Nobody gets out of here alive .... I get frightened that I'm not going to fly out of the Cuckoo's Nest.... Of course, I'm nuts .... Laughter and 'Looney Tunes' with Jerry & the guys

 For a split second I thought I was going to be seized by the big memory care attendant and strapped down until someone could put a pillow over my head.

Nah, no pillow. But I did have a bit of worry there for a second at the nursing home, when it looked like they’d confused me for a patient.

That was toward the end of my visit with Jerry Manley this week. He's actually pretty well. There are holes in his memory. Big ones. But he's still articulate. And we love each other.

I was sitting in his room, when he lifted his tiny, empty water glass. “So damn thirsty,” he said.

I leaned forward on my walking stick to push myself up from the recliner in my best friend’s room in the memory care ward of the nursing home.

“I hate for you to have to go down and get it, but I’m thirsty,” said Jerry Manley – one of the four original News Brothers (who hates his “Chuckles” nickname, but has come to terms with it after 43 years.)

Jerry, who had been watching “The Rifleman” – Lucas McCain was bailing his son, Mark, out of trouble after the young man allowed a stranger to stay in the barn the night before – had just finished off the  mini-glass of water. By “mini,” I mean it was about double the size of a shot glass.

“Man, I’m thirsty,” he had said, again. It’s a pretty far stretch down to the dining/party room and kitchen, so I told him I’d go find him something to wet his whistle.

That’s when I used the walking stick – a cane that my brother, Eric, made from a tree limb and inscribed with a Paul McCartney quote: “I don’t work to be ordinary.”  I don’t really take the cane out of the house much, but I do use it to help me at home. It’s a beautiful piece of finished, knotty wood and I could kill someone with it. I use it when my back troubles me or if I want to kill someone.

Even back in the heyday of The News Brothers, pushing a half-century ago now, the problems with my back were visible. I never have been able to walk perfectly upright and my running down Third Street in the “Rocky” sequence demonstrates the off-kilter running style that results.

It’s from scoliosis, the severely curved spine my parents gifted me with, with additions of rotting, cracked discs and other lower-disc degeneration caused by my career as a mediocre – but chemically fueled and very fast on my feet – football player.

Anyway, I spent six or seven months going to a chiropractor for “spinal decompression” last year. It was designed to put tissue between the compressed discs. Didn’t work. Spine is too curved, apparently.

So, I’ve been using the cane a lot to keep myself upright.  I only use it if I’m going to be on my feet too long, and my focus on keeping the back straight turns to pain.

Outside of my house – which I rarely leave because most of my friends are dead or elsewise incapacitated physically or mentally – I mainly use it at the nursing home where Jerry moved while everyone else was celebrating Thanksgiving.  Those are long hallways, going from the regular retirement center to get to the secured memory care ward.

And no one there looks twice at an old man on a cane, unless it is to admire it.  I think the old ladies are looking at my crotch, though. “Still got it, Timothy,” I’ll fool myself.

When I got to the party room and asked the only attendant I could find on-duty for something my friend could drink, I was greeted by a resident who introduced himself as “Paul.”

“Who is this rascal?” he asked, to no one, as I waited for the attendant. “You new here?”

I told him my name and that I hadn’t yet met the requirements for entry into this exclusive and very clean club; that I was visiting because my buddy lived at the end of the long, freshly waxed hall.

“Well, hello, Tim,” he said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Come see me again.”

I shook his hand, and he turned back to the TV, where – and this is absolutely true – “Looney Tunes” cartoons were playing.

I gimped my way back to the room where Jerry lives and plopped down in the recliner that is wedged between his bed and a recliner “belonging” to his roommate who lives in the other full-size bed in the traditional dormitory-style living.

“You ever meet your roommate?” I asked Jerry. 

“I reckon I have, but I don’t remember. He’s not in here much,” he said.

There’s really not many places he could go, so I figure he must like to spend his time in the party room, or perhaps he has a girlfriend he’s shagging mindlessly someplace down the hall. (“Do it again, do it some more, I know that it’s nasty, it’s nasty for sure,” as Frank Zappa told me on the first Mothers album.)

“Here comes Bob now!” said Jerry, as the roommate, a 90ish-looking fellow in a yellow running suit, entered the room.

“Hello, Bob,” I said, as the roommate sat down in his recliner, about six inches to my left.

Jerry and I didn’t let that stop us, as we talked about all the great beer and otherwise altered adventures we had. How I had developed a particular love of Scotch and pretty much drank it by the fifth or even quart back in those days.   

