Category: Non-Musical

Ask just about any musician, Americana or otherwise, why they do what they do and they’ll tell you something along the lines of: “It’s all about the fans.” Well, one of Americana’s most dedicated fans is St. Louis, Missouri’s Robert ‘Rob’ Needles, who can lay claim to the world’s largest collection of the genre’s autographs. Well-known as the Gateway to the West, most country-rockers pass through ‘The Lou’ at some point as they criss-cross these United States and somehow they all seem to cross paths with Needles. It doesn’t matter if they’re nationally famous (Waylon Jennings, Wynona Judd, Todd Snider, etc.) or merely well-known (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Shawn Colvin, Steve Earle, etc.), if they’re shadowy cult figures (Sun Kil Moon, Richard Buckner, Bill Callahan, etc.) or virtual unknowns (Conrad Albee, Riley James, The New Dylan, etc.), if they’re Americana, Rob Needles has their John Hancock.

Or should that be their Butch Hancock?

Of course, for every signature inked, you know there’s a story to tell and Rob, who has the wan pallor and nebbish look of a gamer boy turned Fuller brush salesman, is more than happy to regale an eager listener. Americana Unsung caught up with Needles recently in his East St. Louis apartment. Once on the topic, it’s like emptying a spittoon, with no stopping the many tales of autograph hunting derring-do. Like the time he followed Iris DeMent into the women’s toilet at Cicero’s to ask her to sign his bar napkin only to be greeted by the ripest honk he’d ever whiffed.

“I don’t know what the hell she’d been eatin’, but it fairly made my eyes water,” laughed Needles. “It was rank, I tell you what.”  

It was a very startled DeMent indeed who met Rob standing just outside her toilet stall, pen and paper outstretched. “You best believe I made her wash her hands before she put her mark on my napkin,” he assured us.

Or the other time he got David Lowry to sign a $20 bill he borrowed from St. Louis ‘personality’ Beatle Bob after a Cracker show at Off Broadway. “There was nothing else to write on around,” Needles explained. “So, quick as a flash, I bummed the twenty off of BB. When you’ve been in signature acquisitions as long as I have, you learn to think creatively.”

“Oh, and I never paid Bob back!” he added with a glint of mischief in his eye.

When it comes to Americana autographs, Rob always seems to land on his feet. One time, he stumbled across Lucinda Williams making out with someone in the alleyway behind St. Louis’s Old Rock House. Well, that someone turned out to be a young female Old Rock bartender Needles had been following on Facebook for her Florida vacation photos. The discovery would have stymied lesser men, but Rob is made of sterner stuff. He interrupted the pair mid-mash, got the bewildered living legend’s signature on the torn phonebook page he’d liberated from a nearby booth, and then let them get on with it. The whole process took just over 30 seconds..

“I only watched ‘em goin’ at it for another 15 or 20 or 25 minutes or so before going back home,” he reported.

One thing that Needles has learned over the years is the power of persistence. When word went around that Ken Burns had begun production on his epochal 2019 documentary mini-series Country Music, Rob figured that, as the foremost collector of Country Music autographs, Burns would wish to speak with him on the subject and “get [Burns’s] autograph while I was there.”

“I sent a few dozen emails letting Kenny know where and when I’d be available for interview,” he said. “but he must not have gotten them ’cause I never heard back.”

Despite the increasingly desperate and threatening tone of the emails, Burns was still not responding so Needles knew he’d have to up his game. “I found out he was doing a sit-down with Ketch [Secor] at the St. Louis Four Seasons,” Needles remembered. “Well, I figured I could save Kenny time and speak to him there and, not incidentally, get a two-fer-one, you know, autograph-wise. But PBS security somehow penetrated my hotel maid disguise as soon as I knocked on the hotel room door and threw me out after a pretty rough physical assault.”

The story has a happy ending however, as Rob managed to secure Ken Burns’s signature on a restraining order the elusive New York filmmaker had taken out against him.

Things don’t always go Rob’s way though.

“I was outside the Way Out Club where [American Music Club] was playing and approached Mark Eitzel after the show to memorialize a Newsweek subscription card I was carrying,” he recalled, shaking his head ruefully. “I got him to sign, but then he invited me to a nearby Stucky’s for coffee. Well, I could hardly say no, but once there, the man would not shut up.”            

