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