Guitar Highway (Under construction)
Leon Fullerton wrote this preface to his unfinished memoir, A Fretful Life: "Guitar Highway ain't on no map. It's got no start, no end, no middle. There's no rest stops, no speed limits, no exits, no scenic overlooks, no soft shoulders. The phone wires are its strings, the signs are its lyrics, the traffic is its tune, and every side road is a song that wants to get sung. The bridges are all washed out, and the detours all take you right back where you started: somewhere, going nowhere, with songs in your heart and holes in your shoes. The toll is your soul, the gasoline is your blood, and that racket under the hood is your heart fixing to throw a rod. There's no directions, no compass, no friendly traffic cop pointing where you want to go. It's no shortcut to Happy Valley, but it's the best way I ever heard of to scratch your name in the book of life. Hell, if I even rate a footnote, I'll die fulfilled."
Songs on this page:
Songs on this page:
- Guitar Highway
- Rolling Out of Baltimore
- That's What Friends Are For
- Texas Twelve-step
- Foreclosure
- Dodger's Blues
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1. Guitar Highway
copyright Leon Fullerton [Fresh audio track coming soon.]
All I ever cared about was playing on my guitar, but Daddy always said, "You'll never be no star. Lift that barge, boy, tote that bale. Get out of line, you know you're bound to fail. Look homeward, angel, down the Guitar Highway, from Fullerton to Nazareth to Kalamazoo, thumb-pick the wind down a broke-down byway, the heart of the world is a steel-string sound, the rock of my soul, lay it down and play it all around. All I ever tried to find was one fine rhyme, but Mama always said, "Don't you waste your time. Tin Pan Alley leaves you nothing to choose. You'll never make a dime on the heart-broke blues." Look homeward, angel.... One more last-call barrelhouse boogaloo, been playing since dark, been raving since two. You got another minute? I got another song. Wouldn't run out playing all night long. Look homeward, angel.... Play it all around. Play it all around. Play it all around. Play it all around. |
Fullerton called this his love song to the six-string love of his life and dedicated it to the three corners of what he called the guitar's Golden Triangle, the birthplaces of Fender, Martin, and Gibson guitars.
Asked by a young John Mayer why he didn't include the birthplaces of Paul Reed Smith or Taylor guitars, Fullerton said, "Who?" 
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2. That's What Friends Are For
copyright Leon Fullerton [Fresh audio track coming soon.]
I found her down at the county jail, she tried to tell me she was doing just fine. I shouted, "Hey jailer, what's her bail?" She said her bidness wasn't none of me. She said, "I'm too low-down to fear a fall, so, hon, if you don't mine, I'd rather keep these bars in front of me and leave the past behind." I heard she smacked her Pontiac, went running to the scene. There was extensive damage to her chasis, and I feared what that might mean. The jaws of life could've swallowed her, so I threw myself between. She said, "Hon, go back where you belong, you know, I'm tougher than I seem." I said, "That's what friends are for, that's what friends are for." She said, "I don't need you anymore, I don't need you anymore." I taught her everything I knew and things that I did not, but though I gave her nothing, that was more than I ever got. She thanked me for the memories, but of what, she would not tell, like a motel angel Christmas eve with nothing left to sell. I said, "That's what friends are for...." |
We can find no information on this one anywhere. It appears on the B-side of the “Doublewide!” single and probably dates to Fullerton’s late seventies Idaho Airstream period, of which we know almost nothing. Photos of his metallic trailer (emblazoned in artful scroll-work with the unhelpful words “Great Silver Twinkie of the Deep Abyss”) include two with a Pontiac Firebird with bird-tattooed hood parked nearby. (The pictures are in his daughter's possession, and she promises we can use them when she finds them.)
Fullerton had little tolerance for Pontiacs in general and Firebirds in particular. Whoever held title to the Pontiac, we speculate that this was a short-lived union. |
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3. Rolling Out of Baltimore
copyright Leon Fullerton [Fresh audio track coming soon.]
Mama got a lover, Papa got a gun, Mama took a flyer down the main line run. Rolling out of Baltimore, glad I saw her go. Wrote us once from Reno, never wrote no more. Brother got a V-8, Sister got a beau, Papa got a summons, but he never did show. Rolling out of Baltimore, glad I saw him go. Wrote us once from Cuernavaca, never wrote no more. Grandma got pneumonia, Grandpa got a lump, my buddy got ambition at the high-test pump. Rolling out of Baltimore, glad I saw him go. Wrote me once from Daytona, never wrote no more. My baby got deported, my boss got paroled, my aunt got rented, my uncle got rolled. Rolling out of Baltimore, they never saw me go. I'll write 'em once from New York City, never write no more. |
A paean to the dissolution of the American family.
Fullerton met young Declan Spliff on a train to New York in the winter of ‘77. Spliff was the type whom Fullerton considered ready to shake life by its folicles. Between Trenton and Penn Station, Splif told Fullerton his whole short but eventful life story. It was a finished song by the time Fullerton went on stage at the Village Vanguard that night and is included in his only in-concert album, Neon Leon: Live and Lovin' It at the Vanguard. Live versionRecorded at Riverside Park, Westbrook, Maine, July 2016.
