In defense of early Wings

For years, John Young and I would spend hours, literally hours at a stretch, talking about Paul McCartney’s recording career as a solo artist. Just making each other laugh. Because some of McCartney’s output – particularly in the Wings era – was sublime in its badness, its weakness, its very lameness in composition and execution. There are so many genuinely awful songs in that canon – roughly 1971 through ’79 – that making fun of them was like shooting fish in a barrel.

The great ones, of course, were beyond reproach.

The thing was, John and I absolutely loved all of it. That was always the galvanizing thing about McCartney – you could hate the music but still love the music. As many times as we dissed “Mumbo” and “I Am Your Singer” and “Big Barn Bed” and “I Lie Around,” John knew, as I did, that those songs were in our bloodstreams, knocking around with all the other music that we both held dear.

We didn’t have the exact same taste in music, John and I, and we didn’t always agree. That’s the nature of friendship, right? But when it came to solo McCartney, making fun of “Bip Bop” or “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” or “Morse Moose and the Grey Goose” was like taking the piss out of an eccentric old uncle. We loved the guy, but he sure could be weird sometimes.

All this to say that I’m really looking forward to the forthcoming reissues of Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, the first two Wings albums. Because as much as there are some real clinkers in there – among the treasures – they’re our clinkers. I grew up on those tunes, and these days I’d much rather revisit them than John Lennon’s angry political songs, or his self-pity songs, or George Harrison’s dreary sermonizing.

Love those guys too, of course, but I think early Wings has held up better than Imagine or Living in the Material World.

Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway will always make me think of John Young, to whom I have not spoken in over four years, because we bonded over them, long before we even knew each other.

Dragonfly, you’ve been away too long,

The White Album in context

People who remember when vinyl records were the only option often complain about how streaming or downloading music denies the listener the total experience – no graphics, no photos, no lyrics, no nothing. The same people said that about CDs, too, and now that CDs are on the way out, we seem to be left with downloads and streaming. And reissued vinyl, I suppose, but to me reissuing vintage albums seems like putting the cart after the horse. As it were. The point of this eludes me. And they’re so bloody expensive.

Coming in Nov. 9 – on CD and vinyl and download – is the 50th anniversary reissue of The Beatles, the 93-minute magnum opus everyone has always referred to as The White Album.

All you hipsters, allow me to put The Beatles in context. The year 1968 had been a difficult one for the Fabs. Their journey to India in the spring, to study transcendental meditation, had ended badly. On his return, John Lennon immediately hooked up with Yoko Ono, and the press – notably Britain’s famous Fleet Street – had a field day.

They hated her. The slant-eyed jokes and insulting editorial cartoons were vicious. Our John left his sweet blonde Liverpool wife for this? Understand that England saw the Beatles as public property, and divorce, and a very public affair with a married Japanese “artist,” were not in the least acceptable.

When they got a look at the full-frontal cover for John and Yoko’s experimental album Two Virgins, the press really released the hounds on the Beatles. This was some freaky shit, man.

Into this atmosphere came the Paul McCartney-penned “Hey Jude,” such a wonderful, exhilarating and unexpectedly happy single, with John’s ferocious “Revolution” on the B-side. This record was impossible to ignore, Yoko or no Yoko, and it not only became the soundtrack for the fall of 1968, it became the best-selling single the group ever had.

Nobody could have predicted what would come next.

Albums had pictures on them. Happy-go-lucky photos of the Fab Four (in the early days), smart and arty-looking designs (Rubber Soul and Revolver) and multi-colored pastiches (during the band’s psychedelic period).

The Beatles appeared on November 22, almost exactly five years to the day after “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

This album jacket was all white. No pictures, no printing. The title, The Beatles, was embossed on the cover in awkward block letters, and each cover was individually numbered, like a lithograph. When you were a kid, and you knew nothing about art, you didn’t understand any of it. In those days, after all the media attention given Two Virgins, we were sure the record company had whitewashed another naked album cover.

The song titles were not revealed until you tossed the shrink wrap and opened the cover up. And there were those four individual black and white photos, simple as block prints. Inside there was a big folded poster with a bunch of tiny photos spread out, collage style.

It was an ugly poster. It’s still an ugly poster. The lyrics were printed on the back. It was all very mysterious.

The four photos were included, too, as full color 8x10s. You’ve seen them here and there over the years, reprinted everywhere.

So The Beatles, as you played the two records, had no visual reference points. Like you would put on Sgt. Pepper and marvel at all the weird stuff photographed on the front cover, or wonder what all those dumb cartoons were about inside Magical Mystery Tour.

The music, from the first note to the last, was sublime. It was all over the place. It was different. It was great to hear John still at the top of his game, and not crashed in some opium den with his freaky girlfriend. He contributed “Julia,” a love song to Yoko. And the bitter “Sexy Sadie,” a dig at his Indian guru. And “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” And “Dear Prudence.” And “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” which made zero sense to us, but was one of the most joyous, exhilarating songs on the record.

The music is sharp, pointed, and occasionally angry. The snarling electric guitars had never been better recorded. The drums pounded and resounded.

McCartney is both whimsical and fierce (see the bookends “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Martha My Dear,” “Blackbird” and “Helter Skelter”) and even George Harrison is on fire, turning in four fine songs. None of them, I remember being glad to discover, were dreary like his ’67 dirge “Blue Jay Way.” There was no filtered Indian pseudo-mysticism on display.

The whole point seemed to be, LISTEN TO IT and don’t focus on what we look like, or whether we look happy (they weren’t, as we all found out later, but so great were the Beatles that they could turn their bitterness towards one another into cool creative music). There was absolutely NOTHING predictable about this album.

Each record label had a bright green apple on one side, a sliced apple on the other. That was different, too.

These days, I still don’t think the White Album songs belong on compilations next to “Penny Lane” or “Yellow Submarine.” It is its own experience.

The Beatles seemed to think so too, as “Hey Jude/Revolution” – remember, THE BIGGEST SINGLE THEY EVER HAD – was not included on the album. Instead, they put 30 more songs on it. And none of the LP tracks were issued as singles.

I can’t explain what it meant to be a 10-year-old kid, staring at that blank cover and listening to “Revolution 9” for the first time. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t know why. There were no smiling Beatles looking back, reassuring me that the world was still OK.

@2014 and 2018

Bleeder, a memoir. Part 2

There are frequently many or a few strokes associated with the recovery phase from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. It is due to these strokes that Bill still has persistent ataxia, tremor, some rigidity of extremities, personality changes and some behavior problems. His youth and determination should help him overcome many of these problems.

Whether or not he will ever recover completely without any residual deficit is very uncertain … There is no known drug or form of therapy which seems to speed up the recovery and there has been no proven drug which will really diminish the damaging effect of a subarachnoid hemorrhage.

Whenever any improvement is apparent it should be pointed out. He is very frightened and apprehensive and will need a lot of encouragement. As he begins to see some improvement himself hopefully much of his depression will clear.

R. Hurston Babcock, M.D., P.A.

Letter to E.L. DeYoung (my father)

Oct. 3, 1978

 

Back at the house, they walked me up the short hallway to Mom and Dad’s room, where I was to spend the first few weeks of recovery. There was a queen bed there, the better to accommodate my lanky six-foot-two-inches. I suppose my parents each took one of the other bedrooms.

After so long lying prone, muscles atrophy, meaning they’ve been neglected and so don’t work too terribly well. They’re rubbery. So standing up, walking across the room, even using the bathroom, they were all out of the question. Someone, usually Mom, would have to come in and support me through all of it.

She would stand me up, and my head would spin. It was like going from stone sober to dead drunk in a heartbeat. A helpless feeling compounded with another helpless feeling.

My friend Chris, who lived not too far away, was recruited to help me into the shower every other day. It was terribly awkward for him, I know, but he’d wear a bathing suit, hold me up under the water, and we’d get through it. I was embarrassed, but by then I’d become used to being dependent.

Somebody came over and cut my long hair to a manageable length.

One day a physical therapist arrived. They’d hired him through the hospital. He was tall, and had blonde hair, and that’s all I remember about him – except that he came into my room, on that first day, with a worn paperback copy of a book called Joni – the story of a quadriplegic teenager who’d leaned to adapt. On the cover, she held a paintbrush in her teeth and was smiling at the camera.

Clearly, the guy didn’t know what he’d find when he met me, and brought the book as inspiring evidence that people with catastrophic injuries can still lead productive lives.

