Nola's death brings memories rolling back to the guy in the power-blue tux, Jocko's best man

When I learned Nola had died, my first thought was to look for that picture of the two guys in their power-blue tuxedoes standing at the front of the church in Marion, Iowa.
Of course, the two men, boys really, weren’t the focus of that picture. The focus was the beautiful blonde, a tall, former pompon girl at Iowa State University, full of life on that day. The smiling and happy bride. Nola.
As I’m not the world’s most physical guy, I would always greet her with: Nola. N-O L-A. Nola. No-No-No- No Nola … especially if I drank champagne that tasted like cherry cola. Again, another side trek here. But it’s true. I never hear that Kinks song without changing from "Lola" to "Nola" in my head and heart.
The guy next to her in the picture was Jocko, my comrade with whom I chased many dragons and caught a few. Sometimes he didn’t go along for the most reckless of the rides, as I pushed both limits and sky, but he was always there to greet me, literally standing on his head on my returns. He was a loyal and good friend, a guy I loved. Still do. A brother-in-arms.
We’d actually arrived on the cusp of late, at the wedding ceremony.
I had been asked by the tall woman, the bride, to drive her future husband because she was afraid he might be too nervous. Jocko’s mom concurred. “Yes, ladies, I’ll drive.”
Instead, we did as we’d done for years, sped through the countryside, spinning Iowa gravel. Our tuxedo jackets were in the backseat, because we were sipping and sliding toward destiny. Everything was going to change. So we stopped for a bag of grease burgers, as I called them. We tried to make sure they didn’t drip over the fancy suits.
The bridegroom goosed his GTO or whatever the muscle car was … I can’t remember … other than it was brown with a light top and I had driven it a time or two when we were out on our night-time patrols. It drove faster than my ’65 Falcon, although that too found its share of duty as we escaped into Iowa nights.
Finally, a couple of miles from the church, Jocko pulled the car into a picnic area, one of those old roadside things with a turn-around and a picnic table, and said I’d better drive, as everyone expected the best man to be in the pilot’s seat when the groom arrived at the church.
I was the best man that day. I think it was 1974, but it could have been 1975. Perhaps 1976?
Doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.
Ages of memories and heartache, good things, sad things … just life really … separates that that day from this one.
This morning, Oct. 7, 2010, I learned that Nola was dead. Cancer. A week ago in Montgomery, Ala., where she’d ended up after the divorce that I guess came 20 or so years into the marriage.
Even if I can’t find that picture of the boys in powder-blue, it is in my heart and my sometimes fuzzy, still-concussed brain. The beautiful blonde bride smiled, as did the bridesmaid, her sister, who herself was to get married two weeks later in a bowling alley. There is a side story there that I may tell one day.
I kept that picture among the pictures of my life in an old file cabinet next to my desk in my office before the flood of May 1-2. I didn’t look at it often, but when I did, it always made me smile. It was piled in that drawer with pictures of my grandparents, my various pets, an old drifter pal named Skipper, my mother and a “Have Gun Will Travel: Wire Paladin, San Francisco” calling card from an old Tide box when I was a kid. There was a picture of a young man with long, dark hair and a scraggly beard walking out of the Grand Canyon and sitting by a redwood in the High Sierras. Looked a lot like me.
