Page 26 - the NOISE March 2014

WHERE ANGELS WITHOUT WINGS
find a home to sing their song
STORY & PHOTO BY
SARAH GIANELLI
Jim Youell is dozing in the sunshine when I meet him at his post on the town steps, a mini amphitheater of sorts, on a typical, bustling Sunday afternoon in Jerome. A six pack of
Busch cans, half empty (and to which I add another four), are lined up beside him, and his guitar leans lazily nearby, while he takes in the music of the streets around him.
Giving him a start, Mr. Youell rouses and busts open with the raucous, guttural laugh that will echo throughout town, and the minds of those who knew him, long after he’s gone.
As if the 69-year-old’s laugh isn’t distinctive enough, Mr. Youell is further distinguished by the moniker “Black Jim,” a humorous testament to the size, diversity and comfort with the nonpolitically correct in this little town. He can be found here more days than not (at one point, homeless after a break up, he even lived here), making noise of some kind, though he says the steps are for drinking, not for playing.
“I’ll sit here in my office, get a little drunk, and people get to see me. When I’m not here, they get to worrying and come looking for me ... ‘Where’s Jim? He hasn’t been on the steps in a while ... is he okay?’”
He does have a home, though it would be a stretch for most people to call it a house. It’s a small shed with gaps in the slats wide enough to see through. The interior is crammed with dust-laden computer monitors and keyboards, tools, a wet vac, sound equipment, clothes, shoes; and a tangled nest of electric blankets to keep him warm in the middle.
The second most likely place to see Mr. Youell is on his corner — or curve — thumb stuck out for only a moment or two before
someone gives him a lift down to the minimart or up to town. As with many people who have lived long, meandering
lives, and seen unfathomable things; Mr. Youell’s recollec- tions don’t necessarily follow a linear timeline. However, true for many men of his generation, and perhaps even more so for Mr. Youell, the war figures prominently.
Mr. Youell grew up an army brat. When he was two months old his mother took him by steamer to join his father — a non- commissioned sergeant in the army — in Europe, first Germa- ny, where although WWII was officially over, hadn’t petered out entirely, and then France. He didn’t return to the United States until he was 10 years old. His family settled briefly in Seattle (they would move every two to three years to count- less locales throughout the country) where he says his first American friend and neighbor was Jimi Hendrix. “Jimi’d come over with a ukulele strung backwards, and I had an old Stella bad wood guitar from Sears & Roebuck that my dad had got me and we’d jam together,” says Mr. Youell. “I lost touch with Jimi when he did the Isle of Wight gig in Hawaii ... then he went to England and died.”
Knowing this, and listening to Mr. Youell play, one can’t help but hear flickers of Hendrix in Mr. Youell’s sound and style, as if a shard of the musical genius’ light leapt across and lodged itself in Mr. Youell’s boyhood soul.
Mr. Youell reaches for his guitar, crosses his impossibly long legs (I am always amazed when he manages to fold them into
the front seat of my tiny Volkswagon), and plays a western called Dead Cowboy Song, a hard-strumming rock and roll bal- lad about finding appreciation for the simple things — the feel of sunshine on his skin — in the most dire of circum- stances.
All of his songs are original, but he doesn’t exactly make them up either. “I was out in the desert on a horse with no name, quite literally,” he says. “I fell asleep on the horse, and it kept going. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. You know why I woke up? The horse stopped. You know why the horse stopped? He stepped in a hole and broke his leg. It wasn’t my horse. It wasn’t my saddle. I had to pay for a dead horse and a saddle I had to leave out in the desert. I should’ve died out there too, but I didn’t.”
Mr. Youell was propped up against a rock, his lips cracked from thirst, vultures circling overhead, just waiting to die, when out of nowhere came a“white boy”on an ATV.“He takes off his helmet, looks at me and says ‘you okay?’ And I swear to God I almost died laughing! Do I look like I’m okay?!” he roars.
The next song I request, having heard it before and re- membered to be quite beautiful. First he dons a flat-topped Russian military hat which evokes a blast of fluent Russian — something he picked up while special ops in the military.
