Despite his earlier determination
to stay awake until his show, Ellis Paul succumbs to two hours of dreamless sleep at the
Holiday Inn in Kingston before a shrill 7 am wakeup call rousts him out of bed and back
into the car.
It's mornings like these that make
Paul long for the financial stability that could keep him off the road for more than a few
weeks at a time. He wants to take a month off this summer, sit at home and write songs.
He wants to cut his touring
schedule back to 100 gigs a year.
"That way I could actually
have a home life," he explains.
With luck, the release of Me,
Myself, & Irene and its soundtrack will be the next step on Paul's long trek to
that life.
"It's one of these little
nugget breaks that you hope for as a musician," he says. "It's like a carrot -
it keeps you going. It's like, 'Oh, I'm not working for nothing, I'm actually doing
something that people are recognizing.'
"I don't want to be Emily
Dickinson and die with a bunch of poems that never get seen by anybody until after I'm
gone," Paul adds, as the West Strand Grill slides into view.
Inside, folk musician Mindy Jostyn
is already performing, the first in the three-set "Acoustic Breakfast" program
that includes Paul and Jules Shear, broadcast live on Radio Woodstock. Except for a
handful of gregarious children, the 50 or so people in the place are all heavy-lidded; the
effort it's taken to get out of bed on this chilly Saturday morning is testament to the
unrivaled devotion of the folk fan.
Paul camps out with his guitars on
a sofa in a corner of the drafty room, wearing the same rumpled blue shirt from last
night's show. He does not expect to sing well today. He doesn't think he'll be able to
find his voice.
But, somehow, he does - though
after the performance, as Paul mingles with with his audience, sipping coffee, he is his
toughest critic. "It was a struggle to hit every note," he says.
It is not yet noon, and already
Paul and Jaccodine are back on the road, this time headed east, towards home. It is still
raining, but despite Paul's frequent threats to relocate to meteorologically superior
California, at this moment he wants nothing more than to make his way to his bed in
Medford.
The musician and his manager take
turns sleeping and driving. This kind of traveling companionship is a rare luxury for
Paul, who's grown used to the solitary life of a touring musician.
"When I was going through
that period when my marriage was breaking up, there were two or three years where my heart
wasn't into touring, and I was just trying to keep things going," he remembers.
"Now I'm enjoying it and my attitude's in the right place, and I've spent the last
year and a half playing with a lot of passion, and it's stirred things up again."
He won't soon forget the years of
work it's taken him to get to this place, or what he's given up along the way. "You
have to have been where you were in order to get where you are," says Paul, as his
car winds its way toward Boston, towards home. "And here I am."
finis
