Parsons and Hillman, Part Two

The interview with the Burritos continued with me asking for some history, and soon came the remarks that made Jim McGuinn very unhappy...

(But first a few many-years-later second thoughts: note how dismissive the guys are of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the album they recorded as Byrds before splitting off, now generally considered the defining moment for the transition from rock into country-rock. "Mighty Sam" (see below) was likely Mighty Sam McClain, not so old back then, still recording Blues and gospel just a few years ago. And Steve Cropper, of course, was/is one of Stax Records in-house geniuses, an influential white guitarist and an integral part of Booker T. and the M.G.'s.)

Could you tell me something about the old Byrds?

CH: I don't know... The Byrds to me were really together when the five original Byrds were there--and no other time since. The five started out from scratch, you know, like playing on nothing. That was The Byrds. Clarke ((meaning Mike)) was hittin' cardboard boxes, I was playing a $20 red Japanese bass, and McGuinn had an acoustic 12-string. That was the real Byrds. Gene ((the other Clark)) didn't really add that much. It just got stale. We ran through the mill; it had its good moments, but it's long gone.

At what point did Crosby leave, in terms of the records?

CH: He was up till half the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, then he left. Then the next one came out. Then Gram left. Then I left. It just got to be ridiculous. It's very difficult to work with McGuinn, you know, on anything. He's the type of guy that... it's just a job. He goes up on stage and becomes a musician. Offstage, he's not--he doesn't buy records, he doesn't listen to the radio.

GP: He brings you down.

CH: And he doesn't really keep up with what's happening in music. The last album that they did, it was McGuinn, and the rest his hired group.

GP: He's always found a way to either buy the information or gather the information that he needs to keep up with what's goin' on. He himself doesn't live that life.

Has he got the same people with him now that he had for that album? Clarence White and whoever else?

Chris Ethridge: Wait'll you hear that little fucker play... whoo-ee!

GP: Clarence White has always been right. White's right--but he's an original friend of Chris Hillman. Chris and he played together years and years ago. McGuinn wouldn't know Clarence White from Mighty Sam if it wasn't for Chris. As a matter of fact, he probably never heard of Mighty Sam!

I got to admit I haven't...

GP: Well, Mighty Sam was an old, old Negro from Florida that put out a bunch of really great singles I'm sure you'd love. Model T. Slim's another.

CH: They should have just buried it, let it die; that was it, over. All it is now for McGuinn is ride it out till it ends... just for the money.

GP: A bad influence on children!

CH: It's not a creative, productive thing any more. He pays everybody's salaries every week, and he's the head Byrd.

GP: And everybody still writes all these comprehensive articles on it, like Crawdaddy and all that analytical bullshit.

CH: That's right. You read all this shit about superstar McGuinn.

GP: Singin' like Dylan, thinkin' like Dylan, sellin' like Dylan.

CH: It was the five Byrds together, Gene Clark and everybody. McGuinn just happened to be the last guy holding the bag. But that's what made it--the five together.

Seems to me at one time there was a rumor that White was gonna quit and come with you all.

GP: There's still a possibility of that.

CH: But, you know, Clarence has a family--a kid and one on the way. Clarence was originally asked to join this group, but he didn't want to take the gamble because of his wife and kids. He's been scuffling as long as I've known him. He quit school when he was thirteen and went on the road. He's been a musician since then, shuffling from honkytonk to honkytonk. And he finally gets in The Byrds and gets a salary, and you know he don't want to leave.

GP: But he gives up a lot of studio sessions by bein' on the road. It's a matter of keepin' yourself together and your phone hooked up. That's the way to be a studio musician and in a group at the same time.

Chris E: He loses a lot of money every time he goes out.

GP: Sure he does. Not go out, and then make more money in the studio than just recording with Linda Ronstadt and once in a while with the Everly Brothers. But the Burritos, man, everybody thinks we're just a country and western group. It's country music... but what people don't understand is that country music has as many fine points and as high a line drawn above it as Blues does. And everybody's longing to put it all together and just say it's this or that. They don't know 'cause they can't do it. Many a fine Blues musician has sat in with us and not been able to play what we play. You can't blame it on three-chord music, four-chord music, five-chord music, country music, or any other thing, man. It's just getting into what you do. And we're into it. And anybody who says that we're not is full of shit.

Has anybody said that you aren't?

GP: Sure they have--in Rolling Stone they have. An article written by our friend... by your friend and mine... ((the name forgotten perhaps))

CH: They look at us and they think we're puttin' them on, you know--up there yukkin' along and puttin' them on. That's not it. We're not. It's like he ((Gram)) says, man... everybody thinks, "That's three-chord music, that's easy. Country music is simple; I can cut it." But we've had people like Procul Harum sit in with us and blow it. They can't do it.

GP: You've got to feel it as much as anything else. It's like people have realized... they say, "Steve Cropper and others put all this fine stuff into Blues, even though they're white, because they have this knowledge of technology, and they've made something almost classical out of it." Well, that's what we're doing with country music. Other people are as well. There're just as many old funky artists ((in country)), there's just as much inside of it, there're just as few chords, there're just as many good musicians. And we would like to be able to make it immortal, in time, as Blues is being made immortal by young people. Only, it was created... no, not created, sustained and supported by white people; and it has an amazing amount of technology already in it. One steel player has to take care of as much as four horn players take care of, with nine pedals and a bar and a set of finger picks. That's a heavy job to do. There're very few cats who can cut it.


((Which cues the interviewer to ask more about Sneaky Pete... coming up in the next posting.))

Parsons and Hillman, Part One

By the late Fifties and early Sixties I'd moved on from my rockabilly roots to become a confirmed folkie, just starting to head into an every-day-since love of the Blues. But The Beatles and Stones, and Dylan's adventurous changes leading into The Byrds, made me take another look at rock music. I began writing rock criticism for various magazines, including Rolling Stone back when it mattered. And it was as a member of the press that I came to discover young musicians Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman and their new band The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Not-too-long after their split-off from The Byrds, the Burritos played Seattle three times in a short period. I caught them live and persuaded Gram and Chris to agree to an interview; and as a result of that, Southern-genteel Gram and I hit it off (more than Chris, whom I admired much but who was more stand-offish). Parsons and I both had Georgia roots--he from birth and me from my mother's family who were South Georgia farmers; I'd spent many weeks there as a kid.

As well as hotel or backstage talking, the guys came to my house for dinner during one visit, and I edited together a long interview that appeared in Seattle's underground paper The Helix in late-Summer 1969. But in typical hippie-lackadaisical fashion, my byline was omitted from the layout, and even though the Los Angeles Free Press subsequently picked up the piece, I never was credited! I heard later that the quotes from Chris and Gram made Jim/Roger McGuinn curse and gnash his teeth and threaten reprisals, demanding that The Helix fly down to L.A. to hear his side of the story. But he calmed down and nothing further occurred.

Meanwhile the Burritos came back north to play the Seattle Pop Festival; and since I was covering that one for Rolling Stone, I hung out backstage, part of the time with Gram--which lead to the ride through the country with Jim Morrison I wrote about in an earlier blog posting. I still have a photo from that day, seen up above, with Gram looking great and me looking goofy (probably snapped after that wild ride); this was posted somewhere years ago and wound up used in a Parsons bio written by some Australian journalist.

The last time I got to visit with Gram was at the ugly and depressing Altamont Festival--which I will write about at some future date. But today I'm launching a multi-part project, to put down in electronic print for the first time the unedited Hillman-Parsons interview, whole chunks at a time, and maybe complete eventually if there's enough interest. First, the lead-in I wrote for The Helix:

The Flying Burrito Brothers, in their own bittersweet honkytonk way, have become the subject of much foolish controversy. Hailed by numorous critics, fans, and even straight c&w artists as a breath of fresh country air in the cloying citified, low-down-and-blue world of rock, the Burritos have also been scoffed at and berated by other purist listeners as being slick and phoney rock musicians jumping on the country bandwagon. These decriers all manage to make the somewhat irrelevant point that Buck Owens is just so much "truer-to-life." (It would be enlightening to hear from Owens himself on the subject of the Burritos.)

The fact is, the so-called "citybilly" Burritos have deep-down rural roots. Chris Ethridge (bassist with the group at the time of the interview, since departed) hails from Meridian, Mississippi, and has been scrabbling for several years in the South and in the recording studios of Los Angeles. Sneaky Pete Kleinow (yes, Virginia, he does have a surname), a true genius on pedal steel guitar, has been playing that demanding instrument for more than a decade. Chris Hillman was strictly country/bluegrass until he hooked up with The Byrds back in the mid-Sixties. Gram Parsons escaped from Waycross, Georgia, and is still shaking the dust from his heels; and he has many fervent admirers among the c&w folk. Mike Clarke, another ex-Byrd, hails from the Spokane area and Texas.

That the Burritos' country music has some of the frills and fills of rock most often seems to offend only the people who demand categories and pigeonholes. The Burritos' A&M album exhibits some mixing problems, it is true; but the infectious country spirit and hick hijinx of their music, on record and especially in live performance, more than compensate for any first-album flubs.

When the Burritos are on, they're right on--as anyone who saw them at the Seattle Pop Festival or the Trolley Tavern or Sky River Festival can attest. Everyone on stage and off has a high old time as the Burritos' special magic turns a big, crowded open field into (alternately) a backwoods hoedown and a honkytonk bar...

