Scotty Moore content to live quietly in a world that won't let his musical co-conspirator rest in peace

The deet-deet-de-deet of the guitar break from “That’s All Right” played in my head long after the speakers turned silent.
So I reached for the telephone. Actually I call it “The Flap Phone.”
It was time to call Scotty Moore, the underappreciated man who fashioned that sound -- the sonic mold of what rock ‘n’ roll guitar is supposed to sound like -- as well as the perfected head-bobbing, smiling role of the lead guitarist.
Recording in a cramped studio with a “very different” cat named Elvis, standup slap bass-master Bill Black and with fiery Sam Phillips in the control room, Winfield Scott Moore, now 78, combined the licks he perfected as the boss of a country swing outfit with the sounds of the Mississippi Delta, Beale Street and gospel tabernacles.
The recording session on July 5, 1954 is sometimes credited as the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.
While that may easily be disputed by other artists who had already recorded in a similar style, it can’t be overlooked that something different had been cooked up in the studio that night. As the late Bill Black said when the stew was ready to serve to wild man DJ and raconteur Dewey Phillips: “Damn. Get that on the radio and they'll run us out of town."
Of course, they weren’t run out of town. Soon that town belonged to them. Elvis and his Blue Moon Boys cut across racial boundaries entertained all who would listen, cruising the two-lane blacktops to world conquest. Well, eventually, anyway. At first the roads led to high school gyms in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, where the girls swooned and some surrendered.
And the beat went on … to the Louisiana Hayride, where some said the kid with the wild lick of hair and his colorful sidemen were, well too much. Others couldn’t get enough.
Then there came the Sullivan seat-wetting, and the singing to the dog with Sinatra (an embarrassment in hindsight, but given it was at the request of Ol’ Blue Eyes, it really may have been an offer even Elvis couldn’t refuse. No one would want to wake up to Bassett hound’s head in their bed.)
Scotty Moore was really the driving force, in so many ways, behind that threesome’s early success. Yeah, everyone still misses Elvis. But the early, pre-Colonel Tom records were credited to “Elvis, Scotty and Bill.”
Later on, D.J. Fontana was stolen away from the Hayride and joined up for the big ride, but at first it was that tight little threesome, having fun, stealing hearts, changing the world.
What influence did Scotty Moore have on the world, on rock ‘n’ roll music?
"When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ I knew what I wanted to do in life. It was as plain as day. All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis, I wanted to be Scotty,” said Keith Richards, a fairly well-known rock guitarist and rock innovator by most accounts.
He of course achieved his dream. And Richards and Ronnie Wood (Faces and then Stones guitarist after Brian died and Mick Taylor drug himself loose) not only learned from Scotty, they drank with him. Scotty’s lessons were so desired that when he was in England, the men – back when they were all heavy drinkers – would trade guitar licks and whiskey bottles.
Getting way ahead of myself here as I think about Scotty and that “deet-deet” plays in my head. Think I’ll put it back on the stereo as long as I don’t have to make a stop for “Love Me Tender.” Great song, sure. Not my style on a day when I want to rock and listen to Scotty Moore. A high-ticket collectors’ box is coming out soon with all of the Elvis stuff remastered. This will include the early Blue Moon Boys stuff. Too rich for my meager soul, but I’ve got the 45s and a turntable. So that’s all right.
Of course I’ve written about Scotty before, both on the internet for fun and before that for various publications.
Today, though, I’m just writing about a guy I’m privileged to call a friend. One of the joys of living in Nashville is that I can pick up the phone and call Scotty Moore, Tom T. Hall, Earl Scruggs, Mac Wiseman and Bill Anderson.
I’m writing about Scotty today because he’s one of the last true vestiges of the music that changed my life when I was an elementary school kid who dyed his hair black and Bryllcreemed it into a ducktail for Halloween when I was in third or fourth grade. A little dab’ll do ya, indeed.
By the way, if anyone out there is seeking a writer for a story about this great man, born in West Tennessee cotton country – which has produced musicians from Carl Perkins to Tina Turner to Isaac Hayes and beyond – I’d be glad to do it.
But that’s not why I picked up the telephone, just as I do every so often. I just wanted to say hello.
“I’ve just been hanging out here, trying to keep cool,” says Scotty, when asked how he’s been faring this summer.
He didn’t feel up to normal trips to Memphis or New Orleans. The air-conditioned confines of his home suit him just fine. He’s been waiting for this weather to finally break. Perhaps in a day or two, he’ll venture outside.
I’d been thinking a lot lately about the guy who lives on a hill in rugged Northern Davidson County.
First of all, he has had constant health scares. In fact, he can hardly play the guitar anymore.
“I got the arthritis so bad that when I do try to play, it hurts,” he says, his voice a touch sad, but resolved. He knows he can’t play guitar any more, just like he knows his old pal Elvis has been dead 33 years and knows that a lot of people these days don’t really care or know his history.
I try to call Scotty fairly regularly. Just like I used to call Vassar Clements, Bobby Thompson, Josh Graves, Eddy Arnold, Bobby Hebb, Captain Midnight and Chet Atkins. They were my friends. Sure I told their stories for the newspapers. But it became much more important to me to chat, at least on occasion, with these guys, after those stories had been published.
I miss them all.
I also regularly checked in on Johnny Cash. In fact, as I’ve said before, I was supposed to see him for an interview as soon as he got back from the West Coast. That trip was never taken. He went to the hospital and died instead.
So I covered his funeral, just as I did that of his wife and life partner, June Carter Cash.
Speaking of the Cash family, Rosanne’s new book ‘Composed’ is a definite “worth-reading” entry. I didn’t find it particularly focused, but it is random by design. And the ruminations on her dad, stepmom, mother and even her divorce from Rodney Crowell are worth reading. And there’s a funny section about John R. burning down the California desert.
But this isn’t a book review. It’s just a note about friends I keep track of not because I’m anything special, but because they are.
My regular phone calls to Scotty began long ago, when he was being inducted into the “sideman” category of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.
The local newspaper here in Nashville didn’t seem too excited to send a reporter… “Who is Scotty Moore?” asked a “hip” editor who knew all about Shaggy and Sneezy and Dopey and Grumpy and Bashful or whoever the current pop-rap-crapper was. FYI, the only Bashful I knew well at all was neither a dwarf nor a rapper. He was Bashful Brother Oswald. I’m not going to explain who he was. If you don’t know, I suppose you too think I may be old and in the way. I probably am.
So I was asked: ‘’Who is Scotty Moore?”
No there was no reporter dispatched to New York City (get a rope) to cover his induction. But I wasn’t about to let it go unnoted, so each morning, while he was up there, I’d call and get his insight into the big celebration. For the record, he didn’t really enjoy it. And he thought he and Bill and D.J. should have gone in with Elvis, just as he thinks Garry Tallent and Clarence Clemmons and Little Steven should have gone in with Bruce.
I inserted Scotty’s observations in the local celebrity gossip column – the one with the “zoinks” and “mazel tovs” and boob jokes as compiled by my friend, Brad Schmitt, with whom I often sang our famous newsroom rendition of “Your What Hurts?” Another story, but tell me, exactly what is it that hurts on you?
When the festivities ended in New York, I continued to call Scotty every month or two, just to see how he was doing.
A few years ago I wrote a long story about Scotty for the newspaper. Again, I was criticized because I was “wasting too much space” on an old man who isn’t part of the target demographic – the young, white women who apparently can’t get enough pictures of the Swan Ball and trendy shopping tips. Did anyone notice the other day that the lunch wagons, long a staple of Little Mexico and other ethnic areas of Nashville, finally became worthy of news hole when they were found to be a trend in East Nashville? Almost choked on my charred pollo
Back to Scotty Moore. I am thankful that my work at the newspaper allowed me to tell his story.
For this is a man who changed the world. He won’t admit it.
In fact, in this most recent conversation, I asked Scotty if it was time for us to get together again, maybe even write a long magazine story or a book even.
After all, what he knows and saw is unique.
“Nah, Tim,” he said, with a laugh. “C’mon up anytime you want. But I really don’t want to be interviewed any more. And I don’t want to tell the story in another book.
“What’s left for me to say after that last story you wrote? I guess I could begin making stuff up.”
We laughed and went on to talk about the weather, about the guitars he can’t play without pain, about the home studio where he used to gather with Billy Cox, Carl Perkins, Mitch Mitchell and others.
“No one wants that music anymore,” he says. So he’s stopped producing it.
Oh he’s not bitter. I guess maybe I am.
How could a world of quickly made, assembly line, electronically tuned and polished music be unaware of the importance of the gentle soul whose analog equipment and guitars sit unused, on top of a hill?
Of course, the answer is right in the question. There would be no room in the digital world for the imperfections and improvisations that made the music sprung from that cramped room in Memphis so special.
While Scotty is lazing away his retirement in relative contentment, his pelvic-thrusting friend simply isn’t allowed to die.
We have just passed the 33rd anniversary of Elvis’ death.
Scotty used to go to Memphis to participate in what has become known as “Death Week” activities. Back then, he’d play music in the Overton Park Bandshell, just like he did with Elvis. What has evolved into a necrophiliacs’ carnival began as a tribute to a great artist and a great friend of Scotty’s.
When it changed, well, Scotty decided not to head west on I-40.
“Nah, I don’t go any more,’ he says. “It’s like a circus. Everyone just wants to make money off him.”
“Him” is his old friend, the "Momma-loving" truck driver who liked to dress funny, curl his lip and drive pink Cadillacs.
“Yeah I miss him and Bill,” says Scotty. “I mean I don’t sit around and think about it all the time. I like to watch TV. But when you spend so much time together, there’s a lot of stuff you know that no one else does.
“We had some good times.”

