The funeral was in Pennsylvania, and Bob went back up there for all of that. Music was forgotten for a while, though work was a necessity when he returned to Nashville.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “I was flat broke. After awhile, I got a job opening up in the mornings and working the lunch shift at the Radio Cafe. There were times when you’d get paralyzed, just out of the blue I’d think, ‘Oh my fucking God, my son is dead.’ And then you’re there again, standing over the bed and watching him die. And then three people walk in and want lunch, and you’ve just got to do it.”
For months, he worked and mourned, leaned on friends, prayed a lot and felt helpless. Friends remember him shaving his face and head, and some of them remember the night he disappeared from a party for hours and they found him outside in the yard, distraught and broken.
“It’s easier to deal with now, because I’ve established some beliefs about where I am and where he is and what happens as a result of that,” Bob said. “But it all very well could be a lie. When we die, we might just die. It might be all over, and that would really suck. I don’t personally believe that, but you have to allow for the possibility.”
Eventually, he went back to music, to writing about his irrevocably altered life. He recorded four songs with Steve Allen at Blue Planet, and the music sounded more primal yet more wizened, all at once. “Things Change” was a look at a long-passed love affair, though the lyrics were colored with an unyielding sadness that draws from a deeper well. “It’d Be Sad If It Weren’t So Funny” featured Bob and Moorer wailing through a dispiriting but musically propulsive list of inanities. “Heather’s All Bummed Out” started with a joke and ended as a textured portrait of a woman’s death of spirit. And the wholly autobiographical, baying, goth-country-rock “Where Are You Tonight?” evoked unchecked psychological torture.
“The most painful thing that a person can endure is surviving your children,” said Dave Herndon, Bob’s old Village Voice champion. “And that’s what ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ sounds like. He’s not pulling any punches. It’s ‘Here’s what it sounds like to feel this pain. And you deal with it.’ What he’s been through personally is an incredible price to pay, and he never would have chosen it, but the result it that the guy’s got more to say than most people, because he’s been through more. And as an artist, he’s able to say it.”
Schell recalled tracking “Where Are You Tonight?”
“I was playing drums, and Bob was yelling so loud that his voice was bleeding into the drum microphones,” he said. “So finally, Steve puts him outdoors with headphones on, and he has to sing it out there while we play inside. Steve’s studio is in his house, and he lives in a residential neighborhood, in a valley where the sound really carries. You can imagine the neighbors, inside their houses, hearing Bob literally screaming those lyrics [‘I wake, I try, I talk, I lie, I wallow, I think, I move, I sink’]. And they can’t hear any music with it, because we’re all inside.”
What was inside came out, and it was loud and unruly and angry and defeated and grieving and human. For the unsuspecting neighbors, it was as clear a window into Bob Chaney’s head as anyone could have.
Chops,
Great party, but don’t even try to become a lead singer. You’ll never make it.
— Hal
p.s. Best of luck in all you do.
(as written in Le Souvenir)
Hal hasn’t yet been proven wrong. Since Zach died, Lonesome Bob has washed windows, waited tables, appeared on “Austin City Limits” with Moorer, worked for an alarm company, fallen in love and set up residence with girlfriend Marie Arsenault, answered phone calls for an automobile finance operation, opened an amphitheater show for Dwight Yoakam, turned 46, and worked for a long distance company. As a result of the Blue Planet demos, he also secured a record deal with Fredro Perry’s upstart Leap Recordings, which has just released Things Change.
Produced by Lonesome Bob and Steve Allen, the album starts with the rock ‘n’ howl of “Got Away With It”, then downshifts into honky-tonk (“Heather’s All Bummed Out”, “I Get Smarter Every Drink”), country-soul (“In The Time I Have Left”), and even harrowing, slowpoke bluegrass (“Dying Breed”, written by Moorer and Butch Primm).
