man. We walked into the first place I saw, the International Hair Design on Third Street. If I don’t get a cut, I’m a mental disaster, an unkempt tyrant pouting the hours away. “Time for a haircut.” I need one every two weeks.
“First things first,” I announced to Ohio as we drove into Clarksdale, some 70-miles south of Memphis. The revolutionary died right there, right outside door 306. Now a monument, the eeriness of the hotel is no recreation. We would also visit the very spot where the great Martin Luther King met his fate, at the Lorraine Hotel, second-floor balcony. The next day we would sign the wall at Graceland then skirt our way through Grind City, sniffing all the old microphones at Sun Studios, peeling back the layers of wonder, knowing Elvis Presley stood in this tiny room, creating The King. Waiting outside baggage claim, Gate Z, Ohio pulled to the curb and signaled me in. Sniffing the microphones of the old Sun Studio in the presence of The King.Įarlier in the day in Memphis, a former wrestler named Ohio arrived at the airport terminal in a black minivan with heavily-tinted windows, sporting a porny-looking mustache and a Colter Walls T-shirt. The sunset cooled me to the point of paralysis, providing me a private baptism of sorts. Good luck.” That kind of distance.ĭays ago, sitting in an enclosed porch attached to a one-bedroom sugar shack, swaying back and forth on a two-seat swing, I got lost in the golden glow that fell over the old plantations in Hopson, a non-governed region just outside Clarksdale. I went for the quiet, for the distance that Nowhere provides. You wait for it to arrive, and when she does, you hold it tight and start lapping at all that bittersweetness.īut I didn’t go to Mississippi necessarily for the blues either. Like a wild dog, you don’t try and force the blues on a leash. Not until I heard The Wolf and R.L Burnside and Lightnin’ Hopkins bending them strings towards the Killing Floor was I hooked.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was slick as slick gets. The Robert Cray Band didn’t do it for me. And there was some tough learning along the way. Now, it took me decades to learn to love the blues. I grew not just to love Clarksdale for the grit, the people, the history and the music. What luck! For three days I stumbled through that tiny town teeming with the memories of some of the greatest originators of blues music. I’d been there before, a few times, starting in 2004 when the Boston Globe sent me on assignment as a correspondent for the travel section. That’s right, the Delta, home of the Blues, Devil’s Crossroad. I went to Mississippi, Clarksdale to be exact. If you like to get up in the mix.īut I didn’t go to Florida. And of course, the intense cocktail vibe Florida so wonderfully provides is reason enough to go. The slow morning warm-ups, drinking coffee in bare feet heating on crushed stone, whiffing at that sweet-smelling Bermuda grass. So I saw.Ĭall me what you will - a dirt knot, a bottom feeder, a trash bucket - I don’t mind. Sometimes that’s the only place worth seeing. I just made my way toward Nowhere, all for the heck of it. Veni vidi vici Got myself a “get out of town” pass for 48 hours recently without having any real reason to leave town.
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