MOMENTS OF FOREVER: Kris Kristofferson's Love for ALL Defines His Llife

Willie and Kris were playing the Miami Marine Stadium, basically covered bleachers on a small inlet that ran along Key Biscayne. It was a scrubby situation, designed for South Florida rednecks to watch speed boats race and take jumps, just metal bleachers with an overhang to keep their hangovers from baking them out of their mortal coil in the scorching Saturday high noon sun.

The stage set on pontoons. The backstage was a couple of low rent yachts.

When the call from the promoter came – “Would you like to interview Kris Kristofferson?” – I couldn’t say “Yes” fast enough. He seemed surprised. Kristofferson had become an actor and an activist, far more than a songwriter or rock star. I was the cred freelancer covering country, black and rock of a certain stripe.

How do you tell a middle-aged white guy you and one of your friends once cut out of school one afternoon, took two Rapid Transit trains to Van Aken Center to watch the afternoon showing of “A Star Is Born”? Explaining that his swagger, shirtless or in a poet’s blouse was dangerous, bravado forward, but poetically elegant would be moot. He was a pirate, a rock star, a gypsy and a man who took great risks, reached deeper into the human condition and offered up the pivot points of pain, dignity and courage without furrowing his brow.

Heck, my father started telling me about Kris Kristofferson when I was a kid, propped between my parents watching “The Johnny Cash Show.” Landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him a tape. Janis Joplin’s last hit – the one after she died – was a Kristofferson song. He understood addicts, alcoholics and washed out losers in a way that meant they weren’t actually born to lose.

Oh, and he’d gone to Oxford.

Yeah, I wanted to interview Kristofferson, whose music career was sagging, but whose mark on American songwriting was already indelible. Rushing to the morgue to pull the clip file, I blessed the Miami Herald’s Fred Burger, who’d covered so many of the Outlaws and other progressive country acts with a matching eloquence. He not only had several pieces, he’d seen to it that the artists he thought were important had clips from other sources in there as well.

Reading, reading, reading. Boxing, the Air Force, a Rhodes scholarship, William Blake, a teaching appointment, flying out to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for extra money, parents hated the idea he would give up his legacy to write songs. Janitor at CBS Studios, where Bob Dylan was recording; dreamer who kept handing out demos, making friends with Willie, Cash, Waylon, Roger Miller, all the other travelers seeking to make a more elevated, sophisticated kind of lyricism with an even simpler melodic zone.

When the call came through, I was ready.

Scrawling my own kind of shorthand, the voice was ruddy, rich, warm, like a savory biscuit slathered in  something delicious, something like apple butter. He was laughing a bit, telling his stories, thinking about some of my questions, really honoring my curiosity. And that’s when I shot my shot.

“So what was it like, studying with William Blake?”
“Excuse me,” he said, tone twisting around itself a bit.

“William Blake, you studied with him…” pause, then adding helpfully, “at Oxford.”
“I’m sorry…” the voice on the other end was puzzled, then a giant laugh rolled down the phone.

“No, no, you studied with William Blake,” I protested. “It’s in the morgue.”
“Honey,” he said, tamping down his chuckle, “William Blake is DEAD.”
“I, uh, uhm,” the mortification was immediate. “Can you give me one second?”

“Sure, honey,” he graciously responded. “Take your time.”

Head down on the classical writer James Roos’ desk, I silent screamed like I was auditioning for a slasher film. And then I did it again, and again, and a fourth time. Exhaling, knowing I needed to pull it together because my 20 or 30 minutes was evaporating, I closed my eyes and reminded myself I might be 19, but I am a professional.

“I am so sorry,” I began picking up the phone. Kristofferson kept laughing. “I am so embarrassed. I was reading all the clips, and I swear, it was there… I didn’t just make it up.”
“Holly,” he said, cutting me off at the pass, “can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” At this point, he could end the interview. It would’ve been deserved.

“When was the last time – do you think – someone asked me about William Blake?”
I was silent. I had no idea. I didn’t want to make it worse.

“You there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”
The voice was kind, not chiding. He obviously recognized how stupid I felt. It appeared he felt for me: a young writer at a good paper who made a gaffe of Olympic measure. “Holly, I’ll make this simple: no one ever asks me about William Blake. I’m not sure most of the journalists I speak with even realize I know classic English poetry.

“The fact you did? You get all kinds of points for that.”

We talked for another 30 minutes; far longer than was booked, so he could answer all my questions. The story was good enough, it made the cover of the Weekend section, I believe left well and above the fold; though it might’ve been the entire bottom third all the way across.

Before he hung up, he asked another question. “You coming to the show?,” which I was.

“Okay, then do me a favor. I’m going to leave you a couple passes. I want you to come back and say, ‘hi.’ Can you do that?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, knowing full well rock stars never remember. They don’t. Ever.

Until I got to the box office. Not only were the seats the first row that rose up so you could see over the four or five rows on the flat, but there were the two backstage passes. My second fiancee, twice my age and never one to come to shows, looked at me with a cockeyed grin.

“Well, Gleason, look at that. Passes! You must’ve made an impression.”
I’d not told Jason about making an ass of myself, played it off as the promoter being grateful. My fiancée, who loved Willie and Kris, said, “Well, you need to go back there, say ‘hello.’ I think it’s important. Those are really serious artists…”
“Are you going to come?” That might’ve been even more embarrassing.

“No, I’m not going to come. Some things in this world, you need to do on your own. You need to walk back there and be Holly Gleason, the writer from the Miami Herald.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll think about it.”
I was definitely not going back there. Sitting quietly, wondering when the show – a good 15, 20 yards away from us – was going to start. John Valentino, the dark, lion-haired promoter rep, was suddenly squatting down by my seat. He was smiling. “Hey, somebody backstage wants to meet you. I’m supposed to bring you back to say ‘Hi.’”

“Gosh, it’s awful close to showtime.”
“Yeah, I don’t think the show’s starting ‘til you get back there.”
Slowly I rose, grabbed my purse and fell in behind the nicest man in South Florida concert promotion, who told me how much he loved my story. He remarked that everyone attached to the show really loved it, so he was glad they sent him out to get me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, clearly out of sorts. Pontoons on a choppy bay are no fun to walk on. Holding the ropes, feeling like my knees were buckling, I would lurch forward, hoping I didn’t fall straight into JV. When we finally climbed up on the stage, he took my hand, guided me around to the back and waved towards a gang plank down onto a boat. “Go ahead.”
Standing right where you’d step off, in a black tshirt and jeans, sinewy, slightly salt in his pepper and oozing charisma, Kris Kristofferson went, “Well, you must be Holly! And you look even younger than you sound.”

“I’m 19,” I said, used to people assuming a Herald writer must be in their 30s. “Hello…”
I put my hand out, he pulled into a hug. A big, friendly, warm and loving favorite uncle hug.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “And I wanna look you in the eye, and tell you that’s one damned fine piece of writing. I can’t believe you got all that from the scraps of conversation we had.”
He was smart: get me talking about the art of writing. Suddenly, we were writers, not a kid and an icon-in-the-making.  By leveling up, he made the awkward disappear.

“Are you kidding? Those answers were great. Your story’s amazing. And I got to write about all your songs, the way you use words. How could it not be great?” I asked.

“You’d be surprised,” he said a little too knowingly. I was young enough to not realize how cynical and crummy journalists could be once the white-hot moment had passed.
“I guess, but I still think if the songs are good, the conversation is excellent, the writing should lift itself.”
“You might think, but I promise: it doesn’t. You write like this at 19, I don’t know what you’re majoring in, but you should think about being a writer. You can write, and I know that’s not even what you’re studying.”
Holy crap! He remembered. He remembered me telling him my Dad wouldn’t let me study journalism or English, because I was a published writer from the time I was 14. Whoa.

The tour manager stuck his head over the side. “You ready?”
“I guess so,” he said. Then he looked at me. “Wanna watch from the side?”

“Hell yes,” I thought, but wanted to act cool. I said, “That would be nice.”
It was an open stage. I figured my boyfriend would see me. If he got mad and left, I’d figure out how to get home. Right now, I was going to stand a few feet away from Kris Kristofferson, so lean and cool, and watch him sing “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “The Silver Tongued Devil and I,” even “Jesus Was A Capricorn.”

Tasting the salt in the air, a tropical breeze blew across the stage and pushed his shaggy hair off his face. He really was beautiful, even more beautiful than in the movies. But his passion when he sang those songs, the vulnerability and willingness to show the broken places was mind-blowing. And talking about going to church with a lady named Connie Smith, walking to the altar and falling to his knees inspiring “Why Me, Lord?,” it opened a portal into blessings where it's all falling apart.

He and the band tromped offstage. They swept me up with them, then Kristofferson cut me from the pack. “C’mon,” he said, and walked me over to the other boat.

“Willie, this is the writer I was telling you about.”
Nelson was sitting with the writer from the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. He smiled and nodded. “Come sit,” he said. “Visit for a few minutes.”
Kristofferson bounced off the boat, probably to towel off from the swelter. Willie Nelson, his braids shorn into a flat top, looked exactly like my grandfather who’d just died. I was dumb struck, literally unable to speak.
“That was a fine piece you wrote,” he said. “Kris said he thought you were young. I don’t think anyone thought you were…”
“This young?” I managed. “Weird, ‘cause we talked about school.”
“Sometimes the details don’t register.”
“I get that.”
“It’s really about the work.”
“I get that, too.” Never have I struggled so hard to stay in a conversation.

When the promoter came to take us away, he was buoyant. “I am so proud of you,” JV said. “I am so proud you wrote a piece that made them want to meet you.”
“Yeah, wow,” was all I could say.
My boyfriend was so impressed. He actually told me, “If Willie would’ve let you stand on the side of the stage, you should’ve…”
“No, they definitely showed me out.”
Clang! Clang! Clang! “Whiskey River” kicked into gear, bottles – and a few drunks – started raining into the water between seats and stage. It was raucous. Lots of bikers, as well as kickers and redbecks. They came to dance, throw down and get lit.

By the time Kristofferson returned to the stage for a bawdy “How Do You Feel About Fooling Around” and “Circle Be Unbroken,” the place was unraveling. This was the power of unadorned music thrown to the crowd like gold coins and roses; people scrambled to grab what they could of the moment, to pull those emotions towards them.

Imagining this must’ve been what the Allmans were like in their prime, I held the back of the seat in front of me, a little dizzy. One man had a hand in getting President Carter elected, the other made landmark films like “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Both of them had talked to me; I would be in a daze for days.

“Here Comes That Rainbow Again,” to drop one song in among all the others, speaks so much to the way those men saw the world. Set in a café, dust bowl nowhere kind of town, a waitress took mercy on two hungry-eyed kids, telling them the candy they coveted was two-for-a-penny; it was exactly the money the children had.

A truck driver asks the waitress about why she did it. She asks, “What’s it to you?” believing in kindness over the straight bottom line. To her surprise, when the two truckers leave, there’s a small windfall at the table. Chastened by her kindness, they raised her ante and left a tip to say that kindness is the way.
An O. Henry short story over a classic folkie kind of melody, Kristofferson suggested what doesn’t kill you is worth indulging if it gives someone a little magic or breaks their melancholy. In the brightness and innocence that washed away the cynicism and world weary, the Songwriters Hall of Famer who received their Johnny Mercer Prize transformed anyone who listened.

When The Highwaymen, produced by Chips Moman, turned Waylon, Willie, Kris and Cash into the first true supergroup, the buzz was deafening. Tower Records’ PULSE assigned a cover story to me; all I had to do was juggle classes, superstar availabilities and not choke. At the time, this was the Mount Rushmore of the genre, and I understood even more now than when I’d done the Marine Stadium preview three semesters before.

First thing out of Kristofferson’s mouth, even before “Hello,” was “I just want to alert you: William Blake is still dead!” He laughed. I laughed, It was a riff on a “Saturday Night Live” bit, but it was also a small private joke, shared between the star and the humble scribe.

From being a total dodo to having a private joke? That was what made Kristofferson so lovely. He wanted to take the beat-up kid, find a way to usher her into the club. He wanted to connect some of the dots on the songs; they had Woody Guthrie and Cindy Walker, Ed Bruce’s “The Last Cowboy Song,” Guy Clark and Jimmy Webb, Bob Seger, two Johnny Cash classics, a Steve Goodman/John Prine co-write. We talked songwriters like people swap baseball cards; he spoke of what was inside the ten selections that made the album
It was strength without bullying, manly, not machismo. There were themes of social conscience, of passing time and tough places. These weren’t party songs, but things to make you think about the state of the world, how people treat other, who we throw away. It was smart and sobering as a work, and rich in terms of what we talked about.

He thanked me when he hung up, told me it was always a pleasure. I thought, that’s because you’re so good to talk to. Anyone not enjoying talking to you? They’re not doing it right.

Of course, Kristofferson was getting ready to get back into the water as an artist. He had a film with Nelson called “Songwriter,” a madcap sticking it to the Boss Hog music industry guy that looked like fun to make – and gave you a sense of how Nashville was when the creatives really were their own class of people. Independent, figuring out how to work between the lines, ready to hit the road, willing to go to any length for a practical joke and looking for a hit without selling out.

But Repossessed, a decidedly political album of social reckoning, was coming. It pulled no punches, threw down and drew lines. “Mean Old Man” and “Anthem ‘84” set the tone for a cruel, consumed by consumerism world and “They Killed Him” called out a culture that killed its visionary leaders, slaying them to never have to consider the truths Ghandi, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys put forward.

It was bold, and it struck a nerve if you listened. Most people chose to tune the radicalism out, marginalize the movie star who’d not had a hit album in a long time. When the phone rang at my desk at the Palm Beach Post, Kristofferson asked me what I thought. I told him I had hippie babysitters, this stuff is critical – if we can’t come together in peace, we would perish in the divisiveness.

With a band that had Billy Swan and Donnie Fritts, there was plenty of funky grit to go around. An outdoor show, it was a motley audience who showed up. Women swooning, because he was so fine. Vets and bikers who respected his courage for speaking up. Some country music fans who believed in the catalogue of many of their favorite artists. Native Americans who honored the way Kristofferson spoke to and for their heritage.

A melange of humanity, coming together in the songs. We didn’t speak that day. No backstage passes, though I was sure he saw me in the crowd, winked and nodded. That was plenty. Why crowd a legend when you can interview them for the paper?

By 1990, the politics had sharpened. Songs like “Jesse Jackson,” “Third World Warrior” and “Sandinista” left little to the imagination. He didn’t care; wasn’t going to pull his punches. He’d rather make music he believed in, cut live in the studio with his guys, that spoke the truth no one wanted to discuss. He wasn’t desperate, but was raging against a machine that wanted to use pop culture to distract America from what really mattered.

Like Jackson Browne, he spent his time talking to thinkers, leaders, the people on the front lines. He used his platforms – he was still an in-demand actor – to spread what he knew, and he knew plenty. He put his career and his life into the causes he believed in. And he just kept coming.

Somewhere in all of that, he fell in love with an ashy blond who was as fresh-faced and smart as they came. He and Lisa built a life, a family, kids who went in varied directions, saw the world and raised people’s consciousness. Mostly, they were love in action – and they served as an example of what can be if you truly commit and support another human being.

Just the way he looked at Lisa and smiled, you understood why he was the thinking woman’s heart-throb. That is how every woman deserves to be seen, but also respected.

He may’ve been an international superstar, touring the world with the Highwaymen or making any number of films. But mostly, he was a family man and the lover of Lisa. That was his joy, his grounding. In Hawaii, where they moved, all the local children adored him, too, called him Papa Kris – and followed him around, laughing and loving him as their own.

He stood up for the underdog, the little guy, the bullied and the overlooked. When Sinead O’Connor appeared at the all-star Bob Dylan Tribute Concert, held at Madison Square Garden, the air was charged. She had recently torn up a picture of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live,” igniting death threats, boycotts and being denounced by every Catholic organization in the world.

Brave, she took the stage, eyes piercing and seeking. She had come to sing for arguably the greatest songwriter who’d ever lived. Before she could get the first note out, an avalanche of boos hit that stage like a mountain collapse. Unable to withstand the velocity, the Irish songwriter/vocalist collapsed into a cloud of tears — and Kris ran from the wings to shepherd her off, cloaked in his arms.

As soon as he reached the shuddering musician, she proceeded to vomit. The vitrol she’d absorbed had to go somewhere. Kristofferson held her for a moment, assuring her the artists were with her; offering strength and comfort in a dark place, a pummeling moment.

If he didn’t suffer fools, he was generous with his praise. When an Oxford American think piece for his meditation on aging Feeling Mortal crossed the family’s horizon, he marveled that “Holly wrote that?,” no doubt picturing the kid from decades prior. When he saw me, he laughed and told me I’d clearly grown up.

And when “Better As A Memory,” a two-week No. 1, received it’s BMI Award for Most Played Songs of 2008, it was chaos as I teetered up to the stage in my 5” stiletto ballet slippers.

“Can you walk in those things?” BMI Nashville head Jody Williams inquired. “If you can, close your eyes and open them when I say…”
Like a good dancer, his hand slipped to the small of my back. Turning me 80 degrees, I heard now, and opened my eye lids to see Kris with his fingers in his mouth leading a standing ovation with Don Was. Surreal doesn’t begin to cover it, but my feet hurt, my heart was in my throat and tears were in my eyes.

“Can you believe it?” Jody asked. I shook my head no, because, well, it was hard to take in.

Pictures taken, someone escorted me off the stage. Before I could make my way across the room to say “thank you,” they were gone. The CMA Awards were the next day, so most likely they had an early call for rehearsal, or meeting because they were actually in town.

Walking out of our own rehearsal, I was talking to Clint Higham, Kenny Chesney’s longtime manager, about how the runthrough had gone. Coming in and cutting against the grain of rushing talent support teams, Kris was making his way towards us.

“I was so proud of you last night,” he said, taking my hands and looking into my eyes. “That is a damned fine song, Holly. A damned fine song, and you wrote it.”
I just looked at him. Cry? Laugh? Whoop? Busting a smile that was as wide as my face, I said “Thank you, and thank you. When I saw you and Don, I almost lost it.”
“We almost lost it, too,” he said. “Lisa had to tell me it was you…”
“Because you’ve never seen me in a dress.”
“Yes,” he admitted, laughing.

“Well, now you have.”
The talent wrangler came and got him, but we hugged. He told me I’d done good as he walked away, and I felt a little bit taller. If people had scoffed about me writing a song, they forgot I did it under another name so the song could have a life… and it did. If people acted like anyone could do it, like it was my proximity to Kenny that got the song cut, I didn’t care in that moment. Kris Kristofferson told me I’d written a damned fine song.

And when Kenny Chesney went on to co-produce Willie Nelson’s A Moment of Forever with Buddy Cannon, that Kristofferson title track wrecked me. A quiet performance, contemplative, yearning and yet thrilled with what has been shared, Kristofferson’s song was about the hope and wonder that even a transitory connection can yield. It’s not what was lost, it was what was felt.

Listening to Nelson in the studio, a witness to so much living, loss and adventure, the song felt like the wisdom of time. It also felt like a leavening exhale in a realm of shrinking connections, devastation and people lost not to fights or other lovers, but leaving this world.

When Kris began to fade several years ago, a bad diagnosis that Lisa refused to accept, they both hung in, seeking answers that would refute the diagnosis. One came, Lyme disease, and health returned, though the fragility of aging crept up in small degrees.

Still, there was Kris out playing with Merle Haggard’s kids, showing up at Farm Aid, being honored on the Outlaw Country Cruise. There was a tribute album. There was picking up Jerry Lee Lewis’ Country Music Hall of Fame medallion and delivering it to the Killer in Memphis.

Always something, always love.

Always love.

The last time I saw Kris, it was from eighteen rows back at the Hollywood. Rosanne Cash, beaming, walked across the stage as her rich, coppery alto followed the gorgeous imagery upwards. “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” may be Kristofferson’s most gorgeous song, and Cash grew up knowing poet laureate of the Outlaw movement long before she was herself a formidable songwriter and artist in her own right.

As the first verse  concluded, she reached her arm to the wings – and Kristofferson, eyes the purest blue of early morning, walked towards her in a parsons coat. Hair white, but flowing over his collar, he beamed right back at her, clearly knowing this was a moment to transcend all of our mortal realities. Rosanne continued to sing, Kris leaned into her and the mic, found his way.
They tangled voices, words, emotions on a song about letting go of someone you loved so they can find something better. Triumph in the sadness, a light that shines from doing the right thing. They both sang from a place of intimacy, a knowing that few can share. Though they had never been lovers, they had been life companions since Rosanne was still a girl – and when he looked into her eyes, you could see the pride he felt for the woman she’d become.
“Dreaming is as easy as believing it was never gonna end…” the song extols. Looking at the legend, Rosanne almost melted with her heart on her sleeve. Kris was savoring all that was, looking at her in pure delight. It was perfect, so perfect Cash dropped out, and let Kris have that final “do again…,” collapsing into his arms in an embrace that spoke to how precious their connection remains.

Turning away from my editor at POLLSTAR, I could feel the tears on my skin. Here was a man who’d seen so much, who should be eternal and always. Here was a man who wrote about hangovers (“Sunday Morning Coming Down”), needing human congress to survive the ache of living (“Help Me Make It Through The Night”), who knew that even when it’s over there’s a place for one last time (“For The Good Times”) and who understood the life-saving grace of surrender (“Why Me Lord”).
He was robust, tender, willing to let go. He spoke to the ‘70s zeitgeist when he wrote, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…” on “Me & Bobbie McGee.” There was no room for anything but being wholly present, leading with love and standing on the convictions of right and wrong.

For all that he was, he was a distiller of hearts. He offered generations of people seeking to understand a better way to express their longing, frustration and truth. He was fearless, joyous and willing – and as he wrote, “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down.”
I promise I won’t. But I can’t say that I won’t cry all night. I can’t say that I won’t stare into space on a plane to the West Coast tomorrow, wondering about losing another beacon of light to the stars above. Too many precious ones are leaving, and I imagine them all sitting around a poker table, laughing and raising the stakes: John Prine, whom he helped launch, and Steve Goodman, Cowboy Jack Clement, his dear Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Sammi Smith, Bobbie Nelson, Waylon, Donnie Fritts, known to all as “the leaning man from Alabam” and so many more rogues, characters and dreamers.

It was inevitable, of course. People age, people fade. But the ones who write such truth, they seem as if they’re immortal.
After suggesting that you were young enough to dream, and I was old enough to learn something new, Kristofferson summed up the seekers condition adroitly. With a demi-chorus, he explained,

“And come whatever happens now
Ain't it nice to know that dreams still come true
I'm so glad that I was close to you
For a moment of forever”

www.hollygleason.com

IF YOU HAVE CRYING EYES: John David Souther Will Be Here at Closing Time

IF YOU HAVE CRYING EYES: JD Souther Will Be Here At Closing Time

“All the press ever cared about,” he said, forcefully, but threaded with a whine, “was who I was dating.”