Recalling the gift of having been allowed to spend 'Sunny' hours and days with my friend Bobby Hebb

"We're in the university of life and last time I checked, no one is in a hurry to graduate."
Perhaps the gentlest soul I’ve ever met in the years I’ve been privileged to interview musicians, Bobby Hebb looked up at me and smiled when he said that.
I quickly scribbled that down in my now unreadable reporter’s notebook, took a long deep sip of the Scandinavian roast coffee that he’d prepared.
“I think you’ll like this,” he had said, urging me to go ahead and try his formula for boosting the coffee’s spirit-lifting taste, attitude even.
Hebb spooned some brown sugar into my cup and poured in some real cream, not of the low fat variety – for he was only 5-foot-6 and 130 pounds – and we looked out the back door of his tidy home in Bordeaux.
“It’s nice to be back home,” he said, before leading the way back to the living room/dining room/family room combination that was filled with the tools with which he served humanity.
There was a baby grand, some guitars, a keyboard.
“Listen to this,” he said, walking over to the stereo near the front window. He put a CD in the changer, let it load up and then pushed play.
The song that was Hebb’s greatest gift to the world – one composed of his own despair, alone in a New York apartment – softly escalates in volume, gradually filling the room. Bobby’s eyes glisten with soft tears of joy.
“This is my favorite version,” he says as a very different – though still oh-so-familiar – version of Bobby’s classic, “Sunny,” escapes from the speakers.
“This is Eugen Cicero,” he says, softly, so as not to interrupt this music. For the next seven minutes or so, the living room in Bordeaux is filled with the European pianist’s version of “Sunny.”
It’s all instrumental – although in this listener’s mind, the lyrics are ever-present – and is deceptively simple: piano with upright bass backing. While exploring ”Sunny” in a way that would have made Bobby’s old friend Thelonious Monk proud, Cicero offers up doses of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and Chopin's Polonaise in A-Flat Major.
We sip our brown-sugar-hinted, almost espresso, and listen. Neither of us wants to speak, as Bobby’s eyes dance, his denim-clad leg bounces oh-so-slightly to the beat.
But even when music isn’t playing or being performed by this gentle and disarmingly humble pop star, this friend of Beatles and jazz greats, who left Nashville to conquer the world only to return when there was nothing left to prove and perhaps he needed refuge from the storms of life, there is a rhythm to this day.
Bobby hadn’t been interviewed for a long time, other than by my friend Michael Gray, who was curating the Night Train to Nashville exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Michael’s exhibit – born of his own enthusiasm and embraced by his bosses at the Hall – was groundbreaking, in that it recognized the R&B side of Nashville, Frank Howard and the Commanders, Eddie Frierson, Earl Gaines, Roscoe Shelton, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Cox, Ted Jarrett, Marion James.
It was mostly an observance of what had happened on Jefferson Street – before the historically black nightclub district and thriving surrounding neighborhood was cut in two, basically murdered when Interstate 40 brought “progress” to Music City.
The interstate, when constructed, surgically separated that district right at its heart, a concrete and steel amputation that killed a district and clubs that had not only nurtured local musicians but brought in the best of the touring R&B acts. Word pictures offered up by those who still survive – and so many of them have died even in the years since the exhibit – paint a picture of a lively strip that would compete with Harlem and its Apollo and other clubs as musical venues.
But Bobby Hebb was one who was not really an R&B star. Though he was a black artist nurtured in Nashville and though he played and sang R&B, he also played and sang jazz and pop. His truest early musical friends included Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Bashful Brother Oswald – among the best purveyors of the White Man’s Blues – from his days with Acuff on the Opry.
Later he came to know and be known in the New York jazz circles, where Monk was a pal and his dark influences became a part of Bobby’s musical palette.
And later still, he, like so many black artists, found greater acceptance in Amsterdam and Tokyo than in the U.S.
But during decades in which he had been all but forgotten here in his hometown, Bobby’s most famous tune had become a part of America’s musical vocabulary.
“Sunny,” at its heart, is a breezy song. But it was born of sorrow, both personal and national. Bobby was in his New York apartment when he learned his brother Harold, among his musical heroes, had been stabbed to death.
Harold was a member of the Marigolds, a group that was an offshoot of Johnny Bragg’s The Prisonaires, an all-convict band that spent its time away from the penitentiary playing for the governor and other members of Tennessee’s ruling class.
In fact it was Bragg, whom I knew slightly, who had provided the perfect entrée to my desire to speak with Bobby in the first place. When Johnny died back in 2004, I wrote the obituary and pushed for my employer at the time, The Tennessean newspaper here in Nashville, to give it decent play. Johnny may have been a convict, but he also was a musical wizard and he too had created at least one classic in the song, “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.”
When I called Bobby to say I’d like to interview him – after I was told that he was relatively reclusive – his first response was: “I know who you are. You did a really nice job on Johnny’s obituary.”
Then he told me to come out the next day to his home to do an interview for the newspaper and, in the process, gain a friend
Anyway, I got a bit sidetracked here, Harold had been stabbed to death outside the old Club Baron – now the home of the Jefferson Street Elks Lodge.
The day before Harold died, the whole country had been thrown into a down spiral of mourning when JFK’s brains were blasted away by a weasel-faced coward who hid in the Texas Book Repository in Dallas.
Both these events were a part of the inspiration for “Sunny.” It wasn’t that Bobby was using those events as his lyrical and musical driving force. He actually was pushing away from those melancholy events and the black dogs of depression when he wrote what may be the perfect pop song.
He simply wanted to lift both his own mood and those of anyone who would listen.
On that first day we spent together -- and it truly was a day, and there were more – Bobby told stories of his life, of Nashville’s black music, of Mr. Acuff and of Luke the Drifter.
We drank cups of brown-sugar-flavored coffee and we laughed at old pictures and listened to music.
And Bobby’s lilting voice and laughter as well as his Zen-meets-Instant Karma rap – for he would take off on long and philosophic tangents that mixed hippie ideals with Christ’s teachings and Eastern mysticism – are in my head and heart even today.
The most powerful images though are of the slight man, who at his piano, at his keyboard and with a guitar, performed not only “Sunny,” but other songs of his life and of my own.
The day was flavored with music and tales of Dylan, Seeger, Monk, Lennon/McCartney and the slight giant who had all but been forgotten named Bobby Hebb.
To sit in the living room and listen to the composer and the first voice to record the classic “Sunny” sing that tune and then playfully move away from it in lyrics and texture, sampling other sounds and other times, was one of the gifts life has given me.
In the years since that long and happy day in October 2004, I’ve called him a few times. We’ve joked on the phone. And he always thanked me for telling his story, finally, in his hometown.
In recent years, he was very ill, although the last time I spoke with him he wasn’t letting that stop him from dreaming.
I had tried to get publications, both local and national, to let me tell his story one more time. But no one was interested. That didn’t bother Bobby, though.
He had made his mark. His story finally had been told here. A local museum had helped him celebrate the music of himself as well as that of his family and friends.
I have been privileged to share time with so many great people, from famous artists and athletes to regular people who have thrived and made their own marks on the world.
When one of them is gone, so is part of me.
And I felt that loss, that amputation of a piece of my heart when Bobby died Aug. 3. I was out of town, on vacation at the beach, when I was told Bobby’s long battle with lung cancer had ended. My friend, Peter Cooper, the Tennessean music writer, had been tasked with writing the obituary, from which I am proud he was able to find some useful information in the story I wrote after my first “Sunny” day with Bobby. He knew I’d want to know Bobby was gone.
I went for a walk on the beach and “Sunny” played in my head.
And it did as Bobby always intended: it lifted my spirits.
Thank you, old friend.

------------------------
For the Tennessean obituary written by my friend Peter Cooper as well as photos of Bobby Hebb, visit http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2010/08/03/bobby-hebb-sunny-songwriter-and-revered-singer-dies-at-72/
------------------------

What follows is the Oct. 17, 2004, story I wrote for The Tennessean newspaper in which Bobby Hebb allowed me to share his story with his hometown. There are a few “sidebar” stories at the end.

HEADLINE:One so true to the music

From gospel singer on the streets of Nashville to member of the Smoky Mountain Boys and opener for The Beatles, Bobby Hebb has always felt the music. Now, the artist whose signature is 'Sunny' returns to Music City and his family's roots.


