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

Dan Einstein & the Essence of What Matters: Unfinished Business, Prine & Sweet 16th's Grace

“He doesn’t talk to college papers,” said the voice at the other end of the phone.

“But college students are the future. They’re the next generation of fans,” I protested.

“He doesn’t talk to college papers.” CLICK.

I blinked twice. John Prine had a mail order record label. No one I knew knew who he was. Who was this rude person who wouldn’t even listen. I lamented for this empathetic soul who’d written about an OD’d Viet Nam vet, forgotten old people, a middle aged housewife shipwrecked in her marriage. If only Prine knew...

And then John Prine booked into the Carefree Theater, which ran smart movies and the occasional concert. Even though it was West Palm Beach, Doug Adrianson, my editor at The Miami Herald, would understand the value of this performance. He immediately assigned the story. 

The concert promoter was thrilled. A million people across the state would read the feature; it would help sell tickets on the other Florida shows they were promoting. Just one thing: I wouldn’t talk to that Dan Einstein. They could set-up the interview, but I wasn’t speaking to the rude man who’d hung up on me.

The day before the appointed time, Jeff Chabon, Fantasma Production’s publicist, begged me to please call the management office. “He’s a great guy,” he insisted. “We went to college board stuff together: him from UCLA, me from Arizona.”
“He’s a jerk. I don’t care.” I responded.
“Holly, they want to make sure you’re not a psycho.”

“You don’t want me to make this call...”

Sometimes you do what you gotta do. I picked up the phone, listened to a half-baked apology, said I didn’t care. I asked tersely, “Is it okay for him to call me now?” 

“Yes, tomorrow at 2.”

“Great.”
”He doesn’t like doing interviews, just know that.”
“Okay. Thank you.”

And at 2 pm on the dot a slightly sand-papered voice called, asking, “Is Holly there?”
We talked for over two hours. About so many things, the Midwest, Aimless Love, old songs, home cooking, country music, Johnny and Rosanne Cash, traveling the country – and not being too famous, just famous enough.

When I took a job at a competing paper, my story was spiked. When I went to review the Carefree show for the Palm Beach Post, because I knew small labels lived by people knowing they’re out there, they put me front row. Prine stepped over the speakers during the opening “Lulu Walls,” said, “Hey, Holly...,” scared me to death and forgot the next verse of his song.

Waiting after his set to apologize for wasting his time, Prine could’ve cared less. He wanted to tell me about Tribute To Steve Goodman, the tribute recording for his best friend who’d died from leukemia. Told me I should call the office and get a copy.

“Your office doesn’t like me,” I said. He laughed.

“Well, you call,” he encouraged. “And they’ll send it to you.”

“The Palm Beach Post isn’t that important,” I explained back in the days when advance cassettes on good tape was a meaningful expense.

“They’ll send it,” Prine assured, eyes twinkling. “Because I’m gonna make’em.”

Calling for the advance music, Dan Einstein asked if we could clear the air. Chagrined by the killed story, apologizing profusely, I agreed. He told me about the late folk singer, who I knew from Alex Bevan, my childhood idol who’d opened several Midwestern runs, about his sense of humor, love of baseball (especially the Chicago Cubs), his amazing family, his years long battle with leukemia. You could tell this voice on the other end of the phone really cared.

Barely out of college, I summoned the courage to tell him the story of visiting my aunt in Chicago as a young teen and seeing Goodman’s “Soundstage” on the local PBS station. So fired up by the broadcast, I made someone drive me down to the tv studio, where I was sure they would be loading out the gear. It was dark and abandoned when we got there.

That made him laugh. He promised to send me the advance cassettes, to Fed Ex them three day “because we’re a small label, and, well, we cut costs where we can.”

In the middle ‘80s, the idea of “running a label” for an artist with actual traction seemed crazy. Sure, Alex Bevan, my idol, had Fiddler’s Wynde, but he had the local record stores and his shows to sell records at. John Prine – or Steve Goodman – were nationally known. Major accounts weren’t going to deal with a handful of titles here, a new release with maybe 100 copies there. And yet, with the customer cards and mail order business, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were making it work.

Dan Einstein was figuring out how to do the impossible. Over time, he figured out how to not just get the rack jobbers and accounts to do business with them, but to pay upon delivery. In a net 90 day business, Goodman and Prine were strictly COD. It took years, but they got there.

It was fascinating to hear the machinations of building allies, the stories behind pulling off the concert at the Aerie Crown Theater in Chicago with the local folkies, plus Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

He would tell me stories, too, about the punk heyday in LA. Going to shows at the Masque, Madame Wongs, the Starwood. Tales of the Germs, X, the Cramps and the Screaming Sirens, booking the Motels at UCLA long before “Take The L” and “Only The Lonely” were hits. Through his eyes and words, I got to glimpse the raw demi-monde of a scene that felt like fire.

Sometimes I think we’d invent reasons to call each other, to just talk. Him, a college drop-out staking his claim with a small artist management company where he could build these crazy labels, me a music critic for an outer ring daily paper and freelancer with a growing national reputation through Tower Records Pulse!, Trouser Press, Performance, Rock & Soul, Billboard, HITS and Mix.

When Billy Vera had a moment with “At This Moment” during Michael J. Fox’s famous breakdown on “Family Ties,” Dan told me about Vera’s band the Beaters, about Peter Bunetta the drummer and emerging producer. The Palm Beach Post was early on that story, breaking two days before the Associated Press.

