Peace and Love triumph as Ringo spreads joy (and to me a dash of mortal melancholy) in "Look Up" concert that Nashville guests turn into glorious tribute to a Beatle who loves country music

 

Ringo raised me to tears of joy and melancholy during the magnificent Ringo & Friends at the Ryman concert and television taping Wednesday night.

While the show was to support the launch of his new, country album, “Look Up,” it really turned into a tribute to the 84-year-old entertainer who has been a part of my life for more than 60 years.

And not all the joy came from the iconic Beatles drummer and his almost soft-shoe showmanship, but from the people who gathered around to perform with him or to perform some of his classics while he waited in the wings with affable music producer and performer and Dylan crony T Bone Burnett, who served as master of ceremonies.

The concerts – the first installment was Tuesday – were to promote Ringo’s new country album, “Look Up,” that restates his love of country music. That love was shared by his Beatles cohorts, who borrowed heavily from all types of American music.   

Ringo restated his love of country music with his wonderful “Beaucoups of Blues,” his second solo effort, released in 1970, as members of the Fab Four moved their own directions.

Ringo Starr during The Beatles' final stage in the first picture, from the film "Get Back" (still playing on Disney-Plus) and the cover of his first country album, "Beaucoups of Blues," from 1970).  

On this night, most of the classic songs Ringo has voiced with his old mates and in the years since were covered by some of Nashville’s best, mostly young, musicians, while Ringo showed off some of his new songs from “Look Up.”

For example, Molly Tuttle got the crowd singing along to “Octopus’ Garden,” a song Ringo wrote – with generous encouragement from his cohort George Harrison – and which is on arguably The Beatles’ best (and last) album, “Abbey Road.”

Jack White, who helped get the show going when he joined Ringo on “Matchbox,” was a generous guest.

White also did “Don’t Pass Me By,” another Ringo classic, and he was the star’s biggest support during the soul-stirring finale, “With a Little Help From My Friends.”

 Indeed, after that finale – an intense and exuberant singalong featuring most of the night’s performers as well as guests like Emmylou Harris and Brenda Lee and the loud, perhaps offkey Ryman crowd -- White stayed on the stage, enjoying his favorite activity, playing guitar, while the backing band continued to play after the rest of the guest stars, led by Ringo, almost rhythmically exited stages right and left.

Billy Strings, a great musician in part responsible for the resurgence of bluegrass music, did Ringo’s Beatles classic, “Honey Don’t,” and he and Tuttle teamed up for “What Goes On.”

War and Treaty, Sheryl Crow, Jamey Johnson, Larkin Poe, Mickey Guyton, Rodney Crowell, Sarah Jarosz and more all took their turns at singing for (occasionally with) Ringo.

Ringo does his "job" as drummer for The Beatles in 1964, in this photo from Wikipedia. 

My tears – some happy, some melancholy dealing with mortality – actually were spurred by the great showman himself, when he performed songs like “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Boys,” “Photograph,” led the singalong of “Yellow Submarine” and especially the star-filled stage finale of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” his best-known Beatles song (from “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”)

That joyous melancholy for me reached its peak earlier, on the 10^th song of the night, “Boys,” when Ringo climbed up behind his drumkit to sing and to play that instrument where he is most at home and where he first became an international household name more than 60 years ago.

Something about being 50 feet from Ringo Starr on the drums (the giant screens made it closer) while he did that Beatles classic song – on which he was the original voice – and watching him play the drums “Ringo-style,” an easy smile on his face as he sang….

Likely this gentle man had memories flooding him of when he did it back in 1963 with his mates, John, Paul and George. And it emphasized to me the fact that it was 61 years ago that I heard that song first, with this same guy on drums. Wednesday night, I put my walking cane aside to stand up for the ovation. I’m no longer a kid. And that great drummer no longer is a young man.  

And Ringo’s rendition of his solo hit, “Photograph” hit also bit deeply my heart. It was written in 1971 by him and by George Harrison. But over the years, the tale of lost love has become something of an essential part of Ringo’s set, and many view it as a sad farewell to Lennon, who was gunned down nine years after the song was recorded.

Ringo's two nights of Ryman concerts will be spliced together for what ought to be an amazing CBS TV special.

Also, Ringo – who lives in Beverly Hills, California -- is donating a chunk of the concerts’ proceeds to Los Angeles-area wildfire relief.

As Ringo guaranteed at the beginning of the show, it would be a night of peace and love. It was that. And, to me, it also was a night of pleasant memories and visions of mortality. Peace and love.

Ringo with his cowboy hat for the new country album, "Look Up."

  

 

Legendary singer Bobby Bare praises 'unique' 'Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes'

 I am honored that the great Bobby Bare wrote the preface to my book:

 I have been a fan of the great journalist Tim Ghianni for more than 30 years. He should have won a Pulitzer by now for all that he has written about Nashville and country music. Underline Pulitzer and underline Tim Ghianni.

Tim has written a book of up-close-and-personal chapters about country superstars who have changed the direction of the way country music has been perceived.

This unique style of writing gives an insight into all the personalities and quirks, good and bad, of a lot of famous people – from Shel Silverstein to Eddy Arnold, Charlie Daniels, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson – and so many more magic revelations during a period of time that will never be forgotten.

Being the notoriously great human being that he is, Tim Ghianni is respected by all, close friends with many, and to a few others like myself, a best friend.

n  ..............Bobby Bare, Grammy-winning member of the Country Music Hall of Fame

Bobby Bare, the great survivor of country music's best era, in first image with me and then singing along with guitar guru and songwriter Thomm Jutz. The first photo is by Shannon Bare. The other is by Ken Gray. These are just two of many rare or previously unseen images illustrating my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes.  The book is on sale this week for $21.58 at amazon.com, and delivery in just days. It's also available at Parnassus and other book stores. 