By TIM GHIANNI | Senior Writer
Bobby Hebb's legacy is Sunny. So is his disposition. The former has a lot to do with the latter. His song about the girl whose smile eased pain and erased rain is a pop/rock classic, ensuring this animated 66-year-old Nashville native will never vanish nor starve.
Perhaps the seed to that song was planted by Luke the Drifter, Hank Williams' gospel-wailing alter-ego, who gave the kid a few kind words about writing songs. Or maybe it started with Bashful Brother Oswald, the Opry legend who told Little Bobby to "feel what you sing."
We know for sure The Beatles liked the song. They told Bobby as much when he opened for them during their last tour. Heck, he says his piano playing almost got him a job as the fifth Beatle. "Ringo wanted me to come back to England to work in the studio." Hebb recommended Billy Preston for the job.
Despite all his stellar connections, Bobby's song and the attitude can be most attributed to the careful nurturing of his mother and father, blind musicians, who set all of their children on the path of musical and spiritual greatness.
"They were always my inspirations," he says now, thinking back to his youth spent singing, spooning and dancing for tips on the streets of Nashville with the rest of the Hebb family.
The Hebbs may not have been the von Trapps, but they surely were the inner-city equivalent. Instead of the Austrian Alps, the Hebbs' sound of music was birthed in south Nashville's Edgehill neighborhood.
There were two Hebb outfits. The four girls sang with their mother, focusing primarily on gospel music and churches.
"Daddy had a washboard band," he recalls. "Hebb's Kitchen Cabinet Orchestra."
Bobby and his two brothers joined their pop. "Daddy played the guitar. Harold played the washboard. Melvoid played the lard-can bass. I did the tap dancing and played the spoons."
The sound still can be heard in gospel gatherings around town and in Bobby's performances as an easy-listening, guitar-strumming pop star in Europe and Asia.
And it is being heard more here in his hometown now. After decades in New York and in Rockport, Mass. (a seaside village on Cape Ann near Boston), he's returned to his roots. Yes, he'll still travel the world to please his fans. But planes fly out of Nashville, too.
Oh, some of the boxes are still unopened. Other stuff remains up north for now. But the guitar and baby grand in the living room are proof he's home in Bordeaux.
"Listen to this," he says, his piano noodling leading up to some of the chords of his most famous song.
He pushes himself up from the piano bench and takes a step, then pauses to look toward the ceiling, right hand counting the beat into the fan-stirred air. And then it erupts, that voice, softly at first, then building.
"Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.
"Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain."
The song that became his signature and his livelihood was born in his apartment at 2186 Fifth Ave. in Harlem.
He'd gone to New York to seek his fortune in the music business after years spent as a member of Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys.
Some stories have him writing Sunny in response to the slaying of his brother, Harold, outside the Club Baron. Others say it stemmed from the death of JFK in Dallas the day before.
Sunny has more to do with mood than history.
On the day he died, Harold Hebb was a member of the Marigolds, a group sprung from Johnny Bragg's all-con band The Prisonaires.
An armed robbery conviction sent Harold to prison. His singing abilities caught the ear of the band leader.
Outside jail walls, the group flourished, although Harold's career and life ended as he bled to death outside the club that now houses the Jefferson Street Elks Lodge.
"It was so sad," says Bobby Hebb. "Such loss."
While the Hebbs felt personal pain, they were hardly immune to the pain that had a nation weeping.
Bobby wasn't helped much by the fact that musical cohorts, such as Gerald Wilson and Thelonious Monk, produced dark sounds.
"I needed to pick myself up. I needed an upper. It all goes back to playing with Roy Acuff and feeling the music."
Writing Sunny "was therapy."
He stands and walks across the room, dropping into an easy chair. He reaches to the coffee table to rescue a ceramic cup half-filled with Scandinavian roast coffee.
"I usually drink tea," he says, sipping robustly on the coffee that's well flavored with brown sugar and cream.
He surveys his surroundings. "What I like about this house is that it's not too big. Everything I need is here. That's not to say it's got everything I want, just everything I need.
"I didn't need much yard. I have someone cut it for me, anyway. But I also didn't need to have a really big house. I needed to have room for my things, but not so much room that I needed to spend a lot of time cleaning it. I needed to spend my time on the music."
There are three bathrooms, including one upstairs. "I don't go up there much, because there's no furniture," he says. There's also a black 1991 Mercedes in the driveway. "I bought that on Clarksville Highway."
The 5-foot-6, 130-pound fellow in denim is pretty much like anyone else in this upper-middle-class development. But when he opens his mouth, in speech or in song, it becomes apparent he's someone special.
And it's not just Sunny. His satchel is filled with songs he's written. And he's certainly not averse to singing the works of others, guys such as Dylan and Hank Williams.
"I recorded Cold Cold Heart for the new record," he says, pointing out his admiration for Hank's work.
"I don't know Bob Dylan personally. I do know Pete Seeger. And Leadbelly (Woody Guthrie's folk-singing black associate of Goodnight Irene fame) was a cousin of mine. Used to be at all the Hebb family reunions."
Without warning, he leans back in his chair and mixes his own soft, sweet voice with Dylanesque rhythm and attitude.
"It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, Babe/It don't matter anyhow
"And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, Babe/If you don't know by now.
"When your rooster crows at the break of dawn/Look out your window and I'll be gone
"You're the reason I'm traveling on/Don't think twice, it's all right."
He laughs at himself. "That's my favorite Bob Dylan song."
Perhaps Dylan's tale of rambling and lost love strikes a chord with him because it describes parts of his own past, which includes two divorces and a definite rootlessness.
But that clearly is not the direction of his future.
First of all, he remains in close contact with his daughter, Kitoto, 27, an aspiring actress and bus driver who lives in Massachusetts. "I love you, too," he says at the end of a phone conversation during which she's calling to check on her pop's health now that he's moved home, embracing his roots.
"My main thing now is to work with my family, get the Hebb family singing gospel together," he says.
"I want to teach it to all my nieces and nephews. I want them to carry on the family tradition."
He looks over to the piano, where the sheet music for Will the Circle Be Unbroken shares space with a couple of other gospel songs the family is working on.
"I loved my childhood. It was rough, but what's not rough? Life's not a piece of cake." Then he cues up a familiar song on the CD player.
"Oh, the dark days are done and the bright days are here,
"My Sunny one shines so sincere.
"Oh, Sunny one so true, I love you."

---
WHO IS BOBBY HEBB?
o Bobby is the last male member of the original Hebb family singers, who trace their origins to 1708 12th Ave. S. Harold, Melvoid and Jerome are deceased. There are four sisters living: Helen Hebb, Ednaearle Burney, Shirley Trotter and Cleavette Davison. Among Hebb's many cousins: state Sen. Thelma Harper.
o Hebb remains popular in Europe and in Asia. "I love Germany and Japan," he says. He also loves England, noting that one of his songs Love Love Love remains a hit "after all these years."
o Sunny, of course, is Hebb's biggest claim to fame. His favorite version of the much-covered song is performed by European pianist Eugen Cicero, with upright bass backing, in an all-instrumental version. Over almost seven minutes, Cicero blends in doses of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and Chopin's Polonaise in A-Flat Major. It is available as an import on an album called Swinging Piano Classics.
o A devout "old school" Christian, Hebb also observes Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, during which he fasts from sunset to sunset. "Christ did this for the Christians, he atoned for our sins. But there was something I felt in my heart that I should do that."
o Schooling? "We're in the university of life and last time I checked, no one is in a hurry to graduate."
- TIM GHIANNI, SENIOR WRITER

---
'SUNNY' FOR 34 YEARS
Sunny is a 6 Million-Air, which means it's been broadcast 6 million times, according to information provided by BMI.
Based on an average length of three minutes, one million broadcast performances are the equivalent of 50,000 hours or 5.7 years of continuous airplay. In other words, if you linked all of Sunny's plays consecutively, it would last more than 34 years.
- TIM GHIANNI, SENIOR WRITER.
---
ADVICE AND INSPIRATION
o Roy Acuff became a hero to Bobby Hebb not just because Acuff hired him, but also because he would refuse to stay in a hotel if the black youngster was not allowed to stay, too. In that regard, the singer and fiddler became something of a pioneer in the world of civil rights.
o Acuff's Dobro player, Bashful Brother Oswald, gave the kid some advice heeded by the Smoky Mountain Boys. "The fellas could not read music, but they could learn to play it how it should feel," Hebb remembers. Oswald took the youngster aside: "He told me, 'Feel the music while you're performing it.' "
o Learning to write songs with emotion was the goal when Hebb approached Hank Williams backstage at the Opry. "Hank was very friendly. ... He says, 'You just sit down as if you were writing a letter.' My mother corrected me on that count. She said you must have a story to tell when you write. She ... showed me the correct way to do it."
o After working on sessions for John Lee Hooker in Chicago, Hebb ended up in New York, where he encountered Thelonious Monk. "Monk was playing this." He stretches out a few measures of classic Monk piano styling. "It was that chord I wanted to learn about."
o "Whoo. I was very excited and very thrilled to get that job," he says, of his spot on the bill during what turned out to be The Beatles' last tour. He played for the biggest crowds of his career, "and the audience listened to me. Some of them sang along with me on Sunny ...."
The performers flew together on the charter and stayed in the same hotels. "All of them were nice. Of course, when they sang on stage, there was so much screaming, they couldn't hear themselves. John and George, well, they were very quiet. But Ringo and Paul were more active and easier to get to know. It was just something to be with those cats."
o One night, at a party in New York, he found himself singing with other guests, including Tony Bennett and Judy Garland. "I was writing songs for (Judy) when she died." Judy wanted me to write a song for her. But her daughter did it. It was called A Natural Man. Liza recorded it. And, of course, Lou Rawls did too." Rawls won a Grammy for his version.
- TIM GHIANNI, SENIOR WRITER

Steamy night en route to Junior's Farm with a 68-year-old genius singing along with Dylan