But that's enough ancient set-up. Today Chris Hillman is still touring and recording beautiful bluegrass-based CDs; and though Parsons died too young, the usual drugs/health stuff, he's now viewed as the "father" of country rock and a major influence on alt.country and Americana performers. What the two had to say nearly 40 years ago may still be of interest; Ethridge was present part of the time but mostly silent, and Kleinow wandered in and out.

Here now, without my previous editing and rearranging...


GP: Johnny Cash? Why don't they talk about us? Bob Dylan? Why don't they talk about us? Waylon Jennings? Why don't they talk about him? I'm just saying it's about time people wised up. We're together with Waylon in a big way. Take Dylan and Cash, McGuinn and electricity, the Burritos and Waylon--same combinations.

Well, is he your main man as far as country music is concerned?

GP: No, not at all, just a good friend. There are very few country artists alive today that are top shitkickers that are willing to come down to the Whiskey and make friends with people like us. Moody, Tompal Glazer, and Waylon were the only real country artists at our last gig at the Whiskey. Roger Miller has been at some things that we've done, some other people--but I'll take Waylon. The Burritos' favorite artists would include George Jones, the Louvin Brothers (one of whom is dead), the Everlys. Yeah, I've played on Everly records, but I don't know if they're aware of us.

Somebody got a quote from one of them on your International Submarine Band album.

GP: Oh yeah, I played that album for Don. But he's a little bit out of touch. They ain't the old Everly Brothers, if you know what I mean. Not like those old Boudleaux Bryant... that stuff, man... They could still get that heavy, you know, but I guess they've got a brother thing goin', one of those brother problems.

You're from Waycross, Georgia, right? I guess you read that thing in Rolling Stone talking about Waycross. It was in a review of y'all's record.

GP: Yeah, yeah, that was really nice. And whoever said that was right about Waycross, although I felt sort of bad that it was so much about me. Chris is one of those hicks too--he's from Rancho Santa Fe.

Wow, where's that?

CH: It's down about a hundred-twenty miles from Los Angeles. It's inland; it's just a real small town.

GP: And knowin' him, it's just got to be weird. And Chris Ethridge is from Meridian, Mississippi, which is most certainly weird.

Yeah, I was telling him that I lived in Montgomery for a year back in the Fifties, and my mother's from Georgia... ((nervous interviewer forgets name of town of 300, which actually was Mystic!)) What the hell's the name of the place...

GP: If you say Macon, I'll die.

Well, I've got relatives in Macon.

GP: That makes eight people this week who've told me they have relatives in Macon, Georgia. There are more hippies from Macon... Waycross, Georgia is in the wiregrass country and the Okefenokee swamp--and that, I will admit, is one of the strangest areas of the world. Strange for many reasons, a lot of them he ((RS writer)) didn't cover because he'd never lived there. It was a very comprehensive article except for the damn quotes from the songs, which were just all wrong: "Ventura may be just my kind of town." Really. "I'm your top, I'm your old boy." Jesus Christ, you cats. (We said "Jesus Christ" before John Lennon!) The right words are "Vancouver may be just my kind of town"; "I'm your toy, I'm your old boy."

How about "This whole town's filled with sin..."?

GP: "It'll swallow you in."

CH: That's L.A., boy.

Did y'all write that in honor of the coming earthquake?

CH: We wrote it when we were very dragged one morning. It was just before Christmas and it was about to rain; and we were living in the San Fernando Valley in a tract type home.

GP: We were looking forward to the earthquake!

CH: A bunch of redneck creeps all over the place. Fuck. Town's full of sin, you know.

GP: It really is, and it'll swallow you in--the sooner the better. ((laughs)) We drive down Lancashire Boulevard all the time just to take a look at it. The people who don't look at what's goin' on are in trouble, the ones who think the Sunset Strip is what makes you hip. The Sunset Strip is about ready to...

CH: Blow up.

GP: That's the "earthquake" ((song)) line.

CH: It's lousy. We all hate it. But there's one side of L.A. that's rather funky--North Hollywood and the valley. There's all kinds of clubs in the Valley that have all these good bands--clubs that we haven't even been to. And we check them all out.

Is this the area where Delaney and Bonnie got together?

CH: Yeah, and there's the kid ((pointing at Gram)) who found them. He was the first guy to find them.

GP: Me! Chris E. worked with them three years ago; I was working with them--we were together, and they were workin' at the Prelude and Snoopy's. And now we're out at the Palomino, a place where no one can play. I just dare 'em to try playin' at the Palomino. ((laughs)) The Palomino is the toughest...

Chris Ethridge: Delaney worked there.

GP: But he worked there five years ago, before he had long hair.

CH: It's a country-western club, the top club in L.A.

GP: Tough mothers. Truckers galore. It's like a truckdrivers' Whiskey; it's got red velvet and everything. It's the biggest, money-makin'est club in the Valley. But we fill it up every Monday night, or whenever we play there now, with a bunch of long-haired, long and lanky people. And girls... at first they wouldn't let the GTO's dance with each other there. Now they will. Leon Russell comes in, Leon and Rita--Rita sat in with us there, Rita Coolidge, Leon's wife. She sang back-up on Delaney and Bonnie, as they call themselves; I've always called them Bonnie and Delaney. I have a big plaque they gave me that says "in appreciation" to me and to the Burritos for all the nice things we've done for them. And it's signed "Bonnie and Delaney."

They're playing up here in about a week with Blind Faith.

GP: That cat who plays bass with Blind Faith, Rick ((Gretch, originally in the group Family)), I lived for a while with him in England. He's really a nice cat. Rick and I honkytonked it throughout London; he was the only cat I could find who liked honkytonkin'. I first met Rick in Rome, met him on a bus--he had a bottle of Scotch in one hand and a bunch of pills in the other. ((to Hillman)) You remember that, when we met Family on that bus?

((Arrival of Kleinow prompts a question.)) "Sneaky Pete..." Do you spell that with an "a" or an "e"? I've seen it both ways.

SP: Everybody spells it different. I don't care.

GP: I can't even figure out if in Kleinow the "e" comes before the "i"...

SP: Sometimes. Well, excuse me, please. ((He leaves again.))

That was quick.

CH: Yeah, he snuck off.

GP: I told you we were the most misunderstood band in show business. ((And then he cryptically writes "MOURNING BECOMES ELEKTRA" on the tapedeck mic.))

((more to come on other posts soon.))

Joes and Pinkos

I watched the movie Breach the other night and fell right in with its suspenseful storyline--FBI scrubbed-face innocent (Ryan Philippe) going up against Chris Cooper in his riveting, award-winning portrayal of snide and vindictive master spy Robert Hanssen. Great scene-chewing by Cooper and sneaky half-truths from Philippe. Seems the kid was the superior spy after all--unless you want to argue that Hanssen was riding for a fall and maybe tired of the cat-and-mouse game of decades, just too worn down to go on.

A fine film regardless, and it brought to mind the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings of late-Spring 1954, when our nation's putative, self-appointed watchdog against Communism, Joe McCarthy, attempted to expose the Secretary of the Army (a rather wan Robert Stevens) as "soft on Communism," guilty of harboring Reds in his Department.

My family was living in Arlington, Virginia, at the time--Dad was stationed at the Pentagon--and I was home sick for a couple of weeks, with serious measles or such. Eleven years old, I was reading a lot and watching some daytime television, and somehow I became hooked on the televised Senate hearings, which some may remember were broadcast "gavel to gavel," starting in late April and extending to mid-June.

Even with my father at the Pentagon, I don't think I was particularly interested in the military's point of view, and I certainly wasn't political. But the lines drawn, shown by the TV cameras day after day, were clear even to me: McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn on one side, and Stevens and his counsel Joseph Welch in opposition. The other participants--Senators and witnesses, and lawyers lurking in the background (Robert Kennedy was there, for example, though I sure didn't notice him)--seemed non-entities really.

Like many millions of other Americans, I was mesmerized by the hearings, watching every telecast. The cameras revealed everything (long before the famous Nixon-Kennedy debates changed political campaigns forever). McCarthy always looked like he needed a shave, pontificating windily and obliquely like maybe he'd been drinking. Cohn was sort of scrawny and nasty-looking, and his nasal voice was no improvement. Stevens seemed like a puffed-up, nervously perspiring banker. And Welch, wow, he appeared to be the epitome of wit and wisdom, everybody's favorite uncle or not-too-elderly grandfather. He even dressed snazzily as I recall, making bowties look hip again.

Of course, my memories of the verbal exchanges, the charges and countercharges of 53 years ago, aren't all that detailed. But I do remember McCarthy using his famous phrase to interrupt some speaker, "Point of order!" (later the title for a brilliant documentary, a video-to-film assemblage on those hearings that I caught at the Seattle Film Festival many years ago).

And I do most emphatically recall the climactic day, single moment even, when Welch rose to defend a young lawyer in his own firm besmirched by the Wisconsin Senator, saying to the odious other Joe, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Then he actually cut off McCarthy's spluttering attempt to answer, and the viewing gallery erupted in applause. Man, now that was theater!

The rest of the hearings passed uneventfully, but McCarthy had signed his own death warrant, so to speak. His political career was pretty much over. The other players receded into the Washington woodwork.