“This is a song about how I really feel about people,” he says, striking the first chords of Angels. Well I woke up one morning, went to the kitchen to make me some brew, opened up the refrig- erator, found a beer there, grabbed it to drink it too. And from the kitchen window, came a bright rosy glow, faces of peace and hap- piness, someone I just didn’t know. I said ‘Hey! What are you doing here, what do you got to say?’ They said not a word to me, they just chased all my fears away. You asked me if I believe in angels, well I guess that I do. I’ve seen so many angels in me and you ...
“The war actually taught me to love people more than any- thing,” says Mr. Youell. “When I was in the very serious busi- ness of killing people, it never settled with me. You’re not sup- posed to kill your brother; I don’t care what the situation is. I was morally unfit to fight that war. And it hurt me — emotion- ally, physically and spiritually.”
Although he and his father both knew he wasn’t cut out for combat, Mr. Youell signed up for Vietnam anyway. As he puts it, he thought his daddy was God and, like most sons, wanted to make him proud. As a special services officer, Mr. Youell began playing music again, taking advantage of access to a musical instrument library funded to support soldier morale. By the time he discovered his niche, it was too late to get reas- signed and avoid going to Vietnam.
“Any amount of time there is too long,” he says, when asked how long he was stationed there. “It was horrible. When the door opened from the C130 that we came in on, the smell that came in was like a pig farm, a really big one. We were just outside of Saigon, and it was just full of people ... so much humanity all smashed together like that, it gets pretty stinky. I found out what it was like to kill my brother, and to have a brother who wanted to kill me, for reasons I didn’t understand,
for people I didn’t even know. How’s that for life changing?” After the war, his first marriage having fallen apart while overseas (he came home to a “Dear Jim” letter), Mr. Youell landed at Fort Huachuca in Cochise County, Arizona, and fell in love with the desert. In the early ‘70s, when his time in the service was up, he relocated to Tempe, where he spent many nights sleeping in the dry river bottom before moving in with
Anne Bassett and John Livingston, now well-known long- time Verde Valley residents.
Together they would be part of the pioneering hippies that re- founded Jerome and revitalized it into the eccentric artist com- munity it is today. Mr. Youell had lined up a construction job in Flagstaff, and Ms. Bassett told him to drive through Jerome. He never made it to the job. “Two years later I was still here,” he says.
In his life, Mr. Youell has been a cowboy, a soldier, a fish- erman; a mountain climber, hang glider, and flown airplanes and helicopters. “I also killed my brother,” he says. He’s sal- vaged old barn wood, mined precious stones and minerals, taught lapidary and silversmithing, and still carves pipe- stone and beads into sculptures and jewelry. As a musician, he’s traveled around the country as a family band (with his second wife and musically talented children), been a regular performer at the Spirit Room, and his band “Jimmy” was the house band at the Grand Hotel for a number of years.
When asked where the inspiration for his songs comes from, typical of his tendency to answer obliquely, “Sweetie,” he says, “it’s all in your mind. Everything you think, everything you think is real; everything you don’t think is real. Everything you believe; everything you don’t believe. If you believe it, you will act in kind. You put your experiences together — you write about it; you sing about it; you express it in some way. That’s all it is, a form of expression.”
A few more beers in, teetering on the tipping point where illuminating wisdom devolves into overzealous rant, he con- tinues.“Not everybody’s belief system is in sync with concrete reality,” he says. “If you dive off these steps headfirst you’re going to get hurt. We all walk around in reality bubbles; and they’re not necessarily in line with what’s really going on; not even in your own life. It doesn’t mean if you believe it, you’ve got it right. It just means that’s what you believe now. If it isn’t real, concrete reality is going to intrude and go sour on you. For instance, when you get a blowout the car stops. Sometimes you’re going so fast you crash into something — whether it’s your heart, your spirit, or a tree. But you crash. Sometimes you even burn a little bit. I diligently pursue get- ting my reality bubble in sync with concrete reality.
“I may be in this world but I don’t always feel of it,” he adds. “I stand off a little bit. Maybe my European experience had a lot to do with that ... you never know what to expect so don’t
make up stories about it. Wait and see what happens.”
| Sarah Gianelli’s bubble includes fine dining Saturday nights. sarahgianelli@hotmail.com
26 • MARCH 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us