Paul and I rolled hard and fast into the steamy night. It had been a great concert and he had some time to kill before he went to Charlotte to do it again.
“I don’t want to think about the next show just yet,” he said, looking into the glove box of my old Saab and fishing out a cassette tape of volume one of The Beatles Anthology.
“Don’t you have anything else in here other than this old batch of odds that me, George, Ringo and Yoko fobbed off on Americans,” he said, with a laugh, slapping the old cassette into the slot and waiting for it to rewind. “John would have loved how everyone in the States bought all of our outtakes and junk.”
I shrugged. Heck, I’d bought it all, a couple of times. Cassettes for the car, CDs for home. Even have the old TV promo kit with the series on VHS tape.
Sure, I bought the junk, as I am a Beatles completist. But on this night, as we cut through the steam of downtown Nashville, I knew I was going to get the last laugh on the 68-year-old knight.
“Lay lady Lay, lay across my big brass bed,” Dylan, doing his sort of Nashville/Perry Como thing, escaped from the 26 year old speakers.
“That’s Bob, don’t you know,” said Paul. “Not us.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, smiling as I took a left, jamming the car the wrong way up a one-way street through the dying industrial district near the condos where Steve McNair died last year.
I pointed that fact out to Paul and he shook his head. “I really like American football, you know. British football, what you call ‘soccer’ is pure crap. Don’t you hope Favre comes back one more year?”
Ever since I’d known him, I knew he was more than the so-called “cute Beatle,” because he likes the real game of football. And, since he is 68 and had just put on the show of his life, or at least one of the shows of my life, at the Bridgestone Arena, I could understand his affinity for Favre.
I have the same feeling. Heck, I’m going on 59. Paul’s not even a decade older than I am. And, as most of us know, Favre is now 83 and yet he still can throw a clutch pass or an interception just like he did when he helped Vince Lombardi establish the Green Bay Packers Football Club and Bocce Society.
I smiled, because Paul was singing along with Dylan’s voice. He hadn’t even mentioned that a copy of Nashville Skyline had found its way into the plastic container for Anthology. He didn’t change it either.
“I like this album. Kinda reminds me of why I came here to record all those years ago,” he said, patting his sweat-stained black Beatles jacket and coming up with a peppermint stick. He broke off a piece and handed it to me. “Breath, Flap,” he said. “What’d you have for dinner, bloody fish and chips?”
I jammed the stick into my mouth, remembering the days before we became peppermint-stick guys and we would cruise into the Nashville nights, giggling, searching for watermelon stands and Thai food.
We’d avoided the arena traffic after the concert. I’d rolled down in the tunnel that sinks into the guts of the arena and picked him up.
Speaking of arena traffic. Has anyone ever seen the kind of pre-concert human congestion in the plaza outside the Bridgestone/Sommet/Jagger Center before? It was dangerous, sweaty people pushing against each other for two or more hours in 100-degree heat, the ones at the very front knocking on the door, telling the guards to do them a favor and let ‘em in.
Course no one did. The crowd suffered. Tornado swirls were in the clouds above. If that rain broke loose while we were jammed out there, there would be a stampede. Blood on the streets in the town of Nashville.
A guy with a Predators jersey and a Beatles ballcap said to me: ‘’leave it to Nashville to make things dangerous. I wonder why they don’t let people in to buy merchandise, beers and get in their seats.”
Sounded reasonable, but I had no answer. And besides that, I already had the aftertaste of my fish and chips dinner, washed down by three liters of jelly-bean-flavored cold water. All I wanted was to get in the arena, find my seat and find out if Paul had gotten my message that I’d pick him up when the show was over.
I didn’t know for sure until a few minutes after the red and pink confetti filled the arena and he disappeared in a sort of “Elvis has left the building” fashion. I sprinted to my old car and cranked it up, rolling it from my secret car-stash spot and right into the tunnel to the guts of the arena, the place where the Zamboni is king. Paul signaled to the security that I was OK. So they holstered their weaponry, allowing Paul to climb down from the big ice-making tractor – “I’ve gotta fit Zamboni into a song soon,” he said.
“I got a girl named Bony Maronie, she’s got a butt like a big Zamboni,” I offered.
He laughed and said: “Flap, hit it!”
Before we knew it we were on Lebanon Road, on the way to Gladeville. Paul, pumped up by the evening’s performance ,was looking forward to waking up Curly Putman Jr. and serenading him with the song named for the spread where the McCartney family and the band Wings stayed back in the summer of 1974.
“I want to sing him Junior’s Farm,” he said. “I need you to play guitar and sing harmony.”
Well, I have to tell you at that point I thought I probably was dreaming. Very seldom in my life has anyone, not even a Beatle, asked me to play guitar and sing along.
The main thing, I’ve been told by my friends in show biz, such as The Musician Peter Cooper and Brad “I love to sing show tunes” Schmitt is that I can’t play guitar, otherwise I’d be very good at it. That’s true enough. If I do something, I do it as well as I can, work hard to make sure it’s the best I can offer. But, as Duane Allman once told me before I turned down that spin on his motorcycle: “Flap: You suck as a guitarist.”
And then there’s the fact that it sounds like I got my vocal training from Kris Kristofferson, who is a friend and can write like the devil, although the devil carries a tune better. And you remember how bad the devil sounded when he played fiddle with Charlie Daniels. Kris: you’d better rosin up your throat, man.
Of course, “I’ve always been a word man, it’s better than a bird man,” as Jim Morrison used to tell me when we looked at the moon from the rooftop in Venice Beach and he told me how he thought he’d probably grow up to be the President of the United States of America. Instead, he’s sort of a bearded, fat puppet dictator over a colony of Lizard worshipers at the edge of Uganda.
Speaking of the Presidents of the United States of America, where were any of them when I needed help this summer?
Oh, I know, my pal the Big O plays a mean game of “H-E-Y-J-U-D-E” on the basketball court here behind the house.
But he also promised me he’d get me help to escape from what has been the most horrible summer of my life.
The flood devastated my home and tore away what little income I have. The Big O told me FEMA would help me.
I’ve been neglected, inspected, rejected and suspected by every sort of evil and ornery G-Man since the days after the flood.
FEMA has been here four times. The first three visits led to them declining my pleas for aid. But then I decided to take one more crack at it, compiling a very professional looking portfolio that included the square feet damaged, the materials hauled away, the materials and cost it took to replace. I got the whole 29-page package of documentation – including a letter from the Big O and another from Muhammad Ali asking them to cooperate with me – notarized, certified and sanctified and mailed it off about five weeks ago.
I have a collection of FEMA rejection letters that almost equals the collection of rejection letters I got from publishers, girlfriends, the NFL and the Greater Wichita Falls Association of Acupuncturists and Toe Suckers.
Those of you from outside of Nashville may not know about it much, but we had one of those “Who Built the Arc” kind of events in early May and a lot of my friends and myself are still bailing out. Well, not literally any more, but scrambling for another day and another dollar.
My own losses were, as you probably know, in the millions of dollars. Well, maybe a lot lower than that, as the only thing worth in the millions of dollars in my house was my best friend, my cat, Pal, and he died of cancer as we still were rebuilding. I’d rather be homeless and still have my cat.
And just as the rebuilding reached an end, there was that big old BAM, when the woman ran the red light at what appears to be a high rate of speed and hit my family’s minivan squarely in the driver’s side door. It was such a fierce impact that the frame was bent, the car deemed irreparable and insurance settling for what it is worth to them rather than what it is worth to a real family that needs a vehicle to carry them around town and who has taken care of the vehicle from day one.
Oil changes at 2,500 miles, new tires whenever needed, belts, hoses, brakes … Keep it running at most costs because we can’t afford a car payment.
After all, thanks to Sarah Palin, all efforts to help the little guy in this country have been put on hold until she decides when she wants her little girl and that young punk to make their man and wife public appearance. Of course, it depends on how much money she can get from the hate-mongers at Fox.
Hate-monger a little strong? OK, ask Shirley Sherrod about the edited tape provided by one of Washington’s many wacko right-wing opportunist bloggers – some of them are Vandy grads, by the way -- and then thrown on the air by Fox.
Saw today that one of those outfits was ranting and railing about Paul McCartney’s dig at Little W’s lack of intellect, charm and integrity during a White House bash for the Big O.
These self-important fascists said they thought it would hurt McCartney’s concert tour, as if anyone cares what kind of verbal shot you take at Mr. “Mission Accomplished, so now let’s just let the soldiers die and rot in the desert for another decade or two and we’ll pretend war is over.” Yeah, if you want it.
Big O, you could fix that, by the way. As Paul said the other night, “All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance.”
I used to sing that at anti-war rallies back in the Vietnam days, when music and politics and social upheaval had a perfect union, when the world changed, briefly, for the better.
Of course that has changed now, and students primarily get up in arms about tuition increases and other criminal acts. The whole world’s watching and ashamed.
Hey kids: See the boxes they’ve been flying home to Dover? There are former people in there. War heroes to be saluted and buried. Not for their war, but for their sacrifice.
Oh yeah, back to the car. We haven’t gotten the check yet, but you all know what happens. A car is worth thousands to you, because you have paid it off, kept it up and don’t plan on getting a new one any time soon.
Then someone runs a light and that car is now worth pennies on the dollar. Bad damn summer, at least until Monday’s concert.
“Paul you know it ain’t easy,” I said, fudging a line from the last real session Paul produced for The Beatles, The Ballad of John and Yoko.
“Yes, Flap, I know how hard it can be,” he said, reminding me that I was with John when we made that song up after a night of bowling near Gilley’s in Pasadena, Texas.
It was about then that my good pal Rob “Death” Dollar, who took me to the concert, tapped me on the shoulder and I returned to the weird reality of the crowded confines inside Bridgestone. I stood up and sang along. My voice still sounded bad. There were fireworks and explosions. Peace signs and a cheerful dancing drummer. Big smiles and great entertainment from a genius, who even offered up tributes to his fallen pals, Georgie and John.
I watched for awhile. Then I shook off the reality and returned to the Saab, where I looked over to Paul and goosed the car.
We sped toward Gladeville, the moon roof open in the old Saab, the passenger standing up, fiddling with the strings of his Hofner, and yelling Moroccan curses into the night.

Old notebook brings back trauma of reporting No. 9's bloody death and visions of a happier ending

