James Apollo - Interview

"My legs are half titanium now"

October 9, 2008, 09:19 PM

He's had to cancel twice, and I'm starting to fear he'll do so again when I get the call. It's him. Right on time. His voice is deep, mellifluous and obviously hungover. We can't meet at his apartment, he tells me apologetically, there is simply no room. He's building himself a "jalapeno" bass, he says—"half the size of a regular upright, but with twice the kick"—and tools and sawdust cover the floors.

We agree to meet at the corner coffee shop. Moments later he appears, six feet tall and grass-reed slim. As we sit, I can't help but notice that his boots are completely caked in mud. "I'm just off the mountain," he says by way of explanation. Oh. I look at my watch. It's just past 9 a.m.

"So James, where should we start?"

"Well, I was born in Libertyville, Arkansas..."

Startled, I begin to object, but think better of it.

"And Libertyville...well. It didn't have much then. I was just there, actually, and it doesn't have much now, either: there's a post office, a bar and a gas station. I'd spend my days wandering about, daydreaming about taking the highway out of town. Not sure what I thought I'd find. I guess I wanted to see where the sun went after it vanished somewhere over Texas. When I was 16, I decided enough was enough. I gathered a few musician roustabouts and we hit out West."

"What did you do for money?"

"I'd scrounge for food. I'd scheme. I'd pine. I'd survive. I'd write songs. Rainstorms in the desert? Well, find yourself a drainpipe. Snowstorms in Oklahoma? Get yourself a coat.

"It was a good time overall. I'd play music with the folks I'd meet along the way, work a little, and when I got sick of the scene, I'd pick up and move farther west. Eventually, I made it to San Francisco, and then the land ran out. SF is a beguiling mistress, and I fell for her hard. The problem was, I had no money for rent. That's how I ended up on the boat."

"The boat?" I ask.

"Well, it was tiny, mind you. Came from somewhere in the ’60's, not a boat so much as a floating trailer with a mahogany hull. I loved the dark side of San Francisco, and man, there's nothing darker than being alone on the water in the middle of a gale, with the rain beating down on the roof. The guitar and I spent some miserable, lonely nights in that boat. I eventually settled into the scene, and even scraped together enough money to sit myself in front of a microphone and crank out a record. Everything live, in two or three takes, in and out in a day. That album is probably still out there somewhere, though I haven't seen it in years."

Apollo has never stayed long in one place so it's not surprising that after a couple of years, he concluded that "life on a boat was a sinking ship." He made his way back across the country and settled in Minneapolis, "in a big house with some pals on the bluffs along the Upper Mississippi." He started performing in earnest and soon caught the attention of NoAlternative Records, which released his next two albums, SWEET UNKNOWN and GOOD GRIEF.

"One day an old pal rang up and asked me if I wanted to play a show in Iceland. 'Iceland?' I said. Well. Why not? I've toured through, worked in, or been driven out of 48 of the 50 states. It was time to get out, go abroad, see how other folks live. Iceland led to England, and England led to Italy, which led to Austria, which led to the rest of Europe. My luck ran out in Amsterdam. The band and I were dead broke, and at each other's throats. So what's a guy to do? I picked up a couple of bottles and headed for the train station. It turned out to be the wrong move, as I was thrown out just one bottle into my night. When I ran into the rest of the band on the street, one guy claimed that his passport had been stolen. We shared that last bottle of whiskey, became friends again and ended up sleeping under a bridge that night. The night before we had played two encores in Vienna."

He shrugs.

"It was time to come back home. I hadn't seen my surfboard or my pals in over two years, my things were all covered with dust. So I flew back to New York, cleaned up, got a job, bought a motorcycle and taught myself how to ride it. That was my first mistake. I had thought the motorcycle would cure my wanderlust—that was number two. It wasn't long before my bags were packed and my boots were ready to roll on another tour. The night before our flight, I made mistake number three: taking the bike home after rehearsal in the pouring rain. Some bastard decided to turn right into my leg and I sailed 20 feet through the air, bounced off my head, and broke both my legs."

Apollo pauses here to sip from his coffee cup. He looks up at me as if to see if I'm still here. I'm furiously scribbling in my notebook, trying for the life of me to catch up.

"My legs are half titanium now," he begins again. "I was in a cast from the waist down. When I woke up from the operation, it felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my kneecaps. Oh." And here Apollo shakes his head and begins to stir his coffee absentmindedly. "It was a haze of pain and opiates. Pain and opiates, all day, and into the night."

"Those were troubled days. The hospital was like a prison, and my legs were the wardens. I was ready to hang it up. I didn't want to play music. I just wanted to walk. I wanted to breathe. I wanted to be a regular guy. It's the only time in my life I've ever wanted to be a regular guy. They put me in rehab, where my comrades were senior citizens with broken hips. I'd never envied an 80-year-old man's spryness before; I did then.

"But bodies heal, if you're lucky. And I've been lucky. I moved from a wheelchair to crutches to a cane. I had always wanted to use a cane—come to find, it's not so cool when you actually need one.

"We're off to the UK for another tour, in November, and I'm really looking forward to it. It'll be the official release of my new album, HIDE YOUR HEART IN A HIVE, and hell, I'm happy. The album was written for a new world on an old piano that used to live in my parent's barn. Ninety degrees in the summer and zero in the winter, and it still holds quite a tune. I'm not much of a piano player; I kept it simple and just plucked out the notes one at a time. I was writing nursery rhymes. Lot of power in a nursery rhyme, isn't there? Power and beauty without all the horseshit."

And here my interview with James Apollo came to an end, as abruptly as it began. He has to remove the clamps from his jalapeno bass before the bone glue "grew teeth," he says. With a wink and a quick smile, Apollo nearly runs out the coffee shop, no worse for wear from his brush with death, it seems, and again ready to follow the highway to the end of the line.

Amanda Forero
September '08