Ah, but lawyer Welch, jovial Joseph, actually became a movie star, for a brief period anyway, appearing a couple of years later in Otto Preminger's courtroom movie, Anatomy of a Murder, starring James Stewart, sexy young Lee Remick, and the kinda-lazy soundtrack music of Duke Ellington. Welch played the presiding judge, and all his patrician charm was right there on the screen, though his acting was rather wooden. (Fred Thompson must have taken notes; on Law and Order he does seem, grumpily, to care.)

The nation recovered from those Red-Scare Witchhunts, and I got up and went back to school.

But I have never recovered from a lifelong aversion to politics and politicians stemming from that viewing experience. I simply don't trust any person, organization, or nation that seeks power over others. Commies, Al-Quada, Christian rightwingers and neo-cons, Capitalist mega-corporations, can't-quite-accomplish-anything Democrats--they're basically all the same, in it for the money and the right to force everybody else into some we-know-what's-best-for-you line.

A pox on all their Houses. I believe in the little guy, the common man and woman, the workers against the bosses, and the Liberal humanitarian position in general. But 40-plus years of voting every election, every issue, has not persuaded me of the power of the polling booth, only of the power of pols and polls.

As the comic strips used to put it, "Phooey."

Spies and Ghosts

Two novels read lately (coupled with a viewing the other night of the movie Breach) have revived my always-lurking fascination for the Spy Novel, whether set in the Nazi era, the Cold War, or post-collapse Russia, where the spies have become entrepreneurs, even heads of state!

Ladies and Le Carre fans, I give you Christopher's Ghosts by America's master of espionage fiction, Charles McCarry--plus Martin Cruz Smith's latest brilliant novel, called Stalin's Ghost (what's with all this ectoplasm?), which has no spies but rather post-Soviet death squads and soldiers turned politicians; the madness of Chechnya and the near-madness of chess.

McCarry wrote two of the greatest spy novels ever, The Tears of Autumn (regarding Vietnamese involvement in Kennedy's assassination) and The Last Supper, both featuring (as do most of his books) an agent named Paul Christopher, sometimes present and sometimes absent, but even then still haunting the actions of others. Two other early books, The Miernek Dossier and The Secret Lovers (the title a brilliant pun), center on Christopher too; and these original four together form a kind of Alexandria Quartet, with The Last Supper serving to tell you what was really going on in those earlier books you thought you had figured out!

Christopher's Ghosts, going back in time to the late Thirties and then ahead to the Fifties to tell more of the convoluted history of Paul, is sad and beautifully written, but somehow--I think--not as complex or involving as the others, even though it forces the confirmed fan (and I qualify!) to reexamine yet again some of what he thought he knew. That's McCarry... always another layer of onion to strip away.

And speaking of onion-dome Orthodoxy, Smith's list of great Renko novels, starting with Gorky Park and reaching a moody and frightening climax (or so we mesmerized readers thought) in last year's amazing post-Chernobyl story called Wolves Eat Dogs, now must make room for Stalin's Ghost. Stubborn-as-ever Renko, who seems more droll with each passing year, gets cuckolded, choked, and shot in the head, and that's just in the first half! But this aging investigator is no master spy, no supercop immune to pain; he suffers and bleeds and needs time to recuperate, yet still drags himself back into the fray, confronting various "ghosts"--of Stalin, his father, and the Chechen dead.

I think I won't reveal any more, but rather just say: Buy it, read it, check out Smith's other novels as well as those of McCarry. (And I include the third Renko novel, Red Square, omitted from his current list of published works for some unknown reason.) If you can read The Tears of Autumn or Wolves Eat Dogs without feeling haunted or short of breath, without aching deeply for the central figures, you're a better man than I, Gunga Deighton.

Given that one of the recurring themes in Smith's and McCarry's novels is the pain of love, the tragic consequences of caring for others, I think I will end this with a somewhat relevant poem, written back in the time of Gorbachev, when my first marriage was coming to an end...


Glasnost, Lesser Spirits

The thaw has breached us.
And now in our icebound Baltics
a certain freedom of movement strikes

the alders, as flights of rhetorical starlings
pursue their social revolutions.
Snow that lay like linen

now flows in rivulets
down the steps and sidewalks,
and dissident speech of crows marks

preparations for the May Day coming.
In all the withered-away reaches of the state,
suddenly green

young workers arise,
throwing off the chains of mothering earth.
It is Progress of Spring all over

again, the break-up of a long, hard
chill, after the Fall
and rime of years. In this

spirit of no love and understanding,
we brush aside the dust of bitterness,
shed our heavy coats, and walk

carefully, negotiating each
step, taking the sun…
apart.

Got the Blues, Still Not Satisfied

Continuing the story begun last post...

I did manage to get in to see a couple of agents (hoping for representation) and one producer too, leaving them copies of the Hellhound script. But I also came down sick, retching and sweating, holed up alone in that airless and un-airconditioned bungalow for several days. By the time I recovered I was also feeling overwhelmed by the movie scene, ready to head back to Seattle; and when one agent said he'd represent me for sure if I would move to Los Angeles, I just said I'd have to consider it...

Nothing to consider. I was sure my writing was so obviously brilliant that the script would sell without me down south to work it, make connections, schmooze with the big guys, whatever. Totally wrong, of course.

When nothing happened in Hollywood, I tried to push it myself via other connections, working to get a copy to Eric Clapton (never happened), and sending copies also to John Simon (producer who had moved on from The Band to film work) and white bluesman John Hammond; the last two gave friendly-but-not-interested responses.

I did succeed in getting scripts to black actor Ossie Davis (suggesting him as director) and the management for Taj Mahal, thinking that after his experience with the film Sounder maybe he'd like to provide the other-than-Johnson music for my film too. And I got back letters from Davis, saying he'd be pleased to direct if I could get a production going, and Taj's manager or some other person saying pretty much the same thing--show us a production and we'll be interested. (Taj told me later he'd never known about the script.)

By about 1975, I was ready to write off Hellhound as having no chance. But the script had an odd (devilish?) circulating life all its own, and something new would happen every five or ten years. A Seattle area black man, involved with the state's Film Production Support office (or whatever that title was), decided he'd move to Hollywood and sell my script; he had no luck. A well-connected cameraman known for perfecting the Steadi-Cam (can't remember his name) wanted to start directing, and he wrote me to say he'd be taking my script around to various studios. Again nothing happened.

As the years passed, one or two other eager producers called me up all excited, having found Hellhound in some stack of good unproduced scripts, ready to launch yet another effort to sell the film. I actually signed papers a couple of times authorizing so-and-so to exclusive rights for six months or a year. But I never did demand any option money, believing that unencumbered access would improve the production's chances, and that I'd get paid further on.

No luck. No film. Decades have passed, and many other movies involving the Blues have appeared--from elegant documentaries to sad blaxploitation films--some worth viewing and remembering, others just reminding the world how basically useless most movies are.

When the late-Nineties Robert Johnson CD box set finally appeared, selling millions of copies and reviving interest in the Blues once more, I hoped maybe the magic would finally work. (Nope.) But I have had 40-some years of reading about and listening to Blues of all kinds, from Chicago to the Carolinas, from London to Lisbon, from Memphis to Malawi. And I have enjoyed two other benefits from the years with Johnson...

First, back in the early Seventies I managed to place several Hellhound excerpts in a Boston-based rock magazine called Fusion. When the issue appeared, I was definitely jazzed (blues'd?) to see my prose and dialogue in print, but the rest of the world evidently just yawned.

And around 2000 when the excellent Blues Museum down in Mississippi opened and was accepting materials to build up its holdings and library, I presumptuously sent off a copy of Hellhound on My Trail, which was in fact welcomed, and which now appears (the script title, anyway) in some Museum computer files or lists.

So my own Story of the Blues rolls on, just like that mighty Mississippi!

(one of these days, I'll post some excerpts from Hellhound... maybe.)

Preachin' the Blues

By the early Sixties, thanks to the widespread late-Fifties popularity of the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and, a few years later, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Folk Music scene was thriving--and the real folk musicmakers like Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley were getting discovered or rediscovered, and even listened to. Cambridge and Greenwich Village were in a happy ferment that mixed new songsters like Dylan (see the previous posting), old hands like Pete Seeger, and old new-handers or new old-timers or some such like half-brother Mike Seeger's New Lost City Ramblers.

And an amazing sidelight of this search for the real roots of American Music was the explosion of interest in the Blues. Seemed as though the entire East Coast was in a mad dash to track down old Country Blues performers like Son House, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt. Some of this was helped along by the Newport Folk Festival, which soon began showcasing rediscovered Bluesmen, and anyone else who played like them!

One album I bought around 1964 included a rousing performance by John Hammond (Jr., that is, son of the famous talent searcher and record producer), with John singing in a strangled voice and rippling his guitar masterfully and the elder true Bluesmen cheering him on from the wings. I thought, Yeah! White guys can play the Blues.

Which freed (presumptuous word) me too; I felt I'd been given the go-ahead for my own mad dash. But I was living in Seattle, so rather than searching for mysterious missing performers, I was searching for new albums in record stores (those astonishing RBF and OJL reissues), and old 45s and 78s in thrift stores and junk shops. (As you might imagine, the number of Country Blues 78s in the Pacific Northwest was limited. But I did assemble a small collection, spiced by Chicago Blues 45s, that I later sold to Bob "The Bear" Hite, lead singer of Canned Heat.)