“Red roses ….Biohazard”
Three words in bleeding ink scrawled in a reporter’s notebook sent me retreating in horror to the day, almost a year ago, when I roamed from Nashville’s bars to apartments and even a grisly murder scene, alternately asking “Why, Steve?, Why?,” my heart aching while racing on newsman’s adrenaline fix.
Those three words hollered at me after I reached into the back seat of my old Saab the other day. I needed a reporter’s notebook for an interview. Underemployed, I reuse notebooks front to back and back to front. Many date back years. In fact, in the trunk, there’s a “King of the Hill” six-pack holder stuffed with half-used notebooks and some Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters advance CDs to keep me properly despondent if ever waiting for a tow.
Occasionally when I reach for one of the notebooks and look at the contents, they make me smile. I mean, here’s some almost incomprehensible stuff from Brian Wilson in one. Anyone who has ever seen my reporter’s scribble knows it’s almost incomprehensible enough, even if not quoting someone who prefers a sand box to real life.
Of course, I wasn’t made for these times, either. Just ask the corporate journalism types. Hold it … that’s not what they said. It wasn’t that I wasn’t made for these times, it was that I was too old to understand what they knew to be true, that Shaggy was more important than Eddy Arnold to Nashville newspaper readers. Of course, I like Scooby-Doo as much as anyone else. Oh yeah, different Shaggy. At least Afro-Man had an excuse.
Let’s get right to the point in a roundabout way. The other day I was going to meet a studio hand who, among other things, helped coax the last songs out of Marty Robbins, a nice man who could sing like the devil and drive like Richard Petty. Speaking of Petty, many mornings I’ll sing Tom’s songs. I guess they’re not related and Marty sang El Paso.
“Down in the West Texas Town of El Paso, I always got searched by the border police,” I sing. That was when I went with Mule, Denny and I think Capt. Kirk or Wizard or Carpy or all of the above to watch a friend play in the Sun Bowl. We made it to the game, too, no thanks to the frisking of the border guards. I mean, so what if my hair had grown so long it stopped by itself? I neither stunk nor smuggled. My intentions were always honorable, but I always was frisked before finishing my promenade over the muddy ditch filled with naked kids begging for money.
“Mister, Mister, throw it to me,” yelped the youngsters as they jumped into the snake- and body-filled Rio Grande to rescue quarters. Some threw dimes and pennies. Didn’t matter. Heck it only cost a penny to get into Mexico back then. I think it cost a buck and an intimate pat-down to leave.
Well, again that’s a different story. I liked Ciudad Juarez, even if nowadays the drug gangs are gunning down innocent people on the same peaceful streets where I bought my black-velvet painting of Jimi Hendrix for $2. Of course that was 1971, I think. It’s probably worth $4 now and is stored securely with my poster of Dennis Hopper’s fatal “hello” to the rednecks in “Easy Rider.” Perhaps I’ll use them by my coffin instead of graduation pictures, especially if they throw in my black-light Sergeant Pepper poster.
But it was when I reached in my back seat for a notebook, flipping to see if there were any blank pages that I saw “red roses” and “Biohazard,” and was sent, at least for a time, to one of the saddest days of my journalism career.
Those notes were my basic description of what could be seen from the stoop of the apartment where the bodies of Steve McNair, the beloved quarterback, and his girlfriend had been found. The storm door was smudged from the CSI fingerprint guys. It seemed a humble place for an NFL great, a good fellow with a fatal flaw, to have his brains blown out.
I stood there last July 5, less than 24 hours after the bodies had been found. The New York Daily News hired me to be their “man on the ground” while they dispatched their own reporter. A football star murdered by a suicidal lover is good fodder for Big Apple sensationalism.
Some friends of mine from my career in journalism – and I do have friends, despite the rumors – had recommended me to The Daily News.
Now it never had been my dream to be a tabloid, sensational journalist. Course, I had nothing against it, either. Even my old comrade Brad Schmitt, who should have known better, enjoyed a good celebrity sex tale. And while the newspaper honchos looked down their bulbous, busted-vein-punctuated noses at Brad’s stories, they would often promo them on the front page: So and so celebrity found to have bi-sexual, kleptomaniac lover who likes to watch porno while listening to old Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “Sylvia’s Mother” backwards.
Now it was my job to edit Brad. And in the scenario above, which isn’t true but ought to be, my main role was to tell the bosses what we had and they’d jump up and down and disappear into the bathroom for a bit while Brad wrote. (I also edited out his more blatant burp and fart jokes, but that’s only because I had to sit next to him and it was redundant.)
Anyway, I was actually on special assignment for a newspaper in New York, New York. By the way, as much as I love Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” it’s a shame it has displaced “New York, New York” as the semi-official song of the Big Apple. Did you notice the horses yawning during the Belmont post parade?
Now, though, back to the story that still, when I think of it, makes my body hurt.
It actually began July 4, 2009, when my friend, Peter Cooper -- a good guy, loyal pal, skilled harmonicat, violinist, trapeze artist and confidante to Jay-Z and Tom T. -- called to tell me McNair had been murdered.
Peter was working the July 4 shift at the paper and his job was to focus on the huge amounts of money wasted by Metro that should be going to the homeless and disadvantaged but instead pays for a fireworks show. Only he was to put a more positive spin on it.
Peter though heard about Steve, and knows I have a passion for the Tennessee Titans that has rubbed off on my kids, Emily and Joe, who loved to watch No. 9 on the field. No. 9. No. 9… Turn me on dead man…. Oops, Beatles in my mental soup again.
Peter, who now is a dad and soon will know how kind his gesture truly was, wanted me to know before my kids found out on TV. He figured I could tell them and save some of the trauma.
Which worked. But my own trauma was just beginning when the next morning The Daily News editor called me to say he’d like to employ me to roam around the city, to the place where the young woman had lived, to the murder scene, to the bars Steve had frequented in his final hours and to call in details as I went along, which would be woven into a story being constructed in New York City (get a rope!).
I was escorted off the premises of the young woman’s apartment complex, but at least they were gentle with me. I once was physically shoved aside by a Klansman and another time by a drunken photographer. Part of the job.
And out at Dave and Buster’s, where she worked, the pretty young women all in a row greeted me with big smiles and “we were told to keep our mouths shut.”
Which took me to the DEATH CONDO, within eyeshot of the stadium where McNair carved his legend with toughness and heart. I climbed the steps to see the “with love” or whatever maudlin message had been attached to the roses. I looked at the Biohazard sign, always left when blood is shed at a crime scene.
I went over to the pool, where residents smoked cigarettes, drank cheap light beer and passed judgment. “We find it concerning that everybody brings their kids over here to show where he was having an affair,” said one woman, nodding as an apparent mom and pop and their kids ended their Sunday afternoon drive by gaping at the fingerprint smudged door.
“He was having an affair with a 20-year-old. It’s disrespectful,” she spat.
Another in her party noted that no one ever saw much activity around the condo, other than the limousines that came up and down the alley during the night. It was almost a “he had it comin’” feeling, which sent me then to a peanuts-on-the-floor cowboy dive on Division, where McNair apparently enjoyed his last beverages before meeting his lover so he could be shot in the head.
No one would comment there, other than to nod that Steve had frequented the place. A couple of drunks, apparently protecting the image of this bar, followed me out the door and stood on the porch of the joint yelling at me as I got back in my car.
At this point, I climbed from the car and walked back to the porch. “You guys want me for something?” I asked. They turned to re-enter the bar. But I followed. “If you fellows need to tell me something, go ahead,” I said to them as they let their faces fall into their suds inside the joint and turned their eyes to Wimbledon or soccer or whatever vile sport was on TV.
I was in a tired and angry mood on that 90-degree day. I’d been exposed to the judgmental and mean. One of my favorite athletes had drowned in a puddle of sleaze. I wanted to be home with my kids watching the Cubs and doing shots of Pepsi Maxx, washing away life’s primer coat of slime.
Instead, I headed for Green Hills, to the lush estate Steve occupied, at least when the spirit moved, with his beautiful wife, Meshell and the two boys.
What I found there never made it in The Daily News, as the deadline was passed. And, it really wasn’t juicy.
You see, what I found was mourning. In fact, I scrawled it out in the notebook so I could dictate verbatim to the desk in New York City if they were interested.
More than 20 vehicles, mostly luxury cars and trucks, were gathered at the McNair residence in Green Hills. About half of those were behind the wrought-iron security fence.
Inside the sprawling brick home, friends and family were making arrangements.
“Just like any family does at a time like this,” said one of the gathered, identifying himself as a friend….
These people were kind and warm to the visitor, me, who really wasn’t looking for sleaze, but was looking to report, at least, on the atmosphere around a family in mourning. Heck, I was mourning, too. And as I stood by the fence, talking with the fellows who dropped back long gulps of Gatorade, I looked across the yard.
A pint-sized Fisher-Price basketball hoop stood next to the garage. I imagined Steve McNair, laughing, doing a little slam-dunking there with his youngest sons, Trenton and Tyler.
I would have preferred telling that story.

Silver-haired, silver-tongued devils as seen through the youthful, bright eyes of Bonnaroo generation