Featuring: Bob Barton, Charlie Bernstein, Paul Hunt, Jim Katsiaficas, Sue Silvestri, and Waterford Slim |
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4. Texas Twelve-step
copyright Leon Fullerton [Fresh audio track coming soon.]
You got a mule between your legs, you got a monkey on your back, you busted out of Camarillo, and you’re damned if you’ll go back. Get down, daddy, tell you what you’re gonna do: You do the Texas Twelve-step, that life is bound to be the death of you. You go to bed stone-sober, you wake up crazy drunk, you’re desperate for some shut-eye, but your woman burned your bunk. Get up, daddy, tell you what you’re gonna do: You do the Texas Twelve-step, that wife is bound to be the death of you. You got a Buntline in your belt, you got a Bowie in your boot, you got a beef that needs relieving, but you don't know who to shoot. Get back, daddy, tell you what you’re gonna do: You do the Texas Twelve-step, that knife is bound to be be the death of you. You got a mule between your legs.... You do the Texas Twelve-step, that life is bound to be the death of you. You do the Texas Twelve-step, that life is bound to be the death of you. |
The state mental hospital in Camarillo, California, is vast because most residents of the great state would be fit candidates for tenancy. Fortunately for the state budget, it's more discriminating than that, leaning more toward accommodating the luckless than the witless, teeming with people who have done nothing crazier than get caught out of control with a controlled substance or get captured in the depths of a payday drunk.
Fullerton qualified. Drunk was his clinical condition when he was arrested on upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco, in 1971 and remanded to Camarillo a few days later for observation. The rooms were adequate, but he found the food absent of nutritional or gustatory merit and the substance abuse program devoid of entertainment value. More disappointingly, the “a few days” that might have been a refreshingly uneventful respite was stretching into a few weeks and then some, with no end seemingly retreating faster than he was approaching it. Unable to check himself out via customary channels, he found it convenient to impersonate a groundskeeper and escape with a rake and wheelbarrow appropriated for purposes of verisimilitude. |
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5. Foreclosure
copyright Leon Fullerton [Fresh audio track coming soon.]
Mary, blow the candle out, it does no good to stay waiting by the window for a sign to come our way. We staked our one good chance upon a tractor and a loan, we might have planted bolders, for all the good in what we've sown. No breeze stirs the curtain tonight, no cloud blots out a star. We hocked your ma's Victrola, killed my daddy's car. Time has all but run out on a hundred bills past due. Now all you've got is a broken heart, and all I've got is you. Fate's the thing that crushes you when it falls back from the sky and makes you wish with all your soul you'd never made it fly. Come back to bed now, Mary to your only man, tomorrow we will rise again, do what we can. |
Fullerton was in a Bay Area jug band for a few years in the sixties, the Telegraph Avenue Tub Thumpers. A Mary Mayfield played the saw and concertina and sang soprano. She’d been married to a farmer in Kansas for a while, until they lost the farm and her husband went to prison for enlightening a banker with an axe handle.
Fullerton didn’t deem that sufficient grounds for divorce. According to Dwight K. Martin, the band leader, Fullerton told Mayfield, “Can’t see the crime in flying off the handle if what’s doing the flying is a crooked banker’s teeth.” 
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6. Dodger's Blues
copyright Leon Fullerton Cool Hand Luke never made a plan.
I made just one: Go west, young man. When you're dodging the draft and fleeing the breeze, to fit your life in a duffle, that's a might tight squeeze. Turned up my collar to the early snows. My first ride took me clear across the Poconos. The tenth ride took me through the Cumberland Gap with a song in my heart and a Baptist on my lap. A woody full of hippies swung me north across the Ohio. It makes no sense to hurry, no one cares where you thought you oughta go. When you've made it past Ohio and Indiana, too, you know that any place in the world but Fort Wayne will do. Corn stalk stubble stretched far as I could see. The wind chilled Nebraska, and it surely chilled me. Spent my last dollar in a diner down 66 South. I can't speak very highly of living hand-to-mouth. I saw an old western once, and I swore someday I'd join a wild west show, got me teeth reconfigured outside a rodeo. It'll take my whole life to forget the Alamo. If Texas is heaven, Christ, I'd rather not go. Midnight transit 'cross the Great Divide with a speedfreak in a Fairlane with a jug of Gallo snuggled by his side. Crossed a flight of Angels when I reached the Pacific Palisades. They opened with clubs and I paid in spades. The radios were dreamin' Californ-eye-yay and never had to wake up to the dark of day. Things never pan out the way that you planned the day you started on the road to the Promised Land. |
Sometime around '69 or '70, Fullerton met a draft dodger in an Oakland saloon, bought him drinks, and got his story. In his unfinished, unpublished memoir A Fretful Life, Fullerton wrote:
Fullerton met him again in the eighties at an upscale North Beach pizzaria. A few chapters later in Fretful, he wrote:
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"Zing went the strings of my heart." The Platters