♪♪ - Welcome once again to the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour.

We're coming to you tonight from the Powerhouse Arts Center in Oxford, Mississippi.

♪♪ ♪When you're feeling way down low♪ ♪You got no place to go♪ ♪Can't call a lover♪ ♪Can't call no friend, can't find you so and so,♪ ♪just put your hand on the radio.♪ ♪Can you feel it down to your toes?♪ ♪Can you feel it?♪ ♪That's how it goes.♪ ♪Can you feel it?♪ ♪Lord only knows.♪ ♪Can you feel it?♪ ♪Just put your hand on the radio.♪ ♪Oh, I'm down on my knees.♪ ♪I'm begging you, please.♪ ♪Here comes Jim Dees.♪ ♪Oh, oh, oh.♪ ♪No, no, no.

Here comes Jim Dees.♪ - Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Welcome once again to the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour.

As I mentioned, we're at the Powerhouse Arts Center, a stone's throw from the Oxford Square.

Great show for y'all tonight.

Two fine songwriters from two very cool towns.

Nubia Yasin is here from Memphis, Tennessee.

I believe she's going to sing with the Yalobushwhackers.

Fine songwriter, fine poet and filmmaker, I believe.

From the Atlanta, Georgia area, we've got Huey.

She's here.

She has some great songs that she'll be playing for us.

Our author tonight is Jay McInerney.

Y'all know Jay McInerney.

Brand new, yes sir, brand new novel out called "See You on the Other Side."

And we certainly will see him on this side.

But we got this band here, y'all.

Look at this great big old band.

We love them.

Let's bring them to the stage.

It is the Yalobushwhackers.

[cheering] - Thank y'all.

[Applause] ♪♪ ♪Ooooh♪ ♪Ooooh♪ ♪Oh I see the storm is threatening♪ ♪My very life today♪ ♪If I don't get some shelter♪ ♪Oh, I'm gonna fade away♪ ♪War, children, it's just a shot away♪ ♪It's just a shot away♪ ♪War, children,♪ ♪It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away, yeah.♪ ♪I see the fire is sweeping our very streets today♪ ♪Burns like a red coal carpet♪ ♪Mad bull done lost its way♪ ♪War, children,♪ ♪It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away♪ ♪War, children,♪ ♪It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away♪ ♪♪ ♪Rape, murder♪ ♪It's just a shot away it's just a shot away♪ ♪Rape, murder♪ ♪It's just a shot away it's just a shot away♪ ♪Rape, murder♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away♪ ♪It's just a shot away♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪Oh, yeah.♪ [cheers and applause] ♪Mm, flood is threatening my very life today.♪ ♪Give me, give me shelter.♪ ♪Or I'm gonna fade away♪ ♪Oh, children, it's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪I tell you, I tell you, love, sister,♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪It's just a kiss away.♪ ♪Oh, yeah.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪It's just a shot away.♪ ♪Hey.♪ [applause] - How about this, Yalobushwhacker Big Band?

[applause] All righty, Huey, you're Alex Huey, and you go by Huey, of course.

Boy, you've got some great tunes out.

I encourage you to seek out Huey.

The latest single is called "Dueling Flame."

Y'all please welcome Huey.

[applause] ♪♪ ♪I touched down on Oceanside where the weather♪ ♪is still warm and kind.♪ ♪I take a picture with my eyes for you.♪ ♪Be there with me if you can.♪ ♪Legs lost in the sand♪ ♪And slipping through our hands as moments do.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm a paper angel.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm just a jet in the cross-flow.♪ ♪When I take to flying,♪ ♪oh, the last thing on my mind is how I'm getting home.♪ ♪♪ ♪Riding out through the sacred hills♪ ♪Some old town steeples and cotton mills♪ ♪Hollers holding secrets in the dune.♪ ♪Barefoot through the delta dawn, pick up♪ ♪the tune of an ancient song.♪ ♪The wildflowers will hum along with you.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm a bird on a brand new wing.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm just a long lost balloon.♪ ♪When I take to flying,♪ ♪oh, the last thing on my mind is how I'm going to.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm a paper angel.♪ ♪And sometimes I'm just a jet in the cross flow.♪ ♪When I take to flying, oh, the last thing on my mind♪ ♪is how I'm getting home.♪ ♪Yeah, the last thing on my mind is how I'm getting home.♪ ♪Yeah, the last thing on my mind is how I'm getting home.♪ [applause] Thanks, y'all.

[applause] - Huey, y'all, one more time.

Let her hear you.

[applause] Thank you so much.

All righty, y'all.

Our next guest is Jay McInerney.

As I mentioned, new novel is called "See You on the Other Side."

It is from Knopf.

Y'all please welcome Jay McInerney.

[applause] Hey man, so glad you're here.

The four books about this couple and the turbulent things that are going on in America, you're great about tying that in.

There's a wonderful story about you having some health issues that led to you finishing this book.

And I say health issues, tell us what happened that led you to, you were kind of in a slog on this book and then what happened?

- Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I started and stopped it several times, partly because when I started the book, it was during the lockdown.

And and and after a few chapters, I realized everything I always write about is New York social life.

People, people going to parties together and movie premieres and bars and hotel rooms to do things they shouldn't be doing.

And all of that shut down, of course, during COVID.

Well, I shut down a little bit myself when I was writing this book because I apparently there were no witnesses to this.

I stood up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I must have fallen over and I must have hit my head really hard because there was blood everywhere.

And three months later, three months during which I couldn't write a word, I had brain surgery.

They actually drilled two holes in my head.

[chuckles] It's funny, I've always been fascinated by the word "trepanation", which means drilling through the skull.

For some reason they've been doing this for 10,000 years.

There are Neolithic skulls with holes, either to relieve blood pressure or evil spirits.

In my case it was the blood.

But anyway, after this surgery I got out and my writer's block disappeared after a week.

And my neurosurgeon likes to think that it's all his doing, and that he should get some royalties for this book.

But suddenly I was really inspired after about a week and I just started jumping up in the morning and I suddenly realized exactly how the book was going to end.

- And then your heart.

I don't want to sound too geriatric here but yes.

- That's what do, we sit around and talk about our ailing backs.

I just had this operation, but it's incredible to me what you went through back to back.

- Well, three months later I had quadruple bypass, emergency quadruple bypass surgery.

That one was a real doozy.

You know, they saw you down the middle and they spread your ribcage and it was a five... five and a half hour surgery.

Not the most fun thing I've ever been through, but I'm happy to say that it seems to work.

And I like to think it's all new equipment here now.

- Yeah, you look great, you sound great, the book is great.

- I'm feeling good.

I mean, a lot of people thought the way, you know, some people judged my lifestyle to be such that they didn't think I should make it this far.

But I seem to be doing fine.

- If I may say, you came through on the other side, am I right?

[audience groans] Please, please.

- Get it?

- I'm highly paid to come up with this stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

Don't even worry about it.

I read or heard in an interview that when you started this, this tetralogy with these characters, Corrine and Russell, you didn't realize it was going to be a series.

- No, no.

So the first book came out in '91 and it was called "Brightness Falls."

It was about this couple, very glamorous couple that then just they were both turning 30.

And and he worked in publishing.

She was a stockbroker.

And they were the kind of couple that-- they got married very young, right after they graduated from Brown University.

And they were the kind of people-- they were the first in their group to get married.

So they hosted parties with their single friends, and they introduced their single friends.

And everybody kind of looked up to them.

And I really-- I don't know, I kind of fell in love with them both a little bit.

And so when I was groping around many years later, after 9/11, I thought I've got to write something about this terrible event since I write about New York.

And I suddenly thought, why not see it through the eyes of Russell and Corrine and their friends.

That was the second book in the series called "The Good Life."

I do want to point out, you don't have to have read any of them to read this one, because I explain what needs to be explained.

- All right, well, we do want to hear you read just a minute or two from this.

It is a great book, and again, it takes place during the COVID era, but it's not a COVID book.

- God, I hope not.

- No, no, not at all.

There's a lot going on here and you'll enjoy reading about these characters.

Again, it is called "See You on the Other Side."

Jay McInerney, y'all.

[applause] - Stepping out of the cab into the twilight, he felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of the red and white neon sign hovering above West Broadway like an old movie title materializing on a dark screen.

Like the start of a film set in New York, it signaled a certain promise.

The promise of metropolitan pleasure, of social and gustatory adventures.

The evening was freighted with possibility.

The Odeon was one of the surviving landmarks of the protein city that he'd inhabited for almost four decades, teeming with memories, layers of personal history, ghosts.

Pre-night club dinners with the boys punctuated by trips downstairs to the bathroom to snort cocaine, which made him feel as if he would live forever and the night would never end.

Bounding up the stairs afterwards as if on springs to ogle the models and to pretend not to notice the famous actors and painters at the adjoining tables.

Business dinners where he'd wooed authors he was hoping to sign back when young novelists were the toast of the town.

overnight celebrities who appeared in the gossip columns as well as the book pages.

Meetings to plot a hostile takeover of the publishing company that was his first employer and almost succeeding in buying it with borrowed money before the stock market crash of '87 had derailed that plan.

The end of the overreach of his youth.

Recent lunches with Condé Nasters after their offices moved into the New World Trade Center that had risen ever so slowly from the ashes of the Twin Towers Date nights with his wife, Corrine, when they lived around the corner in an old school loft with pressed tin ceilings and warped plank floors over which they crept carefully on returning home so as not to trip and fall in their tipsiness and wake their kids.

Lunches as a family, the kids venturing beyond grilled cheese to croque monsieur.

He hadn't been here in several years and he found it reassuring that it endured.

That the restaurant was waiting unchanged, long after the monumental towers had fallen and the rented loft where his kids grew up had been gutted and combined with the one above to make a deluxe duplex.