It was a challenge, a bit of a punchdown on the media. The dismissal was stupid, petty, especially uninformed. My ears pinned back.

“Well, you put it out there too much when you weren’t doing interviews. You made it a point.”
He was elegant, lean. Cheek bones and fast eyes, sandy/copper-colored hair a bit full, but well-sculpted. This was a man of refinement, who knew how to present himself. The gaze settled on me.

“WHAT did you say?’ Now the tone was incredulous. Clearly this person was used to selling his story as whole cloth, chapter and verse; an authority who didn’t know, but his position left him unchallenged by people who either knew less or didn’t want to tangle.

I didn’t care, because I was a journalist. Getting it right was critical.

“Who you dated,” I said. “It was always a thing, always known. Whispered about, but not quietly. One walking into your house as the first was leaving. It was legendary.”
He was gobsmacked, staring without words.

“And I knew that as a kid in Cleveland, Ohio. I loved Linda Ronstadt, and I knew. I knew about her, and Stevie Nicks, and Joni Mitchell, maybe Bonnie Raitt.”

Holding the inferno gaze as the face reddened, I knew I was a guest, asked to join Rodney Crowell’s family and friends at Talesai on Ventura Boulevard because I’d been the one who did the booking on “The Tonight Show” for Crowell’s wondrous album The Houston Kid. I’d been sliding into dinners with Crowell for years, been present at family dinners and awards moments, treated like a bonus kid or cheerleader baby. But always, I knew I was a guest in these rooms.

“It’s true, and the saddest thing is the music never registered the way it should have. You are J.D. f*%&ing Souther, and those albums were amazing. But it was never about the music. It never was, and I read it all.”

Hannah Crowell, Rodney’s gorgeous blond mermaid of a daughter, started to laugh so hard she almost flipped her chair over. Unbeknownst to me, no one spoke to JD Souther like this, no one dared. But how could they not when he came so hard and with such ballast? 
“I, I…” he said as Hannah’s outburst stopped the exchange. We all laughed, probably as much to puncture the awkward moment. He didn’t like the correction; I wasn’t happy that he’d just maligned something I’d done my whole life because he’d been played into a fame-facing hunger that America couldn’t get enough of.

“You are important, and your songs? But someone in your world rather than poisoning you on the media, telling you how crummy they all are, should’ve done a better job setting up the music, telling that story better, so the default wasn’t you as a dating man or co-Eagle.”

Rodney, no doubt, said something conciliatory, told us we were both smart, passionate people. I just laughed. Macho white men in the music business? Nothing new. It was a culture of blame and victimize what doesn’t come easy, say it doesn’t matter, talk smack about how little the critics are paid, what can you expect? But don’t kid yourself, everyone famous wants the good reviews, wants to be respected. It’s the curse of the creative class. 

He told me, “Well, Jay Cocks loved me. I always had that,” in self-defense.
I said, “Yes, his work at TIME is exceptional.” Souther’s jaw almost crashed on the table.

When we broke up for the night, people headed to where they were staying, JD Souther approached me. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t…”

“I get it,” I said. “I know what they feed you. People who don’t know how or can’t be bothered. Vilify what you can’t control; feed the artist a diet of rage and resentment, so they buy into dismissal instead of wanting what – in your case – they deserve.”
“Rodney told me about you,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”

That line fell there, somewhere between us, and lingered. 

Maybe he’d think about it, find some peace or ask for better next time. Trouble is artists often fall for flattery in the service of vanity. They don’t always realize that it’s not the people who fawn or drop names the hardest who can get the job done. 

How can an artist or manager truly know? Unless you’re on the frontlines, most people only know theories or have hunches about how it happens. What gate-keepers say becomes gospel. But in the end, it’s the actual how, not “facts” stacked as “gospel” that explains the way a story or placement came together.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was never going to see him again, and I not only loved his songs, I loved some of his albums.

Half a second paused. “You know, Black Rose is one of my favorite albums ever.”

“Ever?”
“Yeah, your version of ‘White Rhythm and Blues’ is so silky, and I loved Linda’s, and, well…”
“Well…”
“I think ‘If You Have Crying Eyes’ was the best George Jones and Tammy Wynette song I’ve ever heard. It sets the two people who should be together up in a way that also says why perfect and jagged as it is, they can’t connect.”

All the anger and charge was gone. He just looked at me. His car, and it was very shiny, black and waiting, was now blocking the mouth of the tiny parking lot partway into the Valley. 

“You actually know my music.”
“Yeah,” I said, head bowed demi-embarrassed as I moved towards my teeny tiny rental that was two cars back in the valet line-up. “I know your music.”

I can’t remember if Rodney gave me his number, or JD got mine. I am not quite sure when even. But somewhere in the blur of the next few months, there was a phone call. I apologized for being so strident, he explained he felt trapped in the way he’d been painted in the pop culture conversation.

“Well, you shouldn’t have talked about it so much,” I said.

“You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I do,” I countered. “Lots of famous people date lots of famous people. Most of us little people have no idea what happens in Club Fame, except with you.”
Silence, but I couldn’t gauge it.

“Well, except you and Joni Mitchell.”
He laughed. Point made, “And we know how Joni Mitchell feels about the press.”

I didn’t get into the inherent sexism of defining a woman by her paramours. How he was a cocksman, and she was a side piece. I’d already had one tumble down the electric mineshaft of recrimination with him. 

“But the sad fact is: you are an important American writer who also has a strong sense of classic songwriting structures and truths. That is what should’ve driven the way you were seen all along.”

He laughed again. He got it. He knew I knew. That was the moment that cemented our friendship in ways that transcend fame or commerce or any of the ways most “show friendships” are held together. Not that he cared that I “got” it, but the notion that I knew and understood. That was what mattered to him.

There was always something courtly about dinner with John David, something grown-up and elegant. White linen tablecloths, waiters in dinner jackets, very, very chilled martinis. Tone always one level below conversational, wicked humor, muted and boisterous laughter, the conversations romped and ranged; all about books and famous people, the truly famous and famous to those who cared, names like Tom McGuane, Eve Ensler, Jim Harrison, delicious things to eat and films that needed watching. Always films that needed watching, because as much as JD loved and devoured writing, that visual element of great cinema when executed to evoke added a dimension to what was already intoxicating.

He could be prickly, too. Annoyed at things that probably deserved annoyance. Had a code of ethos that governed how he dressed, engaged and responded to the world. He loved his beautifully tailored Manuel suits – that felt like the most gorgeous flannel – but instead of the normal rhinestones and technicolor embroidery, it was grey on grey. He preferred boots that were worn, flannel that was soft, old leather bags and taking your time whether it was a meal or a conversation in a parking lot.

I can close my eyes right now, see so many restaurants in muted light, a table away from the bustle – because musicians’ ears need more quiet to hear intimate conversation – and that, “We meet again” falling from his lips. Whether it was Nashville’s iconic Sunset Grille, a Mexican place on Sunset in the forsaken space between Hollywood and very fancy, a joint somewhere outside of town, or Sinema in an old movie theater, designed to capture glamour long gone, it was all treated with the same respect for dining and enjoying the meal.

Enjoying was one thing John David knew how to do: wherever he was, however it was going to be, he would savor every last morsel or moment. Making recommendations, taking forkfuls of something, always encouraging you to find other flavors or insight.

And that makes sense…
Look at the songs. Look at the heart. Look at the collaborators. 
When you’re writing with the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Rodney Crowell, and you’re not the artist, it means you bring a special kind of heart, a sort of wisdom and word sense  they can’t find on their own. “New Kid In Town,” “Faithless Love,” “Prisoner In Disguise,” “Best of My Love,” “Simple Man, Simple Dream,” the silky “Silver Blue,” even the torqued “Roll’Um Easy” and the rager “Heartache Tonight” defined the ‘70s and ‘80s, lingered well into the new century – and over the last few years seems to have found a new ubiquity.
He had his one brush with the Top 10 with his own Roy Orbison-esque “Only Lonely,” which shimmered when it poured out of the car radio. In an era of gleaming arena-sized rock, Souther had tapped a retro-nerve with the yearning that throbbed under Springsteen’s songs of romance from “Racing In The Streets” to “Thunder Road.” 
There was a balm to the big feelings, a swelling to the yearning that suggested how much emotion wasn’t being shown. But it was also a benediction that all will be well in the end. That sense of knowing the end is what matters always made John David’s songs a poultice to draw out the agony and heal the aching inside.

Even his other brush with the radio was a post-divorce, reality-check with James Taylor. The clear-eyed “Her Town, Too” offered the reality of how shattered bust-ups of seemingly true marriages could leave whole social ecosystems asunder, but especially dealt the woman who doesn’t have her own means of support, access or community. If JD’s voice was a birch to Taylor’s maple, both men brought a solidity to facing the wreckage with compassion, even mercy – holding up how unfair and cruel what happens to the woman left behind truly is.

“She gets the house and the garden/ He gets the boys in the band…” Like turning cards over in a game of solitaire, the acknowledgement how some people care, but they go with the work – and they understand, but it’s life. The ones who talk, who said they were your friend, more consumed with the gossip than the loyalty or the hurt. And that’s where John David Souther excelled.

He looked through the chaos, the buzz, the salacious and saw the heart of the person left behind. He wrote such great songs about love, because he was at his deepest core and corps a romantic. He recognized – and delivered – the hope and promise of the most exhilarating gambit of the human condition. But even more than pulse-race, it was the tenderness that mattered and seduced him, her, us and anyone, really, who paid attention.

Because a Texas kid, who did time in Detroit, Michigan and Shaker Heights, Ohio, he was a man’s man. A refined man’s refined man, as well, and there is a difference. He was stoic when need be, but heroic any chance he got. And it stained much of his later work with a sense of how evolved a being he genuinely was, always seeking that perfect heart-shaped valentine, that girl who’s soul he saw in a way it had never been seen.

When I turned 40, I decided to throw my own party. New Year’s Eve is a horrible night to celebrate anything but people who shouldn’t drink, and I dodge my birthday as a matter of course. But 40 is the turning point in life, I had a gorgeous green velvet jacket, and sometimes one needs to face the world and their life in.a way that says, “I’m here.” 
At the last moment, I almost choked and didn’t go. Called Sean at the Acorn, left my credit card number and suggested he just have the table order. John Hobbs, my most recent ex-fiancee, would have none of it when I called to ask him to serve as back-up “please eat” for what was ultimately a wonderful table of dinner party companions.

“I have a key, I am coming to get you.” Hobbs informed me.
The word uttered started with “F.” I have no trouble with age – except other people’s use as a way to marginalize and dismiss – because I believe if you stay curious, you only become more luxurious and wise. Just the self-importance of it felt off… attention? me? No. No, thank you.

When Rodney Crowell arrived with his blindingly lovely wife/artist Claudia Church, you almost saw no one else, because they are such a stunning couple. But Rodney explained that he’d performed a wedding, wanted to bring the couple along. He knew my virtual world means my friends are any friends of someone I love.
When I saw JD looking cute and elated, I may’ve barked just a bit. He was holding hands with a slight dark headed woman with a face that was pure Victorian joy. If Jane Austen could conjure a hip, glowing heroine, it was this gamine creature named Sarah, who was Irish-born and infused with that heart of glee and adventure. With that glittering smile and laughter that bubbled over like a shaken-up root beer, she was that certain someone who’d captured the Warren Beatty of the American songbook. 

Talk about a present on so many levels! To see someone who was so erudite, so humane, so consumed by life on a foundational and intellectual level find the woman he would pledge his fidelity to? He had to be in his late ‘50s, and clearly this wasn’t a jump decision fueled by fear of mortality. No, it spoke to the willingness to keep drinking people in, letting them open in your heart and trusting the moment when it arrived.

Few things that night made me as happy, not the jokes or the stories about the time that… Not the good news about my friends, not the chocolate Acorn cake that did impossible things with devils food layers and buttercream, not the great hugs and resolutions and hopes for the year ahead. John David Souther had done what I’d assumed was for him the unthinkable, looked happier than ever and was more alive and animated than a man should be.

Ahhhh, we should all be so seen and realized. 
JD, Sarah and Enya, her daughter, bought a farm outside of Nashville, had some land, some dogs and created a world that Ralph Lauren would envy. Not only did it hold all of the totems that make the designer iconic, it was suffused with love and use, meals, chatter, coming together with neighbors, fellow musicians and friends.

And he started really writing and making records again. Joking about “I don’t know if anybody needs them,” but he set standards for songwriting, pulling back the curtain on adult desire that was for a connection beyond erogenous zones. If The World Was You arrived in 2008, somewhere between cocktail classic, boite noir and Sinatra-esque jazz as an adult outgrowth of what Laurel Canyon had wrought.

“I’ll Be Here at Closing Time,” which opened that first album in forever, was all tiny details of a charming woman, a gentle promise of being there later, possibly forever -- and delivering in ways carnal and profound. It’s a simple man, who knows to come proper, to a woman who’s a waitress but so much more.
It drops directly into the staccato humanity/lack of commentary “The House of Pride.” A bit of a barnyard scramble, with horns looping in and banjo plucks, it calls out all the venals and vanities that destroy the best of who we can be. Plucky, then attenuated, the song embodies the deals people make with themselves, the hungers and the “needs” that are wants with a wink that impales.
There was the sultry “Journey Down The Nile,” the slinking, horn slither rejoinder “A Chorus Of Your Own,” the humid Latin slow boil “Rain,” even the roadhouse burlesque piano-tittering “One More Night,” and the almost innocent, gentle recognition of life’s knocks in the misdirection of “In My Arms Tonight.” Complicated, sophisticated, it was redolent of what pop music for adults could be, but at the center of how basic so much of what life is. 

Indeed, fairly spacious “The Border Guard” excavated the cages we keep ourselves, even the freest ones, in. The falter points, the codes, doubts and lines we will not cross that bind us and keep us apart from what we most desire. “I ain’t goin’ to heaven now, I’ve learned to many tricks…” he intones as the bridge passes, a trumpet emerges to write what can’t be spoken.

“The Border Guard” holds those things that keep us warm on the nights when we’re most alone. It understands that sometimes the most heroic things we do – let people go, walk away to let someone else rise, show up and remain when everyone else has left – often leave us without. 

Noble? Foolish? Frightened? Frozen? It doesn’t matter, we have done the thing we believe is right, and that is holy.

John David understood the conflicts, the contrasts that knot our lives. Beyond messy, it was complex and therein lies the fascination. Broken wings, busted hearts, open trenches filled with tears that no one ever sees? That was his stock in trade. Not that it was a sad girl summer, nor was he the catcher-in-the-blue-girl-valley.

I remember the raw day, sky two shades lighter than slate grey and a cutting briskness to the wind, I got the call from the vet telling me Zelda, my wing-girl-spaniel was on her last months. Collapsing a bit against my car, walking by in a perfect black topcoat was J.D. who felt the energy move. 

“Well, what have we here?” he asked, clearly knowing it was not going to be good.

I explained, more wordbarfed all the things that had been said all over him. He listened, nodding. Was I making sense? I’m not sure. Zelda, the Prada of Dada, was my best self.
“Okay, pal,” he acknowledged. “This is bigger than right now. I have a meeting at Frankie & Zoey’s to talk about mixes. Can you.. Is there…”
He was giving me room to sort out what I needed. “You mean, could I go do something and you’ll find me?”
“Well, yes…”
“Okay, I was going to Baja Burrito for lunch. If I can eat, I guess I can…”
“Yes, even if you just sit there with an iced tea, I’ll come right back to you.”
And that’s just what happened. I sat with a mostly cold, uneaten burrito staring at the table. It might’ve been 20 minutes; but all I know is panic moves fast and too slow all at once, drowning you in grief and terror.

“Okay, now tell me so I can really get it. Slow down a little,” he said as he pulled the chair out across from me. I explained it was kidney failure, we’d been doing bags of fluid. He asked some questions, made some suggestions, told me that I could do things to make it comfortable for her, even make her life extend if that’s what I wanted to do.
“But one thing, promise me: It’s better five days too early than ten minutes too late.”
I wince just typing that. And I smile, because John David and Zelda had always had a thing: he loved older dogs, he saw the pretty girls they were when young and recognized the soul they embodied as they grew older.

I started boiling chicken, feeding her the meat with rice. I started sleeping on the floor, with rubber sheets and linens that were always in the washer. I started talking about life with my cocker spaniel, and seeking truth in our long, long walks across the street and at Radnor Lake. 

JD would check in, to see how “our girl” was doing. He’d laugh, tell me maybe the vet got it wrong. But we both knew, we knew the time would come. And it finally kind of did: not a hard when, but a knowing. 

Five days early, not ten minutes too late.

“Schedule it, girl, and I’ll come with you. Just let me know.”
Spring and summer was touring season, everyone in Nashville flying off in different directions. He had a flight he had to catch to make a gig, and I wanted every possible moment. “You can do this,” he reassured. “You’ve got this, you two girls who’ve seen so much and chased so many dreams.”
Yeah, but now who’ll chase those dreams with me.

J.D. had a way of knowing when to show up, when to recede, how to help even when he couldn’t be there. He knew the power of someone who understood, who saw what everyone else missed because they were too caught up in their own thing; he got the strength of locking eyes and nodding just a jot, telling you “You’ve got this.”
When my mother passed, a fraught relationship that defies explanation here, Souther was in Cleveland for a Sherrod Brown benefit with Jackson Browne. He called to ask me where the church was. “I’m a Shaker boy, too, don’t you forget. I’ve brought my suit, and I’m going to try to get out there.”

Alex Bevan, my childhood idol, sang “Gunfighters Smile” for the life gone and “Silver Wings” for the kid I was sitting in that pew. Michael Stanley, the rock god of Cleveland with all the attendance records that still stand, slipped into a row two-thirds of the way back after the casket had been rolled in. I did the eulogy, telling truth and humor, the purpose of this far-flung forceful life my mother led, taking no prisoners and creating both fury and fabulous with true originality.

Walking out, Michael helped me with my coat, said he’d played that benefit, too; that J.D. had mentioned he was coming. Maybe to let me know my glamorous songwriter’s intentions were to be there; maybe to let me know they’d found a commonality – or he didn’t want to fall short in the eyes of a man who took masculine respect to a serious level.

John David had called, of course, while we were in the process of it all. “Holly, I am so sorry. I have my suit out, and it’s pressed, but my hands are giving me such problems. It is so cold, and wet, I just don’t think I can. But I’m with you and all of yours. I promise… Oh, and big girl drinks soon.”

I loved that he loved that I call cocktails “big girl drinks.” He always thought it was such a funny way to quantify something that’s supposed to be chic and adult. To me, the inner Eloise is all demanded “big girl drinks”; he got it, embraced it, even dropped it into the swirling string-ladden Nelson Riddle homage “Dance Real Slow” on his final Tenderness album.

A year later, needing to face the grave, I made the trek to Cleveland. If my mother’s burial was bitter cold, bracing and penetrating, the little bit if snow was granular. Driving through Lakeview Cemetary, trying to find the plot on Daffodil Hill, the snow that day was wet and heavy, the kind that makes the wipers move slower. 

I exhaled watching my breath plume in the limbo between heated car and open window. Tears don’t make it any clearer, but I had some resolve. I was taking Alex Bevan and his bride to see John David later that night at Nighttown, the boite on Cedar Hill that derived its essence from James Joyce’s writing, Tiffany glass and a ‘70s brass and polished wood aesthetic that froze time in a Woody Allen kind of movie.
If I could get through this, I could give the very first person who talked to me about songs the ultimate “thank you” for showing up to sing for my mother. All I had to do was get out of the car, crunch through the heaviness and place the roses on her grave. Wrapping my muffler tighter, I walked down a small hill, around a curve, humming “I’ll Be Here At Closing Time.”
Fist in throat, knot in stomach, roses freed from their plastic, I went up the hill, and saw the roses from my stepfather. This must be the place. Honor what was. Hold it in, hide the tears, remember what’s good. Employ the dignity that defined John David. Get to the raggedy taggedy restaurant that had better than good food, meet my friends and remember the glory of being alive, also part of the ethos of John David.

He had, of course, made sure that the table was brilliant. He made it a point to sing to us and for us. When he sang some of the songs from his upcoming album, songs that I’d known for months, he was sure to deliver the key lines to us. It was worlds merging, the reasons songs matter so profoundly and the humor of “that chip upon your shoulder makes you seem much older, but you’re just a kid in dangerous disguise” escaped none of us.

That was the thing: the smallest details, strangers and known quantities, another town somewhere out there. Converging the way they can creates sacred bonds, and those bonds hold even when it feels like the ships coming apart at the beams.

When the note landed – a follow up to some feedback from a reader on a project I’m doing – they assumed I’d known, but wanted to make sure I’d heard. In Florida with mono, I’m not so in the loop, and I turn my phone off. It took me a moment to absorb what I was reading, to think who to ask, where to look. 

Because there are all kinds of facts – Songwriters Hall of Fame, the people who’ve covered the songs, the chart positions, the stories of the songs – but where’s the man? How do you show people someone who was so charmed by the daughter he never thought he’d ever have – “you know she’s a real ballerina now, and quite good,” he would probably tell you – that it transformed him even in passing conversation? How do you get people to understand that for as intractable as he was in the way he lived his life, he was gentle and encouraging to those who sought his comfort or guidance? How do you show that fabulous sense of humor, the love of gossip and dishy conversation that could turn an early dinner into closing down the place? 

Or his reverence for those who were such an integral piece of his own story, the ones who found great fame and public recognition? 

He would speak of Ronstadt’s brilliance, her reading and informed socio/cultural as well as political takes, Jackson Browne’s sense of humor and poetry, or Henley’s songwriting that they’d picked up “as if we’d never left off” in recent years with a respect we all aspire to. Never starstruck or name-dropping, these were his cradle-mates, the people who were there when a pop moment was forged and Laurel Canyon country rock emerged from the folk-populist rock of the Sunset Strip realm of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Burrito Brothers and Poco.
Like the little match girl, he made those people come to life in a way that was dimensional, that transcended even the often incredible interviews I’d done with many of the names we had in common. But that was never the point, it was just sharing the rich tapestry of life from a man who was always seeking.