In the winter of that year, I was going to be in Nashville doing interviews and a little media training for CBS Records. He was going to be there for publishing administrator BUG Music’s new office celebration. “We should meet,” he said. 

I wasn’t so sure. What we had on the phone was great. Why ruin it? Why run the risk of... What? I didn’t know, but that first call, that first hang up nagged at me.

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun... and maybe I can get you into the show BUG’s doing with John, and John Hiatt, Dave Alvin, Marshall Chapman, some more people.”
And so, we met. Sat at Tavern on the Row, laughing and making small talk like we’re always known each other. He wasn’t as old as he seemed on the phone, and he really liked to laugh. We could’ve sat there from the end of the day to the show, but he had to go check on Prine. He left me with, “You’re on the list. I’ll see you there.”

Days when you go from interview to interview, a media training session wedged in, maybe a meeting with someone like Tony Brown to hear what he’s excited about can be exhausting. Was I going to even be awake by 10? But it was Prine, Haitt, maybe Peter Case, too.

The venue, long since bulldozed for what is now the massive Warner Nashville Building, was low-ceilinged and poorly ventilated. Just walking in, it was so hot, you felt the humidity. Unzipping my coat, looking around, I couldn’t find him... I just sat down where I could find a table, a little disappointed. Of course he has to work; he had the headliner. He was busy. What part of this did I not know? But before the first act came on, there he was, dragging a chair behind him. He knew that late, there wouldn’t be one; he brought his own.

That was Dan. Ahead of what needed to happen, ready with the solution.

After the show, he took me back to say “hi” to John, who admonished him to make sure I got to my car. Standing on the corner of 16th Avenue, the small talk continued until he finally kissed me. It was not Paris after the war, but it was a dam breaking. Stammering, because I’ve never ever thought in those terms, I kissed him back, then said, “I think we should probably go home.”

Whirling, it was one of those, “he likes me” moments. The knowing someone who you really think is smart actually truly likes you. You drift through the next few hours, sleep some, but a little more electric than before. What did it mean? Did it matter? Who knew...

Walking into Warner Brothers the next morning, I was greated by Janice Azrak barking, “You slut! You whore!” and regaling all in earshot about seeing me kissing some boy on the streets of Music Row last night. There were no secrets in that era Nashville, what was I – in a bright pink winter bomber jacket – thinking? Trying to explain, it was a pile-on. Embarrassed, shy, what do you say?

Nothing. I didn’t even know where the boy was staying. I didn’t have time to think.

Rodney Crowell, the great white interview whale, was that afternoon. After three years of asking anyone who might have a notion how, doing his wife Rosanne Cash for the cover of Coconut Grove’s alt-weekly Grapevine, having had multiple publicists from the high cred Network Ink intercede for me with their assistant, it was to be. There wasn’t a record to tie it to, but having been a fan of his writing, it was a chance to unpack bruised romanticism, life as Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band wingman, a producer on the rise and a maverick talent who’d signed a poster from his last Warner Bros. record to me after I sent a copy of my review from Rollins College’s paper to the publicist at his label,
The interview was incredible. Crowell is a good and easy talker. He drank a gallon of water, unraveling stories of growing up in the “white trash” part of Houston, the road with Harris, writing pop and country hits for the Dirt Band, living in California and moving to Nashville. Leaving there, I was levitating.

When I got back to my friend Ben’s house, there was a note with a number. I called, asked and was put through to the room. A suddenly formal voice said, “Uhm, may I take you to dinner?”

“Well, yes,” I said, still afterglowing from a great interview. Suddenly awkward, “But, uhm, one thing...”

“Okay. I mean, I was thinking we could go somewhere kind of nice.”

“I interviewed Rodney Crowell, and I really don’t want to change out of these clothes,” I hedged.

“Okay, that’s fine.”

“Well, I’m in a yellow sort of sweat shirt and sweat pants,” I explained. “I was, uhm, thinking we could go to... Krystal?”

“KRYSTAL?”

“Is that okay?”
“I was thinking I could take you to a nice dinner...”
“I know, but I would really like to just go to Krystal.”

There was silence.

“If you don’t mind. I mean, it’s really nice that you want to do that.”

“I have John’s credit card. He said to go use it.”

“You don’t have to tell him...” I hedged. He laughed.

And Krystal it was. For a handful of teeny double cheeseburgers. Three hours of talking over fountain cokes. What about? Who knew? Where we’d been. What we thought, or figured. We only stopped to pick-up my friend Ben Payne at the airport, whom we dropped off, and rode around for another hour talking.

I left the next day. When I got home, there was a message on the machine to call Dan and let him know I’d made it back safely.. It was a different number. When I called, John Prine answered, said, “Hey, Holly...,” then called out, “Daaaaaaannnnnnn, it’s a girl.”

And so it began. 

Unbeknownst to me, the man who wrote “Donald & Lydia” and “Paradise” was our Cupid, finding ways to throw us together. Telling Dan to take me to the Grammys a few weeks later, “if she’s a reporter, she’ll love that. She can file for that little paper.” Hiring me to write the bio for German Afternoons, so they could fly me to Washington, DC for Prine’s sold-out Wolf Trap show. The second Farm Aid, where it was brutally cold in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the dressing rooms were masking taped sections of the fieldhouse floor. Making Dan come to do settlement when they had Florida shows, then taking me out on the run with them.