“So how did you get to know Kris Kristofferson?”
The intelligent young woman asked me that question when she was cruising through some pictures of the great songwriter (I really can’t call him a great singer-songwriter…. Because, well … listen to him sing….) But I love the guy. His wife and kids too.
The young woman was putting together a story on Bonnaroo for a student news web site where I serve as sort of “journalist-in-residence.” I like this work and the young people and their ideas and energy.
While we looked at the Bonnaroo story, she had begun to go through the internet files to see what types of pictures were available. Oh there was the big Centeroo with the arch. There were some pseudo-hippies and perhaps some real ones too.
Most of the real ones are dead, you know. Or they’ve gone away to work for Big Oil, Corporate Media and the Insurance Empire. Perhaps they even work for FEMA or are next in line to serve as supreme commander for the illegal war, once Gen. Dave gives his “Rolling Stone” interview.
Oops. There I go again. A fellow I like (despite his politics) wrote a note on Facebook the other day accusing liberals of being non-patriotic, that we’re tearing down all that this nation stands for. Glad the conservatives have come down so hard on their pals in Big Oil, Shotgun Dick and the like.
Conservatives, with the Big O’s help (it pains me to say), have done a great job to my favorite place in my limited exposure to Earth. Oh, I guess I like Bermuda better. And the Mayan ruins in Central Mexico were cool too. Yeah, and I got my kids in Romania. Spent a lot of time there. Great country. Also Switzerland. And the Netherlands. And Canada…. But you know, I’m pretty simple in a complicated way. I love the Redneck Riviera, where I’ve been told by Anderson Cooper that Big Oil coats the sand, and shrimp-boat captains are killing themselves.
Talk about ruining America and tearing us apart?
Ah, get off the soapbox, old man.
Yeah, that’s where I was going. Will get there eventually. Castles made of sand melt in the sea eventually. Perhaps not so much now that they are caked with oil.
OK, back to the time spent with the very nice and intelligent young woman. She was going through the pictures from Bonnaroo, to illustrate a good story another student had written.
That’s when she stopped on the picture of Kris…. And she laughed. “Look at Kris Kristofferson,” she said.
I said “He’s a friend of mine.”
She surveyed my appearance and it was obvious she could see why I might be a friend of this long-in-the-tooth, weathered man of words. I’m kind of that way, although not as long of tooth yet. I hope to make it that far. No one is paying me so much for my words these days, which is why I’m casting them out here for free in hopes for a sitcom based on my days with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their liberation of Alberta from the crazed gypsy mongrels. Or whatever those kinds of dogs were.
Then this young woman said, “How in the world did that happen?” or something like that. Here I am sitting in this little newsroom talking to a bright and talented young student … and I know Kris Kristofferson ….personally?
Gotta admit that at the very first, I thought that this was gonna be one of those moments where I could talk about hanging out with Kristofferson. About how Tom T. Hall once told the crowd at the Hall of Fame how I was a great writer. Perhaps I could throw in my friendship with Mac Wiseman and how Louise Scruggs once took the phone away from Earl so she could assure me she was going to get Bob Dylan to call me. "If anyone can get you Dylan,I can," said Louise, a great and stubborn woman. I occasionally have been known to call Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And I knew Ginsberg and Groucho a little.
I thought I could tell this young student how I once had a good conversation with Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones and how that band’s music director, Chuck Leavell, invited me backstage for a visit the last time those boys were in town. He remains a friend of sorts.
I was gonna tell her about how I interviewed Brian Wilson and how I spent an afternoon walking a golf course with Alice Cooper.
I was going to tell her how John Kay from Steppenwolf remains a friend and we correspond after I was the only one he ever allowed to interview him in depth during his 16 years of residency in the Nashville area. He lives outside Vancouver now.
Then perhaps I could have stepped out of music and told her how I know Muhammad Ali, have spent a few hours casually hanging out with him and also interviewed him several other times.
Knew O.J. pretty well, too, though I seldom brag about that. “To my pal, Tim, Peace and Love, O.J.” says the autograph on the picture he gave me when he took me to lunch at Austin's, a restaurant in downtown Clarksville. I don’t think the Juice lived up to his peace and love mantra. You know he’s not really a nice guy, even if he did win the Heisman and buy a nice Bronco.
Wilma Rudolph was the cousin of an old friend of mine, Ol’ Steve Pettus, who ran a barbecue stand outside Clarksville. I used to spend nights barbecuing shoulders with Steve and his brother, Euless. I regularly was invited to the massive Pettus family reunions. I was treated as family. Wilma was a beautiful and graceful woman.
Oh yeah, I could have then gone on to talk about my two interviews with Ringo Starr and how Tom Petty once wrote me a personal note telling me how much he liked my Facebook mugshot. “Mr. Ghianni, nice picture,” he said, likely coughing and reaching for a bag of chips, salty and chocolate and a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream.
Oh yeah, Eddy Arnold was my friend. So is George Jones. I knew Carl Perkins. Scotty Moore is one of my favorite people. Duane Eddy kind of likes me. Then there’s Foster & Lloyd, good fellows both.
Johnny Cash liked me. Perhaps I’d tell this student how I was supposed to interview him ---he had agreed to have me come out to his house after "I get back from the Coast." Instead he went in the hospital and died, so I covered the funeral instead with my much younger old man pal, Peter Cooper, a fine musician of limited acclaim.
Ahh, but this young student wanted to know about Kristofferson. So, I took to describing the great series of events, from a telephone interview to a meeting at the Americana Music Awards to conversations at June and Johnny’s funerals to, well, a special afternoon when Kris and his son Johnny Cash Kristofferson wandered with me down Music City Row. Johnny shot video. I’ve got that in my closet. The three of us roamed the wild streets of Nashville on foot and also in a minivan. You ever try to carry on a conversation with a personal-hero-turned-friend when you are driving a minivan around a statue of nude people? Don’t look, Ethel…
It was Kris’ first daytime visit to the Row in 30 years and his first sober visit in probably much longer.
Anyway, as I told the young woman the Kristofferson story -- warming up for a longer trip down memory lane, perhaps even stopping to recall the time my pal, Rob Dollar, and I, along with some News Brothers comrades, joked around with John Glenn and terrified the Secret Service -- I noticed she began flipping quickly ahead to other images.
Dave Matthews, Conan, Jack Black, Regina Spektor, Dr. Dog … I’m a fan of many of them. I particularly like Spektor. Matthews bores me. But Conan did a fair “Tonight Show” impersonation there for awhile. Funny guy. I still prefer Letterman. In fact, the king of late night remains Johnny Carson, whose last TV appearance was to resounding applause at the Letterman show.
I saw Carson’s show one sweaty afternoon in Burbank back in 1973. Slept on the sidewalk to get tickets. David Carradine was there, riding high on his Kung Fu fame and long before he was found dead in a hotel closet in some remote land. And Buddy Hackett was there. Outside, when the show was over, I found Tommy Newsome parked near me by the Orange Julius stand. You may not remember Tommy. He was the trombonist in the Tonight Show Band who sometimes took over as bandleader for Doc. Oh yeah, I know Doc, too. Nice, unassuming man.
Ah, but I digress again. Back to the young woman in the newsroom with her pick of pretty pictures of young artists.
I realized then that she probably wouldn’t be that interested in hearing me tell those stories. Probably had better things to do. You know, classes and stuff like that. Gotta get that Gypsyphonic Disko image and post it. Actually, I think she went with a crowd shot. Just as well.
Good, smart young woman.
Likely to be a successful journalist or successful at whatever she tries in life.
And, I have to admit, there was a difference between the images she was dwelling on and the image of Kris.
I mean, Kris looked … old….
Then it hit me.
I’m old too. In fact, this first hit me for sure when someone, my wife or someone else of equally innocent and diabolic intent, started telling me and everyone else who would listen that I was almost 60, rather than 58 or "in his 50s."
“Your dad is almost 60 years old, Joe. I think he can tie his own shoes.”
OK. Usually I can, by the way.
I suppose Kristofferson gets that sort of stuff around his house, too. Oh well, I'll only live 'til I die.

Memories of Toad, Lizard King, sum-sum-summertime, Capt. Kirk, Blue Cheer & the Mighty Quinn

Started an interesting, to me, discussion the other day on Facebook when I just tossed out a favorite summer song. Wanted to see what people said in response.
I wrote the following in my status: All-time favorite summer song? How about Cream's 'Toad' played full-blast, echoing off the surrounding buildings.... Just thinking. Not sure yet....
I landed on “Toad” because of some time going through my memories lately, at least in part due to reconnecting with Capt. Kirk, Terry Kirkwood, an old college chum who served in the Navy. He was the guy Ho Chi Minh pointed out as a reason it was necessary to get all of the Americans out of the former South Vietnam. I mean, Capt. Kirk was no intergalactic warrior. He was just a pool-playing swabbie whose claim to fame was that he entertained the deck mates up and down the Delta by singing Tom T. Hall’s “It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines": The Iowa weather was 13 below/I had come to Des Moines for a radio show/I awoke in the evening from a traveler's sleep/With notions of something to eat/The old elevator slid down past the floors/My head and my eyes said "You should have slept more."/The man at the desk said the restaurant was closed/Outside it was 14 below….
Of course, if I am indeed telling the truth above, Capt. Kirk, a proud native of Des Moines, where he now works as something of a telephone sharecropper and reformed carnival sideshow airbrush T-shirt artist (his life’s ambition, it turns out), was singing that wintry song of his hometown because it was always hot in Vietnam.
So that’s not a summer song, of course. But my e-conversations with the Captain, who was a faithful sidekick and pal during the time Ames, Iowa was my turf -- I know, who would want Ames other than me? But I loved it there. It was where I met Groucho Marx, that Ginsberg poet guy, my Uncle Moose, and, yep, the boys from Sha-Na-Na. And the late Dennis Wilson before he was the late Dennis Wilson -- have inspired me to remember those days and nights among the tornados, cornfields and pig barns.
And that’s where this summer song conversation began. Because during that time in my life, I lived in high-rise dormitories on the campus of Iowa State University.
As on any campus, the greatest times are in the spring, when the taste of summer arrives and music pounds from every available window, floor speaker and ‘65 Falcon. After an Iowa winter (see Tom T.’s song above – I love that guy, by the way. His wife, Miss Dixie, too.), it’s great to feel anything resembling summer heat and perhaps feel some summer beat ricocheting off the high rises while throwing Frisbees over the rows of sunbathing coeds.
And those are the greatest memories I have of “Toad,” because it is Cream at its finest, particularly Ginger Baker at his best. His work opened the doors for a lot of rock drummers to go ahead and take the forefront. Good or bad, a lot of drum solos have come from that wondrous 13-minute version of “Toad” that’s found of “Wheels of Fire.” It earlier had appeared on “Fresh Cream” and was a staple in concert.
Now I’ve seen Cream. But I probably felt Cream the best on spring days in Ames, Iowa, when, without a doubt, the live version of Toad would pound from someone’s speakers and shake the air from Larch Hall to the power plant.
Perhaps it’s not my all-time favorite summer song. But I do know that every spring I do dig it out and play it. Loud. Try it sometime.
By the way, years ago, I had my vinyl version of “Wheels of Fire” stolen. If someone out there has a copy of it with my name on it, I’d welcome its return, no questions asked. Also lost “Bitches Brew” and a couple of Zappa albums.
Here are some of the responses I got to my posting about songs that bring back summer memories:
Father Laird MacGregor, Episcopal priest of the manly Pressed Rat and Warthog order: “Ridin’ in My Car” by NRBQ. But then he rethought some and came up with entire "Pet Sounds" album by the Beach Boys. “Conjures memories of one summer in particular," he writes. Perhaps it was the summer he opted to cut his long hair, shave his head, enter the priesthood and give up his favorite breakfast of licorice-flavored Schnapps and Wheaties.
The good padre, rector to the famous News Brothers band of journalists co-founded by this author, then adds “Nobody has mentioned Mungo Jerry.”
So, with that in mind, I figured I’d dredge up that old Mungo tune: In the summertime when the weather's high, /you can stretch right up and touch the sky,/when the weather's fine,/you got women, you got women on your mind./Have a drink, have a drive,/go out and see what you can find.
Kinda makes you wonder why Mungo Jerry isn’t hailed as a great band in the vein of The Beatles or at least be mentioned in the same line as Canned Heat.
Jim East, an old journalism pal opts for Eddie Cochran’s version of "Summertime Blues.” I personally would go with The Who version from “Live at Leeds.” But Jim’s a stubborn traditionalist in the most sincere way, though perhaps not a Republican. Speaking of that tune, who remembers the version by Blue Cheer? Yep. I see you nodding out there.
Darryl Illmo Prince writes in that he likes an old-reliable that will have you dancing: “Gotta Go With Van The Man … ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’”
Drew White, Blue Oyster Cult’s meatiest fan, weighed in with " ’Gimme Some Lovin' by the Spencer Davis Group. In the car, windows rolled down and the volume turned up to 11. It sounded even better in the old days of AM radio coming out of a single speaker grill on a metal dashboard!” Drew still has that old sound system. It’s on concrete blocks in his front yard. Next to the fridge. Nah, not true. But nice image.
Ray “Da Plane, Boss” Duckworth chose Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” Must have come from a time before Ray only listened to Jimmy Dickens while sipping coffee and watching for airplanes from his patio.
Bush Bernard seems to be speaking from his musical heritage in the bogs of Louisiana when he says “"Play that Funky Music, White Boy."
Renee Elder says “For me, personally, it's got to be ‘Rikki Don't Lose that Number’ by Steely Dan.” Now I’m not a Dan man, but that’s a pretty nifty little pop tune, although it’s not in my collection for some reason. I’ll not lose sleep over it, though.
Chuck Emery, formerly the honcho of failed Catfish Bay Records, a fine musician and former Chukker’s record store owner on Franklin Street before Clarksville got blown away by the tornado says “Toad or NSU or I Feel Free...or maybe a medley!”
Janice Kay Brewster Staggs says “Love Cream, but think I'd pick a Led Zep song.”
For David Sims it’s "’Blue Sky’ by the Allman Brothers. Greatest kick-back song ever.”
My cousin Michelle Robertson weighs in with another of my own favorites by my old pal John Sebastian: “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck.....”
Kathleen Carlson, who obviously wants to take off all her clothes (it’s part of the lyric of this ridiculous and I can’t believe she’s serious choice): "It's getting hot in here” by Nelly. Nelly or Skanky or one of those pop/hop guys were preferred by executives at the morning newspaper to Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson back when I was there. Caused me problems when I was in charge of entertainment coverage, as I really didn’t cooperate. “You can’t be a maverick and not think like me and be a success here,” or something like that I was told. Yet, I found personal success came by playing Cash and Kristofferson stories above Skanky and Nelly or whoever. Oh yeah, Shaggy was the other one. I thought this was Music City? Oh well, thanks for bringing this up, Kathy. Are you OK? Is it getting hot in there?
Rob Simbeck has a couple of haunting melodies on his mind this summer when he submits "Tie: ‘Spooky’ and ‘Time of the Season.’"
And then there’s Reinaldo Garcia, who not only picks the song, he picks the summer and the city: “L.A., 1967, Light My Fire (long version.)”
You know that I would be a liar if I didn’t say I loved that song. Heck, I bought all the vinyl put out by Jim and the boys. I even like The Doors’ “Soft Parade” album, which is the one most don’t like. Course I’m no Lizard King.
In wrapping up this little experiment, I think any song that makes you smile and think of great summers past is a good song.
Actually “Toad” isn’t my favorite summer song. That would really be “A Day in the Life” from that 1967 summer album about that little vaudeville band that was formed in Paul McCartney’s head.
No, it would be “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” because it dominated the AM dial during the one year when I was cleaning out stalls and trimming weeds at a day camp in Chicago.
Or maybe it would be Rick Nelson’s version of “Summertime and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high” from my true youth.
Nah, I’ll stick with “Toad.” At least as this first day of summer descends on us tomorrow morning.
Later in the day, I may opt for a visit by the Mighty Quinn.
Course I do like that slamming coffin lid at the end of "A Day in the Life."

