With passing of Margaret Everly, all you have to do is dream that she restores harmony to Don and Phil so they can help St. Pete's choir and roadshow

I was sitting in my eye doctor's office Tuesday morning when a dear friend called me to let me know Margaret Everly had died.

Peter Cooper -- musician, historian, author and mostly damn nice guy and beloved friend -- knew that I had a long-time telephone relationship with my one-time neighbor, who died today at 102. He figured I might  care that another of my "telephone pals" had died. 

I didn't know Margaret well enough to contribute any knowledge or wisdom or enlightenment to Peter, who always has enjoyed being enlightened. But I did get to know her kindness and her voice during many phone conversations over the years. 

I don't really need to go into the decades of telephone contact that I have kept with so many old-timers, mostly musicians but some simply citizens of our world. It has been a simple joy to let people know they haven't been forgotten.  I'm the one who has gained by it.

Truth is, most of the folks who were on that list to get a call from me are gone now. Now, I mostly stare at the phone and try to remember some of those people, those conversations. Those calls were part of my lifeblood.

Anyway, I'm going to revise a prior blog post that I wrote last summer when Don Everly died. In that post I referred to my calls with Margaret ... we had lost contact in recent years ... that were initiated in the late 1980s, thanks to late Nashville Banner iconic journalist Bob Battle.

Bob is gone now, long-gone, but it was my joy to work with the legendary journalist in the old and lamented Nashville Banner newsroom.

I usually came to work around 4:30 or 5 a.m. ... and Bob already was there. He may have smelled of the white wine of the night before, but he was a helluva guy, an old-time journalist who knew everyone in Nashville (back when it really was a community and not a high-rise forest for California and New York transplants ... welcome folks, but you don't know how it feels to be me or any Nashvillian.)

Others who beat me into the newsroom included my great friend Max Moss, the wire editor, and clerk Albert Davis. Both of those wonderful gents are dead now. Just about everyone is, I guess.

Anyway, it was Bob who connected me with some of the folks in the entertainment industry and in the world of high crimes and misdemeanors. 

Everyone called Bob for advice, as he was a kind old newspaper dinosaur of the type they stopped creating on November 18, 1951. That date is only important to me, by the way. The other participants on that day in Pontiac, Michigan, my mom and my dad (who knew Bob well) are gone now. Just about everyone is, I guess.

Bob, who always wore a pressed white shirt and tie, answered the phone with booming cheer and inquisitive charm. If he thought I should get that call, he'd transfer it. 

"This is the mother of The Everly Brothers,'' Bob said one morning. "Maybe you can help her. Her name is Margaret."

It was the first of many chats I had with the mother who raised the greatest harmony duo in the history of music, The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil.

In her calls, she complained about her sons, while also trying to enlist my help in getting them to, as ET (that little space monster) would say "Phone home."

I think Phil was in Los Angeles, hanging out with Warren Zevon, a healthy enough pursuit that I wish I'd been able to enjoy. Lucky I didn't, though, I suppose. I've never understood "moderation." Quit or die.

But Don was here in Nashville and in Kentucky.

A former confidante of both Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, he was hanging out at Brown's Diner, where he obviously enjoyed the hamburgers. That's the only place, other than on the stage, that I ever saw him "perform." Bye-bye hamburger. Bye-bye piles of fries. Bye-bye chili pie ....

One place he wasn't was at his mom's house.

She didn't name which son it was, but just said "my son hasn't visited" or some such.

Since Phil was not around, as he was getting his "shit fucked up," as Zevon would say, or hanging with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (again, something I'd have enjoyed), I guessed it must have been Don she was mostly trying to reach.

Her house was a few blocks from my own, although in a slightly more upscale corner of the neighborhood.

"I just don't know why he doesn't come home," she said. "I kept his room like he had it. It's all painted black..... If he's not coming home, I think I'll get it painted."

Again, it must have been Don's room.

According to published stories, he'd enjoyed LSD with Jimi and others. Again, what about me?? I believe she told me there were posters all over the walls and ceiling of the black room.

The quotes and recollections are hazy and paraphrased, as I wasn't taking notes. She simply was calling to see if I could get her son to visit. And nothing grabs my heart like a distressed mom, unless it's a big, old dog.

I never accomplished that task, getting little Donnie to go home. I tried, I just couldn't track him down.

But I'm sure Don did, on his own, finally visit his mother. There was a legal tangle over ownership of the house she was living in, and I'll bet that Don and his mom finally resolved that issue and perhaps -- I'd like to dream, at least -- Margaret and her bulkier harmonic son got out the paint rollers and covered the walls and ceilings of the room so the house could be sold. I don't imagine that's true, but, what the hell, everyone's dead now.

I should note that she did invite me over to see the room, but by the time I decided to do that, the number I had no longer was in service.

Now both the boys are gone.

And finally, if things work the way we've been taught, if that everlasting optimism spread from pulpits has basis, well Margaret today was reunited with her boys and with her husband, Ike, who led the charge into show biz for the family.

Ike died in 1975.

Phil died in 2014, on the West Coast, where he lived like the rock 'n' roll legend and pioneer that he was.

Don joined the heavenly choir last August.

Given their fractious history, the brothers probably have been spending their eternal time (or is there time in eternity?) arguing about who came out on top in their famous stage tussle back in 1973 at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. The brothers split for 10 years, but did reunite for commercial purposes 10 years later. It likely was a reteaming that made the testy commercial-reteaming and money grab of Paul and Artie seem sweet by comparison.

Now Mom Margaret is with them, so maybe she can get them to focus on their work in the heavenly choir.

God, it has been said, loves to hear "Wake Up, Little Susie," "All I Have to Do is Dream," "Cathy's Clown," and my personal favorite "That's Old Fashioned (That's the Way Love Should Be.)" Back in 1962, when that was the brothers' last Top 10 hit, I used to play it on the juke box at the Malt Shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a subtle message to the girls who liked to share my booth. Three plays for a quarter.

We enjoyed sitting side-by-side in the ice cream parlor.

I can hear those great songs whenever I want to. All I have to do is dream.

A writer looks at 70, wonders how he made it this far & why? Ponders deaths of Roxy, Badger, Tony, Nardholm, Max & Moose, relishes friends, loves family & Peter & Jerry & ... especially: The Beatles

 “Hey, man, did you ever think you’d be 70 years old?”

The question from my friend, Jerry Manley, the pride of Petersburg, Tennessee, basically was an echo as I said the same thing to him.

We’ve grown old, more or less together, at least in spirit, ever since we combined forces as friends without a care … or was that without a clue? … sometime in the 1970s. We were young newspapermen when we met.

All I ever wanted to be was a newspaperman. Always was until Korporate Amerikan politics took that from me. At least they gave me a sendoff (I could not be celebratory or accept in good faith the “Go forth and prosper” of the company Magoos.) Jerry hung on a few years, finally being “bought out” while he was on vacation.  It was not a “don’t look back” message: Just “don’t come back” to a fellow who had given more than 30 years to the morning newspaper in Nashville.