Funny thing is: it didn’t take much. Anyone who talked with Dan, fell in love with him. So smart, so many ideas of how to make things work that one couldn’t figure out. From him, I learned the idea of your friend is my friend. Cathy Hendrix in Atlanta, running a small label. Mike Leonard outside Chicago, doing stories for NBC’s “Today.” Marina Chavez, their once receptionist, who would become one of roots music’s pre-eminent photographers. So many names; all they ever had to say was “Dan told me to give you a call...”

And it worked that way the other way, too. The Illinois Entertainer. David Gans at MIX. Cowboy Jack Clement, the legendary producer and Sun Records’ creative spark. Steve Berlin when Los Lobos was on tour for Will The Wolf Survive. Always, “Hello” and “What do you need?”

That was Dan’s heart, and he brought it out in others. Just as the somewhat shy, often unwilling to let you know how really accomplished he was man kept making impossible strides and creating magic and unthinkable things.

By the very next Grammys, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas had two of the five nominations in the inaugural Best Contemporary Grammy category. Tribute to Steve Goodman, with all those loving performances from the Chicago folk community and a few famous friends, and German Afternoons showed that artists who didn’t fit the system could make a mark making music on their terms.

When I saw the nominations, I screamed. Dan, being Dan, said, “Well, I guess this mean it’s working.”

Working? The mail order business, with the comment cards. The occasional catalogues to tempt people into other albums. The one-by-one accounts. Slowly, purposefully, building to something that almost paralleled what the big labels did on a far smaller scale.

“We have to do something special,” I remember on a late night phone call, trying to come up with some way to mark this moment. Whether he knew the significance or not, as a reporter, I recognized what they’d done out of three sunlit rooms in a slightly worndown building built for Marion Davies by William Randolph Hearst.

Having made many trips to see my boyfriend and eventual fiancée, I had found a street fashionable boutique on Melrose where they made clothing out of very old kimonos patched together to give the beautiful fabric new life. Claudia Grau and her staff would visit with Dan and I when we would go to Melrose, talking about local music gossip, people on the scene and life as an indie label.

When I asked if she’d consider making me a dress, the answer was yes. When we were in the store discussing it, they asked Dan to try on a pair of pants they were thinking of making as a unisex option. Laughing about trying them on the “girls dressing room,” he came out – and they looked at each other smiling.

Were they really thinking about genderless clothing in the later ‘80s? Hard to say.

But when Dan picked up my dress and bolero to bring back to Silver Lake, he was aghast. 

“BooBoo, what’s wrong?” I asked, not sure why he was so thrown.

“They... uhm...”

“Yes.”

“They made me... a cumber bund and a bow tie. They...”

“Is there something wrong?”

“They wouldn’t let me pay them for it. They said to wear it for good luck.”

“Is it ugly?”

“No, no... It’s...”

He reached into the bag, where it had been lovingly wrapped in tissue paper. Pieces of kimono in rich, deep tones had been sewn into what a man wears with a tux. Judging from the size, it would fit perfectly. I smiled. Those women wanted to give him so love in exactly they way they knew how.

“It’s beautiful, Dan. I think you should put it on. I think we need to leave soon. It’s pre-telecast and it’s LA... and we have to valet.”

At the Shrine Auditorium, back in the smaller more community music industry days, people were glad-handing, waiting for the doors to open to begin the awards to small for network television. We sat down hear the front; John, me, Dan, Al Bunetta and his wife Dawn watching the winners be elated and thank the people who mattered to them. The Winans, a gospel group with family members in seemingly every category, were so euphoric we decided we had to go hear their music.

And then it was Best Contemporary Folk... and the winner is... Tribute to Steve Goodman. Dan hesitated more than a beat. Prine reached over, with a big smile, and said to his friends, “You better go get it.”

It was a blur. What they said, what happened next. If the year before, Dan had found me a pay phone to file from – because as a date, I wasn’t in the press room – then kept people away from me, while trying to make the connection work with the remote transmitter, this year, he was a big winner.

“I can’t believe this,” he whispered when he got back from the press gauntlet. “How did we do this?”

“Well, you booked a theater... you called Stevie’s friends,” I joked. He looked at me with tears in his eyes. 

“You understand this mean’s Stevie’s not forgotten,” he said. “And all those people who loved him, they’re not going to be forgotten either. Those songs now maybe live on...”
“Yes, Dan, I do. Because that’s what you do. You make sure people aren’t lost, or overlooked, or forgotten.”

He squeezed my hand. “Maybe. And when this is over, we’re going to get Chinese food. Or the Pantry. Or Astro. Or something.”

“Hey, can we just be here right now?”

Being here now could mean so many things, because Dan’s ability to love and be curious went so many places just in LA. The San Diego Zoo. The train to San Juan Capistrano. Pacific Coast Highway north until we decided to come home. The tea room at I. Magnin, “because who would ever believe people lived this way? And we can still pretend.” The carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. Shows everywhere where he knew everyone.

When The Palm Beach Post fired me – alleging things that couldn’t be further from reality or the truth – Dan was on a plane the next day. “Don’t worry,” he said when I called him in tears. “We’re going to figure this out.”

Picking him up in Miami, as I’d done so many times, he announced, “I think what you should do is move to LA... and become the world class rock critic you are. Screw small town papers. If The Herald doesn’t have room, then come to LA.”

“But Dan, a freelancer can’t afford those bills...”

“They can if they move in with me. Tell you what: you pay your phone bill, and I’ve got the rent. Can you do that?”

