“Jive Talking… telling me lies…”
“Blamin’ it all… on… the nights… on Broadway…”
“Night fever… night feverrrrrr…”
“More than a woman… to…. meeeeeeeee…”
And the near-threat of the sinister enjoinder, “You should be… (swoop swoop) daaaa-annnncin’….”
It was everywhere. If the earlier singles had been treacly and challenging of my young patience – I also hated Barry Manilow and that damn dog Mandy with an unholy fervor – this was inescapable. It was in TIME magazine. Parents were trying to learn to “do tha hustle…,” wearing gold medallions dangling overt their scandalously open rayon shirts.
This was not the pink and green suburbs, this was bridge and tunnel.crowd Kids aspiring to another world, or possibly even eschewing it in the name of their own euphoric, tantric golden-footed high. Because like music, dancing releases endorphins in a mighty way.
“Night fever… night fee-vurrrrrr….”
They wore white satin, tight pants, had perfectly coiffed hair. They were like Cyclops or unicorns, mythical beasts – unlike the Daddies where I grew up. My friends were crazy for them. Especially crazy for Barry, who’d once again don the white satin for his big duet with Barbra Streisand on the even foamier “Guilty,” not to mention the glaringly pop fondant of Kenny’n’Dolly romping through a Gibbs-penned “Islands in the Stream.”
Sheesh, they were disco. In a way even Donna Summer, who passed last week at the far too young age of 63, wasn’t. Somehow, they managed to exude nightclub fabulosity without any suggestion of the seamy demi-monde that seemed so intriguing about too much of disco’s glory.
They were squeaky clean, not Warholian. The parents loved them. Heck, the ethnic kids all around Cleveland, Ohio could be seen everywhere in the sans-a-belt slacks and the rayon shirts, gloriously unbuttoned to reveal virgin skin.
None of them were testosteronic enough to actually have chest hair, something the BeeGess seemed to have in glorious abundance, all blown dry and back-combed. They were Ken Dolls, sexually non-threatening, yet somehow manly and desirable.
It was easy to write them off. Until you had a friend who knew something about music listen with you. They’d point out the swooping harmonies… They’d talk about the percussive dynamics, the grooves that would scoop you up… The way the melodies were almost aerodynamically constructed.
“So, you’re telling me…,” the argument would begin, “that these guys are musically sound?”
“Fraid so,” would come the reply. “Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot more Beachboys in here than you want to believe… And just because it’s not so clean and perky, don’t think that the musicality is any the less.”
I said a bad word. It started with “F.”
I had to reconsider everything. Everything.
Whirling like a disco ball with colored lights pointed every which way, the music just kept churning, turning asunder and rushing towards those hooks that glide up, higher, higher, higher. Lyle Lovett may’ve written about “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy,” but this was the aural equivalent of an amyl nitrate capsule busted beneath your nose.
Not that I did whippets or whipping cream canisters. But I knew the sketchy kids, and they loved the stuff. Talking in that same falsetto squeal, sucking on helium and acting like outlaws.
Maybe the technical achievement warranted extra consideration. I just couldn’t tell anyone… I mean, really?
And, truth be told, it was thrilling to see John Travolta burn down the dance floor, all liquid and serpentine, snap movements and quick spins. Nine years of modern dance, a lifetime of “dancing school” to properly ballrioom and an odd addiction to the jitterbug with my friend John Griener who could flip, roll and slide me any number of gravity-defying ways.
Flesh covered poetry, melted like caramel maybe. Better than figure skating… and somehow libido-inducing, even for a kid whose hormones hadn’t kicked in yet.
It was a time: those thick harmonies of “How Deep Is Your Love.” Pillowy or downy. Like jumping into silky clouds or whipped cream mountains that you’d never hit the bottom of. Narcotic in a super-sweet way.
Play that stuff late enough at the Ground Floor’s subterranean lounge, and the quiana dresses would swirl as the gropping and steam began to rise. You could only hope melt into another, the forensics suggested to a kid with dinner plate-sized eyes, sitting in a banquette taking it all in. And take it in I did.
So, this was the suburban jungle – and the Bee Gees, if not the guide, were certainly the game caller. Effective. Technically excellent. A veritable trampoline of hormones and want to, blown dry to perfectly feathered hair, an Italian horn or coke spoon dangling down where the buttons found the holes and the heels always flashing, the soles and hips moving snap snap snap.
To not know is frustrating, but somehow sweet.
Sitting here, thinking Robin Gibb had been the miracle we all needed to believe in, I wish I didn’t understand. I wish – with all the death that’s been tumbling since Steve Popovich checked out last spring – that this pinwheel of untimely deaths could… just… STOP.
62, 63 is young. Too young. And these are not deaths by misadventure. Too many good times coming home to roost; the eternal Russian roulette of high living, fast cars and the disco inferno of random coupling in a bathroom or balcony beyond the falling starlight of a refracted mirror ball.
No, this is cancer. The thing we’ve been trying to cure fo decades– but that is taking more, not fewer lives as chemo barns and dialysis centers become profit centers. It’s what no one wants to say…
And like my innocence, it lays slaughtered if undiscussed before me.
But we’re getting to the point where whistling by the graveyard isn’t working any more. It’s too hard to pretend all these hands aren’t getting folded, one after another, every week it seems. Heck, every day if you’re really paying attention.
Earl Scruggs so profound a passing, no one mourned Doug Dillard, who dieded last week. Or Robert Nix, the drummer from Atlanta Rhythm Section, who found his way to the next realm at 4 a.m. on Sunday; I only know from Georgia Satellite Dan Baird’s Facebook page, where a sucker-punched gap-toothed rocker posted from the precipice of his own disblief...
Dillard, obviously, because of both his stamp on Southern California country rock from the Eagles to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as being one of “Those Darlings” on “The Beverly Hillbillies” has a certain amount of roots traction, but what about a guy whose band’s greatest claim to fame may be turning the turntable from 33 1/3 RPMs to 45 RPMs when playing the single “Imaginary Lover” yielded a performance that was oddly similar to Stevie Nicks during Fleetwood Mac’s witchiest success?
They are falling like dominos. It’s getting to where every day you expect to hear about the next one. You won’t know why, or how… Just that we’re hemorrhaging these artists, these forces of music back when music really, really meant something.
Even the stuff you didn’t really like: it stamped you in ways that defined you.
Each one who passes, like rhinestones on a Nudie Suit or sequins on a disco tube top: enough go and you feel moth-eaten, shabby, bare. More like a welfare motel than a place like the Chelsea once was. Not squalid chic, just broke down like a hooker who’s turned too many tricks and can’t remember the Johns names any more.
“Baby, right/” you say, too numb to even engage, too disoriented for anything more than getting through it.
Worst part is, I never got jaded. Some hit me harder than others, but they all gut me in different ways. These deaths all tell me things about the passing of time, bony fingers tugging at my wrist, papery whispers echoing in my ear about inevitability.
Wasn’t it all supposed to be gay and fey and shining? A miracle of tempos, white people finding the beat, tossing their Well Balsom’ed manes as the blocks of dance floor light up beneath their feet.
Isn’t that how I remembered it? Isn’t that how it was? So how does it all end like this?
Ronnie Dunn won the CMA Song of the Year for a rafter-clearing gospel ballad called “Believe,” It contains the lines: “I can’t quote the book, the chapter or the verse/
But you can’t tell me it all ends… with a slow ride in a hearse…”
It’s hard to believe these days. What to think, heck what to know.
Everything you ever thought is shifting. Even as the rhythms rise up, wave after wave of harmonies breaking all around you, the memories flooding back.
It’s the end of another day, another star has twinkled that last time, surged bright than black. There’s a void where the light once shone, and my eyes sting from the tears and the squinting.
This is more than vulnerable, teetering here on the abyss of gone, gone and more gone. What was once an object of parental torture, watching adults do things incredibly embarrassing, while telling you “hey, I’m hip…” That was agonizing and laughable. Ironically, now that I’ve attained the age of reason and knowing, it’s just agonizing – and I’m not, as Todd Rundgren sang, sure what to feel.
I can put on my disco slippers, slide into the night, turn a couple New York Hustle steps, raise a glass of champagne and think about “Auntie Mame.” She the lose-it-all-and-laugh broad who declared, “Life is a banquet, and most of you sonspfbitches are starving.”
Yeah, maybe that’s the post-disco-decadence-apocalypse battle cry.
Live now. Live deep. Live real. Live out loud.
Take it all in. Taste and savor. Touch and exult in the texture of skin, salt, loss, velvet, satin, burlap, canvas, but especially love.
I find myself – a person chronically closing phone calls with “I love you” anyway – making sure people really know. Because we don’t know. Anything more than right now, anything more than here we are. Maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s all there is.
Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and enjoy the ride. After all, there’s no money back and it is what we – like Robin Gibb – make it.
]]>Only I was too young to know. I was just marking time on the way to another day at the Laurel School for Girls.
My school was too small for buses. We had school cars. Or rather station wagons, in these frosted off shades of green; the logo in white on the driver’s door. Announcing that we were the girls who went to the school where smart, athletic girls existed beyond the world of normal kids going to regular schools.
They’d pack us in like sardines: upper schoolers who didn’t drive, middle schoolers stuck in between and the “littles,” as underformers were known, who didn’t have a clue, but were so excited to be riding with the big kids.
Some years, I was stuck on “the route.” Some years, my parents got me to school.
Some years, the radio crackled with interesting music, things that just captured my ear and seized my nerve-endings. Some years, it was stuff I didn’t understand. Like “Love To Love You, Baby.” I didn’t understand it… at all.
There I was in a dark green and blue plaid jumper, knee socks, Hanolds white blouse, hyper-listening to… WHAT? What was THAT? Why was she moaning? It sounded like pain. It sounded like slow agony. Worse than a stomach ache. And that broken-voiced confession, all ragged and raw, where she wrung out those attenuated “luhhhved ta luhv yuuuuuu, bayyyyybeeeeee…”
That was love? I didn’t feel like that about Stitches, the Cocker Spaniel.
And still I listened, transfixed, trying to understand, to make sense of this twisted writhing bit of synthetic churning. For surely something was going on. I didn’t quite know who to ask, but I did notice the gap between the tittering amongst themselves upper school girls who knew things, and the obvious discomfort of the middle schooler seated next to “Wolfie,” the hirsute 20-something janitor charged with transporting this carload of all-girl school girls.
The origins of my life with “the big dictionary,” the one on the platform that required me to get on a step stool or small ladder to view it, was always random. An Evel Knievel story in TIME about his Snake River jump and the word “fellatio”… a dinner table discussion about a porno motel a few suburbs over and the word :kinky,” which was unsuitably defined… and now this travesty of AM radio and the word “orgasmic.”
Even after pulling the ladder over and thumbing through the pages, I’m not sure the definition of the adjective or proper noun clarified much. Furrowing my brow, I debated asking the librarian; but looking at Mrs Jennings with her severe pixie haircut and heathered Shetland wool sweater, I decided it was probably a trip to Miss Frost’s office in the making. I resigned myself to living with the unknowable.
