Story Behind the Song: Junk Town

Junk Town

This is a story about a road trip from Silverton to Grand Junction, Colorado, in June of 2012. In the summer time, I’m usually too busy playing music to bother with any road trips that don’t involve a gig. I spend between eight and twelve hours in my car during any given week, so spending more time in a car for leisure isn’t something I generally do. I didn’t really want to be doing it on this particular trip, either.

The thing is, I had bought a kayak and a bunch of paddling gear I had found on craiglist. At the time, I had starting rafting and stand-up-paddleboarding with friends on my days off, and was enjoying being on the river. As a kid, I didn’t really do any river sports, so it was all novel and new to me as an adult. I didn’t really know if I would enjoy kayaking or not, but the other gear was important to have if I was going to keep pursuing river sports.  Furthermore, as a native Coloradoan, I know you can never have too many toys or too much gear, so I pulled the trigger on the kayak and bag of gear I found on craigslist.

I had never kayaked before. It was always this really scary thing to me—you’re essentially strapped to a boat that has a propensity to flip over, leaving you underwater for who knows how long, trying to right it. Of course you can always pull the cord and exit the boat and swim, but that also sounded kind of terrifying. The potential for bad things to happen goes up significantly from other river sports. I know people who have died in a kayak because they were pinned or unconscious and otherwise unable to get out. So, me buying this boat didn’t make any sense. It sounded good at the time, in my head. Gutsy, yeah, that’s the word, I thought. I’m a brave, independent, strong Colorado girl. What’s one more sport to add to my down time? Even better that it’s scary and difficult; those facets only make me feel even gutsier.

 

 

 

 

I live in Silverton (as you know from the Colorado Song story).  Silverton is 2.5-3 hours away from Grand Junction, and in the height of my season, I am playing the piano at the Grand Imperial five or six days each week, as well as different shows in Durango, Ouray, Pagosa, and other locales three to four nights per week.  I put about 500 miles on my car each week, just commuting to gigs.  So for me to decide to go to Grand Junction in the middle of June, to drive a 240-mile round trip, to spend 5 hours of my life when my free time is already so limited was not something I normally would agree to do.  HOWEVER, there was a guy from Glenwood Springs selling his kayak and all his gear– dry tops, PFD (personal floatation device), booties, helmet, etc., for a very fair price of $500.  Even better, he was willing to meet me in Grand Junction.

So I got in my truck after finishing a shift at the piano at lunch time, and proceeded on to Grand Junction.  In Silverton and some of the other rural towns around the state, some of the locals refer to Grand Junction as “Junk Town.”  The most viable explanation I’ve heard for this is that us rural residents go to the “big city” to shop and buy all our junk.  Grand Junction is far from a junky town– it’s a college town, they did a big remake of their downtown area to incorporate arts and Colorado history and geography, they’ve got several sweeeet thrift stores, there’s this coffee shop that makes this amazing, soul-saving coffee drink called Rocket Fuel that I’ve never been able to duplicate nor find anywhere else, plus they have the Ale House, which is also pretty great if you like beer and delicious food.  (By the way, I am not making any money from plugging these places– I just really do like them and think you would too!)  Of course there are parts of town that aren’t as glitzy and cool, but that’s true of any town I’ve ever seen.

I know I’ve gotten off-course here a little bit with this story telling, but I want you to know that I was doing two things that I would not normally be doing:  buying a kayak, and driving to scorching-hot Junk Town in the middle of summer for reasons that didn’t involve playing a gig.  I got there, at the pre-arranged public location of the parking lot of the Ale House (convenient, eh?), and saw the guy with the kayak in his truck bed.  In a few minutes, we had the thing strapped to the top of my truck, money exchanged, and I was inside ordering dinner, feeling very gutsy.  I was going to be a kayaker!  I was going to learn how to not drown while I was upside down in a river, strapped to a boat!  This was gonna be great!  I named my kayak the Hot Grape, thinking of how slick it was to be so mobile on a river.  I ate my dinner, and steeled myself for the drive back to the mountains.

 

 

 

I get in my trusty truck, windows down, and I’m scrolling radio stations.  I pull up to the last stoplight at the south end of Grand Junction, annoyed that this one light is keeping me from leaving this hot, asphalt-ridden metropolis.  I was not as annoyed as the girl in the car next to me, however.  She was young, maybe 19 or 20, driving an old-school 90s Cavalier convertible (or something like that).  She had the top down and the radio up.  Bruce Springsteen was playing Thunder Road, if I remember right.  She had a lit cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other, the latter of which she was yelling into.  I didn’t catch every word, but she was complaining about traffic, the heat, the town, her car, and then, in a less aggressive and more exasperated tone, she said these magic words, “I gotta get out of junk town.”  The light turned green, and I thought to myself, I’m gonna go home and write that song.

 

I did.  It didn’t take me long.  By the time I got back to Silverton, I had the chorus and pieces of the verses saved to the voice memos on my phone.  As soon as I got home, I grabbed my guitar and within minutes had all but the last couple of verses.  It’s one of the few songs on the album I wrote on guitar, and not piano.  Guitar seemed more gritty, junkier, especially since it’s not my primary instrument and I have far less finesse on it than I do on piano.  As you can see from the dates on my songbook, I finished it a little under a month later, making tweaks to the lyrics as I went.

I sometimes wonder what happened to that girl at the stoplight.  I inserted a lot of fiction into this song that she inspired; I wonder what her real life was like and what it turned out to be.  I hope she found a place she didn’t want to leave.  I wonder if she’ll ever hear this song and be like, “YES!  I totally get it!”  I wonder if she’ll hear it and know it was her who inspired it.

 

 

Kayaking was never in the cards for me, as it turned out. I took swimming lessons as a kid and could basically save myself, but it wasn’t always pretty.  As an adult, I learned how to swim athletically instead of reactively, and I felt okay about being in water over my head. However, I also remember having panic attacks while trying to snorkel in Hawaii; something about telling myself to breathe–even to exhale–underwater just kind of short-circuits something in my brain.  When I got down to actually thinking about being underwater, strapped to a boat, trying to right it, I could feel my chest tighten and breath shorten.  I am not a good candidate for being in a situation like that, and no amount of outdoorsiness or being gutsy is going to change that.  I sold the Hot Grape a few years later, after I had made peace with the fact that I would likely never feel good about learning to kayak.

 

 

 

There’s a Junk Town for everybody.  There’s always going to be somewhere that you want to leave, that doesn’t work for you and brings you down, even if you’re only visiting.  I have been lucky to live where I love to be, with people I love to be around. May we all be so lucky.

See you next week with the story behind “Trouble,” which will likely remain a mystery to you and me both.

-Lacey

 

p.s. If you’d like to hear Junk Town, along with 9 other songs on the full-length album, click here!  It’s also on all streaming sites, by searching Lacey Black + Junk Town.  Thanks for listening!