When I got my rescue spaniel, Corliss, I was on the verge of a book tour for PRINE ON PRINE: Interviews & Encounters, a three year odyssey created with a lot of help from my recently deceased third ex-fiancee who’d co-managed the iconic American songwriter. Fraught, emotionally-triggered and facing a publishing company that just didn’t seem to get how to promote this book, I was overwhelmed and sure I was going to fail this gorgeous furry creature who needed love and deserved a good home.
One trainer was too hippie dippie. Another was too military, too “You be the boss of that dog, or he'll be the boss of you,” which triggered a mad barking episode that was scary. I knew there would boarding, me in and out of town. Consistency is everyting.

Torn, I called John David. A man of dogs, a human of deep fiber when it comes to the right thing, he would know. 

“What’s up, kid?” he answered. He obviously knew, or felt it wasn’t just a chat or looking for a quote. Once again, I started crying, showing fear of failing the rust-colored dog, frustration at not being able to get this potty-trained little animal to do the basics, confusion over was I being selfish? On the verge of finding him another, better forever home, it was a 9-1-1 call of the spirit.

“Now, now,” he said softly. “Can you send me some pictures? I’m gonna call you right back.”
Doing as told, I sent a handful of the pictures you can find on my Instagram. Like any proud parent, there was a fistful of shots of my gorgeous little man.

The phone rang. 

“Well, you’re not giving him back or to anyone else. This is your dog.”
“I don’t know… I don’t want to fail him…”
“Fail him? Look at those eyes, he’s all about living life. He may be a little hesitant in those first few, but he’s coming into his own. You can see it, and look at that form! He’s a beauty, Holly.”
I agreed, explained about the two trainer failures. My worry that all the travel now would create a long term problem for his socializing.

“He’s a smart boy, you can see that. It’s not gonna happen in three sessions, it’s about time, and it’s about you. It’s definitely about you, and you having the patience to trust you two will figure it out.”
I protested out of guilt, the folks whose helpful advice hadn’t worked and all the rest of the things that motivate self-doubt. John David listened, taking it in. He never told me I was wrong, just didn’t feed the monster. Finally, he said, “Here’s what I think: Seeing him, I can’t imagine that dog with anyone else but you, and there could be a whole bunch of great families for that handsome spaniel.”
He paused. “But I think dogs rescue people, and you might need him as much as he needs you, and you won’t even know why for a long time. You’re a good dog, Mom, Holly. You really understand them, feel for them, and work hard to give them a good life.

“Your book is gonna do great, and you’ll work hard to make it work. You’ll write other books, great stories, win more awards. But after all the dogs you’ve almost adopted, your Zelda wasn’t having it – and those dogs went to other people. Has it dawned on you: Zelda hasn’t stopped this one.  Did it ever occur to you this might be Zelda’s work?”

In a time of yammering confusion, too many commitments and a world that just kept telling me, “Yeah, it will be fine,” without really thinking it through, John David Souther not only heard all the trouble and considered my responsibilities, he remembered the minutiae of three or four missed connections over the fifteen years since Zelda died – and he realized that was what really mattered.

JD would check in to see how we’re doing. We’d catch up for quick calls about books and moments, always ending with “Be good to that fine young spaniel.” 

He’d left Nashville – leaving a massive hole for all of us in Music City – and he made me promise next time he was in town, I would introduce them. Laughing about the Jimmy Buffett tribute at the Hollywood Bowl, “where I’m not kidding there were so many layers and levels of passes and wristbands, I don’t think I could get to half the people I would’ve wanted to see,” he asked me if I remembered our conversation when I was in crisis about keeping Corliss. Saying yes, we both laughed; the larger lesson did not need to be unpacked.

Mr. Corliss, named for TIME’s late film and culture critic Richard Corliss, breathes softly beside me, his tummy rising and falling as I type this. All I can think about is John David’s doggies at home after he passed, probably beside themselves because they couldn’t help their Daddy. I think about the fact he’d been out playing shows, his luggage and guitar case just inside the front door from him returning from a run of dates to be unpacked the next morning.

In some ways, it was the perfect transition. Make people happy, share your wondrous songs and charm the groups of people who came out, then return home to your dogs, exhale and pause. Take it all in, realize how much love you’ve sown, grown and tended. Because beyond the songs, the stories and the acclaim, that’s the thing that remains. 

The people who’ve called me, texted, emailed, it’s all about the beauty and warm feelings that JD conjured in us. For those left behind, we have the music and the memories, not a great trade, but it’ll serve us. Right now, I can see him walking across the sky, all his ghost dogs bounding up to him, his first mate Glen Frey waving, saying come on in – and I’ll show you’round. 

Something tells me he’s settling in, making heaven an even better place for us all. Me, I’m gonna take Mr. Corliss for a walk, let him stretch his paws and tell him about my friend J.D. Later, I’m gonna get a big girl drink, raise that glass and tell my friend good-bye.

Holly Gleason

YOU CAN'T KILL ME: Mojo Nixon Has Left The Building

YOU CAN’T KILL ME: Mojo Nixon, Free, Drunk & Horny + Ready to Rumble

Mojo Nixon was crazy. Walking on a razor edge, laughing into the wind like some kind of kamikaze “Hey, y’all! watch this!” good ole boy on too much acid, there wasn’t much of anything Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr. wouldn’t do. 

Indeed, the more you’d recoil, the harder the fast talkin’, social commentarian would lean in. If he saw your flinching place, he’d double down, laughing that maniacal laugh to make you feel stupid and somehow empowered to laugh about whatever it was, too. Not that everything was a joke.

Though he’d juggle social taboo machetes like mandarian oranges – or some equally benign parlor trick, he knew music, politics and bullsh*t like nobody’s business. If his original calling card was frenetic talking blues, two chord punched up songs and a back beat that often worked out like a speedbag, don’t think he didn’t know the deep origins of the music he tore from the ground roots first.

That manic, raging street preacher thing – whether exhorting unbelievers “Elvis Is Everywhere,” thundering “Don Henley Must Die,” whirling through the reality “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant (with My Two Headed Love Child” – mined grooves that slung low, twisted hard and got funkier than cold medina.

From the very first salvo, a primitive, starkly thrumming guitar blues that teetered back and forth as he raved about “Jesus at McDonalds,” he merged a Lou Reed sangfroid with a confessional stream of consciousness that invoked all the religious leaders, fast food restaurants and Mama getting it on with Santa Claus “blamed it on menopause.” As the song’s tempo ebbs and flows, that wobble is as much a drunk man walking as a revelation.

Whatever it was, and I promise you not even Dr. Demento was sure, a brushfire ensued. Maybe it was the far fringe tastemakers at Engima Records... or the X/Blasters/Tex & the Horseheads vortex of California punk with a crazed Beat Farmers’ chaser. Taste was not the issue; that Mojo & Skid debut strung the unthinkable – “Moanin’ with Your Mama” – across a terse Bo Diddley grind. All gruff roar, blatant bragging and inappropriate in extremis, you had to laugh when he confessed “pokin’ holes in her liver” after a particularly randy assignation.

However it spread, people were buzzing. Editors at Tower Pulse, regional fanzines, record store clerks who’d tuned into champions for indie record companies dealing in the anti-major label insurrection. It was a wild time. Mojo, thrashing and bashing away, defied anything we’d seen. Not as noir or creature feature as the Cramps, not as straight up political as the Dead Kennedys, too inbred and rural to be the Replacements, he raged away like Jethro BoDean on steroids, howling like a dog about whatever hypocrisy that hit his viewfinder, as well as any hormonal, jacked up puberty-stricken XY-chromosone nonsense he could reckon. Before there were Beavis and Butthead, Mojo Nixon was a tall, two-fisted temple of arrested development with an IQ higher than a dog whistle.

The Pogues loved him. Tours together were a direct threat to their collective livers. Dash Rip Rock, Screaming Cheetah Wheelies, the Del-Lords all devoured the joke. The Dead Milkman loved him, too, celebrated  the erstwhile ranter in their “Punk Rock Girl” with the tilted couplet, “Your store could use some fixin’/It don’t have no Mojo Nixon.”

Yes, he was reckless, wild, drunk, drugging, blowing things up, body slamming road life with a velocity seemingly no one – perhaps not even Keith Richards – could withstand. Yet somehow, Nixon and his erstwhile tour manager Bullethead not only survived, they thrived. Every gambit, controversy or moment was something to laugh their heads off about, then tell the story in larger and taller detail over the months ahead.

When someone would say, “Two notes? Sounds like he needs Thorazine?,” then look at you like the Emperor is wearing a flesh suit, you could only sigh – and know how square your seemingly cool friend was. Sophomoric? Of course. But also seething, thrashing and delivering genuine commentary.
Before the fabulous Mitch Schneider arrived to steward the buzz, many of us writers circled up to tell the story. Pitching Fred Goodman, one of my Rolling Stone editors, I explained it was as much strong, savory comedy as it was TigerBeat trogolodyte songs for the truncated young men whose only love was self-afflicted.

He was intrigued. It didn’t help that I was the Steinbeck mouse in lunatic comic Sam Kinison’s pocket. As the young woman who’d never done drugs that would sit up some nights talking about bands and God, gender identity, jokes, and whatever else crossed our purview, the editor knew I knew comedy. 
“Yes, okay,” he said, wanting to be first. “Come up with something to do, ask some smarter questions – and try to bring us a lively read,”
When Dan Einstein, my fiancée left to turn John Prine’s songs into Oh Boy’s records, he asked, “What does your day contain?” 
Laughing I explained Mojo Nixon and I were going to “do” something we could hang a story on. Einstein looked at me, bemused. “Mojo? Adventure? Something for background?”

I nodded, big smile.

“I see,” he said, half quizzically, half-joking. “Well, don’t get arrested – or tattoed.”
“But, Dan, we’re kind of friends.”
Half a beat passed, he exhaled, smiled, and repeated, “Yes, so don’t get arrested – or tattoed.”
The van rolled into our lot on the second steepest hill in LA running a little hot. For some reason, I think it was the transmission or drive shaft. That van – driven into the ground touring – was classic flat paint, cargo warrior; it couldn’t fail, but it could be expensive to fix.

Young, Mojo was lean, muscular like “I’m on Fire” Springsteen, thick hair with his Elvis obsession extruding from his pores. “I need to get something to get married in,” he explained. “It’s gotta get done.”
Was it an invitation to help? Or an exit strategy that was Teflon?
“What’re you thinking?”
“Something cool. Something wild. Something me.”

“You ever been to Nudies?” I asked citing the cowboy courturier who dressed movie stars, country music legends, Led Zeppelin and more. “They’re in North Hollywood.”
“I can’t afford that,” he pushed back, explaining his wedding was going to be at a go kart track. 

“You’d be surprised, what’s it cost to look?” And the I added, “Even if you get nothing, I can use it for the story... and you can see the place Elvis, Gram Parsons and Mel Tillis shopped.”

“MEL TILLIS?!” he faux-reacted. “I’m in.”

Parking outside the split-rail building on N.Lankershim Blvd with the rearing Palomino horse on the roof, I smiled. “This could be magic. Just poke around, look at the sale racks. And if his widow’s in, she might work with you.”

Sure enough, and sure enough, and sure enough. There was a white satin shirt on a sale rack with a red satin yoke, pearl snap buttons and piping. It was still too much, but Bobbie Nudie, Nudie Cohen’s widow, was working the register, wash’n’set crash helmet hair in all its motionless glory. 

Walking over to the circular rack, I explained who the lady leaning on the counter was. “Tell her what it’s for. She’s a fan of the story. Oh, and flirt with her. That works, too.”

I walked away, didn’t look back. Some bread won’t rise if you stare it while waiting for the yeast to kick in. When I came back, she was wrapping up the shirt, smiling coyly and telling him his intended was a lucky woman.

I started to laugh, but I knew: if you’ve got the ball rolling, do nothing to break the momentum. Just eyes down, walk on; get in the truck. Once we were moving, he laughed that garrulous laugh, side-eyed me and proclaimed, “I feel like I stole it.”
“Really?” the intrepid reporter began.

Whether a fan of wild young love, good looking young bucks or just hoping to make a sale, the widow of the man who’d dressed all the cowboy film stars had set a price Mojo could afford. But – and this was instructive into the man I was riding with – beyond the “Hell, yeah” of scoring some gilded wedding clothes, there was the aw shucks of a kid who’d loved cowboy movies, a humility for where he’d been and what he’d purchased. The raging lunatic talking bluesman had joined Elton John, Keith Richards, Dolly Parton, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, r.e.m. and Gram Parsons in the rock and country royalty who’d worn Nudie.
And he got it. That was part of what made it intriguing. Sitting there at the wheel, the chiseled featured alt-star was thinking about what that shirt meant; not that he’d made it, but that he had touched the hem of something great. For all the frothing, foaming, seek-and-destroy propulsion, underneath McMIllan, Jr. was more educated than people realized and more appreciative than the cyclonic presence could ever reveal.

The conversation circled being on the verge, something you can’t truly capture until you’re on the other side. But the momentum and the pressure of almost breaking through to the mass pop consciousness was palpable. When the questions turned from ham-fisted pop up flies – designed for the obvious punchline or proclamation – the answers turned thoughtful, the character broke and a man looking to skewer and impale stigmas emerged; he wasn’t out of control or feral, but a wicked intellect that understood the psychology of respectability and seeking more who knew just how to land a punch of the things they held dear.

Unfortunately, the gags were so delicious, Rolling Stone ran three Random Notes in quick succession. Suddenly, he’d more than permeated the 2x a month rock periodical – in a time when that real estate was finite and coveted – and the decision was made to spike the profile. 

It meant I didn’t get paid, but it also meant people didn’t see the deeper, more thoughtful side of the kid born in North Carolina, raised in Danville, Virginia, who went to a liberal college in Ohio, drifted to Colorado then San Diego as he carved out space for his outsized brain and worldview. He knew music, deep and wide; held opinions that were informed and thought out. 

Ironic, and yet, people loved the too loud, too robust freak flag flyer tilting about plastic Jesuses, myriad Elvis incarnations, magic mushrooms, foofoo haircuts, being vibrator dependent, legalizing  pot, refusing menial labor, burning down the malls and stuffin’ all-American MTV VJ Martha Quinn’s muffin, but he also did Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with all of the verses, even the “subversive” ones.

And any time someone suggested it was a novelty, how long could the joke last, Mr. Mojo Nixon would land on another plateau of “how did he do that?!” And the “do”s that stacked up were impressive.

Beyond playing drummer James Van Eaton in the Jerry Lee Lewis film “Great Balls of Fire,” which was filmed in Memphis and starred Winona Ryder, Dennis Quaid and X’s John Doe, he dipped in and out of movies. A bit of Ferris Bueller “Can you believe this?” matching the intensity of someone willing to see how far he could push the moment.

That intensity also nitro-funny-car fueled his performance art as cultural white trash snapshot promos that gave MTV an edge as corporate rock began subsuming the strange place where music videos from pasty British bands, quirky art school downtown acts, dance, punk and new wave  and other fringe artists had launched into pop status. 

Concerned about being consumed by “the man,” Mojo’s list of demands were copious. MTV met them all. Suddenly, he was a preacher, a used car raver, an overgrown “Deliverance” refugee and best of all, himself freestylin’ about whatever topic they were tropin’.

Again, there was all of that. But there was also the music. Jello Biafra, Dave Alvin, the Beat Farmers, the Pleasure Barons all made records with him. Even the legendary producer and creative iconoclast Jim Dickinson helmed an all-star band that included Doe, Dash Rip Rock’s Bill Davis, the Del-Lord’s Eric Ambel, Country Dick and more for Otis. Recorded in Memphis with a six figure budget, it was the one to break the joke wide open.

In Memphis for a showcase, I ran into Davis in the lobby of the grand Peabody Hotel. We were waiting on the ducks, killing time in the suspended hours of late afternoon, explaining to the other why we were in Memphis. Talking about the Liberation Army show they were going to play at the Omni New Daisy Theater, talking about the combustion in the studio, it was too strong a pull.
Playing hookie from the junket, a young writer and a piano player in tow, we descended into the humid night. Our names were on the list, that seemed to be my mantra in the ‘90s. Inside the overpacked theater, the music was so loud the walls pumped and the swelter made one’s clothes limp. But onstage, there was so much heat and fun, the bodies were pressed a dozen deep, roiling like fish at feeding time as the music crashed over them.

Handing my leather jacket to the piano player, I announced, “I’m going in,” and plunged into the sweaty mass. Euphoria was the only word for it. Never one to love a mosh pit, what was happening on the floor was a whole other thing: the largely male, teen and post-teen throng were caught up in the rhythms and the off-handed jokes. It was the ultimate “your favorite band” situation – only every musician on that stage, including Dickinson who sat on, was legendary in their scene.

The propulsion coming off the stage was James Brown-inflected, terse and taut. They might be singing about racing big foot trucks, Shane McGowan’s dentist, polish that won’t take or the infamous Don Henley death sentence and a Star Spangled anthem of Mojoliciousness, but the playing was blistering. There was no joking on the bandstand.

Wandering back into the dressing room after the final encore, “What are you doing here?” was met with his “Yeah of course” embrace of whatever happened. Beyond the pleasantries of post-show chatter, there was the acknowledgement of how good it was. He knew what he was doing musically – and he wasn’t gonna pull light.

That roaring way of talking geared down to own just how impressive what was happening was. If the outboard motor was the outrageousness of what he was saying, he knew it could allow him to make a record of the funky soul, shuffles and high octane hillbilly rock & roll he loved. 

Maybe the greatest joke was on the music industry: the loon was the guy preserving certain strains of American music in a way that major labels paid lip service to, but didn’t give a damn about protecting.

Not that he took it all serious. Playing the National Association of Campus Activities Convention at Nashville’s Tara-like Opryland Hotel, he had no problem whipping out “Louisiana Liplock” (applied to the metaphorically sound love porkchop) to the mid-afternoon ballroom of student talent buyer, exhorting them to chant along. My mother, with her striped high-rise hair in town, looked sideways at me, inhaled and announced, “How charming.”

She, too, had martini dry skewering skills. Dragging her back to say hi, she assessed the frenetic mass of flesh, looking up and down, sizing him up as he raved at me.  Frustrated at his missing the obvious, I hissed, “Mojo, THIS is my MOTHER...”

“Oh, Mrs. Gleason,” he chuckled, wiping his hand and extending. “How nice to meet you.”

Eye-rolling, she announced, “Charmed,” clearly not. Whatever Mojo he shot through his mahic fingers, a moment later, she was laughing along, leaning into him a little too much. Alchemic tilt realized.

No doubt he told my mother I was a good writer, that I got it deeper than many. He might’ve mentioned the Alternative Press cover story I’d written, that lost night in Memphis or picking up a wedding shirt at Nudie’s. But more likely, he flirted with her 1% more than just an empty threat – and she liked it.

Mojo’s magic was he always knew which button to push to get his desired result. What to say, what to do, how to sling it, drop it, roll it or set it on fire. There was no looking back, just full speed ahead. If you couldn’t hang, you shouldn’t be there anyway.

And the smart ones – like me – knew when to go home. 

Music business is a full frontal assault with back-knifing as wholesale sport. People come, people go, people betray and say “they’re always there for you.” Mojo Nixon – who made mincemeat of televangelist Pat Robertson on CNN’s crossfire – should’ve been a sitting duck. He was a powder keg of the wrong thing to say, in the middle of a fire pit. Somehow, though, his thinking was clear enough and his Zero F’s Given brazen enough that he was indestructible.

A radio stint in Cincinnati, reunion gigs for Kinky Friedman at Austin’s iconic Continental Club were moments. His legendary runs with the Toad Liquors, a ninja death squad of a raucous road band comprised of Earl B Freedom, Pete Wetdawg Gordon and Mike Middleton, barnstormed across America, seeking to burn down the tedium of 9-to-5 existence for every desk jockey and blue collar brave enough to come out.

He became SiriusXm Outlaw Country’s Loon in the Afternoon, the jock whose freefallin’ “Outlaaawwwwww Kuhntreeeeeeeeeeee...” became the signature siren cry. He did a NASCAR show, a political throwdown so saltily named I won’t tempt people’s server filters. To listen to Mojo was an existentialist assault into the pleasures of outlaw country, trucker anthems, alt-roots and other raw, ragged kinds of hard primitive.

Having moved from San Diego to Cincy, he was more in touch with the middle of the country. He was in the pulse point of the flyover, right where the South (Kentucky) met the Midwest (Ohio and Indiana). It was a perfect fit for speaking your mind, slathering what you loved in big talk and throwing razors at what stunk of self-interest of the worst kinds.

A few pounds heavier, Elvis sideburns a bit less bushy, Hawaiian shirt and Daisy Duke Carhartts a fashion statement of their own kind, Mojo Nixon was once again larger than life. Your best friend at the bar who spoke truth and didn’t look back, he was hilarious and you’d forgive him whatever the departure from your own buttoned up (or down) life.

My own world had moved so far into the mainstream, it was more an exercise in big smiles and joyful hugs when we’d cross paths. When you were there, not much needs to be said. The laughter is an encyclopedia of all that’s happened.
But Outlaw Country keeper Jeremy Tepper, himself once the manifest behind trucker label Rig Rock, cajoled and prodded me to get on one of their Outlaw Country Cruises. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “You have to trust me.”

Cruises? Blech. Old people, bad buffets, no phone or wifi service? No thank you.

Until I said “Yes,” and was swept away in a world of pure musical immersion, unfiltered and uncensored exhileration. And as Penny Lane explains to William Miller as they race to the Hyatt on Sunset in “Almost Famous” – “If you never take it serious, you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, you always have fun. AND if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and viisit all your friends..”

Visit all your friends?! The Outlaw Country Cruise was better than any record store, even the Tower on Sunset or in the Village in New York. Everywhere you turned: Steve Earle, Rosie Flores, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ray Benson, the Mavericks, Dan Baird, NRBQ, Rodney Crowell, Carlene Carter, Elizabeth Cook, Warner Hodges, and more...

Leering on the top deck, Mojo Nixon stood like the Ambassador of All. More than Big Daddy, Boss Hog or Evel Knevil, he was surveying a world where people railed against things that blunted freedom, destroyed originality, small businesses, personal integrity or a sense of joy. These were his people, many suckled as young college students drinking stale beer and chanting along with his most rank choruses. 

“YOU!” he said, looking at a creature in a floor length Lilly Pulitzer caftan. “You still do it just like you did.”

He threw back his head, laughing at the perpendicular clothing that embodied the spirit of anarchy he embraced. What could be more outlaw than wearing something like that? He got the joke on the joke, and he loved it.

For five, six days each year – and one extra from California for West Coast punk – the Outlaw Cruisers could drink, yell, rock and party with complete abandon. Nobody was driving. Their favorite bands were on-board. Everyone was in on the heist.

