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

Crawling through oil with 'Snake' Stabler, Rose Garden partying and having 'the shrimp talk' with Big O

I finished my gentle Australian crawl running parallel to the shoreline – sharks be damned, I tried to tell myself, chasing away the fear while also escalating my heart rate – and rode the surf into the beach.
When I stood up on the sandbar, beginning my 100-yard trek back toward shore, I looked admiringly at my tan.
“Man, Flap, you really got brown out there,” said Kenny Stabler, my old friend, Oakland Raiders’ No. 12, with whom I usually share a breakfast or at least a Waffle House or oyster bar, whenever I’m down on the Redneck Riviera.
I looked at my torso – not a wonderful thing to do these days, as my weight’s down but ever since my brains were liberated in the July 4th car wreck I haven’t really felt like trying the heavy workouts or even the medium workouts that are necessary to keep the body of an almost 60-year-old man (my wife’s favorite description of me … whatever happened “you’re pretty darned good for an old man?”)
Serious about the brain scrambling, by the way. Still missing words here and there and have headaches. “Face it, old man, you are concussed,” says my doctor, every time he calls me to see if I remember my name. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I even remember who my doctor is, good thing since he’s the guy who has to do the prostate exam, which I wouldn’t trust to a stranger, because of possibly vile and perhaps Republican intentions .
Anyway, that’s another story of this long and glorious summer of my discontent, dismay and discovery.
As I noted above, while “Snake” Stabler did his Tai Chi bit on the little spit of sand, I looked at how brown I’d turned. And it was my first real day down at the Redneck Riviera, my favorite relaxing spot in the world next to Ciudad Juarez, where I sometimes go with the Big O – he likes the donkey shows --when he’s ashamed of his wife’s crass and materialistic behavior. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, I’d gladly tell her.
She probably reminds the Big O of his age as well, but I get a feeling he’s well, not really whipped… perhaps a bit frightened or at least humbled or tormented. Yep, the Big O, my friend – I was with Magic, Joachim, the late Wilt the Stilt, Derek Rose and the rest of the guys for that hoops and shrimp fest at the White House the other day – just can’t tell Michelle anything.
“I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t go to Spain on vacation while you and the rest of the country are suffering and wallowing in this deep mayonnaise,” The Big O said, as he dipped his shrimp and his tie in Miracle Whip.
He often confuses malaise for mayonnaise, but that’s OK. Little W, his predecessor (and poker-playing, A&W float-sharing buddy), once referred to a portion of Iraq as “Turdistan.”
I never corrected him, even though I have many friends from that region, because every time I tried to talk to Little W, Shotgun Dick would shoot at one of his friends. Obviously that never meant me, but I do hate for old Republicans to be blasted in the face with buckshot. Some deserve it, but I leave that to the killers hired by Oliver North and the late Soupy Sales.
Speaking of countries in torment – other than our own – how about the floods in Pakistan? It makes me cry.
Every time I see the news reports of the floods in Pakistan, the people having to leave their huts, livestock and Vizio flat-screens and climb aboard relief boats, it reminds me of how lucky I am.
Yes, I lost half my house in the flood and no one, not government, not insurance, not even my pal, The Big O, came to my assistance, even though he ate half the cookies my Aunt Rita sent from Buffalo to help us survive.
Oh yeah, FEMA did finally come up with a few hundred dollars. You ever try to pay for gutting and then rebuilding a half of your house for less than a grand?
And we’re still not done. Just done-for and, well, exhausted.
Part of that tiredness comes from the July 4 wreck, when a nice woman with other things on her mind, ran a red light and hit the family minivan while she was traveling 45 mph. If I’d been in my Saab, I’d be dead. It would have made a dandy coffin.
As it was, the van became trash. My brain temporarily battered, and probably not for the first time. And the insurance check covered about a quarter of what it took to replace it with a suitable, safe family vehicle. Repeat after me: insurance companies and oil barons and evil, gun-wielding terrorists coached by Shotgun Dick – even from his hospital room – run the world.
All of which is to say, my summer has not been good. And while I entered it with a sense of optimism that my professional life was going to take a big turn for the better and I was finally going to be able to enjoy things on the Yummy List and in Marie Claire magazine, I am leaving it with a sense of dazed confusion.