Kid Rock-style country makes me hanker for Lefty, ET & Shel

Watching Kid Rock emcee the CMT Music Awards the other night, I had to struggle for a moment to remember just why it was I fell in love with Nashville back in 1972. Or was ’71? Long time ago. I was making water heaters by day and roaming the streets of the city by night. One reason I fell in love with this city was the guitar player who took the “stage” nightly at … well, I can’t remember the name of the joint. It was right across from Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, because on occasion Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, one of the Cash boys or some other Grand Ole Opry stalwarts would come in to sing along with the house band. They may have been trying to kill time between the end of the Grand Ole Opry -- which then was in the Ryman Auditorium regularly and not just as a refuge from the flood -- and the Midnight Jamboree down at ET’s Record Shop. Hang around long enough on a summer night and you’d see Loretta Lynn or Little Jimmy Dickens perform for free and for the joy of music. There were times that I took a nap after my shift on the line and got up just in time to go down to see those shows. So much older then, much younger than that now. There was no such thing as a suburban Donelson ET Record Shop or a Grand Ole Opry House – submerged or otherwise -- at that time. In fact, Lower Broadway was a place of bars, honky-tonks, sticky-floored peep shows and other “night shift” workers who would openly proposition day and night. Their clients apparently were led to rooms above what now are souvenir shops. Suppose they all -- or at least those who picked up that trade -- eventually moved to Dickerson Road or Murfreesboro Pike. Sure, some visitors may have found Lower Broad a little seedy. I relished in it. I’ll have to look up the name of the guitar player sometime. I do remember that they found him dead, dreams of glory dashed, in the high-rise residential hotel that's name I can't recall. Can’t remember if he was reaching for some needle arm that drove him down to hell or if he was just expired. He was a big guy. Man he would play. Lower Broadway was not the neon lit, family friendly Disneyesque district it is today. I’m sure tourism officials are pleased. And, for the most part, I guess it’s good. It wasn’t more than a year or so after I first hit town that the Old-Time Pickin’ Parlor opened on Second Avenue North. Now a booming restaurant an club stretch, it was a warehouse wasteland there, reminding me as much of the ghost towns I used to explore during my long pursuit of the secrets of Joshua Tree and the non-existent American Dream. First time at the Pickin’ Parlor, I saw Doc and Merle Watson. That was before Merle got run over by a tractor. Guests may have included the likes of Vassar, Dawg, Hartford. Perhaps even Garcia. You never really knew. I was fortunate in that Vassar became a dear friend in his later years. It was a privilege. Yes I still go downtown, or rather to Lower Broadway, occasionally. In fact, I likely will go back down to the fancy tourist district this weekend, if only because I love the city and I love the fans who come to CMA Fest. Although I guess more of them come in from Brooklyn and Bonn than Defeated Creek any more. Most have never stopped at Wall Drugs, in other words. If you don’t know what that means, it matters even less to me. But I do lament the old and sometimes seedy ghosts at times. Rather than recreating “classic country” with new-fangled music-goosing machines and the like, the real stuff played down there on Lower Broad in that bygone era. There was the jolt and joy of listening to the weeping steel and the occasional visit with Lefty or ET, either in a bar or while sat in Tootsie’s back room. Boot heels hooked under the tabletop, they’d lean back in those suds-soaked chairs, armpits stained dark after leaving their spangles and such across the alley in the Opry while they sought refreshment. Sometimes I’d hang out in the alley, and talk to those guys. Sometimes I’d sneak in the alley door and catch the Opry’s last few segments. Or perhaps I’d go down Fifth a few steps and watch someone swampin’ them tables down at Green Gables. Yep, Waylon fans, there really was such a joint, but I'm joking about it being here. It was in Texas, and Billy Joe Shaver's mom swamped tables there. He wrote songs about it. It escapes me right now the name of the restaurant where I’d drop in, down Broadway, where I’d have coffee, trying hard not to succumb to the urge to bother Roger Miller reading the first editions of the morning newspaper. Or perhaps it was the last edition of the afternoon paper. He smoked a lot. So did I back then. I’m sure Roger was just twisting the words around for pleasure. “Dang me. Dang me…” What rhymes with that? Of course that song predated those nights, but you get the idea. “Woman won’t you weep for me?”  Oh, yeah, the restaurant was Linebaugh's. Merchants is there now, occupying the space of Linebaugh's as well as the old Merchants Hotel.

As for Roger, well, speaking of roller skating through buffalo herds or, more to the point, twisting words for pleasure, there was Shel Silverstein. I’ve written before of my first encounter with one of my heroes. Shel one night, likely well-oiled but precise of diction, coaxed his late-night buddy, Bobby Bare, into helping me load up my 1965 Falcon’s trunk with the bricks that Metro was tearing out of Fifth Avenue South. Metro was modernizing by tearing out the old bricks and replacing them with asphalt that would help spawn potholes and please the tow truck drivers who still claim that stretch, although I understand there is still a seething border war. Again, another story. Most of you don’t remember the brick streets. Heck, I was sure not going to forget them. So for some reason, at 2 a.m., I decided it was a good time to take a few souvenirs. Shel and Bobby came up to me from the vacant lot where they’d parked their car, a lot that decades later would be buried someplace near the special Jack Daniels entrance into the Bridgestone Arena. I liked the smile and the friendly tone that approached me in that humid early morning. If you don’t own it yet, Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein came out Tuesday on Sugar Hill records. Guys like Prine, Kristofferson, Bare Sr. and Jr. and Ray Price sing the great words of the poet. If you ever heard Shel sing, by the way, you’ll know that he made Kristofferson seem like Caruso. Ever see the footage of him doing “Boy Named Sue” on the old Cash show from the Ryman? But if you ever spoke to Shel, you came away feeling better. Like the easygoing conversation we had when he did more than his share of loading bricks. I think the absurdity of helping a long-haired young man load his trunk with apparently obsolete bricks while guitars – electric and steel – echoed through streets of Guitar Town suited him just fine. Done, he and Bare bounded, or at least, vanished into the night. I told Shel I loved his songs and such. Bare, well you really can't find fault with him. He's now a great friend and mentor. Sometimes we talk about our road bricks introduction.  And there were the nights spent at the Tally-Ho Tavern – the site I believe now is occupied by a Curb building – on Music Row. If you were lucky, Kristofferson was in town. Don’t bother him, but catch him and Billy Swan, Charlie Daniels, Funky Donnie Fritts, Arthur Alexander, Billy Ray Reynolds and  Bare out on the picnic tables, swapping tunes. The Rev. Will Campbell, who lived downstairs from Kris in the rotting tenement a few feet away may be there too. Likely not preaching. Captain Midnight, a renegate radio outlaw, also a friend I acquired along the way, may have been challenging Waylon to a knife-throwing contest. I told Kris about those memories once, when he and I looked for what once was the Tally-Ho and he just smiled that grizzled movie star smile. He'd not been back to those sites in three decades when I took him. He was curious, but shared my melancholy that all "the old stuff" was gone. Anyway, memories like those guided me into something teeteing between respair and wild, ribald Johnny Russell-style laughter while watching the CMT’s -- what used to be called the Flameworthy Awards… Or what I dubbed back during my days at the morning newspaper “the Spongeworthy Awards.” I like Kid Rock. And there are some great musicians in the likes of Brad Paisley and Keith Urban. But the Nashville I fell in love with is as much in the past as whatever bars or pawn shops stood where the Predators play hockey or the happy Detroit “rock-rapper” emcees a show that is supposedly a big night for country music but instead is some TV programmer’s nightmarish vision of what fans want. Tom T. Hall, George Jones, Loretta Lynn and my old friend the late Carl Smith likely slept right through it. If they watched it, it may have been one of the few times when the others considered Carl lucky. I’ll be back on Lower Broadway, either Saturday or Sunday. I’ll look for Roger Miller. I’ll look for Lefty Frizzell, who actually was an affable sort. Maybe ET will show up, at least in spirit, in front of the record store. More likely, I’ll gawk at and give directions to the tourists. Maybe I’ll talk with my pal Mandolin Dan, who likely has had a good week. I’ll think of other down-and-outers I knew who have died. I’ll remember when the joint named Possum Holler blasted orange neon into the night somewhere near where the Hard Rock is today. I love Nashville and what it has become. There is no better city. But it’s not what it was 38 years ago. Course neither am I.