Anyway, that’s sort of the end of the tale. Jerry and I have been friends for nearly a half century, him entering my life a few months after I began work as a sportswriter at The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville, Tennessee. (Hindsight has me still there now, after the heartbreak at 1100 Broadway, where there use to be newspapers…. Although, the Clarksville paper has turned soft and flimsy. Like newspapers in general.)

Nashville still is fortunate to have a newspaper, even one of diminishing circulation. I have friends there and hope they don’t get the kind of call Jerry got.

Hell, a woman I love as a friend got a call like that at her grandmother’s funeral. I won’t use her name here, but I’d offer hugs to her and her family if I bumped into her.   

Jerry, at the time we met a half-century ago, was an editor of the paper over in Gallatin, Tennessee, and he and a guy we knew as “The Rhinestone Fat Man” – David Rush encouraged it by wearing rhinestones and being fat – came over to the newspaper building that really was the heart of Clarksville, Tennessee. The Rhinestone Fat Man would also join us, at least back in those days, in our after-hours (they had to be after-after-hours, as I worked until 1 a.m. many days) gatherings and would sing “Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy” and nasty racist and misogynist David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” as his gut pushed at the snaps on his cowboy shirt.  Written by Steve Goodman, it is the perfect country song, even if Coe is despicable.  I miss Steve Goodman, though. And John Prine. They were friends.

Coe’s song and much of his catalog, for that matter, was a part of the Rhinestone Fat Man’s party schtick when he’d plop his monstrous frame into a chair. I don’t know whatever happened to him, though I saw “The Rhinestone Fat Man” probably 25 years ago and he was thin and happy and living in Florida. Flipflops instead of cheap Acme Boots. Floral shirt instead of rhinestones.

But this isn’t about Rush or Coe. It’s really about me. And my friend, Jerry, who I love like a brother, and damn I do love my brother, although Eric (my real brother) never wears rhinestones or stayed out all night washing away the arenaline of a newsy night – like the one where Chico the Monkey escaped and Montgomery County deputies mobilized in St. Bethlehem.

“Tim and his friends are crazy,” Eric told our mom after he failed to make it through one of our all-night news meetings and flapjacks festivals.

The way we – The real News Brothers and others who we loved -- lived was better than any other kind of life, even the lives where people were making several hundred bucks a week to our one or two. For $3 you could get a short stack and all the coffee you could drink at G’s Pancake House on Riverside Drive. Open all night long. Constant water refills (necessary for us) .Now it’s closed and gone.   Clarksville, like everywhere else, has gentrified. No room for grease and caffeine overlooking the river at 3 a.m. any more.

I’d been working at The Leaf-Chronicle for awhile – truly loved it so much, I stayed for 14 or more years – and Jerry came over from Gallatin to paste up the News-Examiner, helping Glover Williams’ composing room crew trim the copy with that nasty razor machine (I always fretted when I was around it, as I’m clumsy and bleed very easily. Oh, what pleasant company. We all need someone we can bleed on.)

Jerry, or “Jer,” as I cleverly called him, would need to get his weekly newspaper’s stories waxed and his pages to Ronnie Kendrick, who remains a dear friend, in the camera room and onto the presses before those of us from the daily Clarksville paper – founded 1808, oldest newspaper in Tennessee, phone number 552-1808 back then --could begin our composing room work. Fire up the cigarettes, folks, smoke ‘em and toss them on the cement floor. Hey, Glover, show me the way to the next whiskey bottle to flavor my coffee.

Hell, I’m talking too much about Jerry here.  But he has stood by my side for almost a half-century. Often he stood by my side because it was the only way either of us could stand up. There are photos of me sitting on the pavement outside a place we called “Camelot” that might fool you, thinking I was posing. I was simply holding onto the earth.  

One time we stood side-by-side on an interstate overpass and tried to rain our used beer down on a friend of ours, Max Moss, who died last year, who was commuting from Clarksville to Nashville, where he was wire editor at the Nashville Banner after being shat upon by the corporate types in Clarksville. 

I knew Max drove that lonely stretch of highway at about 3 each morning, heading to the Banner, which was an hour away.  Jerry and I liked being out at 3 a.m., whether above a long and lonesome highway or down in my basement, absorbing concoctions, aswirl in smoke and listening to music until dawn.   We gave up our rainstorm plans because we figured we’d fall onto the highway and die.   

Anyway, most of the above won’t make sense to you, and that’s OK. I’m writing about me today. And as of 7:30 this morning I have 70 years to reflect upon.  If you were part of my life but don’t make it into this tall tale of truth and fabrication, you are better off, because most of the folks whose names will be in here – other than me, at least of this writing, and Jerry – are dead. The rest of you out there, whether here or not, who love me, well, shit, I love you, too.

Anyway, to answer Jerry’s question that started this tale: It really does feel out-of-place to be 70.  I began my day, as I usually do my birthday, by saluting my Mom when I looked at the clock that said 7:28. I expected the phone to ring in two minutes..  Up until 22 years ago, she would call me at 7:30 to remind me that “30 years ago today .. or 40 … (or whatever number I was settling in on that birthday) …it was a snowy day when we walked to the hospital ….”

It was the whole story of my birth, minus the contractions and gory details.  It was almost biblical, though there were no angels nor shepherds present and my older brother, Eric, was staying with my Grandma and Grandpa Champ in the middle-class home in urban Detroit, right across the street from the Vernor’s Ginger Ale plant. They used to use an elf as the advertising trademark of that ginger ale, and as a young boy when I was old enough to visit that house and sit on the porch, I decided that God looks like that elf that was painted, huge, on the side of that building.  Funny thing is, in my mind, when I depict God, he really does look like that Vernor’s elf.  I kinda hope I find out I’m right. Although that discovery can wait.

Actually, once my family moved into Central Time – away from Michigan and to Chicago and then Nashville – I think my mother was an hour off. The 7:30 she told me about when I lived in Michigan is 6:30 Central time. I never corrected her, though, as she had a nice rhythm to her tale.  She was a brilliant woman and kind, except for the time Rusty Perry and I tested our tricycle knowledge by rolling down the hill to the deep canal on the other side of the cornfiled near our house in Sylvan Lake.  Chased us both back with switches. I think I was 3 when I climbed on that tricycle and went looking for adventure in whatever came my way. A true nature’s child, I would get the front wheel of that ride as close to the deep water as possible. And laugh. Man, did I laugh.

So far, most of the people in this post are gone.  Oh, Jerry’s around. So’s my brother. And Rhinestone Thin Man likely still is singing country songs at an alligator farm or somesuch.

Yeah, back to the basic premise here. I didn’t want to die young, though I probably deserved to, at least made all the right moves for way too many years. Sometime around the time Suzanne and I adopted our kids in Romania, I was already an “old” dad, and I decided I needed to behave myself so I could see them grow up.  Emily fooled me, though, as she moved to California, where she is raising my grandson, Roman, as damn fine a toddler as you’ve ever seen on a telephone screen.  Joe still lives with us, though. I enjoy having him here while he commutes to grad school.

