Badger Shelton, dead 13 years, and my brother, dead 9 months, and me, still alive, were chased by a cop, danced with a big, red elephant after we joined Death to become pals with Mr. Lone Ranger

 Scott Shelton, my brother, Eric, and I were dancing and cavorting between the four legs of the giant elephant and tugging, salaciously, on his trunk.
I wish we could do it again, but Scott died 13 years ago January 23 (today as I write a quick, no-edit tale of glory). My brother died last spring.  They were among my closest pals. Most of my closest pals are dead, by the way. They all were glad they knew me, and I hope they'll  tell God to have mercy on my soul when the counting’s done.
But Scott and Eric were with me on the day we met Mr. Lone Ranger, befriending him for life, and later doing our best at evading the law and dancing with the elephant down on the boulevard.
The elephant dance came maybe 15 minutes after my life-or-death attempt to escape Kentucky State Trooper Rudy, who was damned determined to make sure we followed the rule of law in Christian County, Kentucky.
As Rudy chased my old, faded-yellow Dodge Duster with its slant-six engine and apparently failing brakes, Scott – who was in the back seat – leaned over my shoulder and kept on urging me to “run for the border.”
“He can’t follow us into Tennessee,” Scott said. “Let’s go, Flap…. You can make it.”
My brother, Eric, wasn’t much help, either. He just tightened up his seat belt and laughed, looking over his shoulder to see Trooper Rudy closing in on us as I did my best to elude the long arm of the law on U.S. 41A. “Fucker’s gonna get you, Timmy,” he said. “Either go faster or pull over.”
Not wanting the trooper to begin firing his .44 Magnum at my tires (which weren’t so good to begin with), I succumbed to common sense and a will to live – I used to have that – and I nursed the Duster up onto the shoulder of the highway.  The only thing other than trees and fields in sight was a long, seemingly endless white, wooden fence.  Cattle farm obviously. Or perhaps it was a place to ride your horse till you can’t no more.
I’ve told this story before, and it involves all kinds of legal treachery in the courts system of Christian County, Kentucky.  The facts are mostly the same, depending on when I’m telling the tale and how much sleep or whiskey I had the night before. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, God,” I pledged on the Bible in the courtroom where I ended up a week or two after the feverish attempt to make it to the Tennessee line (even though we were still miles from that goal.)

Rob "Death" Dollar, Scott "Badger" Shelton, Mr. Lone Ranger, me "Flapjacks" Ghianni. My brother, Eric, took this picture. We also took one with him in it. Scott died 13 years ago January 23, 2025. My brother died in the spring of 2024. The Lone Ranger also is dead. Rob and I live on, and are damn proud of it. Instead of mourning Scott on this deathiversary, I choose to tell a true story of truth, injustice by Trooper Rudy, salvation and a red, concrete elephant.  