CMA Fest triumphs by leaving Fan Fair's sideshow feel in the dust (but I miss Tammy Wynette)

The quadriplegic from Pennsylvania coal country was one of my favorite acquaintances back during what they used to call Fan Fair here in Music City, USA.
I’m not complaining about the newer, sleeker CMA Music Festival at all. It actually is far superior to the old Fan Fair. I know, because I experienced both. In fact, for several years, before my life as a newspaper expat, I plotted coverage of the CMA Fest and before that Fan Fair.
For example, I’d gather Peter Cooper, Brad Schmitt and -- when he wasn’t yelling at his lava lamp -- Craig Havighurst into a conference room at the morning newspaper and we’d toss around ideas. I gotta admit, I worked a little blue in those days.
Before that grouping, I had Jay Orr and Tom Roland. And before that, when I was at the late and still lamented afternoon daily, I had Orr, whom I used to call “the professor” for no real reason. And Michael Gray, back before he got so slender. Oh yeah, I had Calvin Gilbert for awhile too. Nice man. Bad beard.
That’s a pretty good collection of talent over the years. It was an odd mix of country music scholars, a country music reporter who loved Richard Marx, a business-oriented music writer who was then considered among our town’s finest and most public intellectuals, a great and loyal friend who was and remains the king of kosher fart jokes (and some that weren’t) and another loyal friend who has gone on to become an Americana superstar who will bring the Sheboygan Elks Club to its knees (not that they need that much help, after nights of pickled eggs and warm Schlitz).
We’d talk about who should be profiled. For example: which rising star would Peter follow for the week, writing the always fun look at how this CMA Fest was seen through the eyes of, say, SheDaisy or the Kinleys.
Then Brad would pipe in that he wanted to make sure he was where the girls were. He didn’t care if they were musicians. He just hoped they were charmed by his combination Borscht Belt schtick (check the spelling) and effervescent charm and charming array of massive black shirts. He’d then list a bunch of events he’d be at, usually where Mindy McReady and Cledus T. Judd would join him at the trough.
Of course, Craig would write about the impact on Music City of 576 million tourists, according to the random “eenie, meenie, minie moe” counting technique perfected by tourism honchos and insurance adjusters… .
It was pretty much a story budget that we’d amend each year. For example, if Mindy McReady wasn’t available, Brad would spend time with Charlie Pride or, in a bizarre twist, that little guy in the annoying Big & Rich video. These kinda guys aren’t gonna be comin’ to my citaaaaay if I have any choice.
And if Peter couldn’t find a rising star, he’d find one who was all washed up, choking on the stench of Old Granddad and failure, and paint a glorious picture of resurrection.
Just kidding here. I enjoyed these planning sessions and most of you know that Peter and Brad are, to me, like two sons. Peter likes to talk music with me and I with him. Unlike many younger journalists, he knows the first name of George Jones and also knows that is different from Grandpa Jones, my old Thoreau-spouting friend. Peter and I’ve been known to share a large souvlaki platter. Gonna lick the platter, the gravy doesn’t matter.
And Brad, well, he is a man I’ve come to admire as much for being able to deal with a series of setbacks and still maintaining his level head and positive outlook as for his personal warmth and, well, large array of black shirts.
As for me, well, here I am, sitting in my living room, after my downstairs office was flooded out during the great Gurgling Water Massacree of a month ago, and I’m typing about CMA Music Festival for free, as no one will pay me to do so.
As I do this, I keep coming back to the quadriplegic from Pennsylvania.
Anyway, I do like what the CMA Fest has become and what it has done for our city. Despite my sometimes anachronistic appearance, I am a fairly progressive sort who wishes only the best for our flood-ravaged city. And I have a lot of respect and even admiration for many of today’s stars, like Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert.
And the CMA Music Fest brings in an estimated 67 billion bucks daily while the tourists are here. I think I made up those figures. We’ll see if they turn up in the local press.
It really is cool to see the newer and younger artists. I mean, Carrie Underwood does look better than, say, Loretta Lynn. Although I’d rather listen to Loretta sing. Sorry Carrie: My daughter does love you, though. And you looked swell in that softball outfit Monday night at Greer. That oughta sell a few more CDs.
And Josh Turner makes female heartbeats patter faster than Conway Twitty did in his later years.
And who wouldn’t prefer to see Kenny Chesney sing about his blue chair ponderings rather than seeing Billy Ray Cyrus do Achy Breaky Heart? (This is a hint… stay tuned).
These are all pluses of the new festival. Well, not new anymore. Just the way most of you know it because of its recent, splashy, star-spangled and well-shaved success. And I hope you support it. I know I’ll try to get down to a couple of events, mainly because I like to be around the enthusiasts who come from all over the world to get Taylor Swift’s autograph.
Oh, yeah, I like Taylor Swift a lot, even if I don’t like her music that much. She’s a good person, which to me matters a lot.
But as much as I love the CMA Music Festival, and as much as it brings back fond memories of planning out coverage while Brad Schmitt did his old police reporter best to shoot holes in every story anyone was planning – including his own, which usually had the most holes, as it were – the quadriplegic from Pennsylvania always returns to my heart when CMA Music Festival gets going.
You see, before the makeover – and like I said, it’s generally very good – the thing was called “Fan Fair” and was held in the sweaty barns, mule stalls and near the manure pits at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds.
Of course, we all have a way of remembering the charm and grace of things in hindsight. The charm of Fan Fair was in the wide array of pawn shop glory and claustrophobic sweat and panic attacks.
I don’t lament its passing. But I do miss some of the seedy Joshua Tree roadside snake show flavor of the old Fan Fair.
Everyone was jammed in those little stalls. It didn’t matter if you were Garth Brooks – who once did 24 hours straight of autographing in his booth – or Jimbo and Jim Beam, leaders of the Starcrossed Cattle Ranchers Swing Band and Bowling Team from some coal town in Pennsylvania. If you had a CD to sell or a pin to sell, you were there.
And sometimes there were guys, like the kindly and cool quadriplegic, who followed the band from the coal town to Nashville as they took their shot at the big time in this cow manure scented section of 110-degree Nashville. I can’t remember if they were wearing their bowling shirts. They may have left them in the swelter of the adjacent trailer park.
I would go most years, even after it became CMA Fest, to check things out. And, as I hate heat almost as much as I despise floods and that creep who chose to rub against tattoos instead of Sandra Bullock, I relished the air conditioning of the venues in the modern era.
But sometimes I can’t resist the sort of melancholia that sweeps over me when I remember Conway and Loretta on the stage at the side of the race track. Or the big reunion between George Jones and Tammy Wynette, back when she was still alive. I still love George and I miss Tammy a lot. I wish she was still around. Although no one would recognize her.
Heck, if I remember right (I may be right, I may be crazy), the Beach Boys were there one year. I believe Brian Wilson brought his sand box and Dennis Wilson was still dead. Mike Love was there and I think maybe that guy from that stupid TV sitcom that produced the phenomenon known as those sexy and sometimes lightweight Olsen sisters. I can’t remember his name, other than the fact he dumped a supermodel wife or vice versa. But that has little to do with Fan Fair, anyway. And he wasn’t a good drummer.
OK, you ask me where the quadriplegic from Pennsylvania coal country comes in. I wish I remembered his name. He was a great guy, full of life-affirming philosophy. I spent more than an hour with him as his friends made sure he made it to the various shows and booths.
I was there as features editor of the old Nashville Banner. And while Jay Orr and either Calvin Gilbert or Michael Gray were studying the serious acts and pontificating on the joys and sorrows of Fan Fair, I was always going out there in my role as a columnist, seeking human interest stories.
I chose this one day back in 1992 to go to the Fairgrounds because I had been reading about the “Cyrus Virus” spread by a pelvic-thrusting singer who was capturing hearts in backwoods Kentucky, which is much of the state. I wanted to see what this guy was all about.
So I made my way to the big stage and stood in awe as this mullet-headed mother nature’s son sang and danced to the almost unforgettable (unfortunately) song with its gripping lyrics: “Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart / I just don’t think it’d understand/And if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart/ He might blow up and kill this man.”
The crowd – mostly 57 years old with pig-tails and stretch, pink and yellow clothes held up by elastic American flag suspenders (and we’re talking all genders here) – screamed wild approval.
“So this is country music,” I said, as I watched the twitching, seemingly good-natured guy begin his skyrocket to stardom that would spawn Hannah Montana and a slutty looking Miley Cyrus. Put some pants on, kid.
As for me, well, I wasn’t all that impressed. I mean, I thought he was talented and all. I later found him to be a really nice guy. But I had come for George Jones. And I thought I’d seen Skeeter Davis someplace back in the barns/exhibition halls. She was the one who brought the Byrds to the Opry and I always loved to speak with her.
So, as I walked out of the grandstands and down into the potholed pathway back to the halls, I saw this guy in his wheelchair. He was laughing. He was happy. Billy Ray Cyrus, he figured, was pretty good.
It all didn’t matter, because instead of sitting back in his home in a Pennsylvania coal mining town making small talk with Bob Barker, he was here, in Nashville. And maybe he’d see George Jones or Loretta Lynn. Heck, this Garth Brooks kid was pretty darned good, even though he had by then begun his Peter Pan act, he reckoned. For the record: Garth always has been kind to me, so I had to agree with my new friend.
I found much joy in talking with this guy. It made my trip to the Fan Fair grounds worthwhile. And I climbed back into my crappy red Saturn with its peeling impenetrable clear finish and drove back to the offices of the afternoon newspaper.
I began to sing. No it wasn’t “Achy Breaky Heart”, that would be too good an ending. I think I was singing “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.”
Course, I really can’t remember if any of the above is true. It was a long time ago, in an era that will from now on be known as a time not only before the flood but before Hootie became a country superstar.