Parts of my life long gone, people, for the most part, long gone. In the massive Nashville flood that washed away a part of my house last spring, I rescued that cabinet, but it had to be separated and carried to dry land drawer-by-drawer. Some things from lower drawers washed away. Others still are piled, awaiting their turn to be rediscovered, in the garage.
That picture may be there. But I really don’t need to look at it today.
I remember the bride and groom looked nervous. I looked a little nervous myself, even though I was reinforced by vodka and, of course, Lifesavers. As was the groom. A good best man, after all, has to take care of his charge.
The bridesmaid looked magnificent, as well. Always did.
It really was among my life’s happiest days.
The whole world was ours to unravel, to chase. I was a year or so out of college and I was still going to be Jack London or Jack Kerouac or Woody Guthrie. Kris Kristofferson. Tom T. Hall. Hemingway maybe, but I wasn’t going to blow my brains out. At least I didn’t think about it at that point in my life.
The bride and groom were going to settle down in a farmhouse on her parents’ farm in Marion, just outside Cedar Rapids.
He was going to work an inside-sales job at a local company. She was going to be a teacher. They were going to have children and live happily ever after.
In my roaming, I’d visit occasionally, if for no other reason than to chase away the pheasants and squirrels when Jocko went hunting on his property. I’d get him to laughing so hard that there was no reason to kill, a hobby he’d picked up from life on the farm.
I don’t drink any more, but back in 1969 when I first met the guy on whose right I’m standing in the picture, it was about 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday. My dorm room door was open. Actually I seldom closed it, ever. I looked down the hall to see this big guy I’d met only briefly in our first three or four weeks of freshman year. He’d been busy as a football player, so I didn’t know him that well. He looked exhausted from morning drills.
I reached into my footlocker and produced an almost full bottle of cheap gin and hollered down the hallway: “Hey, Jocko, I’m having dry martinis this morning. You want one?” With that both a nickname – I called him Jocko because he was a scholarship athlete – and a friendship was born. And we took turns pulling very dry martinis out of the bottle that morning and probably into the night.
I’d say it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For the next four years, no party was off-limits. No excuse for laughter ignored. I was a good student. But, even back then, I believed time was running out. Of course it was, slowly. So, I got mostly A’s. Profs loved me. I never missed class. I did my homework. But then it was time to signal, with that hand-over-hand motion, that it was time to roll. Studies done. No one had been called by the draft board. Let’s roll, baby, roll.
Sometimes it lasted days, like the time Jocko and I planned and executed the Viking Fest – a debauched feast ripped from either the movie Tom Jones or the life of the Rolling Stones. We charged boys $5 a head for all they could eat and drink if they brought a girl. We charged men who came alone $10. Unaccompanied girls were admitted free. Such festivals, where we cooked turkeys and pheasant stew, drank from spiked kegs, were the way Jocko and I made pocket money.
Of course, we also were the primary beneficiaries of the frivolity, that night at “Lean Feeners Lodge” or elsewhere. After expenses, we could easily clear $200 or $300 and it beat working at Taco Tico.
We were the guys who walked into parties singing that Carly Simon song, who rode motorcycles long and hard into the night, who saw way too many sunrises through parched eyeballs. We knew every obscene word and gesture to throw into the Guess Who’s “American Woman” and the Doors' "Touch Me." He cheered me on when I first established my Joe Cocker party routine or became the notorious and still-famous-in-Ames guy known as "the Dancing Bear."
