Please allow me to introduce my children to the land of their birth ... Gypsy freaks, Vlad and all

Four blocks from where the fat, legless Gypsy beggar angrily tossed my son Joe’s offering of a piece of candy before she reached into her underwear for her iPhone,  Emily stands atop the stone wall, looks over the ironwork and sees a 43-year-old man with long, brown hair on the orphanage steps.

“Dad.   I remember,” she says, emotion offering a bit of gravel to her normally sprightly voice. “You were sitting right there, and I crawled up the steps to you and you grabbed me and held me.”

The pigeons – and there are even more than there are members of the Gypsy sidewalk freak show troupe – sing “woo-woo.”   Perfect pitch.  Like in the chorus for The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,” a song which – even when I have seen Mick sing it in person -- still catapults me to this land of  narrow cobblestone streets, plow-pulling mules and fields of sunflowers and hops.

Romania: The land that time forgot, where the clubs are filled with those stuck in some sort of cigarette and martini Sinatra cool while the peasants – pronounced “Pees-Ants” by those attempting English – suck on second-hand cigarettes and navigate a hardscrabble life.  If they are lucky they make it to Bucharest, the capital.  One million people were there on my first visit in 1995. Ten million now.  The children of salt miners and hops harvesters know that if they can make it there they’ll make it anywhere. Of course, most don’t.    It’s difficult to make any progress at all on roads planned by an evil dictator for 25,000 cars and trucks that now accommodate a million tiny, exhaust-plumed vehicles.      

Getting ahead of myself, but for those of you who have never been to Romania, let alone know where it is in the farthest reaches of Eastern Europe, nestled against the tepid Black Sea, please allow me to introduce you to it, a bit, at least. It is a poor land of mostly wondrous people and Gypsy con artists. Watch your wallet and try not to meet the eyes of the beggars lest you become sucked into some sort of deviant lifestyle.

After all, isn’t this the same country where Vlad the Impaler, who drank his enemies’ blood, gave birth to the legend of Dracula? Both are national heroes.

Vlad’s ancient fortress, still being excavated from layers of dirt, Nazi troops and general abandonment, is right around the corner from our hotel in Bucharest’s Old City. More pigeon “woo-woo” choruses can be heard -- at least in my mind -- as I stand at that fortress of blood and stare at the age-worn statue of Mr. Vlad D. Impaler.

But on this day of fat and freakish beggars, we aren’t in Bucharest. We are across the country, in a battered but brave college city called Arad, filled with ancient churches and statues celebrating war heroes who seemed to have saved Romania from everyone – the Hungarians, the Serbs, The Nazis, the Commies, Matt Dillon and G.I. Joe. And the Hungarians who saved the Romanians also are saluted. As are the Arad residents who hid Jews who escaped from nearby Germany during crazy little Adolf’s reign of hate.  How could such a little fart with a licorice-stain mustache be considered the leader of the master race?  

No answer though, at least not here, where Romanian cops tote AK-47s while eating freshly twisted pretzel-like pastries  filled with chocolate from the almost constant series of storefront bakeries.       

On this day, during our search for our children’s pasts, I help hoist my daughter the three or four feet to the crown of the concrete and stone wall so she can look over the ironwork and see the front steps of the orphanage from which we adopted her 18 years ago.

The sudden flashback it spurs from her is the payoff for this trip in which we search for something… Answers? Closure? The end of recurring nightmares about old people staring in windows? Swallowed fear of abandonment?

Even though we’d planned for a year and I’d taken on as many writing jobs as possible to help us from depleting all of our resources, we really aren’t sure why we were here. Since we don’t  know what to expect, why should we expect anything at all?

It is mission with purpose, though, to help our kids confront their pasts.  But how do you do that when, to us, their pasts only go back to the days we embraced them in the orphanages?

Well, the only thing we knew was you can’t find those pasts on Rochelle Drive in a tidy little middle-class section of Nashville called Crieve Hall.

My kids were raised in this neighborhood of 1950s ranchers and mature trees.  But they were birthed and abandoned in another world, in that country that always comes to mind when I hear “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Our children – Emily, 19, and Joe, 17 – are all ours. Sometimes I regret that my sense of ethics and never backing down nor bending over when principles are challenged has perhaps hampered their material rewards. I just hope they have learned about doing the right thing … and why the cost is worth it. Besides, how many Xboxes does a kid need?  

I’ve been their dad most of their lives.  Before Suzanne and I met them, absorbing them into our hearts, they existed. The existence? Perhaps not pretty. They were abandoned by their mothers, perhaps for their own good I suppose, and spent their first years in warehouse-like dormitories filled with cribs and chaos and chicken pox and the stench of dirty diapers. In Emily’s case, when we first got her 18 years ago, she was swaddled in plastic, sort of like a low-grade Hefty kitchen trash bag, taped around her midsection.

Almost 15 years ago, Joe’s diapers were more conventional. When we met him, he was naked from the waist up and his lower half was covered by leggings. He wailed as Suzanne pulled them off and replaced them with Pampers and American toddler clothes.

They don’t remember much, my beautiful babies.

But sometimes what they don’t remember hurts them. And they don’t know why. Nor do we. We only know their lives since we went to Romania in 1995 for Emily – I remember Jerry Garcia died while we were in Bucharest back that summer, only because the radio in the bus blasted about what a long, strange trip it had been -- to my agreement – as I stepped out the door for some bananas from a farmer.

 We returned three years later to adopt Joe, the kid the orphanage director scolded for crying, cursing him in Romanian and tossing his last name at him like a weapon. “Flagiu!” he shouted when the little boy resisted the two Americans who were going to take him from the only home – disheveled,  nicotine-stained  and soiled as it may be – he had known since his mother turned him over to the orphanage at six months of age. She lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor, neither electric nor water. Several families shared the “home.”  She had other children, but could not care for the kid who has become Joe.  I think he’s better off. At least I hope so.       