Little Jimmy Dickens and his fabulous Christmas lights display ... The tale of a big heart in a pint-sized package offers one more reason to buy 'Pigrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes'

Great photographer Bill Steber took this photo of Little Jimmy Dickens by the Ryman. He and his equally artistic colleague John Partipilo have several photos in my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, which you can order at amazon.com. There are many never-before seen photos from these gentlemen and from families of my subjects in the book.

A dash of melancholy hit me – not particularly unusual – when I drove by Little Jimmy Dickens’ house the other day, and I remembered his magnificent annual Christmas lights and decorations display. I thought about the day, late in his life, that he and I spoke about the fact he no longer could decorate. The neighborhood children and orphans from across the highway were going to have to do without.
He wasn’t happy about it, but age had caught up with him. The Christmas lights are just a part of the chapter in my book – Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes -- about Tater, as his pal, Hank Williams, had nicknamed him.
The book would make a great holiday gift if your giftee likes country music, Nashville and human beings.
Here’s just a section from the chapter about my friend, Little Jimmy:

Again, he thought about the lack of lights on his property. Just two generous wreaths and nothing else Yuletide could be seen from outside his beloved home.
“Oh, it’s a lot of work. It takes me about a week to put them up,” he said, adding he didn’t know how many lights he normally displayed.
“Golly, I have no idea. I just kept putting them up until I ran out,” always on the day after Thanksgiving.
He looked around his yard and then over toward Franklin Road and the orphanage – the Tennessee Baptist Children’s Home -- on the other side.
“I like it when the kids in the neighborhood come by and look at them. And down at the Orphans Home, well, they bring the children by and see them lights,” he said.
“That was worth it. They would just bring them buses by. That’s the part I miss more than anything. The people in the neighborhood thanking me for putting them up and the kids enjoying them.
“That meant a lot to me.”
There is a long pause and a twinkle. “I think I’ll probably do them again next year.”
Unfortunately, Little Jimmy never put the lights up again on the spacious home he and Mona shared. There was no lack of holiday spirit.
He just got old. And tired. And his health began to diminish. He kept on going out to the big auditorium for the Opry almost until his death, though.
“Until he died, he was the oldest member of the Opry cast,” someone wrote after his death on January 2, 2015, days after his final show with the venerable radio broadcast.
And, as was his way, when his final Opry broadcast came to an end, he didn’t holler out to the fans: “Good night.”
His normal farewell was “We appreciate you.”
And for the better part of a century, country (and rockabilly) fans appreciated him right back.
I’m just so glad that there were many occasions when I encountered him offstage, not in stage gear, of course, his Nudie stuff in the closet at home.
Even so, he worked the crowd, whether at the Opry or in the frozen food aisle. “I love people,” said the fellow who finally decided at age 90 that climbing up on a ladder and putting up Christmas lights was a mighty tall task.

A friend for life is a friend in death, too: A good man, his dog and a foreword that makes me smile

 Since Peter Cooper died two years ago, I’ve been missing him and our often-daily phone conversations and regular lunches. There will be many folks today who look back and lament the bright light he was, even while battling the disease that caused his death. I am responsible for bringing Peter to Nashville from Spartanburg, S.C., since I was the entertainment editor at The Tennessean who hired him for the chief music writer’s job.  In the 17 years-plus since I was “bought out,” Peter has been on my mind, even bringing smiles in the last two years when I think about our many serious talks as well as wordplay/horseplay or his appreciation of me and my profane life. Sometimes while we spoke, Russell,  the dog, was literally inside his shirt (truly). He loved that dog, and I'm sure they are sitting at some heavenly computer while Peter cranks out his own version of the Good Book, adding tales about baseball and Batman tattoos and a really literate dachshund. Peter and I were the “first” readers of each other’s work. Even after I left the newspaper I’d get his stories before his editor. And I read all of the speeches and other writings he did before he turned them in to his bosses at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.  He read each chapter of my most recent book, Pilgrims, Pickers And Honky-Tonk Heroes as I finished each installment in the course of the year or so when I was writing it.  I loved the guy and he often told me he loved me.

Instead of rerunning the teary and raw (to me, still) blogpost I wrote at the time of his death, I thought I’d rerun one of his final pieces of work, the foreword to that book. This is not an ego thing for me. I do this because it actually makes me smile. And I need that.

Here are Peter's words from my book:  

 

There is no such thing as impartiality. 

Or, God forbid, there is such a thing. If so, we’re screwed. Impartiality is robotic, metronomic, and exactly the opposite of everything that writing should be.

Everything in the world is subjective. There are people who worship the sun, and that’s fine. A favorite (see, I am impartial) songwriter of mine, Malcolm Holcombe, sings, “I like the shade, where it’s cool and green.”

I want to hear Malcolm sing about the shade, not about the sun. I want to hear Tom T. Hall sing, “Those clear Kentucky streams, they are always in my dreams/ I think that is something you should know.”

I don’t want to hear Tom T. objectively compare Kentucky streams to West Virginia streams.

I want to hear Kris Kristofferson sing, “Take the ribbon from your hair/ Shake it loose and let it fall,” and I don’t want to hear him give an impartial guide of ways that someone might secure their hair.

I don’t want to hear that Hank Aaron hit .268 with 20 home runs in 1974. I want to hear the story of how he changed everything that year by hitting a towering blow off Al Downing of the Dodgers on April 8 that made him the all-time home run king.