I jumped ahead of myself there.  You see, I was in court because Trooper Rudy – a kind and laughing fellow – didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense as an excuse for driving too fast on HIS highway, and he gave me a ticket that I ended up taking to trial. The judge didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense nor my explanation that I usually drive much faster than that.
The law-and-order segment of this tale can be found in other blogs and in the journalism classic expose “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory.”
My time in court is legendary in Christian County, primarily because of my Lone Ranger defense (“I am a friend of The Lone Ranger”). I had thought of using a different tactic, telling the judge I was driven to break the law because of the death of Chico the Monkey, but I decided I wouldn’t. Instead of The Lone Ranger trial, as it’s been dubbed among State Police and judges in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it would have been “Tim’s Monkey Trial.”
Interesting, but certainly not accurate. Chico, you may recall, was a spider or squirrel monkey whose escape from a Clarksville house sent deputies and lawmen there in a panic. “Deputies go bananas: Monkey at Large!” screamed the next day’s newspaper. Almost cost me my job, but newspaper circulation skyrocketed.
I’m getting a bit far afield here, but all of the above – including the crawling around the elephant legs – is related.
Scott, who was a News Brother dubbed “Badger,” and Eric -- who was the News Brothers’ biggest fan and who used to tell my approving mother that I was completely crazy, dreaming my life away and living that life in one of the faster lanes – were in the Duster that day, because we were going to meet another News Brother, Rob “Death” Dollar at the Dollar Estate and cat sanctuary on Sherwood Drive in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Rob and I co-founded The News Brothers, suffered dastardly at the hands of Korporate Amerikan “journalism” and also wrote the book mentioned above.
Rob was going to ride with me and the others as I drove to some sort of fairgrounds in Hoptown to meet The Lone Ranger. It was a dream come true for Baby Boomers, who grew up loving those thrilling days of yesteryear and hollering “Hi-Yo Silver” every time our mothers took a wooden spoon to our butts.
Of course, that sort of stuff happened 30 years before this adventure I’m telling you about today.  Rob had been invited to a Lone Ranger Day at the fairgrounds that was staged by a local wheeler-dealer and damn nice guy who always wanted to make movies.
There were two original, full-length movies, featuring the Lone Ranger origin story and further adventures with his virgin-white horse, Silver, and his best friend, Tonto, on his pinto, Scout.   
Then Clayton Moore, the only actor who ever should have played The Lone Ranger, spent an hour talking to all of us overgrown kids and real kids.  Me and Rob and Scott and Eric, though got more time with him.
Rob and I corralled The Lone Ranger as he was attempting to leave the celebration. He was headed outside to climb aboard Silver (the real horse was long dead, but this one looked the part) and get him to trot into the horse trailer attached to the big, pink Cadillac with longhorn horns on the hood that The Lone Ranger had driven all the way from Calabasas, California, where he lived.
“Mr. Lone Ranger, we love you,” all four of us chanted, before we started shooting the breeze with the legendary masked lawman.
I guess he spent about an hour with us, telling us wisdom of life on the trail as well as lamenting his best friend – seriously – the actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto and died within months of our time together in the Hoptown fairgrounds snow.
Any jokes or untruths aside, we all did form a bond with The Lone Ranger, who began calling us by our News Brothers nicknames (I was “Flapjacks” and Rob was “Death” … on this day, Eric was going by his own nickname “Big Bro", even though he was only linked by blood to perhaps the most notorious and deranged member of The News Brothers). The Lone Ranger also referred to us as “my kids,” because we represented his demographic.  I was 30ish, Rob and Scott a year or many younger, Eric a couple years older than me and a much-nicer person.
Rob and I continued to stay in contact with Mr. Lone Ranger right up until his death and several years before our own.
This is all building up though to our trip back to Clarksville, after dropping Rob off at the Dollar Estate.  I had to get to my newspaper in Clarksville, where I’d write a column about The Lone Ranger that I’d use to lead the Sunday newspaper. I think Rob had that day off, if he hadn’t already been fired for applying to be Clarksville police chief (please read our book). Eric was going to spend a part of the day in the newsroom before going to my apartment and eating my meager food and drinking my sody pop while I put out the Sunday newspaper. He might meet us for a drink at Camelot at 2 a.m. the next day.
Badger had to get back to WJZM-AM, a 50-watt station that operated out of the attic over a furniture store in downtown Clarksville.  He was news director there, and a damn good one. Rob and I formed our friendship with Badger because we always were bumping into each other at news events.
Also, Scott liked to hang out with me in the newspaper newsroom, where he enjoyed watching the staff reel from all of the exploding cigarettes and rubber vomit involved in putting out a quality newspaper.
Interestingly – to me, not you – is the fact that Scott’s Dad, Bill, had become my friend before Scott did.  Bill was the nicest older gentleman in Clarksville. He enjoyed my regular columns and stories about his town. So, instead of just calling to say something, he started coming in and sitting in the chair by my desk.
 He would tell me tales that made me laugh, fill me in on local history, talk about his family, ask who the fuck I was and why I was in Clarksville, anyway? Many stories came from our visits. If it was a news nugget, I’d pass it on to Rob, Richard “The Marine” Worden or to Harold “The Stranger” Lynch – depending on the year and who was working at the paper and alive at that point. I was in Clarksville many years, too many, but I had a demon to shed before I left town. That’s a long and sad, remorseful tale and 40 years in my past, now.
Bill several times asked me to quit smoking. “The cigarettes always win,” he said, preaching and beseeching me.  I did quit, but not until 2000, long after I became the burnt toast of Nashville media.