Speechless, I nodded. Then in three days, we packed up on apartment, setting most of it in storage, the things coming in my car in a pile by the door; things that were precious were in a suitcase he took with him.

As we worked to clean up the apartment, I used dishwashing liquid in the dishwasher. He emerged from the back bedroom to a living room engulfed in suds and bubbles; the howling laughter pulled me from deep cleaning the grout.

“Ohhhhhhh, Luuuuuuuceeeeeeeeee...,” he said through giggles, “you’re home.”

I burst into tears. He hugged me. “THIS is funny. We will laugh about this always. Please stop crying. Please, please. Only you, and that’s why this is so perfect. I’ve already scuba’d in, stopped the dishwasher. We’re going to have to get this cleared out, but let’s laugh and jump around in the bubbles.”

Let’s laugh and jump around in the bubbles. And we did. Eventually opening the patio door, taking armfuls and boxes of soap suds out into the bushes. It looked a bit like a snow drift when we were done, but we were laughing and finding an ironic joy in the shattered disappointment of being treated so poorly by people who had no idea what they had.

Before I turned in my key, I’d sold a story on Jackson Browne to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner for a Chrystic Institute Benefit he was doing. I would arrive – after a week at Fan Fair, where he would meet me for the drive to California  – a published Los Angeles-based writer.
When he told Prine what happened, John said, “Well, then you two kids should come to England and Belgium with me. It’ll be just the thing! Have some fun. See the world. Screw that stupid paper.”

We could barely see out the back window of my teeny Nissan Pulsar, but away we went. Telling stories about the towns we drove through, looking up stuff on the map. Sometimes we’d try a truck stop, other times we’d just roll into a grocery store and grab an apple or some yogurt. Somewhere in Oklahoma, a stock boy bagging up water for us saw my advance cassette of Motley Crue’s next album; he came a little unglued.

Dan winked at the teen, and went, “Magic is real. Sometimes these things escape – and if you’re lucky, you catch them.”

“Whoa, man,” the kid replied. “But that’s THE CRUE....”

“And it F’ing rocks!” Dan affirmed, laughing. “You’re gonna love this record. It’s sooooo good.”

Never mind he was wearing enormous glasses, had a tiny pony talk and a well-groomed beard. He looked nothing like an Okie headbanger, and yet. The kid nodded solemnly, and Dan nodded back.

Coming into Tucumcari, New Mexico, Dan had started singing Little Feat’s “Willin’,” the Lowell George truckin’ song Linda Rondstadt had mainstreamed. We both loved Little Feat and the Band, so it seemed like ironic soundtracking at its finest. Nosing the car off Rte. 66, we landed in the parking lot of a low to the ground turquoise building wearing a sombrero. 

“Some of the best Mexican food in the world,” he offered smiling. “I thought a little adventure and a surprise would do you good.” 

It was delicious. Unexpected. Soul-sustaining as well as stomach-filling. We decided to drink some coffee over our plates of cheese enchiladas, to just keep going as far as we possibly could. What had started as a retreat in defeat was truly becoming the beginning of something else. I didn’t know, but this person believed, so I did, too.

Back when the first wave of women rock critics had mostly faded away, I wanted to do something that wasn’t really being done. White men, often with Ivy League degrees, had taken over – and even having been on the road with Neil Young as a college student, having written a Tower Pulse cover story on Johnny Cash/Waylon Jennings/Kris Kristofferson/Wille Nelson’s Highwaymen configuration, as well as the Trio with Linda Ronstadt/Emmylou Harris/Dolly Parton – I was often the only woman in the room. Taken seriously? Yeah. Sorta.

When a record company person would want to take me to lunch, Dan would patiently explain to his wildly dyslexic girlfriend how to get where she was going; occasionally telling me what to order to prevent a dining disaster with the more exotic – to me – cuisines. He would explain why surface streets were better; implore me not to give homeless people money “as the mental hospitals have been cleaned out, dumped into the streets and you never know which paranoid schizophrenic might have a box cutter.”

Musician turned to BAM. The Los Angeles Times started using me, as did Music Sound Output, Home Studio Recording, FRETS, CD Review. YM came calling. Dan was right: I was a national level music critic, only my location suggested anything else.

Rolling Stone fell open when I got a call about talking to Joe Isgro, the independent record promoter who spoke to no one. When I called with the news, squealing and not bothering with spaces between words, he just said, “Get dressed.”

Not too long later, he showed up with that proud smile. “You hungry?”

I was still squealing. Rolling Stone in the ‘80s was a tough nut to crack; two issues a month, the space was finite – and freelancers were rarely used. But I had my CP Shades matching oversized top and skirt, my grey with black wingtip Tony Llamas on. 

“Where are we going?” I asked. 

“Surprise,” he said, as the car nosed down the Duane Street hill, through Silver Lake and onto the surface streets that would eventually put us on Sunset Boulevard. Passing the Comedy Store, I figured we’d either head towards Dan Tana’s – one of Prine’s favorite spots – or go to the fancy Hamburger Heaven just off Sunset. 

But we turned just before Tower Records, nosed up the hill behind the car rental place we used and into a lot outside a low all white building. The valet opened our doors, and I blinked.

“SPAGO?” It was the outpost of stars in movie magazines, glitterati like Cher and Pacino.

“You only get in Rolling Stone the first time once,” he said. We could barely afford it. When we got engaged, we didn’t even bother with the ring, because “we’d rather eat it than have me, a girl who doesn’t care about jewelry, walking around with it on my left hand.”