I was just 43 when I first entered this land where the pigeons seemingly always coo the “woo-woo” punctuation of “Sympathy for the Devil.” (Sometimes I’ll be walking alone on a Romanian street at night and I’ll hear someone singing “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste….” Except it’s in my head.)  

My mission 18 years ago took Suzanne and I from Bucharest to Arad – via the Orient Express and to a train station where men urinated openly while rolling cigarettes and sharing liters of beer  with naked youngsters. We were only in Arad briefly, with our lawyer leading four couples past the guard shack – the guard was smoking with a pal that day, I recall – and into the building where we would first meet our babies and then take them down into the courtyard to play briefly before choking down thick, boiled coffee and signing the legal adoption papers.

Our daughter had been left in the hospital after she was born.  For almost two years she lived in this orphanage.

Now, 18 years later, Emily gets to look again at that courtyard where her life was changed. Where she became my kid. Where she climbed into her Tata’s lap and smiled.

The guard shack is empty so there was no one to bribe with American cigarettes on this visit.

As I watched the mixture of awe and shock on Emily’s face the other day, images of life also flooded my brain. Inside these now-locked gates – they are refurbishing the old orphanage to make it into a social services building – I remembered clearly those first few moments with our 23-month-old daughter.

I was one of four brand-new fathers on that journey and the only man who did not frighten the little girls, who had been raised by an all-female group of caretakers and administrators.  The three other girls also sought me out on that day, in that courtyard, on those steps.  Never knew why. Perhaps it was because of my long hair. Perhaps it’s because beneath the bluster and profanity, I’m a relatively gentle human being. Hell, for all I know it was the fact I didn’t smell bad. Or perhaps because I did.

Of course, there was the one girl who changed me forever.

Perhaps I’ll return to that courtyard one day, I thought back then.  Because in addition to the girls who were getting new homes in the U.S., there was this tow-headed boy, maybe 2, wearing a ratty Cubs T-shirt. He kept grabbing my legs.

“Wish we could take him home, too,” I told Suzanne, who tearfully agreed while she nestled our new daughter back in 1995.

Well, we didn’t get that boy. But it was because of that day in the courtyard, the frightening and heart-swelling mixture of emotions, that we did decide we wanted another child, boy or girl, from the orphanages that littered a land that time forgot.

That’s why three full days before I helped Emily to the top of the concrete and stone wall my family – Suzanne, me, Emily and Joe – stood in the playground of another former orphanage, now a safe house for battered wives and their children – and recalled a 1998 day in the countryside of Slobozia, about 15 kilometers outside of Giurgiu, across the mighty Danube from the high-rises and nuclear reactors of Bulgaria.

 Back then, to enter this facility -- a refuge for abandoned boys younger than 3 -- we’d had to step through the gates and wade through a sea of smiling and scruffy kids.  The boys clutched our legs and eagerly reached for the chocolate cookies – “biscuits” they called them – we handed out as we made our way through the playground to the office where we dressed Joe for his “escape” from the too-full system. “Mister. Biscuits,” seemed to be the only two words of English these boys knew.  I slipped packs of Merit 100s into the hands of the female caretakers, all of whom were dressed in bathrobes.

 A few days ago my son Joe’s eyes glaze --shock and awe or weariness?  – as we wander through the same playground where the children of the abused mothers climb on the same swing set and slide that had occupied some of Joe’s time up until that day 15 years ago.

Joe stares at the playground equipment as we re-enter the old and somewhat shabby building. Instead of rows upon rows of cribs – miniature barred prisons for Romania’s cast-off children – filling the rooms, separate suites are shared by mothers and their children, refugees from spousal abuse.

The moms and the kids smile as we wander the hallways, one of the caretakers talking to Joe in Romanian about what this building had been and what it is now.  Course Joe couldn’t understand her. But he did understand the crucifix and icon-covered walls and the new Eastern Orthodox chapel out front.

He also followed the woman as she took him across the street, where a farmer had set up a tent that he filled with chickens: Tuesday-night dinners awaiting the purchase and slaughter by area peasants returning to their one-room, dirt-floored houses after a day in the sunflower and hops fields or salt mines.

Suzanne and I both notice time had not erased the strong smell of urine from inside the building.

For the two of us, this is our third trip to Romania.  In a very real way the most important.  Our children, now nearly full-grown, always have known they were adopted from this country. And to them the words “orphans” and “orphanage” were basically concepts.  Sure they came from orphanages, but what did that really mean?

And yes, they had been abandoned by their birth mothers and stockpiled in the backward orphanage system run by the state, but where did that occur?

We knew we couldn’t offer them the “why?” of their abandonment. And since both of us came from basically middle-class American upbringings, with the nuclear family and bickering siblings, we really couldn’t fully understand what our children had gone through.

All we knew was that we loved them, that we had rushed to Romania for Emily’s adoption as soon as we could after ABC reporter Tom Jarriel, now long-retired, exposed the orphanages, hundreds of them, as he traveled with the revolutionary forces during the fall of the communist regime at Cold War’s end.

 We knew that before they left us for their own adult lives, we needed to return to Romania.  Both of my babies have scars from their orphan years that we are helping them heal even if we can’t fully comprehend the cause. The trip was designed to help them know who they were, where they had come from, perhaps give them a little closure and make them realize their lives in Crieve Hall, USA, do matter.

Sure, we had told them about the King of the Gypsys and how he and his brother had matching castle-like mansions on the road from Bucharest to Giurgiu.

And we had told them about the Gypsys themselves, back then kids who were mutilated by their own parents so they could be more successful beggars. Now they are fat and middle-aged. But still maimed.

We had told them about Bucharest and its examples of extreme wealth and poverty, a city designed  by evil dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to look like Paris. But it also resembles hard-scrabble sections of Queens or Brooklyn or North Nashville.

The fact that the streets clogged with a million cars were designed by the evil dictator to only accommodate 25,000 was the source of frustration for our new friend, Lori Erbatu, who is on the board of a Christian group home for orphans in Giurgiu.  We had hired Lori as our driver after he – on his own time – had followed up on my e-mail clues to wander the countryside of Slobozia looking for the old facility from which Joe had “escaped.”