But this really is supposed to be about Scott. Well, not really. I wrote a long and teary farewell to him when he died, and I’ve saluted him some in my blogs in recent years.
Today, instead of being somber, I choose to revisit the day we met The Lone Ranger and danced between the giant elephant legs.   
You see, after the trauma of the $80 ticket for allegedly doing well over the speed limit on Trooper Rudy’s highway, I continued driving the Duster home. That path goes right through Oak Grove, Kentucky, back then best known for the Cat West strip joint. Stripped all the way down to the vagina. The subsequent raids and illegal activity among city officials who loved to witness flesh on a pole and didn’t mind the related drug and sex-trafficking activity led to us establishing a one-column spot on the top of the front page. We called it the “Cat West Corner.”
It was a way for newspaper execs to have it both ways.  If it was a Cat West story or perhaps a story about raids of my truly good friend Connie Lampe’s two brothels, it went up in that corner of the paper. They didn’t want me to put it in the main three-column spot with sensational headlines like “Bare breasts titillate Fort Campbell soldiers” or “Connie’s Whores told to squeeze their business assets shut.”    
That main three-column spot was for Wendell Wilson’s “serious” news stories that always began “The City Council met last night and ….” Substitute County Commission…. School Board …. Chamber of Commerce … or any other government body that met.  
When Wendell became city editor, the reporters – Jerry Manley, John Staed, Harold Lynch, Rob Dollar, Greg Kuhl, Elise Frederick, etc. did not write leads that stale, so Wendell rewrote them.
Ooops, I may get back to this section when I have the desire, but today’s entry is about Scott Shelton, who, like Harold and Kuhl, and most of my friends are dead or mentally infirm.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about me and Scott and the elephant, not about his death 13 years ago.
As we drove down toward Clarksville and our mutual workplaces, we had to pass through and across the highway from Fort Campbell, the sprawling Army post where the 101^st Airborne (Air Assault) rests when not keeping their Rendezvous With Destiny (their division slogan, basically meaning that in all American wars, the 101^st is the first division in and the last out. Look it up. It’s impressive. 
Soldiers, in addition to seeing naked women either as entertainment or as professionals, also enjoy liquor.
On the left side of Fort Campbell Boulevard stood a full-size red, cement elephant, an eye-catching beast that helped this liquor store stand out from all the others and the neon bars and too-many (from my perspective) barber shops, like Buddy’s, run by a toothy fellow who liked to tease me about my hair. “Fuck you, Buddy,” I’d say. And the shorn soldiers would laugh.
As Arlo Guthrie told me long ago, you can get anything you want on Fort Campbell Boulevard. Or shit, maybe that was his dad, Humphrey.
Scott, who did not normally venture this far north of Clarksville, immediately focused his eyes on the massive, red elephant.
“Flap, let’s stop here and look at the elephant,” he said in his best news radio voice.
I think he was suggesting this as a way to get me – I am medicated OCD – from dwelling about the basically full-week’s take-home that Trooper Rudy and his judge pal were going to extort from me.
So, I pulled the Duster onto the broken-asphalt, yellow-striped parking lot and we got out.
I went in the store and asked simply: “Can me and my friend and my brother play with your elephant, sir?”
You’d be surprised what people agree to, if you are polite.
So, while my brother filmed on the Super 8mm camera I’d stolen from my Dad, Badger and I played elephant tag and came up with words that rhyme with “trunk.”
It was like two little kids in a playground, discovering a new teeter-totter (“See-saw, Marjorie Daw,” we’d always chirp when on those devices).
I told Eric to take his turn, and I held the camera. If you ever heard either my brother or my friend Badger laugh, you’ll not forget it.
Hell, it even almost drowned out the clatter as the sun reached noon over Fort Campbell Boulevard.
Unfortunately, that film, like a lot of that we shot back then, has faded or been displaced.  Rob and I did a whole Johnny Carson Show on film one night, and that’s gone as well. And the L-C rooftop scene, where Badger, Death, Danny Adkins and Tennessee Williams watched as I almost tripped and fell three floors to Commerce Street while filming also is gone.
But when I think of that day, of many days, spent with Scott -- who used to let me sneak on the radio airwaves with Jimmy in the Morning (also dead) and spin “Helter Skelter,” which both deplored -- today I’m not really dwelling on his death all those years ago.
I’m thinking about the fun we had, the laughs we shared. I’m also thinking about Trooper Rudy and his refusal to accept my plea that “we’re all friends with The Lone Ranger” as an excuse to let me get out of the ticket.
I think about my friend, Death, who is alive and as well as can be, on Sherwood in Hopkinsville.  He rescues cats and takes care of all generations of Dollars. Despite political differences, we love each other.
I think about all the guys who were my friends – really, since I was a workaholic, my only real friends have been those I met in the newspaper business – and who have died. I’m basically alone in this world, at least in terms of friends.
On that subject, I always think about my brother, whose fairly recent death keeps me awake in the middle of the night.
But then I think about the red elephant and how much fun we had being silly, even though we could claim “Mr. Lone Ranger,” as we addressed him, as our friend.
I dropped Scott off at the radio station and took my brother to my apartment before I went to work for the day. Thank God Harold, not Wendell, was the Saturday reporter. One day when he was the Saturday reporter, he was our “cover” as me and Rob and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and John “Street” Staed ambushed American astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn. He, too, remained our friend until the end of his final countdown.   
At 2 a.m. the morning after The Lone Ranger’s friendship was ours, I was sitting with Rob and Jimmy in the Morning at Buford Thaxton’s rambunctious Camelot club, telling the story of Badger, Eric and me and the red elephant that lifted my mood after enduring police cruelty. My brother came in to join us. Rob fiddled with my Lone Ranger mask, that Clayton Moore had signed. We were hoping Scott would show up. Fuck, let’s just assume he did.
 Life has its ups and downs. See-saw, Marjorie Daw.
 

