David Crosby: That's Why They Call It Recovery

The Cros is gone. Having dodged so many bullets, what a gift that he made it to 81…He was deeply talented, creative, intelligent, articulate, poetic, driven, committed, bold…deeply flawed but deeply honest about it and therefore deeply wise…and in the end and always, deeply, deeply human. All of which made for a fascinating man and a beautiful artist. I’ll always be grateful that he shared a bit of his life with me. Here ‘tis…

David Crosby strummed a chord on his guitar and the rich sound filled the living room of his Encino home.

“I was in full flower in ’85,” he said of his addiction. “There were a tremendous number of freebasers by then. We thought we were the Dark Side.  We thought we were going to buck the trend. But that’s about when the turning point came, when it hit the streets as crack.”

Crosby hit another chord.

“I was a stone-cold junkie. Sores all over my body. Numerous car wrecks from having grand mal seizures while driving. Multiple seizures from toxic saturation. I’d tried several times to straighten out, six times in hospitals and at least four times on my own-all utter miserable failures, each of which made me less able to try it the next time. I was dead but still walking around. Stole drugs. Dealt drugs. Pleaded, begged, borrowed, and told any lie to get drugs. The only thing left was my wife, Jan, and we would lie down on our bare mattress on our bare floor, throw a blanket over ourselves, and just hold on to each other.”

Freebase is produced by mixing cocaine hydrochloride powder with ether and water to switch the drug’s pH back from acid to alkaline, reducing the substance to its base so that it can be smoked. As Crosby noted, “All basers are obsessed with it. They think they know everything about it. Basers imagine they’re chemists, scientists, doctors and pharmacists, and everybody has a slightly different theory about how to make it right.”  

Scads of accoutrements are required: little pieces of glasses, tubes, bottles, stoppers, screens, pipes, pieces of rubber, scrapers, containers for liquids and powders, pH papers, water, ammonia, baking soda. And the all-important torch, of course. The problem with basing is that ether is highly flammable—and the higher you are, the easier it is to start fires, as Richard Pryor discovered on that night in 1980 when he ran screaming down the streets of the San Fernando Valley, engulfed in flames.

The second problem was the two-minute high, which film director Pasul Shrader described as “like falling down a dark elevator shaft.” The ascent was so fast and so intense that it made the descent that much more severe, and the desire to get high again that much more compulsive. This made freebasers frighteningly greedy— “like starving Dobermans waiting for red meat,” as writer Michael O’Donoghue characterized them.

The final problem was paying for the damn stuff. An ounce a day was common on a really bad jag, which would cost about $2,400. David Crosby’s habit eventually consumed a personal fortune of about seven million dollars.

“I sold that piano. I sold these guitars. I got them back, but there’s a story about them.”

The guitar that Crosby was holding was a gorgeous vintage 12-string Martin conversion, purchased with the first money he ever earned as a performer, at clubs like Mother Blues. Crosby had played the guitar in the Byrds during those years when he was living in Laurel Canyon, cultivating the sybaritic lifestyle of his wildest fantasies—he was Lawrence of Laurel Canyon, as one of his friends called him—one of the princes of the new psychedelic spring. He later wrote such classics as “Long Time Gone,” “Guinevere,” and “Wooden Ships” for CS&N on that very guitar. At the nadir of his addiction, he took his guitars along to a hospital called Cold Forge in Altoona, PA.

“It was one of the places I tried to get straight, and when eight-thousand forty-nine minutes later I tried to get up and split—and believe me I counted every one of them! —there was a guy there who befriended me and my wife and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you your stuff,’ and went right out and sold my guitars. And that guitar, it was like losing your best friend. I tried everything; the guy was gone, the guitars were gone, the trail was cold.”

Over the next few years, Crosby served time in a Texas penitentiary and became one of the most public recovering drug addicts in America. Then he completed an autobiography—Long Time Gone, written with Cal Gottlieb—that will no doubt stand as one of the most authentic and powerful works ever published about the era of Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.

Throughout those years, much of what had been lost along the way was restored to him: career, self-esteem, friends. He purchased this home in Encino and fathered a boy named Django, but like a metaphor of his addiction, his guitar was lost—a continuing reminder that notwithstanding the wonders and gifts of a new clean and sober life, some things may never be recovered.