Over those few days, a theoretically big deal music industry practitioner would turn back into a baby rock critic. The surge of the shows, the love for Lucinda Williams, John Anderson, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris gave the ships meaning, but it was expurgating the carbons and expectations that it made it so ragingly fun.

That first year, standing between Mojo and Bullethead, his long-time manager, both wearing matching suits, it was that moment when Penny Lane informs William Miller, “You... are home!” Leaning over me to share an aside, both men chuckled. Glaring up at them, Mojo just laughed harder.

It wasn’t mean, it was recognition. This was where I grew up, this was where I would always belong. Whether I fell away for years, or was there next week, there was a bond for people like us that transcended niceties and how it’s supposed to be done.

In that room, in that moment, there was only surrender to the music, lavishing in a love without conditions or expectations. Do your own thing, girl; be what they need, but come back to your friends and know we’re good with the Lilly clothes, the monograms you can see from space and that too serious way of taking everything on. You’re not like us, you’re exactly like us.

Broken toys, conscientious objectors, lost souls, human dumpsters, spewers of vitrol at how stupid so much of it is, the Outlaws and the Outlaw Cruisers are a breed unto themselves. It’s a crazy, magic, mixed up millefiori glass window with which to view the world. It is also the perfect distillation of the unhinged freedom that Mojo Nixon conjured every afternoon.
Walking out of a church women’s guild luncheon in Palm Beach, the text came, saying, “You got a minute?” 

Tepper and Bullethead, no doubt wanting to run in how much fun they were having at sea, were reaching out to someone who’s work landlocked them this year. Calling Tepper, his voice was off, “Uhm, they worked really hard... They tried...”

“WHAT?!” Turning into North County Road, cloistered by Banyan trees, I could tell the news wasn’t going to be good.

“He had an amazing set... maybe the best show he ever played last night... just killed it...”
“What’s going on...”

“MOJO.”

How could that be possible? The man who squalled, “You can’t kill me/ I will not die/ Not now, not ever, no never... Gonna live a long, long time...” over a variation of “Amazing Grace” was an insurrective manifesto for everyone raging against the machine. With Wet Dawg doubling down on jukejoint piano, the drums crashing and the guitars splaying across the track, it was a speedball of life.

“Holly...”

“Yeah, we need some help...”

The conversation was brief. Some details about breakfast, Adair, known as “the Bride of Mojo,” and their son being flown home from the cruise, what great spirits he was in, a nap taken – and a twister of whoa flying into the stars without another word spoken.

“Got it. Okay. I have two things that must happen. Stand by. Of course. I’m so, so sorry.”

They were waiting to cast off and return to the Atlantic. Dash Rip Rock, Bill Davis’ band, would play their show, dedicate it to the psychobilly life force, and let the Irish wake seethe with proper ballast.

What better place for Mojo to leave the building? A near perfect death. Close to matching his hombre amigo Country Dick Montana, who died onstage at a packed show at the Longhorn Saloon in Whistler, British Columbia, both died as they lived. Hard, happy, regaling the world with what made them both burn so bright.

Pulling the car over on the sawgrass, my throat was a fist. Like someone had punched me, but from the inside out. How can you explain all that Mojo stood for? The joy, the anti-bullying, the raging against crap and the exulting in a great solo?

And then the ugly crying began. It lasted too long and not long enough. It has gone on for hours, and it’s still breaking through. Beyond the rapier sharp mind, there was a big bold heart – and it was far more open than people realized.

Nobody called foul louder, but few people created as much acceptance and welcome as he did. For me, it was losing a chunk of my innocence, my wild-hearted years of chasing songs and stories. But it was also losing a touchstone of integrity in a world that has none.

Pressing my lips together, I can see him raving onstage in the Magnum Lounge, a sunken fishbowl pit of a smoked mirror bar. The band is pumping hard; the audience smashed together. Drops of sweat fling into the crowd as people are chanting about tying their pecker to their leg, to their leg – and it is glorious. 

For those few moments, everyone is 21, wild, free and ready. To be able to do that, to dissolve all limitations and realities in the name of utter surrender to euphoria, is powerful stuff. Sixteen hours later, I’m finally finishing this essay, raw voiced and swollen eyed, but marveling how long and how close I stood next to that flame.

Maybe because he was so generous, he didn’t incinerate the rest of us. Our last few talks had been about PRINE ON PRINE, how could he help, when were we going to do that book event in Cincinnati. “I’m ready, Holly. Just tell me when...”

Somehow it feels like he already did. And somehow, too, it feels like he’s still ready, and we just need to tell him when. After all, the chorus of “You Can’t Kill Me” closes – after maligning those who’d ban books, sex, where and how one can live -- with the professions “You can shoot my body full of holes, but you can't kill the spirit of rock 'n roll” and “my soul raves on forever...”

What more needs to be said? Exactly.
Go watch “Mojo Manifesto.” Turn up BoDayShus or Whereabouts Unknown. Get a cheap polyester tuxedo and head to the stock car track, all night dive or anywhere the unlikely convene.

AND IN HIS OWN WORDS: https://news.pollstar.com/2020/03/30/qs-with-mojo-nixon-now-more-than-ever/

Feb. 7, 2024

www.hollygleason.com

BEYOND THE CORAL REEFER: Jimmy Buffett Finds That One Particular Harbor

BEYOND THE CORAL REEFER: Jimmy Buffett Sails Into That One Most Particular Harbor

It was always the ne’er-do-well golf pros. Everything cool, somehow contraband and just beyond the true reach of a 12-, 13-year old girl who was too thin and absolutely curious about what the grown-ups didn’t see because they weren’t paying attention.

Songs about smugglers, washed out drifters, deadbeats and writers would drift from that backroom, occasionally with a waft of steel guitar and some short blasts of harmonica. The voice felt just like one of those naughty golf pros – warm, familiar, welcoming, wry – except it had some flannel to it, some molasses and a bit of cayenne as it flowed over notes that lifted and fell like the curtains on a slow, humid night.

He sang of a Florida I knew from going to Pompano, Delray, Palm Beach to work on my golf game during the six, seven months Cleveland wasn’t hospitable to that sort of thing. When his voice drifted out the bag room on a small gust of gasoline, dope smoke and sweat, my ears pricked up for the stories, always the short stories about pirates looking at 40, men going to Paris to seek something, lives intersecting in Montana...on Monday.

It was all so romantic. Even before I knew about “Margaritaville,” because I lived in a place and time before that Key West loser’s lament became the freak flag, good-time National Anthem. Somewhere in the delta between personal responsibility and screw it, that song plumbed the awareness of a man who knew better, but just didn’t care.

Jimmy Buffett must have been changing labels. I bought all those ABC/Dunhill Records – it seemed – remaindered at Record Theater at the Golden Gate Mall. A1A after the single lane coastal road that ran along the east coast of Florida; the sunk skiff Livin’ & Dyin’ in Three Quarter Time that was too hillbilly on first listen, but “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown” reminded me of too many babysitters; White Sport Coat & A Pink Crustacean who’s “Grapefruit Juicy Fruit” felt like something I was living, a Gatsby world for a barely teenage Catholic driving to another golf tournament, as well as the slinky “They Don’t Dance Like Carmen No More” that saw my father wax rhapsodic about Carmen Miranda and then wince when “Why Don’t We Get Drunk & Screw” rolled up.

We didn’t think about “labels” then, just “cool” or “lame.” Cool, of course, came in degrees. Buffett was that uncle your parents wouldn’t let babysit, even if he could talk to them about sailing, literature or Gulf Coast resorts. That made his sangfroid that much more delicious to a kid sitting on a worktable in a back room, not getting all the references.

“Margaritaville” wasn’t a hit when people started singing it, just the self-confession of the guy who drank himself out of the deal – and wasn’t 100% sure he cared as the hangover throbbed. He was coping, tequila, ice, lime and blender. For a washout, it was perfect.

All the sun slaves loved it. Work hard, party hard, recover while you you’re onto the next.

I loved that he painted this Florida of black top turned grey by the sun, the old people in plastic shoes, Walgreens and crusty ne’er do wells in bar rooms watching the ceiling fans turn. He got the Key West of Hemingway, who I already adored, Tennesseee Williams, who would beguile me in college, as well as the next wave macho literary and creative brios Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Guy de le Valdene.

Key West was for pirates. Dusty, dirty, chickens roaming the streets, space between buildings that held Lord knows. It felt like electric creativity when my father and I would escape from “practice,” head South over the 7 Mile Bridge and set to walking the streets like the tourists we were: an older Dad and a scrawny little tomboy, both sponges for whatever was in the air.

He’d lie to Mom about where we were, that’s how I knew it was good. And when Buffett’s songs came pouring out of a muscle car’s rolled down window or in that badly-ventilated back room, I was right there at Sloppy Joe’s on a barstool next to my father.
“This is the stuff, pro,” he’d tell me. “THIS is... the stuff.”

Buffett was snide about the right stuff, tender with the good stuff and savoring of the naughty stuff. Even before he turned into a billionaire industrial conglomerate of frozen drink machines and retirement communities, he understood not just what mattered, but how.

If the Eagles were “The Dirty Dozen,” Buffett was Butch Cassidy’s “Sundance Kid.” He had the escape route planned; he wasn’t backing down and he wasn’t afraid to hit the tricky spot. At a time when Southern California rock included Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, J.D. Souther, America, Neil Young to some, Poco to others, Buffett was the Southern cousin, a bit more leaning to the folkie side of singer/songwriter.

He ran with Jerry Jeff Walker, Jesse Winchester, Steve Goodman. He got those traditions. He exhumed Lord Tom Buckley’s “God’s Own Drunk (& A Holy Man),” which he delivered with a hilarious ramble on You Had To Be There. It was that notion of street musicians, playing for tips and vibes; a secret handshake and a wink to a counterculture that was as romantic as it was pungent.

“People ask me, where in the hell is Margaritaville?” Buffett says on You Had To Be There, after referencing the possibility it’s a little island in your mind or the bottom of a tequila bottle. Then he proclaims, “It’s anywhere you want it to be, baby...”

Postcards from a life I didn’t have agency over. Yet. People I didn’t know. Yet.
But I leaned into the poetry, loving the notion of captains and kids, characters painted with same detail John Prine conjured. But where Prine could be profoundly sad or lonely or conscience-tugging, Buffett was more the brio of the literati he was running with.

Dreaming dreams inside the songs has a strange centrifugal force. Like so many people who drift into the world not quite sure where they’re headed, it can pull things you never intended to you. Alex Bevan, my first folk singing idol who befriended a wet behind the ears kid, knew him from their days playing National Association of Campus Activities showcases, trying to get regional college dates. He’d talk of their intersecting wages of the road: afternoons in laundromats, talking about Goodman, Jerry Jeff and whatever.

Buffett hadn’t blown up yet. Bevan made him seem real-sized in a way. Even sneaking into “FM,” a film about free-form, big business rock radio, with cameos from Buffett and Ronstadt, the notion of pirating someone’s concert for broadcast seemed delightfully on point. In “Urban Cowboy,” he took that out West cowboy nonsense and lacquered dancefloor country with his zesty “Livingston Saturday Night,” no doubt informed by his writer friends who fled Key West for Montana.

And then I fell out of the sky at St. Andrews School in Boca Raton, seeking to be recruited for college as a golfer. It was a co-ed school with very rich kids who were sophisticated in far more fast-track way than Ohio. That was where I met Valerie.

Valerie de la Valdene, heart shaped face, tilted smile and a wash of ebony hair falling across her eye, was the daughter of a count. She was also Buffett’s godchild, and like me, a young’un used to running with older kids; she couldn’t drive, but she was one of us. If Eloise had been raised by adventure hunters, she’d’ve been Valerie, who ran up and down Worth Avenue barefoot, laughing madly and plotting the next adventure.

Valerie, who got us the tickets to Buffett’s annual Christmas show at Sunrise Musical Theater in Ft Lauderdale, who said, “You should review this for the Bagpiper,” our school paper. Being such a big Florida icon – even then –it seemed to be the most perfect idea. Until they used that issue of the paper for the annual fundraising drive, missimg my smirking reference to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (& Screw)?”
What would Jimmy Buffett do? It became my sextant and compass. Looking at the Dean, who was braced for some kind of antics, I exhaled slowly, smiled innocently, and said, “Obviously these people are not music lovers...”

Jack Bower could barely contain the laughter. His face turned red; the howl was trapped in his throat. A theatrical man, husky but not fat, his eyes danced as he looked at me, suggesting I keep talking without saying a word.

“Dean Bower, that IS the name of the song, and it was a climax to the show. It was bawdy and brazen, but also self-deprecating and self-impaling. To not say it happened would be to not tell the story properly.”

He couldn’t take the mealymouthed sweetness. I was not that kid. He knew it. Barking as a laugh and his voice escaped, he managed, “Get out of my office. And please, Holly, be smarter please. The donors are important... They’re paying the bills.”

Turning in the doorway, I tried one Hail Mary pass. “Would it help if you knew I went with Valerie?”

I smiled. He laughed harder. It was implicit: while Buffett was the dope smugglers’ personal hero, he was also a saint in South Florida. Though his manatee awareness campaign was a few years off, he quietly did much for the region that was over-run by Haitian refugees, other Spanish speakers, profiteers who’d pave the Everglades and other entities to check.

“Get out, stay out of trouble. You know what to do.”

Yes, whatever Jimmy Buffett might do.

Still, he was quicksilver. Sightings all over the state. “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” Concerts at Blossom Music Center, Sunrise, Rolling Stone magazine, softball games against publications and radio stations. It was a different time, and place.

One day during college, while clerking at the Miami Herald, a call came through to the general features desk. “HELLohhhhh,” the voice came down the line, “How are you today?”

No one was ever friendly on that extension. The euphoria felt real, the voice familiar.

“I was wondering if you could help me... I am trying to figure out where to get some good Thai food down here in Dade County. Can you help me?”
“Well, sir, uhm, we really don’t provi...” I was trying to avoid making a Herald endorsement.

“Honey, would it help if I introduced myself? This is Jimmy Buffett, and if the restaurant sucks, I promise we won’t get you fired.”

I turned purple. Of course, he won’t. He gets the plight of the late teenager/early twenty-something. I gulped; didn’t want him to think I’m stupid.

Putting him on hold, I asked a couple of the folks on the desk that I trusted. Got back on the phone, trying to “sound” like a pro, I picked up, “Okay, not sure where you are in the county, but the place you want is called Tiger Tiger... It’s down Dixie, south of the Gables, and it’s delicious. I think you’ll like it.”

“Awesome, baby. And if you can get out of there, you’re welcome to join us.”

He laughed and was gone. Dixie Highway is an easy navigation, especially in the ‘80s. Just get to Coral Gables and start looking; that restaurant was dark wood. It’d be easy to spot.

Whether it was a pleasantry or a genuine invitation, I was too intimidated to show up. Besides, real life drive-bys are only magic when you’re not stalking.

A year later, I would get to interview Dan Fogelberg, playing the NAMM Convention in Hollywood, Florida. He had a bluegrass album, High Country Snows, coming, and I stalked my story with a vengeance. It’s hard to say no to a kid with shiny straight hair in a striped t-shirt with hope in their eyes; the tour manager agreed, saying I needed to chase their limo to Ft. Lauderdale – and I could meet him in the restaurant, talking while he had his dinner. Nina Avrimades, his manager, was there; I tried to not be too excited, but I knew her name from Buffett’s record covers.

The Fogelberg interview went impossibly well. Turned out he’d had his dinner sent to his room; he was only going to have soup with me. But he ended up staying for the entire hour. When he left to go change, I set upon the lovely blond-haired woman, asking questions about what she did, how she did it.

“You know, he normally hates these things,” she confided. “Dan genuinely enjoyed that.”

Screwing up my courage, I asked the big ask.
I opened with the obvious, “You know Jimmy’s the Grand Kahuna down here. No one is bigger.”

She laughed. She saw the set-up, and she knew he wasn’t “in record cycle” or “touring.” We left it that she’d think about it, see what she could do. A couple months later, Buffett called my dorm room – and the Herald ran the piece.

So did Country Song Round Up, the world’s oldest country fanzine. My canny editor there told me about Buffett’s connections to Nashville, the reporting for Billboard magazine, the days hanging out at the Exit/In, Closed Quarters and the general creative hauntings. Suddenly, the Jerry Jeff Walker stuff, the steel guitars and the actual country undertow made sense.

It opened my mind to how impossible things can merge and converge; made Willie Nelson not the only one who could tap authenticity in seemingly opposing realms of music. But where Nelson was truly making country safe for the alternos, Buffett was slyly interjecting country music into songs people loved and never letting them realize it was “liver.”

It always seemed to be that way with this Buffett character. He existed in our world like twinkle lights in a bar; look up and smile at the twinkle in whatever other clutter was around. He knew poetry, knew how to deliver it – and he knew how to revel like an Endymion Mardi Gras float, tossing ravers out to the fans like so many fistfuls of beads.

Signed by Tony Brown, it wasn’t that Buffett came full circle, so much as music had turned all the way around to where the kid born in Pascagoula, Mississippi and raised in Alabama started his journey. Sure, there’d been Lear jets, misadventures, crazy stories, mysterious substances, inside jokes, sports teams and “60 Minutes,” but there was more to come. Writing his own books about Joe Merchant and memoirs, launching a chain of cheeseburger restaurants that turned into hotels, Broadway shows, football stadiums, creating a space for the regular guy to get a little tropicrazy and have the license to let your freak flag fly high.

All that was ahead of him. Records were a place to give his creativity a home. He was still everybody’s favorite “oh, yeah” songwriter/singer/supernova, but the Parrothead ubiquity was just starting to quicken. “One Particular Harbor” from that era was beautiful, a lulling melody that spoke of refuge and peace/piece of mind. It wasn’t what country radio was doing, but the video – possibly shot in Polynesia – was close to four minutes of mental escape every time it rolled up on CMT or TNN.
That escape was everything. As MTV blared and pulsated, Buffett was saner, smarter rebellion against 9-to-5 and the status quo. His touring business grew more robust without radio; his legendary Coral Reefers became more formidable. At different times, Timothy B. Schmitt (the ether-high vocalist with the Eagles), Josh Leo, Tim Krekel, Will Kimbrough, especially the tenderest hearted songwriter/guitarist/ Mac MacAnally, all artists in their own right.

Suddenly, it wasn’t about chasing hits, but the longevity of classic tracks, the opportunity to convene with your Parrotheaded brethren, to sing these songs together. Buffett was the grandmaster – and he took his duties seriously.

He used that power to launch Margaritaville Records, where he signed original Nashville compatriot Marshall Chapman for her It’s About Time: Live from the Tennessee State Women’s Prison project and a neophyte trickster/writer acolyte of Jerry Jeff and Keith Sykes named Todd Snider, whose mostly talking blues “Alright Guy” caused an alternative/triple a sensation.

Snider, a free spirit, and Chapman, a lanky rock guitarist with blazing charisma and a drawl for days, embodied that notion of outside the lines is the only place to color. Original voices and perspectives, they brought it with a burning intensity as different as the other – and as contrasting to Buffett’s cool

Chapman, opening for Buffett at the Hollywood Bowl, knew how to bring a Chrissie Hynde panache to a bare bones rock’n’soul grooved attack. She and her Love Slaves left those fans panting for more, and when the main dish is Buffett, that’s saying something.

Saying not just how astute a judge of talent he was, but his willingness to share the stage with a woman known as “the female Mick Jagger” in the ‘70s and the sly Snider, a songwriter who loved to see what would happen, including wandering off from the venue on one tour and not look back. That is all part of the carnival, the glorious feast Auntie Mame promised in the original Broadway show. If it gets twisted, that’s part of it.

So Buffett became an icon, larger than life – and somehow still inviting. A Saturday morning superhero, he was the kind of cartoon who was so frisky his skin almost seemed not enough to hold him. The tales of shots fired at his plane over Jamaica; the tales of adventures that inspired William McKeen’s Mile Marker 0; the charities he anchored and advocated for in New Orleans, the Hamptons, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

But even then, it was the random Buffett, the sightings of the man in the wild. Running into him in a purple label Ralph Lauren tux, where he got up and sang some for the wedding of one of his friend’s sons in Palm Beach; laughing jocularly at a CMA Awards after-party after singing “5 O’Clock Somewhere” with Alan Jackson; on his bicycle on County Road in Palm Beach, dropping by to see friends at PB Boys Club or reports that he was out surfing with friends.

Of course, he was. For while his brand was the guy who lived his life on his terms – St. Barths, St Kitts, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Jimmy Buffett actually inhabited a devil-may-care world where he just was. Not rejecting the fanfare, but laughing it off as he went.

Which isn’t to say he ever stopped thinking about what his next creative step might be. A million years ago, reading the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Wall Street Journal at the pool at a fancy Vegas hotel, he spent a little time with an emerging country artist, sharing some wisdom, talking about football and demonstrating how little one needed to change. That lesson served Kenny Chesney well; he remains indifferent to fame, investing his heart in the buzzy byproducts of making people happy with glorious concerts that remind them the joy of being alive.

When he played the annual Everglades Benefit in Palm Beach County, usually with some splashy single name guest, the high dollar tickets flew out. When the Gulf Coast was destroyed by weather, he got a few of his famous friends – and came in to raise millions of dollars. Big shows with an undertow of fun within the wreckage, offering hope as it solved or helped with problems that were critical.

If Springsteen wrote “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” Buffett lived it. Top-to-bottom, front-to-back, inside-out and upside-down. It was a tilt-a-whirl, centrifugal force of ebullience – and it never flagged. Whether Las Vegas, peaking out from the wings, or West Palm Beach’s “what name is it this year?” amphitheater in the swelter, it always delivered exuberance and delight. If you came with a squad or a date, we are all one once the singers slithered onstage, the tin drums started their rolls and the churn started turning.

In 2018, fresh from induction into the SOURCE Hall of Fame, which recognizes women in the music industry behind the scenes, I boarded a plane to fly across the sea. All alone, my destination was Paris, France. To mark the triumph of the unseen, it didn’t matter that no one else could join me.

Raised on the poetry within songs, hearing Jimmy Buffett sing “He Went To Paris” at La Cigale seemed the most perfect way to hold that young girl who didn’t quite understand all the grownup emotions, but recognized the power in those songs. Deceptively engaging, Buffett – like the Texas songwriters, the wild authors and filmmakers of Key West – knew that if there wasn’t conflict or a yearning, the song didn’t lance whatever was stuck in the listener’s heart.
It wasn’t that I was numb from the music business, but it extracts a toll on women who don’t fly by their looks or native charms. I needed to remember those moments when a song sounded like something I could – and must – touch, and my heart sped up at the way the images often stacked up to create some truth about living.