Brian Wilson, I believe I noted earlier, told me “you just weren’t made for these times either, Flap.” That was during one of our many sandbox conversations. I was seeking solace from the disaster, the ruins of my life, furniture and drywall, carpeting and treasured old newspapers piled in the driveway. Brian would visit – often hitching a ride with Petty -- because he couldn’t figure out where he was and where else in Nashville he could go to play in the sand. Tom told him I had dumped a pile on the driveway after using it in sandbags. That wasn’t true. But Brian would sit there where he thought the sand should be and stare, blankly, into the wooded hillside and philosophize: “Those East Coast girls are hip,” he’d say, before napping.
Speaking of which, I have pretty bad headaches since that wreck. Paul McCartney made fun of me by singing “Scrambled Brains” to the tune of “Yesterday” and pointing at me while we rode unicycles around town the day after his concert here. I told you about Paul and me, man. You know that we’re as close as can be man. Turns out he’s a really nice guy. He told me he wants me to join his band. Or was it he wants me to hold his hand? Drive his van? Beep-beep, ba-beep-beep yeah. Can’t keep much straight these days.
Which reminds me, did any of you ever see Faces play when Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood were doing their best music? First time I caught them it was during an Iowa blizzard in a National Guard Armory in Des Moines. Hitchhiked with Smokin’ Joe from Ames. Ended up sleeping in the back of the station wagon belonging to the girls who picked us up because the snow got too high to navigate.
Speaking of high, there was a big, black guy working with Faces whose only apparent job was to keep uncorking wine bottles and rolling joints for the star and his guitarist. Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
Long time since I saw that show. I was reminded that the other day when the kid from the Iowa State alumni office called to ask for money. He began by asking if I’ve had a good summer. I laughed and said something rude about what he could do to the Iowa State Cyclone mascot this autumn.
Sometimes I’m just waiting for a friend, and that’s why I was at the Rose Garden for the shrimp party that went on for two full days and ended up with half of the NBA’s University of Kentucky Wildcats franchise sick from ingesting too much oil.
The wife was in Spain with Sasha. Malia was at camp. Mom-in-law was rolling craps and gulping down Sloe Gin in Tunica. The big house and the Rose Garden was ours. It was beer and shrimp and basketball. I don’t drink these days, and the Big O only drinks an occasional beer to settle racial disputes. But have you ever seen Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson get in beer drinking contests? Last I saw it was the second day of the party and Bill Russell, who came along as the token black, was stretched out beneath some of Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite bushes. He was staring at the stars and hoping that no one was pointing a rifle at him from on top of the Executive Office Building, which is, as you know the place where the government snipers are positioned.
It’s a presidential mandate that began back when Truman was president. Whenever black people are anywhere near the White House, snipers with the best weaponry possible are dispatched by the president to hold high positions surrounding the White House. Of course that wasn’t often back in those days, so the guys usually stayed over at the Capitol Grille, drinking casks of Amontillado and eating 36-ounce porterhouses.
The problem came, though, when the Big O decided not to revoke the policy of dispatching the kill-hungry veterans of Desert Storm – for they never did kill anyone there – to the surrounding roofs when black people are within eyeshot and earshot of the White House.
Now I love this president. Not his policies, but he’s a good fella and enjoys Baskin-Robbins with me some days. He didn’t really think his policy through.
“Man, you realize you are black,” I tell him, pointing to the ever-present snipers. Big O doesn’t listen, or it doesn’t click. All he wants to do is sit behind the bushes with me and Tom Petty and try to talk over the police sirens and machinegun fire in the sultry D.C. air.
Which brings me back to my surf and Nerf football tossing with Kenny Stabler last week.
Snake was right about the tan. I’d never tanned so fast. Then I looked down. There was a little swelling down on my inner leg where a jelly fish had stung me a little too close to my tentacles ….
So I reached down to examine the injury, and when rubbed against the spot where I’d been stung, my leg turned white. I looked at the three secondary fingers of my right hand (you know which one is the primary finger, of course) and noticed they were covered with brown grime.
That’s when I realized it. I was not tanned. I had taken a bath in black gold, Texas tea…..
I called the Big O to tell him about it, but he just laughed, “I finally realized why those snipers are always around,” he said.
“Did you change the policy and send them home?” I asked, as Kenny Stabler leaned close to the phone so he could hear.
“Nah, I sent them some of this shrimp,” laughed the Big O. “I’m sure not going to eat it. I don’t know how it got oil on it.”