Although its survival also induced a nostalgia for all that had disappeared, for the declension of its bright shining moment in the history of the city.

Just as its artful retro design conjured a lost city of Edward Hopper-esque luncheonettes and cafeterias like a layer of myth below the sedimentary strata of memory.

Russell's best friend Washington Lee had taken over the restaurant for the night to celebrate his 35th wedding anniversary.

The least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow becoming over the years a model husband and father, as if to illustrate the fact that each marriage is a mystery, an iceberg of which only a fraction is visible from the outside above the surface.

His own wife took his arm now on the sidewalk, illuminated by the sinking sun of the Magic Hour, looking up at him in locking eyes, a ritual of affirmation, a mutual recognition of their union before they entered public space.

They'd been together so long that it was sometimes hard to really see her, hard not to see instead the ghost of the girl she'd been when they first entered these doors.

But tonight he scrutinized her closely and he was happy with what he saw.

To his eyes, still a fine-looking woman after all these years.

Yes, she had a brow lift seven years ago, something to which he strenuously objected at the time, but had come to approve of as the results were so pleasing.

He'd been afraid she would look different, that he wouldn't recognize the face he loved, But in fact, she looked even more like herself, more like the girl he'd fallen in love with.

"I don't recognize myself in the mirror," she'd said, arguing her case.

It was a small victory against the relentless onslaught of age, which they were nevertheless losing every day.

He knew he was thicker and softer in the middle, His forehead corrugated with age, creased from his nostrils to the end of his lips, and wattled in the chin.

They'd both turned 60 a couple of years ago.

[cheers] - All righty, Nubia Yasin, thank you so much for being here.

I'm going to say your first time at Thacker Mountain Radio.

Y'all please welcome Nubia Yasin.

♪♪ ♪I've been moving too long now.♪ ♪It's time for a change.♪ ♪And I'll be his perty birdy♪ ♪If he builds me a cage♪ ♪It's gotta have two stories♪ ♪I won't be assuaged♪ ♪I'll be pleased or I'll be leaving♪ ♪He can't have it two ways.♪ ♪He's got the whole wide world in his fretted, feathered girl.♪ ♪And he ain't too bad to look at himself.♪ ♪He bought the whole wide world♪ ♪for his fretted, feathered girl.♪ ♪So she flew down, flew down,♪ ♪flew down to his shoulder shelf.♪ ♪And she said, don't you want to hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪It's all in your hands, my man.♪ ♪Don't you wanna hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪Beautiful hands for a beautiful man.♪ ♪Don't you wanna hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪You're the man, the man with the big plan.♪ ♪Don't you wanna hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪Beautiful hands for a beautiful man.♪ How you guys doing?

You doing all right?

Am I making sense up here?

Is anyone hearing what I'm saying?

♪♪ ♪You want babies, I'll give you five.♪ ♪You won't have to worry, I'll keep it so tight.♪ ♪I'll sing in the mornings, won't that be nice?♪ ♪And then every evening, you'll get to make Birdie cry, cry, cry.♪ ♪He's got the whole wide world♪ ♪In his fretted feathered girl♪ ♪And he ain't too bad to look at himself.♪ ♪He bought the whole wide world♪ ♪For his fretted feathered girl♪ ♪So she flew down, flew down, flew down to a shoulder shelf,♪ ♪and she said, don't you want to hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪It's all in your hands, my man.♪ ♪Don't you want to hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪Beautiful hands for a beautiful man.♪ ♪Don't you wanna hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪You're the big man, the man with the big plan.♪ ♪Don't you wanna hold my face in your hands?♪ ♪It's all in your hands, my man, my man, my man.♪ ♪My man, my man, my man, my man, my man, my man, my man,♪ ♪my man, my man, my man, my man, my man, my man, my man, my man.♪ Thank you guys so much.

[applause] - Nubia Yasin, y'all, one more time for her, Nubia Yasin.

[applause] How about her?

Beautiful voice.

Thank you, Nubia.

Memphis, Tennessee.

We're gonna get one more from this big old band to send us out.

Y'all have been a great audience.

We love you, we'll see you on the radio!

[applause] ♪♪ ♪I sailed an ocean, unsettled ocean,♪ ♪Through restful waters and deep commotion, often frightened,♪ ♪unenlightened, sail on, sail on, sailor.♪ ♪I rest the waters, fight Neptune's waters,♪ ♪sail through the sorrows of life's marauders,♪ ♪unrepenting, often empty.♪ ♪Sail on, sail on, sailor.♪ ♪Caught like a sewer rat, alone but I sail.♪ ♪Bought like a crust of bread, but oh, do I wail.♪ ♪Seldom stumble, never crumble.♪ ♪Try to tumble, minor rumble.♪ ♪Feel the stinging I've been given.♪ ♪Never ending, unrelenting♪ ♪Heartbreak searing, always fearing♪ ♪Never caring, persevering.♪ ♪Sail on, sail on, sailor.♪ ♪♪