Meanwhile I was reading every book, magazine article, and passing word that I could find about the Blues. There weren't many sources available then, back in the mid-Sixties--no comprehensive histories yet, no bios of big names published; just the groundbreaking books by Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, and one or two specialty mags from England, led by the great Blues Unlimited. (Even Rolling Stone was still a few years away.)

Somehow I got it in my head that I should write a film about Robert Johnson, whose reissue album on Columbia had stunned people everywhere, from Dylan and the young Allmans to Clapton and the Rolling Stones. I knew the few meagre bits of info available about his life, and I thought that he might be the perfect tragic embodiment of the rural Bluesman's life in the Twenties and Thirties.

I immersed myself in articles that mentioned Johnson (Pete Welding interviews with Howlin' Wolf and Honeyboy Edwards, for example), album liner notes for Johnny Shines, Johnson's own LP, and more, plus Oliver's astonishing book and accompanying record called Conversation with the Blues--even Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man helped me imagine Robert's world. I also studied Les Blank's Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb documentaries (got to know Les a little) and went to see every Country Blues performer that passed through the region; Son House and Bukka White were standouts.

And it was a help, I thought, that my mother's family had been farmers in Georgia and that I'd lived in Virginia and Alabama; I felt I had a broader perspective as a child of both North and South, son of a USAF officer, which meant I had been raised in the un-segregated world of the military. (The base teen functions back in the late Fifties were always racially mixed. Heck, I had a major crush on one beautiful black girl, me still too young and dumb to know it was a dangerous, racially fraught role for a white boy.)

Anyway, by 1969 I was ready to write, and over the next year and more I did just that: wrote, threw out, started over, revised, put away, kept thinking, rewrote again, until by 1971 I had a screenplay, Hellhound on My Trail, good enough, I was sure, to sweep Hollywood off its feet. I copyrighted it with the U.S. Government, then packed up and headed off to L.A. to sell it (and me as writer-producer). And thanks to filmmaker Blank, who owed me one and who was off filming somewhere, I had his bungalow to crash in...

(the rest of the story next time)

Dylan for Dollars

In 1961-62 I was a sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of Chicago. Sometime that year I discovered a terrific folk music radio program, on WLS I think, that was regularly playing this amazing song by an unknown new folksinger... yes, Bob Dylan and his "Song to Woody."

A few hearings convinced me I had to find this guy's album and add it to my meager array. I bought it, a bit puzzled by the young-punk picture on the jacket, but reassured by the rave review of a Dylan club appearance reprinted on the back. I spun the platter (people still talked like that) and discovered... whoa, a reedy, nasally voice packed with attitude, backed by some excellent guitar--blues and folky stuff but no other piece as compelling as Dylan's original, his tribute "Song to Woody."

But the album grew on me almost immediately, and I went home at spring break, back to Tacoma, eager to play it for friends and girl friend. Well, everybody hated it--ex-high school pals, my girl, my parents and sisters. They all dismissed him as some wiseass who couldn't sing. I refused to back down, arguing his case to anyone who would listen (but secretly doubting my own taste too).

Bob in hand, I returned to Northwestern for a few more months, until summer break and my official transfer to the University of Washington in Seattle. I kept playing his album, people kept shutting their doors... but I'd fallen for his trickster air, his seemingly amateurish performing style. So I kept watching for a new album to show up. And when Columbia announced the date of release, posted I guess at the record store I was frequenting, I was determined to be one of the first to buy Dylan Redux.

On release day, I scooped up a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and took it straight to the turntable. Sitting there, trying to absorb, trying to dig his new songs, and also reading the liner notes, I gradually realized that the list of titles on the jacket and labels and the music in the grooves just didn't match up...

Maybe you can see where this is leading. Yes, I had in my possession one of the early, mistakenly released, tried-to-be-corrected copies of his second album, resulting when constraints applied by the Ed Sullivan Show, or complaints by Columbia's sales force, or Dylan's own last-minute second thoughts caused a new version of the album to be rushed into production; various reasons were given later.

Although the jacket list of titles and even the labels (in some cases) got changed, a few copies of the original disc still got shipped to the West Coast in the rush to meet the release date, creating copies like the one I bought that had four songs not matching. I had "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," "John Birch Society Blues" (the one rejected by Sullivan), "Rocks and Gravel," and "Gamblin' Willie" in the grooves instead of the four last-minute and available-ever-since substitutions.

So what did I do? Of course. I returned it to the store as defective and got a copy that did have the correct titles and tracks. If we jump ahead 40 years, collectors everywhere would definitely die in their footsteps to find a copy like the one I gave back, fool that I was, back in the days when rock 'n roll or folk records were just stuff to play rather than cultural artifacts to preserve and collect. A copy as pristine as mine was would fetch around $15,000 now, it seems...

Oh well, easy come, easy go.

Back in the Sixties, I kept listening to Bob, even when he stopped writing protest songs and started with the personal and increasingly obscure stuff, and then--horrors--went electric. There was just something about the guy's whole gestalt that was amazing and magical. I was lucky enough to see him live for the first time when Joan Baez brought him out from the wings to sing a couple of songs with her--black leather gear, goofy cap, Charlie Chaplin insouciance, cocky grin and all. And over the years since, a few more times with The Band and other backing musicians... and rarely (did it happen or is it just wishful thinking on my part?) just Bob and his guitar.

I'd pay a lot to see/hear Dylan lay down his weary tune once more, even if, as he sang in that perfect take he recorded but refused to issue for years, "no one can play the blues like Blind Willie McTell." Hit or miss, many misses in fact, once in a while Bob can still knock the fractured and fractious competition right into his old cocked cap.

The Colonel

My father died a few years back, but he lived long enough to celebrate over 60 years married to the same woman. If Marge and Ed Sr. were still around, today would be their 66th anniversary. First, D-Day the 6th of June, then A-Day the 7th--made it easy to remember the date every year!

Since next weekend is Father's Day as well, I decided to consider Dad in this slice o' blog.

Born in 1917, he was third in the string of four boys of a well-to-do family residing in Joliet, Illinois. But the Stock Market Crash and Depression wiped out the family money, so my father and his brothers (one of them nicknamed "Cheese," mostly because Leimbacher sounds something like Limburger!) went to college and/or work early; no playboy life for those guys.

In fact, I think my father quit college slightly early to work as a shoes/clothing salesman. He joined the Army Air Corps in '40 when war started looking more likely, and then completed his degree after WWII courtesy of the GI Bill. (If these factoids are wrong, no doubt one of my sisters will set me straight.) He was a flight instructor throughout the war years, and even served as a "poster boy" of sorts for the work of the Air Corps (see photo).

Anyway, he started a water-softening business in the later Forties in upstate New York, then got called back to service when the Korean War began. His hapless partner drove the business into the ground (so to speak), so Dad decided to make the Air Force his career thereafter. But he was no driven Cold Warrior. Serious, hard-working, yes, pilot enough to keep his flight pay, yet more an administrator and manager, Dad still rose steadily and became a Lieutenant Colonel.

We dependent brats took to calling him "The Colonel," but really that was because Mom and he taught us three to think and be in-dependent; and by the time of high school and college, social issues like Civil Rights and Vietnam and the Feminist Movement all created a widening rift between elders and upstarts that made the "parii" (another nickname) wonder if they had created three young Frankenstein's monsters.

But we all survived those angry years, and Mom and Dad were able to call on us as their years advanced and health declined--my sisters especially rallied 'round. I carried some residual resentment from the stuff said back and forth in the Sixties and Seventies, but I guess things were okay by the time they died.

Some years ago, I tried to address the differences in a poem meant also to be a tribute to Dad...

Your Shirt

I wear it sometimes.
Recruited by seams
and sharp creases,
military press,
rapt in epaulettes
and flap pockets,
I briefly become
another: someone
larger, uniform;
I’m armored warm.
Midnight-blue wool
might not be cool,
but the USAF cut
doesn’t chafe… much.

Touched, I salute
the brass we accrued
as service brats:
h.q. where your hat
and hash-marks hung;
no one place for long.
Which meant I grew up
all over the map...
intellectually.
You expected me
to act sans orders.

In off-base quarters
the soldiers’ old saw
("No Asian land-war")
brazenly became
"Reclaim Vietnam
for US." I balked.
Then father-son talk
burned down a decade
of sniping and Red-
baiting... Long ago,

that war. I’m blue
at 55 now,
while you’ve turned slow,
receding, 80.
Peace, separately
made, suffices—
the past, I guess, as
shucked off as your gear
I sometimes wear:
the survival boots
that counsel how to;
the warm-up jacket,
requisitioned, that
helps me play ball.

I’m your son… still
cadging cast-offs,
unwarranted gifts,
the blessings of your
heart’s blue yonder.
Shrunken over all,
you might not fill
the shirt these days.
I try to, always.

Irish Times

I'm midway in an excellent debut novel, a more-than-mystery titled In the Woods by Tana French, set in the environs of Dublin and concerning a detective who was himself the victim of, maybe, kidnapping or, maybe, abuse as a child (he has amnesia about the events and only his partner knows of his troubled history), forced by the murder of a young girl to revisit the scene of... whatever happened back then. Very atmospheric and elegantly written.