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.

Sharing wisdom with John Glenn and avoiding death at the hands of bloodthirsty Secret Service

John Glenn simply scratched his bald head and nodded approval. At least he didn’t want us to be gunned down like dogs on the tarmac.
The Secret Service agents gave me and my buddies menacing Lee Van Cleef stares, obviously patting for their holsters, thinking maybe this would be a good day to kill. Dead burnt bodies, veins in their teeth…. Oops, wrong story …. Not wanting to face down His Majesty’s Secret Service in a remake of The Good, the Bad and the Way Too Ugly – especially as we had no guns and too much guts -- I had to appeal directly to the gentler side of the First American to Orbit the Globe.
“Senator Glenn! Senator Glenn!” I said as we ran toward the gun-toting G-men, our hands in the air, showing we were not only unarmed but quite possibly impaired.
“Hey, I want to talk to these boys, let them through,” said Senator Astronaut Glenn, then a presidential candidate, who stopped to visit the News Brothers at the appropriately named Outlaw Field, the then-depressing little civilian airport in North Clarksville, not far from the mammoth air strips of Fort Campbell where Space Shuttles frequently stopped.
You didn’t know about that, did you?
While the world’s eyes were turned to the very public Space Shuttle flights, it is well documented by those of us who care about adventure that when they needed to take it easy, cool off a bit from the pressure of interplanetary exploration and killing of Russians and Libyans, the intergalactic pilots would nurse the big old ships onto the runway in the middle of the night. These were not your “TV missions.” These were secret. And deadly. And sometimes the pilots just needed to come down to rest before being hurled back toward space from the launch pad hidden way back in the woods of the post that’s the size of about three counties.
Those landings did spark a lot of talk of space invaders and little green men around the post, but those were generally laughed at as so much hillbilly hoo-hah.
Even Space Pilots get that wired/melancholy feeling, now called “the Sully Sullenberger Syndrome,” and they need a place to rest. So they drop in from outer space, land at top-secret places, particularly Fort Campbell and that little spit of land outside of Amsterdam , where hashish is legal, to refresh, perhaps grab some coffee at the Hilton or eat chocolate cake in a bag.
I’ll bet you thought all those guys stayed out there in space for a week or two at a time. Pure farce, staged by the various Presidents of the United States of America in order to pump up national pride so we’d pour more money into the space program and forget about things like feeding the poor and making sure the people in New Orleans have ample public health and safety facilities and even can read.
But those are side issues today. Sometime I’ll tell you about my time on the Challenger. That was before it crashed and everyone died in one of our saddest days. No joking about that day. I just was proud to have spent time on that ship.
But there is some lightness to be found in the time I spent with John Glenn. Yes, I know the senator and astronaut is loathed by those in the insurance and oil industries, the vile demons who follow the whims of Shotgun Dick and addled radio hosts who have hypnotized so many of America’s older and whiter men. Many of the hypnotized used to be in the Greatest Generation and they deserve acclaim for that. You’d have thought that sometime, while they were saving the world, they would have gotten some common sense and wouldn’t listen and follow, mindlessly, ignorance and hate. I mean, one, two , three, what were they were fighting for? Dump Hitler and his like. Hang Mussolini up by his privates (and his majors and colonels, too). Get rid of the Emperor. They saved the world. Now they let fat billionaires on painkillers tell them how to think? Sure. Why not? Better than figuring out stuff for themselves.
Of course, they may be right. I may be crazy. I’ll have to say that I, at times, have felt like the lunatic they were looking for with their implements of destruction, floods, speeding cars and other misfortune.
Anyway, back in the days when the News Brothers were in season, we spent time with our most famous astronaut.
Oh, as for News Brothers season, well it’s not over yet, as everyone seems to be gunning for us now, either running into us, not helping us find work (although I do appreciate the real friends who do try to help), flooding our houses, not paying out insurance and conspiring with Shotgun Dick to hope we rot in Misery & Bankruptcy (Steven King’s upcoming 600th novel, written in a day. It’s more than 900 pages, with plot hidden in gibberish. All work and no play, indeed, Stevie boy. Congrats for pulling off this literary prank for all these years, ol’ Cujo, my lad.)
