Silver and Gold. Roly, Joan, and me.

This weekend Sweet Relief is hosting A Night To Honor Joan Baez at The Masonic in San Francisco.

A well-deserved tribute. Joan Baez will be there, of course. Along with Emmylou Harris, Hozier, Rosanne Cash, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, and more. All backed by an ace house band featuring Joe Henry, Greg Leisz, and other luminaries.

I recently took in the Joan Baez documentary, I Am A Noise. And it got me to thinking. And circling back to our old friend Roly. And the early days. For another typically disjointed Substack post from out here on the road.

Back when Roly Salley played bass with us.

Roly Salley had a storied past.

Among other things, he’d done a stint in Joan Baez’s band. He had some pretty wild recollections of Joan at the time, that track pretty well with the Joan Baez documentary.

As for Roly, I distinctly remember meeting him for the first time. We had a mutual friend in the dearly departed Aaron Gregory, and I was looking for a bass player. Aaron said, “Give Roly a call, I’m sure he’d be up for whatever.” So I did.

Roly rolled up one day in front of the warehouse I was living in down on Folsom Street, South of Market. Smoke plumes blowing out the back of his Chevy Nova. He pulled an upright bass out of the backseat and bounced up the stairs to my loft where Stephie and I were rehearsing. Before we’d hardly said a word, the three of us fell into playing. He was following along, occasionally looking at our hands to follow the chords until we cycled through a verse and a chorus. (Stephie was just learning to play guitar and I teased her that he was looking at her hands more than mine.)

Now suddenly we were a band. We played some covers. Dylan songs. And I was working on the songs that became Brother Aldo. Stephie had a gift for harmony and would do a couple songs. Sometimes we’d play with Brian Godchaux, a great fiddler. Brian happened to be related to certain Grateful Dead alumni I would later learn. We’d trade off solos, more often than not in the key of G. “The key of confidence,” as Roly joked. And he would play upright and would do his songs. Stephie played the Silvertone Red Swirl piano accordion she’d scored at Mission Loan on Mission Street.

We started playing around town immediately, in between my Green On Red commitments. House parties, the Fillmore, the Paradise, the Haight Street Fair. Whatever. An arts center in Modesto? Sure.

Roly always lifted us up. Big time. Roly had experience. For one, he’d written “Killing the Blues.” Yeah, THAT song. A minor miracle of a song. We knew it from the John Prine version. If that’s all he’d been known for, it would be more than enough. I mean, he could play – a great feel and a great ear – but he seemed happy to put up with our limited chops.

Also, at the time – and to this day – Roly was in Chris Isaak’s band. Chris hadn’t really broken yet; he was still living in an in-law apartment in the Sunset District taping bus transfers together to get around town and haunting thrift stores for vintage threads. Chris would be hunkered down in the studio with his producer Erik Jacobson for months on end, wrestling (see footnote) his new opus to the ground. Which gave Roly enough free time to moonlight with us.

Footnote: Isaak was a boxer. Grew up in Stockton out in the Central Valley. So there’s probably a boxing analogy that could replace my wrestling description, but I’ll let you come up with it.

I should add, Chris was definitely on a trajectory. He had a great British expat manager, Mark Plummer, who was a dead ringer for Ray Milland who starred in The Lost Weekend. Plummer was a total character. He dressed impeccably in vintage suits. I once visited his apartment where he’d summoned me to play a little with Chris. And Plummer, at my request, played me a Gram Parsons record. (That’s how we rolled back then. If you wanted to hear a record, you had to track it down. I’m sure it was well out of print at the time.)

We sat on his couch listening to Gram, Plummer ashing his non-filters in an ashtray on the coffee table where also sat a heavy Bakelite rotary phone. If the phone rang with an inquiry for Chris, he’d shout, “I’ll have to get back to you. Things are slammed right now!” And he’d slam the phone down, put his feet back up on the coffee table and go back to blowing smoke rings.

Nothing looked slammed to me.

Genius.

It was also where I witnessed Plummer taping two bus transfers together for Chris. Personal management! This was back when the driver would poke a hole in your transfer to mark the time you paid. And it would expire in two hours. But if you grabbed the right one off the ground and scotch taped it to the one with today’s date, it would magically put you in the two hour window. Plummer slammed open a drawer on the coffee table and rooted around for just the right wrinkled transfer.

Anyway, Roly. We looked up to Roly. Still do.

Fast forward a few album cycles of touring in the 90s, I’m thinking some time later in 1997, my band, which now included Max Butler, Anders Rundblad, Paul Revelli and Stephie, actually opened some shows for Joan Baez. In Italy. Not exactly the most obvious pairing, but it somehow made sense to the Italian promoter. It must have looked good on paper, written in Italian.

I wouldn't say the gigs were triumphant on our part. We were never more electric than when we were out there touring behind Homemade Blood. So playing those refined theatres and amphitheaters with grown-up audiences, wasn’t exactly where we thrived. It was like we were driving an eighteen wheeler around a garden party. We were accustomed to playing the black box circuit of clubs in England and the Continent. Just pounding the music with our single-coil guitars and drums. And with sheer volume.

To be honest, we’d be much more prepared to handle something like that today. We’ve progressed. We’ve matured. So we didn’t quite connect with the audiences a hundred percent. But it was a cool experience. We were opening for Joan Baez! In Italy, no less! Posh venues. Clean dressing rooms. Nice hotels. Certainly a step above what we were used to. Dreamy locales like Lake Como. With snow-dusted Italian Alps in the distance. Boats on the lake. All good things.

I didn’t know that much about Joan. But what I did know made me think I might want to keep a professional distance. (I’d heard about an incident involving Joan chucking a vase of flowers and another where she stormed off stage and climbed into the back of a limousine, where she curled up into the fetal position, sucking her thumb. I wasn’t about to pop into her dressing room for a little Bob Dylan chit chat. “Did Bob really wreck his motorcycle? Come on, Joan, let’s write a song!”)

As for “I Am A Noise”, the Joan Baez doc making the rounds, it’s unflinchingly candid. About her conflicts. Her love life. Her struggles with mental health, her complicated family life. And the rest.

Either way, she’s a queen.

Back to Rome in 1997. One afternoon Stephie and I were chilling in the stands doing nothing. Lying in the sun while the stagehands were setting up at this outdoor amphitheater. That’s touring. You sit down. Or get in a moving vehicle. And you fall asleep, or at least zone out. From behind me, I felt someone running their fingers through my hair. I turned around and it was Joan. She says, “I feel for you guys. You must be tired.” She sounded very nurturing.

We fell into conversation. She said she was worried about my voice. And that if I kept on singing the way I was singing, I was going to ruin it. She offered to teach me some warm-up scales. In her dressing room.

But I was probably a little too insecure. Scales? That sounded advanced to me. Maybe that was it. Maybe I’d end up saying or doing something stupid. Always likely to happen.

Reading about the new doc got me thinking about Joan, so I hunted down this photo of us on tour with her. Max Butler took it, I recall. And I’m wearing that silver snap button cowboy shirt that his then wife Christine brought back from Nashville, where they honeymooned, and gifted it to me for Christmas.

I probably should have taken Joan up on those warm-up exercises. Has anyone seen the film?

Onwards,

-CP

Stephie, Roly, Chuck, and Rich Brotherton – Austin, Texas