Took him (Joe, not Roman) with me to see The Rolling Stones a few weeks ago. Since that time, he keeps playing me Stones songs and performance videos.  Of course, to me, that is sort of a mission accomplished. When Travis Scott and Drake presided over the stampede that left many young people dead and injured the other day, Joe said he liked that music fine. “But this is real music,” he chirped, displaying footage of The Stones during their Nashville show. His favorite song is “Paint it Black.” You devil.

“I’ve seen The Rolling Stones and I’ve seen The Who,” he’ll tell me, and then add that his favorite band remains Eric Brace, Peter Cooper and Thomm Jutz, three friends of mine who make brilliantly enjoyable singer-songwriter-style music. Peter qualifies to be up there with Jerry atop my friends list.  When I hired him to work with me at The Tennessean in the entertainment department he wore a purple tie and worshiped Jason & The Scorchers.  I don’t know if he’s still got that tie.

I’ve taken Joe with me to see Eric, Peter and Thomm about five times, and they are his favorites. Maybe he and I can go see The Rolling Stones four more times.

And I’d really like him to see my honky-tonk-singing pal, Jon Byrd, a refugee from academia who tossed out all of his books and moved, with a guitar, to Nashville many years ago.  Contrary to his hip image, he lives in Bellevue.

I’ve been going to concerts since a mid-teen, when I’d go catch Ike and Tina or Vanilla Fudge at Ravinia, outside Chicago or later MC5, P-Funk and The Byrds at Soldier field. I think James Taylor was at that latter concert as well. He was just breaking in. I think he’s done OK with that Fire & Rain. Mud-Slide Slim.

I once tried to book The Rolling Stones (along with a friend named Jack Meyers, who I’m sure is wealthy and retired now) for a concert at the arena in Ames, Iowa, where I never missed a class nor a beer. We had a formula figured out where they’d make a million, the university would make money and Jack and I would be able to pay back our school loans. The guy in charge of the arena nixed our entrepreneurial adventure on our second meeting.  He blew his nose and then he blew my mind. Or my vision.

Still, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson laughed either with or at me on another night outside that arena, when I was leaving with ample assistance.  I think the rest of the original Beach Boys were there, beneath a sweet cloud as I passed.

There have been many adventures along the way, mostly legal and always ethical by my standards.

I made a movie with Jerry, Rob Dollar (a self-retired friend in Hopkinsville, Kentucky), Jim Lindgren and a few others. Someday I’ll share it with you guys. Or maybe not. It was in Super 8mm, with a synched soundtrack, as our production took place in the dawn of the 1980s and long before people had home video cameras and machines. Crude, but it does have Jimmy Stewart and John Glenn in it, among others.d

I married happily one time, and Suzanne and I adopted both our children in Romania. I mention that above as a stabilizing influence on me.  True enough. I love my family.

I’ve lived a life with dogs and cats as my best friends and lament long after their passing. I have been unable to shake the death of Roxy, and her raging cancer led to her a humane death a year ago, the day after Thanksgiving I held her and stroked her head, staring into her eyes, as the lights extinguished.

I’d do anything to have her back. I’d do anything to have any of my pets back. But damn it, Roxy was my best pal.

And that’s not mentioning all the friends I’ve lost, like Scott "Badger" Shelton, radio newsman and pal.

Tony Durr had earned his spot as my closest friend when he died, reaching for a phone, an empty pill bottle by his side, in an Alaska Coast Guard barracks.  That’s more than 30 years ago and I still miss him.

Others: Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, Richard Worden, Max Moss (and his wife Merrily), Glover Williams, C.B. Fletcher, John Seigenthaler, Jimmy Carnahan are just a few of my friends from my newspaper career. Among their things in common: They are dead.

And I really miss Okey “Skipper” Stepp.  I just enjoyed my 40 cups of coffee a day with him at the Royal York Hotel Café. He lived in the hotel, then a flophouse for lovable losers, no-account boozers and even the occasional honky-tonk hero or the arthritic, crippled carny and merchant seaman who once served spaghetti to Al Capone.

My mom and dad are gone, or I’d be having birthday cake with them today. Chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream. My brother, Eric, was the vanilla guy.

In addition to Peter and Jerry, I have many friends. Some newer, like Peter Rodman. Others I’ve known longer, like Thomm Jutz and Eric Brace. Bill Lloyd comes to mind. Billy Fields. Larry Schmidt, whose parents I adored. Elise Shelton (widow of one of my most-trusted friends, Scott “Badger” Shelton, who wanted to kill all Republicans.

Tom Carpenter remains with me from my college years. He’s retired from success as a veterinarian and plays golf almost every day near his Vegas home. The fact we still are friends brings me great joy. John “Titzy” Nitz is also out there, a wealthy agribusiness sort of guy who long ago took me and Jocko and Narholm back to his home farm in Cherokee, Iowa, for the hog-cutting.  Makes me wince when I think of what I witnessed. Jocko and I did the cooking, by the way, as we never wanted to cut off anyone’s privates.

I’ve reignited a friendship with high school friend Josh Hecht, a music man, and also with a woman I once dated named (then) Dee Gerson, who is a helluva artist. They both are out near San Francisco, among my favorite cities.  I’ll probably go out there with Suzanne again next summer.

Other college pals,  Uncle Moose and Nard Sandholm (aka “Nardholm” above) being the best of them, died from cancer, kind of like what took Max and my cousin Marc Champ, who was partly raised by my folks and was like a brother to me. The last time I talked with Moose – long, long ago – he was holding kittens and sitting in the yard outside the farmhouse in Red Oak. He told me he was dying and we laughed about our evenings with Allen Ginsberg and Groucho Marx.

Some friends don’t respond anymore. Which is fine. Jocko I miss the most. But he says he doesn’t feel like reconnecting now. And, of course, now is critical, increasingly so for me. Later likely won’t work.  

We lose friends along the way.  Like a doctor who lives in Carolina and a judge in Florida. Like Captain Kirk, who turned into a Trump-loving, Jesus-thumping asshole, who told me I was wrong about both. Jesus is my friend, but Captain Kirk used him as a weapon, at least until I told him to go to hell. Or actually a much harsher farewell ended our final conversation a year or so ago. A friend since college no more.      

If I was to tell a 20-year-old Tim that one of his best friends by the time he turned 70 would be original country outlaw Bobby Bare, he probably wouldn’t be surprised.  That 20-year-old loved music by Bare, Kristofferson (also a dear friend), Willie (who I know) and Johnny Cash, who liked me before he died.

I’m not going to go on and list all the musicians I have known and loved. For that, well, you’ll have to stay tuned for further stories. Though I sure love Chet Atkins, Eddy Arnold, Mac Wiseman and Funky Donnie Fritts.

Duane Eddy is another friend.

I do feel lonely often as I work alone in my basement office. I have a great family and a fine cat, Champ, who helps me. But Roxy’s gone.

And I need to get down to see Jim Myers at Elliston Place Soda Shop, where he works his bearded ass off. Oh, I guess bearded ass probably isn’t a great description.

Freddy Wyatt is playing golf with his preacher son in Clarksville. And my good friend Pastor Kip is not to me a holy man, but a source of encouragement and love.

