Track 2: Interview Questions for James Calvin Wilsey (1957-2018) by Aarik Danielsen
CW: Brief mentions of suicide, addiction
Some sorrowers, harboring candles of belief, whisper smoke as they breathe out prayers for the dead. Others slip between water molecules, cooling their conscience, committing to a baptism for the departed. Me, I sit up preparing interview questions for long-gone rock-and-rollers, the upward curves of these sentences forming my shrine.
How I long to linger in some modest Midwest diner, talking to James Calvin Wilsey about old guitars, touring with Chris Isaak, and how the best records sound like crying, our conversation cooling the steam rising from plates of eggs and pancakes and cups of coffee.
But the guitarist slipped off this vibrating earth on Christmas Eve after bouts of addiction and homelessness, dying too young from organ failure at age 61.
There’s something to be said for dying on Christmas Eve. Does the last air through your lungs still smell like pine and snow, even in L.A.?
Permit your inner stereo to conjure “Wicked Game.” Perhaps you first hear Isaak channeling gods of other ages, Elvis and Roy Orbison, as he sings, “The world was on fire / And no one could save me but you.” Or you receive a moving image of the singer and Danish model Helena Christensen on a black-and-white beach, their bodies curving like clay in the hands of a master.
Take the counter back before time begins. Soak in the first two notes, Jimmy Wilsey’s contribution to rock and roll history. He plays those first two notes like he’s laying angels down upon the head of a pin—lusty, red-blooded angels giving quarter to every desire, eternal and created.
Did you ever bend a note so far it broke?
Wilsey played on Isaak’s first four records, chased soundwaves across the country, eventually made music under his own name. But there’s a tone—a strangely divine tone—best embodied in two notes that earned Wilsey his nickname from keen listeners: The King of Slow.
What shapes could you see in the cloud fields over Albuquerque or El Paso or Butte the afternoon before a gig?
I am watching a clip of David Letterman’s show from the night of March 27, 1991. Rather, I am watching it for the twelfth or thirteenth time, taking in moments, learning to feel my way through the melody and motion of March 27, 1991. Minutes before Letterman draws Isaak over to the couch to speak of Stockton, California and crooked noses, of taking cues and phone calls from visionary filmmakers like Jonathan Demme and David Lynch, his band begins “Wicked Game.”
The King of Slow is dressed in a suit, gold and glossy like some hard-luck dreamer’s vision of the American West. On the early arpeggios, his fingers move nimble and easy, the way a man might write his name.
God, Jimmy Wilsey is writing his name.
In later measures, he angles his guitar toward the amplifier, drawing out and sealing every point of resonance.
What is it like to send the purest distillation of yourself back to yourself?
As Jimmy Wilsey bends his notes into the shapes of oblivion, he glances up at Chris Isaak, nods and smiles, as if to ask “What do you make of that?”
Winding “Wicked Game” to its close, Isaak intones his broken confession: “Nobody loves no one ... Darlin.’ ” Then he smiles like a matinee idol, swivels and slaps each member of his band five, Wilsey first.
When you lift your eyes from your guitar like you did there—are you looking for approval? Or do you look up because you’re already basking in the feeling of being approved?
Now I am watching every live video of “Wicked Game” the Internet can summon. Anything mid-’90s on features another guitarist. A very skilled guitarist. One whose name I won’t chance sullying by spelling it out for you like a comparison. But they are eulogizing Jimmy Wilsey in the YouTube comments, even here; they are holding a perpetual wake for The King of Slow.
Do the comments show up all the way from heaven? Does somebody flicker the lights every time your name is mentioned?
Possible follow-up: Do you and God ever talk guitar? He knows you play, right?
And I hang my head because I didn’t feel his absence till strangers told me I missed him. They told me no one else plays those two notes like Jimmy Wilsey. So I listen to more live versions and to so many sexy, blissed-out covers of “Wicked Game.” Other artists stretch the first two notes even further, recast them on keyboards or mallets, skip them and go straight to the chords; I know what truth the assembly speaks.
When you’d hear it in the wild—pouring from a jukebox, over speakers at the grocery store—could you name that tune in just one note? Or did you need the two? Could you make it all the way to that first, fateful whisper (“This world is only gonna break your heart”) or did you head straight for the checkout?
I read digests and dispatches, some terse, some affectionate. A few crumple up the decades of Jimmy Wilsey’s life; others expand the years till each last minute stings. These passages make and break myths, let Wilsey speak his own words and say what he couldn’t say for himself. I read of Wilsey the artist and the addict, the Midwest kid and the devoted father, the man burdened and hopeful. I read of Jimmy Wilsey, just like me.
