{"id":1925,"date":"2016-07-28T07:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1925"},"modified":"2023-03-10T09:54:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-10T14:54:24","slug":"truck-driving-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/truck-driving-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Truck Driving Man (Paris Metro\/Vince McCann)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Nm4_xxQDEcA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That trip through Morocco in the winter of 1978 ended with my guitar being stolen, then a week in Agadir as guest of Rudy Leal Villareal,<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-4812 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Rudy-Leal-Villareal.jpg?resize=115%2C133&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"115\" height=\"133\" \/> a Chicano hashish smuggler from San Antonio, Texas, with whom I traveled back to Spain. I went on from there to northern Europe, he went to Madrid, then jail, then was deported to France&#8230; and at some point I ran into him in Paris and he brought me to Le Mazet.<\/p>\n<p>Le Mazet was the buskers&#8217; bar, on the <span class=\"st\">rue Saint Andr\u00e9 des Arts<\/span>, down a passageway from the Od\u00e9on metro station. It was populated by male musicians from various countries and teenage French girls\u00a0 who worked as &#8220;bottlers,&#8221; collecting the money. The musicians were basically lazy, and would play the trains for a couple of hours, then come back to the Mazet, change their <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1927 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Mazet-scene-early-1980s-1.jpg?resize=286%2C284&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"286\" height=\"284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Mazet-scene-early-1980s-1.jpg?w=350&amp;ssl=1 350w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Mazet-scene-early-1980s-1.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Mazet-scene-early-1980s-1.jpg?resize=300%2C298&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 286px) 100vw, 286px\" \/>coins into bills, and have a few beers. Some of the girls were harder workers and would do their two hours, then trade in a tired busker for a fresh one from the bar and head back to the trains. The money was split evenly, half for the busker and half for the bottler, so the busier bottlers were doing pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>Le Mazet did pretty well, too, since it had a captive clientele &#8212; the only other place that would change a big haul of coins into paper money was the National Bank, which was open only for limited hours and didn&#8217;t serve beer. At the Mazet you would ask the bartender for a tray, arrange your money on it in ten-franc piles, and he&#8217;d give you the notes. Then, late in the evening when the banks were closed, the waiters from the nearby <span class=\"st\">caf\u00e9s would come to Le Mazet for change. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>I spent many happy hours drinking, chatting, and trading tunes in the Mazet, and sent Van Ronk there when he had a gig in Paris, and he wrote a funny piece about it in his (entirely fictitious) notes to my LP. Almost forty years later, I&#8217;m still in some kind of touch with a couple of musicians who were regular habitues. In particular\u00a0 Vince McCann<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1929 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Vince.jpg?resize=192%2C307&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"192\" height=\"307\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Vince.jpg?w=192&amp;ssl=1 192w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Vince.jpg?resize=188%2C300&amp;ssl=1 188w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 192px) 100vw, 192px\" \/>, a tall, sharp-nosed, longhaired Irishman who took pleasure in being as insulting as possible and is a fine honky-tonk country singer. We teamed up with a bass player named Doug Ley, from Ithaca, NY, and worked the trains as a trio: Vince and I would sing something together with Doug harmonizing on the choruses, then one of us would sing while the other bottled the car. Doug played stand-up bass and we figured a lot of people paid us extra out of sympathy for him hauling it on and off the trains.<\/p>\n<p>They were right to sympathize, since we maximized our profits by only working a short segment of the Metro, from Od\u00e9on to Porte d&#8217;Orl\u00e9ans and back. That route was perfect for our purposes, because it divided neatly into three segments with a major station followed by two or three minor stations, so you could do a eight- or nine-minute set for a captive audience, bottle them, change cars, do another set&#8230; and then you had to climb up and down the stairs to change directions, with poor Doug schlepping that bass. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1930 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Le-Mazet.jpg?resize=300%2C267&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Le Mazet\" width=\"300\" height=\"267\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Le-Mazet.jpg?resize=300%2C267&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Le-Mazet.jpg?w=350&amp;ssl=1 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Od\u00e9on to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, Montparnasse to Denfert-Rochereau, Denfert to Porte d&#8217;Orl\u00e9ans, then back again, over and over till we got tired and headed to the Mazet for another beer.<\/p>\n<p>It was work, not art, and Vince and sang the same two numbers, train after train: &#8220;Good-Hearted Woman&#8221; and &#8220;Truck Driving Man.&#8221; Both were from Vince&#8217;s repertoire, the first learned from Willie and Waylon, and the second presumably from Buck Owens, though a lot of other people had recorded it, including a memorable version by Leon Russell. Neither became part of my solo repertoire, but we played them day in and day out for long enough that both are permanently wedged in my memory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That trip through Morocco in the winter of 1978 ended with my guitar being stolen, then a week in Agadir as guest of Rudy Leal Villareal, a Chicano hashish smuggler from San Antonio, Texas, with whom I traveled back to Spain. I went on from there to northern Europe, he went to Madrid, then jail, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/truck-driving-man\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Truck Driving Man (Paris Metro\/Vince McCann)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.9 - 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There's a full schedule on my website at https:\/\/elijahwald.com\/2026concertdates.html, and please spread the word. As\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/665999127ed82396c72f2b23_melodica9-e1777123474462.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1314,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wild-good-cocaine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1925,"position":2},"title":"Wild About My Good Cocaine (Dick Justice)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 18, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the records I bought during that year in New York forever changed my understanding of the world. Like much of what I was buying, it was a reissue of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s on the Yazoo label, but this one had a particularly strange cover and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Mr Charlie's Blues","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Mr-Charlies-Blues-298x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5344,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/crawling-baby\/","url_meta":{"origin":1925,"position":3},"title":"That Crawling Baby Blues (Lemon Jefferson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"September 21, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Lemon Jefferson was an incredibly varied and idiosyncratic guitarist, and \"That Crawling Baby Blues\" is without doubt the most idiosyncratic guitar arrangement I've ever learned -- or at least ever retained -- with a lyric to match. As a result, I've never performed it in public, but always enjoyed playing\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blind-lemon-Jefferson.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3567,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/kijana-muke\/","url_meta":{"origin":1925,"position":4},"title":"Kijana Muke (Jean-Bosco Mwenda)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"March 31, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I've loved a lot of musicians, but only twice made serious pilgrimages to study with anyone. The first was Dave Van Ronk, for whom I spent a year in the wilds of Greenwich Village; the second was Jean-Bosco Mwenda, for whom I traveled to Lubumbashi, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/john-Mwenda-Bosco-300x264.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5890,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/he-went-to-paris\/","url_meta":{"origin":1925,"position":5},"title":"He Went to Paris (Jimmy Buffett)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 10, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"This may be my favorite Jimmy Buffett lyric, though I haven't tended to perform it (unlike \"Peanut Butter Conspiracy\" and \"Margaritaville,\" both of which have edged into my repertoire at times, and which I've covered in previous posts). 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