(He still is, in my partial opinion, though cold statistics and easy research will tell you that the homer crown is shared by Barry Bonds and performance enhancing drugs.)

None of this is to say that facts are inconsequential. You can’t get ‘em wrong, or you’ll lose credibility. But facts are an essential but incomplete part of our stories.

Where are you from? Who are you, really? These questions are often related. The answers are inherently different. I’ve never met anyone from Ironton, Ohio, who reminds me of native hero Bobby Bare, and I’ve spent some time in Ironton.

I’m partial to Tim Ghianni, in no small part because he’s anything but impartial. He sees people for who they are, not for their statistics. He values humanity and humility over scoreboard-lit accomplishments. If you want to know what these people did, you can look it up yourself (it’s simple these days). If you want to know who these people are, or who they were, you can’t find it anywhere but here.

Tim’s writing provides a window into people you will treasure.

If you want to know who Tim Ghianni is, you’ll find that here, too. And, partially speaking, it’s a finding far worth the journey.

-Peter Cooper

 Nashville, Tennessee

 

Kris Kristofferson's words helped make Nashville my home, his friendship warmed my soul; For 88 years, his love and laughter and poetry made the world a better place. Now he's passed the rainbow

 

Kris Kristofferson and I sing "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I" outside a building that occupies the site of the old Tally-Ho Tavern. This was in 2003, when I asked the great singer-songwriter and human being to join me for a stroll down his Memory Lane on an even-then-unrecognizable Music City Row. Johnny Kristofferson, then 16, took this picture for us.  

The party's all over
Drink up and go home.
It's too late to love her
And leave her alone.

Epitaph (Black and Blue) is evidence of how Kris Kristofferson took personal heartache and soul-numbing regret and faded-jeans despair and seldom-success and turned it to poetry.

He sliced open his heart and shared it with the world in his songs, like this particular one about a lover and a friend who died with a needle in her arm, figurative and literal. 

This song, literally, came to Kris and his wingman “Funky” Donnie Fritts, the Alabama Leaning Man, when they shared the quiet, after all of the farewells and tears, after their friend Janis Joplin “died all alone.”

Janis was the best female rock singer ever (I am hyperbolic, yet truthful). One of her greatest accomplishments was turning Kris’ windshield wipers-punctuated, harp-driven tale of loneliness and lost souls in a dark, wet night, “Me and Bobby McGee,” into a Top 40 (when there was such a thing) radio classic.

Kris -- with the Leaning Man’s musical help -- turned his heartbreak, Janis’ self-destructive waste, Funky Donnie’s bluesy accompaniment, and his own “why couldn’t we have saved her from herself and the world” melancholy and turned it into “Epitaph (Black and Blue),” a song that is one most people skip over.  To say it’s one of his best is opinion only. How many songs qualify in that ranking?

Fittingly, “Epitaph” is the final song, the 10^th track, from his breakthrough album, The Silver-Tongued Devil and I, that proved this student of William Blake’s recommended life of excess, an admirer and by then a friend and student of John R. Cash, was not to be ignored.

He was, with his words, changing the vocabulary of country music. Yes, there were the beer-soaked pickup lines at The Tally-Ho Tavern – my own favorite watering hole a half-plus century back.

There also was the lover’s lament – “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” the contradictions offered by beliefs in Christ, peace and patriotism in “Good Christian Soldier,” the love, innocence and subtle melancholy of “Jody and the Kid.” Janis’ death, mourned in “Epitaph” is revisited in “Billy Dee” – “yesterday they found him on the floor of his hotel, reachin’ for that needle arm that drove him down to hell.”  He took his “why?” reaction to Janis’ death and used it to populate the tale of promise snatched away by the world.

 It may be his soul was bigger than a body's oughta be

singin' songs and bringin' laughter to the likes of you and me

cause the world he saw was sadder than the one he hoped to find

but it wasn't near as lonesome as the one he left behind

yesterday they found him on the floor of his hotel

reachin' towards the needle, Lord, that drove him down to hell

some folks called it suicide, others blame the speed

but we all called it crucified when Billy Dee O.D.'d

  And there is “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” about life, ambition and disappointment. This and the title track are the two with which I most identify.

 “See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans, wearing yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile. Once he had a future of money, love and dreams, which he spent like they was goin’ out of style….”  

It was that album, his second with his The Border Lords band, that announced to the Baby Boomers -- the folks who digested every word by Dylan and Lennon and McCartney, every wail of Clapton’s and Hendrix’s guitars, every tale of debauchery and resulting conquest by Richards and Jagger … well, you get the idea – that there was a voice as complex on Nashville’s 17^th Avenue South.   And it was accompanied by Dobro players like Uncle Josh Graves or the flattop picking of Mac Wiseman.

I bought that album in 1971 at the same store and perhaps on the same shopping trip that I bought Led Zeppelin’s first (and by far, best) album. A year or so before I bought Steppenwolf’s debut there.  Everything by Dylan. Of course, Beatles and Stones and Sly and Who, Simon & Garfunkel and Airplane, Dead and Messenger Service.  Hell, even Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly and Moby Grape ended up on my turntable.

But suddenly, there was this voice telling -- not in psychedelic wordplay but in plain, simple language turned to Blake-style poetry -- tales of misery and dreams and a cussing kid kicking a can down lonely 17^th Avenue South on a hungover Sunday Morning.

I smoked my brain the night before on cigarettes and songs that I’d been pickin’.

That song of a regretful and quiet Sunday was on his self-titled first album (later titled “Me and Bobby McGee” to capitalize on Janis’ impact).