Once, outside a concert hall in Pennsylvania that he was playing with Graham Nash, his wife Jan saw a boy go by who she was certain was wearing a shirt of hers that had disappeared from the hospital along with the guitars. They brought the boy backstage, and it turned out he was engaged to a girl whose father had both guitars—an Armenian fellow who’d never taken them out of the cases the whole time he’d had therm. The promoters then called and tried to convince him to sell the guitars back to Crosby—everyone from the CS&N camp called and tried to convince him to sell back the guitars but the response was always then same: “Fuck you, I paid for them, I’m keeping them.”  Then, with Crosby’s fiftieth birthday approaching, his wife decided to make one final attempt and asked Graham Nash, the diplomat of the group, to give it a shot. Nash came back downcast. “It’s hopeless, David. We will not get those guitars back.”

At the birthday party, where 200 of Crosby’s friends gathered to celebrate the miracle of his life, Glenn Close and Woody Harrelson approached him. “David,” Close said, “you know Woody plays guitar, and he would really love it if you would show him how to play one of your songs.”

Harrrelson then said, “Come on, man, I’ve got my guitar right over here.”

When Crosby opened the case, there was his darling Martin conversion.

“They set me up good! It was like my heart stopped when I saw it, and my eyers filled with tears.”  He went silent for a moment. “You gotta be real bad to lose something like this…”

The costs of Crosby’s addiction were not over. Within two years, he would almost die of liver failure and struggle back yet again from the brink of death after a transplant. After that, he’d find the long-lost son he fathered out of wedlock back in the Sixties and form a band with him. And so it would go in his life: things lost, things regained with new meaning.

“I’ve had a lot of wonderful things happen to me in sobriety. Anybody who tells you that they got their life back isn’t lying.”

Cosby finger picked a few harmonic notes on the guitar--notes that flitted about the room and reverberated like beautiful sonic doves.

“That’s why they call it recovery.”

For Michael Lang, Wunderkind of Woodstock: Just Look At What You Got, Man

So many thoughts and feelings about Michael Lang since he passed away but the story that came immediately to mind was one that he told me about his first psychedelic experience. He was only a teenager growing up in Bensonhurst at the time, a bold and precocious kid already gravitating to what was going on in the Village, so when he managed to get his hands on this new stuff called LSD, he decided he was going to just take it and hop on the subway and head into the city to see what would happen. 

The LSD was pure Sandoz—a tiny dark dot on a white sugar cube—and like so many others who encountered it at the time, Michael had no idea what he was in for, and he wasn’t quite ready when the guy sitting across from him in the subway car began transmogrifying into a giant rabbit. He knew about Alice In Wonderland, and there was the imaginary rabbit friend of Jimmy Stewart in the movie Harvey--but oh, this was something else entirely…

 By the time he got off at 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, it was coming on full throttle. As he headed north, he only got higher and higher with each step until it all became too much and he began to feel like he was losing his mind (of course, he was), but the fear that he would never return began to overwhelm him, so when he spied a church across the street he ducked into its garden, seeking refuge from everything that was coming down on him.

 “I got completely lost in that little garden,” he related. “I had no idea of where I was or even who I was anymore.”

It was a beautiful spring evening and the garden that he’d wandered into was in full bloom; within moments he was utterly enchanted. 

 “I was walking this tightrope between the magic of what I was experiencing and the fear that I was lost and would never find my way out, and then I began realizing that the more I just let go and went with the experience, the calmer I seemed to get, and the less it mattered that I was lost in a garden. At some point I just looked up and saw the Empire State building and then I knew exactly where I was. All I ever would have had to do was just look up into the sky and I would have known! But somehow that’s not what I was there to do…To this day I have no idea what church it was or how long I was actually in it—a minute, or an eternity—but It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life…”

Somehow the story of Michael’s virgin acid trip always seemed a template to me for how he would handle Woodstock--for those decisive moments when everything seemed like it might all unravel into pure disaster. There were many and they were very dramatic. The moment he decided to make it a free festival, despite the devastating financial ramifications. The moment when Nelson Rockefeller was breathing down their necks and threatening to send in the National Guard. The terrifying prospect of thousands of people being electrocuted in the mud in front of the stage after the climactic storm. Michael instinctively understood that his whole generation had materialized on Max Yasgur’s farm seeking something far beyond the music—seeking the refuge of a garden from the madness that was America during the 1960s—and that there were hundreds of thousands of souls out there on LSD freaking and flashing, in states ranging from the most infernal psychic and physical discomfort to the most primordial ecstasy and transcendent release. He was always able to project calm and courage in those fateful moments because he was always confident that if they got lost, all he had to do was let go, and look up into the sky exactly as he’d done in that little church garden, and they would get their bearings and find their way. And he was right. 

