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Price column: Slim went where the spirit moved him

by ROBERT PRICE, Californian staff writer | Tuesday, Jun 26 2007 10:44 AM

Last Updated: Tuesday, Jun 26 2007 10:44 AM

“Sometimes,” Scott Sturtevant once told me, “I feel just like Edward Scissorhands. Ugly and threatening on the outside ... and tender-hearted on the inside.”

Sturtevant was overstating the first part of that self-evaluation but not the second. True, the Bakersfield songwriter known as Slim the Drifter might have seemed a little intimidating to anyone easily bothered by hobos or carnys or barflies, but those who knew him well knew the capacity to menace was not in his makeup.

There was a certain tenderness to Sturtevant, evident to anyone who could see past the stringy hair, the raspy voice and the wrinkled, untucked Gram Parsons shirt.

But there was something tragic about him, too, so it was no great surprise when we learned last month that Walter Scott Sturtevant had died at the age of 46. The cause of death, cirrhosis of the liver, according to his wife, was no big shock either.

Sturtevant was a great character, the sort of one-of-a-kind iconoclast every town — and every good novel — needs to have. He was funny, self-deprecating and circumspect, full of sadness and joy, dissipation and achievement.

When I met him 10 years ago he was living on peanut butter, black coffee, menthol cigarettes and the proceeds from a hocked guitar. That, and the hope that his next song, his next self-produced collection of one-take punk-folk lamentations, would be the one. He was the next Johnny Cash, the next Kurt Cobain, if only someone affiliated with a big record company had the vision to see it.

But on another level, he suspected he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing — seeing the country on Greyhound, experiencing life from the sidewalk, an itinerant poet too impatient to stick around for fear of missing something somewhere else.

He went where the spirit moved him, even if it occasionally moved him into a jail cell. In the process, he created his own mythology.

After coming up a few credits short of graduation from West High School in 1978, Sturtevant moved to Los Angeles and went to work as a roadie for a punk-rock band. Two years later he returned to Bakersfield and founded Teen Suicide, widely considered Bakersfield’s first hard-core punk band. They were summarily banned from every place they played, Sturtevant said.

The band got one of its first gigs playing at Virrey’s Mexican Restaurant.

“We told them we were a country band,” Sturtevant explained 10 years ago. “The owner told us after our first show, ‘My God, you play the worst country music I’ve ever heard in my life.’”

The owner of another defunct downtown Bakersfield establishment ended his association with the band one night, Sturtevant once claimed, by chasing band members out the door with a gun.

He married, moved to San Francisco, tried his hand at playwriting and acting, and moved back home — alone. He eventually married again and got back on stage, singing with the Rainmakers (1985), Kissing Jane (1986) and 97 Tears (1987). That year Phil Luttrell of The Wichitas gave Sturtevant the first part of his stage name. Inspired by Hank Williams, who made records as Luke the Drifter, Sturtevant became Slim the Drifter.

He left town again, bummed around the country, made more self-produced records (one of which, Sturtevant says, got some airplay in Japan), and was recognized on the street here and there. In the mid-’90s he came home again and made yet more records.

By that time liver disease was taking a toll. In 2000, he was formally diagnosed at stage three on a scale of four. He was well into the end stage when he married again last year on the Oregon coast; he and wife Debbie eventually moved to Fernley, Nev. He died May 25.

Sturtevant was proud of his musical legacy. He was once on the front edge of the punk scene in Bakersfield. “And now,” he liked to say, “I have punk-rock children all over Bakersfield.”

If Sturtevant could live on as a rumor in the same way Jim Morrison has done — is he really dead or not? — he no doubt would. It suits him. Maybe it’s just reassuring that there’s a guy like Slim out there somewhere. It takes a certain amount of courage to live the way he did, with a freedom we mortgage-bound working stiffs can only dream about. But it came with a steep price, and Sturtevent knew it.

“I’m only walking around now,” he once said, “because God kinda leads me around.”

Robert Price’s column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.