By Fred Camper
“In those days guys who couldn’t afford a guitar would take an old washtub and a broomstick and a string and play juice-harps while singin’ the blues,” he says. There were no amplifiers then; just megaphones. “I liked it. It was for real. But Mama always said, ‘I don’t want you on Beale Street; it will get in you in trouble someday.’ Now I understand what she meant.” But the music he heard was “from the soul. It had no special tune. I would say 99 percent of the blues singers, if you put some music before them they couldn’t read it and really don’t care to try. A music writer would have to let them play and try to write the notes to what they’re playing.” Boyle links this spontaneity with creativity: “B.B. King don’t sound like John Lee Hooker, who don’t sound like Muddy Waters. It’s their individuality–just like my art is from the soul. I saw this sign in Chicago, ‘Soul Food Kitchen.’ I never saw my grandmother or mother or auntie pick up no recipe to make nothing.”
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When Boyle was 15, he got a job waiting tables at the tony Peabody Hotel. This suddenly gave him spending money–as much as $20 a night in tips. He would only work until nine on school nights, but when he got off he’d go to stage shows at the Palace Theater, where “they started bringing in big names.” But this was still in the days of Jim Crow, and the audiences on Beale Street were mostly black. The police would stop a stray white, Boyle says, “and they would say, ‘Evidently you’re from out of the city. It’s better if you go up to Main Street.’ I’ve seen them go as far as put them in the car and take them off the street. But sometimes you would catch white sailors and marines. They would tell the police, ‘We down here,’ and the police would call the shore patrol. They’d say, ‘Look, man, we’re in the service; two or three of my best friends is Negroes, so what’s the problem?’ I’ve seen the shore patrol physically throw them in trucks.” Boyle recalls all this without bitterness: “I never did have a race problem.”
Boyle had been working summers as a waiter on a dining car for the Santa Fe Railroad between Chicago and Los Angeles; in 1972 they offered him full-time work if he would move to the west coast. Even though he was told the job might last as little as a year, it was “time for me to get out of Chicago anyway.” But after getting laid off from the railroad, “I started really drinking. ‘Who cares?’ The self-pity bag and all that. That’s when I hit skid row. I even drank myself out of a flophouse. I slept outside; it was warm. I’d hear winos say, ‘It’s about time for the snowbirds to hit,’ and I thought I’ll wait and see what they’re talking about–white dudes? But then I would hear white guys on skid row say, ‘Well, man, the snowbirds will be here in a minute.’” The “snowbirds” were the guys Boyle used to hear in Chicago saying “I’m going to hobo to Los Angeles and Florida” for the winter. “Skid row was the only place I found no segregation at all. If people would take a lesson from the way those people get along so good they would get over all these racial problems.” Working sporadically, Boyle would panhandle, paying $7.50 a week at the Greyhound bus station to store his clothes. “I ate at missions. In Los Angeles you have so many top stars who are recovered alcoholics and put money into AA programs, into missions, to help.”
“I say thanks be to God for this art work, because I can always wake up and do something. If I don’t have any images and visions I can go pick up some bottles, go wash some more, and spray ’em and let ’em dry. I pick up the bottles with an old grocery cart. If you don’t know me you might mistake me for a homeless person. I dress just like them; I know the garbage pickup schedule; I know what areas to go to, where people drink.” Referring to his liquor bottles, Boyle says, “The thing that God curses you with is the same thing as he blesses you with. God has a plan: I used to drink ’em, now I paint ’em. I take the money from selling them and put it into God’s work.” Boyle has what he calls a “placemat ministry,” handing out laminated placemats bearing Bible verses on the streets of Memphis.
Thinking back to his years in Chicago, Boyle remembers an incident, involving “the trumpet player Miles Davis in the Sutherland Lounge. It was a fact that Miles Davis would stop playing if you got loud. I came in the club, and I was drunk, and I sat and I said ‘Play, Miles, play.’ He was playing whatever tune it was, and he’d hit that note, and I’d say, ‘Blow, Miles, blow!’ The captain came over, and said, ‘Hey, man, quiet down.’ But Miles had walked off of the stage. They said Miles won’t be back tonight; somebody else started playing. The next day I went and bought a cold bottle of champagne and took it to Miles in his hotel room. I said, ‘Look, Miles, I’m so sorry about what happened. I didn’t mean no harm.’ He said, ‘I understand, but I just can’t blow.’ I didn’t understand why Miles Davis would do that until I got into this art work.” o