And it has caused me to think of the Green Isle, the Four Green Fields, Galway Bay, peat fires, bog people... But who am I kidding? I've never been to Ireland, or Eire-plus-the-North. I've lived overseas, traveled around the world, been to Europe several times, but no Ireland. Ridiculous.

As a perennial reader and sometime writer, I cherish the Irish: Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, and many others (maybe even Tana French henceforward). And I've loved Irish music since i was a wee lad, from the Clancy Brothers to Moving Hearts, from Van Morrison to U2. Heck, if I drank beer, I'm sure I'd be a Guinness regular...

Should have gotten there while the island was still an economic backwater, the still-lamented homeland for so many emigrated Americans. Now it's become The Celtic Tiger, most jobs-prosperous nation in Europe. And now even the Northern combatants, Orange and Green alike, are swearing to work together for peace. (Makes you wonder if there's maybe still some tiny hope for the Middle East.)

Ah well. Cultural references aside, what I have done in my stumbling fashion is write a few poems with a struggling Irish lilt to them. Here are the best two (and reading them on the "page" means you don't have to hear me mangle the accent); the first came from discovering the quotation from Flaubert--I have no idea why my imagination then went straight to the land of
Joyce--and the second was my attempt to pull a fast one:


Bear Language

"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we
beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all
the time we long to move the stars to pity."
--Gustave Flaubert

I beat the cracked kettle
with a single stick of hazel
and listen as the thick syllables
run together. The chain pulls
this way and that, rattles
its own countermeasure, and hauls
me up tall, tipsy-toed to reel
Old Blarney in, drool and all.
Oh, he’s a handful,
he is: brown fur matted wet, male
razzle slapping his time, the usual
twinkle of trouble
in his one good eye. Bears

‘ll dance for you, and stand still,
shuffle and stall and sometimes scuffle
a bit; but Old Blarney’s a regular dazzle.
He rears back, high as Maeve Hill,
and sets his bear backyonders to heel-
an’-tow, and wriggle sure and all.
With his great paws flapping uncle,
his gap-tooth smile,
and his raggle-taggle tinker’s airs,
why, honey wouldn’t melt in his muzzle.
And thereby hangs a tale…

Or did. Just the last April
it was, at Derry Fair, and him on a publican’s table,
stepping out something fierce and typical.
Till he backstepped his backside full
in the barman’s electric fan, and fell
all over himself and nine pints with the froth of the pull
still on them—pell-mell and holywell
water, prancing and roaring and clanking, hide-hairs
a whirlwind behind him, parts of Old Blarney mill-
ing amongst us like the pieces of a puzzle
we couldn’t reassemble,
though we patched up his pride by wetting his whistle
with enough of the stout to befuddle
Cuchulain. He passed out in a puddle
of Guinness, still licking his chops, wishful
like… And now he just grins and bares it all.

Me? Oh, I’m just the bit of a shill.
Whilst Old Blarney struts his wonderful,
I blather and beat on this kettle
and watch his tin cup fill,
till the stars come out all unawares.



Postcard from Northern Ireland

I wanted to write something
better than ranting
that follows the letter of meter,
and rhymes.
Reflecting the times,
I settled for this
bit of rhetoric.


Postscript added days later: finished In the Woods, and I do recommend it highly. Some plot stuff can be guessed as one gets closer to the end, but not what happens, or doesn't, to the conflicted hero. Bravo; excellent writing throughout. I hope Ms.French shows her stuff again soon, Irish or not.

Four Musketeers

Two years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Not a very pleasant experience, those first few days and weeks, as I went from shock ("I'm too young!") to scrambling to learn about this unique-to-men form of cancer and decide how to deal with it.

Remarkably, maybe, two of my best friends stepped forward to offer advice and support; they too had had it. (I hadn't known.) And later on, another good friend received the same diagnosis, and I was able to offer some useful words to him.

But think of it: four men in their late 50's or early 60's (I was pretty much the link among the others, three of us being creative types and the fourth a lawyer--sort of the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan--with each living in a different city) all getting the same diagnosis within a couple of years of each other. Does that reflect more cancer in the male population? Better diagnostic testing? An excess of zeal on the part of urologists?

Prostate cancer is pretty mysterious still--no one knows what causes it, or how to prevent it, or even what to do when it occurs. It can spread rapidly, ending a man's life in a few months, or it can take years, even decades, to grow and/or move out from the prostate into surrounding flesh or the bloodstream. Most, maybe all men actually contract it during their lives, but those with a slow-acting form can die at an advanced age from other causes before their prostate cancer ever reaches a dangerous state--and never know they had it.

So a diagnosed patient must decide, blindly really, whether to act quickly and decisively, or to take his time choosing a course of action, possibly even electing to "wait and see" for a few months or years. (That last is a plan followed often in Europe.)

No way I could wait, nor can I fathom how anyone might actually be casual, even blase, about a cancer in his (or her) body. Even though there are several newer treatments involving radiation these days that are, at least for the first few years, less intrusive and have fewer potential side effects, I chose the completely intrusive method of surgery to remove--meaning, cut out, albeit very carefully--my entire prostate.

Each of us, we Four Musketeers, made the same decision for radical surgery ("All for one, one for all!"), but acting independently. Now, months or years later, we can only shrug and state simply, "So far, so good"--and let me just touch wood saying that!

But the idea of surgery affected us in various ways. The lawyer already had had health problems for several years, and one more challenge, even prostate surgery, couldn't faze him. One guy never told anyone he had been diagnosed, just quietly went about his surgical experience, and only 'fessed up later; he seems ornery as ever. My operation was openly discussed and seems to have gone well, with no side effects of any significance. And the newest patient found afterward that his cancer was potentially virulent, but his surgery, we hope, came in the nick of time.

We four continue our complex and busy lives--yes, of course! that was the point of having surgery--perhaps now with a heightened sense of urgency. Yet only one of us knows that he really needed to act immediately; the rest only that ugly related surprises may still be waiting for one or all.

We are alive and, for now, well.

Frank Herbert Remembered

In the late Sixties, I was an educational film writer in Seattle, where science fiction author Frank Herbert was still making his steady living as a newspaperman. (Dune had been published, but had not yet become recognized as a modern sf classic and model of ecological awareness.) One short documentary--I hadn't written it but was producing--required an outside expert on environmental matters, and somehow King Screen Productions found Frank. Working together on the film led to us progressing from slight acquaintances to casual friends.

Frank and I were both living atop Queen Anne Hill in those days, and one winter’s night a year or so later, Seattle was experiencing such near-blizzard conditions that I was forced to park at the base of that steep, half-mile-climb hill and then proceed to hike up and over to my house a mile away, arms laden with bags of groceries. After several blocks of slipping and falling in the blowing, 10" inch-deep snow, I finally staggered onto Frank and Bev’s porch and into their living room, exhausted and half-frozen. They cheerfully warmed and fed me, and finally I was able to stagger on for the last several blocks home.

Later the Herberts came to my house for a sort-of payback dinner--enchiladas, frijoles, and guacamole that I prepared--and after the meal and some great sobremesa conversation (did we have margaritas too?), Frank studied the bookshelves, found my copy of Dune--only a paperback, but at least I had it there at the right moment!--took it down and inscribed it with a friendly message that also kidded me about "being so Mexican."

Frank and Bev soon moved over to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where they constructed an early attempt at a self-sustaining "green" home, using a tall windmill as well as solar batteries to generate their electricity, for example. Frank was also proud of his live chickens, free-ranging before that term was introduced (I think), there to eat the bugs and supply chickenshit for... fuel, was it? He had big ideas, as any fan of the Dune books knows!

We saw each other less frequently then, but I did conduct interviews with him for a couple of magazines as his reputation grew. And long before the movie of Dune ever appeared I also adapted with Frank's approval a portion of that novel--Paul’s exhilarating first worm ride--as a comic book story for a Marvel Comics b&w sf magazine, but poor art guaranteed its failure. Yet pause to consider that the heroic people of Arrakis, in a resistance movement often resorting to terrorist measures, seem to be descended from Arabs.

Increasing fame, movie deals and such, plus Bev’s cancer, diagnosed as terminal, finally led to their departure from the Northwest. I know they tried cancer cures in Mexico and then wound up in Hawaii, but we lost touch. Thinking critically now, I believe Frank should have stopped the Dune series after the third book, but it's hard to argue with such huge success; and I believe the Herberts likely needed all the money they could gather in the face of approaching death.

Anyway, Frank Herbert was a fine man, genial and thoughtful, and clearly ahead of his time. His like is not to be seen in these sad days of global warming, global economics, and yet another now-global war.

Makes you wonder if Arrakis might not be our future too...

Brecht-Weill (und Leimbacher)

On the boards right now at the Biltmore in New York City, staged by Manhattan Theatre Club, is a musical play titled LoveMusik concerning the strange but compelling marriage of Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill--created by well-known playwright Alfred Uhry and directed by the legendary Harold Prince. But I'm getting ahead of my story...

In the late Eighties I had it in my head to try writing plays. I attended workshops and staged readings, had season tickets to a couple of Seattle theatres, etc. Most of my fledgling attempts at one-acts and full-scale works went nowhere, but one did arouse some interest from a local group and did evolve to a staged reading. Nothing beyond that, however, as local mainstages then turned me down.