Keith Cartwright has a new book out that I need to read. And I miss Charlie Appleton, who wrote of bizarre murderous twists. He’s fine now. Just kind of old and enjoying his family.

There are other friends I should mention. Hell, I almost forgot Phil Lee, former Burrito Brother turned troubadour. And the late George Hamilton IV. George Jones.

I can’t get to all of them or you, so don’t feel badly if you aren’t in this treatise. I love a lot of people until they stab me in the back or, worse still, stab one of my friends in the back. Do the latter, and you are dead to me.

But I know I’m surrounded by love and I know I’ve lived life both fully, until my system couldn’t stand it, and lovingly and with few regrets, but a few costly miscues.

I cherish those who cross my path probably more than I should, as I can’t understand why they drop their friendships after they’ve gotten what they could out of me.

My best friends, though, are really John, Paul, George and Ringo. They’ve been with me through it all, occupying a large slice of my brain.  I listen to them today as much as ever in my life and I did interview Ringo a couple of times. I’ll be cranking up the “Get Back” remasters while I ride my 10-12 miles on my exercise bike in a few minutes.

Mick and Keith and Charlie and Bill and Brian and Mick T. and Ron also spend their time in my head, but only to punctuate my soul. We all need someone we can lean on, as I noted earlier.

I could go on, but I’m tired and need to get to work or at least save energy for my daily bike ride.

Yes, I am surprised I am 70 years old. Only old people live that long.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.  

 

Life, death, love, cotton candy and newspapering: Max Moss, my mentor, now joined by Merrily, and they finally breathe free atop the Ferris wheel

They were a team. They both brought me warmth and love. And wisdom.

And now, if you are among those, who -- like them -- believe in an after-life, in eternity, they are sitting together, watching TV, probably old Westerns, in God's reclining chairs. Resting up for the Ferris wheel.  

At least that's what I'd like to believe, what I see in my mind's-eye and in my hollow heart today after I have learned that Merrily Moss died. Max, her partner -- the guy in the adjacent recliner trying to choose between Randolph Scott, John Wayne and maybe Butch and Sundance -- died October 22 a year ago. Merrily died sometime after 4 a.m. October 31, 2021, just over a year after she had to say farewell to her love and lover.

Well, really, I believe she said: "See you later, honey," to Max.

She had been fighting lung damage, work-related, for decades. Doctors were amazed that she was able to carry on, that she lasted this long.

I pretty much figured she'd go right after Max. You hear that sort of thing, of devoted couples dying one right after the other, often. I've written news stories about such happenings, especially if it was involving prominent people. Max and Merrily weren't "publicly" prominent, but they were prominent in my life.

And they remain prominent in my heart today, just after their son, Max Jr., called to tell me his mother had passed.

He's a good kid. Well, he's more than that, of course. He's an accomplished retired military officer and a lawyer who breeds horses out in Oklahoma.

Four decades ago. Well, actually almost five decades ago, Max Jr. was my scorekeeper, walking the football sidelines with me when I was covering high school football games in the Clarksville-Fort Campbell-Erin-Dover-Montgomery Central area. 

He helped some with basketball, too. He really was just a kid then. I think he got paid $15 a night to keep the scorebook for me, freeing me to take notes and photographs, to do interviews to prepare for writing game stories and sidebars and columns on all the prep activity.

His little sister, Karen, always seemed happy when I came by the house in my old 1965 Ford Falcon Futura Sport Coupe to pick up her brother. She was very young. Now she has grown up and become one of the most beautiful and successful women it is my pleasure to know.  Yeah, she's a knockout. She's also one helluva wonderful woman, wife, mother and, I think, maybe even a grandma now. Probably wrong there. Karen, don't get mad. I know you are young and beautiful, still, in heart and soul.

Those two great people, who I've known since they were children, were -- with their families -- in the rehab center Saturday night when Merrily, who had been having setbacks lately, stirred wide awake and talked about the life she'd led, about her long love-affair with Max Sr. (including a cotton-candy flavored night when they were stranded on a Ferris wheel at a fair ... Max hated heights, Merrily loved cotton candy and sweets and especially Max.) 

Max Jr. told me a few more things today about that short conversation with their mother the other night. No sense going into detail here, other than to say that Merrily was looking forward to the other side, to being by her spouse's side.

It's been awhile since I spoke with Merrily. About a week ago I called out to the nursing home where she'd been living and her phone rang incessantly. No answer. I tried again a few times. 

I didn't know it, but she apparently was in dire medical straits, though, and was treated at the hospital and then in rehab. Plans were for her to get back into her assisted living room as soon as she bounced back from this latest setback.

I should note that one of the things that kept her alive so long after her husband died and, indeed, in the long and struggling health years before, was her love of family. I'm so happy her kids were there with her for her little conversation.

She'd been having a lot of health problems  -- all connected to her exposure to paint fumes while working in the Clarksville city garage -- but she was lucid and, I'm sure, even a bit on the happy side to see her family ... while, at the same time, happily anticipating hanging out with Max Sr. again.

In her heart and soul, I'm sure she knew she was saying goodbye to her kids and "Hello, Max, honey, I'm home."

The last time I saw them together was a morning just weeks before Max died at home in Pleasant View.  Max had lung cancer that metastasized.  The two of them joked about whose oxygen cord was longest.

It may seem a funny thing to laugh about, but they were practical people. They were playing the hands they were dealt. 

No, they weren't running around outside getting Max's bass boat ready so he could go to Bumpus Mills and haul in enough crappie for Merrily to clean and fry. 

And they weren't dancing in my living room, as they had on a couple of wild nights decades ago. Too much wine, perhaps, at least for Merrily, who left some on the side of Fort Campbell Boulevard. 

And they no longer could have the belly laughs of laughter they exploded when they saw my film "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture," a sendup of a newspaperman's life that was told lovingly.  They saw it for the first time in my living room where Merrily had tried hard to dance to "Inna-Gada-Da-Vida" for 18 minutes. She asked me to put on some Coltrane instead. Merrily was at the party while Max finished up at the newspaper that night. He drank beer and was amused by her chirpy energy. I'm sure we all amused him by the time he got there.  

The last words in that film "Sounds Reasonable," chirped in unison by The News Brothers --me ("Flapjacks"), Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, Rob "Death" Dollar and Jim "Flash" Lindgren (with a few other fellows who showed up for the final scene on the railroad bridge over the Cumberland -- was Max's trademark phrase.

Tim: "Max, I'm going to take my film into the darkroom and soup it and print some shots. You want me to take yours, too?"

Max: "Sounds reasonable."

Tim: "Max, there's been a big wreck out on Fort Campbell Boulevard and Rob is headed out that way to cover it. We probably should send Larry (McCormack) out there to shoot."

Max: "Sounds Reasonable."  

Tim: "Max, I'm going to lead the paper tomorrow with a story about a manhunt for an escaped monkey named Chico."

Max (this time with a laugh): "If that's the best story you've got, partner,  sounds reasonable."

I could go on, but I think you get the drift.

Max, as I said a year ago and as I told him in person many times, was the best newspaperman I ever knew.

