Malcolm Holcombe
When: 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 24
Where: Broadway’s in Asheville

It was cold but bright outside the windows of Broadway’s in Asheville, and the sun was setting over the top of the civic center across busy Lexington Avenue.

Don, the bartender and long-time friend of singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe, buzzed around cleaning the bar, making phone calls, and looking out the window. Holcombe sat in front of a video poker machine with a glass in one hand and a soft-pack of Winstons in the other.

“Want a cigarette?” he asked, in his gravel voice.

We sat for a while more looking out the window and watching Don move around before he spoke again. Holcombe wanted to know my ambitions, what I was doing — questions designed for him to answer. The tables weren’t supposed to be turned on the interviewer.

After briefly answering him, he cocked his head to the side, narrowed his left eye and widened his right, and stared at me. His light blue irises shone bright in the center of his cloudy-white eyes. His stare said I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Then he smiled and said, “You’re about as vague as I am.”

Don moved a chair across the bar.

“Vague, ambiguous,” he continued, “like the dreaming DT’s.” He waved his hand around in the air, as if groping it for the word he was after, and repeated the same phrase.

“Delusional,” Don said from behind the bar.

“That’s right, delusional. Delusions. Delusionaries.”

Who are delusionaries?

“The opposite of visionaries. You’ve got delusionaries, visionaries, and missionaries,” he said with a harsh, dry chuckle. “Everybody’s a missionary, looking for themselves. Don’t you think?”

What’s your mission?

He leans in closer and makes a face. “To be responsible.”

Responsible?

“To have this interview, to leave, to go home to my wife and 5-year-old,” he said. “I take it one step at a time.”

He’s been taking it one step at a time since he began his musical career in a band called the Hilltoppers that he started while in high school in Weaverville. Since then he’s gone on to release several records under his own name, among them 1996’s A Hundred Lies and last year’s Another Wisdom. A new record, One Room at Night: Live in NYC is due out May 4.

About One Room at Night, why New York?

“I just happened to be up there. It was after a show and we were having fun and hanging out and playing songs. And we just started whittling it down like you whittle a stick and we ended up with something like a project. It was a process of a lot of people whittling on a chunk of wood — everyone carved their initials into it. And now it can keep you warm, or you can use it as a door stop,” he laughed at how much mileage he got out of the metaphor.

When he stopped laughing and put his glass down he shook out a new cigarette.

“You know, it’s a cynical world,” he said flatly.

Would you say it’s too cynical?

“Yeah it’s too cynical. It’s rubbed off on me just like it’s probably rubbed off on you. It’s like rubbing alcohol, you feel it sting. It goes in one ear and out the other, but you can still feel it sting. It festers.

“Someone may be so wrapped up in cynicism that they lose their audience. Instead of trying to uplift people with knowledge, you’re trying to tear them down with cynicism,” he said.

He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. It seems that in his mission to be responsible he’s also taken to philosophizing about the nature of modern life and working on ways to uplift rather than infect.

Laminack is a Smoky Mountain News intern and a student at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at zslaminack@hotmail.com.