Truth be told, I never made it to Woodstock in’69, so I’m not reporting these things firsthand. That summer between junior and senior year of high school, I had a job as a houseboy at a country club. I knew that if I went to the festival, I’d lose the job and I wanted to keep it, so I stayed put. Of course, after the movie came out, I bitterly regretted missing it, which meant that I went to every rock festival on the East Coast for the next four years hoping it would happen again (it never did because it never could). But I did get to immerse myself in the Woodstock story on four different occasions, once for my book Can’t Find My Way Home, twice for two of Barbara Koppel’s Woodstock documentaries that I had the pleasure of working on, and once with Michael himself when he asked me to help him develop what he envisioned was going to be a Woodstock exhibit that would travel the world (alas, it didn’t happen). In the process I got to know him quite well, and each time I delved into the story of Woodstock it became clearer and clearer that Woodstock simply would never have happened without him. All you have to do is look at his Woodstock partners to understand why. John Roberts and Joel Rosenmann were basically a couple of preppie kids with money who didn’t know the difference between Gracie Slick and Gracie Allen, and had it not been for Woodstock it’s unlikely you would have ever heard their names. And even Artie Kornfeld who was a hip music business guy didn’t grasp the zeitgeist of the moment like Michael. Like many of the early hippies he was a true cultural adventurer, and he understood the relationship between the music and the lifestyle, the art, the politics, the mind-altering substances, and the spiritual consciousness more than any of his associates. Michael was a true visionary—a hippie with a dream--but underneath the dream was boundless ambition, the charismatic smoothness of a snake charmer, and the guile of a riverboat gambler. 

Of course, it was the movie that made Michael famous, and what emerged was the image of the coolest hippie on the planet rambling around the site on his BSA motorcycle, bare-chested in his leather vest, his long mane of ringlets bouncing behind him. He was beautiful and above all else authentic, with an infectious grin and a twinkle in his eye that made anything and everything seem possible—he was Woodstock, embodying its essence of freedom and change. At the age of twenty-five he was commonly viewed as the wunderkind who made it all happen, who had conjured and presided over an event that defined an era and a generation, but rock festivals were a minefield and even someone as nimble as Michael could be victimized by their explosive unpredictability, as happened shortly thereafter at Altamont. And so, Michael settled into a successful career as a manager in the music industry. He made no money on Woodstock but was fortunate enough to end up with a piece of Billy Joel, which floated his boat. The great Joe Cocker had become known for drunkenly stumbling around stages and vomiting when Michael pulled him out and helped resurrect him. 

Throughout everything he did, Michael retained the aura of the Woodstock wunderkind and never abandoned the dream of doing it again. And again. And again. As a custodian of its cultural consciousness he never forgot that he was purveying a myth of Woodstock—an ideal, and he always had to walk a fine line between marketing it to the corporate interests who had the resources to make it happen again and his sincere belief that the myth could be real and magic, because he had lived it. It was in some respects a dance with the devil, like riding a tiger, and the ride itself could be addictive. The results were mixed. The ’94 festival was no mirage—Michael actually succeeded in bringing Woodstock to a new generation—a triumph that only made the flaming Gotterdammerung of the ’99 festival that much more awful. There were other long-held dreams that Michael was never able to actualize like the movie he wanted to make of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margherita and his elusive quest to bring Woodstock to Broadway, but perhaps none were more obsessional than his attempt to put together a festival to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary, which fell apart so sadly and spectacularly before he became ill with the Hodgkins lymphoma that took his life after a long brutal struggle. In the cynical and darkening world of recent years in which he tried so hard to regenerate another Woodstock, he seemed a Don Quixote-like figure jousting with windmills of legend and mega-finance and so many other forces, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was driving him to ride the tiger again in his seventies. Michael was a complex man, but I suspect that the primary motivation was still the simple one most organically evident in the first Woodstock movie, when he and Artie Kornfeld are standing blissfully on stage in the aftermath of the storm being interviewed by Gabe Pressman, and Michael says that this is only the beginning of something and articulates the very ethos of the Woodstock experience as he sees it—that of a new culture and generation functioning “on their own, without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles” and how it works, and how “everybody pulls together and helps each other.” He fully recognizes that the Three Days of Peace, Love and Music that they pulled off was a financial disaster, and when Pressman wonders why they were smiling, his comment says it all: “Just look what you got, man. You couldn’t buy that for anything. These people are communicating with each other, and that rarely happens anywhere anymore.” 