Paris, as Audrey Hepburn declared, is always a good idea. The streets alive with passion for life, the different size glasses of wine you can order, the fabulous cafes, the bookstores, walking along the Seine, over the ancient bridges, the Deux Magots and Café des Flores, as well as the D’Orsay, Marmottan. Picasso Museum and yes, the teeny Hemingway Bar at the Ritz.

Stopping at Le Roc, supposedly the oldest Catholic church in Paris, I knelt in a chilly stone cathedral and wept for all that life had given me. So many blessings, adventures, wonders, people and dreams that came true; not just my own dreams, but the dreams I’d midwifed for artists who didn’t always see what I dreamt for them... artists who didn’t always see how their music changed lives.

Sitting so close to the stage later that night, taking notes to always remember, I was overwhelmed by how much joy could be delivered; also, the heroism washed out characters could have being true to their own shattered lives. “He Went To Paris” was, indeed, the miracle I believed it would be.

“Looking to answers... for questions that bothered him so...”
La Cigale, there in the 18th arronddisement, had quite the history. Built in 1894, Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier had played there, later Jean Cocteau would stage avant garde evenings. It would become a movie theater in 1940, ultimately falling into a screening house for Kung Fu, then X rated films, but always it remained. Deemed a historic building in the 1980s, the French recognized its intrinsic essence – and Philippe Stark was drafted to return it to its former glory.

The metaphor was not lost on me, or the fact this less than 1000 seat venue was where Buffett chose to play. Like Key West in the ‘70s, it was the fabulous dissolute chic without resources that deliver dignity and delight right where you are.

I had traveled alone, but I sat in that row at La Cigale with every me I’d ever been. The little girl run off with the naughty golf pros, the baby rock critic people didn’t take seriously until they saw my words, the young dreamer working in a world where a journalist’s stories weren’t vanity, but a truth for the tribes, a voice that shaped how people saw the worlds and the artists who mattered, a business reporter, a major label department head who hated the way decisions were never for the artists, a boutique artist development and media relations innovator who’d fight for her clients, a battered survivor of a callous industry, a truth-teller when it mattered – and nobody wanted to listen.

It got crowded in that row. But it also got epic, because Jimmy Buffett had also flown into headwinds over and over again. He never won a Grammy; only had quantifiable hits on country radio with people like Alan Jackson. He didn’t care.

Jimmy Buffett believed in his songs, his friends, the characters who’d inspired him. As long as he had those people, a little imagination, he’d find a way. Oh, and that way made him a billionaire; he had the last laugh on the music business know-it-alls.

Not that that was his motivation. Standing onstage, with the smile slicing his face like wide open like a ripe mango, eyes sparkling at the naughtiness of Parrotheads converging on Paris in some kind of electric mojito acid test, there was revelry to be had – and songs, poetic and ribald to be sung.

That way the joy and the mission: honor what is however it was, remember the beauty, hang onto the high jinks and never, ever doubt the songs.

For someone who tilts at windmills, gets treated more poorly than people would ever imagine, whose best friend once squealed – driving around the streets of LA as two unhinged medium-20-somethings – “You could be HER, Holly Gee!” as Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” poured from her tape deck, La Cigale took back that fate which stretches you across a rack until you break and gave me back the effervescent joy of serving the music. That was what it’s about...

Even when the king of the parrot pirates was out flying his planes or chasing the sun, talking about good times or creating more memories, he was always braising those songs. Living like he sang, laughing like he wrote, it was all the same beautiful ecosystem so many people drew their moments of release, of elation, of crazy wild “oh yeah” from.

It was money I probably shouldn’t have spent, but it was the best value I’d seen in a long time. On the plane back, I smiled and exhaled and mindfully let all the good that is my life flow through me. “This is what being present feels like,” I marveled.

Jimmy Buffett, more than anything else, was absolutely, truly, completely present. Like his friends from Key West, adventurers all, he understood: Immersion is everything. Dive deep. Go big. Go crazy. Have fun. Feel it all, revel in it – and let what makes you feel alive be your navigational buoy.

It was a lesson that mattered profoundly.

When the call came at 5:11 a.m. from Kenny Chesney who’d texted me the night before, he didn’t have to speak. Just “he’s gone,” and gravity fell out of the room. It was dark, too early for morning to even think about breaking, and yet...

When we hung up the phone, I pulled the new rescue spaniel to me. Petted his silky head and felt tears fall off my face onto his ears. “Oh, Corliss,” I told the little guy, “you have no idea. To find someone who lived as most artists who pretend to, who embodies all the happiness that comes from being present, who wrote about places that mattered and being ripped down and forgotten...”

So many songs, so many moments, so much life.

And not just Buffett’s, but our own. I found “He Went To Paris” rising in my throat. Not because I called it up, but something in my muscle memory sent it through the transom. Singing softly to a red cocker spaniel who was licking the tears from my face, I couldn’t believe when I got to the end...

There it was: the words the old man, who’d seen World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, great love and horrible loss, had told Buffett more than half a century ago. Suddenly, there was the elegy for us all.

“Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
“But I had a good life all the way.”

www.hollygleason.com

Ooooh, Child: Valerie Carter's Stone's Throw To Heaven

It was the cutest hat. Slouchy and short brimmed, close to the head like a cloche, but limper. There was a ribbon band, rumpled and all the way around the crown, with some antique-looking flowers – possibly pansies, possibly posies -- pinned just above the temple behind the eye that was cast in shadow.

It was ragamuffin chic, slightly waifish, slightly bohemian, definitely post-hippie. The mousey brown hair hung straight – and the eyes, knowing a bit too much, looked straight into me. Or possibly straight out, as the poster hung above the racks of 8-tracks, that were hung behind locked glass sliders in the suburban strip mall record store.

7 March 2017

Rickie Lee Jones may or may not have happened yet, but there was a sense that with Linda Ronstadt ascending – and Emmylou Harris also rising as the hippie princess of hillbilly music by way of Laurel Canyon – eclectic girls were about to be “in favor.” Bonnie Raitt, who’d captured my imagination with “Angel from Montgomery,” was her own continent, one draped in the blues, just as Joni Mitchell was an émigré from folk and Carole King had moved beyond the tundra of Tin Pan Ally,

Valerie Carter was cute as bug. Like an earthier, yet more worldly and sophisticated version of the groovy babysitters I idolized. She seemed beyond running off with the Children of God religious sect, or getting busted bringing a lid of grass back from Mexico, or even just having the misfortune of a bad acid trip at the Rapid Transit platform under the Terminal Tower. This was a sophisticated kind of squalor for sure.

I pinched that ten dollar bill from Christmas or the Honor Roll or whatever my grandmother had pressed it upon me, and looked up. I didn’t know what sepia was then, only thought it was an old black and white from long ago that somehow held the image of a modern girl who’d distilled flapper ennui, free love innocence and Willa Cather and John Steinbeck’s post-Dust Bowl starkly gaunt forbearance.

I’d had my heart set on something else, but the hat got me. As did her utterly guileless knowing. Whatever it was, I wanted in. I just hoped it didn’t suck.

***

Fender Rhodes, literally electric keyboards in cases the size of writing desks, have this velvety bell tone to them. A few descending chords, passing notes littered between, a rising brass section, and a voice caressing the words, “Oooh, child, things are gonna get easier…” I melted right into the dust and shellac’ed  hardwood floor of our airless attic.

How did this woman I’d never met, never heard of get it so completely. A family rife with strife, we were anything but a Norman Rockwell portrait – and I was anything but the classic bright shiny high achiever that I’d learned to show the world. Though I achieved and shone, what roiled beneath the surface – doubt, anxiety, concern for and about those around me – was a powerful churning.

And in one verse of a song made popular by The Five Stairsteps, I felt like things could get better. A weightless seemed to lift up from my carcass, drifting soft and without gravity. No imperative or directive, no empiric evidence given, just the caress of that voice promising that this, too, shall pass was the agency of my condition.

Valerie Carter had that gift: she could make you believe impossible things with a tone that was somewhere between ridiculously expensive satin and the lushest sink-into-it velvet. Her soprano, like the embodiment of afternoon or first morning sunlight, glistened in your ears, somehow moved beneath your neural centers like a glider on a balmy, still night.

Even more wondrous were all the phases Just A Stone’s Throw passed through. Aural pictures painted against economical playing – the almost Tom Waits’ free noir of the well-past closing time’s wash-out “Back to Blue Some More,” the churning gospel soul of the title track, the faltering reggae undertow of “Ringing Doorbells in the Rain,” the raw hillbilly yearn of “Face of Appalachia,” not to mention the Earth, Wind + Fire-backed blue-eyed funk of “City Lights.”

Rumor had it – cause once I knew, I started hoovering up any scrap of information I could find – she was Lowell George’s girl. Little Feat’s “Fat Man in the Bath Tub,” with a proclivity for overalls and a musical gumbo that could sweat the Crescent City’s grisgris with the fringe of country and the undulation of rhythm & blues understood hybrid vigor. Carter’s rare instrument, her tone but also her ability to turn emotions inside out, was suited to it all.

Before I was a music critic, I didn’t bother with the delineations, just the way the music made me feel. Stone’s Throw made me real in a hopeful way, my hunger for knowing, tasting, feeling many things more rational than merely the product lacking focus from my dyslexia. The songs dipped into so many veins and wells of emotions, it suited my not-quite-teenage hormonal swings like a second skin.

And that girl on the cover? That was the me I’d be in a perfect world… without a uniform, expectations, a limited budget, my mother harping, the ghosts behind my eyes. She was cool, and funky, and hip, and somehow just shabby enough to not be an uptight rich girl at Beachwood Place, the expensive mall with a real Saks Fifth Avenue in a suburb near our modest brick home.

She had cooler friends, too. Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat’s Lowell George and Billy Payne, James Taylor. Earth, Wind & Fire! Lots of names I knew from the back of the records, people I spent hours with – and felt like I had relationships with based on the songs they wrote or sang. They scraped at what my mundane existence was made of, and somehow made my heart flicker with a desire that seemed more.

Even the boy she loved – that damned “Cowboy Angel” – seemed like the kinda romantic foil I could understand. As a harmonica bled out and her voice opened up on the long syllables, the note struck wide and full, strong without overpowering, she was a real girl wanting an actual, if elusive, boy.

Frustrated by the prep school boys who just seemed dumb, caught up in things that just didn’t  seem important, this “Cowboy Angel” was the accessible answer to the guy Bonnie Raitt was pining for in “Angel To Montgomery.” What I didn’t understand in the moment: Carter’s angel was in close proximity, Raitt’s cowboy had grown mythic – and smaller than a horizon spec -- over time.

It’s all perspective, but you don’t know that when you’re young, on fire and waiting for your destiny to begin. Instead, you sigh into your pillow, listen to your records on eternal repeat and mainline all those emotions you can only access by listening to the words smeared across rock, pop, r&b and even new wave melodies.

 My ultimate genuflection to Valerie Carter came later that summer. On Running on Empty, Jackson Browne’s paean to roadlife – something as a competitive golfer I knew a little more about than the garden variety middle schooler – she co-wrote “Love Needs A Heart.” A secret handshake of a song, it spoke volumes to the states of self-inflicted human bondage that come with always being gone, never being around people you can truly trust and, especially, being shattered by those you do.

Rather than one more rootless rolling stone song, the high messiah of the way long gone countenance, this was a song of reckoning and the price paid – or even extracted – for the life, but also the damage already incurred. That’s what nobody tells you when you’re acting brave, sucking it up, shaking it off, pretending it’s for the best: all of that face saving for one’s dignity comes with a cost.

And you know that it’s Carter who tempers Browne and George. Only a woman would profess,
“Proud and alone, cold as a stone
I’m afraid to believe the things I feel
I can cry with the best, I can laugh with the rest
But I’m never sure when it’s real…”

That’s some powerful vertigo. But also exactly how it happens. You pave over your embarrassment, your hurt, your anger at the disbelief of what just happened -- and you stop trusting what you know, being able to honor those emotions that are right there.

With a piano part any serviceable seventh grader could play, Jackson Browne rues and confesses his personal treason. It’s the tale of leaving when he confesses he’s broken this woman’s heart, and in that first verse, it feels like what a thousand other guilt douching songs sound like.

But then it turns, the stakes add up. Maybe a man could’ve written what comes next, but quite possibly not. As the second verse bottoms out, the revelation dawns.

“Love won’t come near me, she don’t even hear me

She walks by my vacancy sign
Love needs a heart, trusting and blind
I wish that heart was mine…”

By the time Valerie Carter – opening Browne’s tour to good notices and obvious fertile creative winds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxBAYr9p4kI) – co-wrote “Love Needs A Heart,” plenty must have happened. The sylph urchin had been banged around a bit by life, or “the life,” and now was counting up her scrapes and bruises, weighing the risks and considering the damage. Not to mention the ultimate truth: once you know, you can’t not know.

And so, Valerie Carter put her heart in a song she didn’t sing. She carried on, like singers do, the music too potent a force to let go.  Once you make your way in or through songs, there rarely is another path to travel.

Wild Child, the next record, bore witness to it. A tight cropped head shot – echoing Diana Ross’ Diana­ – was sleek, slick, technically gorgeous, somehow clinically detached. This gamine was haute everything, Scavullo-esque in her high forehead and higher cheekbones, but her eyes had enough of the dilation, you had to wonder what other highs she might be sailing, what numbing strategies she’d devised.

I remember hearing Wild Child on the stereo at Record Theater, played – as all in-store play was – to entice the customers to lay down their hard-earned dollars. It was shapeless soft rock/jazz lite stuff, perfect for chilled Chablis and Virginia Slims’ uber thin cigarettes crowd. Perfect for the richer Mommies. Technically perfect, more than a little cold, the fire and raw passion that dripped from her notes was gone – much like the disco precision that was rising all around the suburbs, chasing a thrill and a high that was never truly there, even with your nose stuffed with cocaine.

I didn’t buy that record, didn’t hide my disappointment. Didn’t know what to say, or even why it mattered. I doubled down on Stone’s Throw, knowing sometimes one record that holds so much is worth more than a wheelbarrow of careers from the REO Speedwagons, Styxs, Rushs and Deep Purples.

And I got on with living, with trying to figure out why and how. Not just to survive, but what happens next, where shall the road take me when it’s finally time to take me away. Sometimes we make deals with ourselves to make the best of where we are. Sometimes we get vertigo or just lose our way. Sometimes our hearts break in ways we can’t even explain, don’t always know or understand -- and the world doesn’t care – so you soldier on.

Valerie Carter was a brave soldier in the realm of song and reason, romance and how it goes. She’d paid her money, took the ride, shimmered so brightly, she’d still turn up on records like Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence, and remained James Taylor’s favorite female back-up vocalist.

Mostly, though, she disappeared. To Florida. To relative obscurity, occasionally circling back for the music, but mostly, staying out of harm’s way.

When the news hit that she’d passed from this world, Taylor’s socials carried in part this remembrance, “…Valerie was an old soul and as deep as a well. Her voice came from her life and her life was a steep, rocky road. I believe that we can hear it, whenever the music is that crucial, when the song is saving someone’s life….”

Saving someone’s life. Oooh, child. Never mind the latter day scrapes with law enforcement, with courts of law, with Taylor himself paying for your out-of-state in-patient treatment and coming to your drug court graduation. Forget all the disappointments and promises made along the way nobody bothered to fulfill.

We can’t know the things that go unspoken or unseen. We can only hope that free, she is a shaft of light as pretty as those high notes she’d twirl around on, sparkle like the naughty twinkle in her eye. Sometimes freedom isn’t until the next life – and sad as we all are, maybe that’s the truth to hang onto.

George Michael: I Want Your Sex... & Faith; Another Passes As Christmas Dawns

They were adorable. George Michael with the greatest hair since Farrah Fawcett Major’s backswept wave of honey gold, and cheek bones that crested as plateaus of desire on a face of pure Dionysus. Andrew Ridgeley, his by no means slouch of a wing man, more plausible for the average girls sighing and screaming, reduced to swampy panties and utter hysteria at the waft of the Brit duo known as Wham! UK.

Squeaky clean, perfectly PG. “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was pure bubble gum with a whole milk chaser. “Careless Whisper,” the angsty whispered ballad, suggested betrayal, but how? Who could be so reckless with either of these boys with the gilded tans, the pearly white teeth, the seemingly perfect manners.

As MTV was establishing dominance, Wham! was a panacea that worked for everyone – the little girls who understood the rush of hormones, the women who breathed in the young buck musk and pined for that youthful erotica, the parents who felt they were safe quarry for their daughters and the concert promoters, who made the pair’s first – and ultimately only American tour – a stadium-sized proposition.

Heck, George Michael even dated that paragon of chastity Brooke Shields, a woman whose virtue – in spite of supermodel status and controversial films roles – rivaled iconic ‘50s good girl Sandra Dee. You don’t get much more wholesome, and yet…

For all the “good boy” patina of Wham!, there was an undercurrent of erogenous intent that was palpable. Too good looking, too breathless, too somehow unsettled; the bruised heart of “Careless Whisper” with the swelling sax and churning melody was a bit too fraught to be more boy band fodder.

Originally coming from the realm of rap, I remember talking with the guys from Whodini on the first Swatch Watch Fresh Fest about the UK darlings that merged pop and soul. The Thomas Dolby-produced “Magic’s Wand” trio knew all about the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” duo; they had toured together and talked collaboration. There was some real and some street on the cute boys from England, no matter how many day-glo t-shirts, perfect blow drys and shapeless linen blazers they sported. 

And then it was over. Rumbles and stray shards of gossip. Egos and credit-grabbing, conflicting notions of who, what and why; like so many ragingly successful acts before, the tension and outside influences won. Seemingly tragic, yet ultimately, the notion that perhaps the glorious looking Michael did have a musical bent a la Michael Jackson and Prince, something steeped in deep soul, filled with melody that wrapped around your ears and hung on.

When “Faith” dropped, the quick beats and the sweep you up vocal that brought a taut line between desire and fidelity, Michael was undeniable. If the new romantic wave that brought Duran Duran, ABC, Culture Club and the Thompson Twins in on a tide of videogenics and synthesizers – and the accompanying “Faith” clip absolutely beef-caked the dark haired songwriting – Faith was a testament to swooping soul, revved up rhythms and languishing desire stretched across ballads with candle wax poured for emphasis.

That slow burn permeated the steamy “Father Figure,” a noir sort of dance song as much “West Side Story” dramatics as it was breathy come on/fidelity pledge. Slightly anonymous, slightly driven by the rhythm of a beating heart, Michael played a cab driver in the accompanying video without ever prissying it up for the camera. Just a regular working stiff with a 5 o’clock shadow and hours to go until he sleeps; but oh when he gets there…

All of this to sift through the rubble of what was. The news that George Michael was dead crashed our Christmas dinner via friends dropping by for thick slices of bouche du Noel, one more pop culture depth charge with unintended consequences. Because with all the loss this year – Bowie, Prince, Leon Russell, Guy Clark amongst many – enough is enough, and at 53, George Michael is way too young.

George Michael, the beautiful amatory, had passed into ether. After a series of stumbles and falls from grace – the Beverly Hills’ men’s room arrest for soliciting sex, the confession to being gay on CNN, the several arrests for drug use, the notorious law suit with Sony US that may’ve stunted his career – it’s hard to remember the price of trying to follow one’s muse and integrity.

Instead we have that hunk who knew how to thread iconics, to balance the come on and the reassurance with his quarry. When Michael was still ambiguous about his own preferences, “I Want Your Sex” was lobbed on pop radio with a force that made it ubiquitous. The horn’n’guitar slashed middle chunk was Bootsy Collins/George Clinton light, as the lyric empowered the listener to give in to their hedonistic desires.

For a guy who once made desire an innocent commodity, he was no decriminalizing whatever got you through the night. Never afraid to be the beefcake, he raised the stakes for everyone listening out in radioland or watching on MTV: find your passion, feed your bliss, let your freak flag fly.

Like Madonna, George Michael was working the boundaries of what was acceptable. So damned good looking, he could get away with unthinkable things – girls in merry widows’n’garters shot strictly for their bottom – and make most people crave more. One had to wonder what all the seemingly polite songwriter craved, too, because that kind of hungry isn’t something conjured as a matter of exercise.

 Somewhere in the flyover, I smiled while I watched the deliciousness. The gorgeous on display, the throb that slowed down rhythms elicited, the blatant, almost voyeuristic way the camera moved across this body, that beautiful face. If hot girls had been flaunting their charm for years, Michael decriminalized a non-muscle-bound swagger that was confident, but looking for satiation.

Whether he was or wasn’t, who cared? He brought it – no matter who you were. Omnisexual in terms of his draw, everyone with sight would have to want him. Like Tom Ford, when he took over Gucci, Michael understood the sex-positive nature of lush, body scraping designs – second skins that melt and move with you.

 It seemed, in the late ‘80s, like another galaxy had exploded with the brooding Greek songwriter. If he understood major chords and bright melodies, how to make a beat pop, rush or lean in, swirl desire like ice in a drink, the world – not just America – was guzzling it down. Faith was inescapable; the title track giving way to “Father Figure,” “I Want Your Sex” becoming the raison d’etre for a world crawling from the first wave of AIDS sobriety to reclaim their joy.

 If “One More Try” suggested an elegiac Elton John ballad and “Kissing A Fool” felt like a torch ballad that was equal parts Dean Martin and  Sara Vaughan, the album was a carnival of beats and grooves that suggested the phases of a lycra bound aerobics class sweating to utter perfection. “Hand To Mouth” percolated, “Look at Your Hands” swagger with sweltering sax punctuations and “Monkey” took its staccato dance punch from bits of the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” Bowie’s most brazen Let’s Dance pieces and a bit of Cameo funk whiplash.

 The foment and churn took all the excess of Studio 54 and distilled it into a post new wave gasp and release. Who didn’t wanna get laid? And suddenly this caramel colored beauty with the great butt – which he had no compunction about shaking for the camera – and great mind – these were smart songs about the greatest frontier since Eve handed Adam that apple – emerged unapologetic and wide-open celebrating not just coupling, but being coupled.

Whatever may happen later, in this moment, George Michael made sex almost safe, something you, me, everyone must have. The collective panting could be heard any time his videos were on MTV. Staid ladies would whisper, rent boys would wink and the pretty girls would throw their hands up as they howled along with the songs on the radio or in the club.

Then came the high concept, grainy black and white “Freedom! ‘90” video. Exhausted by being the beefcake bulls eye of the new decade, Michael tapped David Fincher to vamp on the celebrated British Vogue cover that featured the five definitive supermodels of the era: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington.

The result was even more libidinous and pulse quickening than Michael’s previous work. As the women mouthed lyrics to the verses, strutting, rolling in the sheets, soaking in a large enough for two bath, coming in and out of the frames, the implicit fantasy was overpowering – and the underlying convergence of sex*music*fashion was intoxicating, all were one, one was all. 