In that album, that includes “Bobby McGee,” by the way, there’s a wicked slash at American middle-class hypocrisy – told in a Salvation Army Band growl -- titled “Blame it on the Stones.

Father's at the office, nightly working all the time
Trying to make the secretary change her little mind
And it bothers him to read about so many broken homes
Blame it on those Rolling Stones.

 In the wake of Kris’ death last Saturday, September 28, 2024, a host of expert music critics and even more heartsick fans have weighed in on the guy’s importance, even though most had ignored him in the last decade or two.

Early in the 2000s -- actually the night after I was told the newspaper was "buying me out," I attended a Kris Kristofferson "residency" at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Kris and I were just chatting, probably about corporate cruelty. Great photographer John Partipilo shot this photo. 

In this little piece, I’m only a human being, a Boomer, of hand-rolled, hoisting Mad Dog vintage, who listened to this man with stubble-bearded wisdom and values. I’m no music nor social scholar, I’m a normal guy who discovered Kris’ music as tonic for my own long nights and my real fears of being drafted back in 1971. So much of this stuff, from the 1960s and 1970s was crafted at 1717 17^th Avenue South – a long-gone, rotting, redneck tenement-like apartment building where my friend the Rev. Will Campbell told me the floors were dirt, even the upstairs ones.  They also were so flimsy, Will – a walking contradiction as a civil activist Baptist preacher, liberal leftist and kind old man – told me he always feared his upstairs neighbor Kris would come right through the ceiling at the end of a long shift serving and drinking beer at The Tally-Ho.  

Of course, The Tally-Ho Tavern – later The Country Boy – was actually a character in Kris’ tales. It is where The Silver-Tongued Devil fuels his seductive nature with a bottle of beer or two.

Kris actually worked at that tavern – now a Curb building is in that spot – and told me many times about how he was paid something like $50 a week and all he could drink.  “I came out ahead on that,” he’d say, with that charming laugh. It may have been $100 a week. I am just visiting my head for this tale, not doing any research. If I miss a lyric or two, a year or two, a street or two, that’s only because my mental transmission falters with grief.

Kris long-ago moved from Nashville. But he kept coming back. Waylon, Cash, Vince Matthews, Billy Ray Reynolds, Captain Midnight all were here to greet him.  Now all are dead. One of his few remaining close friends from those days is Chris Gantry, who, when I told him how sorry I was that his old friend had succumbed to the physical and mental maladies of the last many years said: “At least now he’s free.”

On one of Kris’ visits to Nashville, after Johnny Cash died, he and his family stuck around awhile for a planned tribute special. He’d not been to Music City Row (as he called it) during the daylight in the 30 years since he moved West – to Malibu and Maui.  Swimming pools. Movie stars … as his friends Lester and Earl sang.

I asked if he’d like to spend his Sunday with me, walking down the Row, resurrecting memories of what had been the Hollywood of country (and some rock and blues) recording. I was surprised, kind of, that he took me up on the idea.

“Can I bring my son, Johnny, along?” he asked.

It was a Sunday Afternoon Coming Down, filled with comrades’ laughter, sure, but always downcast by reality.

 “I wish the old stuff was still here,” or something like that, he said, as we walked what are the various Music Squares East, West, etc. – the “identities” given to 16^th and 17^th avenues south and their cross streets when the city began to bastardize history for the sake of tourism and to make way for condominiums where historic homes and recording studios once stood. Hell, my friend Chet Atkins’ office and the house it was in, the building where the Nashville Sound was fertilized, didn’t even survive the front-loaders and swinging ball-busters.   

In that civic effort, a massive statue of nude dancers, penises and vaginas fully exposed, was installed in the middle of a new roundabout in a spot where one of Hank Williams’ homes had stood, neglected. But now gone.  No one in Nashville now would miss it, of course. And they would have little idea of who Hank Williams was or that Kris did his best to bring that troubled son of Alabama’s musical grit intact and even push past those honky-tonk heartache boundaries.

“Look, Ethel, they’re nekkid!” hooted Kris, imitating the character in an old Ray Stevens’ Shriner song, as we rolled past the massive statue I refer to as Nudica. It’s impressive, but has little to do with three chords and the truth.     

Of course, I wrote a long story about that day spent with Kris on Music City Row. I was joyous for the pleasant surprise that was offered by having Kris and Lisa’s son, Johnny, along for the ride, and the walk.  Johnny, 16 then, had no knowledge of his dad’s history on these streets. Johnny was and remains a great young man, hatched and raised in the glory that was Maui. (“We are safe, the fires are on the other side of the island,” Lisa told me when I called after Maui’s “main city,” Lahaina, disappeared in flames a year ago.)

Johnny made a video of that excursion as his dad and I walked and talked, as Kris reflected and allowed slight melancholy for what already was lost – and this was more than 20 years ago – of the history of Music City Row.

Johnny wanted to share this bit of his dad’s history in a class project for his school not far from the Kristofferson homeplace on the edge of a volcano on Maui.

Outside the Curb building, in the space where once stood The Tally-Ho, Kris and I looked at each other, nodded and put our arms over our shoulders and sang “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I”:

I took myself down to the Tally-Ho Tavern to buy me a bottle of beer
I sat me down by a tender young maiden whose eyes were as dark as her hair
And as I was searchin' from bottle to bottle for somethin' unfoolish to say
That silver-tongued devil just slipped from the shadows and smilingly stole her away
I said hey little girl don't you know he's the devil he's everything that I ain't
Hidin' intentions of evil under the smile of a saint
All he's good for is gettin' in trouble and shifting his share of the blame
And some people swear he's my double and some even say we're the same
But the silver tongued devil's got nothing to lose I'll only live till I die
We take our own chances and pay our own dues the silver-tongued devil and I…

 Johnny sent me a copy of the videotape. Fortunate for everyone’s ears is that he didn’t record our duet.  Kris’ voice fits his songs. My voice sounds best when I’m trying to scare raccoons away from my garbage bin.  Johnny did take a slightly out-of-focus photo of the restless duet.