The cover of that book is burned into my mind, because it was the first time I was forced to really think about where I was headed, whether I’d heal up and get back into my own skin – continue with life as I knew it – or wind up in a wheelchair with a paintbrush clamped between my teeth.

But the physical therapy guy was great. Every day, he got me out of that bed, stood me up and held onto me until I began to regain my balance. He talked to me. We laughed. He had me sit on a big inflated rubber ball with a handle – it was called a kangaroo ball, I remember – and roll back and forth, balancing with my legs. I’d walk stiff-legged up and down the hall, over and over, with my arms on his shoulders.

On a day he wasn’t there, after a few weeks of therapy, I hauled myself out of the bed, walked slowly down the narrow hall, balancing with my hands on the walls, walked through the kitchen and dining room holding onto furniture, and presented myself to Mom, who was in her usual chair, watching TV in the Florida Room. I stood there smiling silently. When she saw me, we both exploded with tears of joy.

So I was more or less ambulatory after that, crashing from one room to the next, getting to the bathroom, the kitchen and wherever else I needed to be. Soon I was back in my own bedroom, sleeping in my own bed. My girlfriend was there a lot – in fact, I think she might even have lived in the house for a while – and her presence was calming. She looked after me, and tried very hard to make me feel normal. Best of all, whenever I sank into depression, feeling sorry for myself, she talked me down.

Progress was slow, but every few days I’d reach what Dr. Babcock called a plateau – as if I was climbing a mountain, attempting to reach the pinnacle – i.e., who I was before this had happened. A plateau was a new height reached on the way up.

One morning I called my dad in. I could hear him getting ready for work in their room. He entered, stood by the side of my bed and smiled. I said ‘Watch this,’ and held up my left hand, which had been frozen in a claw since the early hospital days.

As he looked on, I dramatically opened my hand. All five fingers flexed fully open, shut again and re-opened.

This was a plateau.

Still, I lived with the fear of an unknown future. Every minor headache, every ache, pain or throb that passed through my body for the slightest second, was the onset of the next hemorrhage, I was sure of it. In my darkest moments, I knew I was going to have another one, and I wouldn’t survive it.

 

The question on everyone’s mind, especially mine, was how much of him will come back? I was fortunate that the hemorrhage had only affected the part of my brain that controls motor activity, which meant that my mental acuity (such as it was) was undamaged.

The residual damage was all on the left side of my body. My arm and leg seemed to be carrying extra weight – they swung like clubs, without any kind of fine-motor movement and without the coordination I desperately willed into them – and the now un-stuck fingers of my left hand shook with slight tremors. Sometimes they kicked like the legs of a walloped spider, in its spastic death throes on a hardwood floor.

I was a guitar player. It was all I knew. I wasn’t a great musician, but I never stopped learning and I knew that I possessed a pretty keen sense of how music was put together, how harmonies were structured, how changings keys, or the tuning on the guitar, gave you endless possibilities. Most of all, I loved it. I loved to play, and I loved to sing.

Making music was my talent. It was my passion. And at 19 years old, I had never thought of a future, any future at all, that did not involve my playing, singing and writing music.

Dr. Babcock assured me that, while he couldn’t say with 100 percent certainty that my left hand – my guitar-fretting hand – would fully recover, practicing certainly couldn’t hurt. After all, he said, the muscles in my fingers had atrophied, too. Should the dexterity return, another plateau, those muscles would need to be ready.

So I practiced, as soon as I could sit up and hold a guitar. As soon as my head stopped spinning. As soon as the double vision subsided enough that I only saw one instrument in my lap, not two.

It was hard. My fingers at first were like blocks of wood on a puppet hand, or inanimate fleshy things that did not receive the current of messages from my brain. They twitched. I still knew every chord, every lick, every bass run – as I said, the cognitive part of my brain was undamaged – but I could not make my fingers do as they were told. It didn’t help that my arm refused to gently glide my wrist and hand up and down the guitar neck; instead it moved in jerky movements, a few inches at a leap, never landing in exactly the same place twice no matter where I directed it.

Muscle memory means nothing without muscle control. It was frustrating beyond belief to pick up my instrument, go to play something I knew like the back of my hand, and have nothing but the discordant noise of buzzing, half-fretted strings come back to me.

I was left with an awkward, stumbling gait. I was left with peripheral vision that blurred and doubled every time I moved my head only slightly to the left or right. And the tightening in my stomach told me that music – at least the way I knew music – was not going to be an option any more.

For a while, I wore a black patch over my right eye. The idea was to make the left eye, the damaged one, work harder. In those first few months, the double vision was intense. I crashed into walls. I tripped over furniture. I fell down. My depth perception was all screwed up.

Over time, things improved. The patch was discontinued.

After three months at home, I was walking – slowly – with the help of a cane. I couldn’t turn my head quickly or risk dizziness and a possible fall.

Christmas came and went, and I was mobile enough to where my parents – in consultation with Dr. Babcock – agreed to let me go back to work. I dearly loved my job in a mall record store, and even though everybody I worked with had come to visit since I’d left the hospital, I still missed their company. I missed the camaraderie and the joking around and the endless, enthusiastic conversations about the music that consumed our lives.

Most of all, I missed feeling normal.

It was tough at first. I remember being behind the counter one afternoon when an old white-haired lady came up, buying something or other with a kid I imagined was her grandson. I spoke to her, then turned around to get a bag for her, using my cane as support. As I faced her again, the old lady said “You’re all crippled up, ain’t ya?”

That hurt. Forty years later, I can still see her, and hear her, as if it were yesterday.

Mom took me to see an expert in biorhythms, which was some sort of psychological craze in the late 1970s. Perhaps she’d read about it in Readers’ Digest. I didn’t know what it was all about – and today, after researching biorhythms, I still don’t.

The woman placed tiny sensors all around my head, attached with little adhesive pads, and talked to me. I was depressed, I told her, because everything in my life had been turned upside down. I’m sure I went into the whole spiel about no more guitar. My girlfriend, who’d been so great throughout the recovery period, had left me.

I went to the biorhythm center a couple of times. One day, the “therapist,” or whatever she was, told me she understood my depression – and then asked me if I’d ever spent Christmas alone, which she had done and would certainly be doing again, and that it filled her with unspeakable sadness … her eyes welled up with tears.

I did not go back.

 

Looking back, 40 years later, I realize that I’ve lived a lot longer with this thing – and I live with it every day – than I did without it. The dexterity in the fingers of my left hand never fully returned, so guitar playing – the only thing I was any good at – was reduced to something a bit less musical, a lot less fun, and way more frustrating than such a joyous exercise ought to be.

Still, I soldiered on, and still do, dreaming every so often that I’m Eric Clapton onstage at the Albert Hall, playing fluid lead lines with a killer band. Then I’ll wake up and remember that I have little to no fine motor coordination in those fingers. The weird thing is that my brain can still take a song apart – I can hear the chord progressions, the melody and the harmony, I know where my fingers need to go – but my body simply can’t translate it.

I guess I reached the final plateau when I was in my early 20s. Physical therapy stopped helping. From there, it was all about forging an entirely new life.

I’m 59 years old at this writing, and my equilibrium remains shaky. I have no balance, and can’t take more than a single step in a straight line before I wobble off the path. Sometimes, when I’m walking, I’ll involuntarily take a half step to the left or right, or half-spin in a different direction. I don’t have any control over it. I don’t know when it’s coming. Sometimes I’ll crash into a wall.

I still get the occasional tremor in the fingers of my left hand.

I have not run in 40 years. Not once. My left leg slams down hard, like a club, and I cannot find any body rhythm at all.

I have not jumped in 40 years. If I try a little hop, straight up in the air, my legs never meet the ground at the same time. I can’t even hop down from a box or a chair. It’s like my legs are in two different bodies.

Dancing? Not a chance. I’m Lurch from The Addams Family.

When I turn my head slightly, the double vision is still there. My depth perception is poor at best. One of the great sorrows of my life was while my beautiful son was growing up, obsessed with sports, and I was unable to throw or catch a baseball, or a football, with him. I couldn’t see it coming until it was a foot away from my face.  After a dozen tries, you get to be fearful of the thing coming in, and you’re no good at all.

Of course I realize that I was lucky in one very significant way. So many people live their lives in pain, or some sort of agony, or extremely difficult adjustment, and I’m still alive, thinking and breathing and walking and talking. And I’ve had a pretty great life, all told. My son and daughter are healthy, bright and compassionate people, and I could not be more proud of them both.