One of the Bangles was two tables over. We were against the far wall, near a window. Dan let me have the seat facing the wall. We had champagne and pizza, and we laughed like this was a dream and we would wake up. Only we didn’t. We had desert.

And then I saw her. Lauren Bacall. Even more beautiful in person. Stunning. 

“What?” Dan asked, unused to my being overcome. 

“I, I can’t... even,” I stammered. The impossibly discreet restaurant didn’t cotton to gaping at the other diners.

Just as I was about to be busted, I rose, walked over to the iconic actress, and went for the compliment to save – I hoped – our bacon. I could see Dan getting nervous, trying to conjure a Plan B and C.

“Miss Bacall,” I said, as the manager stood by, not wanting to make more of a deal. “You are so very beautiful and elegant, and you embody even more completely in person everything I was raised to believe a lady should be. It’s staggering, and I just wanted to tell you how truly incredible you are – and thank you for the example you’ve been my whole life.”
The manager was staring. Bacall looked up at the man, looked at me, smiled, then said, “MY darling, how incredibly charming you are. Thank you so much for coming over... and letting me known. Your mother must be so proud.”

I just smiled and nodded, started backing away. “Yes, ma’am, and thank you. I just thought it was important for you to know...”

“Well, you’re the sweetest.”

Back at the table, Dan let out a low whistle. Without ever chiding, he said, “I was trying to figure out if I had enough money to just leave the cash on the table, so we could just make a run for it... I can’t believe you pulled that off.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“I haven’t decided,” he said, shaking his head. “Somehow you pull this stuff off, and everyone loves you. But God, Holly, sometimes you scare me to death.”

That was Dan. He’d never clip anyone’s wings, or tell them how to live. When things were good, he would throw open the window in case you could fly, and put out a net, in case you couldn’t. It didn’t matter what or how, just that it was something wonderful.

And when it wasn’t so wonderful, he knew what to do, too. Shortly after arriving, at a Roger Waters concert, we landed in the dressing room after the show. Being taken to meet Jackson Browne, who refused to believe I’d interviewed him – and the back and forth escalating with me moving from horror at the misunderstanding to anger at being betrayed by a socially conscious artist who’d opened up how I’d seen the world, Dan quietly walked over, put his fingers into the waist band of my jeans and gently pulled me back and away.
Outside the dressing room, I collapsed into a pile of tears. How could Jackson Browne think I’d made that up? Why would I? He’s only talked to me and a reporter from Newsweek in four or five years? How does one forget that? Why would he not try to understand?
“ShhhhSHHHHHShhhhhhhshhhhhhhhh...” he whispered, petting my back, telling me it didn’t matter. “Shhhhhhhhhh...”

As the sobbing turned to sniffles, he held me at arm’s length, looked into my eyes and said – perhaps – one of the most important things anyone’s ever said to me. It endures.

“Holly, you have to make a very important decision,” he began. “Jackson’s behavior was atrocious, and we don’t know what’s going on... but you have loved those records, those songs, how he chooses to use his fame for good for so long. Are you going to let the fact that he just acted like an ass take that from you? OR are you going to chalk it up to he’s mortal, and that music is a part of your life?”

He paused to let the question sink in. Then he smiled as I looked at him, slightly dazed. “Because as much as I would love to come home and not have to hear Late for the Sky or For Everyman set on 11, I also know what those records mean to you. I wouldn’t hand something so precious over because a human being made them...”

And so, to separate the art from the mortal, the artist from the flawed being. He was right. He was, honestly, always right. 

And he always knew just where to be. When South By Southwest started, we were there. When “Austin City Limits” was more for country singers, they sent John Prine to Terry Lickona and his wonderful weekly show any time they asked. The New Music Seminar – leaning to hip hop and dance, punk and new wave – was his regular stomping grounds. 

Duke’s at the Tropicana, where Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits used to hand out. McCabe’s Instruments in Santa Monica, where small shows happened in the back room. The Palomino Club in North Hollywood, a once old school country room co-opted by the punks and Ronnie Mack’s Tuesday night BarnDance with Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams, James Inveldt and so many more; Buddy Miller on the bandstand with Duane Jarvis, Pete Anderson by the cigarette machine and Manuel, the heir to famous rhinestone tailor Nudie Cohen, at the bar.

Characters, colorful people. Chuck E. Weiss. Howie Epstein, who would ultimately produce Prine’s (finally) Grammy-winning Missing Years and Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings. The Heffernan Brothers, who’d produce the Irish series “Sessions” to cross-pollinate Irish and British roots artists with American and the occasional Mexican. Jac Holzman, who founded Elektra Records under the aegis of Warner Brothers, took me to lunch to explain how they did it, to give me even more insight into how herculean what Dan had built with Red Pajamas and Oh Boy.

Formosa Café. The Apple Pan. The Cheesecake Factory in Marina Del Ray to meet his sister. The Mandarette. Border Grille when it was a tiny little nook on Melrose. Dan Tana’s and Pacific Dining Car when Prine was in town. Netty’s takeaway on Silver Lake Boulevard, eating there on the picnic tables. Searching the tables at Lucy’s El Abode, me asking which one Jerry (Brown) met Linda (Ronstadt) so many years ago.

