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

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

“Jive Talking… telling me lies…”

“Blamin’ it all… on… the nights… on Broadway…”
“Night fever… night feverrrrrr…”

“More than a woman… to…. meeeeeeeee…”

And the near-threat of the sinister enjoinder, “You should be… (swoop swoop) daaaa-annnncin’….”

It was everywhere. If the earlier singles had been treacly and challenging of my young patience – I also hated Barry Manilow and that damn dog Mandy with an unholy fervor – this was inescapable. It was in TIME magazine. Parents were trying to learn to “do tha hustle…,” wearing gold medallions dangling overt their scandalously open rayon shirts.

This was not the pink and green suburbs, this was bridge and tunnel.crowd Kids aspiring to another world, or possibly even eschewing it in the name of their own euphoric, tantric golden-footed high. Because like music, dancing releases endorphins in a mighty way.

“Night fever… night fee-vurrrrrr….”

They wore white satin, tight pants, had perfectly coiffed hair. They were like Cyclops or unicorns, mythical beasts – unlike the Daddies where I grew up. My friends were crazy for them. Especially crazy for Barry, who’d once again don the white satin for his big duet with Barbra Streisand on the even foamier “Guilty,” not to mention the glaringly pop fondant of Kenny’n’Dolly romping through a Gibbs-penned  “Islands in the Stream.”

Sheesh, they were disco. In a way even Donna Summer, who passed last week at the far too young age of 63, wasn’t. Somehow, they managed to exude nightclub fabulosity without any suggestion of the seamy demi-monde that seemed so intriguing about too much of disco’s glory.

They were squeaky clean, not Warholian. The parents loved them. Heck, the ethnic kids all around Cleveland, Ohio could be seen everywhere in the sans-a-belt slacks and the rayon shirts, gloriously unbuttoned to reveal virgin skin.

None of them were testosteronic enough to actually have chest hair, something the BeeGess seemed to have in glorious abundance, all blown dry and back-combed. They were Ken Dolls, sexually non-threatening, yet somehow manly and desirable.

It was easy to write them off. Until you had a friend who knew something about music listen with you. They’d point out the swooping harmonies… They’d talk about the percussive dynamics, the grooves that would scoop you up… The way the melodies were almost aerodynamically constructed.

“So, you’re telling me…,” the argument would begin, “that these guys are musically sound?”
“Fraid so,” would come the reply. “Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot more Beachboys in here than you want to believe… And just because it’s not so clean and perky, don’t think that the musicality is any the less.”

I said a bad word. It started with “F.”

I had to reconsider everything. Everything.

Whirling like a disco ball with colored lights pointed every which way, the music just kept churning, turning asunder and rushing towards those hooks that glide up, higher, higher, higher. Lyle Lovett may’ve written about “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy,” but this was the aural equivalent of an amyl nitrate capsule busted beneath your nose.

Not that I did whippets or whipping cream canisters. But I knew the sketchy kids, and they loved the stuff. Talking in that same falsetto squeal, sucking on helium and acting like outlaws.

Maybe the technical achievement warranted extra consideration. I just couldn’t tell anyone… I mean, really?

And, truth be told, it was thrilling to see John Travolta burn down the dance floor, all liquid and serpentine, snap movements and quick spins. Nine years of modern dance, a lifetime of “dancing school” to properly ballrioom and an odd addiction to the jitterbug with my friend John Griener who could flip, roll and slide me any number of gravity-defying ways.

Flesh covered poetry, melted like caramel maybe. Better than figure skating… and somehow libido-inducing, even for a kid whose hormones hadn’t kicked in yet.

It was a time: those thick harmonies of “How Deep Is Your Love.” Pillowy or downy. Like jumping into silky clouds or whipped cream mountains that you’d never hit the bottom of. Narcotic in a super-sweet way.

Play that stuff late enough at the Ground Floor’s subterranean lounge, and the quiana dresses would swirl as the gropping and steam began to rise. You could only hope melt into another, the forensics suggested to a kid with dinner plate-sized eyes, sitting in a banquette taking it all in. And take it in I did.

So, this was the suburban jungle – and the Bee Gees, if not the guide, were certainly the game caller. Effective. Technically excellent. A veritable trampoline of hormones and want to, blown dry to perfectly feathered hair, an Italian horn or coke spoon dangling down where the buttons found the holes and the heels always flashing, the soles and hips moving snap snap snap.

To not know is frustrating, but somehow sweet.

Sitting here, thinking Robin Gibb had been the miracle we all needed to believe in, I wish I didn’t understand. I wish – with all the death that’s been tumbling since Steve Popovich checked out last spring – that this pinwheel of untimely deaths could… just… STOP.

62, 63 is young. Too young. And these are not deaths by misadventure. Too many good times coming home to roost; the eternal Russian roulette of high living, fast cars and the disco inferno of random coupling in a bathroom or balcony beyond the falling starlight of a refracted mirror ball.

No, this is cancer. The thing we’ve been trying to cure fo decades– but that is taking more, not fewer lives as chemo barns and dialysis centers become profit centers. It’s what no one wants to say…

And like my innocence, it lays slaughtered if undiscussed before me.