“Remember, you used to come to my house every Sunday midnight and we’d drink 12 pints of Natural Light together as we made mix tapes til dawn?” I asked. “We’d go to work the next day. I don’t remember ever having a hangover.

“It would kill me today,” I said, adding I’d had a mostly dry existence for the last couple of decades.

‘’I suppose we must have had hangovers,” Jerry said.

“We just sucked it up and went to work,” I said, though I really don’t recall many hangovers. The ones I had, I usually cured with a quart of beer in the morning.

It was at about this point in the conversation that I noticed that every time I said something, Bob was breaking into sustained laughter and even slapping his hand against his armrest.

I showed Jerry a video Rob Dollar had posted, a clip from “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” that captured me, Rob, Jerry, John Staed and Harold Lynch out at Outlaw Field in Clarksville.

Hell, even Mayor Ted Crozier was there, wearing a “Tim Ghianni for Mayor” button. Ted loved me and we remained friends until his death a few years ago.

The basic scene has The News Brothers going out to the airport because America’s first man to orbit the globe, John Glenn, was flying in.

I was The Leaf-Chronicle’s associate editor, in charge of Sunday papers, and I had sent Harold, who was the government reporter, out there to interview the great astronaut on that Saturday morning.

The night before, I suggested (or maybe it was Rob) that the rest of us go out to the airport in the morning – we didn’t go to work until afternoon – to meet the astronaut, a senator who was in town to raise money for a potential presidential run.

He didn’t get to the White House, but as I’ve noted in previous dispatches, he really was a good sport, glad to meet The News Brothers.

Jerry laughed. But Bob, well, shit, he wailed. It was the funniest story he’d heard in years, I suppose.

I got the same reaction when I started reminding Jerry of our Chico the Monkey coverage, something that got me summoned to my fairly regular upholstered hotseat in the publisher’s office. Publisher Luther Thigpen didn’t think the pun-filled streaming-headline tale about deputies looking for an escaped monkey in St. Bethlehem was worth the play I gave it.

Luther, though, liked me. He smiled as I told him I’d do it again the same way. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I told him, or some such.

“What was Luther’s last name?” Jerry asked.

Bob laughed when I said “Thigpen.”

He continued laughing when Jerry and I agreed that Luther, despite his faults and Chamber of Commerce mentality, at least had spent his formative years as a newspaper reporter and editor, so he – in hindsight – was the best publisher I’d ever worked for.

Jerry agreed.

Bob continued to laugh when Jerry asked: “Whatever happened to Chico?”

“He got eaten by dogs a couple of months after his escape,” I replied.

That threw Bob into writhing, almost-tear-laden laughter.

Jerry laughed, too.

Since I’d spent a couple hours with Jerry, and inadvertently driven his roommate into great curtains of laughter, I figured I’d better go home.

I pulled myself to my feet again, using the cane for support.

“Damn, I didn’t think we’d ever get old,” Jerry said, as I squeezed his shoulder and then made my way to the door to the hallway.

“Wagon Train” was on the TV as I left the room. I was tired and it was a long walk down the hallway, so I was leaning heavily on the walking stick.

An attendant, who reminded me of Nurse Ratched, came up to me and asked if she could help me.

“Are you looking for someone? Where’s your room?” she said, all-business.

“I don’t live here,” I told her. “My best friend, Mr. Manley, lives down at the end of the hall.”

I think she was pondering calling the big, black offensive tackle of an attendant when she saw my visitor badge. She reluctantly pressed the button that let me free of the very secure doors.

After I left the memory care ward, I wandered through the “normal” nursing home.  A guitar-strumming visitor was singing Ray Price and Sinatra songs, and some of the old people were clog dancing.

 One man was dancing as if he was holding tight to an invisible partner.       

'Simple Motion' should have been a classic Brace-Cooper-Jutz album, but death forced Peter's heartbroken amigos to push boundaries with masterful duet country-folk album

 My late editor-pal Tony Durr was editing one of my columns 40 years ago, when he looked up at me, caution in his voice and on his face: “You wear your feelings on your sleeve. It’s what makes you a great writer. It’s also what will kill you,” he said, then pretty much repeated himself: “But, it does give you your greatness.”   

“Greatness” is only a perception of the audience, of course.  And it’s why I can unabashedly boast that two of my friends, infused a dash with the spirit of a mutual friend whose illness took him too soon, have made a masterpiece. Greatness on display for all to hear.

