While many alt-country scenesters kept their tongues in cheek, these recordings were kitsch-free. The whole thing was an explosion of sound and viewpoint.
“I remember sitting on Pat Gallagher’s old Chevy one night at Coolsville, me and Tim and Pat way into the wee hours of the morning,” said drummer Rick Schell, who currently plays with RCA Records newbie act Pinmonkey. “Someone brought out a boombox, and Tim started playing a tape of the stuff they’d recorded with Bob at Paul Gannon’s, and I was just floored. I knew Bob, but I hadn’t heard Bob, and there was this big, booming voice, this giant wall of sound coming out of his mouth, and these great songs. Right there, I was like, ‘Fuck, I want in on this stuff.'”
Bob,
To one of the greatest people I know…Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. Keep in touch after graduation. Stay out of trouble. I know enough that you might get into trouble if you don’t watch out
Love Always,
Ellie P.
(as written in Le Souvenir)
The city tore Coolsville down in 1997 and built…a library.
“It’s actually some kind of meditation area on the library grounds now, and you can sit right where the house was,” Carroll said. “It’s kind of cool to do that, to sit there. I took a picture there once.”
The house seemed to offer parting gifts to its inhabitants, as relocation was accompanied by record contracts and road gigs. Horn took over as drummer for the Derailers, Carroll signed a record deal with Sire, and Lonesome Bob signed with former Bloodshot bigwig Eric Babcock, who had moved to Checkered Past.
For Things Fall Apart, Bob’s Checkered Past debut, the songs cut at Gannon’s studio were dusted off and slightly (we mean slightly) polished. He recorded seven more tracks at Steve Allen’s Blue Planet Studio, with contributions from Schell (he finally got in on that stuff), Bill Dwyer, Ken Coomer (of Wilco, at the time), Dave Jacques, Duane Jarvis and others.
Bob augmented the tracks with a then-unsigned singer named Allison Moorer, who overdubbed duet parts on the recordings. (Singer Divy Nelson had already sung over the tracks, but her parts were erased once Moorer came into the picture.) Moorer went on to the world of major-label contracts and Oscar Night cameos, but she was scuffling like the Coolsville crew when she met Bob.
“We just connected,” Moorer said. “As soon as we sung together, we knew we had something. Neither one of us is what you’d call a delicate singer, and what we do together is kind of different-sounding. His voice is huge, and he’s a fearless kind of singer who doesn’t shy away from singing balls-out. But at the same time he sings wonderfully, and beautifully.”
Other folks agreed, as the record received rave reviews in several publications (even Playboy). But good press often will only take you so far. The problem wasn’t getting people to like the album once they heard it, it was getting people to hear it in the first place.
“If you can get to them, you can get to them,” Bob said. “But, God, they’re so hard to reach.”
“I have a teenage son who I never get to see
He lives in New Jersey, I live in Tennessee
I want to fly him down here for a month, but you see
The note from the bank
And the bill collectors’ voices
Are telling me that I don’t have those kinds of choices”
— Lonesome Bob, “Weight Of The World”
This is the really shitty part of the story, the part where critical favor and artistic accomplishment don’t equal commercial success (“I should have known those things weren’t the same, but I probably didn’t,” Bob said); where Things Fall Apart sells less than 1,000 copies, and the decision to quit his graphic artist job in order to tour seems a lot like deciding to quit riding a bicycle in favor of flapping arms and taking flight.