So I went national, in fact sort of international...

Let's pause here as I reveal that the play was titled Brecht und Weill and had as its plot the experiences of those German artists (and Lotte Lenya) in the year-and-some from the end of 1928 to the spring of 1930, between their massive all-Europe success with Die Dreigroschenoper/The Threepenny Opera and the follow-up premiere of the next collaboration, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny/The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which turned into a theatre riot that literally presaged the Nazi takeover of all of Germany (forcing the later emigration of the three from Germany, and eventual move to America).

My play (he said modestly) had brilliant characters, personal conflicts, social concerns, great music, interesting scenes/settings, and more--and basically all I did was put down in words what actually happened among them all in Berlin and elsewhere during that period: the increasing friction between somewhat-sleazy politico Bert and stolid-but-brilliant musician Kurt, the pressure from society for another theatrical hit, the Hitler-driven attacks on Jewish ideas and lefty politics, etc. And my staging followed the Brecht-Weill model too, with projections of newsreels, photo stills, verbal signs, and more, focused on backstage scenes at various rehearsals and events so the Weill music could be utilized subtly, usually offstage so to speak, rather than in Broadway-belting fashion.

I thought of Sting, ex- of the Police, as a perfect choice for Brecht, so I managed to get an address for him in London (Hampstead, I think it was) and sent off a copy for his consideration. Never heard a word back, but gee, golly, who should turn up as Macheath or was it the singing Narrator, in a new version of Threepenny a few years later? Yep, Sting. Wonder where that notion came from...

Meanwhile I had also decided to try the Broadway people, and maneuvered to get copies to Harold Prince (yes, the same man mentioned up above) and his sort of power figure, but had the play copies returned as unsolicited and therefore not to be read--a protective legal action most artists resort to when faced with unwanted mail-in stuff from strangers. Not that the idea of Brecht and Weill might not be filed away, however...

Undaunted, I sent a copy and explanatory letter to Kim Kowalke, famed as a Weill scholar, but also on the Board of Trustees of the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York City (established originally by Lenya, or with her blessing anyway). Kowalke wrote me back and we exchanged a couple of letters thereafter. He praised much of the play's accuracy, warned me about the Foundation's protective policies regarding Weill's music (all adaptations as opposed to straight renditions would be frowned on and require negotiation, if not actually be prevented). He also officially entered the copy into the library or stacks or whatever of the Foundation (or so he wrote anyway); who knows, maybe I could visit and look it up!

But again the idea of a production went nowhere. I ran out of leads and abandoned the whole project, promising my amateur-playwright self that one day I would get back to it...

Now we can return to 2007, a decade and more later. Uhry's play LoveMusik has not been getting great reviews--too bad, because these brilliant and thorny characters cry out for a suitable stage presentation. The comments by critics complain about the diffuse storyline, stretched out over decades and mostly neglecting Brecht, rather than focused on any one or two periods, or on the difficult relationship of the several key figures. The carpers also point out that the music, those amazing songs, are used unimaginatively. The lead actors aren't getting much praise either.

As a different Kurt might say, "So it goes."

Meanwhile, anybody wanta put on a play about those crazy Germans, Kurt and Bert? I know this writer, we could get a barn...

Hidden Depps

Jack's back, and the whole world is watching--or at least waiting in line for the next screening. This time the Pirates have left the Caribbean and headed for World's End... wherever 'tis waiting. Early reviews grumble that the special effects and three-hour length overwhelm plot and character, but I reckon Johnny Depp has enough character to make up for all the whizbanging and slithery creeps encountered.

The nice irony, a big plus for any Rolling Stones fans, is that Keith Richards appears as Jack Sparrow's father, which should be riotous since Depp built Sparrow pretty much on Keef's physical mannerisms anyway, half loose-spine junkie and half fey Ichabod Crane (hmm, another Depp role!), weaving and mumbling and grinning maniacally.

The idea of reaching World's End and falling over the edge haunted mariners for hundreds of years. And the southwestern tip of Portugal, Cabo de Sao Vicente, the furthest western point of Europe, is called just that, the End of the World--a holdover from those early exploration days of sailing when ships from Isabella's Spain and Henry the Navigator's Portugal thought of that lonely barren outcropping as the last bit of land they might ever see...

When I left the U.S. for two years of 'round-the-world travel in the mid-Eighties, sometimes continuing on westward by boat, I was vaguely aware of reversing the course of explorers like Magellan, but really thought nothing about such adventuring until I wound up in Portugal for the winter of 1986-87. My soon-to-be-wife and I chose Portugal's Mediterranean coast, the Algarve region, because we (erroneously) figured it would be the warmest place in Europe to spend the season. (That particular winter was the coldest Europe had experienced for decades--so much for warmth!)

The Algarve has both stark beauty and a rich cultural history, but it has also become overrun with tourists, especially the British, who use the region as their personal Hawaii. Yet the winter months are fairly quiet and mostly devoid of tourists, which was a plus, but we also found ourselves having to invent our own Christmas celebration, for example--scrounging a scrawny tree, handmaking ornaments from beach flotsam and jetsum, cooking up a duck dinner, and so on.

And we actually spent part of Christmas Day visiting the End of the World. The poem I wrote afterwards, two decades ago now, is sadly pertinent still...

At World’s End

A chill wind rising now, and storm clouds
thousands of miles old gathering over us,
arrived from remote Bermudas and Azore shoals:
we lean out looking down and down,
blown upright by the wind, casting our thoughts
below, where luckless sailors drowned,
their boat-borne souls smashing up

against the shear of the Cape, and others put in—
pressed hard to find haven, much less good hope.
Cabo de Sao Vicente served ocean’s masters,
not its victims: those bound south or east,
or west where winter’s sun shutters and dims.
We are here Christmas Day distressed;
we have come to the End of the World…

Portagee sailors looked back on this cliff,
trapped in the currents of history,
hurled by Henry Navigator to the edge
and off his charts, to danger lands and seas
far on the way to the unknown shelves
wrapped ‘round the Pearls of the Indies.
Lord Nelson rehearsed here for hell,

skirting the Spanish fleet, hard-by
a once-sacred reach where older gods
rested--and St. Vincent’s remains too slept,
briefly hidden from the Moorish invaders,
below a guardian host of ravens that
soon chased his bones north to Lisboa.
Oh, this land knew the blooding and blending:

warrior-poets, Christians with Moors…
now their fishermen descendents
sing the fado blues in white-stucco bars.
The wind-stripped coast was laid waste
by ravages of Drake and time,
by gale and earthquake and violent sea
breaking inexorably against its line.

The curious who come now to look
see no caravels, no azulejos or
blossoming almond, no Muslim paradise,
only the rock and water and wind,
where al-Garve, “the Occident,” dies,
and Europe finds its bitter end.
Unseasonably glum ourselves,

we welcome a cliff-top buffeting;
may it dispel this gone-from-home
gloom we’re ashamed to admit, but feel...
A down-day for the postcard sellers.
No tour buses clog the turnaround.
Only the dark man hawking sweaters
has made the drive out from Sagres, town

of crumbling stone where Henry’s Fortress
and ‘ball-diamond-sized Compass Rose
of all directions could remind us that
Europe’s end is its beginning, if we put
sun’s decline and the storm-wind behind us.
We give each other lookalike sweaters,
then ascend the worn lighthouse stairs.

The massive beacon waits for night,
air through its grid whistling wordless fado,
“Perigo de Morte” perhaps; that’s the sign
posted on some wiring nearby.
But we risk “Danger” daily—terrorists
and thieves: romance shocked by reality—
where world’s end conjoins our history.

Home is out there. Here,
sea raven scavengers spire overhead
as the sun burns orange into night,
and the red-blood earth in dying light
drains down to the chop and flutter
of white, the last of land collapsing
back where it began. Battered,

we lean on the cold wind, rising.

Whose Zoo's Who's?

In the fondly remembered days of record stores and bootleg albums--those produced for fans rather than outright illegal copies of regular releases--the single best label for boots was called Trademark of Quality, and a friend of mine, William Stout (comics illustrator, film designer, and dinosaurs/Antarctica painter extraordinaire) was the man who illustrated most of the best jackets, for (in)famous releases featuring the Beatles, Stones, Led Zep, Neil Young, and many others. (Bill also did work for the beginnings of now-giant label Rhino Records--which kinda relates, as you will see.)

But he outdid himself fashioning full-color jackets (now very collectable) for double albums by the Yardbirds and the Who. I've reproduced one jacket as a brief introduction to the Art of Bill--more about my pal in postings to come--and to offer a serendipitous visual for the two poems I'm offering up today, both of which grew from zoo experiences, the first down under in Australia (where a plaque memorializes the slightly comical, long-ago visit there by Eleanor Roosevelt), and the second when Sandie and I were living across from the Seattle Zoo, right opposite bison, wolves, and many birds.

So today, after too many meaty mini-essays, maybe, I choose to be short and simple, which is of course what age does for you anyway: you get simpler (mentally) and shorter (physically). I hope someone enjoys the break...

Rhinocerudes, Sydney

In the midday heat, three rhinos
Lie collapsed, as indiscreet as winos
In their concrete habitat. Iron
Bars hold them back from the siren
Rumble of a lumbering breakout—
Boulder-massive even sprawled about.