And if Michael was pushing away from being objectified, the man wasn’t eschewing sex, want or coital bliss in any way, shape or form. With a snake-hipped rhythm, as much Brazil as Nile Rodgers’ Chic, the song suggested the ultimate erotic thrust was freedom – to go, but also to stay.

At least, on the surface. But the man who tagged his “I Want Your Sex” video with a lipstick fuschia “Explore Monogamy” was always working three layers beneath the surface. If you plugged into the lyric or the iconography, “Freedom” suggested a man still looking for the climax, but unwilling to be the donkey to pin your fantasies to.

Between setting fire to the “Faith” leather jacket – hung deep in an almost empty closet – that cheekily proclaimed “Rocker’s Revenge,” or blowing up the “Faith” jukebox and signature guitar, Michael was serving notice. Listen closer – but why? with those glorious women and the rock steady dancefloor beat – you would hear the declaration of “clothes don’t make the man” in the chorus, the protestation of “living the fantasy/we won the race, got out of the place/ went home and got a brand new face/ for the boys at MTV” were clearer than anyone might have plugged into.

In the moment, many assumed the song addressed the dissolution of his musical partnership with Ridgley. But maybe it ran far deeper. The rest of Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1 was very much a work focused on betrayals, the empty nature of fame, the bankruptcy of hooking up. Did we know that at the time? Or were we all so punchdrunk on the fizzy goodness of the endorphins this music gave us?

 Certainly there were other hits. “Cowboys & Angels” was a more sophistipop, humid and sweeping, something for Ibizia or the Riviera. “Soul Free” suggested Digable Planets, but with that sweeping pop still near the surface, the falsetto utter surrender to carnal pleasure. Even the big orchestral pop of Prejudice’s opening “Praying for Time” – ripe with social commentary to temper whatever follow -- suggested Michael needed more.

 Maybe we should’ve known there was trouble in paradise. Maybe in the growing media invasiveness, it was only a matter of time before the cage match of fame crashed into the increasing gotcha reality of the way we consume our heroes. Or maybe the quickening cycle of obsess and cast off was to blame.

Beyond that lung busting duet with Elton John on the elder’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” or the Aretha Franklin-teaming “I Knew You Were Waiting,” Michael’s star faded. Still huge in the Far East, still a dance floor king in South America and Europe, America was more intrigued by that bathroom bust – and barely registering the ongoing drug problems in the UK.

 Perhaps it was the battle with Sony. While malfeasance happens (and there are those who allege Michael was right), they are also the distribution system; ultimately the ones defining and driving the marketing when you’re on a global juggernaut. Turn them against you, watch your star grow cold and fall from the sky.

In some ways, being arrested for soliciting sex gave him the freedom he’d sung for. Out and free to live the life he wanted, Michael also reached towards the sun of music that was more evolved, more adult. If Older wasn’t a blockbuster, he sampled Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots” on “Fastlove, Pt. 1” and offered a velvety pulp fiction flare to the title track, boite-tempered trumpet bleating in the recesses, cocktail piano rising and brushes hitting the cymbals and high hat with a raindrop plop of perfection.

 Michael’s voice, which always conveyed a whiff of ache, somehow smoothed, strengthened. If the winsome young man had reluctance and a slight bruising, this was something settled and confident. The invitation, once fraught with urgency, was now seductive. But most of us – myself included – missed it. 

And that’s the shame of fame. When it’s at its apex, inescapable to the point of nausea, often no one recovers. Rare is the Madonna or Elton John, who navigate the turns and manage to maintain some form of intrigue. But they are both creature of design, image, dare I say marketing? And they’ve both had an uncanny knack for aligning with strong business people – Guy Oseary for Madge, David Geffen for Elton – at the critical juncture where their expiration date should have been passed.

 When fame burns out, there is the lifestyle that one has become used to. Can you afford it? Or must that fall away? And if you can negotiate the fiscal reality, what about the mocking of media, who delight in your foibles? the lack of the raving cheers that have met your various endeavors?

 Yes, there was James Corden’s original “Carpool Karaoke.” A riff to set-up his piece of “Comic Relief” that poked a sharp stick in the eye of the obvious, talking about the whole gay reality of which Michael was so much a face for. Beyond the all-out sing-along moments that would become a design key for Madonna, Michelle Obama, Gwen Stefani and so many others, there was that twinge of the unspoken – and the notion that perhaps it’s never truly okay in some rooms.

For George Michael, who actually served time for his last pot bust, he met every moment like a gentleman. Telling the British press there was a karmic reality to the short jail term, he never lost his dignity, always – in public – maintained that higher elevation.

 But what or who he was when he was alone remains – for most of us – a mystery. No doubt, he had great times, lived a life that made sense for who he was: a gay man of certain beauty, aging and facing a changing world, a world where his music is more nostalgia, but indelible in ways most never achieve.

 Having lost Prince, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Guy Clark, songwriter Andrew Dorff most recently, this is another unthinkable loss in a year of too much and too many.

 Fifty-three is so young. No doubt in the coming days, every miniscule detail of his last several months will be combed over, will be sorted and read like tea leaves. Was it drugs? A broken heart? A heart that malfunctioned? His own hand? Some other misadventure?

 The statement said he passed peacefully, no signs of trouble is all we have. No doubt there is more. But in this TMZ world in which we live, does it matter? He’s gone. Maybe that’s all we need to know. Maybe that, and the freedom that comes from turning the music up way too loud, screaming along at the top of our lungs, wiggling like a noodle or hotstepping like the catwalk is our natural domain is all that we need to remember this life that for a few years burned so bright and so hot.

 Today, Boxing Day as I finish writing, I think that I shall turn the music up, find the beats that move my bottom, bounce around and laugh. If there is a lesson from this wretched year, we never know when our time is coming. It’s a given, but somehow it is more urgent than ever – and I want to feel all the ecstasy I can.

 It doesn’t mean being stupid, overindulging or putting myself at risk. It means, as Aunt Mame proclaimed, “Life is a banquet, and most of poor-sons-of-bitches are starving to death,” and as Scarlett O’Hara declared, “I shall never go hungry again!”

Go find someone you love, call up a friend you’ve not spoken to, have the small indulgence, go for a run and feel the energy, strength and life pumping through your body, flirt wit that guy or that girl, your wife or your boyfriend just ‘cause. And absolutely, turn up the music and dance – George Michael’s music was absolutely like that, just like it developed into something more ruminative so you could take that rapture even deeper.

Leon Russell: Song for You... and Me... and Gone

I was wearing brand new Prada velvet maryjanes, with saddle leather straps, and a big velvet men’s cut shirt from back in the late ‘80s when I was first in LA, trying to be a baby rock critic of merit. The shirt was one of the few nice things I owned, and Icherished it; sliding into it with banged up jeans and forest green cowboy boots, a little bit of luxe boheme splendor for a girl living on a lotta ramen.

Seems somehow right to be dressed like that to get a text that read, “Is Leon Russell someone you can write one of your passionate tributes to?” Reading it, figuring this was a pro-active editor, looking to stay ahead of the bodystack the last couple years has turned into, I replied, “Yes, why? He hasn’t died?”

But, of course, he had. Hand in the air, I asked for and paid the check, purse flying to my shoulder, soles to the sidewalk. Leon Russell, always sort of fragile, always incandescent like a candle flame. He was never quite a hippie, nor a gypsy, nor a field preacher, yet somehow he embodied all, and so much more. 

Men like Leon don’t really die, maybe shimmer a bit and fade a touch. But dead? C’est impossible. Except the Google Seach confirms – even Fox News says so. And once again, here I am, dizzy from the loss, torn from the moments and music surrendered to the sky.

I can’t even remember the first time I saw him, probably on the great equalizer of humanity, music and social consciousness – and my father’s favorite – “The Johnny Cash Show.” All I know is my mother snarled, as only she could, “He looks high…” at the tv set in their bedroom – and I truly thought Santa Claus had truly made good on that summer of love promise to “Tune in, Turn On & Drop Out.” 

There he was at a shiny black grand piano, silvery cascades of hair pouring down like white waters, eyes behind mirrored aviator shades as his hands kept rolling and pumping over the keys like some kind of baker making kolaches or other kneaded and twisted delight. He had a voice like an old dog lifted in protest, though there was a zestiness to it, too: you wanted to taste what he knew. And I was far too young to even imagine.

But I wanted; oh yes, I wanted to know.

Leon Russell invaded my school car, too. The disembodied voice, wrung out and twisting, floated over the vinyl bench seats. The jaunty “Tight Rope,” all carny and “hey, y’all, watch this” and the arpeggiated “For You,” which pledged of loving someone “beyond this space and time” – and because it was Cleveland, the rock & roll capitol of the world, yes, Russell’s version spun on the rock station in defense of the man who wrote the Carpenters’ inescapable rendition on every pop, ac and elevator music station on the dial.

There was “This Masquerade” for George Benson, “Delta Lady” for Joe Cocker, “Superstar” for the Carpenters. And there were the conversations my hippie babies would have about Mad Dogs & Englishmen, miscegenation (I couldn’t spell it, so I couldn’t look it up back then) and Mary Russell, about Concerts for Bangladesh, records with Willie Nelson and being a genius.

I still thought he looked like Naughty Santa, too much fun and treats and music. I didn’t know about the years in Los Angeles, working with Phil Spector or producing Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Nor was I aware that it was Russell’s Shelter Records, partnered with the producer Denny Cordell, that was soon to toss the terse raw rock/punk Tom Petty and the fist-in-your-face “Refugee” into my world. And I didn’t care. Just knowing someone like him existed was plenty.

It was during my tenure as a freelancer in the mid-80s working the country and black music beats for The Miami Herald that the competitive paper’s Jon Marlowe called me to meet him in the stairwell. Stringy white hair, motocross jacket when no one wore such things, The Miami News’ sole critic’d cackle and tell me what I was missing; treating me like a colleague, though I was mostly starry-eyed kid.

“You have to pay attention to Leon Russell,” he advised. “As important as Dr. John for mainstreaming that New Orleans shuffle, but a much wider hoop – he’s gospel, and rock and roll, and soul. And he doesn’t flinch or pander. They can’t make him commit to a box, so they act like he’s some bit of fringe of an Indian jacket. You dig in, you’ll see.”

So out to the Hialeah swapmeet I went. Nickels and quarters and dimes. A few bucks could fill in the gaps back then, bad cassettes and slightly blemished vinyl. But the content was there, and man, “Stranger In A Strange Land” was an existential question that suited my own no-man’s-land existence; “Roll Away The Stone” took the metaphysical promises of my Catholic Easter and sowed them with a fiery promise, the spongy striphouse piano “Roller Derby” rubbed the undercarriage of the seemingly innocent enough – all of them bolstered by a peacock feather fan of brash female background singers, equal parts streetwalking working girl and street smart seraph. Divine and dirty, glorious and porous all at once.

If I got The Band – and the power of “Cripple Creek” and Music From Big Pink… If I thought I was figuring out C&W’s bastard Byrds/Burrito’s children Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Gilded Palace of Sin… If I believed in the mellifluous tone of the steel guitar rising off those Poco records… Then this was the grittier, funk on the roots cornerstone to whatever those other acts were scratching away it.

It’s the reason Eric Clapton, the Stones, Dylan embraced his musical touch – and Jerry Lee Lewis took a young Russell and his pals out as his back-up band on a two month tour. To have the kinetic charge to serve as the Killer’s band, you gotta know the inside out from the ground up.

And so, I had my own kinda sphinx: behind mirror’ed shades, in crisp white suits, playing hillbilly music under the nom du chanson Hank Thompson and wearing a top hat or Stetson like some kind of real world crown. When I felt down, his records were like tapping a vein; Leon Russell & the Shelter People offered a soundtrack for a dreamer’s diaspora. Promises of home and redemption, songs of raw ache and utter brio, guitar notes twisting and piano thump-thumping like a strong heart taking pleasure, it wrung out my own young angst and hung it on the line to dry in the bright light of the sun.

But Leon Russell, like so many of the ones who came before, seemed elusive. Like the scent of Nag Champa, it is in the air, but impossible to touch: sweet, spicy, sense-piquing, yet ever ephemeral. Leon Russell always in the back hallways and fire escapes of my life and times in LA, when FAX machines were super-high tech and Tower Records was almost a city block of sheer heaven.

You don’t meet men like Leon Russell. Tulsa-born and Tulsa-tied, visionaries don’t exist among mere mortals, so just the notion is plenty as life whips by – and stacks up at your door like so much chord wood for the winter.

Until ex-fiancee #4 said “Let’s go to dinner, let’s go to 12^th & Porter…”

He had that naughty twinkle in his eyes, the one that always promised too much fun and plain adventure. I probably put on something velvet with my banged up Levis, probably pulled on cowboy boots of some sort, wiping my mouth with whatever bright pink lipstick I was favoring then.

At a table on the black and white squared linoleum floor, with a perfect view through the giant fishbowl front window, I saw the biggest old school Cadillac pull up. It took up the whole view, the rumble of the Detroit muscle almost rattling the glass… It was obviously old school hillbilly royalty pulling up, but here?

 From out of nowhere Sherman Halsey, the scion of the country booking Halsey Co. dynasty, whirled from out of nowhere, silky caramel hair tumbling down his shoulders like some sharp dressed Jesus. Opening the car door, he reached in and helped a gorgeous black clad arm emerge…

 My jaw was by now slack, not even completely knowing what was happening. But by now I understood, it was something – and my thrilled at the secret boyfriend looked like he’d swallowed a 100 watt bulb.

Blinking twice, I saw a large, sturdy yet frail man emerge. Sherman helping, taking his weight, the gentleman moved slowly, his fingers circling Halsey’s elbow. There was a halo of serious and a cloud of “holy shit” all around him.

Looking at Little Steve, as Stephen Charles Hurst was known at our house, I couldn’t find the words. Finally, an “OH… MY… God…” sorta tumbled out, knowing my ability to talk like a cloud of syllables was evaporating. “That’s, that’s…”

“Yup, Toots! It sure is,” said my very-satisfied beau. “I thought you’d get a kick out of this…”

 And then they were upon us, and my face flushed, and I felt my hand being held by a papery set of fingers, the sinews and pads very apparent. His face was so carved, so lined by life – it felt like a gypsy reading your palm in reverse. You could see the world’s wisdom in the crags and watch its best parts sparkle in his sharp as a hawk’s pupils. 

It is rare that I lose conversation, especially when it’s important. I remember the oxygen leaving the room, the temperature feeling hot, myself perhaps a little dizzy. I smiled, perhaps beamed – and I think I spoke a little bit, but am not sure. I just remember how warm and welcoming, kind and familial the elegant gentleman was. He was happy to be out, even on a cane – or was it a walker? – and knew he’d have to get his hips replaced sooner than later.

 He was recording some, trying to figure out the next moves for a creative man who might have been passed by by lesser musical beings. He spoke of Bruce Hornsby, who I knew from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2 and I believe I spoke the Virginia-based keyboardist ability to smear genres without losing the musicality. Russell seemed heartened. Men like him, you see, are meant to play.

Working with Sherman Halsey, my fiancée saw Russell quite a bit. He’d come with reports that the rock legend none of my friends would’ve cared about had asked about me. I’d see stardust for days; far more impressed by that than many of the more famous people I worked with. Because those who practice magic get inside you in deeper ways.

 Russell didn’t have the comeback with Hornsby that he deserved. Didn’t get the flex that found Levon Helm or Bonnie Raitt, but he just kept moving forward. No doubt a good musicians union pension – for recording with Sinatra on “Strangers In the Night,” Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, the Ronnettes, Delaney + Bonnie, Joe Cocker, the Beach Boys and beyond had added – and songwriting royalties kept his bills paid, but there was more fire to him than that.

 The Hank Thompson country albums were staunch Texas/Oklahoma honky tonk issue. The genuflecting Willie Nelson offering up a partner in crime for one slice of who he was. It didn’t matter; he kept playing. Got the hip operation, kept playing. Had other health issues, would take a break – and keep playing.

Yes, there was a high profile reclamation of the man who knew no other way by Elton John. For a duet record, produced by T-Bone Burnett, called The Union. A debt for the flamboyant Brit rocker/pianist, John intended to see his exalted influence into the Rock & Roll of Fame – and to have Russell’s contributions to the genre recognized. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT5aYRgmgyM)

 And so it came to pass. Inducted in 2011, Russell spoke of John rescuing him from a ditch along the side of life’s highway. But he also had bought a new tour bus, and was about to embark on making a new album with Tommy LiPuma. As I said, music men keep on playing always.

Little Steve and I drifted apart. He found an incredible woman named Shaye, and they’re so much in love, I was glad I could be a way station on his journey to her. We still talk, for what it’s worth, sharing news of Leon or Sherman, ‘til Sherman died somewhere in the blur of the last several years. Love that “exists beyond place and time,” you see, isn’t bound by things like rings or marriages – or even death.

 Lately, between the election and Leonard Cohen and the death of my own uncle, it feels like life is coming faster and faster, sadder and darker, too. I’ve not had time to pause and reflect, collect and consider – all that has been lost, all that I’ve been blessed to know, to touch, to embrace as part of my life.

Leonard Cohen, truly the ultimate ladies man. Dapper suits, hat cocked just so – and songs redolent of musk and evocation, enough to make a kid’s knees quiver. Like Russell, his gifts transcend the basics of language: he holds much in a few words, scrapes away the sludgy build-up and finds the essential emotion in melodies and imagery.

 Walking around a corner too fast, returning after lunch with Don Was, I bounced into a recording studio just a bit too fast and slightly off balance. The crease in the pewter sharkskin pants could’ve slashed my jugular – only the hand that extended, steadied me and dark cocoa irises bore into my own.

 Set right, the steadying hand extended and a low voice announced, “I’m Leonard.” I gulped. And stared. “And you are?” Again, stammering, I managed to get my name out, as Was laughed and Sweet Pea Atkinson took it in with a guttural chuckle.

That’s the thing about the Towers of Song, they don’t have to flex. They just need to be. The poetry of who they are permeates everything, ignites songs with the right amounts of reserve and tension or raw desire and hell-raising. For each, the way they walked or looked into your eyes was as profound as the songs they wrote.

And whether people realize who these non-attention seekers were, their songs live on. “Hallelujah” has been recorded – like Russell’s “Song for You” – well over a hundred times. Each has their cannon, each has their own special stew; but both created an image, a sonic template, even a place within the times that solidly maintained their reality.

“Shoot Out On The Plantation” is playing as I type this. As the nation is torn in half by what they think is unthinkable, it’s all here in this song. With the chunky funky beat, the sticks moving across the high hats and clanging on cymbals with the pace that says, “We mean business,” Russell suggests the upside down reality of it all --
“Yeah, the last one to kiss is the first to shoot/ And stabbing your friends is such a drag to boot…”

 That’s the thing about these lives, whether spotlight or not, they’re often long gone. Chasing the dream, the song, the money to pay the rent or the rush to keep on going, there is a restlessness inside creative that never truly goes out.

 If Ray Charles won a Grammy in 1993 for his version of “Song for You,” this could be anyone’s refrain who plays the game of plying music for other people to find their truth.

            I've been so many places in my life and time
            I've sung a lot of songs, I've made some bad rhymes
            I've acted out my life in stages, with ten thousand people watching
            But we're alone now and I'm singing this song for you

As a woman who’s chased the road and gently blown on the kindling fire of dreams built on stages and studios, the fragility and need is something I’ve witnessed and felt my own damn self. When it’s late and lonely, you wonder about the cost… and you hum a song, and hope that the price is worth what you’ve paid.

You know, you never know. You really can’t. The rush of when it’s working is so intense, and the emptiness of doubt and all alone can’t truly be measured. Somewhere in between, there’s a lot of boredom and the baseball cards of dreams. You flip’em over and remember how sweet it was, waiting on the next song to come up on random rotation that takes you back

The editor told me Russell, who’s already survived a massive cardiac event and major brain surgery, went in his sleep. He was 74, at home in Nashville. A man who loved and kept it funky, whose humanity was pervasive and reached far beyond those who knew about the Tulsa Scene, who warmed their haunted places with Carney or Americana or Leon Live.

 Somewhere, Leon’s looking down, fingers spread like sunrays as he surveys all he left behind. The grisgris and the juju is our’s to keep alive, and the songs, well, the songs are here for all to love and live inside. Funny, too, how a man who can find the magic in “He Stopped Lovin’ Her Today” and “Rollin’ In My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” as well as “I Put A Spell on You” and the live combust of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” merged with “Youngblood,” would write his own elegy almost half a century ago.

 For all its need and ache, the larger truth in “Song for You” comes now. As the piano rises and falls, the lyrics open wide to hold us in their embrace now that he’s gone. Gentle catch and benediction, it seems Russell had already spelled it out… it’s just we were all too pinwheel-eye’d to believe this moment would ever come.

            I love you in a place where there's no space or time
            I love you for my life, because you're a friend of mine
            And when my life is over, remember when we were together
            We were alone and I was singing my song for you

Like all the real hippies, he didn’t fear death – or heaven. He shook his songs, plied his guitars and piano, mined the chutes of Dixie, swamp, Appalachia, Tulsa and tumbleweeds to conjure that sound that shook its tail and balmed the wild night. When America stood at a crossroad, Russell emerged saying “Why not merge it all?”

Uptopian. Idyllic. Hopeful. Impossible. It was who he was, and all that existed in his music from the very beginning. For a young man who started out Claude Russell Bridges and morphed into Leon Russell by virtue of a fake ID to play in LA clubs, it doesn’t matter… only the music, and how it lifts us up.

 For me, trying to make sense of everything, I’m gonna try to let it do that. And it’s funny, I’ve not been around Mr. Russell – except random airport gates on flights in and out of 6-1-5 – in years, but the idea that he’s gone still guts me somehow, lays me open wide. Maybe it’s for those days when I was young, and he was some kind of earthy paternal presence of us all; or maybe just like Leonard Cohen and David Gleason, there are some who seem as if their inextinguishable no matter what.

With the candles lit and day still blazing, I think I need to walk it off. Find a park or trail, touch the bark and hum just a little bit. He ain’t coming back, but perhaps in the songs, I can hold that smile and white-white hand with the knuckles protruding just a little in my soul again.

www.HollyGleason.com

I Wanna Be Your Lover: Prince Nelson Rogers Finds That Purple Reign

At the college radio station, the poster hung on the wall. A scrawny li’l thing with a few flaccid chest hairs, greaseball hair tumbling down as much Guido Romeo as Latino playa... naked but for a pair of skimpy bikini panties and a cross.