Donna Summer would return, of course. Over and over. Always with that beating of wings, locusts rising fleshy beat that made her disco’s most ravishing siren. If I didn’t quite understand the pheromonal throb of “I Feel Love” and “Last Dance,” I got that she was really, really pretty, wore slinky dresses and could flat out sing. Her voice was strong silk, complete desire – for what I didn’t know – and liquid fire.
I hated the music; I loved her.
I also grew up a little bit, felt that knot in my stomach and the way my mouth got dry, but my white cotton panties damp when certain boys would pull me close in the later, humid hours in some all-boys school cafeteria. Barely moving, barely turning, swaying to “Dream On” or “Stairway to Heaven.” It wasn’t a uniform response, but when it hit…
That realization hit about the same time as Bad Girls, the colossus concept record that was four sides (!) and followed the Cinderella notion of Once Upon A Time. It was epic. It was pulsating, but with a force beyond the mirror ball. Yes, it was disco, but it rocked. Rocked hard. The guitars meant business in a way dance records never seemed to – and the synthesizers were eviscerating, blades and shafts of sound that cut right into you.
And… it was about… HOOKERS!
Ladies of the night Street walkers. Squalid objects of paid for pleasure.
I was riveted.
There in Glencoe, Illinois, where Steve Dahl was jihading his “Disco Sucks” nation to steamroll the records at Comiskey Park, I confessed in yet another station wagon how brilliant I thought Bad Girls was. As Summer and a chorus of back-up singer/trollops intoned,“BeepBeep! Honk! Toottoot!,” one of many cousins told me I was stupid; his friend added, “That sucks…”
I assured them they were wrong. I’m not sure what Blair Tinkle does now, but Tripp is a realtor in Naples, Florida. He owns a Golden Retriever, who exudes the same pliant worship Summer did on the Hot Summer Nights album cover.
And I… armed for bear with “Bad Girls,” “Hot Stuff,” “Dim All The Lights,” “Love Will Always Find You” and the ever-aching “On The Radio” had both the on-ramp to Miami’s gay clubs in the last days before AIDS made its somewhat confusing entrance – and a somewhat fascinating demi-field guide to the sex workers I’d find in the cocktail lounges of old school grand hotels like the Fountainbleu and the Diplomat. Those shabby/grand palaces of much rococo furniture, faux gilded touches and a bottomless supply of random and randy conventioneers wandering the tundra, looking for someone to make the night a little warmer.
The prostitutes were human to me because of Bad Girls. They were a fascinating flock of pros, who knew how to turn a trick, work a hustle and rarely lose their sense of humor doing it. When Summer later – comeback #3, if you kept score – issued the uberEverywoman anthem “She Works Hard for the Money,” I thought of every tired late-20s/30-something in too high heels and a push-up bra wondering if that swollen ankled fez wearer might “need some company?”
Still when the working girls killed time, they made for fascinating conversation. All the stories, faces, places they’d seen. World-weary, wearier than me – and I’d seen plenty. They gave me a pragmaticism that bottomlined life with dignity and temerity, not just a suck the last dollar from the wallet sangfroid.
Even more exciting were the gay discos and night clubs! The Copa, X, warehouses with flashing lights and mirrored walls, everyone fabulously turned out, churning bodies on the dance floor, undulating and shaking and stepping in ways that only made temperatures and heartbeats rise. I knew Donna Summer; I could fake the rest til I figured it out.
So many amazing near faceless artists who no one seemed to know. The System. Jenni Burton. This chicano or black girl named Madonna. Prince. Sylvester, Three Degrees, Candi Staton and the androgynous queen Grace Jones. It was another world.
I was transfixed by the glittering, pulsating (sur)reality. Like Dorothy over the rainbow, or Alice down the rabbit hole, it made no sense and completely enthralled a Midwestern kid who’d grown up in corduroys, a ponytail and buttondown shirts.
Walk into a ladies room and there’s be two full grown men sprawled on the console, talking about mascara and aural/oral pleasure. Step back to confirm the triangle with the legs, walk in to their utter amusement:
“Girl,” they chided/consoled, “you ain’t got nothing that we want.”
If only the same could be said for me. I wanted their glamour, their romping free-spiritedness, even their slightly bitchy panache. They were out and doing as they pleased, finding pleasure where they most wanted it and celebrating with a euphoria that was no doubt fueled by substances I didn’t realize were being passed.
In my quasi-awareness and utter-consumption, I began a double life: writing about country stars for The Miami Herald, crawling the gay clubs for The Weekly News though I was really neither. Showing up at the Hollywood Sportatorium, a horrible sounding building in the middle of nowhere in polka dot stilettos, pedal pushers and a strand of rhinestone dangling from my ears to see progressive hard country star John Anderson confused my father. I knew better than to try to explain; though the drummer seemed to be drawn by the sparkle.
In Donna Summer’s world, everyone belonged. Not quite an island of broken toys, but certainly a place that celebrated who – and what – people actually are. Not just acceptance, but exultance. Let your freak flag fly, let your light shine.
After the serious disco of Casablanca, there was the more meaty time on Mercury, where the music was more muscular, more rock-leaning. Beyond the throttling “Love Is In Control (Finger On The Trigger),” there was “Protection,” written by Bruce Springsteen – where her voice more than held up to the load. She was a fearless vocalist, columns of notes impaling you as they flew almost assaultively by.
And then came the rockpop of her time on Geffen years and post-battle Polygram clean up, slightly experimental, often pushing the edges of what could get on the radio. Beyond “Works Hard For The Money,” there was the reggae “Unconditional Love,” the classic soul-pop of “There Goes My Baby” and the post-50s synthed up Dion gone dance “The Wanderer,”the noir jazz of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” even the elegant AC of Brenda Russell’s “Dinner with Gershwin.”
She started weaving in some of her strong Christian faith. Things like “I Believe In Jesus” would randomly grace her records. She became more convicted in her interviews, witnessing to her beliefs and even renouncing some of the hedonism she’d been a most glorious soundtrack for.
Donna Summer, the willowy vocal flamethrower discovered in Germany by producer extraordinaire Giorgio Moroder, came to realize how much life was beyond the dance floor, the concert hall, the outdoor amphitheatre. She of the tumbling ebony locks, punctuated with that one perfect gardenia, an homage to Billie Holiday and every bodice-ripping heroine of a certain era, saw that there was something else – and she decided to walk the line between secular and salvation, still finding the sweet spot in a pop song, but tempering with a whole other kind fo soul music.
Chaka Khan might’ve been earthier, Aretha a generation before, but Donna Summer of the Courvoisier tone and pole vaulting range had her finger on the pulse of America. She could dead-eye radio, and she did. Over and over again.
And then she stepped back for a bit. Moved to Nashville with husband guitarist/songwriter Bruce Sudano. Came out when it made sense, sang hard, set the night on fire and returned to her home. She was difficult – if that meant wanting things to be right. She was a Bible-thumper – if that meant sharing her truth.
Still glam, still gorgeous, still fascinating to watch n a crowded restaurant, she was regal. But wuth a kid’s smile and laugh that was equal parts homegirl, righteous sister and world traveler.
Asking around today, nobody in town seemed to know she was sick. She didn’t want to live like she was dying, she wanted to die like she was wildly, vitally alive.
The last time I saw her was just over a year ago. At a funeral for a young man who took a turn too fast, and that was that. So many people turned out, the church overflowed, the downstairs was opened up with a video feed and still people kept tumbling onto the grounds.
Summer knew the family, loved the brio of the patriarch who’d lost his only child and the mama who was every bit of what welcoming should be. After John Prine sang and Keb Mo did, too… after a few of the now gone teenager’s friends read the posts on his Facebook page from people finding out he’d passed on, Donna Summer got up and sang.
She sang with her whole being, her whole heart, her whole soul. It was powerful, almost paralyzing in the force of faith that she brought to this wrotten occasion. Just her voice, and that tiny church 48 miles outside of Nashville. Just the tone alone stunned you to where the song didn’t even matter.
This was a song of faith… faith in the worst possible moments… faith that would bring you through… even if you didn’t understand a single world she sang, you could feel the battering power of what she believed knocking back the pain, the ache, the confusion.
When Donna Summer sang that hymn, that was all there was.
“Love To Love You Baby” was 16 minutes and 51 seconds of utter grown-up glory. When I finally figured it out, I smirked too. Laughed at how innocent I was, and how much I loved what I came to understand was the grounding of that performance. What was murky became glorious; what vexed me made me marvel at how all-out it was.
But in a country church on a sad, sad day, she gave up an even greater glory. Head tilted back, tears in her eyes, she sang for a 17-year old adopted boy, the parents who loved him, the friends who were one with him and everyone who lost a different kind of innocence that day.
Donna Summer was born to sing, to exhort us to deeper place of faith and surrender. In the letting go – of rage or torque, pain or want – we could be born again. We could find that higher meaning, the passionate arrival.
Somewhere in the stars tonight, she’s shining. Looking down on us, gardenia behind her ear, sparkling like she did and singing some sweet song that’ll help us all make sense of another constellation’s worth of grace and music gone.
17 May 2012
]]>I was driving when I got the text. Three words: “Dick Clark's passed.”
Trouble with the road is you gotta keep moving, from scouting a location to a drive-by lunch and straight down Carnegie to Prospect to an industrial parking lot, up a ramp, into a black-out curtained cavern where a young band was setting levels and getting ready to greet their fans.
Hot Chelle Rae are kids. Barely a quarter century the oldest ones. Power pop trio with a scaffold-soaring singer. Wasn't even sure they'd understand - even if they all have family in the business, cause, well, it'd been a long time since “Bandstand.”
Professional always, I drove it down. Tried not to think about ithe tear inside Ask the questions I was sent to ask. Watch the show. Draw the conclusion. Let it ride, Let it roll. And I did. I always do.
Jamie Follese, the youngest - who four years on the road has just turned 20, is the one I told. Wide eyes with hair falling into them, he managed a “Wow.” Then he showed just how long Dick Clark's fingers were even after the stroke that slowed him down.
“I can't believe we did his last Rockin' New Year's Eve…” he marveled.
Yeah, exactly.
I'd been in the studio when I got the news Levon Helm had turned for the worst. With a folk singer, my first idol, a sketcher of humanity, mortality and the wonder that keeps us ascending from the sludge and mud.
We had a song that wasn't coming together. “A Way To Make It There” considers the tides that pull us under and gentle breezes that push us on. Taut, driving, yet somehow encouraging, too, it was a song about people lost - and found.
I told Alex Bevan about the word that Levon wasn't long for this world, that they were asking for prayers and love and good thoughts. Then I sat down on my folding chair near the mic set-up and smiled a tired, fading smile. It had been a long three days. But draining though it was, our journey wasn't that.
“I never met him,” Alex said. “But oh, his music…”
His music, indeed.
Their music, really.
I said a rosary while my friend got that elusive performance. I was glad he could find the grace in such sad news. Levon would've liked to think he was woven into someone else's song that way.