Two of them sport gray-black
Convict stripes where their rack
Of ribs pokes out from inside
The topographic map of hide.
(One’s eyes twitch, and pigeons
Instantly hurl themselves to regions

Far removed from all rhinocerudes
With rough, unpredictable moods.)
Their ears curl up without fuss,
Scroll-like and cornucopious
Around the double horns—one nub,
The other sharpened by the rub

Of life, years before this prison.
But look! the third has risen,
A slow and cumbersome climb,
Lurching itself erect in time
To stand bemused, wondering
Where to go when, then blundering

Around the yard, through the slops,
A battle-worn Triceratops
Exiled from some prehistoric veldt.
A certain Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt
Once scrutinized two such corrugated
Beasts, struggling as they copulated

In this bleak, unaesthetic hole,
Then blurted, "Bless my soul!"
Inspired by the President’s wife,
Reformed by their penal life,
These model rhinos more and more
Are aging to resemble Eleanor.


Zoo Morning

Without malice, in ecstasy
of the day, the grey wolves
across the way are scattering
seagulls in a pinwheel flutter,
trotting to and fro amid
the glitter of wobbling wings,
dazzle so bright both gulls
and wolves flare nearly white,
sunlight firing the trellis
of nobby twigs and fencewire,
each dazed and glazed thing
chiming that spring impels
the sap of running and budding,
flapping and climbing--wolves
churning, birds spiring, great
wheel vibrantly turning
another notch today in always,
tattered white peacock
needing no cloak of light
to screech his word of praise.

Why Me, Kris?

Yesterday I watched the recent, well-received documentary titled Brats--which has as its subject us children of the armed services. I vaguely knew of this film but had no idea its name was so stark, and that I was duplicating it when I wrote a couple of postings for this blog. Oh well, Donna Mucil's far-ranging work certainly subsumes my casual thoughts on the matter!

I found much to agree with, some new revelations I'd never considered, and some sociology stuff I'd just sneer at: sort of, "So what? So there's a few million of us. Suck it up. Get a life." Guess that makes me sound like the Robert Duvall martinet father from that other movie, but I did NOT get the attitude from my father, fondly known to my sisters and me as "The Colonel." Dad was a reluctant warrior, a reservist called back for Korea, who decided to stick around till he could retire; and he was a fairly casual guy in the discipline department. Oh, sure, we kids had to be polite and do chores and such, but my family life was blessedly free from trauma, aside from all the moves.

Still, Brats is a very worthy look at the dependents life, helped considerably by the songs of honored songwriter, movie narrator and, these days, elder brat Kris Kristofferson. And he's the real subject today, as I relate the sad tale of Kris and Ed, two Air Force brats who went astray...

Back in the day, I wrote record reviews for Rolling Stone. And one review I was assigned circa 1970 was to examine new albums by Kristofferson and Leon Russell (without a copy of the review in front of me, I can only guess it was likely the second album from each of those soulful croakers). So, as one does, i discussed the artists' voices, song choices, and backing musicians, one of whom was vocalist Rita Coolidge, who sang on both albums.

Then, inspired by rock-crit wiseacres like Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, I cracked wise too, making reference to the fact that Ms. Coolidge has been Russell's so-called old lady, had toured and sung with him, but was now singing and sharing the life with Kristofferson instead.

The fit hit the shan after that. Since I have never had the pleasure of meeting Kristofferson, I can only report what I was told thereafter. He reacted angrily, not to the remarks about his album, but to my snooping into and then discussing his private life. He called (or maybe wrote a letter to) the Rolling Stone offices to complain, and threatened to punch me out if we ever met face to face. I was stunned, intending only to be clever but instead arousing real ire, guilty of having acted thoughtlessly (i.e., see the very first posting on this blog).

I tried to issue an apology through the magazine and through record promotion people I knew, but Kristofferson was having none of it. His next album had on the jacket back a dressing room mirror scene, with supposed LP reviews tacked up, including a parody of mine signed by "Ed Limesucker"! Okay, I thought, fair enough; Kristofferson has gotten even.

But he was not finished with me. As his movie career brought both fame and shame, drinking and drugging (maybe) and casual flirtations (maybe), his relationship with Coolidge soured; and in some long magazine interview (was it Playboy? I just don't remember), he talked about how everything had started going wrong when this one asshole journalist had somehow interfered in his private life and introduced bad vibes or something!

A couple of years later, Kristofferson spent time in Seattle filming a not-very-good futuristic film directed by Alan Rudolph (I think). Once again, I tried to get word to the actor that I would like to meet him in person, to apologize and even take a punch or two if it would just clear the air. Again, I was told to stay away.

And so I have, all the years since. Kristofferson straightened out, got a whole new, evidently happy life, ascended to the Highwaymen rank of country stars, continued to act successfully in Hollywood, and so on. He's become a healthy, hard-running, grey-haired elder statesman, and now the fitting narrator for Brats.

I just wish he and I, two guys who spent too many years acting unprofessionally--un-military brats indeed--could finally settle our differences.

A Whale of a Tale

In its bid to conquer the world, Starbucks recognizes no boundaries.

Rather than corporate maneuvers, I prefer to follow the moves of Starbucks Entertainment: first the company was compiling its own anthology CDs, then it began producing new ones like the Ray Charles prizewinners (and now it's edging into Hollywood moviemaking). The other day in a CD store I found a new Bob Marley/Wailers disc offering (mostly) unreleased live performances from the band's prime early-Seventies period; and lo and behold, it's courtesy of Starbucks! If the company continues to make such great music available to us listeners, I'll certainly find it easier to forgive the other aggrandizing...

But the CD also persuades me to tell my own Seattle/Starbucks story:

"History is lies told by the living to appease the dead"—that’s one poet’s view. Another, maybe more reasonable opinion holds that memory, biography, even history, at best can only approach the truth, because something or someone is always forgotten or missed in the authorial shaping.

Among those who wrote for the original, edgier version of Seattle Magazine back in the late Sixties, both on staff for a year or so and freelance afterwards, was a fresh-from-grad school writer/editor named Leimbacher—your humble correspondent on this sorta-blog--who authored a couple of dozen articles, columns, and reviews between 1967 and 1970. (I also wrote for the Helix underground paper, Ramparts Magazine, Rolling Stone, Fusion, the University of Washington's Alumni Magazine, and various other media as well.)

Seattle Magazine at that time was a mix of Ivy League snobs, heavy drinkers, marketing rejects, and young writers eager to be gadflies on the rump of Seattle. I covered corrupt politicians, the Black Panthers, oil refinery risks ("Oil on Troubled Waters" was the title), and other hot-button issues as well as the Seattle Repertory Theater, modern-day logging, archeological digs, corporate art buying, and certain other cultural matters.

And, soon freelancing, I became the magazine's specialist in writing about the Rock music scene--I actually turned the Seattle Opera's boss onto the Who's rock opera Tommy; and a couple of years after that, the Opera staged a version of Tommy with Bette Midler in a leading role. (She told me later she HATED the experience!)

Around 1969 I teamed up with friends named Gordon Bowker (another Seattle Mag early regular) and Jerry Baldwin to create a brief, season-of-dreams film company intending to write and produce--for the networks, we foolishly thought, in the era before Public Television--a series of films that would document the Music (and musicians!) of the South. Our pilot project, for which I wrote a quasi-script, introduced the richly varied styles of music to be found across Louisiana--blues, jazz, zydeco, Cajun, gospel, and more.

Anyway, I quixotically named our supposed film company Pequod Productions--a bit of whimsy indicating that the company expected to sink without a trace, as had its namesake, one of the ships in Moby Dick. Our documentary proposals were ignored in New York and L.A., and our Pequod thus sank. I continued on freelancing, and the other guys moved on too, to co-found a fledgling coffee company soon named Starbucks, complete with ship’s-figurehead mermaid as logo and a name also taken from Moby Dick, that of Ahab's First Mate. (Melville's whale novel sure did get around. Forget Howard Schultz's version of history; I know that the lost Pequod helped trigger that coffee company's soon-to-be-famous name.)

By then Gordon was also partner with Terry Heckler (ex-Seattle Mag designer) in a then-still-tiny communications design firm named for the partners. Ad work for K2 Skis and JanSport (the Everett backpack company) quickly showed that the team possessed great conceptual flair and creativity. (Actually, and here’s a scoop, one of the two men later told me that his partner didn’t really believe in the inventive, concept-driven, and often weird approach to marketing that Heckler-Bowker immediately became known for--cutting edge in its time, commonplace these days. Who was who? Should be an easy guess.)

However, as often happens, the other people who worked for H-B continue to go unnamed and forgotten. In ’71 or ‘72, when the firm clearly needed a second writer (because providing creative services for both K2 Skis and brand new client Rainier Beer would be a Herculean task), I was invited to join the team. Then when Bowker left a year or so later, selling his share of the business to Heckler (in order to concentrate on rapidly succeeding Starbucks), I became the only writer and agency producer for the renamed Heckler Associates.