Being 100 percent honest, however, not a day has passed that I haven’t thought about August 29, 1978, at least for a brief moment. Once I got over feeling sorry for myself – and that took a very, very long time – I started to examine the event in terms of how it affected me emotionally, and in terms of my relationships with family, friends and co-workers.

I was bitter. Man, was I bitter. What did I do to deserve a kick in the head?

A group of soldiers stands in formation. “I need a volunteer,” the captain says, “for a dangerous mission. You might not survive.”

Everyone in the line, except me, takes a step backward. I’m the involuntary volunteer.

The first thing that happens: You think everybody is looking at you, and they can tell that you’re not right (remember the old lady in the record shop?) So you develop a kind of armor, a protective mechanism that renders you impervious to criticism. Bite them before they bite you.

As a reaction to depression and denial – twin snakes eating each other’s tail – you develop a thick skin to disguise your thin skin.

Behind this is a deep, deep sense of self-consciousness. I have not felt like an entirely normal human being in 40 years, not since my “new normal” was introduced. Despite my successes – I raised a family, had a pretty good career in journalism, wrote a couple of books and ultimately married my best friend – something way down in there has always told me I lost my essence at 19. That I am an impostor in Bill DeYoung’s skin.

Another defense mechanism that developed: Whenever I would drop something (which happened a lot) I would say “Of course.” This was a reference to the Murphy’s Law that I believed my life had become. Something broke – of course. I knocked something off a counter – of course. Couldn’t get a door, or a drawer, open – of course.

The truth, I’ve since deduced, is that I’m just clumsy. For a long time, I guess, it was easier to get pissed off at God, or whatever it was that threw this anvil at me.

It became my mantra, “of course,” so much so that those around me began to believe I was just reacting negatively to everything around me. For a long, long time, I found it very difficult to be happy.

The downside to this is a guilty feeling I’ve never been able to shake – that I gave less than I should have to those who’ve loved me over the years, because I simply couldn’t get over a life that no longer existed. None of this has been fair to them.

It’s been 40 years, and I’m still here. Love and gratitude are key for me these days. Even though I’m reminded constantly of the limitations of my body, I can say this now without crossing my fingers behind my back: I’m over it. You know, forgive but never forget. And enjoy another day.

Read Part 1 here

 

Bleeder, a memoir. Part 1

Dinner was at 6 o’clock sharp. Dinner was always at 6 o’clock sharp; my parents came from that generation where the man went to work, and the woman took care of the house and the kids. So Dad would get home from his insurance office around 5:30 in the afternoon, change his clothes and relax a while, and Mom would have dinner on the table, for all of us, promptly at 6.

It’s not like Dad insisted or anything – ‘have my dinner ready when I want it!’ – that was just the way it was, a working routine, probably passed down from the generation before theirs. Anyway, I never heard him demand and I never heard her complain. Theirs was a happy marriage, four kids later, if not terribly exciting for either of them.

I was 19 years old, the youngest child and the only one still living at home. My brother and two sisters had flown the nest, leaving the comfort and routine (and 6 o’clock dinners) of home and family for lives and adventures of their own. I was struggling through junior college, and waiting for something better to come along.

Mom called us to the table. From different parts of the house, my father and I swept in, hungry. The three of us sat down with the sound of the 6 o’clock news coming from the TV in the adjacent room. It was usually Arch Deal, the evening anchor for the local NBC station, WFLA. Channel 8. Arch’s monotone had been part of this ritual for as long as I could remember.

The meal on that Tuesday night was pork chops, thin cut, fried in a pan (no one really thought about healthy foods in those days) and spinach out of a can. There might have been a potato and a small salad. The spinach was sort of soggy, dark green and salty, with a consistency rather like finely-chopped seaweed. This was a standard weeknight dinner at our house. We always had milk to drink.

I guess it was about 15 minutes in when I noticed the headache. It was in the back of my head, on the right side. At first it was mild, just an annoyance, but after a while I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I must have told Mom and Dad about it and excused myself from the table.

I went to my room – the back bedroom in the house – to lie down in the dark. I didn’t suffer from migraines, and wasn’t prone to headaches, but I knew from experience that lying on my side, keeping still for a while, would make it go away. It was, at worst, a minor irritation.

That night, I was to drive to Indian Rocks Beach. I’d gotten involved in sea turtle conservation – well, as involved as you could get in populous Pinellas County, where there weren’t too many stretches of dark and isolated beach left for the big turtles to haul out and lay eggs in the sand.

Still, some of them ran the gauntlet of condominium and hotel lights anyway. I’d been helping Evelyn Hoezel, an older lady who lived in a little house right on the beach at Indian Rocks. She was authorized by the Florida wildlife powers-that-be to dig up turtle nests from St. Petersburg Beach, Pass-a-Grille, Treasure Island or whatever stretch of brightly-lit tourist beach, and re-bury the eggs in her back yard. We’d mark the transplanted nests with a wire cage.

That way, when the baby turtles emerged after 55 days of incubation in the hot sand, supervised, they’d get to go straight to the water when we released them, unmolested by winged predators or well-intentioned humans. Including us – we never physically touched them.

On that Tuesday night, August 29, 1978, I was due at Mrs. Hoezel’s. One of our nests had hatched out, and we were to remove the wire cage and allow the babies free access to the Gulf of Mexico.

This was my favorite part of the job, watching them crawl across the sunset sand to freedom.

I was thinking about this as I lay on my small bed, the right side of my head pressed down against my pillow. The headache had become a dull throb. In the bathroom, I lost my dinner, then went straight back to bed.

 

Dad was standing next to my bed, talking softly, telling me it was time to wake up. He was dressed in his standard going-to-the-office suit. It was morning. I’d never gone to the beach that night – no Mrs. Hoezel, no sea turtles, no nothing.

Apparently my parents had been trying to wake me up for some time. When I opened my eyes, they were both standing there. I tried to speak but could only mumble like someone heavily sedated. I tried to get up, but my arms and legs didn’t cooperate. It was as if they’d all fallen asleep at once; instead of blood, bone and muscle, my limbs were stuffed with sponge. Mom and Dad stood me up, holding onto my rubbery scarecrow body. They looked gauzy to me.

I remember telling them – or attempting to tell them – that they needed to call my boss. I was supposed to be at work that morning. On a scrap of paper they put in my hands, I wrote “Nora.” I saw the paper later. It looked like spider tracks in the snow. It looked like the scrawl of a 100-year-old man.

They loaded me into the back seat of Dad’s car. I lay there, face down and eyes open, full of fear and dread, but relieved that we were going to the hospital, where somebody would be able to fix this thing. I stared at the little embroidered pillow that had fallen on the floor. That’s a very clear memory.

This all sounds like some sort of overdose, doesn’t it? The sad final act of an idiot teenager’s life? I did not use drugs. The fact was I’d smoked a bit of pot in my life, but even that made me uncomfortable. I was a pretty well-adjusted kid, reasonably intelligent, and putting chemicals in my body, for fun, to be cool, or to numb some sort of subconscious pain, was something I’d just never been tempted by.

My sister Patty met our car at St. Anthony’s. Inside the emergency room, somebody wearing white muttered to someone else, ‘Looks like drugs.’ I was tall and bone-thin, with long, black hair and a scruffy beard; a reasonable assumption, I suppose. I heard Patty say to them ‘My brother doesn’t do drugs,’ and I smiled somewhere down inside.

Next, I heard ‘We’ll do a lumbar tap.’ I knew this was a painful procedure, involving a long needle in the spine, because I’d recently read a Rolling Stone interview with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, who said as much (he’d had one done). That was actually what went through my mind as I lay there, helpless and terrified, on the cold steel table.

They did the spinal tap. I never felt a thing. I think that scared me even more than the anticipation. I heard the guy say there was blood in my spinal fluid, which I understood was not good.

I lay there, unattended, for what seemed like a long time. Very sleepy. I started to close my eyes, thinking how easy it would be just to drift off. I suppose that’s what it feels like when you’re freezing to death – just close your eyes, and let go.

I made myself open my eyes again.

Now, on the books of some local Baptist church I was a member of the congregation. This was a holdover from a girlfriend I’d had in high school; I joined her family’s church to make her happy. And, I suppose, to make her skeptical parents think I was after more than good old teenage sex. I had them pretty well conned.

Anyway, after we broke up – acrimoniously and not a moment too soon, as it turned out – I forgot all about the church thing. A year had gone by.

My last recollection of the ER was the appearance, in the doorway, of the pastor of that church. Somehow, he’d heard that something had happened (I’ll never know how he found out, and so quickly) and had appeared to “comfort” me.

