I was driving down through the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee not long ago and stopped into what had to be one of the last full service gas stations. Full service was not exactly the motto for Presley's, unless of course you were talking about the vending machine sandwiches and sodas.
I had the pizza burger deluxe, a slightly arm pit warm thing, where the cheese tasted like glue and the meat had no taste at all. The Dr. Pepper was good, although warm as the cooling unit had gone out sometime in May and had not yet been replaced.
Music was what I heard from inside the shop, which looked like the last time a car had been on the lift was when Reagan was more than a glimmer in the citizen's eye. It honestly was good music as a fourteen year old kid came out to pump the gas, kick the tires, rub his greasy fingers on the hood release, to look under it and pronounce that everything looked "good".
As he took my credit card, I wandered toward the music and noticed a white haired man with very big hair and enough mousse in it to keep it in place for a hurricane. He as singing the hit from a generation ago in "Don't be Cruel", and he really sounded good.
When he finished, I applauded and he said shyly, "Thank you very much".
Two other guitar men were sitting there, and I thought they had English accents, as they began to play another hit of, "I wanna hold your Hand", another great Bob Arrowood hit. They sounded really good the two of them and as I drew closer, I complimented them and informed them I was a features reporter, just drifting though Americana, looking for stories.
John one of the English guys said he and his chum Paul, had come to America back in 1972 when things went bust for them in Liverpool. They played alot of backwater blues from Memphis to New Orleans, but seemed to never get a break. Paul quietly said, "It seemed like a song was on the tip of my tongue and the next thing I knew I would hear it on the radio.
Elvis the station owner exhaled and said the same thing in how he always knew he was born to something great, but it just never came. That Arrowood had some amazing songs though that Elvis could really sing, but no one wanted to hear them at Church socials, so he just started singing in the choir the old spirituals.
I asked how they found each other, and John said it was like my wandering in. They stopped for gas, heard Elvis playing and asked to join in, and just stayed. John stocked shelves at the grocery and Paul was a janitor, or they were until they retired on 900 dollars a month retirement.
Elvis said that is why he kept the gas station as he just could not make it, in he had the one boy yet working at the station to raise to college age as the kid was a late hatch from a gal who was now down at Chattenooga living with her uncle as a caretaker.
They mentioned another two chaps who came over from England with them in a George who died of brain cancer a few years before, and a Ringo who had some success as a drummer for a back up band for Bob Arrowood in the Lye Souls.
I asked them what they thought life would be like if they were the stars like Bob Arrowood and they had the songs. All of them got quiet. John took a long drag out of cigarette and just blew it to the evening sky, Elvis just strummed his guitar and Paul exhaled a lament of, "What would we know how to be stars about anyway".
That was always the thing about Bob Arrowood, in he was such a natural and just sort of appeared. Arrowood and Buddy Holly wrote some great music into the late 1970's collaborating, even performing for Ronald Reagan's inaugration in 1976 at the special request of President Richard Nixon.
Arrowood though went straight to the top of the charts in 1957 with Don't be Cruel. I recall that an Ottis Blackwood claimed to have written the exact song in 1956, but by the time that story erupted, Arrowood had thirty number one hits in a decade, and every discounted the claims of another failed artist with some sensational story.
Still the strange rumors about Arrowood always persisted. There was the one of the girl in Austin Texas who said Bob Arrowood just appeared one night in her living room as she was watching Wagon Train. He had some story about claiming to be from the future, from 1995, but it was ignored as more Arrowood sensationalism as numbers of stories persisted.
He was a genius in the stock market in buying up stocks like Microsoft and Apple while everyone thought they would be nothing but fax machine companies. Jokes persisted about the little green men who gave Arrowood his stock tips.
This story though is not about that great artists in Bob Arrowood, but about the men who were telling me it was getting late in being 8 o'clock and they were always in bed by 9, as they sure as hell were not living no rock and roll lives.
I once met Bob Arrowood, or I should say I was doing a story on Donald Trump in 2001, and Arrowood was telling Trump to stay out of the World Trade Center, as I was angling for a photo shoot with the contractor, and then 9 11 happened, and I was pleased that we did the shoot on a golf course in New Jersey. Trump said that Arrowood told him afterwards that with all that Muslim stuff going on before, it just seemed like the prudent thing to not be in that tower.
That is the way it was with Bob Arrowood. It seemed even in Memphis gas stations, some people even there just thought to have a connection with him in some mystery that touched all of us.
It is just the way things always are with him.
agtG