You wouldn’t believe it, given the state of the media “culture” now, but there was a time when the “Don’t Back Down” mantra actually did work and flourish, mainly because our publisher, The Big Guy, was happy that we were producing prize-winning newspapers and raising circulation. I’m not sure if those figures were ever matched after the “new way of newspapering” (fewer pages, less local copy, fewer people to do the work) began its cancerous devour of the only profession I ever loved, my calling for as long as I can remember. As a result, my pal Rob Dollar and I, the News Brothers’ sad and weary “brains,” have been dispatched repeatedly on the road to eventual ruin. At least we keep our heads high and very seldom light our hair on fire or pass by a homeless guy without giving him whatever’s in our pockets. Some of them use to be newspapermen and women. The rest are victims of heartless oil demons and Mad Dog 20/20.
It was in the “don’t back down … give them real stories” era of journalism almost three decades ago that John Glenn came into my life. I was the associate editor of the newspaper in Clarksville and, among other things, I made sure the Sunday paper got on the street before Buford at the Camelot bought the last round for the collected cops, newsmen and Apache helicopter gunship pilots.
At the time the News Brothers were making a documentary about the making of a newspaper. Some of you who have seen that movie, Flapjacks: The Motion Picture, will vouch that aside from All the President’s Men, Deep Throat, Citizen Kane and Flashdance, it is the most important and true-to-life tale of journalism ever told.
It’s a pity that it was released in the heart of the era of trickle-down, trickle-down, trickle-down-down economics and ferocious hero-worship of my favorite childhood TV show host. He did for America what 20-Mule-Team Borax did for Death Valley Days. I’m not sure what that means, but I actually liked Ron Reagan. Not as a president, but he seemed like an amiable sort who ran America like a Talk Show. He was the Johnny Carson of the Oval Office. I was sorry when Ron died. But then in his final days, he and I didn’t have a lot of hearts-to-heart and every time we’d talk about the News Brothers, he’d roll his knuckles, like he had a fistful of marbles and mutter “Strawberries. Strawberries.” He did give me a bolo tie, though.
Similarly, The Big Guy, our publisher, while he knew the News Brothers would provide good newspapers, was so frightened by stories of escaped monkeys, serial killers, Santa-clad heroes and prostitutes with hearts of gold, that he often would stare at his office wall – which had the Flapjacks movie poster on it – and say “Rosebud. Rosebud.” Of course, he’d also count his bonuses when the bottom-line tallies came in. He’d call me to his office, thank me for a good story or tell me “I’m not sure I’d have done it that way,” and encourage me to continue this course, always adding “be careful out there, Flapjacks” while he jangled the change in his pockets.
But we’re talking about John Glenn here. As the anointed leader of the newspaper, I decided that a former astronaut and genuine American hero who was coming to Clarksville to stump for the presidential nomination -- that I think eventually went to George Stephanopoulos, W.J.Souza, George Costanza, Anthony Quinn .. . Heck, I can’t remember who that guy was, a Greek geek of some sort, as I recall, no match for the Gipper. Oh yeah. Dukakis…. Say it slowly. Speaking of which, do you ever giggle when Joe Buck pronounces Albert Pujols’ name?
Hold it. The Duke took his shot four years later. The astronaut lost his nomination bid to Wally "The Big Mon" Mondale. I still like to say "Dukakis" three times quickly.
Regardless, I dispatched top political writer Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, a straight-shooter (at least eventually) and a warm and dynamic human being with a mustache that covered half his face to the airport to interview John Glenn, the great American hero.
It was while talking over that story in the budget meeting – the name news organizations used to give to the meetings where we hashed out what ought to be covered and where it ought to be played. I think they still have them, but instead of editors, they are run by the advertising department and the folks from the demographics department from corporate headquarters in Bangladesh.
Anyway, the meeting was normal. I was the guy wearing my high school football jersey and ill-fitting jeans and shades. Top Saturday reporter Rob “Death” Dollar was there, as he had to go to the cop shop and then go out and cover all of the redneck murders and gut-shootings as well as the normal Saturday night soldier highway death out on Fort Campbell Boulevard.
Also in the meeting was Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, who has gone on to have quite a career in corporate journalism, though I love him dearly. He was the copy editor. I think John Staed, now some sort of corporate success story in South Carolina, also was present, but I’m sure he still regrets it to this day.
“So, John Glenn’s in town, what do you think we ought to do, other than send Harold out to cover it and Robert Smith go shoot a handshake picture?” I asked our News Brothers attorney, Court Agate (real name, by the way).