When we’d enter Tork’s Pub, now long gone, the bar would grow silent. It was like those old cowboy movies when the gunslinger comes in. We weren’t looking for trouble, though. Just laughs. I never set out to hurt anyone. I just had to laugh.
I had other sidekicks for some of the adventures because Jocko was on a football scholarship and things like practice and games got in the way. But still, when he had time, he was there, with gusto. He was a brother in arms in my helter-skelter race against depression and war.
There were others I loved as well. Captain Kirk. Carpy. Uncle Moose. Titzy, Nardholm.
Life changes things and people. After I left college, I moved South to be with family – my mother already had begun showing the symptoms of the suffocating disease that slowly and finally killed her 25 years later --and because I loved Tennessee. I talked with Jocko about every day for a few years, until we had a falling out that needn’t have happened. But we both had our reasons and, well, those phone calls stopped, with a few rare interruptions, more than 25 years ago. I’m sorry. But that’s life.
I am one who goes through life closing doors on the way. It spares heartache. It’s kind of that “Don’t Look Back” philosophy.
But it really never works. For the last decades, I’ve thought of my friend often, daily at least. I knew he’d gotten divorced … we did talk about that. I had heard that from other people and called to make sure he was OK. But I hadn’t been in touch in the years since his wife was remarried and perhaps began something of, I hope, a truly happily ever after existence.
I have both ridden the white horses and worn the black hats in my life.
But one thing that can’t be questioned is my loyalty. You hurt anyone I love and I am slow to forgive.
You ever own a piece of my heart, you are there to stay.
I really don’t know much about the lives of Jocko and Nola since their divorce. Last I heard from him, he was dating a nice Lebanese woman. I hope he’s happy.
And I hope Nola was happy too, although, from reading the obituary in the Montgomery Advertiser, she apparently died a slow and painful death.
While I hadn’t been in touch with Jocko I always looked for him and Nola on Facebook, which is where I have connected with other friends from my wild and carefree days.
One of them forwarded me an e-mail today from Jocko: “Nola lost her battle with cancer. Kids were with her when she died. Kinda sucks,” he wrote. Simple, true statement. I knew there were tears there somewhere.
I’ve tried to reach him. Sent him an e-mail. Found the obit on line. And inside I have cried, for Nola, for Jocko, for their kids. For myself, I guess, and the fact time really is running out on lives and dreams.
The years haven’t all been kind, although I am in a wonderful place now in my life, thanks to my wife and kids and my good friends in Nashville and, of course, the notorious News Brothers, especially my appropriately named friend "Death," who help me stay focused and laughing.
But there were years when I was in free-fall, when I needed that old friend who I’d let get away or who had done that to me. A few times, the black dogs barked at 3 a.m. or so and I'd dial his number. Hear his tired -- not irritated -- voice, hope to hear back sometime. Perhaps he needed me too at that time, too. But we just kinda lost contact. Except in our hearts.
No one’s to blame. I know that’s life. We all change. Years fly by.
Tork’s Pub has been torn down.
Nola’s dead.
“Kinda sucks,” Jocko wrote.
Makes me want to go up to Iowa and scare away the pheasants while my old friend totes his shotgun. Maybe we can even have a Geezers Fest and sell admission to those of our friends who are still alive and mobile.
By the way, for the sake of uncommon modesty, I had to buy powder-blue boxers to wear under that tux. Still got 'em.