Always Intermetzo, the little house on Melrose where you could sit at the counter front and watch them make California-fresh French or the lovely tented patio out back. Even when they were busy, they’d find a table for Dan – and we’d eat fettucine with goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes, fresh herbs and walnuts. 

Those small things thirty years later, you can still close your eyes and see, feel, taste. The way the light cast caramel tinges or the hyperblue of early morning, the Raymond Chandler dingy overhead pulp fiction light of Kate Mantilini on Wilshire where dinner could be had extra late – or the blaring brightness of Ben Frank’s on Sunset Plaza if quicker was more in order after the Comedy Store or the Roxy.

We grew up together, became fully formed people together. He a brilliant young executive who could pave a way that hadn’t existed before. Me, a lady rock critic with a strong roots-bend who was a confidante for Keith Whitley, Sam Kinison, Patty Loveless and Nicolette Larson. We co-existed, sparkled in each other’s universes and made the other more. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and that’s how it was.

But even something perfect, sometimes, it’s not the “what it should be,” or the “happily ever after.” Yes, Dan could laugh off my father’s first real question being, “So, Dan, what do you think about Jews for Jesus?” after surviving Easter mass at the Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida... and certainly, I could explain to his stepmother Lynn if it was so important to the family and Dan would make sure they were raised in faith, “of course we could raise the children Jewish; they just need to have faith in a God who loves us.”

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me. Dan’s happily ever after was somewhere else, and so, I let go. Moving out was tricky; Dan kept coming to vet my potential new apartments and neighborhoods. Finally, West Hollywood, right near the Mayfair Market, I found a quiet executive studio and signed the lease.

No tears, only the admonishment. “Wherever she is, I don’t want you to miss the one.”
Friday night buzzer rings, tales of dating disasters. I’d protest, “I’m writing,” he’d counter, “I have Fruzen Gladje.” Always, I would buzz him up.
We stayed friends, good friends. Shared meals at Barney’s Beanery and Hugo’s, both walking distance from my house. When I got sent to Nashville by HITS, he once again helped me pack up and move; drove me to the airport when I’d come back for business.

He took a Chinese cooking class at some point, called me several weeks into it he thought he’d found her. The lump in my throat was joy. BooBoo, the man who once gave me pink bunny slippers we immediately named Chuck and Di, was finally, hopefully getting the love he so truly, deeply deserved.

Loving people isn’t about possession, but wanting what’s best for them, the things that will make them happy. Thissounded like everything I believed when I pulled the chord on the parachute.

When Al Bunetta Management moved operations to Nashville, closer to Prine, but also a creative community fomenting into a place like Austin or Athens, maybe a rootsier Minneapolis or Hoboken. Dan came first, to get settled and figure out what life might look like.

We ate some meals, had some laughs, talked a lot about life. He was so happy. Everything I’d seen was turning out, he maybe didn’t know it, but he knew my Black Irish heart. When it makes up its mind, there’s no drama, but there’s also no going back.

They bought a place. Ellen started high end food styling for tv, film and magazine shoots. Dan continued doing what he ‘d always done – signing acts, helping people realize their dreams. If he’d co-managed the Rave-Ups in LA, now there was Todd Snider, the folkie championed by Keith Sykes, Prine and signed to Jimmy Buffett’s lablel. 

Blue Plate, formed to spread the gospel of West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage syndicated series, was expanding. Oh Boy Classics mined the (Sony) Tree Publishing vaults for recordings by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Conway Twitty and more. Oh Boy signed the roots/rock Bis*Quits with Tommy Womack, Will Kimbrough and Grimey’s co-owner Michael Grimes, as well as Donnie Fritts, Janis Ian and Kris Kristofferson.

What had begun when they were in California with Epstein making Prine’s sound rockier and more muscular continued. The Missing Years and Lost Dogs ushered in a renaissance. After John’s cancer battle, Dan helped usher in a shinier way of polishing dreams. Beyond the Billy Bob Thornton movie “Daddy and Them,” which featured “In Spite of Ourselves,” Dan helped co-ordinate an album of the same name with duets on country classics with women singers Prine admired from Connie Smith to Delores Keane, Emmylou Harris to Trisha Yearwood, Melba Montgomery to Patty Loveless. Longtime tourmate Iris DeMent was on several; she would later sing it on “Sessions at W. 54th” with Prine. 

Watching his second friend battle cancer moved Dan tremendously. He would look at what was created, the things that mattered and the way life can flow away from you while you weren’t looking. He loved his wife. He loved what they shared. He’d done everything you could do on the indie side, and he wondered, “What else?”

Twenty years ago, he did the unthinkable: he walked away from show business. Started a bakery in East Nashville, when East Nashville was still more scary than hip. He pioneered the concept of creating something for his community, a place that gave back and gave refuge. He knew how small things changed lives, so he figured he and Ellen could create somewhere that offered that to people in a way anyone could partake.

Sweet 16th Bakery was born. A building that was demolished and rebuilt. A bunch of recipes from their families, and a few from friends. A breakfast sandwich – “one to go” – that’s been hailed by Gourmet, Southern Living and been named one of Food + Wine’s Top 10 Breakast Sandwiches in America.

The sweets are legendary, having won the Nashville Scene’s Best Cupcake so many times, they’re not even in competition any more. Elvis Cupcakes. Brookies. Scones. Coffee Crack Cookies. Myriad flavor coffeecakes, hand pies and danish. 
Even more than the food – they do meatless soups, grain-based salads, Dos Papas Burritos, quiches and lasagnas – is the comfort. Everyone who goes there works on the “friend of Dan’s (and Ellen’s)” principle. Conversations are had, friendships cemented.
There are dog treats for the pups, cookies snuck to the children. Dan leaning over the counter, smile and eyes glittering, are a sight countless young Nashvillian’s have grown up on. To them, he is “Dan, Dan the Muffin Man” with good reason.