Made alternately bored and depressed by Eitzel’s ceaseless flow, Needles eventually made his escape through a men’s room window when the “Johnny Mathis’ Feet” singer stepped outside for a cigarette.

While it’s true that most of his quarry comes to him, Needles will sometimes travel in order to get a rare item. He still kicks himself about the time he didn’t make a flight to catch the 2015 reunion gigs by Columbus, Ohio alt.country also-rans The Underoos to celebrate the re-release of their lone Lp St. Christopher on vinyl.

“Yeah, that was the one that got away and it still really stings,” he said sadly. “To make it worse, I heard that the original trio played a short set at some dive just north of the OSU campus. I was almost physically sick! I mean, that’s never going to happen again—I think one of them lives in Germany now or something.”

Next to his white label copy of Wilco’s A.M. signed by all 34 past and present members of the band, Needles reckons pride of place in his collection belongs the Travis County parking ticket he got signed by Pete Gaston, aka “The Gay Farmer,” from the obscure Nashville shock-folk band The Kunt and the Aids. “I was in Austin at SXSW, but had to pay a fine down to the county jail because I’d left my rental [car] in a space outside the Austin Convention Center reserved for some Spotify rep,” Needles recalled. “Hoo-boy was he mad!”

“Anyways, the Farmer was [at the jail] too for some reason, so I got him to write his name on my parking notice, but I guess I kept him talking for a while, ‘cause he raced the hell out of there like a cat on hot stove when he realized what time it was.”            

“‘Course he died not 20 minutes later in an incident out there on [Interstate] 35,” he remembered soberly. “Sure makes you think.”

Given his keen interest, you would have thought Needles would be all over Nashville’s Americanafest like a bad rash. But you’d be wrong. You see, Needles has something of the big-game hunter about him and the prospect of getting autographs at a festival entirely populated by the very people he seeks doesn’t appeal at all. “It’d be like taking a shotgun to the zoo,” he reckoned. “Where’s the sport in that?”

Interestingly, for someone so obsessed with Americana, Rob doesn’t really care for the actual music, which he dismisses as “lyrically banal, rhythmically plodding, harmonically static, and sonically uninteresting.” Instead, when at home relaxing, Needles prefers to put on a train sound effects album or crank up the right-wing talk radio.

In 1974, work was recently completed on Rivergate Mall in Goodlettsville, just north of Nashville. It was in this burgeoning suburb that recent Tennessee arrivals Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell needed a ride in order to pick up a birthday present at the mall for Susanna Clark, who was turning 35 that week. This was right before the cherry blossoms bloomed and the late-spring heat and humidity arrived; there was still just enough chill in the March air to necessitate the use of a sweater. Life was pleasant for the vagabond songwriters holed up at the Chapel Road domicile of Guy and Susanna Clark.

The only complication was that, at lunchtime, both Vince and Rodney decided it would be a good idea to dip into the bag of magic mushrooms left behind at the Clark residence by none other than fellow house guest Townes Van Zandt. Around mid-morning that same day, Van Zandt had partaken of a large handful from the Ziploc® himself before suddenly announcing he was going to step out for a stroll. Nobody thought it was strange when he walked out the door, carrying his guitar without a case. He ended up down on the Gallatin Pike where he hitchhiked a ride out of town, and eventually to Colorado, a move that his good friend Guy used to call “pulling a Woody.”

A couple hours later, but before anyone had realized that Townes had actually split town, porch-dwellers Vince and Rodney were nibbling a few Liberty Caps. About an hour after they dosed and also added a few glasses of wine to ease take-off, their friend and dealer Lester McClain showed up with a large amount of marijuana and the day took a green turn. Everybody at the Clark house called Lester, who was a bit overweight and had a bit of a dirty young man’s beard, “Santa Pinkeye” or just “Pinkeye” due to an incident where he literally woke up inside a dog house the morning after a Christmas party a few years before. He had crawled in there having bonded with the neighbor’s mastiff, and woken up with a nasty case of conjunctivitis. 

