Charlie Watts, the heartbeat of "The World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band" (as they used to dub themselves), is gone; It hurts me, but now it really is time for the Rolling Stones to Fade Away

 The tom-tom echoed from the darkness that enveloped Legion Field. Counting Crows had just finished an expectedly whiny set, most of which, fortunately, was lost in the rumble of anticipation in the packed stadium.

"The Rolling Stones are in town, man," yelled a guy with yellow teeth, beer breath and a leather vest he wore bare-chested. He tossed his bucket of popcorn in the air, and it covered me. He didn't apologize.

"Blame it on the Stones," is how my friend, Kris Kristofferson, put it long ago in one of his blistering attacks on Middle America.

The tom-tom gave way to the voice of Mick Jagger, who, with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood by his side, came out with the best version of "Not Fade Away" since Buddy Holly told us what he was gonna do.

The man who played those drums, Charlie Watts, died today.

I am devastated. I already was not happy that Charlie was not going to be a part of The Rolling Stones upcoming visit to Nissan Stadium. Health woes had sidelined him, and former Letterman drummer Steve Jordan is taking his place.

He was 80, but his death surprised me, even though I had been told that Mr. Charlie really looked pretty ill.

I guess the Jagger-Richards-Wood money machine will continue. But really, no one can take Charlie Watts’ place.

I have been listening to Charlie for six decades, since the 1960s, when I first bought Rolling Stones albums, the favorite of which is “Beggars Banquet,” the last full album with the original quintet.

There was band founder Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman, guitarist Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. And Charlie Watts providing the beating heart.

Of course, that lineup has changed over the years, but the core remained: Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie Wood, who stepped in after Mick Taylor decided being a Rolling Stone would kill him.

It did kill Brian Jones before him, of course.

And Wyman, the only Stone I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet and speak with, retired. Darryl Jones, who is not on center stage, is a role player on bass. And he’s not Wyman, nor would Keith and Mick want him to be or sound anywhere near as powerful. He does not get his quarter of the million-dollar nightly guarantee. He’s on salary.

Hey, hee, get offa my cloud. There were only four real Rolling Stones – including Ronnie, who has more than paid his dues after assuming the guitarist role, to accompany Keef, in 1975.

 I first saw Ronnie when he was co-leader of Faces, with Rod Stewart holding microphone duties, back in the late ‘60s or early-‘70s when Smokin’ Joe Matejka and I hitchhiked through a blizzard to Des Moines (from Ames, Iowa, where we attended school) to catch them at the Iowa Armory. We slept in the back of our “chauffeur’s” station wagon later, because snow had piled up during the show.

But this is not about Faces today: It’s about The Rolling Stones.

Now there really are just three.

And only two of them, the school chums, Keef and Mick, who helped Brian Jones start his band, are still performing. Only three are alive, including Wyman, who enjoys the quiet, artistic life.

Personally, I think it’s time for The Rolling Stones to make a graceful exit.

Course, I’ll still be there if they continue. Which they probably will, until all of them are dead … which really probably isn’t that far into the future. Perhaps they'll keep going until Mick is The Rolling Stone, singular, something he tried for awhile, unsuccessfully. 

I’ll never forget those six decades of drumbeats and the jazzy sound of Charlie’s snare. Perfect counterpoint, a disciplined backbeat to what, when it began, was the music of anarchy. The tom-toms in the darkness of Legion Field are in my mental replay booth continuously, should I ever need to hear them.

Now, of course, it’s just show biz. Big paydays. Vegas-style, flashy clothes, and old men seeking the Satisfaction they found in their youth. Still fetching, of course. I still love this band and would rather see them -- with Charlie on the sticks -- than any other outfit. I'm an old man, and they give me energy, save me from a 20th nervous breakdown when I'm angry or sad and decide The Stones are my afternoon LP or CD (or even 45 rpm) antidote.

But, with the death of Charlie Watts, the heart of The Stones no longer is beating.

R.I.P. to Mr. Watts.

Thanks, old fellow.

Of course, you were only a decade older than me. And I really wanted to see you and hear you one more time.

You can’t always get what you want. From today on, it’s not ever going to be possible to get what you need. Not even if you try sometime.

Paint it black.

 

 

 

The scar on my left leg made Marc smile and talk about poker, bluegill, and Camp Spikehorn and Al Kaline ... memories are dreams in past tense

The Camp Spikehorn gang lost a chunk of its heart and soul at around 1 a.m. Detroit time on August 21, 2021.

Yeah, that’s just a few days ago as I write this. I found out about it on the morning of his death. It was waking hours for me when the note arrived. I was wide awake. It didn’t matter to Marc anymore. They had already taken his body for cremation.

His soul was long gone.

I knew it was going to happen. In fact, I wrote a blog about it last week.