Merrily completed him, though. They were a couple, a team. There was no doubt that if there was ever an opportunity that they could be together, they would be. Even if that meant Max coming to a party at my house late.

And that thought, the love of her partner, is what kept Merrily going as she prepared to go to the other side. She was going to be with Max again. She was going to ask him if he wanted a donut or some ice cream while they watched John Wayne. He'd answer "Sounds reasonable."

Last year, when he died from cancer, Max had told me months before that he was going to lose. Nothing more could be done.

Still, he remained cheerful. In part, I am sure, it was because his wife, his life really, Merrily had been fighting her own battle -- as I mention her lungs were mortally scarred to something like 10 percent capacity by paint fumes on that city job site many decades ago -- tried to keep her own sense of humor.

Even though she'd been told, years ago now, that the end was near.   She kept on going. For Max. For her kids. For her grandchildren. With her faith guiding her to eventually be calm breaking on through to the other side.

Last year I wrote about Max and how hard it was to see him die, gradually.    

In our last visits together, he enjoyed talking his family.

And he liked telling me about the kids and his wife. Always.  He'd take good-natured jabs at his wife of 59 years -- who would quickly reciprocate. 

He'd spin a fishing yarn or two. Maybe talk about his old friend, Bobby Knight, the legendary coach of Max’s beloved Indiana University Hoosiers, whose antics made the old alum chuckle. I’m not sure he liked it when Bob threw the chair across the court, but other than that, the eccentricities of the coach pretty much delighted Max.  

I ran into Knight a few times, and I told Max the coach was an asshole. Max just laughed. “That’s just Bob,” he’d say. Max didn’t swear – I took care of more than the whole newsroom’s share – but I think to Max, Coach Knight perhaps was an asshole, but a lovable one.

Even as his strength, wind and his life waned, his flame flickered, he'd not admit to being anything but content.

“Can’t complain,” he'd say, if I asked how he was doing in my semi-regular phone calls or occasional visits. “Don’t really have all that nasty stuff yet.” Or maybe he called it “icky stuff.” Like I said, he didn’t swear.

Because of the COVID shit, I had been unable to go see him in person in the last many months of his life. That's all he needed were bugs brought in by me. But, when we both dared, I did go up to the tidy house in Pleasant View.

Max Jr. was there. His parents both were in good spirits, sharing donuts their son had brought. On that day, the two Maxes were bound for yet another doctor's visit in Nashville. As I noted last year, Max Jr., took the donuts along when he and his dad climbed into the big, fire-engine red pickup that he used during his regular drives in from the plains outside Oklahoma City.

I called up there a few more times, but he was sleeping, creeping toward death. I spoke instead with Merrily or Karen, who lives in East Nashville with her husband but who camped with her folks frequently.

I remember my last long conversation with Max before he went to play the trifecta (he was horse enthusiast) in the sky.

He was the same loving old friend who pretty much taught me all I needed to know about being a newspaperman.

We talked about our lives in newspapers. We spoke of pica poles and souping film, printing it wet and sizing it for reproduction by Ronnie Kendrick in the Camera Room.

Cigarettes tossed on the floor of the composing room while Glover Williams put the waxed copy on the pages.  The whiskey Glover kept in his desk. Sometimes a dash in my coffee.

I reminded Max of my "Whitey Ford/Fuchs Winner" headline when we spoke of the art of getting headlines to fit, back when putting together newspapers was a human artform, not performed by computers.

Wax pencils. Sizing wheels. Pica poles. Cigarettes. Rude language, assholes. Razors and tape.

We spoke of the first time I met him. It was on the second day I worked at The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville. Monday, I reported to work with sports editor Gene Washer, who had hired me the week before for $125 a week, enough for me to find a cheap efficiency apartment on the other side of the tracks, literally, (the last train to Clarksville daily rolled through my yard in the mid-afternoon) and near the Cumberland River and the bridge that sometimes was my depressed destination and challenge.

Max was off that day when I began at The Leaf-Chronicle. Probably fishing at Lake Barkley.  In fact, once he and I became friends -- instantly and forever -- he thought I might enjoy fishing with him. He bought me a one-day license and we went crappie fishing.

I think I caught one. Also nearly bagged a snake that hanged from a tree near shore. Merrily cleaned and fried up mine with all the others that Max had caught.  She may have had to rob the freezer.  

That was the last time I ever fished. My passion, my free time, all was tied up in the newsroom. Or in a bar. Or maybe listening to John Lennon music in my apartment. Or walking on bridges and looking down. 

There's a lot more things I said about Max, over the years and last year when he died. He taught me the technical aspects of being a newspaperman and was my biggest cheerleader when I flourished not just as an editor or reporter but, especially, as a columnist and a leader of the staff. 

"You make sure your fellas don't get out of line," he cautioned me when we used the newsroom for some of our movie.  Max was there, in his office, probably chuckling at what we were up to. It was harmless, especially when we did not burn the building down in the Mission: Impossible scene. 

 Today my thoughts are more about Merrily. But to think about one is to think of the other.

It was the most perfect of love affairs, partnership, two people who found out they were perfect for each other while sharing cotton candy on a stalled Ferris wheel in their hometown of Richmond, Indiana.

She was always glad to see Max and me when we came into their family room, not far from Fort Campbell -- where Max had been posted -- every Saturday night as we took our dinner break during my early years in Clarksville.

We'd stop by the Burger King and get at least one Whopper with cheese apiece and maybe a Frostee and go out to the Moss house for our dinner break.

We'd eat and watch Archie Bunker, eventually washing our Frostees down with beers before we went back to finish out the next six hours until the newspapers came off the presses.

We always were joined by the kids and by Fluffy, the wonderful black dog with the imaginative name, who enjoyed Whopper scraps. I was sad when Fluffy died. I love dogs, but I also loved that family that was broken-hearted by that loss.

Merrily, who ran a lingerie store at the time -- the beloved town madam, a friend of mine, bought her "girls'" work clothes there. That madam, by the way, helped more people without taking credit than anyone I've known.

She'd bring money to me to donate to various causes I'd written about, because she didn't think people would want to know the $500 or whatever came from business between the sheets. She was a beautiful and smart woman, a history scholar, which may be why she took up the world's oldest profession.

Anyway, she was a customer and a friend of Merrily's.

I am having trouble thinking of where to go next. After all, I have a half-century worth of memories of time spent with the Moss family in my heart. 

Merrily will be cremated soon and a memorial service will be held a week from Friday at the same funeral home in Pleasant View where Max was saluted a year ago.

There weren't many of us there, as it was deep in the COVID scare. I sat across the aisle from Merrily and a row in front of my dear friend, Larry Schmidt, who Max and I hired to be our No. 3 sportswriter after he graduated from Austin Peay.

Larry remans my friend. If you ever truly are my friend, you will stay that way. Loyalty is required, but it goes both ways. If you ever turn on me, betray my loyalty or hurt one of my loyal friends, you really are dead to me. A lot of those out there, unfortunately. I've learned in life that most "loyalty" is only make-believe until people get what they want out of you.