The trio were having way too much fun on the porch needling Lester by speaking like dogs for the better part of an hour, with Pinkeye taking it all in good-natured stride, when Guy stepped out to remind his friends that they had a chore to take care of. The boys were immediately enthusiastic about the prospect of visiting the nearby shopping mall while gooned out of their mind on ‘shrooms, weed, and wine. Gauging each other’s inebriation level, Vince and Rodney decided that Lester was the one to drive them, with McClain making the case that he was okay to take the wheel partly in English and partly in “Dog.” Following a further few reefer-abetted distractions, they jumped in McClain’s copper ‘72 Chevy Nova and made their way up Gallatin Pike to the Rivergate Mall, crying with laughter the whole way. 

Once at the mall it was agreed that Lester should chill in the Nova while Vince and Rodney popped in to buy Susanna’s gift. Inside the mall however, suddenly gripped with paranoia, the two became paralyzed; a situation only made worse when they realized that neither of them had remembered to bring their wallets.

Meanwhile, out in the car, things went South in a hurry for Lester, who, unbeknownst to his traveling companions, had also helped himself to a large number of Van Zandt’s caps and stems right before they jumped in the car to go to Rivergate, and was now feeling the onset of a powerful psychedelic experience. Lester eased his chair back, calmly enjoying a passing cumulus cloud and listening to WSM-AM, the broadcast home of the Grand Ole Opry. Unfortunately, the DJ chose at that moment to play the Louvin Brothers’ harrowing “Satan Is Real.” Images of the ‘destruction of homes torn apart’ and places of ‘everlasting torment’ soon consumed our rotund pot peddler. 

The late afternoon sun beat down through the windshield like a greenhouse and Lester felt a sudden urge to remove his shirt. He simply couldn’t stand the feel of cotton on his torso. The feeling grew worse and worse until, throwing open the door, he manically shed every last stitch. McClain then ran wildly into the mall, entering through the Sears and Roebuck, darting around the women’s lingerie department, and raising alarm and shrieks with every step. By the time he reached Rivergate Mall’s food court, the manager at Sears had alerted security guards via walkie-talkie, but there wasn’t much that could be done.

It was hard for Crowell and Gill, however crestfallen, confused, and jittery they might have been, not to miss McClain as he marauded past a Burger Chef stand, screaming at the top of his lungs, “The sun! The sun! It’s gonna explode and kill us all!” When they saw their buck naked comrade leap, heedless to both hygiene and comfort, onto the Squiddly Diddly mount of a Hannah-Barbara-themed children’s carousel in the center of the food court, the two musicians quietly watched events unfold before turning towards the exit and walking away, stone faced.

The security guards, who didn’t really know what to do with the raving, nude Santa Pinkeye, were sort of chasing him half-assedly in the manner of a Benny Hill skit. He was self-evidently unarmed, so they weren’t exactly interested in catching him, so much as herding him in the direction of the exit, hoping McClain would just run outside and away. Eventually, one of them had the bright idea of borrowing a comforter from the JC Penny sleepwares department as a capture net. It took four guards to wrap him up and quiet him down. They secured Lester in handcuffs and marched him to the security offices, where Goodlettsville police were called in to haul his ass off to jail.

It was a fairly long walk home for the two “long-haired freaks,” as a truck driver unceremoniously called out of his passing rig at the intersection of Old Hickory and Gallatin Pike. They were safe enough to travel south on foot, and just after the sun set, both men were back on the Clarks’ porch in East Nashville, inspiring convulsions of laughter in their hosts as they recounted the tale. Susanna reckoned it was the best birthday present she got that year. The hysterics stopped however when it dawned on the group that their buddy was most likely going to be in jail for a period of time.

Two weeks later, Pinkeye showed up at the Clark house to apologize and replenish their dope supply. All was forgiven.

Lester has long since given up dealing and using. In 1989, it was a slimmed-down, clean-shaven ‘Pinkeye’ McClain that bought out an auto-mechanics garage across the road from the site of the now moribund Rivergate Mall. He was ordained as a minister at the Gallatin Southern Baptist Church in 2012 where he occasionally speaks about his wild past as cautionary tale or takes his charges into the John Hiatt Wing of Cumberland Heights to have a talk about the choices they have made, or perhaps help them to begin to realize that they really don’t have any choice at all.