Last Call

"What I'm talking about is going to a place and taking the audience with you. You can't go there alone; there is an exchange of energy between you and the audience--you're bound together. It's time-transcendent. Something extraordinary is there...I'll be damned if I know if it's what we call God, but I know it's unique, and it's not there every night."

Bobby sought that place more than he ever craved a hypodermic full of smack. "Sometimes it's hard," he says. "You're having a bad night. Your fingers hurt, and you're sore and tired of playing the same thing over and over. But I used to tell the guys in my bands, 'If I can just get into the zone for thirty minutes, I'll hack through the other four hours and be happy.'"

And Bobby hacking was better than most playing their best. He didn't write much of his own music, but he chose songs that seemed to apply to his life and made them his own. "Born to Lose," "Tobacco Road," "Going Down Slow." Some of the big names in the music business--Coco Taylor, James Brown, Buddy Guy, Robert Palmer--would catch his set at a festival or in a club and seek him out to praise his work. But there would be no big recording contract, no tours. For the most part, Bobby's music was limited to Denver. His town.

He found a haven in Ziggie's Saloon. The tavern had a reputation as a rough place, a onetime mob joint, then a biker hangout. But it was also one of the few establishments in Denver that boasted live blues music.

Bobby was a Ziggie's fixture--if not on the stage, then at the bar. If he couldn't get a gig anywhere else, Ziggie's owners would let him throw together a band and perform. And when the place was taken over and cleaned up by a former federal law enforcement officer, Joe Teitsworth, Bobby came with the banged-up furniture.

In the meantime, Bobby's boys had been growing up and wanted to know him better. Brian came to live with Bobby at sixteen, when his mother kicked him out of her house because she was no longer able to control his wild ways. Michael was jealous. He wanted more of his father's attention--which gave Bobby the idea of playing with his boys, in the latest incarnation of the Bob Hornbuckle Band. Michael was thirteen the first time his dad had him up on stage.

"The one thing I can never lose is the respect and love of my sons," says Bobby. "That's when I would have nothing worth living for." He sips his beer, Robert Cray playing in the background.

Bobby says that after his folks split up, he gave little thought to his father. There was so little to think much of. For instance, when his grandmother died, his dad and aunt took their inheritance and went on a seven-year binge. "That's how long it took them to drink and gamble it away," Bobby says. "They'd charter jets to take them and their entourage to Las Vegas. The friends lasted about as long as the money."

Bobby peers through a smoke ring that frames his face and smiles. "Funny how that happens."

Bobby Hornbuckle has reached a cruelly introspective point in his life, and the truth--that touchstone every blues musician must seek--has to be recognized and reconciled. Is he like his father? "Maybe the drinking," he says. "But I never gambled, and I never beat my kids."

He closes his eyes and nods as the cigarette smoke escapes his lips along with his words. "And I was cruel to my wife and neglected my kids...yes, like my dad."

By 1995 Bobby Hornbuckle, born to hard times in Denver was finally, forgive the pun, getting his act together. Those who knew him raised an eyebrow when he said he was clean and sober and going to stay that way (he admits to a few relapses), but they hoped for his sake that it was true.

The hepatitis seemed to be in check, but then he was arrested again for fighting with his girlfriend, the same woman he'd slapped in 1992. He spent a month in jail, and when he got out, he got out of the relationship. "We were bad for each other," he says. "She was an alcoholic. I was into drugs. They don't mix." He was still living in poverty, but he was playing music with his boys, making plans.

But there was a pain in his kidney area that would not go away. He tried to ignore it. He tried to drink it under the table. He finally went to get it checked out.

It was rectal cancer. First a polyp, then a major tumor. The doctors opened Bobby and closed him right back up. The disease had spread too far; it couldn't be removed surgically without killing him. Even radiation treatment and chemotherapy would not take away the threat, just lessen the pain.