The Real McCombs
The record-company men broke him like a twig
He writes songs, and licks envelopes for money.
How dare he speak of Primus that way?
Cass McCombs makes for the bubbling kettle in a backstage corner of Bar Le Ritz PDB and pours himself tea. “Do you want some?” He points at an overturned box of Throat Coat and winces, apologetically. “It’s all they have.” I shake my head, so we sit across from each other at a low wooden table, guitars and gear bags occupying the other seats.
We’re in Montreal tonight, one of the first stops on Cass’s North American tour for his latest record, Interior Live Oak. He’s hoping for a better visit to this old, frozen city than the last one, when he was burglarized in the middle of his show. “Someone just snuck backstage while we were playing and stole a bunch of stuff,” he says softly, raising and lowering his tea bag. “It wasn’t kind.”
A slim man in his late forties, Cass has a full head of tussled black hair, lightly dimpled cheeks, and intense blue-green eyes that roam the room as he …
The Front Porch
Moths
The old summer place has been in the family for seven generations, which counting the grand-children makes eight. For most of the year it sits dormant, being more like what was once called a “camp,” with plank walls and little to no insulation outside of the kitchen, with its great stone fireplace hinting at some greater ambition that was seemingly scaled back. It only really comes alive in the summer, when generations of cousins and their children visit, presided over by the surviving elders, who at this point include my mother, who is blind as a bat, and two of her three sisters, who I hope will live forever, so that they can continue to recite tales about the simple pleasures of their childhoods on this very lake, and of the men who came to pay court, and whose advances they ever-so-chastely refused, unless the beau happened to be rich enough, and therefore a fitting prospect for the wedding columns …
Under the Falls
Prologue
Funny thing about the Adirondacks. Head up the Northway toward Montreal, and right away you sense that you’re leaving the Rust Belt. Oh, sure, there’s still evidence of economic hardship, but on that multilane interstate you also begin to encounter cities and towns where your average upstate New Yorker can’t afford to live. The first of these is Saratoga Springs, with its thoroughbred racetrack, performing arts center, the famous Yaddo writers’ colony and posh Skidmore College. To a degree, Saratoga is seasonal, its population during racing season more than doubling with wealthy downstaters, but the city remains vibrant (and unaffordable to most upstaters) in all seasons. But keep going. There’s more. Just a few miles up the road you’ll find Lake George, and after that Ticonderoga and Lake Placid, which, thanks to the Olympics, is more famous as …