I saw him standing there, and here’s what went through my mind: He’s here for my last rites. I used the last of my strength to scream “Get out!” He got out.

And then I went down the rabbit hole.

 

About a year before she passed away, in 2014, my mother gave me a little diary she kept during those awful first days. I treasure this book. There’s her handwriting, which I know so well, and it’s emotional for me to read her thoughts – I can hear them, in her voice.

When we arrived at the hospital Bill was given immediate attention. Dr. Babcock was with him in 20 minutes. Ten minutes later Dr. Babcock came to us with the most horrendous news parents can receive: “Your child is in critical condition + his chances are not good. It’s possibly an aneurism but until tests are taken we can’t be sure. Bill will be in intensive care + we’ll take it from there.”

Not our Bill, our tall lanky long haired Bill, this is a nightmare, we’ll wake up I know we will.

The neurosurgeon’s full name was R. Hurston Babcock, which made me think of Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Still does. Later I found out that R. Hurston was Grand Admiral, or whatever, of the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. There was a framed portrait of him there, serious and proud, wearing a blue blazer and an official –looking blue-and-white yachting cap.  So he really kind of was Thurston Howell III.

He was also a nice man, and fortunately for us, a good and caring physician. Within a few hours of my arrival, his test results showed that I’d suffered something called a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a form of cerebral aneurysm.

It’s defined as bleeding in the area between your brain and the surrounding membrane. Because there’s a webby series of tiny, spidery blood vessels, science calls it the subarachnoid space.

Head trauma, smoking, cocaine use and congenital defects are the known major causes; I hadn’t fallen or been knocked in the head by vicious thugs (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), I didn’t smoke and, as I’ve explained, drugs were anathema to me.

So Dr. Babcock and his team decided that I must’ve had a congenital flaw in a tiny subarachnoid capillary, and it burst at that particular moment for no particular reason, leaking less than a teaspoon of blood into the soft cocoon around my brain. Even though it’s a tiny bit of blood, it causes pressure, which can lead to … well, some bad stuff.

I looked this up recently. According to an online physician site called Medscape.com,

An estimated 15-30% of patients with aneurysmal SAH die before reaching the hospital, and approximately 25% of patients die within 24 hours, with or without medical attention. Mortality at the end of 1 week approaches 40%. Half of all patients die in the first 6 months, and only half of the patients who make it to the hospital return to their previous level of functioning.

Back to Mom’s diary:

At a little before 3 Ed + I walk down to see Bill, something is wrong, the curtains are drawn + Dr. Babcock is being paged. Dr. Babcock came to us + told us Bill had another hemorrhage + things were as bad as they could get, he didn’t hold out much hope. They had put Bill on the ventilator to help him breathe as he also had pneumonia.

This was 1978, and the percentages aren’t nearly what they are today. Mom and Dad were told, after this second episode, I had a five percent chance of survival. My sister Karen was in Central America, a journalist covering the bloody Nicaraguan revolution. When they called to tell her what had happened, she was informed that I would most likely be dead before she could get a plane back to Florida.

How does a family deal with that?

It came out of nowhere, with zero warning. I had never really been sick in my life. I loved my family and I loved my friends. I played bass and guitar with them, in a little band we’d put together for the beer clubs out on the beaches. That’s usually where I was Friday and Saturday nights, working.

Well, I guess you could call it working. I lived for it. The other four band members were older than me by a decade. It had been their project; I joined after they’d played out a few times, and I convinced them they needed someone to handle bass and sing the high harmony parts. The integration was seamless. I started adding guitar parts and singing some leads, too. We were never going to be rich or famous, and there would always be bands that were better than ours. Didn’t matter. We were having a great time. I enjoyed belonging to a gang. I was the kid, but I was one of them.

I had a job in a record store – there, I was in my element – and a girlfriend I was crazy about. I attended my junior college classes infrequently.

I had no idea where I was headed in life. Honestly, I was happy not thinking about it. The only things that interested me were music, turtles and girls. And not always in that order.

There’d be plenty of time to work out a plan for the future. Wouldn’t there?

 

Keith Moon was dead. The enigmatic drummer for the Who lived a life of grand excess, and had famously battled alcoholism for years. The band had only weeks before issued a new album, Who Are You, and on the cover Moon looked seriously overweight and out of shape. It was obvious something wasn’t right. On September 3, he went bloated-belly-up in a London flat, the result of combining his weight-reduction pills with medication prescribed to help him stay off the sauce.

I loved the Who, and for me Keith’s manic, jackhammer playing was a big part of why they were such a great rock ‘n’ roll band. I had Who Are You on cassette in my car.

In the Intensive Care Unit of St. Anthony’s Hospital, there was no day and there was no night. The lights were either on – fluorescent and obnoxiously bright – or off. The big room had no windows.

There was a huge, round white clock on the wall, centrally located where I – and presumably, the other ICU patients – could see it and have some sense that we were still in the real world. It was just like the clocks they had in schoolrooms, the clocks I had been staring at since I was a little kid waiting for the bell to ring so I could get out of there. Otherwise, I didn’t know where I was or who I was, much less the time of day.

And there was always a radio playing. Over and over, I heard the Top 40 hits of the day (“Hot Child in the City” or “Boogie Oogie Oogie”) and the hourly news report. I didn’t understand most of the newscaster jabber, but when I heard “Rock drummer Keith Moon of the Who has died in London,” I perked up. That’s how I found out.

My brother, Ed, came in to visit that afternoon. I told him Keith had died. It was probably the most complete sentence I’d spoken in the four days I’d been in the hospital. He stared down at me. “How did you know that?” he said.

Dr. Babcock told me much later that they’d been close to performing cranial surgery, to relieve the pressure on my brain. I don’t remember the reason, but they never did it. I was never drilled. Once they were sure the bleeding had stopped, it was decided that the best course of action was to keep me comfortable and just see what happened.

I suspect that I was pumped full of some drug or other, because the 16 days in ICU are etched into my memory. When I slept, I had hideous nightmares, and when I was awake, I had little or no idea what was going on. I knew what had happened and I knew where I was – well, sort of. The people in white, flitting in and out of the darkened room, were conspiring to kill me. Every so often, a nurse – male or female – would appear and mercifully drop a couple of ice chips into my Sahara Desert mouth. Best of all were the periodic sips of sugary Gatorade.

Sometimes, though, they didn’t come, for what felt like hours. I could not raise my head, so I listened – to the distant radio, to the moans of patients in nearby beds, and to the sound of the ICU attendants’ chatty conversations on the far side of the room.

They mocked me. They ignored me. I knew they were talking about me … and so I started to scream to get their attention, and to let them know I knew what they were up to. I really just wanted more ice chips and Gatorade. But in my mind, the screaming only made them hate me more.

According to Patty, the one time she came into the ICU to look in on her brother, I screamed at her to ‘get out.’ I don’t have any memory of this, but it makes sense with the rest of the narrative.

 

Periodically, my body would twitch and jerk, my arms and legs flailing about like worms on a hotplate. It was totally involuntary, and probably a reaction to the drugs in my system. The kicking got so bad that they had to tie my legs to the metal bars on the side of the hospital bed.

My family members would come in, one or two at a time, to stand there in the dark and talk quietly to me. I remember being embarrassed that I was strapped to the bed.

I was transferred to a gurney and wheeled out into the hall. Everything seemed so bright and so loud. We went up in an elevator, and my gurney was parked alongside a wall outside whatever room we were going to. I lay there for a very long time before they came back and retrieved me. People were moving back and forth, walking past me. Ignoring the long-haired, skinny kid on the bed. I felt like a piece of furniture. I caught windy bits of conversation and understood nothing.

Then my bed was rolled into the room. Now, the years gone by have blurred this particular memory somewhat, but here’s the way I see it in my mind’s eye: I’m rolled into the center and left under a single very bright light, a hot lamp. A doctor and about a dozen medical students, all dressed in scrubs and surgical masks, gather around the bed, which is now some sort of observation table. It’s what they call an operating theatre.

I am a disembodied head in the center of the table, mute, looking up helplessly as this guy pokes and prods, answering his students’ questions about this test subject. My eyes blink but I am mute. I am propped up on a little stand, part of my spinal cord trailing down from the back like a raccoon tail pinned to Davy Crockett’s yellow skull.