On horrible days, Dan could feel it. He’d come around the counter, sweep someone up in a hug. When a friend’s husband left her, he went to the guy and told him what a mistake he was making – and made sure, man-to-man, he understood the impact of his capriciousness. 
For me, he was always my rabbi, my compass, my human. No matter was hanging over me, pushing me into a corner or creating a particularly nasty vector around me, he’d have the wisdom to know what to do. Always.
And he was always so generous with his insight and his time. Having been cradle babies together, we understood each other in ways most people can’t. If you didn’t live through it, there’s no prism to explain or make clear. We didn’t need it, we lived through it.

A few months ago, Dan was back from the rehab hospital where he’d been getting his strength back from surgery. We were talking in a corner of the bakery, sharing thoughts on the state of everything, when he paused. “You know, you need to start figuring out an exit plan,” he began. “We were gonna do that this year, before the surgery, now we want to get me well, then figure it out, because there’s a great big world out there – and we’ve all worked long enough and hard enough to deserve to experience it without all the responsibility of what we do.”

“Really, Dan?” I asked, because work was just part of not being independently wealthy.

“Yes, find someone to look at where you are, figure out what you need. Promise me.”

It had been two years of COVID, real financial uncertainty. Scrambling to make my bills, to try to put money up for retirement. What I believed was solid wasn’t necessarily what I believed. And here was Dan speaking truth to me about the reality of life post-pandemic.
Promise me.

Promise me.

As Dan has bounced back and forth with rehab hospitals and infections, he’s been the guide to an anthology for Chicago Review Press called Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters. Between us, we unlocked so many missing pieces in those pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia world where AllMusic.com is cited as it’s a real time source. In this pre-digitized morgue world, so many stories have been lost; but thanks to having been there, they’re not found.

The week before he took ill, we talked for two and a half hours from his hospital bed. He was so clear, so sharp – and so ready to get well. Weighing all of it, the ground broken, the music made, the achievements, he got incredibly serious.

“Did any of it matter?” he asked, truly contemplating. 

Twelve minutes of my monologue later, he laughed. 

“I don’t know, Bunny Girl,” he said. “You look at what people value now, you wonder. You look at how all they care about is what they think and not what happened, you realize: the days of paying attention or really feeling stuff may be over.”

“Only if we accept that, Dan,” I countered. “Only if we decide that we aren’t willing to raise our hands, make the points, show people what they can’t see.”

“You might be right,” he laughed. “This book is going to blow people’s minds. There’s always so much more than people see, so many things you can show them. Maybe that’s the deal...”

“Yeah, Dan, that’s the deal. Look at all the things – high and low – you showed me. And you still are. Always will. It’s what you do...”

“Aren’t you going to say ‘and why you matter?’” he teased, knowing I like to complete the circle when I talk. 

“No, because everyone knows why you matter, and I don’t have to say it. Everything about how you live, what you do, the way you treat people: it’s all a lesson in what matters. I know. I’ve been watching you for years.”
16 January 2022. **.**** www.hollygleason.com

Barbara Bush: RIP A First Lady/Mother of Grace, Love, Grit & Welcome

Barbara Bush is dead. It’s hard to believe. She was always sort of older, sort of elegant, sort of the perfect grandmother or mentor young people deserved. But she was in many ways so much more.  She is the kind of woman women strive to be, even when they don’t know it barraged by Madison Avenue insecurity and Hallmark tropes of “good mothers.”

Barbara Bush is the last of a certain kind. A true lady. She understood graciousness in the moment made everyone more, just as she recognized love was the truest lubricant for life.

In a world of big weddings and catfight – or quickie – divorces, she maintained a worldclass romance with George H.W. Bush that swept seven decades, two different Presidential waves, raising children, striking out to settle in Texas with her husband, enjoying grand- and great grandchildren,  and growing old. There was never a question of the love, nor the commitment to family; she did it the same way she drew breath, completely and without ever having to think about it.

Because a woman like Barbara Bush, you don’t need to think. You work from the heart, and the loving thing somehow seems to happen. It’s why when her husband was President and the news media would be raking him over the coals, everyone seemed to love the First Lady.  He joked she was “the most popular woman in the world,” and wasn’t jokingly juxtaposing.

She was exactly the mother/friend/aunt/teacher/grandma you’d  tell your problems. She would listen until you finished, nodding her head or making eye contact to make you feel less whatever was balling you up, then she’d think for a moment and offer some insight, some story about a similar experience, or perhaps just the affirmation, “I’m sure you’re going to figure this out” or “I know it’s going to be alright.”

You believed her, because you knew she knew things, done things. And had she. Not that she did showed out about it. But leaving her home in Rye, New York – and her college education at exclusive Smith College -- with a dashing pilot who became her life’s great partner to help him stake a claim in the Texas oil business would be a crazy notion for almost anyone in mid-20^th century America. From her place in “society,” it was crazy. Yet that’s just what she did.

Mrs. Bush was strong, too. They didn’t call her “the Enforcer” for no reason. She raised three spirited boys, gave them security and a sense of chasing their own worlds to the edge of their dreams. When they got in trouble – as our second Bush President did – she stood with them, helped them pick up the pieces and hold their own families together.