Compassionate, brave and ethical life of journalist Jack Shelley left lifelong mark on the soul of a no-longer-young hippie lad

“Jack Shelley, longtime voice of radio and TV, dies at 98,” reads the headline.
Below that headline is Jack’s face, smiling robustly, from the Des Moines Register website.
I lean back in my well-worn office chair – my perch on this well-worn life – and for a few moments, well, probably longer, think about Jack, what he meant to me, how important a role he played in my life just by being himself.
He was of journalism’s greatest generation, a man who served his public by going overseas during World War II, sending taped dispatches from the front during some of Hitler’s worst brutality and from the days when U.S. airmen began the nuclear age by dropping A-bombs on Japan.
First thing I did was type in a Facebook update, letting people know that we had lost a journalism giant who also was a friend and mentor. He wasn’t a household name, like Reasoner, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley or Murrow. He had his opportunity to join that crew in the public perception, but he turned it down in favor of serving his own state, the pig farmers, educators, businesspeople, grain elevator operators,barkeeps and store owners across a gloriously beautiful state.
In the hours after I learned about his death, I did more than lament it … for after all he had lived a good and honorable life. But I was transported to the day I first met the then-retired journalist who had taken on a role as a professor at Iowa State University.
It was that smile that greeted me on my first visit as a prospective student to the then kinda shabby confines of the Journalism and Mass Comm building, where cigarette butts littered the stairwell and burned coffee’s aroma flavored the air.
Jack’s also was the smile that consoled and counseled me as I made my way through the four years it took me to earn my degree in journalism and mass communication, graduating with “borderline-almost-honors” after indulging in the passions, pursuits, whims and rallies that tore through campuses where males were pitched on the precipice of war. Friends were drafted and died. Others came home and twitched and turned in the night, sometimes springing from their bunks and prepared to kill at the slightest interruption. Talk him down, man. This isn’t Saigon.
That’s just the time it was, a time I wouldn’t trade, filled with mistakes and experiments and experiences savored and regretted and sometimes forgotten. These years – 1969-1973, when Jack was a constant in the life of a young man teetering precariously between cold-sweat fear of war and exuberance of living life to its fullest -- flavor me and the writer, the journalist I have been and always will – even though corporate newspapers seem to feel me old and in the way, as my late pal Vassar Clements might say.
That picture of Jack Shelley and the obituary saddened me and made me proud at the same time. It also launched me into memories of anti-war rallies, time spent with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims, Give Peace a Chance seriousness and Sly and the Family Stone escapism. Suddenly I was in the lecture hall near the administration building and my history professor came into the building, tears rolling down his cheeks, exclaiming “I’ve tried to be neutral and calm about the war in Vietnam, but God damn a country that shoots its students. Class dismissed. I don’t care what you do, but you need to make your voices heard if you think this was wrong and cowardly. Damn. Damn.”
Four dead in Ohio.
Oh, that really doesn’t have anything to do with Jack Shelley, other than that he framed that time for me, made me welcome, a young hippie drifter and Kerouac wannabe who came to ISU because I was kinda pissed off at the state of Illinois.
I had earned the honor of being named an “Illinois State Scholar” for pretty much an A-minus average in what was then considered, at least by Life magazine, to be one of the top 10 high schools in the country. I’d worked hard (played hard, too, but I was sober during much of my high school career) to become a recognized student, athlete (not so good, but popular because I would mouth off to coaches if they were in the wrong), a friend of greasers and a dater of cheerleaders and princesses.
Neither a renaissance man nor a man of means by no means. Which is why I ended up in Iowa and made a close friend in Jack Shelley, perhaps the greatest journalist I’ve ever known personally.
You see, the state of Illinois, while it recognized my “scholarship,” was not going to give me a penny toward my schooling. They said I didn’t qualify because of my father’s income. The fact I was paying for my own school -- that I worked as a night stock boy at Jewel (quit because I hated to wear bow ties at midnight while ink-stamping prices on cans of corn and stew) and did yard work and shoveled stalls at a nearby day camp as well as worked for the Park District (big responsibility: learn to drive the stick shift so I could get donuts from the nearest bakery at break time) – didn’t change that a bit.
So, since they didn’t want to give me any state money, I wasn’t going to give any to them. Which meant going to school out of state. I’d been to Iowa State before, because my big brother was a knee-damaged and shaved-headed football player there. He’s a nice guy and not a bit like me.