 “You will have a good day,” he promised in our last e-mail before my family began the 27 hours of flying it took us to get to Bucharest. 

Lori offered my children a view of what is good about Romania – the people – which I hope stays with them as they continue to digest what it means to be a Balkan orphan.

The children had much to learn.  The old state orphanage system has been disbanded, replaced by private group homes.   The three boys in the group home in Giurgiu – where we dined with the orphans after visiting Joe’s old “home” – were the same age as Joe. Like Joe, they had no memories of the dirty little barracks in Slobozia.  They were among the kids who grabbed our legs and thanked us for the biscuits as we pushed through the playground, hoisting our 3-year-old son 15 years ago.

Never adopted, these boys join us on the visit to their former “home.” While none remembered the place itself, all remembered being abandoned, tucked away in cribs, forgotten children. Blank, stunned stares.

The other three boys joked about their favorite beers and Taylor Swift as we traveled to and from the orphanage.  Joe remained quiet, lost in thought, staring out the windows of the van at the one-room homes, some with straw roofs, others ceramic.   Looking for his biological mother?

Does he think too much or does he think he thinks too much? I don’t know. All I know is that he kept looking around at the horses pulling wagonloads of crops through the streets, and he was amazed by the flocks of sheep that occasionally blocked our path.

 Emily, who helped Joe’s fellow orphanage alums set up FaceBook pages back at the group home, and Suzanne both pointed out the massive water snake swimming near the Danube shore when we stopped at Giurgiu’s tiny sea port.

“A lot of people take cruises from Germany to here,” Lori explained, pointing at the passenger riverboat docked here. “They take the cruise on the Danube and then we (his company) pick them up and take them to Bucharest.”

There they visit the “People’s Palace” – built for Dictator Ceausescu … but he never lived in this second-largest building in the world (behind only the Pentagon) because the peasants and the students killed him.  A gift to the country on Christmas day 1989.

 The “old city” of Bucharest changed dramatically since my first two visits.

The once-abandoned and ancient buildings are being refurbished -- into hotels, restaurants, shops and the occasional sex shop – as a way of providing jobs and keeping the young people in the country, ending the flow of youth who left the University of Bucharest and sought work in Italy.

Churches hundreds of years old sit next to tea rooms and bakeries up and down this central city hill and its cobblestone streets.

This too – the progress, the beauty of the young people, the glories of the nation’s capital – was a very real part of our agenda in taking the kids back.

We could not and will never know what it is like to be abandoned by our mothers and brought up in relative squalor with hundreds of other diaper-dragging tots and toddlers.  But we wanted our children to know the good that is in their homeland.

And there is the matter of physical size.  Joe is 5-6 and likely will grow no taller. Emily is about 5-0.

In the States they are short people, who – as Randy Newman sang in his satirical rant -- stand so low, you got to pick them up just to say hello.

Because of better nutrition in middle-class America, my children come close to towering over their peers in the old country.

“I feel better seeing that everyone here is shorter than me,” says Joe, who adds that if he moved back to Romania he could probably be the center on the basketball team.

“I’m tired of people back home saying I look like I’m 12 years old,” says Emily, who, while hardly towering over the beautiful young women of the city, at least holds her own.

Little things like that? Mission accomplished. 

And maybe now that they have seen where they came from, the other issues of orphans, feelings of abandonment and detachment, will be more manageable. Maybe they can focus on who they are, where they are now and perhaps how they can help their homeland in the future.

Emily’s old orphanage was our last stop in Romania.  Flying from Bucharest to Timasoara (birthplace of the revolution), we took a cab that traveled 91 mph (147 kmh) on the narrow two-lane road to and from Arad.

Someplace in that city, a university town that is the “capital” of western Romania, there may be a woman who slipped from the birthing room and gave up this beautiful child of mine.

We didn’t look for her, of course. But what we did do was stay in a hotel just a few blocks from the building that was the old orphanage.  

And as we walked the streets of Arad, my children may have been stunned by some of what they saw on the sidewalks between monuments and pastry shops.

A dozen-plus Gypsy beggars -- legs chopped, cropped, bent backward, busted forward at the knee, arms or eyes missing -- didn’t slow me as we wandered the streets of Arad. I’d been here before. Many years ago. And I left with first prize.

These laughing, legless and bloated beggars seemed to trouble my children. Joe, as I said, did not listen to my advice to walk away. Instead he gave one woman some candy. She looked at it and threw it to the sidewalk.

“That’s the last time I’m going to help someone,” says Joe, almost in tears, as the woman strong-arms her way back to her huge Styrofoam takeout lunch stashed near the open-air newsstand, grabs her iPhone from her undies and begins a laughing conversation. Probably making fun of the kid who gave her a piece of candy.

“It’s Romania, kid,” I say.  Sure, it’s a dark and tired place where Vlad D. Impaler is a hero and the mutilated Gypsys provide a freak show.  But most of the people are beautiful, kind and warm…. Like my children.

“I always have this wall in my dreams,” Emily says, as she rubs her hands against the concrete and stone that supports the ironwork. “I think this is it.”

And then, as her dad helps her to the top of the wall to where she can see the stairs in the courtyard, she remembers her first few pulls up the steps to the 43-year-old guy with the long hair. The guy she called Tata as he held her for the first time.

“This helps just to be here,” Emily says. Like many or most orphaned children, there are ghosts, many that haunt them through life, causing a mixture of fear of being tossed away with long-forgotten feelings of just that happening.

“You always told me about being from an orphanage, but it’s hard to understand that until you are standing right here. There’s closure,” she says. Garlic and onions flavor the steam from a nearby iron pot being readied for an afternoon party.

Emily reaches for the hand of the brown-haired guy who sat on those steps 18 years ago. Course things have changed.  Yes, “Sympathy for the Devil” still plays in his head, but the hair is now white.  

And that old man has a family he loves more than anything.

                
            


Outside Arad orphanage.