Always without flinching. Usually in a Shetland wool cardigan, partially buttoned, hair just so. She was not glamorous like Jackie Kennedy, but she had that same sense of how one behaves: voice low, eyes direct, heart open to others (even if there were things you were never going to share).

They both loved literacy, the arts and encouraging others. They were both sphinxlike, and careful about what was revealed. Charm was once described to me as learning more about the other than you tell, making people smile and perhaps laugh while doing it, and always finding common ground in the process.

In a world of MILFs and hot wives, Barbara Bush was more and better. Solid. Genuine. Real. She was a matriarch, the kind of woman who is the cornerstone of big adventures, memories that matter and the steadying force for people chasing impossible things. Think about that: President. Twice. Not just her husband, but her son.

As much of a sacrifice as public life can be, she never shunned her duty, always showed up in her gown at state dinners, looking every bit the empress she actually was. But to see her extended hand, whether a dignitary, a veteran, or a child, there was never a sense of who she was. That same electric common touch that erased differences Princess Di had, only Barbara Bush was no young beauty with small children. No, she was a grown woman who’d seen life, progress, disappointment – and she wore it all with a stunning peacefulness.

In a world of faster, harder, more, First Lady Bush represented the swan as mother, then grandmother. Unruffled, welcoming, she was as adept with school children as families stricken, world leaders, the kind of good ole boys who were part of her life in Texas and the old family coziness that existed in places like the Bush family’s Kennebunkport, Maine stronghold.

 It’s a gift: that ability to meet people where they live, to understand how to entertain with comfort over flash, to create environments that’re inviting and understated, yet somehow stylish. Like Lilly Pulitzer, Barbara Bush understood the pleasures of family, friends, lots of children running through, dogs of all sizes and a home filled with laughter; more than titles, the privileges, it was about a sanctuary for the people she loved.

And like Lilly, love was a big part of it. Love, from that giving, unconditional place that seems rare in a world of Tinder, hooking up, friends with benefits, me-mine and the absence of loyalty in the pursuit of one’s place in the world. The smile with the crinkles at the edge of her eyes said everything about who she was, how she saw the world and what she left in her wake.

 I am lucky enough to have grown up in a matriarchal world where women like Barbara Bush existed. From my own grandmothers, who were so different except for their fierce love for the people in their lives; Helen Walker, who came in twice a week to help out and make sure I knew I was loved; Jeannie in the locker room who watched over me like a hawk, even picking the black suit for my mother’s funeral saying, with a note that said, “She’d prefer the Velvet”; Sue Whiting and Ann Upchurch of the Women’s Western Golf Association who marshaled so many young girls traveling without parents into college golf and life; my best friend Kathie’s mother who used to sneak cigarettes behind their store, and wink at me not to tell the girls; Joyce Reingold, who gave me my first job straight out of college and remained a friend throughout my journey through life; Marybelle Matousek, who insisted I play in women’s tournaments when I was a child, taking up for me when the notion of ability to win became a problem.

Grand dames without airs, they were a special breed. Long on poise, short on tolerance for pettiness, they ruled their worlds without so much as wrinkling their brow. Occassionally, arching one, but never losing their temper. Or if they did…

My father, a golf historian, was quite taken with Barbara Bush. Having the opportunity to interview the President – “Did you know his W is for Walker, as in the Walker Cup?” he would always ask – it was the former First Lady who truly tickled his fancy. “She reminds me so much of the ladies back home, and there is so much love coming from her. It’s just fantastic.”

I didn’t hear the news that Mrs. Bush had passed when it broke. I was in my last lecture class for the semester, teaching music criticism to college juniors and seniors waiting for the year to be over. A beautiful day, they were enthused about everything, including the machinations of what makes a great feature.

Encouraging them to get off the straight boilerplate of facts, to try to summarize those things and get to the essence of the subject quickly, I offered, “What things mean, how they fit in the world around them, that’s where the good stuff is. Show me who this artist is, why she matters…”

Then I got in the car, trees just succumbing to the pressures of buds wanting to open. It was sunny, and beautiful, and a perfect temperature. Like I always do, I called my best friend Kathie, and said, “What’s going on?”

Kathie Oh! started talking about Barbara Bush, telling all these stories, and I couldn’t figure out why. I knew she was sick, that she’d opted to not seek further treatment the day before. But, surely, she wasn’t gone this soon?

“No, she died,” Kathie said. “She’s gone.”

We both fell silent. “Another gone,” I finally said.

“Yeah, it’s like the end of an era. Those kind of women are dying out.”

We were both quiet again. Then Kathie picked up what she’d been saying before I’d asked. “You know the thing I loved best about her? We have a friend who knows them, and they’d had lunch with the President not long ago. Our friend asked about doing something, and George Bush said, ‘No, I have to be getting back. After all these years, you know how much Barbara still loves holding my hand.”

After all these years, she still loved holding his hand.

Simple stuff. Truly. Basic. Profound. In a world where Kardashians get Ferraris for giving birth, all Barbara Bush wanted was to hold the love of her life’s hand.

May we all be so blessed with that kind of love. Barbara Bush would’ve wanted that for all of us, I’m sure. And in the not so distant future, who knows? She will, no doubt, be holding her beloved’s hand all over again. Loves that endure beyond the ages must also transcend our mortal coil.

                                                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.