As I looked at the catalogues – remember those big catalogues, glossy pictures and text that all universities had before the internet? – I saw that the university had a solid journalism program, featuring print and broadcast reporters who had covered World War II. These guys didn’t have Ph.Ds in journalism. They didn’t have master’s degrees. They weren’t scholars. They were cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking professionals. That appealed to me, as those passions, along with writing and enjoying life and running scared from a war, were prominent on my own life’s resume.
At that point, I was thinking of going into broadcasting, so I honed in on the fact that one of the great reporters from TV’s early years – Jack Shelley – would be my adviser if I went to ISU.
On our first meeting, we hit it off well. I know I was not the prototypical Iowan at the time. My hair was a bit longer than many of the kids from the cornfields and I drove a Ford Falcon instead of a GTO and a John Deere. But did you know that the farm kids grew hemp between the cornrows? Did you know that possession of pot in Iowa at the time was a simple $5 fine, less than a traffic ticket?
A lot of hog farmers had started growing hemp to help in the manufacture of rope during World War II and, well, they learned how to dry the leftovers on the pot-bellied stove out in the barn.
This did not play into my choice of ISU as a place to go to school, oddly enough. Really, the deciding factor was Jack Shelley. Oh yeah, I was there to see him because I wasn’t going to give Illinois my money and I couldn’t afford Northwestern. I had considered the University of Michigan for a time, but it too was expensive and there was something about the wide open prairies of Iowa I relished after a youth in the Windy City.
It was later that I met Uncle Moose, Capt. Kirk, Smokin’ Joe, Nardholm, Carpy, Titzy and Jocko – some of the boys who helped me in my pursuit of embracing life before life began to consume us and turn us old. These fellows would come and go from my life, some entering school before me and leaving sooner, some arriving later.
But Jack Shelley was there from the start to finish. I had heard of him, as he was the biggest name in Iowa television.
In addition to his famous stories of hometown heroes or whatever they called his “nice” features, he was a hard-news guy who honed his chops on Hitler’s ass.
You see, in his younger years, this jovial man – I considered him old then, though he was only the age I am at this writing – Jack had covered the Battle of the Bulge in the defeat of Hitler’s Europe.
From Fortress Europe, he went to the Pacific Theater, where he had the first recorded interviews with the men who dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also attended the signing of the peace treaty in Tokyo Bay and covered the A-bomb tests in the Nevada desert.
In his obituary in the Register – anybody else remember the “Big Peach” of the Register’s pre-Gannett emasculation? -- it is reported that Jack is held in high esteem in the history of broadcast journalism, right up there with the likes of Murrow, Cronkite and Sevareid.
Fact is, if my ancient and concussed memory serves me – and sometimes it does not -- back on the day I met Jack in 1969, among the things he said was that he actually turned down the opportunity to be the talking head on ABC, a job that went to his friend, Eric Sevareid, in order to remain in his beloved Iowa.
You see he was born in Boone, Iowa, just west of Ames, where ISU was located. Best thing about Boone was it was on the way to the Ledges and sometimes gas was 15 cents a gallon there.
The basic news reports of his death mention that he began as a reporter for the Clinton (Iowa) Herald in 1935. That was back when every journalist honed skills at newspapers. TV was just being “discovered” and radio was king. It was when broadcasters didn’t need to have pretty faces and nice hair. Good thing, too, eh Jack?
He went from the newspaper to WHO radio in Des Moines and quickly rose to news director, remaining in that role after the station became both TV and radio in the 1950s and people began buying those blond-wooded Philcos.
Oh, I could go on and talk more about his role as a hero, covering the great events of the 20th century.
I could talk of the comfort his voice brought to the farmlands. He still did some substitute broadcasting when I was living out in Iowa and I was always a fan of the soothing tones of a man who had seen humanity’s best and worst.
He chose to live his life celebrating the latter.
I opted out of broadcasting rather quickly. I had too much passion as a writer, but when I changed paths, I asked to keep Jack as my adviser. He helped me negotiate the precarious path of a student who was living sometimes in the fast lane but also attentive to school work and dedicated to his profession.
Yes, I am a writer. Sometimes I wish I had gone into broadcasting. But then I’d probably have to giggle at puns by weathermen and wear my hair short.
But the lessons of fairness, the principles of press freedom, the lessons of the responsibilities those of us who entered that then noble profession – either print or broadcast – Jack (and a couple of other professors, long gone), taught me have been my guideposts.
In my lifetime as an editor and writer and now a part-time educator -- I am journalist-in-residence at a local university and have similarly served at another Nashville bastion of learning -- I hope I have and can continue to pass on the principles,hope and lust for telling the story right that Jack embraced.
I loved the old guy. I loved the profession which he helped me enter. Now Jack’s dead and some might say so is real journalism.
I’ll miss them.