But we’re getting to the point where whistling by the graveyard isn’t working any more. It’s too hard to pretend all these hands aren’t getting folded, one after another, every week it seems. Heck, every day if you’re really paying attention.

Earl Scruggs so profound a passing, no one mourned Doug Dillard, who dieded last week. Or Robert Nix, the drummer from Atlanta Rhythm Section, who found his way to the next realm at 4 a.m. on Sunday; I only know from Georgia Satellite Dan Baird’s Facebook page, where a sucker-punched gap-toothed rocker posted from the precipice of his own disblief...

Dillard, obviously, because of both his stamp on Southern California country rock from the Eagles to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as being one of “Those Darlings” on “The Beverly Hillbillies” has a certain amount of roots traction, but what about a guy whose band’s greatest claim to fame may be turning the turntable from 33 1/3 RPMs to 45 RPMs when playing the single “Imaginary Lover” yielded a performance that was oddly similar to Stevie Nicks during Fleetwood Mac’s witchiest success?

They are falling like dominos. It’s getting to where every day you expect to hear about the next one. You won’t know why, or how… Just that we’re hemorrhaging these artists, these forces of music back when music really, really meant something.

Even the stuff you didn’t really like: it stamped you in ways that defined you.

Each one who passes, like rhinestones on a Nudie Suit or sequins on a disco tube top: enough go and you feel moth-eaten, shabby, bare. More like a welfare motel than a place like the Chelsea once was. Not squalid chic, just broke down like a hooker who’s turned too many tricks and can’t remember the Johns names any more.

“Baby, right/” you say, too numb to even engage, too disoriented for anything more than getting through it.

Worst part is, I never got jaded. Some hit me harder than others, but they all gut me in different ways. These deaths all tell me things about the passing of time, bony fingers tugging at my wrist, papery whispers echoing in my ear about inevitability.

Wasn’t it all supposed to be gay and fey and shining? A miracle of tempos, white people finding the beat, tossing their Well Balsom’ed manes as the blocks of dance floor light up beneath their feet.

Isn’t that how I remembered it? Isn’t that how it was? So how does it all end like this?

Ronnie Dunn won the CMA Song of the Year for a rafter-clearing gospel ballad called “Believe,” It contains the lines: “I can’t quote the book, the chapter or the verse/
But you can’t tell me it all ends… with a slow ride in a hearse…”

It’s hard to believe these days. What to think, heck what to know.

Everything you ever thought is shifting. Even as the rhythms rise up, wave after wave of harmonies breaking all around you, the memories flooding back.

It’s the end of another day, another star has twinkled that last time, surged bright than black. There’s a void where the light once shone, and my eyes sting from the tears and the squinting.

This is more than vulnerable, teetering here on the abyss of gone, gone and more gone.  What was once an object of parental torture, watching adults do things incredibly embarrassing, while telling you “hey, I’m hip…” That was agonizing and laughable. Ironically, now that I’ve attained the age of reason and knowing, it’s just agonizing – and I’m not, as Todd Rundgren sang, sure what to feel.

I can put on my disco slippers, slide into the night, turn a couple New York Hustle steps, raise a glass of champagne and think about “Auntie Mame.” She the lose-it-all-and-laugh broad who declared, “Life is a banquet, and most of you sonspfbitches are starving.”

Yeah, maybe that’s the post-disco-decadence-apocalypse battle cry.

Live now. Live deep. Live real. Live out loud.

Take it all in. Taste and savor. Touch and exult in the texture of skin, salt, loss, velvet, satin, burlap, canvas, but especially love.

I find myself – a person chronically closing phone calls with “I love you” anyway – making sure people really know. Because we don’t know. Anything more than right now, anything more than here we are. Maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s all there is.

Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and enjoy the ride. After all, there’s no money back and it is what we – like Robin Gibb – make it.