A final standing ovation; 'Brother George taught us all how to sing with a broken heart'

I was fortunate enough to cover George Jones' funeral service for Reuters. And because it was George Jones, the greatest singer of country music ever, they let me write longer than the norm. A very few things were changed by editors, but cuts were made by necessity (I turned in close to 1,000 words). So for those who want the complete version or simply for my blog archives, here's the untouched version cranked out in the hour after the funeral.

George Jones’ final standing ovation – after a career filled with such salutes – came, fittingly, Thursday afternoon at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville.

And, equally as fitting, the song that drew the 4,000-plus fans and friends and media to their feet, was Jones’ signature tune, about love and death, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

Jones, who died April 26, was in a casket draped by a blanket of yellow flowers, just below the lip of center stage, when the audience leaped to its collective feet to applaud Alan Jackson.

The long-time friend and admirer of the man who so influenced his singing style, Jackson channeled Jones’ country traditionalism when he sang the robust version of that song, ending it by removing his white cowboy hat and waving it toward the heavens while he looked up, tears on his cheeks and said: “We love you, George.”

But Jones would be heard one more time at the end of this service that lasted 2 hours and 45 minutes, but only on the loud-speaker system. After Jackson left the stage, a spotlight was focused on the yellow-flower-draped coffin as the pall-bearers tended to their duties and the family began its exit, “When the Last Curtain Falls,” filled the home of the Grand Ole Opry.

The song, with the lines "When the last curtain falls with a final goodbye/And the bitter cold darkness of night/floods the days of our lives..." continued to play on the public-address system as the casket was rolled out the doors of the Grand Ole Opry House and into the waiting black hears for the ride to the cemetery. 

It was Jones’ final farewell to the Grand Ole Opry, the venerable radio show in which he had been a cast member since 1956, almost from the beginning of the career that was celebrated by musicians and politicians and other guests throughout the long service.

The service with its liturgy and levity – yes, there were the occasional “Yep, that’s ol’ George” stories told by the luminaries – focused on redemption.

For while the stunningly successful early years of his career were celebrated,  the focus really was on the last 30 years, the length of his marriage to the former Nancy Ford Sepulvado, who, Jones frequently said, “saved my life.”

During his career, which saw the kid from East Texas skyrocket to the top, Jones’ drug and alcohol abuse, and the incidents that accompanied them, often gained more headlines than his status as the greatest singer in the history of country music.

But country’s King of Broken Hearts – with the help of his wife – was able to chase away those demons for the most part and live out his career as a revered elder statesman of country music.    

Country superstar Brad Paisley -- who was among the performers to take turns on the stage that was filled with floral arrangements, photographs and a rocking chair (a salute to Jones’ “I Don’t Need Your Rocking Chair” classic) --  performed Tom T. Hall's “Me and Jesus” during the service that was focused on gospel songs.

But before he sang, he talked about this good fortune in getting to call the elder statesman his friend.

“I’m lucky enough to have met George when he had gotten right, beat the demons, found Nancy and found God,” said Paisley. “He’s an inspirational story to all of us. If that man can live to be 81, then all of us can fight against the things that bring us down.”

CBS chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer talked about the voice and the songs and the dreams they fueled – the journalist is a part-time country musician by hobby.  “Nobody could sing like George Jones unless you were George Jones,” Schieffer said.

But he also put the spotlight on the latter years of Jones’ career.  He said while “He Stopped Loving Her Today” saved the singer’s career, “It would take a good-hearted woman to save his life.”

“We’ve had few sounds more lovely than the voice of George Jones,” said former first lady Laura Bush, who sat next to Nancy Jones during the service.  She added she heard that voice frequently during her White House years. “I heard ‘White Lightning’ as George W. worked out on the treadmill listening to George J.” she said, of the former president’s penchant for cranking up Jones CDs while exercising.

She too talked about the love of Jones’ live. “He was blessed to be able to walk through the last 30 years with wife, Nancy, by his side,” she said.

But of course much of the service focused on the singer, travails and all. “He was the voice of the common man,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Jones friend. “He sang the songs that cried for us.”

Tanya Tucker and The Imperials, Randy Travis, The Oak Ridge Boys, Charlie Daniels, Travis Tritt, Kid Rock, Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Chesney and Wynonna Judd all paid tribute to Jones during the service that all four Nashville TV stations carried live. 

 “George was and always will be the greatest singer of all time in country music,” said Barbara Mandrell. “He sang for you and me and now he’s singing in glory for the one who gave him that voice. Hallelujah.”

Vince Gill, who teamed with Patty Loveless to sing his song, “Go Rest High On That Mountain,” that has become a part of every country music funeral in recent years, added  “Brother George taught us all how to sing with a broken heart.”

 

In memory of a great man: Interviewing George Jones, a gentle and sweet human being

This story was published by The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville on Nov. 25, 2004. At the time I was senior entertainment writer for the newspaper.  Since George was buried today, I thought you might like to read this. It was not the only time I interviewed George, but it was (as I wrote earlier for CMT.com ... check out my first-person story for CMT at http://www.cmt.com/news/country-music/1706449/an-afternoon-at-george-jones-house.jhtml), one of the most glorious afternoons of my life.

Here is the story as it appeared in the newspaper all those years ago.

The original headline was: He still don't need no rockin' chair, with subhead: George Jones just can't talk himself into retiring; new compilation, TV special show why......
 

George Jones once turned down a chance to record with Frank Sinatra.

"It hurt me. It is one of my biggest regrets. But I told them I can't sing that way."

If there had been such a pairing - "I think it was gonna be London Town or one of those" - it would have been monumental. Jones has been referred to as ''the Frank Sinatra of country music,'' for a simple reason. He explains: "The Good Lord gives us all some type of talent. You do your best with it.

"If you use that talent doing what you really love to do, that's what makes you successful."

Jones has been called things great and small during his 50 years in country music.

But the moniker of which he is most proud: "The Greatest Singer in Country Music." It is his pride. His joy. His God-given legacy. It also causes him most concern. Jones knows he's abused his gift.