Simple Motion, the new album by Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz, fit my generally melancholy spirit well the first time I decided to listen to the whole album, in sequence. And I played it again on my daily trek on my recumbent exercise bike.

I’ll first say that this is a masterful album, the best yet from the evolving outfit of musicians.

A decade or more ago, Brace teamed with Peter Cooper to make music and mix in highly tuned mirth.  Both had been music journalists. Both had been raised around the great D.C.-area folk/musical godfathers The Seldom Scene.  They both idolized the story songs of Tom T. Hall, as well as worshiped in person at the altar that was Fox Hollow, the Hall estate where I too was a regular visitor. (This isn’t about me, but I was a close friend of the late Tom T. and Dixie Hall, primarily because Dixie loved me and vice versa. I have a carved, Jamaican wood angel looking at me to prove it. Plus a heart that still feels that love.)

Anyway, both Cooper and Brace had other musical outlets and solo prospects in which they turned out what, to my biased mind, were Sunday-afternoon-mood classics.

But there was a certain chemistry between the two that made for great music. Cooper, the dearest of my friends in the music business and on a personal level, and Brace not only recorded duet albums, they began playing live, first at places like Nashville’s Station Inn, but on the road, from Kingsport, Tennessee, to pubs in England, Ireland and on the continent. Sleep in the bar’s backroom, wash out stage clothes in the bathroom sink.  Have a drink. Start over again.

Early on, they acquired a producer and guest guitarist in Thomm Jutz, one of Music City’s best guitarists and a German expat, lured from the Black Forest of Germany by Bobby Bare (long story, look it up in my book Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, which you should read, anyway) to U.S. citizen, dwelling and music-making in Southeast Davidson County. A scholar, kind soul and mammothly-talented picker, he set up a studio and honed his guitar-playing abilities to the point where he might be the best of the thirteen-hundred fifty-two guitar-pickers in Nashville.  (That number comes from one of my friends and heroes, John Sebastian, leader of Lovin’ Spoonful and singer of “Nashville Cats.” The song was written in the 1960s at the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, where the Spoonful stayed after a concert in Municipal Auditorium. I always make John tell me the story again when we talk.)

Anyway, it wasn’t long before Thomm not only played as a guest onstage and on-album (while still producing), he eventually became the third member of the band. Brace-Cooper recordings and performances were supplanted by Brace-Cooper-Jutz.

They are marvelous recordings and I am blessed that – thanks to my loyalty to Peter, who was among my life’s favorite people and one of my few confidantes – I went to performances consisting of all of those configurations, along with some of the best sidemen (steely Lloyd Green and Steve Fishell and Pete Finney, bassist Dave Roe, the miracle that is Rory Hoffman) and sidewomen (see Andrea Zonn, fiddle, and Sierra Hull, mandolin, who both own pieces of my heart. Andrea, in particular, makes me melt with her bow).   I even met and befriended wonderful and kind Jerry Lawson, the best and most soulful voice of the old Persuasions, thanks to these guys. Eric “rediscovered” his doo-wop hero and made a record filled with Nashville Cats.  The debut was at the Station, where, due to mobility issues, Jerry asked me to help him on and off the stage.

Those Station Inn shows, (one or two per year) were some of my happiest evenings.  Heck, I even took my son, Joe, along with me five or six times. The B-C-J song “Hartford’s Bend” is Joe’s favorite song. Mine is “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but that has nothing to do with this tale.  But, let me take you down, indeed:

Something happened just before the pandemic settled in on America.  Peter got sick. It was an illness that kept him from going on the road (though, everybody eventually stopped going on the road because of COVID.)

Eric and Thomm, though, tried hard to keep performing, while lamenting and saluting their friend, praying to the gut-string gods that they could be a trio again. His health deteriorated.  They missed him a lot as they tried to live up to his expectations while he stayed here in Nashville, writing songs and sometimes calling me at night to sing them. Eventually that illness caused Peter to fall, hit his head and die. He’d been reciting lyrics to me that very morning.

That last sentence was difficult for me to write, because normally, most days for the last 24 years, I’d be calling Peter, sick or not, and we’d laugh (he was funny, I profane) and sometimes even make up vulgar songs.

Those soul-lifting – for us both, I believe -- conversations ended when he died around the 2022 holiday weeks, and there remains a void and even a bit of bitterness and plenty of melancholy loneliness (self-pity at having someone else die seems selfish, but I yam what I yam, as Tom Petty used to sing with Howie.)  