Sixteen days after my arrival at St. Anthony’s, I was released from ICU and moved to a private room (my parents insisted, even though it cost a little extra. I’ve always been grateful for that). The kicking and screaming had ceased, as had the nightmares, and it was decided, there being nothing else medically to be done, to return me to some semblance of normalcy.

Over the next two weeks I was visited by every member of my family, and by many close friends. I guess none of the latter knew what to expect, because they hadn’t seen me for so long. I was gaunt (being fed intravenously will do that to you), I had double vision (which was also the name of a stupid song by Foreigner, playing over and over again in the ICU), and everything was blurry, so I imagine I looked at my visitors rather cockeyed. Most significantly, my left hand was clenched in a fist. I could not uncurl my fingers, and I could barely move my left arm. I was stiff and I was weak. I spoke slowly and deliberately, like a stroke victim.

Even so, it was so wonderful to have visitors, to finally, completely understand that I was still around. I remember them all, the gifts they brought, the music they knew I loved, the jokes, the tentative questions about my prognosis, and about my future.

That was the big mystery. Would my speech return? Could I stand up? Walk? Drive a car? Feed myself?

Would I be able to play the guitar, the only thing I really knew how to do, again?

Dr. Babcock said there wasn’t any way of knowing how much damage had been done – certainly, the hemorrhage had only affected the part of the brain that controls physical activity, and only on the left side of my body. Oh, my mental faculties might be in shambles – I was a weepy, emotional wreck – but from all indications, they were still intact.

Only half of the patients who make it to the hospital return to their previous level of functioning.

The doctor advised us to take a “wait and see” attitude.

My parents took me home after 31 days of hospitalization. And we waited.

And we saw.

 

Read Part 2 here

The whales

This was the first feature story I wrote, after a couple of concert reviews. I was 18 years old. It was published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday, Feb. 20, 1977. It’s reproduced here exactly as it was written.

MAYPORT – A large school of pilot whales (globicephala melaena) committed suicide in a mass beaching at Fort George Inlet two weeks ago near Jacksonville. Less than 48 hours later, I was there dragging dead whales out of the surf and observing post-mortem scientific activities.

The pilot is a toothed whale. It does not exceed 20 feet, but is very muscular and bulky. It is completely jet-black, prompting the common name Blackfish.

Fort George’s Inlet is a deep, choppy channel barely 65 feet wide, running off the Atlantic in a mushroom-shaped bay. At one side of the bay is a bridge, behind which lie salt creeks and marshes. All around the rest of the bay is broad, white beach, running back to high dunes and seaoats.

ON THE DAY of the beachings, commercial fishermen spotted a herd of upwards of 200 pilot whales headed, rather deliberately, for the mouth of the inlet. Because the pilot whale is a deep-sea mammal, the fishermen knew something was wrong.

“As the fishermen saw the whales going past and towards land at high speed, it was all they could do to get their nets up in time,” said Quentin White, a member of the scientific crew from Jacksonville University.

Mass suicides, while not common, have appeared with some degree of regularity on Florida coastline. Last summer, a small group of spinner dolphin beached and died at Casey Key near Sarasota. Within the following month, larger groups of False Killer whale beached at Fort Myers and Loggerhead Key. Whether these suicides are deliberate or accidental is a point of speculation. In autopsies taken on self-stranding whales and dolphins, the common factor seems to be two kinds of parasites found living in the animals’ inner ear.

THE PARASITES, the theory goes, throw off the animals’ delicate sonar, a hearing mechanism that allows them to navigate and locate food sources. Thus impaired, the whales swim frantically, and when the pod leader, or “pilot,” swims too close to shallow water, the entire group follows him straight into the shallows and right into the beach. In such shallow water they cannot maneuver, and having neither the strength nor the will to return to deeper water, they eventually roll on their sides and drown. The animals’ blowhole, or nostril, is located at the very top of its head. When they roll over, water gets in the blowhole, and they lay helplessly, waiting to die. The ones that make it onto the beach die of exposure.

As soon as word got around, volunteers of all ages came to the stricken whales’ rescue. Frogmen came from nearby Mayport Naval base, skin-diving clubs turned out in wetsuits and rough weather gear, and scientific researchers from several Florida colleges arrived in vans full of equipment. More than 150 whales, ranging from monstrous bulls 20 feet long and weighing close to a ton, to calves five feet in length and barely a year old, were lined up at various points on the beach or in shallow water.

SOME WERE floundering off the bay’s entrance, still others were stranded on a sandbar several hundred feet into the chilly water. The volunteers’ objective was to right the whales and drag them into deeper water.

The volunteers worked long into the night, and all the next day, trying to keep beached whales alive and grouping up to drag larger animals into deep water.

But beaching whales seem to have a death wish, and, to the workers’ horror and dismay, the unencumbered whales turned right back around and beached again.

During the first day, the situation became so frantic that the Marine Patrol had to block off entrances to the beach, to keep the ever-expanding mob of residents, curiosity-seekers and by now unneeded extra volunteers from getting in the way.

Someone came up with the idea of herding the whales back out of the channel with boats. Several dozen whales were tagged on the dorsal fin with red plastic tags. These were mostly in the deeper parts of the bay, where a little maneuvering was still possible. At the first high tide the boats were brought around, and the roundup began.

“AT FIRST, it looked like it might work,” said one local observer. “They played cat-and-mouse for a while, with the boats trying to stay between the whales and the shoreline.”

Apparently, the attempt was partially successful. “They were playing it right, getting the whales into the channel. Some of them went out into the Atlantic. But then” – and then the Mayport resident speaks quietly – “one of the big whales made a shrill noise and they all turned and dived under the boats.” Moments later they went back in the shallows, dying with the remainder of the school.

Dr. James Mead, curator of mammals from the Smithsonian Institution, was expected to arrive the next day to begin autopsies.

Slowly the volunteers dispersed, leaving an aura of hopelessness and sadness to the scientists and onlookers. The last glimmer of hope for the living died away and finally no one made any attempt to save the last few suffering individuals.

The beach at Fort George Inlet is long and wide, and the sand, continuously shifted by the cold Atlantic wind, made travel by car extremely difficult. As I walked from the last road to the first group of scientists, I could see the Marine Patrol digging a Humane Society van out of the sand.

The tide was high and I spotted a black fin protruding from the breakers.

There were several whales there; all dead, all on their sides. Up the beach researchers from the University of Florida were standing around a group of whales. These were cows and calves, the smaller whales pulled far up on the sand for autopsy. The creatures were beautiful, so streamlined, so perfect. Their dorsal and pectoral fins, stiff and cold, jutted up into the air. Their expression was that of a creature from a different planet: very distant, very foreign.

They all had the same trace of a smile; and I had trouble visualizing them as carefree, free-swimming creatures. One calf, I noticed, was completely decapitated. “They arrested some guy here yesterday,” volunteered one of the scientists. “He came down here in the middle of all the activity, and cut off its head with a chain saw.” He had wanted to take home some whale teeth.

A DISTANT FIGURE on the far point of the bay, near the mouth of the inlet, was Dr. Mead, who had arrived a few hours earlier and was investigating the situation.

As I hiked the good mile of beach to the point where I would find Dr. Mead amid a large concentration of dead whales, I heard a blast of air and looked out into the water. There, about 60 feet out, lay the last live whale, floundering in two feet of water. She twisted and turned, and every 10 seconds or so she would raise her tail and blow out her blowhole.

I stared hopelessly from my isolation on the beach, wondering if I should try and help her, as she blasted out her pain in gradually weakening spurts. Then I realized her destination was already planned, and, remembering the admirable but vain efforts of the volunteer corps, I moved on, as the tide slowly carried her shallower.

“THIS IS AN extremely large beaching,” Mead said, gazing at the scores of fins sticking up from the now receding tide. “Pilot whales are very sociable animals, but usually the big school will split up out at sea and beach at different locations.” Mead said he expected the group of whales driven out of the inlet the previous day would merely beach themselves somewhere else. Several different accounts of the number of dead whales were circulating, but most believed the figure was about 100.

Mead explained that studying beached individuals in such detail may not provide the answer as to why such suicides occur. “The most valuable thing here,” he said, “is not to find answers but questions. Things to look for.”

He said the problem with the parasite theory is that scientists don’t have the opportunity to examine normal, wild pilot whales to check for the parasite. “The narwhales and belugas, both northern dwellers, also have parasites in their inner ears.” To further complicate the situation, the beached spinner dolphins, when examined, were found to have parasites in what would well have been normal amounts.