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

I’ll never look at the Waffle House the same way. The one out by the
Assault & Battery Lane exit, 65 South out of Nashville, called Harding Place
before the name change.
It’s actually on Sidco Drive, a parallel runner that’s lower industrial strip
malls. There’s a Cracker Barrel for the more traditional Christian-types.
Then there’s our Waffle House, like an Island of Broken Toys for college
kids trying, sobering up from a benders, gay kids after whippets and
dancing, old Nashville remembering and the occasional country star.
Everybody sits tucked away in formica veneer booths or at the counter on
swivel stools, waiting on their Scattered, Smothered & Covered. Even him.
See, that’s the thing about Earl Scruggs, bluegrass royalty, generational
bridge, iconic artist and musical trailblazer, he was always at home with theSave & Close
slightly off-kilter.
You’d see him there. A lot. Especially after his lovely wife/manager/deal
squeezing wife Louise passed on. Or at first, you wouldn’t see him. He’d
just be. Maybe you’d go to pay your check, or else you’d notice how neat
and pressed his denim pants seemed.
Wouldn’t think much about the calm man sitting over his plate of eggs. Until you looked a little closer. Then WHAM! One of those only in Nashville moments: “Crap! That’s Early Scruggs – “ would exclaim the voice in your head.
Mostly people didn’t bother him much. Might stop and say a few words.
You didn’t bother stars at he Waffle House; you sure weren’t gonna pile up
on a legend trying to drink his coffee in the not so early morning hours.
I remember the first time. Sucked in by the demin pants. “Ahhh, what a nice
looking older gentleman,” I thought. I smiled, always a softie for serious
grown-ups.
Raising my eyes to gaze into the countenance of this lovely man, I felt my
jaw go slack. “Holy crap! It’s Earl Scruggs…” I hoped was uttered by my
internal voice. He didn’t really look, so the silence was my cover.
He looked up from his plate, met my eyes, smiled.
I smiled back. Dunce, yes, but not paralyzed with shock. Most likely, I was
so surprised, I scanned as someone who had no clue, no notion that this
was the man who invented the intricate 3 finger picking style that almost
eradicated claw-hammer playing.
It was a genuine moment. Quiet, unseen, but engaged. He didn’t need to
show me his Grammys, he offered his heart. Sincerity and warmth is about
as good as it gets.
See, Earl Scruggs might’ve been a master musician and innovator of the
same caliber as Miles Davis or Coltrane, but he was more a man who sought
to bring people together. As a player, his first break came in 1945 with Bill
Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry, but it wasn’t long
until he and Lester Flatt teamed up and spent the 50s and 60s barn storming
the country – and creating a true frame for the Appalachian musical form
that was all ache and flying fingers.
 Flatt & Scruggs were icons. Standard-bearers. Gospel-carriers.
 The audience was white, lower middle class, worked with their hands, backs
hurting. But they found the Flatt & Scruggs sound vitalizing.
And then there were the hippies. When the 60s folk movement hit and the
hippie generation erupted, Earl Scruggs – in part at the behest of his wife
Louise – packed up his sons and took the Earl Scruggs Review to colleges
across the nation.
With the Viet Nam War in full throttle, college kids protesting and drugs
making their way into the mainstream youth culture, musicianship and a
yearning for authentic made Scruggs the hottest ticket with the hippest kids.
This was breaking ground and healing generational damage just by being
who he was.
And who he was transcended what he was. Always a player of high
execution and credibility, Scruggs also believed in music’s transcendence.
When country was as right as you could get and Jane Fonda the only woman
more radical than Joan Baez, Scruggs couldn’t wait to make music with her
-- recognizing the crystal clarity in her voice.
He also played with hippie sitar player Ravi Shankar, the folk-pop band the
Byrds and Bob Dylan. The Eastern music and inscrutable lyrics engaging
him in new and thrilling ways.
Which was really all Scruggs wanted: to be engaged, pushed, challenged, to
see how far music could go. He was there when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
recorded Will The Circle Be Unbroken and returned for Will The Circle
Be Unbroken, Vol 2, produced by his acoustic guitar virtuoso son Randy
Scruggs.
He was there at the Opry. With and without Flatt.
He was all about making music. When Steve Martin got serious about
bluegrass, Scruggs was there. When Elton John wanted to play with a banjo
man, he was there. Indeed, he was as comfortable with Billy Bob Thornton
as he was Vince Gill or Marty Stuart – and folks like John Fogerty and Leon
Russell clamored to play with the man who’s in the Country Music Hall of
Fame, has received the National Medal of the Arts, recorded Red, Hot &
Country for the Red Hot Organization, which supports AIDS charities , and
received a Grammy for his 1968 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” as well
as writing and recording “The Ballad of Jed Clampitt” for “The Beverly
Hillbillies.”
It is vast this legacy. Marks left in places most would never think of, yet
when you pull back and consider… of course.
Like the Waffle House, where I don’t get around to near as much now that
my metabolism has slowed to a crawl. Its just one more all night dive off I65
just south of town, except that Earl Scruggs used to sit at its counter, quietly
eating his breakfast.
Always one of my favorite things to tell out of town guests!
“THIS is Earl Scruggs Waffle House!” I would proudly declare. Their eyes
would open wide. Sometimes they’d get lucky and he’d walk in, or I’d
signal with my own eyes where to look.
Now, of course, you won’t have to. He’s not there. Although my money –
once he gets sorted out in heaven – is that he’ll be back. You’ll find him
sitting there at the second or third stool, not quite present, but there… Just a
presence that will never quite leave.
Of course, when you make the musical mark Earl Scruggs did, you won’t
ever be gone. People will listen to his records and marvel; pick up their
instrument and practice the complicated three fingers rolls, the wildly
accelerated picking.
His mark shall last forever. So will his soul. A man from the same Piedmont
region in North Carolina – which gave us contemporary hipsters Carolina
Chocolate Drops – he was dedicated to his craft, pushing boundaries and
sorting out what the future held.
There’s no more sorting. Earl Scruggs is in heaven. With the angels. With
the Angel Band – and all is, though somewhat sad and slightly empty, alright
with the world, with the ones who pay attention, even as we’re sad through
losing Scruggs.