There were many more days and evenings with Kris (and usually his family was there, too) for the next couple of decades.

Once, backstage at the Ryman, Kris and Lisa said I was one of their favorite things about visiting Nashville.  Perhaps hyperbole? But I know when I got to spend time with them, those were some of my favorite things about living in my world.

When I wanted a picture of Kris and Lisa for my book -- Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes -- Lisa Kristofferson got their son, Kris Kristofferson Junior to shoot one, ASAP, and send it to me. This shot was taken two years ago at a ski resort where the family had gathered. I will always love the Kristofferson family.

One time, in 2005, they were here to promote a racehorse feel-good movie, Dreamer. The interviews were taking place in his room at The Hermitage Hotel, but mine was scheduled in the dining room, giving him a more-casual, friendly respite and time for a few cups of coffee.

I told the greeter at the dining room that Kris was going to be down there in a few minutes and he and his publicist would be looking for me.  “When he gets here, I’ll just be the old man sitting at that table way back in the corner,” I said. The table was well out of eyeshot from the dining room entrance.

Five minutes later, big hands gripped my shoulders from behind. “Hello, Old Man,” Kris said, with a typical broad laugh.

“Hello, Young Man,” I replied, as I signaled to the waiter that he’d better bring us a full coffee pot. I had trimmed down to maybe a dozen cups a day from my 40-cups-a-day heyday.  And I knew Kris liked his coffee bold and black or in a glass over ice, with a wedge of lime.

There were other stories I wrote about him, about his music and his movies. There were more times when there was no story, just two old friends talking about life and family.

Sometimes, those visits turned more into talks with Lisa, as Kris conducted movie star business. That was fine, as I came not only to love Lisa but admire her deeply for taking a man whose fast-paced life was directed toward an early grave and turned him into a happy adult, a great fellow and friend. The guy who worshiped above all his family and his home. And, obviously, his music.  Lisa said Suzanne and I made a perfect couple, perhaps because she sensed the similarities of the women’s challenges and triumphs.

The most foolish I felt during our friendship was when word came to the guys on my entertainment writing staff that Ray Price had died.  That is big news in Music City, and so I jumped in with chief music writer Peter Cooper and entertainment columnist Brad Schmitt to work on getting reaction so we could put a story together for the front page. (Peter, by the way was a treasure, my best friend in Nashville, who seemingly had a world of “almost-best friends,” including Kris. He’s been dead almost two years.  Stupid.)

I always chipped in on those deadline obituaries, since it is hectic to track folks down. I was entertainment editor, and we shared a “shotgun” approach to quote-getting: Just keep calling and asking and see who you can get. In the next 40 minutes if not sooner.

I told the guys I’d get Kris, whose “For the Good Times’’ was turned into a forever classic by Ray, who I was fortunate to know. Kris regarded it as one of his life’s great achievements. So did Ray.

I called and Lisa answered. They were up in Toronto, Canada, touring. They were out for a seven-mile run, so I told her what had happened, and she said Kris would call back when they got to the hotel, and he caught his breath and composure.

Kris called within minutes, and he was both breathless and teary as I filled him in on the widespread national news reports about the death of his friend.

 Then, within a half-hour, those news reports were rescinded. The Cherokee Cowboy perhaps was not dead, after all.

 Weary of the “is he or isn’t he?” I called Ray’s house in Texas. His wife, Janie, told me Ray, who was on his deathbed, was not dead yet. My muddied memory has me talking to the Cherokee Cowboy on the phone, offering encouragement, at Janie’s urging and with her help.  Perhaps it didn’t happen.

Then I immediately called Kris and Lisa to tell them their friend was still breathing.

“We already sent flowers,” said Kris.

I said I was sorry for the fake news that made he and Lisa send their condolence floral arrangement, and he thanked me. “Nah, it’s better this way. He can get the flowers while he’s living.’’

I don’t need to rattle on about other encounters, other interviews, other chats.

I guess I should add that he was an enthusiast of my writing: “Tim is a wordsmith unlike any other,” he wrote as a Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes’ cover blurb after he’d read advance copy. “We’ve shared some good times together, and he encapsulates the experiences as if they were yesterday. A truly gifted writer and friend.”  

I do need to add though that Kris is one of the main reasons I’ve spent my half-century as a journalist in the Nashville area.

Once my future was shiny as the seats of my pants are today, till old mother luck and all her daughters started ducking me.

 I told Kris that song, “I May Smoke Too Much,” seemed close to the bone for me. I also laughed when I asked if he meant to have an “f” rather than a “d” on “ducking.” He laughed back at me.

I’d become a disciple of his music, and especially his writing, while I was still in college. My folks moved from the Chicago area to Nashville after my junior year in college.

The thought of spending my last undergraduate summer in Nashville rather than drinking beer in the leftfield bleachers at Wrigley Field was tempered by one thing: I was going to make sure I met Kris Kristofferson, the guy who sang songs that narrated my life so far.

He's a poet, he's a picker
He's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

 I didn’t stalk him, although I did call the number I found in the phone book, where I also found his address.  (Phone books were huge volumes that annually updated phone numbers and addresses, for those of you who never saw one.)