“The pilot whale’s way of life is quite different. While the narwhales, belugas, and bottlenose dolphin are close relatives, there is one important difference: they all live in coastal water, that is, close to land mass and shallows. The pilot whale, as well as the spinner dolphin and false killers are deep-sea dwellers and as such, they don’t realize the ocean has sides and a bottom,” Meade said.

“THEN, WHEN their sonar or hearing, is impaired, they swim right into the shallows, get confused, and try to keep swimming.  They don’t understand confinement. They’re virtually helpless in shallow water.

”We don’t fully understand the hearing mechanism, so we can only assume that these parasites, in abnormal numbers, are driving the animals into these frenzies.” The beachings then may be more a case of running into a land mass than looking for a beach to kill themselves on.

Whales have beached en masse for thousands of years and it is easy to remain detached when you hear about it on the news, but being there, seeing so many, beautiful, intelligent creatures lying still on the edge of their world, I felt a kinship with them.

THE DOLPHIN is the most intelligent animal next to man, and I wished I could see these whales slide back into the water, out of this foreign tomb. I wanted to shout to them, “Prove it!” But everywhere along the coast of the small bay, still flukes and stiff fins revealed that the story had run its course. The waves would roll them back and forth, revealing the glassy eyes and rows of short, white teeth.

The scientists and workers hauled all of the carcasses onto the sand in a long line. All of them were towed there by the tail, and every one of them faced the ocean.

Walking back down the beach, now at low tide, I again passed the last whale.  She was completely stranded now, on the edge of the receding tide. Painfully she breathed, loud, gasping sounds emerging from her blowhole as she exhaled.

I WET MY HANDS and stroked her head. Her sides heaved and she made several feeble efforts to raise her tail. I was alone. The scientists, reporters and officers were all busy with the autopsies. I wet her dry skin and talked quietly to her. I looked down at her eyes to see if she was watching me; they were closed tightly, the skin around them contorted as if she was straining to keep them closed.

And coming from both her eyes in a slow, steady stream were thick tears. I knew that whales, as well as other marine animals, did this as a way to dispel excess salt from their system. Still, if she had ever had reason to cry, this was it.

Seals & Crofts & Roe & Wade

On the heels of two million-selling albums, Summer Breeze and Diamond Girl, Jim Seals and Dash Crofts found themselves at a crossroads. They’d managed to work many of the key tenets of the Baha’i faith into their lyrics, and after every concert they returned to the stage, house lights up, and held informal “fireside chats” about their religion with whomever felt like sticking around.

That seemed to be enough. Proselytizing was and is a no-no for Baha’is, but Seals and Crofts had found a safe middle ground, where they could express their beliefs, and still have hit records.

In 1973, however, when Roe vs. Wade was handed down, the singing/songwriting duo decided to put their mouth where their money was. And it cost them. The landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States went against everything they believed in.

Lana Day Bogan, wife of the duo’s recording engineer and longtime crony Joe Bogan, had seen a television documentary on abortion and was moved to write a poem, from the point of view of the fetus. Seals, at Lana’s suggestion, put it to music.

Oh, little baby, if you only knew.
Just what your momma was planning to do …

This was the proudly pro-life “Unborn Child,” Seals and Crofts’ follow–up to the sweet and singable pop hits “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” and “Diamond Girl.” The album, also called Unborn Child, appeared in February 1974.

Crofts: “Warner Brothers warned us against it. They said, ‘This is a highly controversial subject, we advise that you don’t do this.’ And we said, ‘But you’re in the business to make money; we’re doing it to save lives. We don’t care about the money.”

Both Seals and Crofts insist the song’s message was, simply “don’t take life too lightly,” to stop and think before going through with an abortion. But the critics tore the record to pieces, and Seals and Crofts with it. The public did not respond at the cash registers: Although the album made it to No. 14 on the Billboard chart, the single stalled at No. 66.

“It was a double–edged sword,” Crofts says of the Unborn Child controversy. “It hurt us in one way, and helped us in another. It turns over fans, is what it does. If you’re against something, you lose those fans. But if you’re for it, you gain some fans. And that’s kind of what happened.”    “I don’t know whether people knew what was in there or not,” Seals recalls, “but some of the pro–abortionists called up the radio stations and demanded equal time. Well, that killed the airplay on it. What we had done is we had taken a single issue. Before, we were dealing with the general concept of things.

“I think everybody in the world, regardless of whether they’ve previously been a racist, or an atheist or whatever, can accept, without getting too upset, the fact that mankind is one family. We’re all here on one dot and we need each other. It’s obvious. But when you pull it down and start taking the different really hot issues, if a person is not looking at the overview that you are, then they’re not gonna connect the parts together. They just see one thing.”

This one thing got Seals and Crofts concerts picketed all across the country. “I think we got more good results out of it than bad,” says Crofts, “because a lot of people called us and said, ‘We’re naming our children after you, because you helped us decide to save their lives with that song.’ That was very fulfilling to us.”

“I thought either it would be very much accepted, on the strength of the song itself, or that it would be the biggest bomb that we ever had,” Seals explains. “But it was incidental by that point, because the music was gone. I was out of gas already.”

Unborn Child hurt Seals and Crofts’ reputation: They had crossed that thin line, that sacrosanct divider that separated their music from their religious beliefs. They toured for much of 1974 with the issue hanging over their heads.

The following year saw the release (in quick succession) of I’ll Play For You and a greatest hits package. The former steered way clear of lyrical controversy, while the latter pointedly did not include the track “Unborn Child.” In 1976, Seals and Crofts scored their last (and, ironically, biggest) hit with the atypical “Get Closer.”

They’d struggle along for another few years, hitless, before giving it all up in the early ‘80s. “Unborn Child” was, for Seals and Crofts, the beginning of the end.

Taken from I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews, St. Petersburg Press.

Lost liners: The Left Banke

Definitive Collection – The Left Banke

Is Line the great lost genius of ’60s pop?

Brown, the baby–faced composer and keyboardist for the Left Banke, wrote and arranged songs of such melodic grace and lyrical sophistication that, in some circles, he’s regarded as something of a Brian Wilson character, lost in his own melancholy and oblivious to everything but the music.

Forget for a moment the shimmering and sad Walk Away Renee, the Left Banke’s sole major hit. Put aside Pretty Ballerina, one of the most achingly beautiful songs to come out of American music’s pre–psychedelic era.

She May Call You Up Tonight is a pop gem that the Raspberries could’ve taken to the top in their heyday.

Barterers and Their Wives sounds like a dreamlike cross between the Byrds and the Monkees. And Desireenot only marries “Eleanor Rigby” with the Association, it has one of the best–utilized horn sections of any record from the era.

But the Left Banke never achieved legendary status. After 1966’s “Walk Away Renee” (#5) and “Pretty Ballerina” (#15), the band continued hitless—and broke up after three years and several serious personnel changes.

Granted it was difficult, in those fast–changing times, for a band that prominently featured harpsichord and chamber strings to get taken seriously by the rock ‘n’ roll public. The band’s slavish attention to sonic detail might have been its undoing.

“Almost too pretty for rock,” summed up journalistic maven Lillian Roxon in her “Rock Encyclopedia.”

The Left Banke was formed in New York City by Brown, vocalist Steve Martin, bassist Tom Finn and drummer George Cameron. Martin, Finn and Cameron were accomplished harmony singers, and with the classically–trained Brown at the piano, worked out offbeat arrangements of Beatles, Zombies and Rolling Stones songs.

Brown’s father, Harry Lookofsy, ran a recording studio and made demos of the fledgling band (joined by guitarist Jeff Whitfield, who’d be replaced down the road by Rick Brand). When the demos failed to attract any label interest, Michael Brown left for California.

In his absence, the other members of the group added vocals to the completed backing track of “Walk Away Renee,” which Brown had written as an unrequited love letter to Finn’s girlfriend (both “Pretty Ballerina” and “She May Call You Up Tonight” were composed for her, too).

“Renee” was sold to Smash Records, which issued it as a Left Banke single in the late summer of ’66. When the record hit, Brown returned to the fold and the band hit the road. Their style was dubbed “Baroque ‘n’ Roll.”

The formula was set: Brown wrote the songs (sometimes in collaboration with the others), arranged them, Martin sang the leads, and Harry Lookofsky produced.

It should have worked wonders for the Left Banke; however, as Brown grew weary of road work, and as the frustrating lack of a followup hit took its toll, the band members settled into a pattern of bickering, breaking up and coming back together in slightly different configurations.

This would continue until November of 1969 when the band, weary of one single after another getting no interest from radio or retailers, called it a day.