I am no biographer like Michael Goldberg, whose work faithfully fills in gaps around Wilsey; rather, a curious observer with questions living in the record’s grooves, burning through the space separating even two notes.
I want to ask questions of rock’s other lost souls; not the megawatt stars necessarily—the collapsing ones. Questions for Doug Hopkins, the Gin Blossoms guitarist who died at 32 of suicide; for Kristen Pfaff, the Hole bassist lost to an overdose at 27; for Mark Lanegan, the toughest of all the bards, who left us at 57. Once I swore I saw late Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon pass me on a bicycle, and the questions rose up in my chest.
Often our questions cut just one way. The living shake songs like puzzle boxes and pick at threads in Kurt Cobain’s cardigan, hoping what’s left will give up an answer to the real and endless query. Could we have seen this coming?
But with every question, at least three more crystallize and turn to interview me. A few resolve themselves almost immediately: No, I am no more interested in death than any fellow traveler. No, I cannot divine the meaning of loss through the music of a life.
Eventually, they force the issue: Am I only serving myself?
See, I have never lined up in a shadow like Chris Isaak’s or played notes of light into the atmosphere, accenting every surrounding star. I know nothing of per diem or the worn-out treads of tours and tires, though I have looked up to watch the clouds traveling above Albuquerque and my own head.
But I know the vice grips of anxiety and failure. I know what it is to hear ice splinter, then crack inside your mind, your heart. And I know what it’s like to lay your head down upon the pillow, feel yourself slipping away, and not care if you slide right off this humming planet.
I cannot muster certainty enough to tell you Jimmy Wilsey—or any other gone soul—knew these sensations. But I have my suspicions, and I want to trace the strings between us and hold up the strings which fall short. Reading someone else’s sheet music isn’t for the sake of resolving their ends but anticipating, perhaps even staving off, my own.
I want to believe I will be remembered: for this sentence and the one that’s coming. More accurately, I want to believe I will not be forgotten. That I am not, this very evening, writing just to warm the void. If someone remembers Jimmy Wilsey for two notes and if Doug Hopkins stays alive through “Hey Jealousy” and if somebody else like me reads Mark Lanegan’s rough and gorgeous memoir, perhaps I will remain.
Were two notes ever enough for you? Will they ever be enough for me?
But Jimmy Wilsey owes me no reassurance. The dead owe me no future or legacy.
Often we take up our prayers and our immersion for ourselves, to soothe aches like the ones trembling me. But at their best, our rites do the work of mindful questions: piercing the sacred, in-between places, groping for more than what we now hear or see.
So I turn toward the amplifier, asking my questions so they might be refined. Notes linger, ring long with revelation: the truest questions actually seek no certain answers. They exist to serve something still human in the living and the dead, as much as this world tries to steal the fire from us both.
A good question serves the one we miss, not just stoking their memory but allowing their work to keep working. To ask something of Jimmy Wilsey means tuning to his sound and hearing echoes in the lives reverberating around me.
This attempt at communion might serve something purer in me, growing curiosity about the songs I have not played, the clothes I have not worn, the lives I have not lived. Only the curious will ever see the seams of what we have in common.
And the conversation serves anyone within range of hearing. Imagining the constellations of possible answers, we try answering for ourselves. Questions become answers become further questions and we observe the greater texture of things, in which every molecule collides to connect.
In his book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life.”
I trust Abdurraqib (his name no doubt would make up the answer if we asked the late James Baldwin Who, sir, is your son?). And I think I agree—how could you not? How could you sit straight-faced and argue for the art and the tragedy over the persistence of the breath and the blood?
I already told you: I want to sit across from Jimmy Wilsey and the eggs and the cups of coffee, to hear his voice laugh and break, lowering itself as human instruments do. I wish he was here, anywhere.
I also know two notes are more than most people give the world, and I will not damn the miracle. We may begin tortured and end tortured, but every tone we play matters, as do the rests between.
In spite of everything, I want to step into the knowing, to put skin on the souls that once swelled with the music that made me. I shake Jimmy Wilsey’s hand still and ask what it’s like to be The King of Slow.
Any coming revelation, any sense of the man, is not owed, but offered—a rebuke to whatever takes people away, whatever keeps us guessing about the contents of a life. A gentle means to recover, to build upon what music and memories we have. In this work, all our questions bleed into one another:
Would you stay up and talk with me awhile—just as long as you have? Maybe play a little music while we’re both here?
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes a regular column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Find more of his work at https://aarikdanielsen.com/