He was just a friend and eventually ended up defending the News Brothers in numerous legal fights against corporate America. Not a very good attorney, obviously, judging by my personal yardstick. I understand he eventually retired to pan gold in the Yukon and live on the flesh of polar bears (or likely vice versa).
Again, another story.
We decided, as you probably expect by now, to go see John Glenn. And get him in our movie about newspapering. Problem was, he was landing on a runway, behind a locked gate and was being escorted by Secret Service agents and also by the Queen City’s friendly coppers (Motto stenciled on their car doors: “Happiness is a Warm Gun”), who were there to escort the city’s mayor. By the way, that same mayor endorsed me to be his replacement, but we re-elected him instead. So who really had the most power?
Again, another story. Great man.
I can tell you already know what’s coming.
As noted above, we followed Harold in when the security cops tried to lock the gate to the runway behind him. And while Harold spun the ends of his mustache and smiled at our behavior, for he was a good and honorable man -- and I was his boss -- we approached the Secret Agents.
Harold by now was interviewing this great American hero and future failed presidential candidate. But we continued to press forward. It was as if in Sam Peckinpah slow motion. The gunsels patted their waistbands and armpits (they were fat and sweaty perhaps or maybe they were readying to gun us down). The Senator and American Hero stepped in their way and said he wanted to talk to us.
The gunmen tried to push him into his limo to take him to the campaign stop. They eyed me angrily as I stepped into the door opening, preventing the hero from being pushed by an agent into the back seat. As I leaned on the door, we all talked with John Glenn, told him how proud we were to meet him and explained that he was going to be in a movie about newspapering.
He laughed until he cried. I rubbed his bald head and wished him luck against The Big Mon or whoever it was who got the nomination, and he just smiled.
Then he hugged us. “Boys, this was one of the best treats. Usually when I get into a town, I don’t have this kind of airport welcome. I’m proud to be in your movie about newspapering.
“And, when I’m president, I want you to come visit me at the White House. We’ll have hot dogs and kraut in the Rose Garden.”
Of course he wasn’t elected. But we used to gather regularly, whenever he came to Clarksville for those secret shuttle missions. We’d go to the Poor Man’s Country Club, enjoy pickled eggs and pigs feet and do Jimmy Carter and Dick Nixon impressions….
Sometimes Ron Reagan would come along, which was OK, except for his annoying knock-knock jokes and obsession with bowel movements.

Horrid time on the highway with Waylon and finding solace in the fact monkeys don't wear silver suits

I know monkeys don’t wear silver suits, but 35 years ago, two pretty young women with unshaved armpits were parked in the middle of the two-lane blacktop in front of Waylon Jennings’ house when I made the split-second decision to live. I didn’t like the other choice, so it wasn’t that difficult.
I’ve been thinking of that day and how Johnny Rodriguez offered refuge a lot lately, since that was the last time I was involved in an automobile accident, before the previously mentioned Big Bam of July 4.
My son, Joe, my near-constant sidekick – I’m just glad he survived our most recent death-defying adventure – says I didn’t swear too much when the car hit ours recently. I supposed I cussed, as I was and remain, as the doc tells me, “concussed.”
Oh help me, please doctor, I’m damaged…. Having to search the mental dictionary for words can be frustrating for a writer or even for someone like me.
But the doc says I’ll be better as just soon as I am able. And I’ve gotta admit I have been finding some good alternate words, both for cussing and for conversation. Lots of weird compound phrases using “vile” and “pig” and “insurance” and “oil” and “Shotgun Dick.” Hold, it I guess those were words I used before. See, I’m getting better all the time.
And it is with all of this in mind that I think about the pair of University of Michigan swimmers (or so they told me, to explain their garb) who had stopped their convertible on Old Hickory Boulevard, at the Brentwood-Nashville line, to gape at Waylon’s house 3½ decades ago .
By the way, whoever bought that old compound -- where magic was created and strange music and perhaps smoke floated in the air -- kept the iron “W” over the compound gate. (Did I ever tell you about the day I saw Willie Nelson, driving a big, old Pontiac, pulling out of that driveway, at least 30 years ago? He seemed happy and probably hungry. Thick smoke trailed from the car. I’m not sure if it was exhaust. )
The first time I crossed beneath that gate was at the height of the Outlaws movement and I was in a moment of despair.