He watched you. Every little thing you’d do. There in that still wet shower, promises of things that should scare you behind his eyes; pleasures untold still glistening on his lips.

Prince hadn’t broken wide when Controversy found WPRK, there on Rollins’ manicured Spanish style campus on the lake. My mother came to watch me turn the radio show on one morning, alone under the library before Chris Russo my news and sports guy got there.

As the generators hummed and the equipment whirred and warmed up, I ran around flicking light switches, grabbing logs and clipboards, tearing the latest Associated Press news feed. I found her, hair teased high and wide, three platinum stripes rising out of the impossibly immobile Lady Bird Johnson ‘do, staring intently at the rumpled poster as long and as thin as he was.

Pressing the Marlboro 100 to her lips, her eyes narrowed as she dispassionately inhaled almost the entire thing. The tip burned angry red, intensifying as she sucked in. When she finally stopped drawing the burning tobacco into her lungs, she let out a plume of smoke, turned to me as I settled behind the turntables and board, preparing to put the radio station on the air.

“And what in the hell is that?” were her only words. Flat, cold, appalled.

“Welcome to another morning of broadcasting at WPRK, 91.5, Winter Park, Florida,” I said as mellifluously as possible, then read from the sign on card. I feared her ballast; I knew it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t get it, didn’t care. The image offended her for so many reasons, though sexuality had never been a problem for the woman with the heavily dented dance card.

Cold drop on “Night Shift,” the Commodores tribute to the glory days of Motown. Turn the volume up slowly. Close the pots, check the logs, find another record. Look up.

“His name is Prince Nelson Rogers. They call him Prince. From Minneapolis. Funk. Controversy...”

"He looks like a freak, no wonder there’s controversy.”

“NO,” I picked back up from the interruption. “It’s the name of his album. A lot of people think he’s offensive. He’s also a musical genius with a big pop aura. Like the black soul Todd Rundgren.”

She inhaled what was left of her cigarette, dropped it into her coffee.

“He looks like a faggot.”

And there you go.

           

Prince Rogers Nelson, like James Brown, like Stevie Wonder, like Rick James, carved deep veins of funk. Grooves you could do the laps in, beats that’d bounce you like a little kid on a trampoline. But he was a masterful musician: to hear him slash and spike strings, you understood the musical violence that melody could sustain.

My gateway drug had been rollerskates. Fat wheels, stiff leather, laced way above the ankles. When “I Wanna Be Your Lover” played, it was so juicy, so emollient, it felt like that polished hardwood floor would push you by virtue of the silky pop grooves. And the way he squeezed his voice in the end? Oh, yeah!

There were no little boys like that at any of the prep schools I went to: sensitive, melting gender, sprawling across rock and rhythm & blues and pop and funk. But Prince did it with such insouciance, such bravado, such luster, you couldn’t walk away. To me, he was everything Carly Simon sang about in that first verse of “You’re So Vain,” only wickedly talented and able to scoop me up in a few bars.

If Rick James was hard and ghetto, there was something so bohemian about the man wearing ladies clothes long before arena rockers found Fredericks of Hollywood. Looking up through that thick black shock of hair, he was a doe-eyed sylph who was all tease, then taunt, then... Well, the mind bucks.

Which was exactly the point. And while those early Prince albums were a thumb on the sore spots, a freaky sex show of “Head” and “Do Me Baby” and “Soft and Wet” and “Dirty Mind” and “Do It All Night” and “Annie Christian,” “Jack U Off,” “Sexuality” and “Private Joy,” they were as fraught because of how overt his approach. Here was a 90 pound banty rooster, often in a frilly shirts or no clothes with a band as tight as James Brown’s making no bones about pleasure, eroticism or the various forms of coitus and release.

And I loved him. Nice girl from the suburbs, plaid skirt, white cotton blouse, I couldn’t look away. Unlike my mother, he didn’t repulse me, but excite a curiosity about what happens when hormones run wild. Even if I remained a nice girl, it’s good to know what happens when you close that door...

Wasn’t that really the permission people who leaned into the erogenous charge were seeking? When the lights go down, the heat goes up, what happens next? Being nice didn’t mean being a mandrake root, and Lord knows, there was a reason Eve looked so good to Adam.

 

So I listened. I sought him out. Almost died that early morning, having just signed WVUM, the Voice of the University of Miami, onto the air – and saw 1999, a double album pleasure fest of untold delight. So new David Fleck, the MD at the time, hadn’t even pulled suggested tracks. Virgin vinyl. Mine! ALL Mine! There as day rose over the student union in Coral Gables.

Scanning the titles – for length as well as provocation, because sometimes size matters – I settled on “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” Cued it up, hugged myself tight – and opened the mic as soon as whatever song by local faves The Front was done.

“And this,” I said in my flattest Angel Dust voice, “is brand new from Prince...”

Letting the record go, I knew I could talk a bit over the hard pulse of the intro.

“The album is called 1999, and this... ahhh, promises, promises... is ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married.’ Enjoy the commute...” and I laughed as I faded my voice down. Once the channel was closed, I blasted the song, shrieking and jumping up and down, tossing my head from side to side, spinning and twisting and yes, grinding away to the synth-ladden, guitar-heavy slice of throbbage.

It was heaven. It was fun. It was one of the moments where the song swallows the moment, there is only music and you and all those delicious gyrations coming from your body swept up in it all.

Suddenly, I noticed the flashing red light angrily spinning. The Hot Line was for emergencies, invasions, matters of national crisis. Oh, Lord... Throwing the volume down, I picked up breathless, squeaking, “Hello...”

“What in the HELL are you DOING?” came the angry bark of Glenn Schwartz the impossibly good looking summer GM. “Jesus, Holly...”

“It’s new Prince,” I stammered. “I thought I’d checked the levels. Am I pinning the...

Before I could say “meters,” he interrupted. “Get. IT. OFF! GetitoffNOW....”

“Uhm, uh, uhm, ah....”

Scrambling, I set the needle flying across the vinyl, shoving in a cart of the English Beat’s ska-skankery “Mirror In The Bathroom,” hoping it wouldn’t be too abrupt. Pulling the pot up, I didn’t bother to break, just cover the silence which is the mark of sloppy radio.

The telephone receiver dangled from all the scrambling. I could hear yelling on the other end. Picking it up to an “Are you there?,” I murmured “yeah,” not understanding. As the shouting resumed, I did pick out “For the love of Christ, ‘I sincerely want to %$#& the taste of your mouth?’ REALLY? Do you give a shit about our license?”

I wanted to be adult, professional. Trying to say, “Yes, yes, I do. I am so sorry,” I somehow fell into a giggle.

“This isn’t funny, Holly. What the hell? Didn’t you preview the track?”

Preview the track? Well, no. I thought we could all burst into spontaneous combustion of funky pleasure together. That was probably not the answer he was looking for.

“Uhm, no,” I said, always committed to telling the truth. “I, uhm, I got excited – and it was a long song. I figured there’d be some jamming, some really grinding down into the groove. I was so lost in it, honestly, I wasn’t even listening to the lyrics.”

“YOU?! The person who plays Pure Praire League on our station? You didn’t check the lyrics?! Are you kidding me?”

“No, Glen, I didn’t. I just knew...”

“Knew what?"

“It was gonna feel good.”

He hung up.

And so Prince became my own private rebellion. If my street school friends knew about Earth, Wind and Fire and Rick James’ “Superfreak,” I knew something even more out. Prince was mine, and I liked it that way.

Only “1999” became the omnipresent party anthem. “Little Red Corvette” took a penis metaphor and unbridled desire and roared across suburban Top 40 radio. It seemed America was turning on, finding the libertine with the sick beats, the narcotic melodies, and those grooves you couldn’t climb out of.

Jealous, I watched his star rise. Watched as he became the James Dean of funk, a tortured misunderstood artist against the world with the film “Purple Rain” and an album of the same name that seemingly outsold everything else combined.

My mother was still not impressed. One night after a few pops, she wandered  by the tv as the still whippet thin musician rose from a steaming tub. Again inhaling her Marlboro 100, she paused with her lungs full, slowly turned as the smoke plumed and decreed, “He still looks like a faggot to me.”

Maybe. But in purple brocade, he was launching careers. Porn motifs as the Shirelles in Vanity 6, world class percussionist as women who knows in the seductive Shiela E(scobedo), cracker jack band with the swerve and the verve the Time, which eventually spawned Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who’d produce Janet Jackson’s biggest albums.

There were also the contributions to others: an innuendo laden hit for throwaway popper Sheena Easton with “Sugar Walls,” the rush rush working girl soda pop effervescence of the Bangles “Manic Monday,” the turbo synth shaft driven departure for Stevie Nicks “Stand Back.” Cindy Lauper cut a roiling “When U Were Mine” and Sinead O’Connor hit the mainstream with the stark lament “Nothing Compares to You,” not to mention Chaka Khan’s blazing return with “I Feel For You,” all sass and verve and whew! and well then...

Oh, yeah, Prince was happening. He hit Miami like a hurricane, blowing into the Orange Bowl with full gale force for the Purple Rain Tour. This tiny little man who danced like a chicken on a hot plate, downstroking his electric guitar and yowling with the demand and gratification of a true sexual avatar.

Yes, yes, yes. Garnering an invitation to the post-show party at the high end South Beach when it was busted hanger-sized disco Club X, I chewed my straw and watched the wide curving stair way hoping for a glimpse.

When he showed – somewhere between 2 and 3 in the morning – it was old school glamour.  A meltingly luxurious suit in a pastel so pale, it was unidentifiable. Tiny like a jockey, but a presence that consumed the room.

Shiela E was with him, laughing into her hand. Caramel hair falling in waves and curls, a pencil skirt slit up, lace stockings and a satiny blouse whose tailoring seemed almost to be designed to second-skin her.

Rock & roll didn’t look like this. Nothing did. I was gobsmacked.

For suburban kids with their bad perms, Manic Panic hair color and mousse to defy gravity, wearing Jordache jeans with combs in the back pockets, this was as unattainable as the lingerie clad court of women who surrounded him like a merry widow army. Little did we know about the members only, nose bleed expensive Trashy Lingerie on LaCienega, where Prince would pull up in a limo and shower these women with whale boned satin corsets, ribbony garter belts and push up bras dotted with feathers, diamante, leopard prints in scarlet red, baby pink, midnight blue, white and naturally black.

Black. The color. The whispered about album. Mythic. Vaunted. A unicorn from Paisley Park. If Prince colonized a forbidden place kids couldn’t get to fast enough, he had his own dark thoughts, his own raunchy excess and grooves to scrape and twist into a scrap metal abyss of “oh, yes.”

There might’ve been “Kiss,” and “Raspberry Beret,” and “Cream.” All those albums that tumbled out, each slightly more obtuse as the funk widened. Was it – like Miles Davis or Coltrane – an attempt to explore universes obscure to the rest of us? Or was the Purple One seeking to shed himself of the obsessive outcasts and mall rats who’d never truly be free or forward or... beautiful.

I got my copy of The Black Album on cassette from the Dazz Band on their way back into the country from a tour of Japan. Winning the 1983 Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group – tying Earth, Wind + Fire – with the unlikely “Let It Whip,” a song considered to be the first B&D smash, it seemed somehow appropriate.

Steve Cox, the jazz-driven synthesizer programmer, slid the Maxell heavy duty across the bar towards me with a knowing smile. “This is the stuff,” he said. “You’re gonna like it.”

It was the beginning of the extended game of chutes and ladders Prince would play with the record business. Getting a fade that read “Slave” cut into his sideburns... refusing to turn in records to his label... figuring out how to circumvent standard business procedures.

He would make the Noel Coward-evoking “Under The Cherry Sky” motion picture. He would turn up here and there. He would release a ridiculous album on Larry Graham. He would  play hide and seek with the public eye.

But whenever he turned up, it would be worth the watching, Sexy*funky*strange. Not to mention, a feminist and wicked appeciator of the feminine form. When “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” descended, every shape and type and trope of woman was celebrated – suggesting the sensual in us all. It was genius, and it made women feel empowered in the world as well as the boudoir.

When you feel good, when you feel desired, what is more erotic than that?

It’s what made Prince someone you wanted to hear, to feel, but also to see.

Having cashed out my journalism chips to take a job at Sony Nashville, running their Media & Artist Development Department, I knew the writers that I needed were the ones covering the mainstream. In the waters where people thought country was – to parrot Sylvester Stallone in “Rhinestone” – “worse than liver” was where the beachhead needed to be.

Explaining to my very forward looking boss Mike Martinovich my thinking, he blessed me to go to the MTV Awards, where Don Was was serving as musical director. In true Penny Lane fashion, it was Was who “found me a pass.” It was standing by him, too, that saved me when they cleared the Universal Amphitheatre for Prince’s rehearsal.

Beyond the assless pants, where it all hung out and a big buzz, here was this loose electric wire, screwed up tight, showering the tech people, script folks and sundry production staff with such sweltering guitar playing, I can’t even remember the song. Bass notes rumbled like big trucks on old brick roads, fat tires flattening just a bit, the drums slapped hard like an open hand on a wet face.

But it was Prince, leaning in, hearing things we couldn’t as the synthesizers pushed what we thought were the boundaries. Binding the music together, it was the closest thing to combustion I’d ever seen at another person’s finger tips.

Even in rehearsal, even with his energy pulled in, he held nothing back from that guitar. It was man and music, entangled, thrashing, pressing and seeking. It was, perhaps the aural equivalent of sex with an instrument – and it felt good.

And when "Screwdriver" dropped out of the blue last year, it was just as alive, just as much voltage rushing through it. An entire day, I did nothing but play the YouTube with the flimsy little video. Over and over. Kept sending the link to friends, loving every Facebook reposting or tweet or gushing email reply.

That sense of the groove coming from the inside out? I never recovered, and all these years later, it still hit me in the face and dropped me to my knees. "I'll be the driver, you be my screw." Uh-HUH.

Like the mixtape a pretty famous regional musician made for me. The expected Buddy Millers, Patty Griffins, Springsteens, a random Vince Gill. But in the middle of all that, a few piano notes formed a curl, chords fell lilke tears as the notes ascended -- and a papery, whispery falsetto intoned, "I am lonely painter, I live in a box of paints..." and i sucked my breath in. So gentle, so soulful, so washed in a carousel of emotions -- want, regret, love, need -- I pulled over.

Prince singing Joni Mitchell. "A Case of You." One of her most sacred songs of love and longing, connection and those feelings so rarely sound, so aggressively sought, even chased. A drummer mostly played the rims, the piano rolled over notes and built, the falsetto rising ever higher before settling into the pledge of "I could drink a case of you/ and still be on my feet."

I could go on and on. But I can’t. I’m not spent. I’m crying again. Not just tears running down my face, sitting here in some deep Alabama truck stop, people who were never touched by the music milling by in search a hot shower, a little food, some gas or coffee.

Not me. I had to pull over when an editor mentioned it to me in a phone call. Had to start writing like Hans Christian Anderson’s Red Shoes possessed my fingers. Had to try to remember it all: the way my blood felt like schools of little fish, nibbling my veins when his music was loud, the pulse racing when I glimpsed him at X or my jaw went slack just watching him push that glyph-looking guitar to places I didn’t know existed.

But always the music pulls me back, holds me down. I am not sobbing, but I am audible. People are looking. What can you say? They think you’re some silly teenager in a flashback moment, lost on a tide of who you were when you didn’t know any better.

They’d be wrong, of course. Prince is the one who brought a freedom and a knowledge, a conquistador’s brio and the hunger of starved wolves to our lives. Like the snake in the garden, he gave us an apple that tasted like music... and sex... and love...

It is easy to remember the freaky, the odd demands, the ego, the flamboyance and excess. But it was the teeter totter of a Jehovah’s Witness, an intense privacy, a wild distaste for how the music business worked – and a drive to make music, play far into the night that balanced those things.

Prince was 57. Too young, not enough, no reason.

As the poet’s say: WTF?

And even worse, the truck stop has no cut rate For You, Prince  or Dirty Mind to buy. Not even a bad second generation Purple Rain or Parade or Sign O’ The Times. It is raining now, just a little, a good cover for my tears.

US 280-E beckons. Miles to go before I keep, and it is that keeping on that is what will pull me to where I’m headed. A football stadium at a massive SEC Stadium, the first ever concert where the Auburn Tigers play.

Ironically or perfectly, Kenny Chesney’s 2016 Tour is called Spread the Love. Inadvertent, yet appropriate. In a very hippie, free-spirited way, it almost siren calls the youth to let themselves go and be in the moment.

As for me, you can find me driving and crying in what most certainly won’t be purple rain. But before I pack my things, back up and drive away, do me a favor: remember, all we have is right now. Today, do something bold. Tell someone how you feel. Wear that expensive thing you’re saving. Drive a little too fast if it makes you feel more alive. Turn up the music, especially, and let it play!

We never know. It never lasts. Take it for all there is before it’s gone. Wherever, however, whatever, forever and ever, amen.

21 April 2016

www.hollygleason.com

Lost & Gone: Tim Hensley + George Jones, Lilly Pulitzer & Christopher Hanna Ripple On

Working On A Building
Tim Hensley, George Jones, Lilly Pulitzer, Christopher Hanna Ripple On…

            I’m at the Rhiga Royale, now called the London. Once upon the time, it was the high, but not most nosebleed expensive rock & roll hotel: a place where Billy Gibbons and I once passed the night talking about heaven only knows, where running a “Regis & Kathie Lee” performance with a young client, Nanci Griffith heard my laugh and ran up to hug me.

            Twenty years ago, Patty Loveless and I sat at the bar, talking about how MCA – the label that had just let her sign with Epic Nashville so she could have her shot – had released her husband, the legendary producer Emory Gordy, Jr. from the George Jones project, a seemingly quid pro quo for her being allowed to leave. We talked about how cruel and unfair the business is, the way it hurts people in the name of because we can, making the point or plain old just not having broad enough grace to do the right thing.
            Gordy had returned Jones to his “He Stopped Loving Her Today” prominence for the label. That didn’t seem to be the point.

            Twenty stories up, a young tenor singer who could bend notes like Uri Geller slept. The rhythm guitarist/harmony vocalist had spent a year in Ricky Skaggs’ band after leaving his home Cincinnati – the ultimate proving ground in roots-based traditional country. Now he was holding down the same role in Patty Loveless’ coveted band.

            Tim Hensley was always sort of “aw shucks” and Gomer Pile kinda guy, but you couldn’t not love him. And as a harmony singer, his voice could rise and arc with another --  singing like precision flying with so much power, nuance and heart, he made the combined voices that much more emotionally-gripping.

            George Jones died Friday. He’d lived every one of his 81 years.
            That was a punch to the stomach. Threw everyone who had a tie to old school Nashville, where Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and k.d. lang  put a credibility scare into the hearts of the old guard and let the legends rise again with a reverence and a vitality that mattered.

            Patty Loveless was part of that credibility scare. Ricky Skaggs was an exalted presence in it. George Jones, like Haggard and Willie, was a phoenix. Tim Hensley was a foot soldier, who helped reinforce the greatness with a gift you couldn’t deny.

            Morning television is the worst. The crew has to load in at 2 a.m. The band soundchecks at 5:15. The singer, whose vocal chords shouldn’t open up until 11 a.m. just by natural order, is usually steaming their throat and trying to warm their vocal chords without forcing it to sound halfway right just to wake-up America.

            Kenny Chesney’s been doing these shows going on a decade. Even sick, with a brutal stomach virus, he can be a trooper and get through it. It’s what you do. Those shows get booked months ahead; you don’t leave people in the lurch.
            Coming out of the door to his dressing room, he leaned over.

            “Tim Hensley just died,” he said somberly.

            A cavern opened between us. He’d been the one to text me about Jones four days before, when people still thought it was a hoax. Our eyes met. It was the sadness and loss, once again. Life, like the business, ain’t always fair.

            Not that we hadn’t been expecting it. There had been the scare a couple years earlier. Two stints in rehab. The bluegrass record -- named for John Prine’s Long Monday, which Chesney co-produced to capture the after-show jams Hensley would lead in countless bus compounds after his boss had rocked anywhere from 20-60,000 people – made in an attempt to realize his talent and inspire him to stay sober.

            There had been a scare in Key West earlier this year.

            It was inevitable.

            It didn’t matter. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole of regret, what could’ve been done, the disorientation of a life lost to drink and talent left fallow in the name of something so consuming.
            “Choices,” George Jones sang about the demons, the temptations, the decisions to be made along the way. The things that save you or kill you. Jones lived it, so did Tim Hensley. As Emmylou Harris wrote in her song “Raise The Dead”: “Hank Williams died when I was five/ He sang I’ll never get out of this world alive…”

            Indeed. Or yet. And how.

            George Jones, then Tim Hensley. Lilly Pulitzer twelve days ago.

            Bang! Bang! Bang! They always come in threes, or some such. Never mind my friend’s mother and son, two weeks apart, all within this same cycle. Christopher Hanna, 37, and his grandma: a 1, 2 punch for the father and the son.

            Just part of the natural order, they say. And it’s true. But lately between the speed of sound, the velocity of life and the relentlessness of the reaper, it’s like so many late October leaves swirling down, whirling around each other to where you can hardly tell them apart; yet in the patchwork tumble, you know. You just don’t have the time to process.

            You move, and move on.

            So I’m sitting in this hotel, where I stayed the night Sinead O’Connor got booed at the Bob Dylan Tribute concert at Madison Square Garden – and threw up all over Kris Kristofferson, her cortisol spiking from the focused hate hurling at her for tearing up the Pope’s picture on “Saturday Night Live” the week previous. It’s a place of profound emotional pile-driving, and I’m wondering about life. About decisions we make, reasons we do.

            A girl companion to the boys of road, I have heard stories and midwifed dreams since I was 19. Touched some pretty rare cloth in the process. I have spun lives and truths into gold and Grammys, taken niche music and given it broader places to exist, offered context to those who might be coughed up and left unseen by the side of the road. Met a lot of incredible people, known some pretty special moments, seen some very wondrous things.

            When I went to meet Kenny Chesney the first time, a meeting 18 months in the badgering by everyone who’d ever met the scrappy kid from East Tennessee, it was Tim Hensley, whose “Hawlleeee Gleason, what are you doin’ HERE?” that set me at ease.

            I wasn’t gonna sign Kenny Chesney, out touring with his friend Tim McGraw, He was too mainstream, I was too Rodney Crowell and Patty Loveless. It would never work, couldn’t work. Besides I “wasn’t their kind,” and I knew it.

            Yet, there was Tim, wide open and guileless as kindergardener. Standing on that stage with his black acoustic guitar, Howdy Doodie haircut and harmony voice that’d stop you like a freight train hitting a wall. He couldn’t believe his eyes, and at the same time, he completely made me feel at home.