Reflections on 9/11, an idiot with a walrus mustache, moon shadow and yearning for the peace train

“Yes, I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow.. and if I ever lose my eyes, if my colors all run dry. Yes, if I ever lose my eyes, OOH, I won’t have to cry no more.….”
Yep, just the terror-filled message of another Muslim, from which we should cower. Obviously this is a man who is filled with hate for all of us, the kind of messenger of Satanic evil whose sacred book should be burned before … well, before he runs a plane into another building and kills thousands of innocent Americans and civilians from all over the world. Heck, if I’m not mistaken, there were even some Muslims who died on Sept. 11, 2001 … not the ones in the planes, but the ones in the buildings.
Yes, this is the kind of person we should obviously fear.
On this day, 9/11/10, nine years after that horrid day in all of our lives, I began to think about just how evil this message was that earned Yusuf Islam the reputation of persona non grata in the U.S. a few years ago, even earning him, if memory serves, deportation when he flew into Nashville for a recording session.
Yep, the artist previously known as Cat Stevens represents all that is the evil that backwater preachers with walrus mustaches – no he ain’t the real walrus, goo goo ga job, because he’s an ignorant headline grabber --- want to abolish, to humiliate, to cast asunder, to throw under the bus, perhaps even to stone.
At least the preacher has advocated burning the Quran, Koran or however you want to spell the name of the Muslim holy book.
Wonder if he realizes just how terrified we should be of guys like Yusuf Islam. Ooh baby, baby, it’s a wild world, isn’t it?
I mean, isn’t God, God, no matter the name? At least that’s what I thought. But of course, now on 9/11, the purveyors of hate have tried to tear us apart. And it’s apparently not difficult.
Here’s another example of the Islamic hatred of Yusuf Islam: “They used to call him Jesus long time ago. They’re still calling him Jesus, don’t you know. They crossed the wood and hanged him, a long time ago. They still misunderstand him, those who don’t know.”
How can we let this kind of hate for all things sacred to America go unpunished?
OK, I don’t think a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero is necessarily a great idea, only because of the hate it seems to bring up in what I loosely refer to as “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
Of course, how wise an idea is it to have, pardon my language, “Titty Bars” right there in what the guy who ain’t the walrus and other hate mongers are referring to as hallowed ground?
No don’t get me wrong, I like a naked woman as much as the next guy – always have -- but a smoky bar where exotic dancers rub private parts on chrome poles while leprous, snot-dripping old men and tattooed, broken-toothed young men stick dollar bills in barely concealed crotches is not my idea of a holy place. Those aren’t spirits which are getting lifted there.
Yet, those strip joints haven’t caused redneck pastors to rally around the burning of G-strings and tasseled pasties.
But, of course, that’s beside the point. Muslims flew stolen jets filled with innocents into skyscrapers, into the Pentagon and were going to go for the White House when some Americans re-hijacked that jet and crashed it into a field instead.
Damn Muslims, right. Hate them all. After all, shouldn’t we hate all Christians because some cowards blew up children in a church all those years ago. If I’m not getting my religions mixed up, I believe people who at least called themselves “ Christians” incinerated six million Jews? Now I sometimes get my history confused, but if I’ve got it right, folks who worshiped in the tabernacles of the South “owned” other human beings, whipping and raping them as if they were … well … I suppose as if they were Muslims showing up at some of those same churches today.
Now, 9/11 still makes me ache. I hate the sound of that date. I remember hearing about the first plane smacking into the Twin Towers when I was on my way to work – yes, I used to hold a steady job until I got old and in the way – when my pal Brad Schmitt, then host of one of those crap-rock/hip-pop early radio shows interrupted his on-air pretend foreplay with Scotty O and Cindy to describe a stunning scene on the TV monitors. Even Brad, who is Jewish by the way, was stunned to silence.
I rushed into work and, since I was toiling at what then was referred to as “a daily newspaper,” I prepared to help in the coverage of that day.
When the afternoon drew to an end, I went home to embrace my then small children and help them understand what had happened – which they really didn’t understand – but also to assure them we were all right and the world wasn’t coming to an end.
That night, we went to a candlelight service, sang “God Bless America” and prayed for the dead and for peace and for our nation and for our world. I still get chills recalling the resonance of that song on that night.
But already, the talk shows – not just Fox, but all of them – were talking about the threat of these Islamic cells in our country. Suddenly, people looked at the Muslims -- who otherwise were basically allowed to flourish in this “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” (there I go again) that has freedom of religion at its very core.
I mean, folks all saw them as they assembled at their mosques. A bit different perhaps. But then again, so are Mennonites. And they’re Christians. I’d say “fer Christ-sakes” here, but that’s not really my style.
Anyway, I had spent a fair amount of time with Muslims and very seldom had one thrown a bomb at me or tried to amputate my hand with one of those big swords. Instead, they were prayerful, thoughtful people, as shocked as anyone else by the acts of 9/11.
And they had more reason to be scared, because of the festering hatred that was directed at them.
I called one of these Muslims the next day and invited him to come to a men’s group at the church I was attending. I wanted him to describe his faith to these men and to also share his thoughts about the vile killers of 9/11.
He was a gentleman, in the truest sense, and he was angry with the mass-murderers of the week before. Of course, he could have been frightened by being among those of a faith that was unlike his own. But he wasn’t. He bravely offered answers, explanations and reassurance. He was applauded and embraced.
OK, so I’m getting a little rambly here. This surely isn’t the definitive 9/11 recollection. I’m just me, a fairly simple guy who likes most people, as long as they aren’t mean to my family or my friends. Hurt somebody I love and I may come after you. Other than that, I’m sort of a turn the other cheek sort of guy.
Which brings me back to the pop/folk prophet Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, and the messages of obvious hate that had him for a time banned from America.
“Why must we go on hating? Why can’t we live in bliss?
For out on the edge of darkness, there rides the peace train. Peace train take this country, come take me home again.
“Peace train sounding louder, ride on the peace train.”
Pretty damned chilling.