Max and Merrily earned a loyalty and love from me that never will end. I am sorry they are dead, but they live in my heart. Life after death. Eternal life. At least in my heart, no matter your beliefs. But theirs were strong beliefs, so I'm sure they registered with St. Pete for the Ferris wheel ride.

Merrily's ashes and Max's ashes -- Karen has kept them, and even spoken with them, I'm told, for the last year -- will be taken up to Richmond, Indiana, to be buried by the rest of their family.

Course, Max and Merrily won't be there. Like I said, they may be in those recliners cheering for Butch and Sundance. 

Or perhaps -- and this is something I'm hoping for -- they'll be once again on that first date, stranded on the Ferris wheel with the cotton-candy.  Max probably isn't scared of heights anymore. And I'm sure Merrily took her sweet tooth to the great beyond.

Sounds reasonable.  

   

Glad we are celebrating our 23rd 'Gotcha Day' with the best All-American young man I know

Twenty-three years ago today, I waded through a muddy yard filled with boys, 3-and-under. They hungrily grabbed at the chocolate cookies -- "biscuits," they called them -- that we'd gotten at a gas station along the road that eventually passed through Giurgiu, Romania, and crossed the Danube to Bulgaria.

I looked at the boys and wondered which one was mine.

They were dirty, obviously not tended to well by their guardians in terrycloth bathrobes -- even late in the afternoon.

This sea of children, most with dark brown eyes and hair and skin, almost Middle Eastern complexions, gathered around my legs.

My wife, Suzanne, was perhaps a dozen yards from me, also making her way through the island of unwanted boys, society's castoffs, who pushed at all of us, eyes pleading. We gave out more hugs than biscuits. Plenty.

Our attorney and my friend, Doru, passed by me, his eyes focused firmly on the front door of the disheveled building that obviously was the tattered home that had spilled these boys out, unsupervised for the most part, onto the muddy field.

My eyes played over the faces. I'd been in a similar situation three years earlier, when we found our daughter, Emily, in an orphanage in Arad, Romania, a few hundred miles to the northwest.

But that time, the children were, for the mostly clean. Semi-happy. Little Mariana -- we kept that as Emily's middle name -- was chubby, the favorite of the nurses and caretakers.

In the yard at the boys' orphanage in the countryside outside Giurgiu, no one was clean. It was a Dickensian scene. Little boys, many in toboggan caps, clothing and bodies soiled with sweat and whatever, had not been cared for.

"Which one is mine?" I asked myself, realizing that if I could, I'd take them all, maybe 50 of them.

They smiled and begged, tugged on my clothes. They'd been here since they graduated from the infants' orphanage in Giurgiu, where the sewers ran in big, leaky pipes above the sidewalks and yards.

I know that, because we had stopped at the infants' orphanage, where some of our party of four couples, had adopted little ones.

We had actually wanted to adopt a 2-year-old, the same age as Emily was when we got her. The babies had a better chance of being adopted. The older they got, the harder it was to get adopted.

A few weeks before we had climbed from the little, Romanian-styled "Mercedes" -- I'm not sure if it really was one -- we had been told by the adoption agency here in Nashville that a boy who was pushing 3, was in desperate need of a family who'd take him.

Who'd love him.

His adoption had fallen through. Lazar's days in the "warmth" of the children's orphanage were numbered. If we could get to Romania quickly enough, we could adopt him. We cleared our paperwork and then made the journey, standing in that yard two weeks after we had decided, with no coaxing, that we should take the boy we'd name Joe, a family name filled with love and dignity.

Time was running out for him.

When boys turned 3, they were relegated to the big institutions, lost in the system, perhaps destined to be living in the sewers and tunnels of Bucharest, the pedophiles' capital of Europe at that time. Teenage boys and girls were out there, every night, all night, outside our hotel, one time a group of them nearly cornered me in an underground shopping mall. I doubt they meant harm. A few bucks and they would be gone. Or a Snickers.

"Don't give them money," Doru had told me, in his thick Bela Lugosi accent.

"That will encourage them." Instead, we carried candies to hand the children. I had seen "stern" Doru handing money over to a child, I should note. Doru's dead now, but he spent his adult life helping the orphans of his native land..

On that first trip to Romania, teenage girls and boys waited in the hotel bar well into the night. Smiling at the tourists, bumming cigarettes and selling themselves.

I swear the guy down the hall from us in the hotel in Arad was Saddam Hussein. Two soldiers, automatic rifles at the ready, stood outside his room day and night. Inside, I'm sure he was mapping out weapons of mass destruction. I doubt that Saddam Hussein was evil enough to be there to prey on children. Suzanne tells me it wasn't Saddam. But I prefer to think I was two doors down the hall from a 20th Century villain.

But that was three years before we descended on the dirty yard outside Giurgiu, where little boys asked "Mister" "Mister" "Lady" "Lady" to take them to America. Anywhere but this desolate and heart-sickening compound.

Across the road on one side, a farmer had set up a tent where he and his family were selling "buy-'em and gut-'em" chickens for the early evening, ox-cart and horse-and-wagon "commuters" on this dirt road that ran pretty much parallel to the Danube River in extreme southern Romania.

A family rode past in a horse-cart, leaving "souvenirs'' on the roadway.

One of the women in a bathrobe made her way through the crowd of boys and rescued my wife and I.

"Your son is inside," is probably what she said in Romanian. I gave her three packs of Merit 100s for her trouble (a long story, but bribes of American goods were encouraged if you wanted to make it quietly through Romania in 1998.)

She led us into the building where we were met by a snarling, swearing doctor in a soiled white coat who was scolding, bitterly, hurtfully, the crying almost-3-year-old who was in the room where we were led.

Suzanne, who by coincidence, lucky stars or whomever/whatever, was celebrating her birthday by adopting a child, held the boy and told him "it's OK, Joe, you're safe now."

While she stripped him of his worn orphanage apparel -- all of the clothing had to be left for other boys -- and put on the little blue shorts and jacket we'd brought him, I looked at my son.

I wondered where all the scars had come from, but didn't want to ask.

I didn't want to stir up any fuss. I just wanted us to get this little boy out of this horror, get him back to the relative civilization of Bucharest, begin the series of legal steps and medical tests, that would enable him to move to Nashville.

Sometimes it hurts me to think of the little boys who "didn't make it out." And it hurts to think of what Joe may have gone through in his first three years. And what he escaped in the last 23.

But then I will look at my son, healed in body and soul, as he works his way through graduate school and has his eyes on a career in which he could help the orphans of Eastern Europe, through a government agency or other employment.

My daughter, Emily, is in California, where she is just beginning to raise my first grandson. Roman will have, from the very start, a feeling of security that only can come from being lovingly raised from birth by his mother. I'm proud of Emily, and Roman is a happy fellow.

Today, 23 years after we stood in the muddy yard of the orphanage outside Giurgiu, Suzanne and I met Joe -- who lives with us right now -- at one of our favorite Nashville restaurants.

And it is a glorious "Gotcha Day."

I love my children. I was an old dad when I adopted them and am nearly 70 now as they live, happily, as young, American adults, taking their own chances and paying their own dues.

I don't think I did anything really special by going to a third world country and adopting them. It's what they have done for me that counts.

