Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
N C L R ONLINE
93
At the Crook of Devil’s Elbow: An Interview with Nyssa Adcock Violet X. Barrows
Rhythm on The Rocks, 2022 (mixed media on panel, 12x12) by Jeremy Russell
fossil? A person – a woman – no one had heard of, and whose sparse, dusty oeuvre, in the glare of the zeitgeist, was an acquired taste, at best. Who cared about Nyssa’s vindication, aside from me? I knocked once more. I felt it before seeing or hearing it: the barest stirring of the hairs on my leg that might simply have been static, a shift in mountain-air molecules. It was a cat. It trailed its rust-and-cream tail over my shins. It looked up, the black discs of its irises expanding and retreating. The cat leaped, one-two, onto the deep stone window ledge. It reared up, batting a paw against the clouded glass. That’s when the front door shuddered open.
I won’t leave breadcrumbs for you, won’t tell you which road to take to find her, in her house perched on the lip of a mountain. She lives by herself, composed and self-sufficient. Hangs mushrooms of bewildering varieties from the rafters nearest the fireplace. She mothers an old tiger-striped cat of uncanny sentience. Her mind: philosophical, tangy, quicksilver, orphic. But when she answers your questions – the ones she chooses to answer – she speaks plainly. A former classmate of her youth once described her as smart as hell, and you need no convincing on that score. (A music historian/critic Who Shall Not Be Named recently wrote of her, in a footnote of his tome on ’70s rock, as Hillbilly Yoko Ono. You might think of this, as she opens the door to you for the first time – and probably the last – and if you do, you will raise a silent middle finger in your mind to the chorus of music-journo-frat-bros who have dismissed her.) Driving away afterwards, aiming to outrace a sudden poltergeist of thunderstorm, I sucked my tongue and thanked the gods: Nyssa Adcock offered me blood-red tea, all berries and bright herbs. She sat me on a tattered fainting couch that smelled of burnt sugar and turpentine. She talked to me of the local legend of the moon-eyed people and shared the mountain tale of a spurned lover who transforms herself into a hawk. She discoursed on the patterns of nature. White magic, black magic. Nyssa is all that. Born of the mountain and sprung from her own head: no Zeus necessary. Following is an edited version of our conversation. VXB: As a kid, what were you like? Did you always have ambitions to be a musician? What did you want to be when you grew up? NA: I was a strange kid. I have an early memory of looking in the old tin mirror on the back of my door, when I was maybe four – hand-painted scrolling strawberry vines, I loved that mirror more than life itself – I understood that my eyes were just gigantic in my skinny face. Crater lakes. Watchful. People felt me charmed, somewhat. Otherworldly is what I