"All them ol' barrooms and smokin' and drinkin'," he laments. "If you could only learn your lesson earlier in life . . . ."

Hard-living into middle-age robbed him of some range and power.

"People say that they wish they could live their lives over, they'd do it different. . . . I'd probably do the same old crap, but only do it worse."

Jones has lived to put his demons at bay while continuing to record and perform. He also has captured the admiration of generations. While taken for granted in Nashville - "They see me out everywhere" - Jones is "Johnny Cash cool" in New York and L.A.

He and Merle Haggard are about the last ones left. That's why it didn't take long to fill the talent roster with many of today's top stars when the word went out there was going to be a special Soundstage TV tribute to the Possum.

The show, to be aired tonight on PBS, is a two-hour special that celebrates Jones' 50 years as a professional musician.

Guests include the likely - Alan Jackson, Kris Kristofferson, Vince Gill and more country greats - and the unexpected - Harry Connick Jr., Aaron Neville and Uncle Kracker.

During the two-hour broadcast, they sing from the Jones songbook. Many of those songs also are featured on the breathtaking triple-disc George Jones - 50 Years of Hits just released by his Bandit Records.

The album came out Nov. 9, the day of the Country Music Awards. Jones did not spend his evening with the celebrated flock at the Opry House; he was signing "400-450 copies" of the album at the Cool Springs Wal-Mart.

"That's where I belonged," he says. "With my fans."

Even Jones was surprised by the turnout. "I expected maybe a dozen people. Here we signed for an hour and a half straight. It went a lot better than I thought."

He pauses to pop a small piece of gum in his mouth. "I'm chewing too much of this stuff. All the time. The other day, I bit my tongue. . . . Almost killed me." He pokes out his tongue to display the sore, red tip. Then he laughs.

"Ol' Haggard says country radio is doing him and me a favor. By not playing our stuff, it makes people have to come out to hear us."

It almost stunned this warhorse that the hastily planned 50 years of hits TV special took almost no time to populate with talent.

"I can't wait to see it," he says. "We had some wonderful artists out there who were kind enough to do it."

Occasionally, they are joined by Jones onstage. The singing wasn't Jones' favorite part. "I enjoyed just sitting there, in the front row, listening. It was refreshing."

He teases that the women, particularly Amy Grant and Martina McBride, chose drinking songs.

There were suggestions that the show only go an hour. And it will play that way in some markets.

But Jones bristled at the idea of cutting it to an hour. "It's something we were gonna do. I wanted to do it at least halfway right.

"I said I don't want anyone left out. We went full-blast. I said this is probably gonna be my goin'-out kind of thing."

This is but one reference to the fact Jones, 73, is aware of his mortality: "I'm lucky to be alive now."

He vows: "I'm gonna work another year or so on tour." Then he quickly recants: "I'm not going to retire from the road completely as long as I can get dates."

He sometimes ponders what he would do if he did retire fully: "I would fish and hunt and do things I want to do. Music takes up all of your time. All of your thinking. That's why a lot of us went way over the line, drowning in a sea of booze.

"Nowadays, it's more convenient for singers, with television and everything. They can work 20 days and then take three months off.

"I missed out on the real big money. If I'd have been born 20 years later, I'd have really cashed in."

Talk about retirement seems just that. After all, he has dates booked. He has a TV special. And there is this masterpiece of a career-chronicling album, one which delights even the legendary singer himself.

So many of these songs are gems the singer himself is rediscovering.

He has to search diligently through a half-century's memories to recall anything significant about particular recording sessions.

"I remember Why Baby Why? (his first hit and the opening track on the album). But as you go along farther, all of the years, it's hard to remember."

That first breakthrough session was held in a "living room in an old house (in Texas) that had egg crates on the walls and the ceiling for the sound. Every once in awhile, you'd hear an 18-wheeler go by."

Many of the later songs were recorded in Nashville, in Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. "Started out in this little-bitty room. Couldn't have been much bigger than this room."

He looks across the spacious TV room. "So many of my hits were cut in there it's unbelievable. White Lightning. Who Shot Sam. A bunch of the older stuff.

"Then we moved across the hallway to a bigger studio. But it's amazing what came out of that little-bitty room."

Jones chugs his White Lightning bottled water. "You know, you hear radio say, 'He's had his day. He needs to make room for the younger artists. ' Well, that'd (tee) anybody off to hear that.

"Country music is like a religion to me."

It's like a business to many of the newcomers. Jones recounts the visit by a TV reporter to the Wal-Mart while he was signing albums on CMA night.

"The reporter asked what do I think about the awards show?

"I said 'Hell, I'm not into that kind of music. I'm into country music.' ''

The reporter backed away before Jones could finish his thought. "I was hoping I'd be asked what I thought about the show moving to New York next year.

"I'd have said, 'You know something, that's the best thing I've heard. This new country, well, they ought to take it to New York and keep it up there.

"It's not country music. These new artists are too big for their britches. And that's what hurts me more, because I love it so much.

"And to see the breath being taken out of it. Well, you wonder if the kids of tomorrow, are they ever gonna get a chance to hear real, traditional country music again? I don't think so."

If tradition is the taste, there now are two important new documents. No. 1: tonight's PBS show.

More important is the 50-song compilation, where every stage of Jones' voice is sampled, from Why Baby Why? in 1956 to Amazing Grace from a year ago.

There will be more from the guy who sometimes regrets not singing with Sinatra. Any talk of retirement will be put off.

"Now, I'm not ready to go, but if the Good Lord takes me, well, I've been here a lot longer than I ought to be."

Rhinestone Cowboy tells Ol' Flap about the Queen Mum, family, Malibu and golf

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to spend time with the great Glen Campbell, prior to the Alzheimer's news, etc.  The magazine for which it was written never developed the web site for which it was intended, so it's never been published. Glen's still out there working, so I figured it's better to run this story now rather than as some sort of too-late remembrance. So, reaching back to a cherished hour or two in the spring of  2010, I thought I'd pull this story from my files and put it on the blog. After all, I believe at one point, Old Flapjacks may have been a lineman for the county. Or perhaps he was just running for the county line....   