I had been cruising along Old Hickory – a rural stretch back then – when the old Plymouth Duster I was driving came over a rise and there were 100 feet or less between me and the pretty girls in the green convertible.
Since Waylon and Willie and Tompall and Jessi were riding high back then, I didn’t blame them for stopping, although I’d have preferred if they’d pulled off the road so I didn’t have to ruin their day and mine.
Now, I admire their fandom of Waymore. I remain a huge fan, even though he remains dead, as many of you likely will agree. I know because I helped write his obituary. Interviewed Ramblin’ Jack Elliott for the obit. “He Waylonized songs,” said Ramblin’ Jack, from his San Francisco apartment.
If I was to ramble, I’d likely end up in San Francisco on occasion, too. If only because I like the Golden Gate, sourdough bread, sea lions, cable cars and the late Jerry Garcia. My son, Joe, says I ought to go there and swim out to Alcatraz. You’re supposed to swim away from the island, kid. Watch that Eastwood movie again.
Anyway these pretty young swimmers were stopped by Waylon’s house and I came over the rise and I couldn’t. Couldn’t stop, I mean.
Brentwood was still a rural outpost, served by the Pony Express and protected by Matt Dillon. Hold it, perhaps it was UPS and Bob Dylan…. Regardless, on that day my choices were to either slam on the brakes and try not to hit the girls in front of me too hard or to go off the road and go airborne, likely rolling several times and dying in a rocky cow pasture, my bloodied head covered with manure.
There are those today, particularly in the world of Shotgun Dick and his vile band of insurance and oil barons who would have preferred I take the latter course (see, I told you it’s all coming back now). In reality, they probably don’t care what happens to me. I’m just a gnat. They have bigger targets like The Big O.
On the topic of the guy from Chicago, my old ball-playing pal, well he promised me he was going to save the economy and end the war and bring me health care. … OK, I know those are impossible tasks … But I think it was Tim McGraw who said “Ya Gotta Believe” when he and Kenny Chesney went for that wild ride on police horses in Buffalo a decade ago. No, it was his dad, the great Tug McGraw who said that. “Ya Gotta Believe!”
So I believe in The Big O’s integrity, even if his delivery – like Tug’s – has been a bit iffy. But why’s he vacationing in Maine when he and Michelle preach that the rest of us suckers should spend our money basking on the oil-glazed beaches of the Gulf Coast?
You suppose he and Michelle and the kids don’t want to collect tar balls and dead fish instead of shells on their beach strolls while watching dolphin carcasses wash over their toes?
C’mon, Big O, man up. You let Big Oil hoodwink you on this one. And those are the same guys you are listening to about that ridiculous war. Call me when you get back from Maine, so we can shoot hoops again. It might help me. It sure would help you.
Back to Waylon and the big wreck of 1975 or so.
Instead of dying in cow manure in a field of rocks owned by Eddy Arnold – who came to be a close friend but who on that day I believe cussed me for blocking traffic -- I chose to live, so I applied the brakes and tapped the pretty girls in the rear end. It was a long time ago when I was older. The Duster I was driving was torn up, but it was repaired in a week or two and I was back on the road to what now I’ve determined is eventual ruin. The girls’ rear-end looked fine. And there wasn’t much damage to the car. No tickets were issued by Jake and Elwood, the cops who arrived on Trigger and Scout. Or maybe they rode one of those Blues Brothers cars.
If I had died on that day, or even in the most recent accident, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be writing this today.
One thing I always wondered: the young women wore those old, one-piece competitive swim suits that don’t hide anything. And while they were very attractive and nice, they didn’t shave their armpits. Maybe they were Europeans. Course I don’t shave mine either and I’m not European. Not pretty, though, either. And I seldom wear one of those bare-it-all swimsuits, except that one year when SI asked me to, but that turned out to be a practical joke orchestrated by Dan Jenkins.
Oh yeah, before I put that story to rest and go back and talk about Alice and the Restaurant, I ought to say I walked beneath the big “W” arch and to Waylon’s house to call the cops. No cell phones back then. Remember, this was 1975 and down here in Tennessee, we still had to have Mabel work the switchboard for our wind-up home phones. Only I think her name was Alice.
But when I needed help, Waylon was up at Johnny Cash’s house, choking down ribs, chitterlings and bourbon and talking to John and June and Bob Dylan, Dr. John the Night Tripper and Lawrence Welk, who legend has it landed a borrowed helicopter on the lawn so the assembled could hear his “champagne music” tales of honky-tonk desolation and broken hearts.