I spoke to Marc Champ’s brother, Jeff, for a long time in the hours before Marc died. Jeff said he figured Marc already was gone, shooting the shit with dead friends and relatives. Maybe, I reckoned, he was playing poker with Grandpa Champ.  Jeff’s a deeply spiritual man, so I don’t think he said “shooting the shit.” That’s just my paraphrase. And Marc doesn’t mind. Still.

Actually, I had called Marc, who I knew was succumbing to a rampaging attack, a massacre caused by liver cancer, when Jeff picked up his cell.  I was overdue for a dream come true, perhaps, but I clung or clinged?? to hope. I’d been calling the last few days.

His wife, Cathy, had let family know a few days before that Marc couldn’t speak much – his mouth was painfully irritated by the disease treatment or the damn cancer itself – but he welcomed calls.

She said just to call his number and leave him a voice mail, and she’d make sure he heard it.

That’s what I did. One night I read him the blog I wrote earlier in the week that focused on our Camp Spikehorn summers. That was a day camp that Marc and Jeff and my brother, Eric, and I attended. It was on a road behind the Grand Rapids Zoo, if I remember correctly. Of course, memories are just dreams in past tense, a semi-wise old man told himself this morning while pounding on this keyboard, after watching the funeral on a live stream.

Every summer, Marc and Jeff spent a lot of time with us, in our house at 507 Elliott Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, before that they summered with us at our house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake, Michigan.

That’s outside Detroit. We lived in basic post-WWII construction there, as my mother and father had purchased their first home outside Pontiac, where dad coached and taught at an all-Black junior high.

That was not long after WWII, and I know the young men who my dad coached always worshiped him, one or two even coming down to visit my dad in his last years down here in Nashville. How my parents got to Nashville is a different story.

In this space, though, I’m talking about Marc and Jeff. How much I love them. How much I hurt now that Marc is dead.

We had such fun as kids. Not just at Camp Spikehorn or at Camp Optimist (we went there one summer as well….) I don’t think it was by the zoo, or maybe it was the one by the zoo… doesn’t matter. Like I said, memories are just dreams in past tense.

I remember my mother, gone 22 years now, as she herded the four of us, skinny little kids, when we walked barefoot from the house on Beverly Road to the end of the street, where it opened up to Sylvan Lake and where the neighborhood beach was located.

If it was hot and if we didn’t whine about it, Mom would allow us to pull off our short pants and go for a swim in our underwear.  I was probably 4 back then. So was Jeff. Marc and Eric would have been 6. I seldom swim in my underwear anymore. Probably not politically correct, anyway.

The boys spent parts of their summers with us because their dad, my beloved Uncle Joe Champ, had been severely injured in the Battle of the Bulge. For you youngsters who think America’s wars were in Afghanistan and Iraq and grandpa talked about Vietnam, as horrible as those pointless wars were, the real hell was in Europe and Asia in the 1940s, thereabouts. And Uncle Joe helped save the world from the Nazis. At a cost. Flamethrower fire burned his lungs. There was a V.A. sanitarium for such-injured soldiers out in Arizona. There also was air that was breathable out there. The air in the Detroit area was flavored by Ford, GM, Chrysler and Packard plants.

I hear Arizona air is pretty damn filthy nowadays, seven-plus decades later. When Grandpa Champ moved down to Nashville in the 1970s to live with my parents, after Grandma died, Nashville’s air was good, too. “Clear and blue as an Arizona morning,’’ Grandpa would say. Wonder how he’d describe it now?

Grandpa Champ, who would take his son, Uncle Joe, and Aunt Florence (Joe’s wife) out to Arizona – along with Grandma Champ – had been a foreman on the line for Nash automobiles. But that’s beside the point. Or as a friend once said to me: Let’s get right to the point. That friend then offers up a great suggestion, but that’s for another day.

Anyway, while Joe, Flo and Grandma and Grandpa Champ were out in Arizona, Marc and Jeff stayed with us. Their big sister, Michelle, must have stayed with friends.

So, that’s where Camp Spikehorn came in. As did dune buggy rides along Lake Michigan and trips to the Drive-In movies to see “The Shaggy Dog” and some stuff by those intellectually challenging Stooges or that wascally wabbit. (Oops, there goes political correctness again). We’d have a bag of 12-cents McDonald’s greaseburgers.

What I’ve not gotten much into so far here today is Walnut Lake, where my grandparents lived in a small house in the hollow, across the swamp and a bog from the Lake.

We’d all meet up there in the summer as well.

Spending summer days and nights at Grandpa and Grandma Champ's house in the hollow by the marsh at Walnut Lake, Michigan, meant that at least half the day was at the lake. And in the evening, Al Kaline and the Detroit Tigers were always on the radio or the old black-and-white TV. Grandpa filled his pipe with Prince Albert in the can.  