And then I was gone. Prayers and pensive, but moving again.
Until the text. The quick emails to everyone I knew who knew Dick Clark well, including one of his sons, who's been one of my best sources of clarity for years. Losses that are public are even more painful in private; I've been watching survivors cope for years.
It's like that Danny Flowers song “Before Believing” - and the lines “what if pieces of the sky were falling/ In your neighbor's yard, but not on you?”
There wasn't time to stop and think, to write as I do. Drive, yes. Sleep, some; the sleep of the deathly exhausted. Then rise and drive and think and talk to God about the meaning of it all.
Dick Clark, for many of us kids in the Midwest, was the gateway to everything we cared about. Bands we loved, artists we needed to know. They all played his show - Madonna, Prince, the BeachBoys when they were babies, Michael Jackson with (and without) the Jackson 5, James Brown, Van Morrison, Men Without Hats, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, rem, Dion, the GoGos, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Barry Manilow, War. Black, white and Latino, the guy who got his start in Philadelphia as a disc jockey by hosting a local tv station's dance party not only made no distinctions, he welcomed all music. Allmusic. Heck, he even helped get hillbilly singers on tv - back when it was a cousin'r'hog-humpin' oeuvre by helping the Academy of Country Music get their West Coast-recognizing awards show on network television.
Clark realized what the kids knew - and you could argue he rode it to a behemoth television empire, or you could say “Someone got it, and gave it back.”
All I know is he had an acute sense of what was going on around him. Things you'd never think he'd notice - he was Dick Clark, after all - registered in ways you'd be shocked to realize.
I'd been shuttling or hanging around country stars doing “The American Music Awards” and “Academy of Country Music Awards” for several years… Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Patty Loveless, Montgomery Gentry, the Kentucky Headhunters, Rodney Crowell…
I'd always smile and say “Hello” as my internal dialogue shrieked “Dick Clark!” and I'd think about all those Saturday mornings, watching the teens and 20somethings dance to all the musicians I dreamed of. An onramp to a magical world, a seeming comrade of the ones I loved…
One day, he called me by my name. Just as if he did it every day. I didn't fall over; but what did you say? Right. I went with nothing. A stupid smile, a nod.
Years later, standing at the production table with Brooks & Dunn in tow, I started explaining the interview flow to the full grown men with the hardcore post modern honky tonk attack. Dick Clark studied me. I could feel him. I was worried I looked bossy.
“Look at her,” he said off-handedly. “They watch her. They listen. They follow her every word. It's amazing.”
A year or two later, I almost closed my business. Somehow Dick Clark heard. Someone who worked for him called me on my cell. “He says he's never seen anyone handle famous people the way you do,” was the open.
I was speechless. “Dick… Clark… said that?”
The person and I talked for a while: what he saw, what he respected. They then told me they agreed with the tv scion. Joe's Garage stayed open.
Levon Helm was the same way, only completely different. Open to everything, aware of what was going on. Very keyed into the energy and the humanity around him.
But Dick Clark was a silk necktie, Levon Helm hopsack britches. Clark was Vegas slickness, studio polish; Helm was funky, ragged, raw and the greasiest groove you could possibly find. One was “the world's oldest teenager,” the other was a wicked drummer with a bottomless pocket who sounded older than hollers even when they were still the Nighhawks, long before Music From Big Pink hit the streets.
They were both enthused about music, the people who made it. One celebrated by finding ways to put it on television - and long before most people today remember, doing “Cavalcade of Stars” package tours and taking the music to the fans. The other could be found doing his celebrated Rambles in his barn in Woodstock, NY - bringing together an eclectic group of roots musicians to jam and remember the notion of coming together in song, the same way he and The Band had inspired a somewhat flagging Bob Dylan and helped ignite his Rolling Thunder Review.
Levon Helm, whose last album was called Poor Dirt Farmer, was about the gritty and the real, the dignity between the cracks and the honor of living with integrity. He was a sweet soul, an elegant gentleman, a smile that lit up buildings and a credit to his Arkansas roots - a place where they grow a little crooked and wild, with a sense of gallantry that's anything but pompous.
No, he made you yearn for a hero in denim, who knew how to find the howl and the soul, to scratch at the dirt and the moon, to craft desirability from the hard scrabble and romance from a woman's small details.
Levon… Helm…. That voice, wide open, almost braying. Those hands, cracking and rolling over those drum heads and cymbals with a euphoria that swept you up, kept time from breaking and making it all so right now.
The Band was one of those acts: essential and the essence of what it meant to be rock & roll while keeping it organic. It's no wonder Keith Richards loved him, no doubt that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band summoned Helm for the reconvening of the tribes, when they bridged the old school Nashville to the modern blurrers on the Grammy-winning Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2.
I watched Helm be as gracious and charming as any human being's ever been at Scruggs Sound just below Nashville. The Dirt Band and he working on a way gospel “When I Get My Reward,” scraping soil and sky and making us feel like salvation was right there for the taking.
He had that way about him. It ran through his daughter Amy's band Ollabelle, too. And when Levon got the cancer that almost killed him several years ago, it was the music that saved him, that led him to other more heartening places.
His joy was always palpable, his growl and time impeccable witnesses to whatever he needed to convey. His Rambles at the Ryman were lovefests: Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, whomever was in town, grappling to be a part of Levon's earthly angel band. Indeed, even the random dog or two would trot onstage or lay down by the man with the wickedly flawless timing.
You couldn't not feel good in his presence, and you wouldn't feel anything less than euphoric hearing the music he conjured. It was like he was blessed, and so were we to know… who he was, what he did and the way he carried himself.
How they carried themselves, Dick Clark, Levon Helm both, was a lot of it. They brought an infectious enthusiasm for what they beheld. They made people feel welcome. In a world of big egos, crazy notions, utter indulgence, they never lost the thread - never lost the sense that it was the music that was made and the fans who loved it who mattered.
I woke up in another town, still exhausted from my run up 71 north to Cleveland for the Rock Hall Induction dinner - and a night that went on and on and on. It was a celebration of how music sets you free, rebels against the inertia and revels in the intensity of being alive.
In spite of the melodrama generated by Axl Rose, Guns N Roses deported themselves as a true relic of the electric kineticism and insurrection of rough rock & roll, the Beastie Boys brought the same pushback via loud, progressive rap and the Red Hot Chili Peppers wadded up rock's slam and grafted it to the most industrial strength funk one could imagine. This night, they all throbbed and threw down. Breath-taking stuff.
Even the Small Faces/Faces aging innocence was charming. Though Rod Stewart couldn't attend due to illness, Ron Wood wore a tiny shiny mod-feeling suit, Ian McLagen in a Technicolor whirl of a shirt and Kenney Jones in bang-about street clothes - and they reminded the local fat cats, the industry standards what the 6000 people in the balcony already knew: whether it's the winsome yearning of “Ooooh La La” with its sweet chorus of “I wish I knew then what I know now…” and the raw sex of the bandy “Stay With Me,” rock is straight stuff jammed directly into one's veins.
There were other acts, too. Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill's induction of Freddy King was jubilant, drawing you in, then dropping the groove for an incredible “Goin' Down.” Carole King's induction of Don Kirshner made the business more than a necessary evil - and showed the way loving the music from the business side can advocate creativity in broader realms, while Bette Midler mainlined her own fandom of progressive singer/soulwriter Laura Nyro for an induction that stilled the balcony out of recognition and reverence for the way music touches us.
On the ride up to my hometown, I'd spent an hour on the phone with a true believer. His brother's pushing 50, but he still rocks, still has a band, is still biting the dream. The name alone tells you everything: the Mojo Gurus. Hardcore, snarling rock & roll, blazing guitars and a cloud of dust. Is it sardonic or stupid? Swaggering or snarling?
At the end of the day, they're mainlining the New York Dolls flash, the Stones at their roguest, a little Skynyrd, a dash of Ian Hunter, maybe a touch of the Faces, a bit of the same things the Black Crowes whirl and churn. Will it happen for this little band that almost kinda coulda a few times? Hearing the yowl of singer Kevin Steele, you get the sense it doesn't completely matter; that's not what he's singing for.
No, it's deliverance. It's the sacred space where you can let the whip come down, the truth rise, the thrill of being in the whip's crack - or as Springsteen exhorts, “It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.”
And it's true. It does. Music is the great soother, inciter, inspirer. To listen is to understand all the things that elude us in the conventional realm. It sows clarity, compassion, resolve, courage, occasionally lust and often romance. And that love is the being in love with life, not even a member of the opposite sex.
Moving too fast, though, you don't get to put things into perspective. You only get to keep dancing as fast as you can, hoping you don't fly off the flat and end up with your head or life cracked wide open.
Got home just now, right on the cusp of rush hour. My phone rang. It was a friend who knew I was driving, figured they'd let me get home (knowing I rarely radio or internet surf when I'm truly covering the miles)…
“You know he's gone,” they said gently as they could.
I didn't have to ask. I knew. I felt the energy drain from my body, felt all the momentum that had been pinning my exhaustion to a wall far from where I was standing fall away.
“Oh,” I said. What do you say? Especially when the man who wrestled New Year's Eve from Guy Lombardo's Big Band had exited the day before.
Even when you know, you're never ready. So there I was, speechless in the kitchen, knee deep in book bags and backpacks. I didn't know what to do, so I managed a “thanks,” heard what I thought was, “I didn't want you to read it on the inter…” and hung up.
Then the tears started. Tears for Dick Clark. Tears for Levon Helm. Tears for who I was so long ago, when all the innocence those men embodied were twisted up with the thrill of music that made my pulse race.
It wasn't about knowing them or not, about the end of their creativity. It was more about two more icons off the chain of people who believed in what the music could do. It was about losing a piece of me that I'd invested in them… invested long, long ago.
Because once you know, you can't not know; but you can climb into a song and remember. It's palpable. It's everything you'd be if you were still innocent.
But to even be able to remember from the inside out, well, that's what music's for. It's the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when they get it… my first idol staying with his filigreed songs until the quietest truths emerge… some band in Tampa playing it flagrant and loud…
It's why Dick Clark was able to keep America's kids engaged, create “The American Music Awards” and “Rockin' New Years Ever,” to remain a touchstone to punks and funks and rockers, poppers, rappers and everyone else.
It's why Levon Helm's solid, crisp beats still bust up every wall and resistance people might have, the voice equal parts Spanish moss, cracked red dirt and sweat that renders eloquent shabby details and heroic normal engagements.
It's why music matters - and these men stand out. We are more for what they gave us. They are immortal for the mark they've left on so many hearts. But especially, they are inspiring for how they embraced the music without limits - and to live and love like that is everything. All you have to do is really listen.
21 April 2012
www.hollygleason
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Weeks before Patsi Cox left her mortal coil, she got busted. Riding shotgun down from Kentucky with a guy running moonshine; the feds in an unmarked pulled the pair over. BANG! Put the bracelets on. Took her in. Couldn’t make the charges stick, but what an outlaw move!
