So before I heard a note from the guitar of Billy Strings, I was already fully immersed in my gonzo journalism story of Asheville. I was told by a tour guide that the famous sanitarium in town had treated the likes of both Zelda Fitzgerald and James Taylor. Black Mountain College was once here and the famous art school for John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. I was getting a sense of the creative, artsy, hazy, rambunctious atmosphere of Asheville. Support local journalism by subscribing to your Blank Slate Media community newspaper for just $35 a year. But once again not so lucky, since I had to manage my way past all sorts of odd characters sitting about on the sidewalk and making demonic type requests for money for another drink. I got lucky again and parked right across Pritchard Park in the heart of downtown Asheville. I have nothing against relaxation, dead heads, hippies or the homeless but when I saw one urinating on the wall I immediately grew concerned and off I went to find another spot to park. However, I noticed an unsavory group of shall we say “homeless person’s/ dead heads/hippies” encamped behind the arena that seemed to be in a state of extreme casual relaxation. I pulled down a street immediately behind the arena and as luck would have it, I found a spot right away.
The performance was on a Friday night, so I drove down to the Harrah’s Cherokee Center long before the show to familiarize myself with the parking situation. I know exactly nothing about bluegrass music but felt this would be a perfect way to perform immersion journalism along the lines of Hunter S. I noticed that the biggest auditorium in Asheville was Harrah’s Cherokee Center and a blue grass band headed by Billy Strings was playing. So, armed with this brief taste of the peculiar Appalachian charm of the South, I booked my ticket and began to establish my itinerary. It’s filled with loneliness, anxiety, death, insight, love and longing as he described growing up in Asheville with a highly intelligent, ambitious, insane and alcoholic family. The novel is largely an autobiography with a sprawling, lyrical, poetic stream of consciousness, comparable to James Joyce. I had read some of the Southern writers like Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, Cormac McCarthy, Mark Twain, Truman Capote but never Thomas Wolfe. I had heard that Asheville was one of America’s favorite cities and I’ve wanted to see the Great Smokey Mountains, so I decided to read “Look Homeward, Angel” and ready myself for a visit. Spain needed Cervantes to pen “Don Quixote” before we could understand the magic of the Iberian Peninsula and Asheville, N.C., needed Thomas Wolfe to write “Look Homeward, Angel” to fathom the curious character of Asheville. France needed Victor Hugo to write “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” for the world to fall in love with Paris.
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