Glen Campbell just has to look out his window to see the waters of the Pacific pounding at the Malibu shore. 

“It’s beautiful,” says the legendary entertainer, whose home is just across the Pacific Coast Highway from the sea. “I look out there and I see that God does some wonderful work.”

Clearly he appreciates his surroundings when he’s off the road. But he also loves to get out and entertain crowds. That’s his job, of course. And he’s particularly excited on this day because he and his new band – primarily made up of his children – are preparing to head to one of his favorite places on Earth: The UK.

The UK tour begins April 23 at INEC Kilarney in Ireland and ends May 13 at the Bournemouth Pavilion.

He’s played the UK often and he loves the people, who clearly love him right back.

“They really know their music, you know. And they sing along. It’s incredible.”

One of the people he was fondest of in the UK was the late Queen Mother, he says, reflecting warmly on what he still regards as a treasured friendship.

He views himself fortunate to have met the Royal Family, but he has especially deep feelings for the Queen Mother, who died in 2002 at 101 years old.

“She was wonderful,” says the singer, recalling how that friendship began. “She had kind of taken a liking to Glen Campbell and told the promoter that she’d like to meet me. And of course I wanted to meet her.

“I had lunch with her a couple of times. She was just awesome, just a breath of fresh air.  I’ll never forget that woman. I really loved her.”

One of his regrets is that he won’t be able to introduce her to the new band that has him as excited as he’s ever been about going on tour. 

You see, this time he’s taking his family along, not only to enjoy making new memories together in the UK, but also to share the stage.

His new touring band includes three of his children: Debby Campbell, singing harmony;  Ashley Campbell playing banjo, guitar, keyboards and supplying vocals; and Cal Campbell on drums.

“It’s great to look over and see three of my kids playing,” says Campbell. “It makes me proud of them.”

Tongue firmly in cheek, he says this family band saves him a lot of money. “I joke them that they are my personal slaves. I said, ‘what the heck is this: I’m having to feed them, so I might as well put them to work.’’’

While dad says being on stage with his kids “is really fun,” he also enjoys the fact that his wife, Kim, is always there on tour. “She loves it. She’s like a mother hen.”

While UK fans will hear plenty of their favorite Glen Campbell songs – classics like “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Gentle on My Mind” – they’ll also be hearing songs by a surprising array of artists who the singer covered on his most recent album, Meet Glen Campbell.

On that Capitol recording, producer Julian Raymond as well as the singer and others culled through songs by some amazing artists – among them Tom Petty, U2, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Paul Westerberg and John Lennon.

But Raymond didn’t want Campbell’s songs to sound like typical covers of those artists’ work.

Instead, the chosen songs were rewritten and “we recorded the songs to sound like Glen Campbell standards,’’ the producer says.

The critically acclaimed album pretty much set the tone for the upcoming Campbell project, again produced by Raymond.

Ghost on the Canvas, which won’t be released until 2011, is meant to be played front to back. The album is full of compositions written for the project that “tells” the story of the singer’s life and career.

Writers who contributed to this project include Jakob Dylan and Westerberg. Guest performers include Chris Isaak, Dick Dale, members of Cheap Trick and the Dandy Warhols, the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and members of Lou Reed’s band.

“It’s a modern classic Glen Campbell record,” says Raymond, who became a fan of Campbell’s music while he was a child, listening to his parents’ 8-track tape player. “It sounds like all the stuff Glen did, but with a sound that’s a modern slant…. It’s got that acoustic-folk feel.”

That engaging acoustic-folk feel, whether in a Campbell classic or in a new tune, is just what people are looking for in concert.

Campbell has no doubts that his new family road band will be able to deliver the new stuff as well as his classics with equal ease. After all, he says his three children in the band are “the best” at what they do.

This devotion to family – whether while touring the UK or just hanging out at home -- is one of the reasons the Campbells relocated to Malibu from Arizona five years ago.

Ashley was bound for Pepperdine University in Malibu and her mom and dad wanted to be nearby.

“She just graduated. Made straight A’s,” says pop. “Can you imagine, one of my kids made straight A’s at Pepperdine?”

So he’s looking forward to showing her and the other children the UK, sharing them with his adoring fans.

Of course, he’s also looking ahead to the time when the UK tour is over and he’s back at his Malibu home.

He’ll still be basking in the joy of playing in his favorite part of the world with his children on the bandstand and his wife in the wings.

But he’ll also be calling his buddies and getting them to join him at nearby Malibu Country Club.

When he’s not on tour, Campbell plays that Scottish game just about every day.  Unlike show biz, it's one game that's gentle on his mind.

 

 (Note: since this interview, of course, much has been written about Glen's "farewell" tour,  and his self-admitted "forgetfulness" was diagnosed as Alzheimer's. In addition, the anecdote about meeting the Queen Mother has been repeated by the singer, but -- to all of his friends and family -- the first time he remembered that occurrence was during our interview.  I'm simply posting this because it was a good story. It remains good, even though it's dated. I did add the last line now, because it struck me while I was editing. Now that someone else can read it, I feel better. This very nice man went out of his way to spend time with me. Now I can rest gentle on my mind.)  

Hammering Henry Aaron may have been impatient with a lot of folks, but he had plenty of time for a damn nice News Brother

Few of the people I've met left as strong an image in my brain as Henry Aaron. 

I remember him as kind of surly, at least on first meeting. I mean I liked him and he liked me.

Of course, I guess I didn’t blame him for coming off that way. After all, here was the greatest ballplayer of all time having to pimp himself out to sell Magnavox televisions in a small Southern city.

And anyone who knows anything about Henry Aaron knows he often had less-than wondrous times in Southern cities … including, of course, Atlanta.

I think it was the autumn of 1976, after he finished up his short “homecoming” stint with the Milwaukee Brewers.  The new Magnavox dealer, out on the south end of Clarksville, called to say “Hank” was coming to sign autographs, I believe for a grand-opening.  