But I did begin taking myself down to the Tally-Ho Tavern to buy me a bottle of beer. And I wandered Music Row, where I met a lot of guys with guitars. I did watch as folks like Billy Ray Reynolds, Charlie Daniels, Funky Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan and Kris picked and sang at the picnic tables behind the bar. I didn’t interrupt them. I had nothing good to add.

And I went to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, had long talks with Tootsie and drank at least one beer. Forty years later, I joined Kris and Lisa at Tootsie’s where bar owners installed a copper or brass plaque in the floor, honoring Kris as the first member of their “Floor of Fame.’’

He said a few generous words, then climbed down from the stage, asking me if I thought his words were OK.  I patted his back with approval.

I don’t go to Lower Broadway anymore. Drunken bachelorettes in crotch-exposing flimsy dresses and conventioneers and tourists stumbling and barfing really isn’t my scene. So, I have no idea if there have been more plaques added to the floor at Tootsie’s.   

It was in that old lounge that I began to listen to the musicians, like Lefty, E.T., Porter and the rest talk about their misadventures while they savored a beer or two between sets across the alley, when the Opry was at the Ryman full-time.

He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars, and he's traded in tomorrow for today, runnin' from his devils Lord and reachin' for the stars and losin' all he's loved along the way ....

 The love for the city that was the setting for that song about the fellow who begins the first verse "wasted on the sidewalk" (in a bit of the song toward the top of this ramble) –  “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” which I viewed biographically -- was enhanced by a chance encounter with Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein that summer of 1972. They helped me steal 1,000 pounds of bricks from Fifth Avenue South, outside a peep show. That story is in my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, and it may, perhaps, have been that theft that solidified this town as my life’s destination. Course, Kris’ words were the magnet.

In recent years, Kris has been fading.  In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, he and Lisa retired from constant touring and filmmaking and settled in at the house at the edge of a volcano in Maui.

There have been occasional appearances. A couple of months ago, he sang with Rosanne Cash at Willie’s televised 90^th birthday tribute.  He appeared happy. Withered. Not well.

After that, as I often have done, I called the home on the edge of the volcano to check in with Lisa. Most times, I don’t get a voice, just a message box, and I leave words of love and admiration for Kris, for her and her beautiful spirit and for his family.

When I learned Kris was gone, that he had died Saturday, surrounded by his family, I was sad. But I was grateful he was with those whose lives made his own worth giving up evenings at the Tally-Ho or Tootsie’s or waltzing with the stars on Hollywood Boulevard to stay home with family. Reading books, picking his guitar.  Singing songs and bringing laughter.

“He is happy,” Lisa told me several months ago. “He sits here and sings his songs.”

One of his favorites was “Here Comes That Rainbow Again,” an O. Henry-meets-John Steinbeck tale, a look at the sometimes-hidden goodness of the human spirit.

She sent me a video showing a smiling Kris, out in the yard in Maui, looking for both ends of the rainbow.     

And the daylight was heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain't it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again

 Now The Pilgrim of another song, myth and friendship, has found out what’s on the other side.

But if this world keeps right on turnin' for the better or the worse,
And all he ever gets is older and around

From the rockin' of the cradle to the rollin' of the hearse,

The goin' up was worth the comin' down

 I could go on and quote Kris songs until the day after tomorrow. As a younger man, my old pal, Jerry Manley, who is not well, and I would “entertain” at parties by singing from Kris’ songbook. I also did a mean Joe Cocker, but that’s another story.

 I didn’t know way back then that the man who wrote what seemed in many ways to be the story of my own life would become a friend.

 And I didn’t meet him, really, until early in this century, a friendship born first by an interview about music and movies and concreted with a long walk on an uncommonly sunny fall day on Music City Row after Johnny Cash died.

 Now Kris is gone.

  The party’s all over.

Drink up and go home….  

 

 

 

 

Well, it's all right, even if the sun don't shine, because my beloved comrade, Chuckles, is riding his bed while going to the end of the line

 

Jerry "Chuckles News Brother" is doing all right as he sleeps all day in his home that is carrying him toward the end of the line.

I've emotionally missed my weekly/twice-weekly visits to see Jerry during the nine months he lived in a room with Milford/Bob in the Memory Care Ward a few miles from my humble home and office (AKA "Da Basement”).

I’ve even had to explain to my friend, Quincy, the Shell Station manager, that he no longer needs to stock the Diet SunDrop. He had special ordered it for me so, during the nine months I visited Jerry in the cuckoo’s nest, I had his favorite beverage – and some peanut butter crackers or somesuch – to give him a break from cranberry juice and institutional slop.

When Quincy ran out of Diet SunDrop, he suggested some of his vintage Diet Mountain Dew for Jerry. He liked the change. Me, I wouldn’t ever buy any of that swill for old Flapjacks. A guy has to be fucking nuts to like that stuff.

Quincy asked if my friend in the nursing home is dead. “No,” I said. “He’s only sleeping,” but not in the nursing home.

“Good. Those damn places are worse than prisons,” Quincy said. I do continue my long-standing tradition of topping off the gas tank on the 1985 Saab at Pump No. 8, and I continue to get pissed if someone, especially anyone with Alabama plates, blocks my pump.

I say “Alabama” plates, but they could be from any state or country, even my neighborhood. I am an intense creature of habit.  Don’t fuck with my pump.

I don’t go into details with Quincy, but Jerry was evicted from the nursing home for uncommon violent behavior: At least twice, he got mad at Bob, who was sitting in Jerry's chair, and he picked him up and threw him to the floor. That is one of the sad results of dementia or Alzheimer's.