How Patsi…
Right before she checked out, she goes flying on the wrong side of the law, laughing and telling stories, feeling more alive than most of us would ever dare. Sixty-some odd years old, and there she goes: 70 miles an hour through the dark, cargo of illegal hootch in the trunk.
Can’t think of a better move. Patsi, after all, filled out the definition of a broad with a ribald sense of humor, a fearless sense of right and wrong, humanity on the half shell and the willingness to speak out about the things that mattered to her.
Busted. Then she left the building. Smoking right up til the end… from emphysema… dying on the same terms she lived: exactly as she wanted. And if she knew it was going to get her in the end, hell, Patsi figured better that than being safe or boring.
Patsi’d always lived like that.
A bona fide hippie feminist, she came out of Denver when it was really wild – founder of a legit woman-concsious magazine in a place where that sorta thing seemed to matter. And when it became a raging success, and the big boys came a-callin’ to put her on their boards or big retainers – hoping to annex some validation from the homegrown Gloria Steinem – Patsy wasn’t buying in. She saw the game, and she moved on.
Moved on – and ended up in Nashville. Before it was sanitized of characters, people with opinions and notions and a sense of what great was. She fell in with a creative crowd, fringing with Johnny Cash cohort/songwriter/producer Cowboy Jack Clement, casting her fate with iconoclastic music biz vet Steve Popovich and producer Allen Reynolds
With that broad laugh deepened by the cigarettes, she could regale you with stories, tell you about the over/under on just about any breaking news story, point out hypocrisy without blinking. She had an eye for injustice – and she’d let you know
She had an eye for good work. She’d let you know about that, too.
When Patty Loveless came over to Epic Records from powerhouse MCA, she had a blood vessel threaten to burst on her vocal chord and still turned in a stunning album. I went after the press with a vengeance.
And it all came in. Only What I Feel was just that good. Patty Loveless, the hard country girl from a God’s honest holler in Eastern Kentucky, a true hillbilly soul singer, was getting her’s.
Having known Patty since she was a singles artist, I remembered her buying vintage clothes and practically living out of the trunk of her little Toyota; I was merely a college kid, writing for all kinds of amazing places, but still mostly a kid. I took her shot personally. I hounded and reaffirmed, cajoled and reminded; she won.
When an ex-husband ran to the tabs with some very unflattering stuff, we fought it back. Addressed it once, waited for the pain to die down. What was sure career destruction was short-circuited.
Late one business day, the phone rang. It was Patsi, whose firm had represented Patty before she’d changed labels – before she'd some in-house, because honestly, I wanted to know everything was being doggedly pursued.
“I”ve been watching,” she said husky voice, all fire and corn whiskey.
My stomach tightened. As a young critic, plenty of people had thrown down the “why HER?” card, daggers at my feet and sniping at my back.
Patsi took things personally, too. Don’t show fear, I thought. Breathe. Just breathe. You can take whatever she’s gonna tell you.
“And…” I hoped I didn’t chirp.
“You’re doing a ^&%ing great job,” then she laughed. “Seriously. She’s finally getting what she deserves… and it’s been great to watch.”
We talked for another half hour. About Patty, where she came from, the secret marriage to her producer – for fear of it overshadowing the music, the songs she chose that gutted you like a fish.
The sun had fallen from the early summer sky. Surely, Patsi had a life to get back to. After all, who calls to say “Good job”? Especially when they don’t have skin in the game.
“You keep doing what you’re doing,” the journalist/publicist/force of nature said. “Before too long, she’s gonna be winning Female Vocalist of the Year.”
Just like Patsi to remember: the little girl, who’d grown up sitting on the kitchen table on Saturday night while her mother washed the floors as they both listened to the Grand Ole Opry on a radio propped in an open window, always dreamed of “the big award.”
When as a kid, her brother brought her down to Nashville to see about those songs she was writing, she was taken under the wing of Porter Wagoner and his emerging equal Dolly Parton. She went to the Ryman as their guest the night they won their first CMA Duo of the Year Award – and she was dazzled by the way Dolly turned real life into songs, songs that mirrored Loveless’ emerging emotions.
“Yeah, Pats,” I concurred. “From your lips to God’s ears…”
“You’ll see,” she soothed. Then she was gone.
That was the woman with the headful of shaggy faded ebony curls, huarache sandals and some kind of boxy clothing on. She always knew when to weigh in. She made her point. Then she was gone.
She was the wingman for Cathy Gurley, who at one point ran the Country Music Association’s press department. Then went on her own. Then was lured to Capitol by the legendary music man Jimmy Bowen, just as the ascent of Garth Brooks was beginning.
Cox had been around Mercury when Steve Popovich had signed a politically (radio)active Kris Kristofferson, a theoretically past-his-shelf-life Johnny Cash, a West Virginia folkie with a voice like expensive silk named Kathy Mattea and yes, polka king Frank Yankovic – and she got them all.
Yankovic, proof that a bull-headed Pollock from Cleveland can never ever get above their raising, made Patsi happy. She got it, and never worried that he wasn’t “country,” because to Pops Poland was a country.
Gurley, like Patsi Cox, loved songwriters. She took me to the Bluebird on my first trip of Nashville in 1983… to see an “in the round,” with Tom Schuyler, who wrote the songwriters anthem “16th Avenue,” Paul Overstreet, responsible for Randy Travis’ “Deeper Than The Holler” and “Forever and Ever, Amen” and Fred Knobloch, who’d paired with sadly departed folk icon Steve Goodman for the stunning tortured torch of “A Lover Is Forever.”
Cathy Gurley sat me down, waited for it to happen. Boy, did it. The power of songs from the source is a blast from a high pressure hose, only it comes at the listener soft and warm and earnest. It was a watershed…
It was also exactly what Patsi Cox traded in. Exactly that mainlining life that made her feel most alive.
Not that a woman like Patsi Cox would ever be fulfilled apologizing and ratcheting up the fame mill. Eventually she drifted back to writing. Authoring Tanya Tucker’s autobiography in a deal brokered for big dollars by a New York agent who didn’t care about whatever humanity the wild child singer might still have.
It was a devil’s deal. What Tucker wouldn’t commit to telling, what the publisher believed they'd bought.
One of the good ones, Patsi understood how a woman who had a couple kids – regardless of how much cocaine she’d ingested, how many cowboys she’d poked, how tempestuous her bust up with Glen Campbell was or how superfreaky her dalliance with Rick James might have been – would not wanna wallow in the squalor.
She stood on my stoop one night, sucking on a cigarette, ruing what people value.
“They only want the dirtiest stuff, and I’m not gonna give it to them,” she announced proudly. “T. doesn’t wanna. The publishers are telling me to push her – and there’s just a point where it doesn’t matter. I’m at that point.”
Ahhh, Patsi, who would never prey on a famous person’s vulnerability. No, she was the kind who would bow up and stand strong for her collaborators.
Pat Benatar fell in love with her when Patsi co-authored her memoir.
Toni Braxton took and took her time and money to where she almost bankrupted the feisty woman who hated what had happened to Braxton, who had faced down a bankruptcy over predatory show biz deals.
Thankfully, an angel appeared from almost nowhere. We were on the phone one night, talking about the politics of Music Row – the peril of knowing the difference, the things that were really at stake.
She got quiet. “If it wasn’t for…(name of angel, she probably wouldn’t want revealed)… I’d’ve been in the streets And they told me to just pay them back when I could, and I almost have.”
She was quiet one more moment, out of gratitude and grace. Then she laughed that rolling tumbleweed laugh, and did a Patsi.
“It’s a helluva ride,” she marveled.
Oh, Patsi. Patsi, Patsi, Patsi.
Damn you! The truth so succinct, so true – and, well, so thrilling.
Over the last few years, things for me have been a bit off-kilter. Things you thought you could count on, people you were sure you could believe in… Well, they’re not always that.
Patsi understood. We’d talk about it. She never pressed for details, just asked “How ya doing?”
The conversation veering from faith to raw stupidity.
“How do you believe when there’s no reason to? What a sucker,” I lamented one afternoon.
“Nah, you’re never wrong to believe, Holly,” she consoled. “You know, if you don’t believe, I don’t think you’d be one damn bit good. It’s who you are, it’s what you do… and if somebody betrayed that, well, that tells you everything about them, doesn’t it? And now you know, and you don’t ever have to look back.”
Patsi did, though. She looked back without turning to a pillar salt like Lot’s wife. Looked back to make order out of random patterns no one saw; looked back and considered what it all meant.
Her book The Garth Factor examined the impact of the arena-sized country superstar from Oklahoma, not just on the country music business, but the world. She looked at how it happened, what it wrought.
She did it with clarity, and she did it with faith.
“Keep the faith,” she’d remind me when I’d be laid low. “Keep the faith. It’s what you do… Well, that and write like nobody I know.”
We would IM about politics, about hinky stuff happening down on Music Row. She’d pull no punches, call a spade a spade. We were both relieved someone else saw what we did…
There was nothing like seeing her pop up as an IM. Like electricity, you knew the exchange would be fast, furious, provocative and send you away enlivened and emboldened.
When Steve Popovich died suddenly, we were all startled. He was the man who built Meatloaf out of raw will, sheer determination and the steel-hard get it done work ethic that is the Rust Belt smelt of Pennyslvania, Ohio, Detroit -- and he knew how to get things done, how to ferret out the passionistas from the poseurs.
He was mythic from my childhood, almost too daunting by the whispers I’d heard floating around my hometown to speak to. I found myself driving north to the funeral, sitting with a man he’d signed to Epic New York who he couldn’t break and Popovich ultimately would have to cut from the label.
Me and the singer had an odd talk about death after the service. “The good ones are dropping,” he said.
It shook me as bad as the service. I found myself writing one of these essays. Staying up all night, then flying to Nashville to drive to Savannah to interview Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, watch the show, pass out and drive back to Nashville to fly back to Cleveland – and finish that essay.
When I walked into the same chic restaurant I’d had dinner in all by myself two nights prior, they remembered me. The manager led me outside, watched me open my keyboard and asked if I was okay.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I gotta get this right.”
Patsi Cox was one of the first people to respond. “You got it” came the three word email. Phew!
Later online, she told me all kinds of stories about the close knit family that were interwoven with her own family. How Pop believed in her, and we both knew that was a pretty good endorsement.
She got guys like that. They got her, too. She was the kinda broad they liked. Tough, savvy, testicle-busting, but the first one to stand up to you, but especially for you.
Then just like Steve Popovich, Patsy was gone. In and out of the hospital, obviously. Oxygen pumped in, but the laughter and her intolerance for b.s. never pulled out.
Even so, few things were so vital as seeing “what are you doing?” or “did you see…” pop up on your screen. She was a live wire, a brilliant source of questioning and insight.She made you think; she made you care.
Funny thing, life doesn’t distinguish. Death hits us all.
And right now, as I’m wedged between two promotion veterans, winging my way to Vegas, there’s a memorial service going on at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
One more moment I miss, and yet, Patsy would’ve probably said, “Get out there! LIVE.”