(Apologies if this isn't perfect in grammar. But it is perfect in intent. I love my kids and am proud to be their dad. This is just a quick first draft of my thoughts on this day. The picture is from a Titans game Joe and I attended a few years ago. Love, Tim)

Crossfire hurricane: Not even foul, sweaty drunk dampens joy of seeing The Rolling Stones; What's the matter with you, man? Well, I miss you, Charlie

 If it wasn’t for the sloppy-fat drunken woman who tried to sing over Mick and who yelled incessantly and sometimes incomprehensibly, The Rolling Stones concert at Nissan Stadium a few nights ago would have been perfect. Pretty damn special, even so. Course, I missed Charlie, a lot. More on that later.

Weather was great. Our seats were good, providing a perfect angle to the stage and ramps and the amplified images and sounds from the giant screens and speakers. 

My son, Joe, had been singing “Satisfaction,” “Start Me Up” and his favorite – “Paint it Black” – for a few days. By the way, he also likes to sing Bobby Bare songs, particularly the duets with Skeeter Davis. I have no idea where he’s picked up those nasty habits.  I take tea at 3.

Joe is a 25-year-old graduate student with his future ahead of him. His dad is a relative dinosaur pushing 70 in a month, with the long, dark clouds comin’ down, or at least blowing in from I hope a distant horizon.

I took Joe with me to see my favorite performing outfit.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The Beatles remain my favorite-ever band and most of my music listening here at home comes from that band of geniuses, either in their various band eras (I prefer the late stuff to the Fab stuff) or as individual performers.

All four of them – John’s “Plastic Ono Band” 50^th (a gift from my best friend), George’s “All Things Must Pass” 50^th, Paul’s “McCartney III” (also a gift from same best friend) and even Ringo’s “Beaucoups of Blues” – have become constants in the last few months.

Well, “Plastic Ono” and “All Things” actually have been on my fairly consistent playlist for 50 years now, so I really dig the expanded versions with warts and all.

But, you see, those four guys aren’t performing together as a band anymore. Haven’t for more than a half-century. They were at their performing peak atop the Apple Building, where they bid their performing farewell. Whenever I see footage of that performance, my heart dances, then sinks. And I get a little angry, because that was their final curtain. John and George are dead – victims of assassination by bullet and cigarette – and the other two do perform, albeit usually not together.

I’ve seen them both in their shows and have to admit to butterflies. McCartney’s extravaganzas do push into Rolling Stones-style splendor, and I love his music. Problem is, he doesn’t have Keith Richards there to cheer him on or simply cheer him, as is one of the roles Keef plays for his childhood chum and Glimmer Twin, Mick.

But the thing is that the sue-me blues and deaths among Johnny and The Moonndogs do sometimes turn my soul melancholy. I’m not a man of constant sorrow, but I do think about what could have been.

I intersperse my home listening more often than not with selections from the guys up on the stage at the stadium Saturday night.

Oh, sure, I do play Tom Petty, and he’s dead.  And Traveling Wilburys, and three of them are dead. Johnny Cash, well, he’s dead.  He did like me, though. Dylan recently has displayed some of the grandeur of early Bob, who somehow disappeared about the time he rode his Triumph to near-doom by the time he got to Woodstock.

Occasionally, I’ll play Elvis. He still is releasing some good stuff, even a couple or more years after he died bloated next to his toilet at Graceland. And Grateful Dead, with a long-dead Jerry Garcia and longer-still-dead Pigpen also brighten my days.

And, of course, Waylon gets his time on my record machine. Do you know what I mean?

The Rolling Stones have always been my second-favorite band; although, there were times when they certainly challenged The Beatles for the throne. Unattainable.

The thing is that The Rolling Stones have been, faraway eyes agree, the top performing band when it comes to live shows. And that’s despite the fact that the original lineup of Brian Jones (he’s dead), Bill Wyman (a nice guy I met, but he’s retired 28 years now), Charlie Watts (dead a month ago), Mick Jagger and Keith Richards has changed dramatically.

Those five guys above created “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Paint it Black,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumping Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Well, you get it, the classic stuff that had us pulling memories from the depth of our souls during the 2 hours and 12 minutes we were granted in their audience Saturday night.

Darryl Jones now plays bass with The Stones, instead of Wyman. But he’s not a full-fledged member. He’s a freelancer with a really steady and well-paying gig. My friend, band-leader Chuck Leavell, sometimes coaxes sounds out of the backing band that helps approximate how they sounded with Brian and later Mick Taylor (who did get in on some of the great recordings after Brian died.) That Mick eventually found the spiking pressure of being a Stone too much to bear and he was replaced by Ronnie Wood in 1975.

Ron, of course, is a full-fledged Stone after almost a half-century as Keith’s guitar-mate. He and Keith also always were good to my old friend, the late and great Scotty Moore, who invented rock ‘n’ roll guitar. He was their hero, their professional inspiration.

Steve Jordan, a genius of a drummer, was selected by an ailing Charlie Watts to be his “temporary” replacement until he got better. He didn’t, so Steve is handling the drum duties. Again, like Jones, a really good hire, but not a Stone.

I’ll get the “Steve Jordan is not Charlie Watts” argument out of the way right now. He’s not.

He’s, as my friend Peter Cooper said “the best drummer not named Charlie Watts” for this band.  He played with fire and flourish. It was obvious he was having a blast in the pocket.  The band loves his contributions.

But, if you thought what you saw Saturday night was “the best Stones show of all” or some such hyperbole, you are wrong.

Charlie, Keith long-ago said “is The Rolling Stones.” I relished Steve’s playing and no one who never saw Charlie Watts would notice much difference.

Unless you pull out a live Stones album – “Ya Yas,” “Got Live if You Want it” or “Love you Live” (especially the side from The El Mocambo), for example.

That’s when you can hear what a difference Charlie made in the band. Steve is a genius. Charlie, well, he was original “Rolling Stones Drummer Charlie Watts.”

Among the greatest memories I have of my many times seeing The Stones in person occurred in 1994’s “Voodoo Lounge” tour stop at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama.  I was there with my friend, Jay Orr, a noted music writer back then, and we had good seats that we claimed while the lights were still up and Counting Crows was finishing up its whining set. Sorry, but Adam Duritz, a talented enough fellow who used to have good hair, is not a showman. It almost sounded like elevator music to be heard while we searched for our seats.

Then the lights went down. Total darkness in the heart of town.  And, in the darkness, there was the tom-tom intro of the Buddy Holly classic “Not Fade Away.”  That simple rhythm continued in the darkness for several minutes, spiking up the anticipation that only comes before a Rolling Stones concert (Sorry, Bruce, but it’s the truth), before Jagger stepped into a lonely spotlight and growled “I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do….”

The rest of the guys gathered onstage and played the night away.  And the only one who didn’t take any kind of break was Charlie Watts, whose distinctive drumming held the entire show … the whole classic recorded catalogue, for that matter … together.

He had a backbeat you can’t lose it….

Charlie, Brian, Bill, Mick and Keith were the five guys who hatched their sound while living in squalor and on pilfered food and heat in a London apartment.