Brown went on to greener pastures with the band Stories, and subsequently the Beckies. These recordings, however, prove that the Left Banke was unique and, indeed, visionary. Ahead of its time.

(Written for Rhino Records in 2003).

‘He was freckled like a spotted dolphin’

It’s only right that this tribute to Fred Neil begins and ends with one of his most beloved and personal songs, “The Dolphins.” With few exceptions, Fred Neil preferred the company of dolphins – sleek, sensitive, majestic mammals of the oceans – over people.

The native Floridian was very much like a dolphin himself, enigmatic, mysterious and intractably smarter than he let on. “I met Fred in Coconut Grove during the Flipper years,” recalls Ric O’Barry, who trained the bottlenose dolphins used on the popular 1960s television show.  “We became good friends. Diving and sailing buddies.”

They were approximately the same build, with curly reddish-brown hair. “Except,” O’Barry says, “he was freckled like a spotted dolphin.”

Neil had complete access to the animals in O’Barry’s care at the Miami Seaquarium, where the trainer lived on-site. “Fred spent a great deal of time trying to communicate with the Flipper dolphins using his 12-string guitar,” adds O’Barry. “His human/dolphin communication work progressed into dolphin protection; something that he became passionate about.” He would sit for hours at the edge of the lagoon where a dolphin named Kathy lived, strumming his guitar for her.

It was Fred Neil who introduced Stephen Stills to O’Barry in 1970 – the three of them went sailing in Biscayne Bay, and the talk, naturally, turned to dolphins. O’Barry discussed his recent epiphany, that dolphins were sensitive and highly intelligent creatures, and that keeping them captive, as playthings, was inhumane.

Lit up like a roman candle, Neil told his pal the rock ‘n’ roll star about his sonic experiments. “It’s not necessarily the music,” he said, in a conversation recounted in O’Barry’s book Behind the Dolphin Smile. “It’s the tone and the sound of sustained chords. When Kathy heard a chord on the 12-string, she had the gentlest way of putting her snout on the vibrating strings themselves and on the wooden box, feeling it like it was something special. And it is, to them. I’ve worked with them a lot, and they seem to like the D chord best.”

When O’Barry left the Seaquarium to begin his Dolphin Project, it was Stills – already a multimillionaire at 25 – who provided the initial seed money. “Fred didn’t have any money in those days,” O’Barry said. “He didn’t donate money, but he donated much of his time to the Dolphin Project.”

“People idolized Fred Neil,” says John Sebastian, who knew the Floridian troubadour from the early 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village. “Once you’d heard him, you realized there was no competing with him: ‘There’s no doing this any better than he does it.’”

“His throat gave out those deep sonorous, mellifluous tones,” Eric Andersen explains, “like the kind of tones you hear in the low range of a tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, or in the low-tones of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. Fred’s voice actually bore the trademarks of having its own unique intrinsic thing, not found anywhere else on the scene with the possible exception of the amazing Tim Hardin.”

“There were always beautiful women chasing him,” declares Sebastian. “We were growing up in Greenwich Village, and all our cute girls were Italians, and Jewish. And here was this guy whose girlfriends all looked like Yvette Mimieux.” It was said that Fred could “pull waitresses from 40 yards,” Sebastian laughs. “It came down to a kind of Piscean sadness about him that women could not resist. As well as the fact that he sang so well.”

His big baritone voice could reach down so low – often when you least expected it – and hit a note that would rattle your ribcage. His songs brought blues, jazz, rock and roll and the fluid rolls of Indian ragas together.

No, there was no one like him, not even close.

“I always trusted and felt of Freddie as a big brother I never had,” Andersen adds. “Of all the Village people and songwriters, he was my favorite, the real deal. I didn’t see him a lot, but we connected.”

Recalled Sebastian: “Fred had something nobody else in Greenwich Village had, with the possible exception of Odetta: A gospel background. He knew what singing in church was. I think a lot of his vocal signatures, also, came from that rockabilly, early rock ‘n’ roll Southern influence … Odetta would always tease him and say ‘You see all those freckles, Fred? You’re one of us.’”

Eventually, Neil left New York for South Florida for good. Bobby Ingram remembered the first time he laid eyes on him, in a brand-new Grove coffeehouse called Trivia. It was 1964. “He was onstage, wearing a sport coat – which you didn’t do in Florida – and he had his cuffs folded up outside the sport coat sleeves, the way we did in those years. And he was wearing these goddam leprechaun shoes. As I recall, they were green. Them stupid pointy-toed things you see at the renaissance fair. And he was playing rockabilly on an acoustic guitar.”

Everyone, Ingram says, followed him.

“It was all about Fred. Fred was the bait. When people knew Fred Neil was hanging around Coconut Grove, the ones that mattered started coming down. Sam Hood built the Gaslight Café South, and Simon and Garfunkel came. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and on and on.”

Unfortunately, the main attraction didn’t always show up. “Fred was always kinda scared,” notes Ingram. “You had to coax him up onstage, until you got him wound just right, or if he was happy with who he was playing with

Between 1965 and 1971, Neil recorded five albums (one as a duo project with Vince Martin). Subsequently, he never signed another contract. It wasn’t so much that he was skeptical about the music business (although he was); it wasn’t that he had fallen victim to substance abuse (although the stories about his intake were legion).

From all accounts, Fred simply lost interest in music. He didn’t burn out; nor did he fade away. He simply slow-dissolved into the universe. He raised a family in the Grove, and eventually moved to Summerland Key, where he died of skin cancer in 2001.

All these years later, what we have are the songs, some fun and frolicsome, others filled with a beautiful, aquatic sadness, weary and blue. The lyrics are prescient: On “Everybody’s Talkin’” he details the life he longs for (“I’m going where the sun keeps shining through the pouring rain/Going where the weather suits my clothes”). Then there’s “The Other Side of This Life,” “Ba-De-Da” and “The Dolphins,” all of which chronicle the continuous search for something intangible.

Fred Neil went looking for the dolphins in the sea – and he found them. And he found so much more.

 

Everybody’s Talkin’ – A Tribute to Fred Neil is available Aug. 12 from Y&T Music.

Tracks:

  1. The Dolphins – Eric Andersen
  2. A Little Bit of Rain – Bobby Ingram
  3. Dade County Jail – Jim Wurster & Omine
  4. Ba-De-Da – Arlan Feiles
  5. The Other Side of This Life – Charlie Pickett
  6. Everything Happens – Diane Ward & Jack Shawde
  7. Everybody’s Talkin’ – Keith Sykes
  8. Candyman – Rodney Crowell
  9. Handful of Gimme – Vince Martin
  10. Mississippi Train – Roger Bartlett
  11. Bleecker & MacDougal – Valerie C. Wisecracker
  12. Country Boy – Tim Krekel
  13. I’ve Got a Secret – The 18 Wheelers
  14. The Dolphins – Matthew Sabatella & Diane Ward

 

 

Interview: Mike Mills of R.E.M. (2016)

After R.E.M. amicably disbanded in 2011, bassist, composer and all-around utility man Mike Mills started looking for new projects to tackle. He considered doing nothing – “I can goof off with the best of ‘em” – but ultimately opted to pick up a gauntlet laid down by his friend from childhood, acclaimed classical violinist Robert McDuffie.

McDuffie challenged his old pal – a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – to compose a classical concerto for him to play, using rock as its foundation. “I can play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven until my hair falls out,” the violinist told Mills. “I want to do something different.”

Five years later, McDuffie and Mills are touring the country, performing Mills’ “Concerto For Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra.” The piece, which had its world premiere in Toronto in June, also features the 11-member chamber group Fifth House Ensemble.

Mills, who wrote the music for many of R.E.M.’s most popular songs, will play bass, piano and guitar during the performance. He’ll also conduct the onstage rock band, which includes two additional guitarists and a drummer.

Although he reads music at a rudimentary level – thanks to his Macon, Georgia high school marching band and jazz combo training – Mills isn’t a composer in the classical sense. He came up with the melodies for all six of the movements in his concerto, and devised every nuance of McDuffie’s solos, then collaborated with arranger David Malamud on the actual scoring.

“It was incredibly daunting, and many times I cursed myself for having said yes in the first place,” Mills laughs. “But once it came together, and we started playing it as an ensemble, I realized that it was some pretty good music. And that with the right players, it was going to be great.”