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley gets Lewisburg cheeseburgers on the rare day he plays canasta with his devoted nephew and other ravings from our long lives filled with busted dreams

 See him wasted by the TV in his sweatsuit eating beans, wearing yesterday’s misremembers like a smile.  Chuckles had a future full of money, love and dreams, but now he just sits there and eats and smiles.

I sort of paraphrased, well, not really sorta … the first lines of my dead friend Kris Kristofferson’s classic Pilgrim, Chapter 33 … when I began this update on the weird health and bleak times of my half-century pal, Jerry Dale Manley, aka “Chuckles News Brother.”

Jim "Flash" Lindgren caught this shot 15 years ago of Rob "Death" Dollar, me (to far right) and our pal Jerry "Chuckles" Manley in orange shirt at a restaurant that served as News Brothers' HQ in Nashville. This is where Rob and I met often with our book publisher and also where the two of us met Abe Lincoln having green eggs and ham.  Like most places frequented by The News Brothers, the restaurant closed and has been replaced by a designer Mexican joint for Nashville's rotten batch of millennials.

We used that song – we, as in me, “Flapjacks” and Rob “Death” Dollar and Jerry in a pivotal scene in the great movie, “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” back in 1982.  The fourth primary News Brother, Jim “Flash” Lindgren wasn’t present on this full Sunday of shooting. (We also did our gay nightclub scene, one of our Mericourt Park scenes and I believe our graveyard scene on this day.)

The “Pilgrim” scene actually focused on me, obviously wasted on the sidewalk on Third Street in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Rob and Jerry, who are fine method actors, arrived – I believe it was after the Mericourt Park frolicking – to find me sitting on the sidewalk in my jacket and my jeans, smoking and appearing generally despondent. It’s really not hard to find me that way, even today. We were, as you may know, searching for editor Tony “Little, Short Asshole With a Beard” Durr. He really wasn’t lost, he had fled Luther and “The Leaf-Chronicle” in the middle of the night and taken a job in San Antonio, Texas. (He later paid for me to come down there to interview to be his assistant Sunday editor of the “Express-News,” but I turned him down, based on his track record, the pay was less than at the L-C, and they wouldn’t pay moving expenses.  I had identical experiences when he got them to offer me a job at the Chicago “Sun-Times” and the “Anchorage Gazette” (or whatever the fuck it was.)

Well, I’ve taken a long sidetrack here. You see, today’s bit of writing is about Jerry, “Chuckles,” who, with Rob “Death” convinced me to throw down my exploding cigarette while Kris sang “The Pilgrim,” and join them in the fictional search that was the “glue’’ of the free-ranging film whose main targets were popular culture and our own naivete and lifelong propensity for valor and eventual defeat.

I love my News Brothers, special kudos to the four main assholes who risked all to make movies and in real life to tell the news to a fact-starved populace. Too bad there are no newspapers today.  

Jerry, of course, is one of the fabulous four, and I worked with him, on and off, throughout our several weary decades as newspapermen. (That, too, has a real-life sad ending.)  