Still, it's the things you miss. Being there. Tall tales that are anything but. Patsi Cox’s just about last ride was shotgun with a shine-runner. It’s the stuff legends and lies are made of, but you know Patsi Cox lived her life her way... never lying down or worrying about what might happen.
“It’s a helluva ride,” she marveled. She would know.We should all hope to be so lucky.
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The cardboard box looked like every other, too. “Arista,” the return address said. Yet the doe-eyed girl with the curly hair and the expensive photo session spoke to me. She didn't look much older, and she seemed so alive in the moment.
“I hope this doesn't suck,” I remember thinking, knowing Clive Davis' predilection for drama queens and divas, Barry Manilows and frumpy AC. I wanted to like this girl, in the days when MTV was exotic and dance music ruled the clubs.
Back in my dorm room, she killed me. That voice: the power, the range, the essence of being alive. She had diva range, but she didn't bludgeon you with it. Instead she leapt over tall buildings, turned cartwheels and seemingly laughed while she was doing it!
“How Will I Know?” seemed to be the anthem for Every(young)woman trying to find herself, wondering if he was the one. She understood, though, how to bob on the anxiety like a cork - and her ebullience gave us all something to cling to as we figured out who we were.
While she was pretty, staggeringly pretty, a former 17 covergirl, as well as the niece of Dionne Watwick and daughter of gospel stalwart Cissy Houston, she didn't seem otherworldly. Whitney Houston could have been one of us, came off as someone who would talk to us. She even in the moments of big vocalizing seemed to feel our pain, our desire, our rapture, our hope.
“Saving All My Love For You” and “The Greatest Love of All” - both bravura turns - had just enough innocence to let us know these were emotions mortals could feel, too. Yes, she looked like a goddess and sang with the kind of powerhouse acumen that would cause Mariah Carey to bludgeon and over-sing through her first few records, but Houston's heart was pure.
It wouldn't last, of course.
The industry would start putting walls between us, currying favor and encouraging diva-like behavior. The stakes and expectations would rise. The toadying would increase. No doubt the disorientation and then vertigo would follow.
She could come off as the same effervescent girl, shiny and happy in the “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”” video, but the unraveling was already being set into motion. Not yet. No, there would be another album that would provide the perky uptempo feel good moments - “So Emotional” and “Love Will Save The Day” - a la the Supremes, and the big ballads - “Didn't We Almost Have It All” - that would recall Diana Ross' most serious solo work.
It was still the music and the image of exquisite perfection. No troubles, no drama. Just a mahogany goddess who poured down light like the sun. Right up until the burn started. If the second album found Houston in a white tank top, hair flying free and easy, “I'm Your Baby Tonight” saw a young woman in the Limited's universal Firenze sweater - just like the rest of us - only seated side-saddle on a motorcycle.
She wasn't trashy, wasn't a whore, but was certainly opening up to the thrills life has to offer. As the MTV Onset Generation's Beyonce, she was the object of fantasy - and it wasn't long until Bobby Brown, New Edition's resident bad boy and emerging solo force, came calling.
There were whispers. There were fierce fights that made the tabloids. There was, obviously, drug use. But there was also more music… the stuff of true soul queen proportions… and the movie that made her an international superstar a la Miss Ross: “The Bodyguard.” Co-starring heavyweight serious man-hunk of the day Kevin Costner as the man assigned to protect the star from a stalker, it was a smash.
Beyond the film, where Houston's goddess-on-pedestal perception was tempered with a humanity, range of emotions and skosh of street smart homegirleality, there was the gigantic performance of Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You” that served as the film's theme. What had been written as an enduring good-bye with gratitude to Parton's once mentor Porter Wagoner was turned into a tour de force of love beyond limits that sat at #1 on every radio chart across the world for months. Ubiquitous isn't nearly enough: car radios played it relentlessly, talent shows were over-run with it.
Whitney Houston, the most unilateral girl singer possibly ever, had graduated to the ranks of inescapable, but was still capable of turning in truly monstrously great vocal performances. She slayed “The National Anthem” on a regular basis. She performed with her aunt and mother on a gospel medley and left jaws slack.
Yet, there was something ravaging the grown woman's psyche. Never mind the theoretical alliance with r&b's hottest male star, nor their small daughter Bobby Christina. Like George Jones and Tammy Wynette before them - right down to a self- tribute-named-daughter named Tamela Georgette - she and Brown seemed hell-bent on conflict, destruction, consumption and being lashed together with a love that would ultimately eviscerate them.
There was the infamous “crack is whack” interview, where Houston seemingly blitzed beyond reason came across not as Ghetto Fabulous, the way newcomer soul queens like Mary J Blige were, but ghetto tragic: out of her mind, possibly lost forever and absolutely throwing herself into a gutter she had no business being in.
Was Brown's rapacious drug use the issue? Had the wild thing sucked Houston under? Or had she so soured on being America's sweetheart that she found the good girl role repellent?
Hard to say. Plus, addiction's addiction. Once you're in its jaws, it's hard to ever escape. And in show business, there's always someone dying to give you a bump, a hit, a puff to gain access to a world they'd have no other entrée to. Plus once you start bottom-feeding, you change the game of both the quality of people you attract and their willingness to not protect you.
The tabloids lit up. Drama. Drugs. Physical altercations. Skeletal pictures. Flubbed performances. Court appearances. Cancelled shows. Riots. It was a fiesta of bad news, and it kept getting worse.
Yes, she made attempts to get clean. Divorced Brown, who'd been arrested on various charges of battery and domestic violence; but not before taking that “hood stance” of so many women that “that's my man…” regardless of what he was doing, even to her.
Whitney Houston languished, became a punchline - not even a cautionary tale about drug use. So extreme, it was comedic - that awkward laughing when it's too uncomfortable to face. So lost, she didn't seem to notice what was gone - or consider how to come back.
That wasn't what was important. What was? Hard to say. There would be glimpses. Maddening seconds where we could remember. Introduced by Prince Andrew of Monaco at “The World Music Awards,” where her weightlessly compelling reading of “I Will Always Love You” - defying gravity, clinging with such strength to the notion of a love that would never let go -- eclipsed any scurrilous notion or harsh photograph.
For the Dawn of MTV Generation - and countless waves of young people who came after - Whitney Houston was definitive. Mariah could pummel a song; Alicia Keys, another Clive Davis protégé, could scale melodies with startling ease; Christina Aguilera could toss columns of air around like feathers, but none was Whitney.
Whitney Houston: effortless, gracious, glorious. She was glamorous even in a pair of beat-up jeans, hair a mess and giant sunglasses hiding heaven knew. She could sing circles around all of them - and had a knack for finding songs that spoke to feelings even larger than her voice - a gargantuan instrument - seemed to carry.
It was all so sad. The train wreck her life became. The music and film careers she eschewed. The chaos the public seemingly would never know. The squalor that swallowed her as drugs devoured her life.
Clive Davis remained unflagging in his support. Rumbles would tumble down the grapevine of a comeback. Houston would get clean, would come out, would dazzle. But had the moment passed? Could she maintain the strain?
It was hard to say. Harder still to know…
Until now.
Until an hour ago, when a few random postings hit the Facebook feed. Then the requisite Google News Search provided entirely too much independent sourcing. Whitney Houston was dead… no cause or whereabouts given… confirmed by her publicist to the ever vigilant and utterly credible Nekesa Moody of the Associated Press… on the night of Clive Davis' annual pre-Grammy soiree.
Ramdon. Sudden. Wham!
Too many images flooding my mind. Too many songs jump-cutting in my head. Too many memories laced into the soundtrack of growing up at the University of Miami, with a ten-year old Mustang with no air conditioning - windows down, radio painting the immediate vicinity with those shiy early hits.
Equally warm and heavy afternoons in Silver Lake, waiting on my star to rise… knowing that my name in Rolling Stone, Musician and The Los Angeles Times would take me places I couldn't imagine. Los Angeles so glamorous, girls like Whitney Houston with their perfect bodies and satin skin dressed to kill intimidating the a Midwestern girl in me… and yet on those afternoons of stultifying heat and doubt about the future, I could put on my pink bunny slippers and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and jump around the apartment until I wore myself out.
My beau at the time would return from the office to find me, t-shirt knotted up, hair matted with sweat and the album cover propped against our wall of vinyl and laugh. “Face down in Whitney Houston again?” he'd ask. “Get any writing done?”
Often the answer was “not really,” to which he'd reply “Feel any better?”
Inevitably, the answer was “Yes.” For if she could, why wouldn't I?
Only a matter of believing, pushing off the bottom and staying happy.
Staying happy is the trick. It seemed to elude her. Screw the talent, the charmed life, the bold faced-ery of it all. Screw the maggots who prey on the famous; the drugs, high impact great love in Brown. Damn the brokers of glisten who forget that it's the music that saves.
Somewhere Cissy Houston has a broken heart, Dionne Warwick is thinking about every sad song she ever sang. Don't even think about Bobby Christina, who lost the disaster that carried her for nine months and was the fierce mother who fought for every choice she ever made.
It was a waste, however it happened - and it don't matter how. Whitney Houston's gone. All that promise, that light, that talent: silenced.
Whatever it was, well, it happened. There's no turning back, not much reason to wonder what if. The tragedy is the entitlement of fame, the predators they draw like moths to light and the reasons too many people don't step in.
We as a culture have made vanity first a reason, now a blood sport. To be the hottest, youngest, famest, flamest… Lindsey Lohan has been choking on the fumes of this since before she could drive; Demi Moore and Heather Locklear are both locked up, unable to cope with inevitable reality of aging and hard-partying lives of privilege that are indulged for those who exist beyond the mortal coil.
Seemingly, they are immortal. So they don't just believe, but are sold by everyone who would sell them out. Lying to themselves and each other about the loyalty of those around them, convincing themselves it can't happen to them.
Until right now.
Whitney Houston's gone. She will, no doubt, always love us - perfection collapsed in Kevin Costner's arms in the climax of “The Bodyguard;” frozen in infamy as one more snuffed out too soon and with God knows how much left to create.
Tonight, Clive Davis will have his party - where she was slated to sing. Among those gathering will be some of pop, rock and soul's true royality: Quincy Jones, See Lo Green, Tony Bennett, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Jackson Brown, Jennifer Hudson, Elvix Costello and Diane Krall. What they will make this loss mean remains to be seen…
What it means to me is this: Create. Love. Be. Embrace every moment. Respect what you're given. Honor the people around you. Be grateful for others' work, their efforts, their gifts.
Try generosity and grace, eschew judgement and especially live with honor.
We all know right from wrong; good from bad, the straight path from the slippery slope - and we've all watched people we love teeter. Rather than say “It's not my place,” let's all reach out, steady or even pull them back. Yes, they might get mad, but in the end, better to cause rancor and save them than tacitly enable the things that can kill.
Whitney Houston was 48. That is the middle of middle age. Tony Bennett is still vital, still msking music and taking our breath away… So should it have been for her, for us.
How will we know, indeed?