Fats Domino finds solace and hope in the piano five years after Katrina stole the neighborhood of his life

“This is Fats,” the gentleman says over the sound of conversation and music in the living room of the house he’s called home since Hurricane Katrina wiped out his homeplace, his neighborhood – the Lower Ninth Ward – and nearly cost him his life.
Fats Domino is one of my favorite musicians -- a gentle, bear of a man, whose flamboyant dress, songs and piano pounding that offered up a mix of the bordello, the tabernacle and the streets of his city, make him a unique figure in the history of popular music.
On the fifth anniversary of the hurricane, I figured I’d just check up on him, wish him well.
I actually expected one of his family members to answer the phone. In previous calls, a friend or family member has answered and said “the Fat Man is asleep” or “Call the Fat Man back in an hour when he’s done playing the piano” or perhaps watching TV.
Much as he was in the home in the Lower Ninth Ward – where he and his family were rescued from the second story by searchers who had feared that the rock ‘n’ roll legend had perished in the floods – he is surrounded by family.
“Yeah, we all livin’ together now, like always,” he says from the house in Harvey, on the West Bank, where he moved with his family after the rescue.
I’ve written a few times about Fats in the years since Katrina. And sometimes I just call. Since I hadn’t called in awhile, I figured the hurricane anniversary was a good time to catch up with him a little bit.
“I can’t talk much,” he says, “but I’m doin’ all right.
”I just stay at home and fool with the piano.”
As for the damage by the hurricane and what it did to his section of town, well, he laments that it happened. But he’s a pragmatist. Can’t change it.
“No, well, it’s the truth,” he says. “Everything is pretty good.”
In fact, his home office, the colorful heart of the Lower Ninth Ward has been resurrected with funds from Tipitina’s Foundation.
But it’s one of the few bright spots in a wasteland. There’s no place to live around there.
In a story I wrote for Goldmine Magazine a couple of years ago, I addressed Fats, his legacy and the fact that many people say he doesn’t get enough credit for helping create the musical style we call “rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Well, that’s the way people feel. It don’t make no difference to me,” he said back then.
That story talked about his humility when we talked about Elvis, his old chum, who is called “the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.”
Fats wanted nothing to do with that crown.
Here’s a bit from that story:
“I like Elvis and Chuck Berry and all of them,” he said in that interview for Goldmine. “Elvis, I went to see him when he was in Las Vegas. He was a real nice fella.”
He, too, regards Elvis as “the King.” “I like him myself. So does everybody,” he says.
Antoine Domino’s large stage persona, dancehall piano playing and drawling tales of love and home made him Elvis’ top rival, if not as a sex symbol, then at least as a box-office attraction and hit record-maker, during the birthing of rock ’n’ roll.
He calls himself simply “lucky” that such songs as “I’m Walkin’” and “Blueberry Hill” allowed him to make a living while staying true to his religious beliefs. “Nobody lives forever,” he says. “Stay as close as you can [to the teachings in the Bible]. That’s the main thing.”
He could easily argue that he doesn’t get enough credit as one of the originators of rock ’n’ roll. After all, he “sold more records (65 million) than any other ’50s-era rocker except Elvis Presley,” writes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame about the man who was honored at the organization’s first induction dinner in 1986.
(The class of ’86 also included Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers in the performers’ category. Early influence honorees that year included Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmy Yancey and Robert Johnson. John Hammond was honored for lifetime achievement and non-performer inductees were Alan Freed and Sam Phillips.)
Fats thanks fans for their loyalty. “I never thought about [being called “King”]. But I know people bought the records, so I appreciate that part. I sold a lot of records, so I say, ‘Thanks‚ to everyone.’”
