Free Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin

“Arrowhead,” and she called me “Shufflefoot McQueen”—I’m not sure why, although I think it had something to do with the fact that I shuffled like a downtrodden subordinate every time our drill-sergeant boss commanded me to make coffee, muttering under my breath as I inched toward the coffeemaker.
    We had a quick, easy, shorthand of a friendship, and I spent lots of time with her and her then-spouse, Richard. Shelley was a football-loving, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed little thing, and Richard was a refined and professorial die-hard feminist. One night as we were watching TV, an ad came on for what was then a revolutionary development in sanitary napkins—the three adhesive strips. Richard took this in and suddenly erupted in outrage. “Jesus! Look at what they put you through! This is unbelievable!” Shelley and I stared at him blankly for a minute until we finally understood—Richard, in his hypervigilance to root out the atrocities done to women, was under the impression that one took the sticky part of the pad and applied it directly to the crotch. Ouch.

    Shelley
    Musically I was keeping things strictly acoustic—no more bands for me—and found a home at Laval’s Subterranean in Berkeley, yet another basement bar. Jim was still writing songs, and I was finally getting a clue that doing original music might be a good idea. I did a lot of his tunes, plus material by Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. Covering songs by men was a good trick I had discovered—sometimes the simple fact that a woman was singing the song would give it another dimension. It was during this period that I taught myself to play “The Heart of Saturday Night” by Waits and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” by Dylan. For the first time, I felt that there was something special going on with my interpretations, and ultimately both those songs made it onto my third record, Cover Girl.

    Me and Jim Bruno, Berkeley, 1979
    (Photograph courtesy of John Palme)
    Although I still didn’t write my own songs, it’s worth noting that I was always fooling around on the guitar, and from time to time I would compose little ideas here and there:
    I’ve been sleeping fair,
    Lately I could swear I’m thinking
    Clearer and clearer,
    And I’ve been working hard,
    Looking at my punch card and
    My mirror, my mirror …
    I went back to this tidbit years later and finished it, called it “Ricochet in Time,” and included it on my first record, Steady On. It’s a song I still love to perform, because it describes being a musician on the road. In fact, it means a lot more to me now than it did when I wrote it.
    I don’t know how long I might have stayed in the Bay Area, but a year after I moved there, fate intervened when I got a phone call that set the wheels in motion to significantly change the rest of my life, both personally and professionally. The Big Apple beckoned.

8
    Dry Is Good

    The Buddy Miller Band—Karl Himmel, Buddy, me,
Larry Campbell, and Lincoln Schleifer—NYC, 1980
    You’re shining, I can see you.
    You’re smiling. That’s enough.
    I’m holding on to you
    Like a diamond in the rough.
    New York City, just like I pictured it. I had visited there exactly once, and it had made me dizzy with its immensity. I would never have possessed the nerve to move to Manhattan without a single connection, but Buddy Miller tracked me down in California and asked if I would join his band. I knew Buddy from my days in Austin, and he’d gone up to New York to hop onto the bandwagon of what became known as the great country scare of the 1980s, what with urban cowboys, Gilley’s, electric-bull riding, and two-stepping. All the things I’d already seen and heard in Austin were now trendy in New York, and Bud went there to see what could be done about enlightening the Yankees to a bit of homegrown, honestly-come-by, grassroots, serious-assed country music. Never mind that Buddy was a Jew from New Jersey. God didn’t