Of course, the great home run king was getting paid by Magnavox.  Still, it was kind of disconcerting to me, as a guy who went to Atlanta to see his last game in Fulton County Stadium a couple years prior, to see this rather unassuming fellow in a sport coat standing over glistening walnut-cabinets containing the best TVs on the planet … or at least the best ones he was hawking.

Still it was Henry Aaron, and I called him “Mr. Aaron,” when I approached. I was unprofessional in that I had a poster, with its illustration of him arm-in-arm with Babe Ruth – “Brotherhood of Excellence” was written beneath the illustration – out in the car.

His surliness went away as my old smile and interest in humans, particularly home run kings gained on him.  At least while he was talking to me, he could ignore the fawning line of autograph seekers and local corporate hotshots.

I realized he liked that. Kind of making “the man” wait for him. Anyway, after I wrapped up my 45 minutes or so with him, I asked “Mr. Aaron” if I could go out and get the poster in my car for him to sign.

“They gave these out at Henry Aaron Appreciation Day down in Atlanta,” I said, offering the poster that on this day hangs in my son’s room.

“They didn’t appreciate me in Atlanta,” he said, or words to that effect. “I don’t remember that day.”

Still he signed it, simply: “Best Wishes, Henry Aaron.”

He rolled it up and handed it back to me.

“Thanks, Mr. Aaron,” I said.

At which point the great baseball player smiled, nodded and said words I’ll never forget:

 “My name’s Henry, Tim.”

My tribute to Pogley: A Vietnam radar man who knew how to live, knew how to die (a friend who liked to fish & roller-skate against the wind)

(Note: I was commissioned by the friends and family of Lance Bell to write this memorial tribute for his service.  They have given me permission to share it here.  He was a good guy.)

