A Greyhound to Memphis

Dispatch

There is no such thing as the Greyhound Bus Company

Finding grace in a nightmare by Thomas Pynchon

The ducks waddling across the red carpet in the Peabody Hotel lobby will never let you down

The Greyhound bus ride from New York to Memphis takes 24 hours, so you may as well do something pretty with your time, like getting drunk before noon off a liter of J&B or tagging the initials "Nc" on the window or checking your blood pressure at the drugstore next to a transfer station. Or you can call a friend to offer some long-distance advice, even if they probably won’t take it. “Imma tell you how not to fumble that bag,” my seatmate Jameer is telling his friend Niki over the phone. They’ve been talking about keeping her life on the straight and narrow for at least an hour now. It’s the real ones who always get the deals. Jameer, the older of the two, is 23 at most. Blessed with an old-school name, he stays up late working on his sound, and offers advice about not getting caught up with party boys who talk game. Given the light flirting and veiled allusions to whatever happened between them way back in the day, I’d bet money that Jameer and Niki were once romantically …

Review

King of the Capitol

Baby-faced Carolinian can sure pick it

Freakish prodigy was raised on Happy Meals and old-time religion, discovered in a guitar shop

Now a full-grown man, Marcus’s talent as bluesman is unmistakable, despite Rick Rubin’s best efforts to make him sound like Adele

By Chandler Fritz

Ernest Hemingway found his joie de vivre in the sweat on a wine bottle. I get mine from a cold can of beer. It helps if you’re holding that can of beer at a Marcus King concert, which is where I found myself on a recent Saturday evening up there at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. I had been itching to go “up there” lately. Not “upstate” exactly, which exists exactly nowhere outside the imagination of urbanites who, as Ben Metcalf once wrote, “thought that thermal underwear and down vests [...] put them well in touch with rural experience.” When I say up there I mean it more like outta here. So I went up there to Port Chester, on the New Haven line, on a lead-gray March afternoon, hoping to enjoy myself not only a can of cold beer and a good rock show but the kind of company who knows such things are good enough for their own sake. King played the historic Capitol while touring for his latest album, Mood Swings, the third since his Grammy-nominated solo debut El Dorado, …

A Greyhound to Memphis

Frontier Justice

King of the Capitol