The other day, a part of the void was filled when I listened to the first song to be released by the new duo configuration of that same group, Brace and Jutz.

It was a great song about “Nashville in the Morning,” a somehow optimistic portrayal of a city (my home for a half-century) that is choking in its own progress and gagging over its national identity crisis and stumbling over the promise of three pair of boots for the price of one. Their song’s focus is on the dewy beauty that remains here, just past dawn, before bachelorettes and California-bred carpetbaggers line the streets with drunken silliness and reckless driving and projectile vomiting.

I actually agree to that beauty, as the great John Partipilo shot the cover for my book at 5 a.m. on a brisk morning when the streets were empty even as the neon still danced on Lower Broadway.

Simple Motion is a giant musical and journalistic step forward, a vocal and guitar delight filled with imagery and life. Also, what’s missing in this album is the third voice, the higher-harmony of Peter Cooper, his contributions on rhythm guitar, his sarcastic worldview.  No “Grandma’s Batman Tattoo” --a crowd-pleasing romp written by Peter and my pal Tommy Womack -- reminiscent stuff in this set.

Peter’s missing, of course, because he’s dead. Damn it (not him).

But he’s on Simple Motion in spirit. In fact, he appears, or at least his spirit does, in a few of the songs. I’m not going to tell you which ones, but if you knew Peter, you’ll recognize the hat-tips, the bridges and flowing water, name-check and life boundaries offered by the still-living duo of musical partners in that fabulous trio.

I am not a music critic. I am, foremost, a music fan but mostly a lover of humanity, with thousands of pieces of recorded music. I generally draw from only a few artists for my daily listening. Seldom the day goes by when I haven’t listened to John, Paul, George and Ringo for at least an hour.

Petty, Mick and Keef, Kristofferson, Dylan and the Wilburys make up most of my daily soundtrack.

I do pull out one of my albums by Nashville’s best country singer, Jon Byrd (I only have two of his, as I am poor, but I do love his music.) Mac Wiseman gets his spins.

And always there’s the work of my favorite local musician and his amigos.

Peter gave me copies of all the albums he did as a solo artist, and I have wrangled up most of the B-C and B-C-J albums.  Being an almost-never-paid freelance writer and author (my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, continues to sell, but there’s not enough sexual fantasy, dysfunctional incestuous royalty nor exploding massive reptile penises in it to make it a top seller.) In truth, it’s a pure-as-country-water look into the lives of many of my best friends, most of them dead, in the music business. Speaking of my too-often dead corps of pals, Peter wrote the Foreword and also edited each chapter as I finished it. He was my biggest cheerleader. “Only you can write this book,” he’d say. “You have to finish it.” I did. Then he died.

Sure, I miss him a lot. And he should have been producing great music for years to come. He should be the third voice on Simple Motion.    

But, you know, as you listen to this absolutely fabulous album, likely the best put together during all phases of this group’s existence, he’s still there.  No, you can’t hear his voice in the magnificent harmonies, but you can feel his heart.

Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz have many different musical endeavors. Eric has the great band Last Train Home and Thomm is an award-winning, Grammy nominated bluegrass music writer and picker, almost to the point where they will put a “national treasure sign” on his battered Fedora.

Eric -- whose voice and songs, themselves, have matured -- startles and cajoles.  A comparison to Gordon Lightfoot is warranted, but I’m not sure it does Eric’s booming vocals justice.

Thomm’s matured. He’s not much like his hero, Bobby Bare, but his soft, pure vocals and sure guitar are reminiscent of “Fire and Rain”- era Sweet Baby James.  Like James Taylor, his pure tales have teardrops in them, even if the subject evokes smiles. Or perhaps a comparison to John Denver, a too-often-disregarded poet of fire and life and sweet home, is warranted.

They also are really nice guys who stood by their friend during his illness, decline and death and who kept him in mind as they carried the torch forward.

I still will listen to Peter’s Opening Day solo masterpiece, if I’m able.

 But Peter’s participation in “his” group’s musical progress will, by tragic necessity, lessen.  Brace-Cooper-Jutz will forever be just Brace and Jutz, B-J.

 Ghosts don’t make for good sidemen.

But there is hope, depending on your beliefs. For example, I speak with my old editor, Durr, regularly, even though he died alone and lonely long ago.

Spirits -- at least by my reckoning as I sit here with emotions dancing on my sleeves -- live forever, kept alive in the souls of those who loved the deceased: guys like Eric and Thomm, who are loyal to the trio in its latest two-voiced incarnation.   With Simple Motion.