Milford/Bob probably misses me, too, since for some reason I could speak his garbled language and make him laugh. Seventy-five pounds, dripping wet, I’ll bet 250-plus-pound Jerry had little trouble doing one of those big-time wrestling body slams or pile-drivers with the little guy.

Actually, it was not that violent, apparently. Milford/Bob wasn’t hurt. But he was frightened as he looked up at the fat guy in the reclining chair where he’d been sitting up until then.

Jerry had nowhere to go but home after they threw his fat ass to the curb (he had similar treatment 14 years ago at The Tennessean.)

 So his nephew, Steven, took custody of him and hauled him to the house Chuckles owns halfway between the edge of nowhere and a pile of dead cows and a slave cemetery, in too-rural Tennessee. I would not go out there unless I had a white sheet in the back seat, so I could blend in with the citizenry.  Actually, I made that part up, and I will, perhaps, drop in and see him sometime. I’ll need my Dad’s WWII MP’s billy club handy, though.  

Even if I wanted to go, I’d have to ask for directions, and I’m not sure Jerry knows where he is or who he is.

The first thing he’ll ask me is where I been. And I don’t know. Haven’t for a long time.

 Steven, had been living in the house with Uncle Chuckles for years prior to his lockup in the looney bin, and he voluntarily decided to turn his life upside down by taking Jerry back home and caring for him. He was the only family member willing to make that commitment.

"It's been better than I thought it would be," said Chef Steven this morning, September 11, 2024, when I called him at the restaurant where he works.

"So far, he just sleeps all day," said Steven, who rousts old Chuck when he gets home from work, when they eat and watch movies together until bedtime.  They used to enjoy beer, whiskey and more, but I promise, after being around him for most of a year, such activity would find him face down on the floor.  And I’ll bet Steven can’t pick him up.

Steven does worry what will happen if Jerry ever decides to escape his snug bed during the daytime and wander out into the living room, wondering "Where I been?"

"I may have to get someone to come in during the days, then," said Steven, adding that if necessary, he'll quit his job to care for his uncle.

That's a pretty big burden for a younger man to bear, but he loves his uncle and does not want him back in the looney bin. Manley blood apparently carries with it large responsibilities down there in too-rural southern Tennessee or wherever the hell the shack is.

Jerry used to have a dog down there, with Steven. “His name was ‘Snow’ or ‘Frosty’ or ‘Snowy’ or something like that,” Jerry used to guess. “I can’t remember. White dog. Nice dog.” I hope the dog is still there to provide company if Jerry ever gets out of bed in the daytime.

By the way, I'm sure Milford/Bob, who I miss since my visits to the nursing home have ended, is glad Jerry's gone, too. Now he’s got two chairs he can pee himself on, while riding and clicking his false teeth, remembering his days as a ribbon-winning horseman.  Those ribbons decorated the walls.  There was plenty of room for Jerry to add his own decorations, but he never could remember what was important to him. Believe me, I asked.

Jerry is shown in a photo here riding on a Clarksville Fire Department truck to the world premiere of "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture" on November 12, 1982.

Rob Dollar -- aka "Death News Brother" -- and I had arranged for our arrival on the fire truck, since the Firemen's Christmas Toy Drive was among the beneficiaries of the less than $3,703 we raised for charity during our all-night showing of the movie at The Roxy. We also saved The Roxy, but that’s another story.

Rob and I also gave money to the Police Department Widows and Children's fund. The police participated in our Bullitt-like chase up and down the hills of the Queen City and they also "arrested us" at the end of the premiere to make sure all of the money got out to safety -- they kept it at the Clarksville Police HQ until the next day.

There also is a part in the movie where police, unaware that we were just making a movie,  pulled us over, stole our props and beat the shit out of us. “You don’t do things like that in Clarksville, boys,” they screamed as their billy clubs made Jerry cry.  Well, the beating part is untrue. Jerry’s crying has more truth, since we were riding in the back of his old, orange Datsun mini-pickup when the sirens and blue lights came at us.  And the thunder rolled.

The final beneficiary of our charity film showing was The Mustard Seed, a Goodwill-type food and clothing agency that was on Third Street, across from the Courthouse. It also is where we bought all of our costumes during the film shoot that lasted a few months of Saturday early mornings.

Of course, I remain "Flapjacks," the title character of our little character study. Jim Lindgren ("Flash") was the fourth primary News Brother, and he's in Sweden today. It is a family ancestry hunt, as Flash, like so many of us wonders where he been.

I think of Jerry often. I miss him, even being with him while he made little sense and had no clue as to whether it was day or night or where he been for months.

I love the guy. And, now that it’s been a month since he was thrown out of the nursing home for unseemly behavior, I really do wonder if he remembers I was with him all of those mornings. And the fact it doesn't matter to anyone but me. Does he even remember who I am? (At least I do, and I'm a pretty decent guy, most times.)

“Maybe somewhere down the road aways, he’ll think of me and wonder where I am these days.  Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays Purple Haze.”

That’s not my quote. It’s from The Traveling Wilburys. I thought of it while I was writing this little tale today and pondering Jerry’s life and future. My own, for that matter.

The name of the song is “End of The Line.” I play it every day.  Just in case.

 

 

James Earl Jones' death sparks memories of the night a Black Panther stomped my foot in a theater filled with his comrades as Irish priest laughs

 The clumsy Black Panther, in full regalia, accidentally stomped on my foot in the front row of the theater balcony. 

I was the one who apologized. And an Irish priest laughed at me, as we surveyed both levels of the theater, filled with Panthers in full uniforms and the White priest who was their spiritual adviser.

 Of course, there were those three White kids who had somehow crashed their obvious Black Panther New Year's Eve celebration, thanks to a car malfunction. We were already in our seats when the Panthers marched into the theater, in formation, most smiling, looking forward to the film. I can't claim a lack of apprehension.