-- Holly Gleason, 2/11/12
]]> Right now, America is reeling… Shocked that a respected coach could take a 10 year old boy, who no doubt idolized him, into the showers at a major American university's gym, pull the child's pants down and rape him. Equally shocking, a graduate student goes to the legendary head of the football program, a man who traded on integrity as a cornerstone of sportsmanship, and after the perfunctory notifications, it was the predator's shower keys that were taken away.
I'm reeling, too.
First, that two grown men - one an old friend who didn't understand his friend needed “help,” the other not so far from youth - didn't intercede more forcefully. Sex is for adults… Consenting adults… Theoretically, people of equal power, influence and the ability to decide what they want to do…
Secondly, that the students at Penn State, who have rioted in the streets, overturned satellite trucks for the local tv news, are more punch-drunk on the illusion of who someone is, then recognizing what that person allowed to go on is what they should be enraged about. Beyond lacking compassion for the unseen victims, they never paused to consider the betrayal of everything these men are supposed represent.
A journalist friend of mine, who is politically aware, celebrity savvy and also a former editor at Penthouse, put it best. “I'd like every one of those students to look at a picture of their tiny 10 year old selves - or even better, their little brother or sister at that age - and imagine someone forcing themselves into their…”
You get the idea. It's easy to degrade when you have no idea who's been or is being degraded. Joe Paterno knew. Joe Paterno did nothing; indeed, he probably interceded for his friend, recommended they keep it quiet “for the good of the program.” But that's never going to be part of the public record, or proved. It's the beauty of “an audible.”
His friend, Jerry Sandusky, quietly retired. Then he started a charity for “at risk youth,” kids who needed some attention, an adult role model. He assistant coached at a local high school. He brought boys into his home. He continued doing what he'd done at Penn State - only now it was under the sanction of doing good for others, a charity giving back to the community.
My mind reels.
Eight boys that we know of. How many more who're too ashamed to come forward… Too embarrassed to tell the truth for being sodomized, touched in inappropriate ways, quite possibly forced into oral copulation. And we shouldn't know: they shouldn't have to suffer through the dirty details beind trotted out like some tittilation for the bleachers - especially to thwart the claims “it wasn't that bad.”
No child, actually, no person male or female, should ever be intimidated or taken advantage of based on authority or position of influemce.
Watching “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos interviewed the mother of Victim 1. Her face was obscured; her voice run through a pitch-changer for fear of reprisals. She told a tale of her son withdrawing, of his being told “no one will believe you if you tell…,” of her son being removed from school without her knowledge…
And she was the one being obscured.
No doubt she felt guilt about what she didn't know, and how long it had gone on. When she started to ask questions, she knew not to press; what could be more embarrassing for a boy on the brink of puberty than to tell his Mom what happened. The same Mom he'd already asked if there was a book of “Sex Weirdos.”
Wisely, she involved the school's counselor. They got the story. So the investigation began. Quietly. Because in 1998 and 2002 and heaven knows how many other years, these investigations were done so quietly, they never disrupted anything…
And here the mother, quite possibly single, had been relieved that a man with Sandusky's reputation had taken an interest in her son. Boys need male role models. She'd hit the lottery. He could most likely help with college, demonstrate another kind of life, help him develop her son's skills and confidence.
How does one not trust someone in that sort of position? With that kind of resume? Who has a charitable organization devoted to this very thing? Especially for so many years, especially with a close friend like the legendary Joe Paterno.
And that's the problem with not speaking up. How would you ever guess? Ever think? Ever dream? How dare you judge someone like that o harshly?
Just as certainly, who would knowingly empower or enable someone like Jerry Sandusky? Who would allow a grown man who victimizes children to not get help? Not ever allowed to be in a position where they could rape or sodomize a child again?
What kind of person stays silent? Is that loyalty? Or a complete moral breakdown? We know Jerry Sandusky has a problem… pedophiles are considered mentally unfit… What's Joe Paterno's malady? The graduate student? Though the student may well have been intimidated, shamed or “reasoned” with… “for the good of the program.”
How good is a program, though, if this is what it covers up?
We're only as sick as our secrets is an Al-Anon truism.
For Penn, it calls into question so many things about the ethics of the people in charge.
For those young men, it creates a vortex of self-doubt, an inability to trust and a rage that they never be able to even explain. Often with this sort of trauma - and it is trauma - the brain will sublimate the memory so the victim can cope. They won't knowwhat's wrong, just that something is…
Or they will have irrational fears. Perhaps withdraw. Maybe become suicidal.
They've done nothing wrong, yet how wrong is this? And how often do the perps use blame, shame and fear as tactics to get the children to remain silent, to endure repeated abuse, to believe there could be worse coming.
It doesn't change much when you grow up. You get conditioned to look the other way, to not make waves. It becomes a way of life. You learn that bosses have power - they can take away jobs, not give bonuses, create horrible workplace conditions - and so you must endure.
Endure or lose your seniority. Endure or risk not finding another job in a tough economy with record unemployment. Endure or lose work that fulfills you, that you're educated for. Move on, and still possibly know the consequences for speaking up could mean no future employment in your chosen field.
Nobody likes a troublemaker. Everybody has a past.
The question, though, is how will the people with everything to lose portray the ones saying, “This is wrong…” or even “No…”
Sometimes it's cruel jokes. Sometimes it's whispers behind their back - or distorting the facts, leaving out pertinent information. Maybe it's bringing up things that are not germane to the wrong, in an attempt to undermine the person who's been victimized's character.
In some ways, the Herman Cain thing is living proof. Did he? Why would he? And yet, growing up, I played enough competitive golf with the wives of men with “good jobs” to understand how women can turn a blind eye to keep their family - or lifestyle - together. “For better or worse” can mean a lot of things… and who men are when their wives are not around can be very different from the devoted family men they present.
The irony is that the women who tend to be victimized are usually the ones who end up being silenced. Many of the ones who come forward, like the mother of Justin Bieber's “baby,” are the gamers.
They are not brazen. They just want to be left alone. They want to move on, to forget about it. Why would you look back at that? Oh, yes, because something - often far more than just your dignity - was taken from you.
The silence is kept… for the sake of getting along, of not being ostracized, of who knows what might be cooked up? The two women in Cain's coterie of “what happened?” are already being picked apart: work histories examined, as if unfair workplace conditions could only happen once. As if a man who might fish off the strange pier now and again - indeed, who might find plenty of willing women who're happy to have a little dinner and a little nibble to get ahead - is unthinkable.
People have cheated as long as there are marriages. Men - and women - have used their positions, influence and money to grease the rails of love, lust and many stripes in between. It is only when the attention is unwanted and leveraged that there's a problem - or when the bias is based on something unfair.
Most people don't remember Christine Craft. She was an accomplished journalist, but more significantly, the first woman to win a high profile sexual bias suit. Bypassed for promotions and key assignments, she was eventually released from her local tv news anchoring job for being “too old, too ugly and not deferential enough to men.”
She won. She had to fight hard, endure her life being completely dismantled and held up for judgment. Theoretically, she was a feminist icon, a woman of principle willing to tell the truth, to stand up on behalf of every other woman trying to make her way in the business world through intelligence, professionalism and solid experience and skills.
"Would she do it again?" I asked her as a college student, reporting for a Miami alternative weekly. She took me in, studied my glowing face. Then she paused. For what seemed like a minute. Truly debating.
“I wouldn't,” she said. “No, uh-uh.:
I wanted to press, but I couldn't. It would've been too painful, I could tell. Whatever she'd been through for justice to be served, it hadn't been worth being eviscerated.
When we were done and making the post-interview small talk that creates the illusion of intimacy, she looked at me again, really weighed who she thought I was. Her eyes narrowed a little, then she dropped the bomb.
“I shouldn't have sued,” she said. “It's hard to find work… There's always a 'reason,' but it's obvious.”
Our eyes locked. Was this sisterly advice from someone who'd been there to a bright-eyed kid? Or merely a woman exhausted from another long day of media and speaking engagements, flogging what happened to pay her bills? Was she a woman who'd found someone she could trust, who might understand why she felt like that - and just needed to unburden?
I'll never know. Overwhelmed by the depth of the revelation, I went, “Wow…”
The bubble burst. I was a kid. The soul search was over.
Christine Craft was a damn good reporter. She shouldn't have had to suffer because she didn't want to play honey-blond-bimbo to her big strong co-anchor. If you had a daughter/sister/best friend, would you want that for them?
But you gotta be smart. As Alan Jackson warned, “Here in the real world/ the cowboy don't always get the girl…” and “justice” might just be a fancy concept, a high-flying notion that's about protecting the powerful in whatever state of conduct or business they might pursue, an illusion brokered to the rest so we can believe “we'll be treated fairly; we're protected from unfair situations; we're all equal and have the same protections.”
“You scratch my back, I'll scratch your's…” is more like it.
If you're a 10 year old boy who doesn't understand… an almost middle-aged woman not particularly interested in favoring a married man - or really any man… It shouldn't become an issue.
Being made to feel uncomfortable, let alone violated, is a wrong. Simple as that.
When you've done wrong - and could be getting exposed for it - the stakes are high How many wrongs are you willing to sow to protect the sketchy? The stakes then become exponential, and, well, to thine own self be true.
Just ask Joe Paterno. Or the mothers of those young men in the area surrounding State College, PA.
Maybe being true to yourself is doing the right thing, speaking up, dealing with the consequences. As my father used to tell me when I was a kid, “Don't do things you're worried about people finding out about… Because if you have to worry, then probably you shouldn't be doing it.”
My Dad also raised me with a sense of “playground justice.” Again, something simple enough for a kid - especially a girl going to an all-girls school where there wasn't much bullying to be seen.
“If you see a kid being beaten up or harassed, and you don't do something,” he admonished, “then you might as well pick up a baseball bat and join in. I'm not telling you to go fight the bullies off, but find a grown-up and make them help.”
Again, it was just that basic.
Listening to Jon Stewart's “Daily Show” commentary about the protestors, I marveled. Seeing the rage on those young people's faces was horrible; realizing they never stopped to think about the kids and what demons they might be living with was sobering. It took me back to the basic wisdom of John Gleason.
Looking to make the point on Facebook, I posted:
Tacit endorsement is doing nothing…
Tacit endorsement means no consequences…
Tacit endorsement is full complicity!
Maybe we can blame the sexualization of advertising, the breakdown of the family, the Girls Gone Wild high school hottie culture, the predominance of internet porn, the easy sleazy I-me-mine reality that is all greed and immediacy…
In the end, wrong is wrong.
If you say nothing, you condone everything. Because nothing changes.
Circumstances, context, actions. Simple as that. “No” means “no.” Children are innocent and that should be protected. Even kids who've been exposed to too much shouldn't be preyed upon.
Job tracks are on one's feet, not back.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean you should.
Somehow I feel a lot less cool right now, but I also feel like I am serving the truth. Not mine to tell, but any support and encouragement that can be given to those who've been wronged is being the kid my father raised. It's not much, but who knows who it helps? And in standing strong for those who need to know someone cares about what happened to them, that's the most powerful thing I can imagine.
