Intermission: Archive 2014
Wade Hill, banjo picker, is a one percenter. He belongs, he’ll tell you straight and prove, to a slim stratum of society that sets its own rules, rambles and burns the fringes, exists hard but free. He abides there with bandit bikers (from whom he adapted his outlaw conviction), prostitutes, street vagrants, common criminals, carnival nomads, tattooists, wrestlers, aliens, ghosts, superheroes, and those, most like him, who live as entertainers, the old way, without safeties or a place to be Monday morning, road warriors performing the identity always. But Wade rides with no angry gang. His percent is the showman’s sliver, vibrant not violent, grateful more than grudging, though still isolated, deviant, and just out of range. Unless we are there with him, he plays while we sleep. But he loves and needs us too, and is proud of us, the civilian ninety-nine. Only now in transition, him facing archive and anthology, can we assume to join. At last he lets us in.
For over forty years, since just a smooth-faced, russet-eyed sudden teen prodigy, Wade has mastered categories and genres in order to defy them. After all the weary miles, he remains today a seized musician, poet, and memoirist, a collage and ink graphic designer, a record producer and band leader, a strange story and joke teller, a public access TV eccentric, and a self-taught self-promoter. In East Tennessee bluegrass and roots music circles, he is a legend, for good and for bad. He might be a wild man, burnt out or baked — certainly unusual and odd, some (most) might say. For sure he battled substance abuse and corporeal indulgence, and such temptations strike back at times with that scolding urge. But no shame: sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, all the way. That’s part of it, he’s quick to assert. He’s bluegrass, he’s punk, he’s hard rock, and he’s the killer Jerry Lee Lewis, his idol, strangely reinterpreted. Not that he endorses foolish abuse or danger anymore. He’ll measure the telling of those tales. He’s a Christian and always has been, though he extoled in other directions, sometimes, too. He was a devoted son until the end, despite it all. But God, there’s nothing, nothing, like being on stage with a good buzz. That right there is reality opposed.
Wade Hill, today fifty-eight, is an idiosyncratic, anxious artist, more solitary than stoned. Still he works. The project: his life as raw display. His muse: himself, and the memories that haunt him. He’s back at home now on Vestine Drive in east Knoxville, in the house where he was raised. He returned four years ago to care for his father, a retired dentist, Parkinson’s ridden. That exhausting task ended with Dr. Hill’s death in 2013. His mother, beautiful Aspacia, known as Crickett to the world, has already been gone seven years, though her every essence pervades. Sally Bales, his banjo-picking common-law wife, kicked out too in 2010. Wade is alone now, his career nearly halted. He keeps grim company in the failing old house, communing with the fifty or so Crickett-curated photo albums, the once-swank stock of upmarket furniture, the erotic busts and shag-lined floors, his model airplanes and kit-built monsters, the sprawling, spectral wardrobe of his dead mother, assorted attic critters, and an empty hospice bed — among other effects and heirlooms. He is there pouring over a hoarded museum of his life, examining and peculiarly exhibiting his four decades of music making, a project we collectors now join him on. Know, of course, that such reflection cannot satisfy the bills. The flow of electricity and water has ceased. To the common sensibility, Vestine is now dim, cold, desperate, and dry. But to Wade, such utilities are an afterthought — the critical expressive services endure invigorated.
Such change is hard for a stalled entertainer. A few outstretch the path they choose. For some, life persists as time’s wreckage. There is always that one that survives, that ghost with a quickened pulse. But the time has come for Wade to press on, transition, begin again. His — listen — has been an artist's life, fully. Wade can do this. He remembers well the first time.