I pointed out in that story, John, Paul, George and Ringo as well as Bob Marley (who said Fats inspired reggae music) as well as Elvis and Carl Perkins all pointed to Fats as the man.
I also ruminated that much of the world likely had forgotten that Fats was even alive until Hurricane Katrina struck.
In fact, as the floodwaters rose in the Lower 9th Ward, and as National Guard helicopters plucked the victims off roofs, there were broadcast reports that Fats was missing.
Many musicians were accounted for at evacuation sites from Houston to Austin to Nashville and Memphis. But no one could locate Fats, who had chosen to ride out the storm at home. There were real fears about his well-being.
That changed with the mass publication of a New Orleans Times-Picayune photo of Domino being helped off a boat after being rescued from his house.
“We were on the second-floor balcony. The water kept coming up,” Fats recalls.
Finally, it was time to summon a boat to rescue the singer and Rosemary, his wife of almost 60 years, as well as many of their eight children and countless grandchildren (“Oh, I never count ’em. I got a lot of them,” says Domino).
Like almost everyone in the Lower Ninth, he lost everything. But to Fats, that’s just material stuff, and it’s not that important. “I ain’t missed nothing to tell you the truth, and I was able to replace what I lost.”
But it was only through Tipitina’s fund-raisers, including a recording and a show at which Fats appeared, that his landmark home, his sanctuary during his years of stardom, was reclaimed.
At the time of the interview, the home was being rebuilt and the family was hoping to move back in.
In a bit of optimism, either my own or Fats’, the story speculated that he would move back home, providing a beacon of hope for the thousands displaced.
I love New Orleans and Fats Domino, and I bought into his vision of returning home, to his happily ever after existence, occasionally venturing out to play.
Truth is, he’s probably not going to return to the Lower Ninth Ward, at least full-time. For some reason, the federal government has allowed that to become a complete wasteland which has shown little sign of rebirth in five years.
And, while he is surrounded by family, his beloved Rosemary has died … far from their compound in the part of the city that was their life’s home.
Still, on this anniversary of Katrina, while Fats isn’t full of conversation – he’s always enjoyed letting the piano keys do the talking – he’s pretty upbeat.
“I still get back to my house,” says the 82-year-old. “It’s only 20 minutes away. Go back often enough.”
Then he asks me to call back sometime … soon and “whenever you want to talk some more.”
But on this Sunday afternoon, I’ve interrupted a session on the piano. No he may never tour again to delight thousands of cheering fans.
That’s not stopping the music in his heart.
“I’m getting ready to record again,” he says. ”I got a lot of songs.”
Is there a market for new music by the Fat Man?
That’s not really the point. “I just want to play again.”

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

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

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

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

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For the Tennessean obituary written by my friend Peter Cooper as well as photos of Bobby Hebb, visit http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2010/08/03/bobby-hebb-sunny-songwriter-and-revered-singer-dies-at-72/
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What follows is the Oct. 17, 2004, story I wrote for The Tennessean newspaper in which Bobby Hebb allowed me to share his story with his hometown. There are a few “sidebar” stories at the end.

HEADLINE:One so true to the music

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


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

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

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

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

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