As you may recall, in the year 2024, I spent a day or two a week visiting him in the Memory Care Ward of a nuthouse a few miles from where I live. I would take him Diet SunDrop and peanut butter crackers (or other equally good for a healthy diet and basic nutrition stuffs) for him to snack on. At first I snuck the stuff in in my pants. But as I became bolder, I just toted it in, daring Nurse Ratched and the others to take it from me. A couple of them were quite nice-looking, so I had hoped I’d be patted down and my crotch searched.

Tim, you are getting too far afield. These guys won’t read this, old buddy. Doesn’t matter. The writing is the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king and purge my sandpaper soul.

Anyway, you may recall that Jerry – who had been dismissed from two cuckoo’s nests down in his hometown prior to moving on up to Brentwood – was tossed from the local Memory Care Ward for taking his roommate Bob/Milford, who was sitting in Jerry’s chair and singing  “Rocky Raccoon”,  and picking him up twice and doing one of those wrestling pile-drivers, tossing him to the floor. I made up the pile-driver, but it had to hurt, as Bob/Milford weighed maybe 75 pounds and Jerry was bulging, I imagine up toward the 270 range, by that time.

Since Jerry’s family, he has two grown and professionally advanced children, didn’t do anything about it, his nephew, Steven, who had shared Jerry’s Lewisburg house, didn’t want Jerry going into another soul prison. So, he took him home early this fall.

I’d been to visit Jerry for about 10 months, but to me, an old and defunct cripple, cluttering my 40-year-old Saab down to Lewisburg just isn’t practical. I got emotionally and physically drained enough when I was spending my hours here, in the asylum. I know I physically would not be able to endure 1½ hours of Tennessee interstate somnambulism at the end of the visit.

If you’ve read my irregular dispatches, all found on this page and in my “They Call Me Flapjacks” internationally acclaimed blog (I have a Brit who lives and works in Germany who is perhaps my greatest fan, and he’s a damn nice guy as well, despite his taste in international writers), you likely know that I’ve tried to keep everyone in the News Brothers community posted on Jerry’s health as he lives with Steven. (My dispatches also are well-received by my beloved pal, Scott “Badger” Shelton, who died 13 years ago next Thursday, January 23, 2012. Fuck, I miss him. But I do talk to him. Shouldn’t be surprising, as I talk to myself all the time, too, and I’m half-dead).

So, you know that Steven turned his life upside-down to care for his uncle. He “retired” from his profession as a chef and went to work as a construction supervisor, so he could have regular daytime hours and not leave Jerry at home alone and be there for evening meals, “Kojak” reruns and heated hands of canasta.

I called Steven yesterday, just to see how both he and his Uncle Chuckles are doing. It is a huge sacrifice Steven made to keep Jerry out of a state asylum or a retired-and-mentally-drained-people’s bunkhouse and death watch facility.

“I’m doing OK,” said Steven, who I caught after his construction job ended for the day. “It’s hard, but Jerry’s worth it.

“He’s not too much trouble.’’

In fact, he says Jerry has “some days” – like the day I called – when the dementia fog is broken by the rare Lewisburg sun. If you can’t get a tan, then you stand in the Lewisburg rain.         

“He goes days without saying a thing. Then, today, he’s been talking. A lot. Surprising. Sometimes he sleeps all day and sits up, watching TV all night, but other times, like today, we talk and it’s nice that he’s ‘around.’”

Steven laughed. “Only trouble he gives me is when I have to fight him to get him in the shower, but he needs to stay clean.”

Jerry’s refusal to shower was the reason one nursing home dismissed him, only to send him looking for a place where he could pound the shit out of anyone named Bob/Milford.

“Otherwise he goes days at a time without talking.

“If he has a good day, maybe we can meet for lunch,” he added, saying that his uncle occasionally will go for a car ride, but more often kicks up a fuss.

“He’s eating OK. In fact, he sent me to town to get him a cheeseburger,” said Steven. “That’s what I’m doing now.

“Only other trouble I’ve had is that he needed to have a bigger toilet put in. He’s too big for the one he had in the house.”

Another old journalism comrade of mine currently is dying in a nursing home, refusing to eat.

At least Jerry is eating.

I told Steven to get himself a burger or two himself when he got to town.

“Oh, and tell him he’s a damn nice guy.”

I hung up the phone and shivered.  “Fuck, Timothy,’’ I muttered, before breaking into “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.”

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….