Which means that from 1973 to early 1985, about twelve years, I wrote every print and radio ad for the wildly popular Rainier (many every year, with the parody radio spots heard across the Northwest) and produced every television commercial, writing the scripts for many of them as well. (Gee, folks, that means that the famous Motorcycle, Running Rainiers, Mickey Rooney ads, rock music parodies, and all others came through me, after Bowker had left.) And I provided the same writer/producer services for many other Heckler Associates clients--K2, Keystone Resort, Canada's Eatons Department Stores, etc.

And I'm not the only forgotten player. Where would the "golden era" history of Heckler be without all the support people and associate designers and later writers who joined and usually stayed for years? But I’ll just cite Craig Marocco and Dale Lantz, and--especially--brilliant scattered resident genius Doug Fast, who served as key behind-the-scenes designer for nearly 30 years. So it continues to gall me that in the usual fond remembrances of Rainier Beer advertising, for example, only Bowker and Heckler ever get credited or interviewed.

Owners and bosses and successful moneymen aren’t the only people worthy of historical and biographical attention. Just as the true history of Starbucks goes back further than corporate powerhouse Schulz--"Got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lad, a whale of a tale or two..."--so too the story of Seattle Magazine and its unlikely offshoot Heckler Associates includes tales that have never been told!

Marjorie Spivey

My mother died three months ago, and then I was chosen Executor, so one way or another she has been much on my mind. She was born in Georgia and all through the late Forties and early Fifties, we five Leimbachers (some of us with more Spivey in us than Leimbacher) got to visit her parents' farm fairly often.

For many years I have struggled to write the suite of poems that would pay tribute to that Southern side. I've rewritten, discarded, tried something else, etc., and finally whittled the work down to a fairly satisfactory five sections. But Mom's death has put cracks in the walls again. I have produced something attempting to tell her part in the Spivey story, have wanted her poem to be part of the larger suite. But I don't think its sentimental tone fits in; too much too soon, no doubt.

For now, let others judge. Here is the long Mystic poem with her section stuck in; if anyone reads the whole work and chooses to give me an opinion, well, I'd be grateful:


Mystic


I. Stories

History is lies told by the living
To appease the dead. These Spivey stories
Lay moldering for 50 years and more…

Southcentral Georgia after the war—not
The Civil War but World War II, before
Civil Defense and Civil Rights proclaimed
That America’s true colors weren’t red,
White and blue, but Reds, Whites, and shades of Black.
And coming to Mystic too: three hundred
Souls wilting in a country-crossroads
Village, six dusty miles from Ocilla
And a pretty good ways from Fitzgerald.
But my mother’s family home: acres
Of corn and livestock and leaf tobacco;
Last fragment of the Spivey plantation’s
Antebellum past, of old "Boss Cotton"
And a hundred-odd slaves--house, yard, and fields
Put to the torch in that War between States,
Shriveled by failed Reconstruction,
Whittled away in the Thirties… now this
Fading bucolic retreat to the past.


II. Scenes

Languid live-oak silhouettes. Emerald
Elephant’s-ear plants flapping in the breeze.
Shattered pecan shells crackling underfoot.
Off-white columns, their paint cracked, wood mildewed:
Old pillars of the "Big House" that now hold
Up nothing. Yet the pineboard porch and worn-
Down farmhouse lean toward them for support.
Days when I dare to, I can balance, cling
With toe-tips and fingers, lean in, and edge
Slowly around each curving bulk of white
On a half-inch ledge just at porch level.
I wander the musty house and grassless
Yard in my pale bare feet (sweet sensation
For a city boy!) and sit on clay dirt
To play Mumbley-Peg—elbow, knee, and toe-
To-toe with colored boys my age, flipping
The sharp penknives they are free to carry.

Sharecropper kids—the sons of black farmers—
And me: from noon on, we chase the sun down
Dirt roads, through dust as soft and slick as silk,
And light like ripe corn. We guzzle ice-cold
Dr. Peppers at the one gas station,
Sliding them carefully through the water-
Chilled metal chambers, the locks and flooded
Ways of that battered pop-bottle canal.
We poke under porch-steps, prodding the blue-
Tick hounds that dream of possums moving slow.
And sometimes we light firecrackers, tiny
Dragon-snappers we toss over the nubbed
Wire fence of silver arches—exploding
In dust puffs that seem to hang in the air
Forever… I am eight and colorless.


III. Songs

Pinecone prickly and peach sweet,
a song of you comes
as sweet and clear
as... pretty as a spray of magnolias yet
tough as the Tar Baby's hide,
or a game of Georgia skin;
...moonlight through the pines,
that was Marjorie Lucille Spivey,
Southern belle, Captain's bride,
and mother of three (stubborn children
who checked her steely core)--
got the blues, can't be satisfied--:
for eighty years and more, she was.

Next-to-youngest of eight--six boys,
"Sister," and her rowdy tomboy self--
jump down, spin around, pick a bale a day,
unfurling like a new tobacco leaf,
a dazzling white cotton boll,
pretty mama, don't you tell on me...
she opened out: farm girl, then campus sweetheart,
then officer's lady, the role she wore best,
goin' up the country, mama,
don't you want to go?
Texas to Turkey to Tacoma,
whether Pentagon hostess
or South Korean mama-san,
no peace, no peace I find...
the "San" she became from then on,
grandmother name she wore like a badge.

Big star fallin',
mama, t'ain't long before day...
but the Colonel's heart and then his mind
were too soon gone,
you been a good old wagon, honey,
but you done broke down...
wearing her down as well, stealin',
stealin' the later joy she'd hoped to find--
look down, look down, that lonesome road...
sharpened Mystic memories finally
more vivid than her pain:
the road leads back to you...
her words lost in Parkinson's at the end.


IV. Shucks

Black and white, brassy bells clanking,
Bulged udders swoggling side to side,
The Holstein cows amble, slowly, home--
Their ramshackle weathered-gray barn
A cathedral of scattered fodder:
Wall-wide hayloft, feed-trough altar,
And brimming silage bin between.
Nine, I toss down the daily offering
Of cobs and rustling shucks, and would
Kneel to receive some transubstantiation.
But it’s a miracle I cannot grasp,
Though I squeeze and push and importune.
Scourged by swishing tails, bovine breath,
I must take any clumsy remembrance
From Granddaddy’s chalice cup of hands.

Yet mid-days in the barn I can ascend
To a kind of paradise—sprawled in corn,
Scaling sunbeams that spill down through
Cracks and jointures. The Baptist church
A short two blocks away is no more cool
Or peaceful, and just as empty noontimes.
Deacon ushers herd us in on Sundays
And Wednesday nights, to study painted
Glass, our Jesus unseen, the loft in back
For colored believers, and "war no more."
Oh, it’s hellfire next time, the preacher says,
But if we hold on to what’s unchanging,
We will have crossed over; we’ll be
Dwelling in Beulah Land by then.
But the rock I stand on now is sinking
Shucks, and chickenfeed, and a faith
As insubstantial in time as a cowshed.


V. Blues

All you be doin’ wrong bound to come back on you
Say all you be doin’ wrong bound to come back on you
You find out further on what it mean to be black an’ blue

Work song in daytime, people, blues come on at night
Work song long before sundown, blues on ti’ late at night
I jus’ cain’t figure out why you never treat me right

Tobacco grow low an’ green, sweet corn yella an’ tall
Tobacco done growed so green, corn stand yella an’ tall
Blackstrap molasses, tha’s the sweetes’ sugar of all

Boll weevil in the cotton, an’ trouble in the fields
See brown bug in the cotton, there’s trouble in the fields
Folks cain’t chop no squares if they forced to kneel

You scorn me an’ mistreat me, but I am with you still
Scorn me an’ mistreat me, you know I’m with you still
Ain’t but the one road goin’ on up this hill


VI. Shapes

And suddenly I am eleven, huddled
On the hardpack dirt floor of my
Grandfather’s smokehouse, hiding out
In hickory-scented black, bulk
Of dark shapes dangling from rafters.
Hams, sides of bacon, sausage strings,
Intestine-wrapped remains of fresh-
Bled hogs, homegrown and home-butchered.

Outside, the air shimmers, night scrubbed
From the landings, morning bleached white,
Rinsed clean, hung out to dry in heat
That renders each day limp with sweat.
Tin tub, washboard, and wringer steam
As torrents of light wash the stained
Workbench and plump chickens pecking
In the shade of the chopping block.

But I am secure in darkness,
Freed from my place as lone white boy
In the tobacco barn’s black crew:
Sorting, stacking, hanging green leaves
Harsh for the curing and blending.
These strung-up carcasses of pigs
Whisper violent histories
I can’t redeem, but can’t ignore.

The sun burns long. The days hum down.
My country kin accept me, yet
I am the Yankee city kid
Come calling; misplaced, weighed
By choices I am pressed to make.
We gather on porches, in shade,
To talk and eat and remember
A gracious past: the Mansion, yes,

Its crinolined belles, gallant beaux,
Quartered slaves defining the edge
Of pre-Secession elegance.
Nothing mean-spirited is said;
My kinfolk are determinedly
More than kind—consonants soft-slurred,
Epithets swallowed, good manners
Personified. Yet the smokehouse

Draws me in. No dissembling
Here, among shapes I almost see:
The blood is fresh, the black complete,
The smoldering ashes curative…
And still spreading hickory fumes
In the darkness of memory now,
A haze of blood and smoke and ash
Obscuring the Georgia I lost.