-- Holly Gleason
11/11/11
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Just as quickly, the romancing of the necrophoolishness began All the talk of the 27 Club, those tortured seemingly-beyond-comprehension-talents who also died in their 27th year Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. There’s nothing romantic about addiction – or the kind of pain so profound no amount of drugs or sex or booze can tamp it down.
It’s an odd bargain we watchers of the bold-faced make. Reveling in the lip gloss and hair color, high heels and hobbies; but also voraciously consuming these creatures who capture our attention, For what reason do we watch? What gift? Does Snookie have any real value? The Kardashians? Paris Hilton?
Beyond Amy Winehouse’s ages old voice, a delicious mix of sweat and ennui boiled in a flammable combination of kerosene, cocktails and bodily fluids, her biggest hit was the sardonic “Rehab,” a song mocking the thing that might’ve saved her – had she ever committed to it.
Instead Winehouse’s notoriety was driven by a bobsled ride of trainwrecks, misadventure after trainwreck misadventure piling up like used syringes. Wandering around, clearly out of her mind, bee hive busted, eye liner smeared down her face, often in a state of near complete undress. Sometimes it was rows with tavern keepers; occasionally, her acting out coming via on-again, off-again husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a man quite possibly along for the ride on the reflected glory fame flume.
A highlight of that combustive union pictures from the morning after a particularly brutal night, her bruised eyes, feet bleeding through ballerina flats and him, face clearly scratched madly, walking hand-in-hand down the street like post-soul Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Placidity post-pound down.
Insanity makes for good copy. The media can’t get enough of a disaster, and 5 Grammy Awards be damned, the high jinks meant more than the music she created. For having been raised on a strong vein of classic jazz and saloon songs – her first album was named Frank in obvious homage, and contained the gold-digger hating vitrol “Fuck Me Pumps” – and easing into a ‘60s soul redux that had a modern flair, equal parts wide-eyed innocence and street-wise irony, Winehouse told it like it was for a generation watching all social norms being melted down for greed and a brand-name-checking nihilism designed to validate from the outside rather than the inside.
But it’s that raw ache, like a rope burn to the soul, that made her something more than the Brit-pop-soul thrushes – from Duffy to Adele – who came in her wake. This wasn’t about the pain of a relationship gone really bad, this was some other kind of soul-battering that had a profound darkness, no doubt heightened by addiction, at least one toxic relationship and the enabling that all pop stars attract.
Because it’s hard to tell pop stars “no.” The second you do, five willing compliants pop up, validating whatever bad thing they crave as something deserves and often deriding the person voicing objection as “a buzzkill.”
Being the one standing by, watching, helpless and knowing every outreach only alienates the addict, sex hound, boozer further. The debate begins: stay close and hope you can catch a falling star… or allow them the consequences of their actions, knowing the ultimate end could be the ultimate consequence.
There’s a saying a recovering alcoholic I know – 20+ years sober – embraces, “Don’t deny me the dignity of my struggle.” Or in the case of record company people who need the next record, the agent and manager who commission, everyone else who gets their fees, the momentum of her fame and the money.
Who tells someone who can still create a furor with next to nothing – her Tony Bennett track will no doubt be a stand out –they don’t have a choice? The tour’s cancelled. You’re off the road until you’re sorted out. REALLY sorted out, not a Band-Aid on the problem and a blind-eye to the fact that your treatment is a white knuckle kinda sobriety.
Not to mention how annoying the incessant calls, problems, shady characters and questionable reasons become. Some of the handlers resent or mock the person behind their back; others join in – as part of the party or from the fringes rocking their own deal because the artist doesn’t know… and no one cares. They’re beyond that in the momentum of the meltdown.
Those meltdowns, by the way, are awesome. Not only does it give the media a quick jolt of adrenal buzz, a way to hold people’s attention, it allows readers, viewers, regular people to feel superior – because they’d never be that messed up.
Look at Britney shave her head… Attack the mean paparazzi with an umbrella…
Watch Courtney throw make-up at Madonna live on tv… see her wander into a Wendy’s almost naked… Fight with her daughter Frances Bean on Twitter…
See Kate Moss honk up a white powder with her then boyfriend Pete Doherty, of Baby Shambles, a man known more for his drug abuse not music…
Watch the indulged famous brats implode. Easy prey. Lost souls. Dumb luck. Hard work. Take this and be cool… Be an outlaw… Rock harder than a mere mortal… And hey, Icarus, if those wax wings melt cause you’re too close to the sun, don’t blame us when you crash to the ground and die.
Shoulda known. All those chances.
We consumed your pain, your freak-out and turned it into water cooler conversation.
We drove our mini-vans or Priuses, wore our neat and clean clothes – or our pseudo-bohemian hipster looks, took out the trash and hit happy hour. We loved the music, but we loved the freak show more. And so the roulette wheel spins. Most make it, some don’t – but we, the Romans are entertained watching the stars face lions that look just like indulgences.
What we lose is what that music might’ve been. There are plenty of great straight up soul singers, but Amy Winehouse hit veins – sometimes with razors, sometimes diamonds, but always with deadly clarity.
Maybe not like Billie Holiday, another famous junkie the press is now rushing to invoke, but perhaps more like Judy Garland, a tragic figure propped up for commerce and lost in a pain we’ll never know.
What kind of songs would Kurt Cobain have written? What would he have said about the state of his generation? The nation? The world?
What kind of breakthrough playing would Hendrix have achieved? Where might he have taken the electric guitar? What might rock songs have become in his cosmos of groovy love and psychedelia?
Would Morrison have recovered enough to find a societal matrix that would’ve broken through to the other side? Merged poetry in its purest form with the release and conquest that rock & roll is at its root?
And Joplin? What soul-melting revelations could’ve come – a la Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time – had she found a little help? Could she have melted pain and defenses with her raging vulnerability? Maybe.
It’s really the “We’ll Never Know Club.” We can’t say they could’ve been saved. But you can wonder what price does putting your foot down exact? Lose the friend, the client… save the life, possibly.
Over the years, I’ve delivered a bunch of bad news. Starting with my own parents. People don’t like it. They get mad. They hate you. There’s never any proof what you stood down “woulda got’em.”
You don’t know. You don’t. And the other person has to want to be more than a piss’n’puke stain on the floor. Tricky business, saving lives that are more valuable in any shape half-functioning. Yet, the ultimate loss is even more.
We couldn’t have done anything to save Amy Winehouse. But participating in the tabloid speculation, the “ooooh”ing and “tsk”ing about “how awful it all is” creates a market for these people to be hounded. The worse it gets, the harder to cope; the harder to cope, the more likely they are to numb.
It’s easy to say, “it comes with the privileges.” And it does. But it’s also about helping these people walk the line of fame in a way their sanity isn’t one of the first things to go, replaced by the copious consumption based on rock star expectations.
It takes special skills to navigate fame, the rush of everyone wanting a piece of you. It takes handlers who believe in humanity as much as money. It takes a long-eyed view of a flame burning awfully fast.
When you hear someone’s sliding, express outrage and concern. Don’t sniger and laugh. It is funny: those humiliating, crazy things that happen when people can’t get right, but it’s something more, too.
Like I said: we didn’t cause, couldn’t stop it. But we’re all accessories when feeding the beast that eats their lunch. What we lose, we’ll never know. Creativity is its own commodity, but a little bit of our humanity goes when we’re callous, mocking, eye-rolling, indifferent.
Think about that, and think about being the change we need to see in a celebrity-obsessed world where too many are famous for nothing but the empty husk of not much more than gaudy consumptive lives
]]> My father wanted to read about business, local sports, major headlines, serious things. I wanted - with every fiber of my being - serious things, too. I wanted to read Jane Scott!
Jane Scott, the world's oldest teenager even then, was the bridge between my 12- and 13-year old self, dazzled by songs and overwhelmed by the notion of the people who created them, and the source of my pleasure, my pain, my quickly evolving insight into who I was and all the confusing emotions that made no sense. I would never meet people like that, glamorous rock & roll sorts… not in my pink suburban bedroom with the canopy bed and a summer already filled with tournaments and tee times.
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, James Taylor, Neil Young, the Allman Brothers and the Wilson Sisters of Heart were far too exotic to ever share the air that I breathed. They were shiny people, channeling truth I desperately was trying to understand - and they knew. They knew…
The best I could hope was to worship from under the Pavillion at Blossom Music Center, maybe the first tier at the Richfield Coliseum - or a shadowy corner of some bar where I'd convinced the bouncer to look the other way, wrapping my library card in money or getting some musician to “swear” I was “their niece.”
Jane Scott closed the gap. She was my friend who was their friend.
She was curious, and she loved the music. She believed in the joy music held, the triumph and power of rock & roll, even its ability to shift how people view the world. It was an interview with Jackson Browne for his tour stop for Late For The Sky where he spoke about environmental concerns, nuclear power and Greenpeace that sent me on a mission to learn about things that are toxic.
That was Jane Scott: what mattered about this artist? How to bring it out? Make it shine?
And she was never cynical.
Never cynical. A Grammy-winning musico I know half-sneered, “She never wrote a bad review about anyone…” And it's true. She believed in finding what worked, maybe acknowledging a problem, but never harping on what was lacking.
As a young journalist in Miami, I fell in with the maverick journalists who ran Tower Records' Pulse magazine, given away free in the stores. It was a loss leader designed to intrigue people about records, and it became a very well respected music publication by virtue of the quality writers they engaged. Their motto was pure Scott: “We listen to a lot of records. We write about the good ones.”
Not that I realized growing up that Jane Scott was paving a yellow brick road for me, She was an artery of truth and understanding, oxygen for a kid who was more alive between the grooves of a 33 1/3 circle of vinyl than most moments of most days.
I would pour over every inch, nodding my head, taking it in. What I was hoping to find, I can't say… But I knew that taken as a whole, I was coming to understand what the soul of rock & roll looked like, the essence that created the music that wafted through the airless third floor attic where I existed with my turntable and the dust bunnies. Too hot in the winter when the heat rose, too hot in the summer when the temperatures got trapped under the eaves.
Carly Simon. Wendy O Williams. Chrissie Hynde. Lou Reed. They were all there. And more… Southside Johnny. Bruce Springsteen. The Eagles, especially Joe Walsh. Linda Ronstadt. Later the Stray Cats. Romeo Void. Devo. The Dead Boys. r.e.m. Missing Persons. U2.
And on, and on, and on….
Live Aid. Woodtstock '94. Lollapalooza. Since Sept. 15, 1964, if it was rock & roll and it mattered, the woman with the oversized red glasses and blond pageboy was there. She carried a huge purse that contained ear plugs, three pens, notebooks, a peanut butter sandwich. She was ready for whatever might happen - and often did.
This is, after all, the woman who followed Jimi Hendrix to a Cleveland Heights Chevy dealer and watched the reality-shattering guitarist buy a blue Corvette. She saw Springsteen at the Allen Theatre in 1975 and wrote “His name is Bruce Springsteen. He is rock's next superstar…” long before TIME and Newsweekthought about putting the Asbury Park wharf rat on simultaneous covers.
