Darkness floods a space just as light does. This was a thought entertained the other night while riding in the back seat of Gillian Welch’s Cadillac Escalade. Welch and David Rawlings, her partner in the modernist two-piece band Gillian Welch, were driving up I-95 to New York from Philadelphia. It was one o’clock. For a while, theirs was the only car on the highway. Tall and slim and standing beside each other like figures on a wedding cake, they had played a few hours earlier for a thousand people at a club in Philadelphia. A day later, they would play a sold-out show at the Beacon Theatre.
In Philadelphia, Rawlings set up an old portable turntable in their dressing room. On tour, he likes to look for old records in stores that still sell vinyl. “Most towns have a store, and some have two,” he said. While he searches through the stacks, Welch walks around looking at buildings. “I don’t have the patience for going through the bins that he does,” she says. “He’s fine for, like, two hours doing that. It hardly matters, because our tastes are identical. All that happens when I get back from walking around is he’ll have his pile, and he’ll drop the needle for ten seconds on a track, and we’ll decide.”
The first record Rawlings played was Hank Snow’s “When Tragedy Struck.” “I just got this in Kent, Ohio,” he said. He had about thirty records altogether, including Ray Charles’s “Genius + Soul = Jazz,” Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Blues in My Bottle.” “It’s very difficult to find old blues,” he said. “They’re very expensive. There weren’t that many made, and most are in the hands of collectors.” Later, he played “Thelonious Himself,” a solo record by Thelonious Monk. “It’s a little warbly,” he said apologetically. “It’s a little bit warped.”
Meanwhile, Welch sat on a sofa and signed posters for their merchandise table. “Dave did all his the other day,” she said. “He was on a roll.”
The other thing that Rawlings had brought to divert himself was a collected works of Shakespeare. “I’ve been reading the histories,” he said. “I’m up to the third act of ‘Henry V,’ and when I’m done I might even start them again. I like how fatalistic they are. They feel a little like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I like it in the Iliad when Homer introduces a warrior and says who he was and where he grew up and who his parents and his grandparents were and what they did, and then Hector disembowels him. Then you get another guy.”
After their performance, Welch and Rawlings changed out of their show clothes, and Welch packed her suitcase on the floor, bending over it to close the zipper. They left Philadelphia a little after midnight, and by one-thirty they were going twenty-six miles an hour among a caravan of trucks, at the head of which was a police car. Welch was driving, and she said, “We got drama.”
“We have a walkie-talkie,” Rawlings said, reaching behind his seat. “It’s just a CB radio, but if any of those truckers are talking we can hear it.” None were, it turned out. Soon the Escalade was stationary behind a truck that had a metal plate on its back door that said “Great Dane,” a trademark. The disruption lasted about ten minutes and was caused by construction workers who were moving a huge piece of steel across the highway. By two-thirty, passing some gas-storage tanks that had “Citgo” written on them, they could see parts of the Manhattan skyline on the horizon. Street lights on either side of the highway wheeled past like crop rows.
A little after three, they arrived at the building on West End Avenue where friends were lending them an apartment, and, as if in a movie about how great life is in Manhattan, there was a single parking space out front. Having taken their bags and guitars upstairs, Rawlings returned to the car to make sure nothing had been left behind. He said that he is also deeply interested in taking photographs. “The light of the city is so beautiful,” he said. “People always look so good in New York. It’s the light bouncing off all the surfaces, and coming from so many sources. If I ever moved to New York, the temptation that drew me here would be the light to take photographs in.” Then he went inside and rode the elevator up and went to sleep. ♦