Since Waylon was gone and I didn’t think Shooter was born yet, I had to walk across the street, and Johnny Rodriguez’s maid let me into his house to make my police call. Too bad his career went belly-up and he moved back to Texas. If he’d stayed here he may not have ever been accused and acquitted in that killing of that Bosco guy he mistook for a burglar but which I always took for a chocolate flavoring you put in milk.
They say “in Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught,” but I’ve been told by one of the Lone Star State’s most respected journalists that down in that savage land it’s OK to use firearms as frequently as possible. After all Texas is pretty much outlaw territory run by illegal war profiteers and oil barons. The only thing that makes it a worthwhile place to visit is the savory flavor of the roadkill when served up on tortillas. Dead from Armadillo World Headquarters.
OK, well that’s enough on that. There was no gunplay involved in either wreck.
Accidents are accidental. Otherwise they’d be assault.
The other driver in the most recent adventure told my wife “your husband was dazed after the crash” because my head was slammed into the window by the impact. My wife bit her tongue.
Which brings me back to universal health care and the fact that I am helping The Big O and the Lone Ranger in our effort to take the nation away from the hate-spewing followers of that fat punk radio prophet they all so enjoy.
And, due to the series of unfortunate occurrences, I begin to sense that those pompous guys who want “to get our nation back” are applauding, hoping that I’ll check myself in to the local saloon or at least to the place they used to call the Insane Asylum in Hopkinsville, Ky.
I suppose it wouldn’t be that bad. My pal Lonnie lives in the subdivision tucked just beneath that complex. He’s a good guy with a lovely wife named Cricket and some dogs. He also saw the Little Green Men who landed in the crossroads of Kelly, outside Hopkinsville, 50-some years ago. I wrote about that before. It’s one of those much-studied alien encounters that have experts debating if it was true or just something misunderstood by the locals who saw the spacecraft and the Little Green Men.
Some thought they were monkeys who had escaped from a traveling carnival. Lonnie still shakes that logic off with the simple statement: “Monkeys don’t wear silver suits.”
That is a gentle truth offering me solace in this summer of discontent and disaster.

Queen Father, pigeon blasting, "The Big Bam" -- in everyone's life there's a Summer of 2010

Bam!
In everyone’s life there’s a summer of 2010. Other people may call it the Big Bang theory. I don’t want to call it the Big Bam theory, because “The Big Bam” is what his contemporaries called George Herman Ruth. The Babe crap was made up by journalists. There used to be journalists, you know. I was one of them. Then we all were sent into exile or assassinated. I’m not sure what happened to me.
I didn’t know The Big Bam, but I have eaten hot dogs and played ball. Only my finest play came back in the winter of 1983, when I took a long and high snowball, deep and inside, pitched by Clarksville’s Queen Father, a duly elected official. I blasted it to the far side of Public Square.
It was shortly after that that my best comrade Rob Dollar became police chief of the city of Clarksville. A lot of people don’t know that, because it was hushed up and he was run out of town on a rail because his selection as police chief was brokered by Gen. Colin Powell and the late Dwight David Eisenhower, who thought the son of a military veteran and a man with a degree in law enforcement ought to be the police chief.
Once he was selected, however, the long arm of the establishment came down hard. And perhaps it had a lot to do with the baseball game we had with the Queen Father. If we hadn’t beaten him, if we hadn’t embarrassed him in front of his/her colleagues, perhaps he/she would have given Rob the rightful keys to the big yellow squad car – it really was a brightly painted Volkswagen van with a peace sign on one side and a police sign on the other.
But it wasn’t to be. For one instant, Rob was police chief. Sworn in. He had his little dog at his side. Ma Dollar was proud. We all had a celebration that involved grenade launchers and automatic weapons gunfire throughout what then were the deserted streets of downtown Clarksville. More pigeons than people ventured down there those days. Lots of dead pigeons during that celebration.
By the way, does anybody remember the old tradition that they had in Clarksville and other towns when they’d invite the local shotgun-toting good ol’ boys to come downtown one Saturday afternoon a year, station themselves on a roof and blast away at pigeons?