Indeed, the music is deeply dramatic, with numerous lighter, poetic flourishes highlighting, say, a simple string quartet or McDuffie’s soaring solo violin. And many of the melodic motifs are haunting and darkly melancholy, like a fistful of great R.E.M. songs (indeed, the fifth movement uses “Nightswimming,” an R.E.M. hit for which Mills wrote the music, as its central theme).

“I tried to write a good song, period, and then I had to come up with a great melody on top of that,” Mills explains. “Because a concerto is all about melody.  It is and it isn’t like writing for R.E.M. Because you’ve got to think – instead of a singer, you’ve got a violin making these melodies happen.”

Although each of the six movements has a name, the 45-minute whole is just “Concerto For Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra.” Mills acknowledges that it’s “a very bland descriptor,” but insists that’s simply how it’s done in Classical World.

“With a concerto,” he says, “the focus is on the virtuosity of the soloists. So whether it’s written for a singer, a pianist or a violinist, that’s what makes it a concerto. When people name pieces of music in classical, it comes after the fact. Beethoven didn’t call the Moonlight Sonata the Moonlight Sonata. It became that later. At some point it will have a shorthand title, but at this point it does not.”

If all that sounds just a trifle pretentious, or far too clever for rock ‘n’ roll, Mills wants you to know he and McDuffie have taken on this project  for a very, very specific reason.

“One thing we’re trying to do is show people that the walls between these genres of music are not quite as high as they think they are,” he explains. “It’s rock ‘n’ roll music, but it’s played by a classical violin and a string section.

“And we’re trying to break down other aspects of classical music, such as: Everyone has to maintain complete silence between movements – there’s no applauding or yelling or anything like that. We’re throwing all that out the window. When Bobby rips off a particularly tasty passage in this thing, people can applaud, go ‘woo-woo’ or whatever they want to do.”

Interview: Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn (2014)

From Louis and Keely to John and Yoko to Derek and Susan, married couples have worked together to give us some of the most interesting and powerful music of the past century.

Enter Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn, banjo innovators both, who wed in 2009 and are the proud parents of baby boy Juno, 10 months old.

Fleck, whose musical skills and restless nature have taken him deep into the jazz, classical and blues realms, started as an fiery, innovative player in the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival in the early ‘80s.

By the end of the decade, he and bassist Victor Wooten had kickstarted Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, and the banjo would never again be seen as something barefoot hillbilly boys plucked aimlessly on Appalachian front porches.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But Fleck, in the intervening years, has almost single-handedly charted spectacular new territories for the instrument.

Washburn was relatively new to the banjo when Fleck signed on to produce an album for her in 2005; she is a stunning vocalist and an ardent student of Chinese music and culture, all of which imbue her music with an otherworldly richness. She and Fleck subsequently recorded and toured, with Casey Dreissen and Ben Solee, as the Sparrow Quartet.

Both have played the Savannah Music Festival separately (in fact, the Sparrow Quartet stopped in once), but their March 30 lunchtime concert will mark the first time Mr. and Mrs. have done the Savannah deal as a twosome.

You’re parents now. How’s that working out?

AW: It’s amazing. We get to have a beautiful little creature that we get to take care of. It’s incredible.

BF: Abby is the Mother of the Year, as far as I can tell. And we’ve been taking him on the road, on these tours, and that’s quite a challenge. But he’s been great. And if we have an early show, he’ll watch the whole show and even take part in it.

The other night, Abby brought him out and she sang the encore holding him, and he pulled the cable out of the microphone and started sucking on it! The audience went wild.

Is this the first time you’ve toured together, as just the two of you?

BF: We’ve been working into it. At first I think we did a benefit for Abby’s grandma, at her church, and it went way better than we’d expected. We just threw a few things together and ended up being really happy with it. But we knew from then on that we would play as a duo, so it would pop up here and there. It’s been on our radar as something we wanted to do some day together. We’re now actually recording a record that’ll be out in the Fall.

AW: This is the first time we’ve taken it seriously … well, we’ve loved to play music together from the beginning, so that’s an obvious connection.

Abby, the last time we spoke, you were telling me that you’d picked up banjo a lot later, and that you were a little intimidated at first playing with the old master. Have you gotten over that— ‘oh, it’s just Bela’?

AW: On one level, it’s a part of our routine. But on another level, the things that come out of him musically night after night are always astonishing. That wouldn’t happen in any other situation, and I see it and I recognize it. And it’s always inspiring.

BF: I think that everybody has different things that they bring to it. I play with a lot of different musicians, and some of them have abilities that I don’t have. And when I play with them I have to deal with that kind of a thing.

For instance, if I go out and play with Chick Corea, as a duet, he’s got abilities that I don’t have. But we meet in the areas where we can meet. And he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we have a great time.

And I think it’s that way with Abby. She has abilities that I don’t have. Even playing abilities—I’ve never been much of a clawhammer player, and she can lay down a groove that I can do almost anything over. And also, her vocals are just so compelling. So I get to be part of music that reaches out to people, and connects with people in a whole different way than the instrumental music that I tend to get involved with. So for me, it’s just a wonderful experience. It’s not like we’re unequal—it’s more like we’re finding different ways to interface.

Does the other person’s creativity change you, depending on the person?

BF: Exactly. That’s the compelling thing for me about playing with a lot of people, because I get to be different. I’m not the same old me. When I play with Abby, I play different. And I play different with her than I play with, for instance, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. Or Tony Rice. There are elements to our duo that is traditional, our Abby and Bela duo, I get to play in a more traditional fashion than I do playing with Chick Corea, or the Flecktones and so forth.

But with Abby, it’s even a different subset because she has this old-time element. And also the beautiful aspects.

As an improvising artist, which is a big part of what I try to be, I’m improvising a lot with Abby but I’m responding every day to what it feels like will work well. But yeah, I definitely spark to whatever’s going on around me.

Abby, are you still bringing the Asian influences into your music?

AW: Yeah, in fact Bela and I decided to seek out a new traditional Chinese song, from southeast China, to try and go in a new direction with some of the Chinese repertoire. And it’s exciting; Bela can go anywhere, he can do anything. He’s a fearless explorer. Which is so exciting for me, because I’m game for the journey, but I might not even seek out certain directions that he sees.

BF: We were listening to a lot of difference Chinese stuff and I was like “Abby, we should do one of these even more obscure, totally Chinese things.” The two that we did with the Sparrow Quartet are almost like pop, not pop but like folk songs—they’re very, very well-known simple songs. And this shows her voice off in a completely different way that any of the Chinese-type stuff I’ve heard her sing before. I like that because it’s showing a new corner of what she’s able to do.

AW: Which is a big part of what Bela brings to me musically, new challenges, new ideas. Sometimes it’s scary and frustrating, and sometimes it’s pretty exhilarating. So I grow a lot when I play with Bela.

Tell me about the record you’re making.

BF: For one thing, the studio is in our basement. Wherever we put the mics, that’s the studio. So we have the luxury of going ahead and recording the stuff that we’ve been playing our duo that’s not already recorded. It turns out there was quite a bit there that we had been doing …

AW: Old murder ballads, old Carter Family songs and things like that.

BF: So that accounted for six or seven tunes. Once we got into old tunes of Abby’s that she’d never recorded that we had nice duet versions of. So hey, let’s put that on the table. So basically what we’re doing is recording a pile of stuff. We’ll probably record 16 or 17 songs, and then see what the record is. In there. And this week we’re going to complete three new tunes we’ve been working on. There’s an instrumental that we’ve written together, and a really cool song that Abby wrote.

Bela, is this like going back for you, to Newgrass Revival days, isn’t it? There’s a lot of Americana in this now. Is there an element of “I used to play this stuff a lot”?

BF: Yeah, it’s the stuff that made me want to play in the first place. And that I love, but I petered out of because I was so interested in moving forward I moved out of that world. Not because I didn’t love it, but just because there were new challenges. And so now, I’m coming back to it in a very earthy, natural way—playing with the two banjos.

We both love the banjo, and onstage we have seven banjos onstage that we switch around—baritone banjo, piccolo banjo, cello banjos—a lot of different tunes and a lot of different instruments that we grab and use in different combinations. So doing that, when we do a traditional song, it’s a different traditional song than you’ve heard before. There’s a lot of rippling going on

The nice thing for me is that, on top of that rippling I’m hearing some beautiful singing. And I don’t to hear that normally.

Abby can access a really old sound with her voice, and an old feeling. Ricky Skaggs calls it the Ancient Tones. And I’ve heard Abby get those sounds. And I love it when I hear it.

@2014 Connect Savannah