  “Liked to fish & roller-skate.”
Paging through the memories of the friends and family of the guy I first called “Poontang” – I couldn’t remember his nickname was “Pogley” on our first e-mail acquaintance – I had to smile.
Here were pages of memories of the school kids Lance Bell mentored.
And the deep-war memories of his old hitch-hiking and hemp buddy Terry Kirkwood (“Captain Kirk” to me).
Then there is the page of basic obituary information that his sister-in-law Sue Bell begins with “Here are the facts on Lance.”
DOB: 11/12/1949. DOD: 11/06/2012.
Parents: William (Ty) Bell (deceased 11/15/2007) and Ginger Lee Spina of Barrington, Illinois.  Born in South Bend, Indiana. Brother: Micky (Sue) Bell of Mishawaka, Indiana. Sister: Billie Bell of Portland, Oregon. Nephew: Nicolas (Kate) Bell of Chicago, Illinois. Great niece: Audrey of Chicago, Illinois. U.S. Navy: 1969 to 1971. Formerly of Lakeland, Florida. Liked to fish & roller-skate. Mentor to kids at Rolling Prairie Middle School. Donations to VA Hospice at Hines VA Hospital, Hines, Illinois.
That’s something like 80 words, mostly names and basic facts summarizing, quickly, the sometimes belligerent little man who died of lung, bone and brain cancer after for too long ignoring his own health concerns while helping to take care of his mom and enjoying his time with the school kids.
“Lance enjoyed going to school, helping where he could and the friendships he found with you kids,” wrote his old friend, Kim Zahrt, a teacher, on a Facebook posting to let those same young people know he had died.
“Some do not understand why he did it for no pay,” says Kim.  “He valued the experience above money and felt it was where he should be. I’m so glad he had you to call his friends at his departure.”
No sense listing every Facebook comment from the kids who Lance had voluntarily mentored the last couple of years of his life.
But here are a few: “Lance was a good guy,” writes Ronnie Braman.
“He always pushed me to do my best,” says Brenden Bashore.
“Thank you for bringing him into our lives. He is missed and loved,” writes Brian Meadows.
Or perhaps this one from Steven Jacobs sums it up best:  “Lance was an awesome guy. He has done so much for so many people.  But we must keep our heads up. That’s what his hard ass would want.” I have to admit that Steven used asterisks to self-censor “hard a**), but today isn’t a time for self-censorship.
That hard ass wouldn’t want it that way.
Gotta say I didn’t know Lance. Never shook his hand or hugged him. At least not physically. Perhaps with words, as we were brothers running against the wind.  Yeah, Captain Kirk used that song to help describe his late friend. “Against the wind/ We were runnin’ against the wind/We were young and strong, we were runnin’ against the wind…”
Course that old Bob Seger tune goes on to have a little bitter loneliness in it, the price of “living to run and running to live.”
Captain Kirk plays that on his harmonica in memory of his old Vietnam buddy. He also plays Jimmy Buffett’s “We Learned to Be Cool from You”: “Maybe I can parlez a little Francais/Maybe I can write a whole page a day/Do a crossword puzzle in a second or two/But I learned to be cool from you….”
All the sudden, I’d be working in my basement, where I try to hammer out a living as a writer after being run out of the newspaper business for being too old and principled, and a note would pop up on Facebook: “Hope you’re having a good day, Mr. G.”  And I’d smile. Because of that note, I would at least have a better day, knowing that old Pogley was thinking about me.
Other times he’d write that he was going up to Jamie Waldo’s lake house.  To fish.
Maybe he’d write: “I had a great day at school today. Love these kids.”
Other days, he’d write that he was enjoying working with the students, but he needed to find work for pay soon. Problem was, well, it wasn’t a problem. Duty was that he was helping to take care of his mother. And that came first.
 Not false nobility here, folks, but there was something special about this stubborn little man and his devotion to doing right by his mom. We get one mother. And Lance spent the last couple of years putting her first. Just as she put him first back before that DOB all those years ago.
As I go through these pages of memories about a guy who was a brother I never met, I keep coming back to that one line in his “obituary information” that Sue wrote. “Liked to fish & roller-skate.”
Somehow, while I read Captain Kirk’s memories of the shared time as radar men on a guided missile destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam War, I keep thinking about that.
The two old salts turned into hippies when they came home, quietly, to no parades, from a war they didn’t start and didn’t finish. Hitchhiking like Kerouac, across America, forth and back.  “We experienced many things,” writes Captain Kirk.  What those are, he leaves to the imagination.
“Lance was a brother I never had biologically,” the good captain continues.
Pogley was twice divorced. He was owner of a pool maintenance business in Florida. He loved the Sunshine state and he liked to deep sea fish and snorkel. And perhaps roller-skate?
“He, Bill Michael and Captain Bruce (Dunsmore) were tight mariners,” Terry writes, adding that his “dear friend from South Bend, Linda Baumgartner, came to live with him in Florida until Lance returned to South Bend a few years ago to take care of his recently widowed and homebound/now bed-ridden mother, Ginger.”
Bill says it was tough to see Lance leave Florida. “I hated to see him move to Indiana, but he felt that was what he needed to do. His Mom and family needed him, so he left Florida.”
Yet there are those decades of enjoyment Lance had with his pals in the Sunshine State. “I met Lance back in the early 1980s. He was my next-door neighbor in Sarasota, Florida,” Bill recalls. “Back then he had two loves: A 1966 Mustang coupe and an old Harley he called ‘Jesse Belle.’
“He was a tough, old bird, didn’t take any shit off nobody, came on to you like a mean old snake, but deep down he was as gentle as a lamb. I can remember many times I told him to his face: ‘I’m glad you have my back.’
“If he liked you he would die for you.”
Bill goes on to recall Lance’s patriotism, his love for the U.S. flag, which he flew on all patriotic holidays, including one Memorial Day when he accidentally hung it upside down. “He immediately had to correct his mistake,” says Bill. “Of course, he was not drinking???”
Lance, he says, loved the pure white beaches of the Gulf Coast and “the babes tanning on the boats.”  If not on a boat, he would wade out in the sea and fish, sometimes late at night.  Later, he lived on the state’s Atlantic Coast and took his 16-foot canoe everywhere, both in the rivers and out to sea.
“He showed no fear,” says Bill, elaborating that the two also loved fishing with Captain Bruce. “Every time the boat went in the water, Lance wanted to be on it.”   
Lance’s influence on young people is apparent. He fathered no children, but he’d have been a helluva dad. Florida housemate Linda Baumgartner’s grandson, Ben, called him “Grampa.”  Lance promised the kid he called “Ben Jovi” that he’d be around when he got older.  He’ll be around, Ben, not physically but forever in your soul.
His ability to relate with young people gave him a reason for living in his final years.  As Captain Kirk says, after he went to take care of his mom, “Pogley couldn’t find a job in South Bend, so he volunteered to become a high school mentor in his old friend, Kim’s, physics class.”
He drank too much and he knew it. Heck, I even knew him well enough to give him a hard time about that on the telephone. He had been a biker, complete with the Harley and the streaming hair.
He looked like Jesus when he went in the hospital. He was bald, hairless and 70 pounds when the hospice’s job was done.
 Gotta say, I liked the guy a lot. And I didn’t know him. I called him a few times in the hospital and hospice, wishing him well.
“Too much morphine, Tim,” he’d say. “Call me back when I’m not nodding off.”
Other times he was in pain. One day when I called he was anxious for his brother, Mick, to show up at the VA hospice. “Hope he hasn’t forgotten about me,” he said. “Nah. He’ll be here. Right now, I gotta sleep. Gimme a call back when you get some time.”
Mick made it and that made Lance’s day. After all, he loved his brothers, living and dead. Pat OD’d in 1974. Lance found the body and never got over that.
But he sure loved Mick.
 “Terry was trying to kidnap me or something,” Lance said, during one conversation. He described a planned intervention that his old Navy pal had tried to engineer to try to save his soul and perhaps his body last summer.
“I don’t know. Terry keeps talking about this Jesus stuff. I guess it’s all right,” said Pogley.  “I can’t take it all the time.”
But, according to Captain Kirk, Lance was happy for the “intervention” from above.  Had found his peace with the Lord at the time of his death.
On his final day with Captain Kirk, after he had prayed with his pal and said he was all right with the idea of finding out what’s next, Lance fell asleep.
Captain Kirk didn’t know what to do. He’d come from Des Moines, Bible in hand, to spend time with his friend before he died.  Yet here was the slight and exhausted former hitchhiker and biker -- streaming hair long-gone victim to the cancer treatment -- no longer conscious.  Sleeping. Or dead.
The mournful silence was interrupted.  “Man, Terry, you are a big, ugly fucker, you know that?” Lance whispered.
Terry almost passed out as the dying friend and his pal gut-laughed.
OK. It’s probably time to wrap this up. After all, I didn’t really know this guy. But I loved him, because we were of the same time, sharing the same experiences. We’d run against the wind, for sure.
I liked his little notes: “Mr. G, hope you’re having a good un. “
Mr. G didn’t have a good day a couple of weeks ago. I’d been unable to get through on the phone to the hospice room for a few days.
So I sent out an e-mail note to his friends, asking for an update on this man I liked but did not know.
And then the phone rang. It was about 9 at night. “Lance died at 3 this afternoon,” said Captain Kirk.  “He’s in a better place now.”
So when it was first asked if I’d write a tribute for him, I didn’t know if it was appropriate.
 Do I talk about his teaching for free?
His Vietnam experiences?
His apparent lifelong passion for the sea?
His love of his family, despite his own crankiness?
The fact he found enough trouble in his life to make it both good and bad?
“How should I remember this man?” I asked myself one evening as The Rolling Stones version of “Not Fade Away” and other classics blasted from my record machine.
 The more remembrances I read, the more I liked the little Vietnam radar man (I actually had “little MF” uncensored in my first draft. He probably would have liked that.)  Lance had plenty of woes in his life, demons he chased, fought, occasionally vanquished. But – according to all accounts – the little (guy) went out a winner.   He was a lot of things, mostly pretty damned good, to a lot of people.
How do I do him justice? 
That’s when the line in Sue’s obituary information made me smile and I knew what I wanted to say: Lance Bell “liked to fish & roller-skate.”