And, he’d climb from his old, leather chair, first kicking the footstool out of his way, grab his walking cane, and make it to the round table in the kitchen.  When my grandparents died, my brother, Eric, was supposed to get that table, by the way. Teddy took it, though. The last time I saw him, Eric was holding me back from killing him for being evil to my mother, who helped raise him, as well. He was just a cousin to all of us, an older cousin, Shirley’s offspring. And, as far as we figured, the best thing he offered us was the speedboat he kept at Walnut Lake.

Marc, Jeff, Michelle, Eric and I would take that thing out, usually me at the wheel and throttle, and torture it as the sun rose. I’m sure they all loved us in the houses along the lake.   

Sometimes, we’d all load up in my dad’s car and go down to Briggs Stadium, home of The Detroit Tigers. That’s where the huge scar on my leg was produced. More on that later, if I decide to ramble that way.

But this is a story about Walnut Lake, about Marc, who is dead, and Jeff, who always was a joker. Michelle, who now lives among Kentucky’s Amish, often was around, at least until she married John, who is dead now, but was a helluva good guy. That’s not the direction today, though.

Course, Eric and I almost always were in Walnut Lake when Marc and Jeff were.  

Cigar smoke. Or Prince Albert in the can jammed in a pipe flavored the air in the little, square house Grandpa built with help from my Uncle Les, Shirley’s husband. They are dead long ago, having produced Teddy and Delores. I don’t know whatever became of those two, though I do wish them well.

Grandpa thought he ruled the house. Unless Grandma decided otherwise. “Now Bea….” “Well George ….”

Maybe Marc, Jeff, Eric and I would sleep out on the back porch, screened in and not really locked. Can you imagine that in 2020? Course this was back in the 1950s and maybe early 1960s.

I’d love to be able to sleep on my deck here in Nashville, but I don’t have a gun. The worst thing I could do to an intruder would be spray him with skunk repellent or bust him over the head with one of our tomato plants. Skunk repellent smells almost as bad as a skunk, but that’s another story that I’ll likely not ever get around to telling.

Back in the late 1950s, Grandpa once went out into the woods, pounding pieces of timber together in the middle of the night, as we slept on that porch.

Scared the shit out of us, as Marc might say. Well, actually, that’s what I say. We trembled because there was a killer … or perhaps a monster on the loose … in our eager and impressionable minds… and he/she/it might be in those woods, among the black walnut trees and berry bushes.

We didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t until the next day, when he showed off the timber pieces over his breakfast of pepper and scrambled eggs (mostly pepper) and kippers (sardines) or fried perch, that we learned the truth.    He had been the monster. Laughed like hell that he’d scared us so.  We laughed, too. We all thought he was the guy who, I think they say “hung the moon.” Whatever. He was a great man.   

I have his pipes and pipe rack here in my office. I don’t smoke any more. But sometimes I’ll smell one of them, and it reminds me of Grandpa Champ. And Marc and Jeff. Grandma. Michelle. Me and Eric at Walnut Lake.

After the sun set, Grandma would take us out to the vegetable garden, where we'd dig for night-crawlers and put them in an old cottage cheese carton filled with black soil.

The plan was that we would be ready to get up at 5 the next morning to paddle out onto the lake and catch bluegill, sunfish and perch. Cleaning them later at the stump out back while Grandpa smoked his pipe.  If we caught a bullhead, he’d pound a nail in its head so he could skin it.

Grandpa would bury the innards, hoping that Topsy, the black beaglish hound, would not dig them up, roll in them or eat them. She did frequently. Helluva good dog.

When Topsy died, Grandpa and Grandma got Spuddy, another beaglish dog, who (along with Grandpa) lived with my Mom and Dad in Nashville after Grandma died.  Another story. A dog story..

I’ve told some of this story before, I think after Al Kaline, the Tigers’ slugger died, because his heroics had been the soundtrack when Grandpa taught me, Marc, Jeff and Eric, how to play poker. Grandpa played for keeps. If it was matchsticks, he’d clean us out. Play for pennies, boys? Well, Grandpa taught us how to lose with grace. If one of us occasionally took in a decent pot, though, he’d smile. He would be glad we’d learned enough to beat him. Then he’d redouble his efforts so he wouldn’t lose the next hand to those “Gawd Damn Kids.”

I may already have mentioned this, but in summers, we’d, of course, be barefoot as Huck Finn as we walked along the path through the bog and swamp and across the oiled roads (They used to spray oil on dirt roads back then to keep dust down in the summer. I doubt that they do that anymore. Probably not politically correct.) Our bare soles turned to black shortly after dawn every day and sometimes Grandma would scrub them as we were in the bathtub at night.