And when one of them goes, the sound is not the same. I love Ronnie Wood, ever since I saw him as the main personality behind Rod Stewart in Faces, who actually put on a show almost as good as Saturday’s Stones show, but without the modern gizmos.  He perhaps is a better guitar fit with Keith than was Mick Taylor. But he’s not Brian Jones, before he fried his brain and struggled to play tambourine after proving himself a master of all forms of instruments and music.

Losing Charlie Watts at first felt like a death knell to me when it came to my consideration of my favorite performing outfit.

And, yes, I really missed him Saturday night. But there’s no reason Steve Jordan can’t sit there, as a hired hand, I’m sure a well-paid one, like Darryl Jones, and provide the rhythm section behind Mick and Keith – the dual heart of the band – and Ronnie.  

It was a splendid concert, among the best of the five times I’ve seen them. My heart was lifted by the old fellows – what a drag it is getting old, I’d agree – as they staged a concert the likes of which no one else is capable.

Like I noted before, Springsteen is close. But, as my grandfather said every time he raked in a pot when Marc, Jeff, Eric and I – kids aged 7 or 9 or 11, I can’t remember -- played poker at Walnut Lake:  “Close, but no cigar.”

As for Joe, well, it made my heart lift when I looked over at him or when he commented on the actions on the stage. He was the main reason I was there, as I wanted to hand the baton of my music over to him, so he can say to his kid: “Did I ever tell you about the first time my father took me to see The Rolling Stones?”

I say first time, because I hope there will be more. In fact, by the time we got home Saturday, Joe, joyful that such a thing happened in front of his eyes while he was with his father (that’s what he calls me: “Hello mother, hello father,” as Alan Sherman sang, etc.), that his mind was working overtime.

By the time I showered and came back into the living room to watch the highlights of the Alabama, Texas A&M game (sorry, Nick, shit happens), Joe already had a plan in the works.

He was searching the internet to see where The Stones will be next on this tour and comparing it to his grad school calendar and my own work schedule.  “I’m just looking to see where we can see them again,” Joe said. “I’ve never seen such a great show.”

It should be noted that his favorite band is not world-known. That’s Eric Brace, Peter Cooper and Thomm Jutz – three of my own special friends, who, pre-pandemic, staged at least one annual local show that I’d take Joe to for the last several years.

His favorite song is “Hartford’s Bend,” by the way, in case you want to listen to those guys on Spotify or wherever you find your highly and overly compressed music.  

He once went to see Foreigner or Journey (they are the same to me) and he videotaped it for his high school. The guys in the band were good to him, so he has a warm spot for one of those bands.

And I took him to see The Who a couple years ago.  He loved it, particularly the lights and dazzling sounds of the overture from “Tommy.” And he was quite taken with Roger Daltrey’s attempts to sing in a voice that was damaged long ago, perhaps Live at Leeds. And who can’t be taken in by the gentle charm of Pete Townshend, who did his trademark windmills like the geezer he is and made fun of himself when he fell down.

It actually was a wonderful show. But bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon were absent. Moonie for many decades, John more recent. Both substance abuse victims. Life in the fast lane, as a fairly static American band sings, in their jukebox-like shows.

I need to pause here to talk about the sweaty, drunk woman mentioned at the top. I can’t say that as a young man I always observed proper decorum at concerts. I once got on the edge of the stage with Joe Cocker (he didn’t notice, probably wasn’t sure he was on the stage.) And, if it was a regional band playing in Ames, Iowa, I was always more than ready to climb on stage and play tambourine. The bands tolerated me, because they knew me. The Beach Boys one night got a kick out of my offstage behavior, but that’s a long story. Even Brian laughed that night.

But I was 19. And one thing I didn’t do was interfere with others when they were watching a show. If they weren’t up, jumping around, I wasn’t either. If they asked me to sit down, I did. They all had paid to be there as well. I usually paid, too (that’s a reference to The Beach Boys jovial applause directed toward me in a field outside the arena).

A middle-aged person, though, as most of us were the other night – I give myself a decade or two when calling myself that) – generally like to let people enjoy the show.

This woman sang so loudly off-key and danced around so wildly that it was distracting. I did say, quietly to her, that I didn’t pay to hear her sing. Others among the crowd where we sat were similarly upset, especially when she said we should eff ourselves, or whatever. Eventually Nissan’s impotent security were beckoned by different people, only to leave her alone and actually empower her to be more obnoxious.

This is a time when I should add I think alcohol sales should be limited at concerts. A punch-card, limiting a person to two $20 beers or whatever. Drunks are much worse than those who smoke jazz cigarettes, even if the smoke sometimes is bothersome (if reminiscent of misspent youth).

The woman’s friends tried to get her to calm down, but she got worse. Since Joe and I had excellent seats for our price range, we didn’t want to leave them, though we moved slightly a seat or two to get away from her.

I do not fight any more. Not with men. I’m not tough. And certainly not with way too drunk and foul-mouthed 50-year-old women, even as their sweaty, drunken bodies strain every fabric of what is intended to be loose clothing.

So much for my complaint.

As one woman told me, at show’s end: “I don’t envy how she’ll feel tomorrow.” Me, I’m hoping she still feels like shit today.

Now, that said, there were many in the stadium who were obnoxiously drunk. This was just one of them. But she was sitting by me. In front of me.

OK, that’s all on that. I had to say it. It was a Rolling Stones show, and, as pitiful as it sounds, those are sacred to me. Sympathy for this devil, I suppose.

I was texting back and forth with Peter Cooper the day after the show. He’d taken his wonderful son, Baker, 11, to the concert, and a couple of drunks sat behind them as well. Knowing Peter, I’m sure it upset him.

I doubt if Baker went to get security (Joe was one of the several who did that for our section).

Afterward, I did complain to the head of security, who promised me that next time, he’d make sure he got me down onto the floor, into the high-priced seats.

Course, it was an empty promise. If The Stones come again, those expensive seats likely will cost $10K, and I doubt I could trade my few hundred buck seats for those.

And there is a question of whether this is the last time they’ll venture this way.

Peter told me that he probably won’t look at going to another show this time around. And, realistically, unless Mick and Keith or maybe Steve Jordan, host me and Joe, fly us in and give us stagefront seats, I doubt I’ll make it again this time around.

Peter, who is not prone to hyperbole except when he is bragging to people about what a nice guy I am, tells me that we should wait.

“They’ll be back at least two more times,” he texted me. “We’ll catch them then.”

Sure, this could be the last time. I don’t know.

And sometimes an audience member is a fat and ignorant piece of shit, but that doesn’t stop me from reveling in the glory of having seen The Rolling Stones one more time.

I just said to myself, as I watched the fireworks blow up at the end of “Satisfaction,” I hope to see these guys again sometime.

Keith long ago said that he and Mick are like old bluesmen, their original inspirations, fellows who will continue playing music until they drop.

If they play as well as they did Saturday night, I hope they don’t drop until long after I’m unable to make it to concerts again.

Think I’m too optimistic? No one’s ever called me an “optimist” in my life.

 So, get offa my cloud.