Last Call

Bobby hadn't really worked in two years; even his music was suffering. The family was sick with pneumonia, but Cathy had gone to her job. They were behind on all their bills and needed the money.

As she left the house, she asked Bobby to call a man who owed them money so that they could pay the mortgage. "When I came home," she remembers, "he was sitting on the couch, smoking pot and playing his guitar. I asked if he had called. He said no. It was as if maintaining our house and our relationship wasn't worth the effort to make a single phone call.

"Bobby left the room and then came back and poured a bucket of water over my head. He said, 'This ought to cool you off,' and went to collect the money," Cathy continues. "Well, I had suffered all the indignities I was going to suffer. I called the man he was going to see and told him to tell Bobby that all of his things would be on the front lawn and not to come into the house.

"I was so tired. I wanted something else--stability, faithfulness, a future. He wanted his music."

I sleep with the sun,
I rise with the moon.
But I feel all right
with my needle and spoon.

--from "Needle and Spoon,"
by Chris Youlden

Bobby smashes another cigarette stub into the ashtray. "I thought I was neglecting my music," he says. "I had decided I wasn't going to work some 'straight' job that would distract me. "She grew up, and I didn't," he continues. "She was my rock for twelve years. But I drove her away...fucked her around. When she left, I was devastated. I essentially stayed drunk for the next two years.

"There's the song, 'You don't know what you've got 'til its gone.' Well, that was me. When I lost her and was free to explore my music, it was bitter and painful. I had to keep playing, otherwise, without it--and my kids--I probably would have killed myself. The funny thing was, my music got better the more miserable I was."

There was nothing left but the blues. Bobby reached that epiphany in a pizza joint in some godforsaken South Dakota town.

"I went up to the jukebox and realized every single song we played was there," he says. "I said right then, 'I gotta quit. This is a fuckin' waste of time. If I'm gonna be poor, I'd rather be poor playing the blues in Denver.'"

Besides, in Denver he could be near his sons. He may have lost everything else important to him, but he never stopped loving his boys. He taught them to play tennis, and he taught them to love music as much as he did. And Cathy, who had custody of the boys, cooperated; although she might be concerned by the example he set, she would not prevent the boys from knowing their father.

"The highest I've ever been had nothing to do with drugs," Bobby says. "It was watching my son Brian being born. I said to myself then, 'This is the most special thing to ever happen to you.' I didn't know--not really--that people were capable of creating such a miracle."

The decade following his divorce passed in a blur of whiskey, drugs, women and music. The bands changed as rapidly as 45s in a jukebox. So did the women, most of whom shared his addictions to drugs, alcohol and self-destruction. In 1992 Bobby was arrested on charges of domestic abuse and assault. "It was a scuffle in the house. I slapped her," he recalls. "I felt like shit when my head cleared. I don't believe in hitting women. And it's no excuse to say the violence went both ways."

Every once in a while, his hepatitis would flare up. Bobby had first been exposed to hepatitis B when he was sharing needles in the Seventies; over the next twenty years he was exposed many more times, and he eventually contracted hepatitis C. The doctors warned that he was ruining his liver--that if he didn't give up the drugs and alcohol, he'd need a transplant or die young. But Bobby shrugged off their warnings.

He wanted the drugs enough that he lost what little he had left. The house he'd shared with Cathy. Furniture. Guitars. Bobby lived wherever anyone would take him in; he never owned his own place again.

But the effects of heroin or cocaine only lasted so long. Bobby's only real escape from the mess of his life was on the stage. Playing his guitar, the pain went away. The music could take him to another place. It could take him to paradise.

"I don't like to use the term 'zone,'" he says. "Too many people use that loosely to mean they had a good night where they played well and the audience was like, 'Hey, this guy is good.'