Grandpa used to work, checking people in at the beach, as he sat in his chair (he was crippled by arthritis). If we were good, and sometimes the other boys, at least, were, he’d give us each a dime to go into the clubhouse and buy penny candy or an ice cream cone. It was Walnut Lake, so generally I had walnut ice cream. People tell me that it’s pretty exclusive out there at Walnut Lake nowadays.

Back then it was a blue-collar town and beach. Now, I think rich people, probably mostly millennial assholes and their parents and offspring, live there with their fancy speedboats and lack of sentiment about what that lake meant to us.

I guess I should get back to Briggs Field or was it Briggs Stadium? Shit, doesn’t matter. It was a real ballpark. Hot dogs and beer and Coke were sold. Maybe peanuts and Cracker Jack. No raw octopus and sake or whatever the fuck they serve at ballparks today.

It was in the time of double-headers, and about halfway through the second game, Grandpa Champ got tired.  I think he waited by the park, because of his arthritis. But we, Dad, Marc, Jeff, Eric, me, would have to go get the car. Anyway, we were parked bumper to bumper across that part of Detroit. It was before the chicken man was blown up in Philly while in Detroit they burned the city down and Roger Smith killed GM. (I put the chicken man in here, because Marc liked Springsteen. If you don’t catch the reference, it’s OK. But they blew up the chicken man’s house, too.)

From the stadium, we had to walk across the bumpers of the cars to find dad’s white, convertible Oldsmobile.  Unfortunately, one of the cars had a broken headlight and the sharp glass grabbed my left leg when I dragged past it. Blood spurted like in a Peckinpah film. Nah, not really, but it bled like hell.

I think my Dad, the only WWII infantryman who was nauseated by blood… actually, he probably saw too much of it, caused some I’m sure, while in his late teens and early 20s … panicked. I think they wrapped my leg in a T-shirt and we went home where Grandma and Mom tended to it.  When Dad died a couple years ago, the family gathered at Eric’s house, where my Cousin Marc (or Maurice, as the big-city fancies in Detroit call him) and I were drinking 12-year-old seltzer. He asked me if I still had that scar.

I showed it to him. The sight of that 60-year-old scar made Marc happy.

The other day, after Marc’s earthly remains had been removed from his deathbed, I called his number again. His voice perked me up.

“I just wanted to hear your voice again, Marc. I love you.” Hell, I paused a second, hoping, I suppose, that he’d pick up.

We’d talk of Camp Spikehorn and Walnut Lake. Four skinny little boys running across hot oil to get to the berry field or to get into the lake. Or to go fishing, if Grandma felt like taking us.

Evenings losing five-card draw to the old man we all worshiped.

Marc, as far as I can tell, had a regular life, though he fought through tragedy. His war hero dad died early in his life. A first wife died from too much of the poison that comes in bottles, if I remember right. He had a stepson he loved who fell from high-iron while working construction on a Florida skyscraper. A second stepson, child of his wonderful wife, Cathy, who set up the phone and also took such great care of her dying husband, also died.

That tragic fabric, though, never stole Marc’s soul. God, or whatever, took care of that the other night.

Besides that, he found and created happiness, despite the sad. He loved to play golf, sell siding and windows, smoke cigars and taste good Scots whisky.  His brother and sisters loved him.

So did his cousins, who saw him infrequently, but when we did, our hearts turned us into those skinny kids from all those years ago.

And, especially, he had a second wife, Cathy, who gave him all the love he could handle and missed out on earlier in life. And, to see them together, you knew that love was reciprocal.

Cathy’s grandchildren became his, too. And he finally retired simply to spend time babysitting those kids. At the funeral service, one of his stepchildren talked about how Grandpa Marc made sure he could watch, through a window, the kids playing in the backyard when he was confined to bed.

The old scar on my leg sometimes itches. When scratch it, I always think of Marc.

At least I have my memories, my dreams in past tense.

 

A few phone calls with a woman who used to "Dream. Dream-dream-dream" that her son, Donnie, would visit his old, black room

Margaret Everly used to call me, complaining about her sons.

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.

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.

But, according to Mrs. Everly, either Don or Phil never visited her. She just said "my son hasn't visited" or somesuch.

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 enjoy), I guess it must have been Don.

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. 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.

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..

Actually, now that I think about it, the first time I spoke with her, Nashville Banner icon Bob Battle, who knew everybody, switched her over to me.

"This is the mother of The Everly Brothers,'' Bob said. "Maybe you can help her."

She called several times for nice chats. 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. I imagine the room had been painted and the house sold.

Now both the boys are gone, after Don's death Saturday.

Margaret survives, however.

And man, I loved the music of The Everly Brothers. Bye-Bye Happiness.

Thank you for the phone calls, Mrs. Everly.

Boys, thanks for the tunes.