            His unaffectedness did that to you. Where Tim went, that sense of down home followed. In the bus lots and dressing rooms of arenas, he’d have that acoustic guitar out, coaxing three- or four-part singing out of “Working On A Building,” “Fox On the Run,” some other bluegrass gem. The jet-engine echo of a stadium show still be ringing in the air, but Hensley’s organic roots would rise above, dangle there and people would just leap on.

            Even in the jaded world of big time show biz, big deals, big dollars, big Big BIG, you couldn’t resist that sweet-voiced authenticity. It had always been there. Right from those first moments, just perfect in the music and the moment and the innocence that gets lost.

            It’s almost like I can’t remember a time he wasn’t there -- somewhere -- with his swooping bangs, guitar-riding a little high.

            Ricky Skaggs, where I first met him as a college girl of 19 or 20, Tim was  just a little older, but completely holding his own. Fresh out of Cincinnati on one of the toughest bandstands there was, he glowed and laughed in the wash of the music.

            Smiling and bobbing his head when I walked into Patty Loveless dressing room on a big Hank Williams Junior/Doug Stone tour in the early 90s, there he was again. Patty laughed that I knew him, saying “Then you know he can sing!” looking on at the dark-haired, high foreheaded young man with equal parts pride in his talent, recognition of being from nowhere and delight at how unsophisticated he was.

            That was Tim Hensley. Always a smile, and a “hello,” and a sincere welcome. In the rush of all this, he always seemed genuinely happy to see everybody, always quick to take out a guitar and play, sing songs and coax others to join in. It was why he was such a part of a delight no matter where he was. He just wanted to make music.

            Or so it seemed. After all, how can you know what people don’t show you? The little details, the little tweaks you might not notice – until they’re an avalanche. Like it was with Tim Hensley, a bottomless pit of things he can’t remember, phones he didn’t pick up, doors he wouldn’t answer.

            Stacked up like cord wood, waiting for the pain to stop. But it never did. Whatever it was. It wasn’t like he told us. Just kept insisting he was okay, doin’ great, doin’ fine. Ole Tim, just hobbling along, looking for the next moment to crawl into.

            After almost passing from this world a few times, he finally did it. Fell down and didn’t get up. 3:15 in the morning, those lost nether-hours, down he went, straight into the stars and floated heavenward. “Working on a Building,” no more.

            Like the ghost of Keith Whitley, those wild-eyed tortured bluegrass boys see and know things we’ll never get. Some out-run’em, some find the Lord, some make peace, some give up and some die trying. Or try to die until they do.

            If Merle Haggard proclaimed “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down,” did it? Or was it just what he needed? Sitting here, it’s hard to say. I can’t even be angry at this sweet soul. Because there’s a point with this sort of thing where you can’t know, and even if you do, who’s to say?

            Beyond it hurts. Us now, for sure. But if what they needed was relief, maybe this ache is shouldering my brother’s burden. Missing them, so they can have peace. Because George Jones careened back and forth for years, grateful to make music, generous to a fault, cagey when he’d fall off the wagon.
            But he got to 81, left an indelible stamp. Loved as much as he was loved.

            He set a standard, and lived on his own terms. An inspiration, he was a nagging reminder about what potent singing ought to be. Few will touch that hem or have the vocal sparks to ignite songs that were poetry stretched over minor keys.
            Or have the fierce love Jones inspired in his wife Nancy. She kept it together, no matter what might come. Always seeking a way, another path in the journey. Making it work, keeping the music playing.

            Suddenly, gone. Like THAT! Another rhinestone off the Manuel suit of what high country was. Nothing can ever replace that, or get close. But it’s not like you can explain that passion to the people who weren’t there.

            And hurling across life, it’s not like you get to feel it, either.

            I’m sitting with my eyes closed on a plane. Time has passed, but the emotional inertia is the same. Trying not to think, trying not to let the crack in my heart split open. So far, it’s been okay, white knuckles, but holding in. Of course, it’s not just Jones and Tim, it’s Lilly and Christopher Hanna… a cavalcade of people who have touched my life, moved my heart, taught me their own emotional colors, people no one in my world even knows.

            There is no recognition, no nod of understanding.  The numbness so great it has its own weight and hurts in its lack of feeling. Gravitational vertigo, maybe; held down, yet feeling like you’re being sucked into the core.

            Christopher Hanna, the 37-year old son of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna, was a kid in a polo shirt who stood just past my waist when I met him in Denver. Bright face, gigantic brown eyes, black curly hair, he had more vitality than a puppy, more love and eager curiosity than a kid had a right to.

            Over the years, I would see him for holidays here and there. Coming to Nashville to see their Dad for Christmas, hitting “Edward Scissorhands” and Dalts after; talking taquitos and Tim Burton, life in Colorado and Salt Lake City, school and the basic realities of being a kid. The fiber of every tiny, shiny moment of too many memories that never register, but are precious for the jewels they are.

            Artistic to a fault, he was a cartoonist, art director, creative force. Christopher was always into something, always had some magical thing he could explain, some intriguing movie he’d seen, some anime that he’d describe. Happy to be alive, rubbing that essential joy about life off on you.

            You’d never see him do it. You’d just realize you were smiling when he was gone.

            And then he got sick. Cancer. Bad. Troops rallied. The best doctors were found. It was pushed back, seemed to be receding. But like so many stories, the “all-clear” turned into “we’ve found something else.”

            So it went, on and on. You’d get the reports. You’d fear asking, afraid showing interest might give it strength. But cancer doesn’t care about any of us, it only wants what it wants: to grow, even if it takes the person with them.

            Christopher, being Christopher still figured out how to glimmer through it all. Where most people would crumble or dampen, he somehow fell in love. Found a girl who was just as precious as he was, opened up his heart and created something exponential. The craziness of knowing time is possibly finite magnifying the pricelessness of what each of them contained inside.

            It was incredible to see, to watch. Which I did this Christmas at the house Jeff Hanna’s made with his wife Matraca Berg, a perfect storybook Christmas with a sparrow of Jeff’s white-haired mother Lee, lots of friends, children who were now having children – and Christopher and Brittany.

            Just watching them was like watching Bambi and Feline: so sweet with each other, gentle, yet consumed. Ahhh, we should all have that. And before Christopher, who looked so dreadfully thin, went to heaven, he did.

            But a boy like that – sweetness, creativity, smarts and light – would. Like a beacon, he attracted it, drew it to him with some gravity we couldn’t see. He made you pause to watch when no one was looking, just to drink in what we all so desire.

            When I hugged him, he was mostly bones jangling around. He still hugged like love itself, and pulled you close enough to know how cherished you were. We talked about “Edward Scissorhands,” how young he was, how much fun that Christmas had been. And he smiled. That smile.

            I kinda knew, even though I didn’t want to. I kinda felt it, even as I tried to shake it off.

            Lee, Jeff’s mother, went less than three weeks before Christopher. Most likely to make the way for her precious grandchild. Her mind had been fading, but her sense of humor remained. No one quite knew why she was still alive. Evidently, she knew when to go so she could be most helpful.

            That’s the thing about Moms and Grandmoms: they know. They do what’s best for their kids. So, Christopher had someone waiting – to take him where he needed to go, to soothe his brow, to make him laugh and understand this was just the beginning.

            I was in Cleveland when I got the news. Barely awake after a miserable red eye flight from California, clawing to consciousness, then understanding my fitful sleep, my unrest upon joining the day. Wind knocked out of me, suddenly where I needed to be didn’t matter.

            But what I needed, something, anything to make me accept this horrible, gutting news was right there when I got in the car. God is my dee jay, I’m fond of saying. How many times, tired and feeling futile, do I walk in a place and hear “Tiny Dancer,” reminding me that some of us who surrender to the circus sow miracles of appreciation and understanding just by being?

            “Comfort me, said she, with your conversation,” Lyle Lovett’s voice quietly intoned. Like a prayer, “The Ballad of the Snow Leopard & The Tanqueray Cowboy” poured out of the speakers, raising far deeper truths to serve as a compass to the shabby, out of time Tangiers where my childhood faith in music would play out at a show by an act held sacred in Northern Ohio, unheard of most everywhere else.

            But in the disorientation and the midday, David Rodriguez’s song continued to balm and calm the storm inside. “It’s funny how we hunger for some inspiration,” Lyle almost exhaled. “And all the things that money can not buy…”
            Lyle Lovett doesn’t whisper, more caresses my aching truth. “But I’m a poet, and I’m bound to walk the line/ Between the real and the sublime/ Give the muses back their own…”

            It had been a season of that. Standing in the spinning instant BLAM! of dead and gone.

            Lilly Pulitzer died the morning of the Academy of Country Music Awards. No time to feel, to think, to even understand. Just keep moving, let the velocity hold you in place – because there’s no time for the breakdown needed.

            Losing Lilly was a sucker punch. The grand dame of pink & green resortwear. Sporty and tropical, flirty and fun. I’d worn her clothes as a child, got to be her friend as a grown-up. She had complimented my shoes, when I didn’t realize who she was; laughed about it when we were properly introduced.

            Lilly of the open door, overgrown “jungle,” wild cats, thrown together dinner parties, children, grandchildren and those of us she was generous enough to pull into her orbit. “Sit next to me,” she would say, patting the place beside her, “and tell me stories about all those wild men you keep in line.”

            She didn’t care about country music, she cared about adventure, spirited beings, places she might not get to. She loved tales about Brooks & Dunn and James Bonamy, Patty Loveless and Lee Ann Womack, Asleep at the Wheel and Rodney Crowell without ever really knowing who any of them were. She liked the momentum, the glimpses people never saw… and the way stories spun.

            When it was time for her first book, somehow she couldn’t get to the line. Was it the writer? The notion? The context? The boonswoggled deal? I never knew. Just that a mutual friend named Binny Jolly showed up at Sunday mass, slid into the pew next to me and asked if I could help.

            “I don’t know,” I said honestly. But it was Lilly. I would try.

            What unfolded were two magical days. Pages read, memories shared, order re-ordered. There was a lot of laughter, a fair amount of being slack-jawed at the stories she told and a lot of wonder at the grace that sprinkled through the life of a young, brilliant society housewife in Florida trying to figure out a way to be relevant.

            She was school friends with Jackie Bouvier, giving her intimacy with President Kennedy’s Camelot. She was a well-bred sprite as society shifted, interjecting sexiness to frumpy country club clothing, independence and self-determination into the realm of “a woman’s place,” humor into worlds that were often dry and boring.

            That never changed. Even when she closed the company; even a triumvirate of young fashion business people re-opened it after creating a licensing agreement for her name. She was – and always will be – Lilly.

            But the thing about Lilly, beyond walking into a Palm Beach old guard outpost like Testas with her and seeing the heads all turn, was her incalculable ability to know what’s needed. During the difficult severing of my relationship with my mother, she sought me out in a quiet moment at a party at her house, and asked, “How are things with MahMA?”

            Trying to sidestep, to not appear anything but gracious and avoid the shame of the truth, I said something vague. She just took me in with a mixture of kindness, reality and compassion. Then said, “REALLY?” in a way to let me know I was busted.

            “No, it is bad… It had to be severed. If you want the truth.”
            “Oh, I do,” she offered. “I always want the truth. And honestly, Holly…”

            She paused, not so much for effect, but to make sure I heard her.
            “Some things are best over. I’ve heard some of it. I know it was done lightly. But it’s done. Don’t look back.”

            In that moment, my guilt melted. I wasn’t ungrateful, I was trapped in something untenable. Lilly -- who loved all, understood people’s varying realities and reasons – had reached out, knowing my struggle. She wanted to give me the sense of peace that would only come from someone seeing what had happened, and understanding.

            “Really?”

            “Absolutely.”

            And then she laughed, asked about freshening my drink.

            Isn’t that how the real blessings and benedictions fall?

            That, and the ones we lose. Even when we see it coming, we’re never ready.

            So, what are the lessons to be learned? What did these lives mean?

            While I’m waiting on the breakdown, what can I take from them to make me more engaged during my time here on the planet?

            All those lives were lived wide open: love, emotions, welcoming, present. Whatever there was, especially with Christopher and Lilly, they found the beauty, the gleam, the warmth, the love – and that is what they reached for. What they used to make that moment indelible. And they were generous, to a fault. Going where they didn’t need to, asking questions or making you feel invited, reaching out to bring you in.

            Even in the pinned against the momentum velocity of my last several weeks, the speed of life not allowing me to embrace what I needed to feel, there were moments that glittered like a diamond in the dust, unexpected and almost unbelievable in the right-when-it-was-needed of it all.

            Finding a friend amidst the tilt-a-whirl of marketing at the speed of now, determined to be as excellent as can be; in a world of good-enough-is-plenty, someone willing to sacrifice herself to get it right. Kindred spirits on the road are hard to find; ones who get the joke are rarer.

            There Sloan Scott was, ready to laugh, to roll her eyes, to embrace Elvis Costello’s truest coping manifesto “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused…” from the girl’s second best friend titled “The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes.” Sloan likes shoes, good meals, better stories, challenges most people won’t see so they don’t have to deal with them.

            In the tumbledown of egos and details, she excels. She’s a marvel of making it work, a juggler of opposing demands and a thrill to watch in action.

            Deep in her lair of characters is a late 50s master of taste, a man who mixes spirits into grown up libations. That work has taken him ‘round the world, let him see the bulls in Pamplona, watch Cubans roll cigars and play the sweetest music, experience golf in the heart of Scotland – all while conjuring things that grown-ups will like to drink, turning the bottles upside down and their emotions inside out.

            Mike Booth has seen it all. Asks questions like “Have you ever been in love?” in the lost hours; weighing the answer for the real bottom. A pronouncement of “that is good” means it is true. As he talks of people’s souls, you know the man who blends the spirits sees well beneath the flesh.

            With the white hair brushed back, yet falling forward and the broad shoulders that make him seem a lumberjack hybrid of Hemingway and Guy Clark, it’s a fascinating way to explore the unseen regions of what life and man is made of. He reminds you things have intrinsic value, like “The Snow Leopard” invoked above.

            Even in the sadness you can’t feel, people like this rise up to show you you’re alive. The daze can’t really mute them, and they’re beacon to pull you towards the weightlessness of thawing out, the good cry that will set you free. But they’re also temples of light to remind you hope isn’t a cruel joke, that joy is waiting when you’re ready.

            In the end, all lives yield truths and sow flowers for our future. We must feel the pain to get to where we need to be. My friend Richard Young, who anchors the once-upon-a-time wildly successful Kentucky Headhunters, told me when my almost 18-year old cocker spaniel died: “It only hurts so bad because you loved so much. You take that ache and know how great the feeling was, and know, too, that that little yella dawg loved you more.”

            That has to give you heart: to know you could care so much. Knowing that, what else is possible? What more can you embrace? What else might you find? All you have to do is feel to heal, let it consume you, then spent from the aching float back to the top. All you gotta do is let it come.

            And so here I am, trying to let that happen. But knowing until it does, there’s all this to embrace, to cling to and linger upon. Seeing the diamonds in the dust, holding the memories close until the tears begin and the beauty rises.

            It is a beautiful life. Even the things we lose, we got to have. It’s everything that made Tim Hensley and George Jones, Christoper Hanna and Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau matter so very much to a girl who is mostly just a blur and somewhere else along the way. In the agony of the waiting to breakdown, it’s the realization that keeps me going… and it abides in ways that outlast however bad the tempest is going to be.

www.hollygleason.com

Robin Gibb: Bee Gees, Night Fevers, Disco Apocalypse & Gone

It started with those swinging paint cans… the jaunty walk… the crease so sharp you could shave with it in the double knit pants… and a world I had no idea about. It all crested on foamy waves of glistening three part harmony, the top so high only dogs could truly appreciate it.
“You can tell… by the way… I use my walk… I’m a ladies man… no time to talk…”

“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.

On The Radio: Donna Summer's Last Dance... & Gone

In that flood of ebony hair, there was always that one gardenia. Floating on top of the satiny waves of almost-porn star mane, it spoke to things past, the moment of ripeness and the perfume that intoxicates. It was almost the same way with her music…

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

When I Get My Rewards: Godspeed, Dick Clark + Levon Helm

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

Earl Scruggs Claw Hammers, Hippie Kids + A Grace Beyond the Moment

I’ll never look at the Waffle House the same way. The one out by the

Assault & Battery Lane exit, 65 South out of Nashville, called Harding Place

before the name change.

It’s actually on Sidco Drive, a parallel runner that’s lower industrial strip

malls. There’s a Cracker Barrel for the more traditional Christian-types.

Then there’s our Waffle House, like an Island of Broken Toys for college

kids trying, sobering up from a benders, gay kids after whippets and

dancing, old Nashville remembering and the occasional country star.

Everybody sits tucked away in formica veneer booths or at the counter on

swivel stools, waiting on their Scattered, Smothered & Covered. Even him.

See, that’s the thing about Earl Scruggs, bluegrass royalty, generational

bridge, iconic artist and musical trailblazer, he was always at home with theSave & Close

slightly off-kilter.

You’d see him there. A lot. Especially after his lovely wife/manager/deal

squeezing wife Louise passed on. Or at first, you wouldn’t see him. He’d

just be. Maybe you’d go to pay your check, or else you’d notice how neat

and pressed his denim pants seemed.

Wouldn’t think much about the calm man sitting over his plate of eggs. Until you looked a little closer. Then WHAM! One of those only in Nashville moments: “Crap! That’s Early Scruggs – “ would exclaim the voice in your head.

Mostly people didn’t bother him much. Might stop and say a few words.

You didn’t bother stars at he Waffle House; you sure weren’t gonna pile up

on a legend trying to drink his coffee in the not so early morning hours.

I remember the first time. Sucked in by the demin pants. “Ahhh, what a nice

looking older gentleman,” I thought. I smiled, always a softie for serious

grown-ups.

Raising my eyes to gaze into the countenance of this lovely man, I felt my

jaw go slack. “Holy crap! It’s Earl Scruggs…” I hoped was uttered by my

internal voice. He didn’t really look, so the silence was my cover.

He looked up from his plate, met my eyes, smiled.

I smiled back. Dunce, yes, but not paralyzed with shock. Most likely, I was

so surprised, I scanned as someone who had no clue, no notion that this

was the man who invented the intricate 3 finger picking style that almost

eradicated claw-hammer playing.

It was a genuine moment. Quiet, unseen, but engaged. He didn’t need to

show me his Grammys, he offered his heart. Sincerity and warmth is about

as good as it gets.

See, Earl Scruggs might’ve been a master musician and innovator of the

same caliber as Miles Davis or Coltrane, but he was more a man who sought

to bring people together. As a player, his first break came in 1945 with Bill

Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry, but it wasn’t long

until he and Lester Flatt teamed up and spent the 50s and 60s barn storming

the country – and creating a true frame for the Appalachian musical form

that was all ache and flying fingers.

 Flatt & Scruggs were icons. Standard-bearers. Gospel-carriers.

 The audience was white, lower middle class, worked with their hands, backs

hurting. But they found the Flatt & Scruggs sound vitalizing.

And then there were the hippies. When the 60s folk movement hit and the

hippie generation erupted, Earl Scruggs – in part at the behest of his wife

Louise – packed up his sons and took the Earl Scruggs Review to colleges

across the nation.

With the Viet Nam War in full throttle, college kids protesting and drugs

making their way into the mainstream youth culture, musicianship and a

yearning for authentic made Scruggs the hottest ticket with the hippest kids.

This was breaking ground and healing generational damage just by being

who he was.

And who he was transcended what he was. Always a player of high

execution and credibility, Scruggs also believed in music’s transcendence.

When country was as right as you could get and Jane Fonda the only woman

more radical than Joan Baez, Scruggs couldn’t wait to make music with her

-- recognizing the crystal clarity in her voice.

He also played with hippie sitar player Ravi Shankar, the folk-pop band the

Byrds and Bob Dylan. The Eastern music and inscrutable lyrics engaging

him in new and thrilling ways.

Which was really all Scruggs wanted: to be engaged, pushed, challenged, to

see how far music could go. He was there when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

recorded Will The Circle Be Unbroken and returned for Will The Circle

Be Unbroken, Vol 2, produced by his acoustic guitar virtuoso son Randy

Scruggs.

He was there at the Opry. With and without Flatt.

He was all about making music. When Steve Martin got serious about

bluegrass, Scruggs was there. When Elton John wanted to play with a banjo

man, he was there. Indeed, he was as comfortable with Billy Bob Thornton

as he was Vince Gill or Marty Stuart – and folks like John Fogerty and Leon

Russell clamored to play with the man who’s in the Country Music Hall of

Fame, has received the National Medal of the Arts, recorded Red, Hot &

Country for the Red Hot Organization, which supports AIDS charities , and

received a Grammy for his 1968 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” as well

as writing and recording “The Ballad of Jed Clampitt” for “The Beverly

Hillbillies.”

It is vast this legacy. Marks left in places most would never think of, yet

when you pull back and consider… of course.

Like the Waffle House, where I don’t get around to near as much now that

my metabolism has slowed to a crawl. Its just one more all night dive off I65

just south of town, except that Earl Scruggs used to sit at its counter, quietly

eating his breakfast.

Always one of my favorite things to tell out of town guests!

“THIS is Earl Scruggs Waffle House!” I would proudly declare. Their eyes

would open wide. Sometimes they’d get lucky and he’d walk in, or I’d

signal with my own eyes where to look.

Now, of course, you won’t have to. He’s not there. Although my money –

once he gets sorted out in heaven – is that he’ll be back. You’ll find him

sitting there at the second or third stool, not quite present, but there… Just a

presence that will never quite leave.

Of course, when you make the musical mark Earl Scruggs did, you won’t

ever be gone. People will listen to his records and marvel; pick up their

instrument and practice the complicated three fingers rolls, the wildly

accelerated picking.

His mark shall last forever. So will his soul. A man from the same Piedmont

region in North Carolina – which gave us contemporary hipsters Carolina

Chocolate Drops – he was dedicated to his craft, pushing boundaries and

sorting out what the future held.

There’s no more sorting. Earl Scruggs is in heaven. With the angels. With

the Angel Band – and all is, though somewhat sad and slightly empty, alright

with the world, with the ones who pay attention, even as we’re sad through

losing Scruggs.

Amy Winehouse: No, NO, no... Fame Kills Harder Than Drugs or Sex or Booze

            It wasn’t like we couldn’t see it coming, wasn’t like anyone was shocked. Yet, the news Amy Winehouse had indeed been found dead in her London apartment tore through my Saturday morning with the harsh ripping reserved for muslin I’m going to use for mustard plasters. Forceful, sick, weakening.

            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 27^th 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