That event was part of the first thought, a memory, really, that came to me when I heard that James Earl Jones had died. I've told the story before, and sometimes, as life's haze comes and goes, it varies. But it is very true, regardless.

It was New Year's Eve in 1970, when we had a bit of car trouble just south of the Loop in downtown Chicago.

My brother, Eric, our friend Gene Chapman, and I were going downtown to take part in the State-Lake celebration welcoming 1971, when something went wrong with the faded-bronze Mustang with the cheap sparkling wine on ice in the trunk.

Looking for help, we lurched south on State Street, getting into an increasingly sketchy section of town, when we finally spotted a Shell station -- back then there were mechanics, with full-scale bays and lifts at every gas station. This was long before corporations decided it would be cheaper for them if we'd pump our own gas.

A couple of mechanics took a quick look at the car. Nothing serious, we were told, but it would be a couple of hours. So we decided to leave the car and go catch a movie while it was repaired. The closest theater, I can't remember the name, was playing "The Great White Hope," the fictionalized account of the struggles and triumphs of great boxing champ Jack Johnson.

The movie house was just a couple blocks .. or maybe a dozen ... toward downtown.

We'd been wanting to see the movie, as I was a great boxing and social justice "fan" (probably not the right word, but this is one-take writing), so Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes. There were slight parallels between my favorite boxer and James Earl Jones' character, Jack Jefferson. And the play that begat the movie was loosely based on the life of great and controversial boxing legend, Jack Johnson.

It was the perfect tale for the Muhammad Ali era.

This night south of the Loop, as we stepped cautiously through territory where we were unfamiliar and obviously alien, came three years after Ali was stripped of his championship title for refusing to be drafted. "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10 thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville (his hometown) are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?" he asked. He lost peak fighting years before Americans, Black and White, and most -- even veterans -- realized stripping a guy of his title doesn't mean war is over (if you want it). The penalty was unjust.

I spent time with Ali on three different occasions over the years, one of the fortunes of being a newspaperman, back when newspapers existed.

But this little, top-of-my head, one-take anecdote sparked by the death of a great actor isn't about Muhammad Ali.

It's about James Earl Jones who died September 9, 2024, and the night a half-century-plus before when he became one of my favorite actors, even though I was in a room filled with Black Panthers, one of whom had accidentally crushed my right toe with his combat boots.

Jones' Jack Jefferson was, as noted, based on the tale of Jack Johnson, the incredible Black prizefighter in the early quarter of the last century. The first Black heavyweight champion, he was an empowering symbol of freedom shoved in Jim Crow's face. Promoters searched high and low for someone to beat him in the ring. Not just any someone, but a White guy. .. "The Great White Hope" of the title.

James J. Jeffries, a former and very White champ, was lured by society and racist sportswriters to come out of retirement to be that hope. He threw in the towel in the 15th round. The controversial Black guy won. Violence erupted among the races, in celebration and in denial.

It was hubris, his flaunting his love of White women and the Mann Act that eventually did Jack Johnson/Jack Jefferson in. I'm not going to go into details, as you should read about Johnson yourselves or at least see James Earl Jones portray that towering and glowering and flamboyant and violent figure in the fictionalized account.

The film scored poorly at the box office and received less-than-lukewarm reviews. But I found it amazing when I watched it on that New Year's Eve with hundreds of Black Panthers, including the one who stomped on my foot to set the tone for the night.

The celluloid tale of a Black man dictating his own course, generally unbowed by Jim Crow, probably wasn't really successful because a lot of White people had yet to come to terms with Muhammad Ali and we still were far from a nation of equality. Are we there now? You decide. The almost universal love for Ali is perhaps an indicator. And so are the colors of skin in pop culture, network news and in politics.

I don't know the sociological answers nor claim any Carnak the Magnificent insight.

I'm talking, after all, about a movie. And a dead actor.

Yes, it was a controversial movie, and I didn't like being stomped by the Black Panther.

But the film pretty much launched James Earl Jones to the point where his death leads the network news. Of course, it's not just his acting. His voice, that of Darth Vader, Alex Haley and Mufassa in "The Lion King," also contributed to the love of this actor. And, of course, there was his dignity that truly was the best part of "Field of Dreams."

Who has been untouched by his portrayal of a blind former ballplayer in "The Sandlot?"

He was a Black face who helped Slim Pickens end the world in "Dr. Strangelove."

Back to "The Great White Hope" 54 years ago, as seen in a theater filled with uniformed Black Panthers and one Irish priest and three young, White guys. 

It was a tale of discrimination and of Black empowerment, all wrapped up in fight scenes and love scenes and hate scenes.

I can't remember the name of the theater. And while I cheered for the Jones character for real, I likely would have at least feigned support for him as I sat in the middle of this well-dressed army.

I remember how moved I was by the performance. I remember ambiguous feelings toward the massive Black fighter and how the movie ended. That's as it should be, by the way.

I've seen "The Great White Hope'' a few times since, and I love James Earl Jones' Hollywood breakthrough performance. I'll always look forward to hearing his voice and seeing his majestic screen presence as long as movies exist.

But when he died, I thought not about Mufasa or Vader, but about my seat in the front of the balcony, and the Panther who accidentally stomped on my foot as he went for popcorn.

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm sorry."

The Panther smiled, knowing that I was not the one to apologize, but I'm sure knowing why I did.

The Irish priest slapped me on the knee and laughed.

The big Black Panther returned with his popcorn and took great care not to stomp on my foot.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Don't want to step on you again."