I remember. When I first began working at the daily newspaper in Clarksville, when it came time for pigeon Saturday, we all were advised to get inside the building early and stay until dusk. Shotgun blasts filled the afternoon. Dead birds and the occasional innocent pedestrian littered the streets the morning after.
Back to the big celebration of Rob’s inauguration. Yes there was wild and festive frivolity in the quadrisexual night clubs throughout the downtown area. The Haberdashery and Strawberry Alley held huge “Village People” spectaculars, where guys dressed as the cop in that group, and sang “YMCA” in observance of Rob’s reputation as being an open and honest man who treats others as he likes to be treated.
That may have been the final straw, because within hours of his inauguration address, he was unemployed and watching spring training reruns on the superstation while my dog, Izzy, found some comfort on his carpet. At least until the flood came and washed him out.
That was a long time ago. But it was a minor flood, which brings me back to the summer of 2010 and the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not my favorite season. In fact, I can’t stand this year. I want out. As soon as possible.
As for Rob, well he didn’t get much out of his short term as police chief. You’d have to search long and hard in the microfilm to find any record of his tenure. Actually, it was expunged. They told him “You can’t be police chief in this town,” and did their best to break him.
Problem is he’s a News Brother, one of the two most active of the brethren. And he sued the city for $600 and a crate of barbecue pork rinds. He could have won, too, if it hadn’t been for the pork rinds clause. The judge, Roy Oswald Bean, thought Rob was making reference to the friendly coppers, you know “Pork Rinds = Pigs” – which now that I think about it could be the name of my autobiography, although I really will title it “They Call Me Flapjacks” because it is about me or someone who looks and smells a lot like me.
Truth is, Rob just wanted to have an ample supply of the pork rinds because they were the favorite snack of the Vice President of the United States of America at the time: George Herbert Walker “Bocephus” Bush, a decent man who obviously had flawed loins, perhaps because he didn’t get enough pork rinds back when he was the Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World. Remember that movie? I think the hero killed something like 27 people in the first five minutes. And it was a comedy.
Of course, Papa Bush was in charge of the CIA, which back then was No. 2 to the KGB before they became partners in crime and eventually started filling up suburbs with their agents. I’ll tell you one thing, the agents we deported in the trade for our agents in the Gulag looked pretty damned good. That’s another issue for another day, but why would we trade beautiful women for dumpy old men? For that matter, why would LeBron James crap on his hometown?
As for Cleveland, my pal “Flash” – who has climbed high in the News Brothers ranks thanks to his undying loyalty and the fact he spent Halloween with us – was in Cleveland the other day. He saw all of these people tearing up the streets, screaming about the departure of LeBron for Miami. “Flash,” though a smart guy and a devout disciple of the late George Bernard Shaw as well as George Gershwin and Yoda and that bald guy in Lost, had no idea who LeBron was. All he told the guy at the Shell station was that “I’d like to go to Miami, too.”
They beat him within an ounce of his life with the handle of the gas pump, before his wife Brenda, who I helped raise when she was a young and beautiful Army brat whose dad and mom were wonderful people, rescued him. She tried to light her hair-spray to fight off the crowd as they gathered to stomp Flash. She’d seen it in a movie. But the Flash family is “green” and they have no aerosol products in their luggage. So that didn’t work. Anyway, she got them to leave Flashy boy alone when she said “my dad is Jimmy Brown.” Hard to believe, but it may be true as there is absolutely no resemblance.
OK, so we’ve all been having hard times lately, what with LeBron showing that he’s got the same kind of class that a nameless and classless “newspaperman” displayed when he turned his back on Rob and eliminated all mention of his brief reign as police chief.
But what about the Big Bang, you say. I’ve been teasing about this lately. Simply put, I got my brains over easy on the Fourth of July.
Suffice it to say that a car ran into my car and it was totaled. This comes on top of the flood of a couple of months ago and, much worse, the death of Pal Kitty, who was my best and least judgmental friend.
I’m waiting to see if I can get another car sometime. But I’m lucky, because at least I don’t have a job to call in sick to.
For that I thank the most recent Presidents of the United States of America and their sponsors: the insurance, banking, oil and media industries.
OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I guess, as Ricky once said to me when he caught me and Fred Mertz eating all of the chocolates that came off the assembly line: “Flapjacks, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
Accidents are accidental. That’s why they call them accidents.
So I’ll just let it go like that and wait for football season and remember that in everyone’s life there’s a summer of 2010.