Maybe she was lucky. Maybe she was so voracious to experience it all - the good, the bad, the REO Speedwagon - that her margins for being right were huge. I didn't care. I didn't think about any of that, I just fell head over heart week after week into whatever rabbit hole she was illuminating.
Pink Floyd? Sure. Todd Rundgren? Absolutely. Bob Welch? Why not?
Why not? Indeed. You never know, I'd think. If perhaps Yes would never strike me, surely there was something to Kim Carnes that would. Valerie Carter, who was produced by Lowell George from Little Feat, and Rickie Lee Jones. Carlene Carter bent at the waist with all that fringe, talking a broken white line between her heritage as the (grand)child of country music's seminal Carter Family and the vows that made her the better half of Brit's pre-punk Stiffness Rockpile. She sang with Dave Edmunds, she married Nick Lowe.
It was all there. All I had to do was beat John Gleason to the front door.
And Jane led me to the world of CREEM, Rolling Stone, Circus, Hit Parader, Song Hits!. Then later British publications like NME (New Music Express) andMelody Maker. It was a keyhole I could peer through, inhale a little of the rarified air. Jane Scott made sure the people who read her had that much. She made sure the humanity and the magic shone through.
I didn't really set out to do this: write about music, make dreams come true. There was no template for that in Shaker Heights, Ohio where the true cash crop is corporate housewives. Girls like me wouldn't know where to begin, or what to do when we got there. And besides, how would one go about it?
Watching Jane Scott was a good start. She led with her heart and closed with her abiding curiosity. Where did the music come from? What did it mean to the people making it? Why did they do it? And what made it special for them?
That seemed to be the basic through line of everything she did. It fed my soul for years as a kid at the kitchen counter, slurping down Fruit Loops or Cocoa Crispies, Captain Crunch when I could convince my mother there was any nutritional vale to them. Reading amazed before the humiliation of climbing into the school car would befall me. The cereal went down without ever being tasted: I was consumed by whatever Ian Hunter, Grace Slick or Cheap Trick had shared with Jane Scott that week.
“Cleveland Rocks”? Indeed. “You Wear It Well”? Rod Stewart transitions again, as did Bowie. A bunch of ramshackle losers - like the Replacements and the Georgia Satellites - all opened up for the guileless (as Lou Reed explained her) woman. She had her ways, and I absorbed them without even knowing.
Without even knowing. One thing, an accident really, led to another.
A week of golf with a demi-famous person -- who would grow up to be the impossibly famous Vince Gill -- and a missed high school journalism assignment. A quick interview, a tossed off suggestion. The reality that 15 years of playing golf was now over at not quite 18. The need to put something there, and the truth that being a voice on the radio didn't get me close enough, offer the outlet I was yearning for.
So I started writing. College paper, local rag, fanzine. But always with the knowledge that I was only as good as my slugline, the inserted line beneath my name that explained how I was affiliated with this publication. “Special to…” or “Staff Writer,” “Palm Beach Post Music Critic.”
Along the way, if it paid, I wrote for 'em. Black Miami Weekly, In Records Timez, The Weekly News, a fistful more I can't recall. But also there were legendary fan publications - Rock & Soul, Country Song Round-Up, especially punk's wonderful Trouser Press.
I was the market correspondent for Performance. Had a guest editorial inBillboard as a 19-year old college junior about plugging into the potency of the Live Factor. Always The Miami Hurricane, the college paper I rode roughshod over, terrorizing editors and writing long, knowing pictures can be resized.
Turned down by The Cleveland Scene, I was writing for The Plain Dealer a few months later, as well as The Miami Herald. At the time, The Herald was a Top 10 daily newspaper - and I was a college sophomore.
Tell the story, find the essence, look for the quote.
What did they have to say? How do you get them to tell it?
I had no training. No idea or clue how to… Just a fire for the music, a need to know where the songs came from, what they meant and why they mattered so much to me.
My father'd advised against journalism in college as I'd already had several pieces published - including the lead story in the 1979 United States Golf Association's Amateur Championship program. “You know how to write,” he'd counseled. “Go learn something.”
So there I was: fueled up on the fear of being found out, driven by this yearning to understand. Odd things like Nazareth, the Catholic Girls, Modern English before they melted with you, the Bangles in a van and Cindy Lauper when no one outside New York cared. And the country acts that paved my way into the Herald: John Anderson, Alabama, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, TG Shepard, Johnny Lee.
Back music, too. I can't forget the other book end. Heck, the Dazz Band was my entrée into The Plain Dealer, “an upclose look” at the hometown band who'd go on to win a Grammy in 1983, tying Earth, Wind & Fire for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group. The Commodores. Ashford & Simpson. Patti LaBelle. The System. Shalamar plus solo Jody Watley and Howard Hewett. DeBarge.
You get the idea. Heck, Pavarotti, who singled me out when the “grown-ups” kept ignoring my raised hand at a press conference. Impressed by my question, we talked for a while after.
The stakes kept going up. The artists more intense. The level of access more elevated.
Every now and then, I'd step out of my body, get the shakes. There was only one answer: What would Jane Scott do? Or even more exactingly, What would Jane Scott ask?
No truer North Star to steer by. Gracious curiosity. Why did you do that? Tell me about the song most people never noticed, the weighty one that mattered? How are you feeling?
And she meant it. Whatever she asked, she wanted to know. You could tell by the way people responded. She got people to be honest, to drop the chip on their shoulder… to be vulnerable. Even Lou Reed, a man so cantankerous he'd walked out of our first interview for no apparent reason - only to be brought back by his publicist, was a supplicant of the woman who once wrote obituaries.
What would Jane Scott do? Go out, of course. See a band. Wear a big smile on her face. Laugh as she considered what might be, what's missing, how to find her way to the center of all of it. She did, too. No one found the center quite like Jane Scott.
I know, because I read her voraciously. Knew the humility, the love, the passion for the music and the people who made it. She had no shame about it; saw her writing as a privilege. She took it seriously, and she brought a lot of people to acts they might not have cared about.
I thought about that watching the very bloated Molly Hatchet perform a lights out set of exquisite Southern Rock perfection shortly after Danny Joe Brown had returned to the band. It was the mid-80s, and I loathed everything they were musically; because of Jane Scott, I loved everything they were and did for their fans.
Jane Scott - and the art of loving what is.
Also, the art of appreciating what one loves. To not get so caught up in the moment - as I did after my third session with Neil Young the first time he and I met on behalf of Tower Pulse for his country Old Ways, leaving my tape recorder on the bus - that perspective gets lost.
Perspective, even if you're trying to look on the sunnyside, is everything. Calibrated appropriately, it lets you tell the truth without being vapid. But it must be watched and maintained. There is a difference, and if you choose to focus on what's good, you have to be aware of what's wrong. Being clear-eyed can let you lean to what's working, because you're not just some fan foaming at the mouth. You realize, too, there is a sacred contract with the reader to tell the truth, not opine and pontificate, but share and show.
Shortly after my name started appearing regularly in Rolling Stone, I had the opportunity to do a panel in Cleveland… for a North Coast something or other, a demi-New Music Seminar that was mostly stillborn. I can't tell you anything about who was there, what the topic was - though I remember making a plea to the attending to believe in their dreams and maintain their standards along the way - or much else, beyond it was in the Flats.
There is one moment, though, that stands out. As the panel was ending and people were coming up to the podium, a lady approached with red glasses and a a blonde pageboy. She was smiling. Her head was bobbing. Joy extruded from her.
“Yes, yes, I'm Jane Scott,” she said As I nodded back, muttering like some simpleton echo chamber, “Yes, yes, I know…”
“You're from here, right?” she asked. “You went to Laurel, didn't you?”
I stopped cold in my tracks. All the Spin, Rolling Stone, Musician, CREEMbylines hardly mattered. Jane Scott knew who I was!
“I did, yeah,” I replied, mystified.
“I thought so,” she beamed. “You used to write me letters…”
Which I did. Occasionally. When I agreed and it seemed like no one else did.
“And I think you used to write for us, too,” she continued.
I nodded.
“Yes, yes,” she said again, happily. Then she got down to business. “And could I ask you a few questions?”
She was writing a wrap-up. I can't even remember what she asked. It just was. Right there, where it used to be Pirate's Cove. Jane Scott, who I'd loved since I figured out what rock & roll was, asking, well, me. Maybe it was shock, or maybe awe. Regardless, I joined a pretty heady list.
In that moment, “the world's oldest rock critic” made me feel every bit as special as she had Linda Ronstadt, Motley Crue, Paul McCartney, Roy Orbison, Roger Daltrey and beyond. That was one of her many gifts.
She wasn't afraid to be unabashed about what she loved. Like the Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn, Jane Scott made it okay to get beyond the indifference or sangfroid of modern criticism - to enjoy without needing to come off as some kind of lord passing judgement.
It was just about the moment, what was said, shared, offered.
The last time I saw Jane Scott, we didn't speak. Not that I didn't want to, just that it wasn't to be.
I'd flown to Cleveland to take Alex Bevan, my first idol who'd graciously agreed to sing at my mother's funeral well over a year before, to see the fourway songswap occasioanlly done by Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett. Getting there early to visit with my songwriter friends, to take Alex on the bus to meet Lyle and Guy, heading to dinner… the bustle of it all… the rhythm of the evening got me back to the bus later than I'd anticipated.
“Do you know Jane Scott's here?” Lovett asked.
I shook my head.
“Hmmm, well, we'll see…” he offered, recognizing my pique.
I'd promised to introduce the four men that night. We both knew Jane would be seated by the time I slunk out front to take my place with my friends. I peered across the first rows but couldn't see her. Ever the appreciator of others, Lovett introduced her from the stage, had a light shine on the woman who outshone the spotlight…
“She is a real treasure,” Lovett proclaimed, and the audience cheered.
Lyle Lovett was right. She is a real treasure. The kind we should all cherish when they cross our paths, whether they're the bank manager, our child's teacher or a woman unafraid to “love some band” - as Sapphire the groupie proclaims in “Almost Famous” - “or little piece of music so much it hurts.”
Jane Scott loved what she loved. She wrote about it. And she wrote about other stuff, too. Always intriguing, always looking for truth. But especially, always inspiring people who loved music to dig deeper, seek more and find the part that made them feel most alive.
Feeling alive was everything to her. Or as she told The Plain Dealer's John Soeder when she tired, “What I like about rock & roll is you can't sit around feeling sorry for yourself… The blues perpetuate you're feeling of despondency.
“Rock gets you up on your feet, dancing! And you forget about it. The beats gets you going.”
No doubt they're “going” in heaven right now. Probably Hendrix met her in that blue Corvette when she hit the Pearly Gates, told her he knew where Morrison was holed up and they were gonna go rock with Joplin later. No doubt, she's laughing with the wind in her air - just as alive in heaven as she ever was on Earth, and for anyone who ever read her, they know: Jane Scott was always as alive as alive can be.
and for anyone looking for a more formal elegy for an inspiration + mentor
latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/07/remembering-legendary-cleveland-rock-critic-jane-scott.html
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