Michael always knew that far beyond the music and the event, the real meaning of Woodstock was something that happened in the heart, and that when it happened people would wear it inside of them for the rest of their lives, as he had. This was his destiny, his true raison d’être.. I have no doubt that as he left us, he let go and looked up into the sky as the boy had done in that church garden, got his bearings, and found his way home.  

Michael, Michael...

The camera never lies. One can’t watch Leaving Neverland and not viscerally feel that every single word uttered by Safechuck and Robson are true. Even beyond what they say, it’s the pauses, those devastating moments when the truth of what happened to them flashes across their faces and registers in their eyes as they grapple with it that make it the most obvious thing in the world.

One conjectures endlessly about Michael and his strange and sad fate: to be gifted with such genius and noble intentions, and yet perpetrate such monstrosity. Beyond the talent, the elements of his narrative have always been plain enough: the trauma he suffered at the hands of his father, the entitlement and power of insane levels of fame and wealth, denial, self-justification, race, pain, victimhood, narcissism, messianism…His own truth is deep, complex, unfathomable and ultimately unknowable, as these things always are. Of course, he was all of it, everything, the good and the bad. How could he not have been?

In the end we are left to make our own judgements, for what’s left beyond the pain he caused is the music he left to the world. Much has been written about how to reconcile the music with the truth going forward, whether to keep playing his music or not, and how one can never quite see him in the same way.. It’s easy enough to understand those who might write him off and close the door on him forever, especially if they suffered sexual abuse as children themselves, as so many have. Harder to understand the die hard fans who refuse to accept any of this, but in this age celebrity worship knows no bounds. Back in the 80s when he was shaking the world, I watched Michael perform at Giants Stadium from a platform high above the stage. I’d been around and seen a few things but I was stunned by the sheer religiosity of that worship—it was scary.

As far as what to do with his music, that has to be an individual prerogative. The sight of Bill Cosby’s face sickens me, for example, and I’ll have nothing to do with his work, but I feel different about Michael when I hear his music. I’m still able to somehow appreciate his gifts and contributions. I wonder, is that because I’m more willing to accept Michael’s humanity than Cosby’s? It’s tricky.

It’s nothing new that great artists can be the most beastly people. The great poet Ted Hughes by all accounts was a despicable scumbag who no doubt played an important part in the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill—should that diminish the majesty of his poetry? Perhaps a better example for me is the music of Wagner—a vicious anti-semite who wrote some off the most sublime music ever put to paper. It’s very hard for me to listen to his music and transcend the knowledge that he was Hitler’s favorite composer, that divisions of the SS were named after his operas, that his music was played in concentration camps as people went to their deaths—but sometimes I can allow myself. Perhaps that’s precisely why Jewish artists like Bernstein and Barenboim have made such a point of embracing him.

It’s the same with Michael. I’m certain that at some point I will be on a dance floor and hear “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” and be able to once again dance like a mad fool—just as I’m certain that at some point I will hear “Bad” and not be able to stop thinking about how bad Michael really was…

Whence the Bop Apocalypse?

The title of my new book comes from an image in Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, Howl, where he condenses the entire era of the 1940s-1950s into a single indelible image and provides its perfect metaphor--

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands

marijuana hipsters peace & drums & junk!

 The narrative about the Beats in the book is about the role that jazz and mind-altering substances played in the creation of what became the breakthrough masterworks of the Beat Generation--Ginberg's Howl, Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and William Burroughs's Naked Lunch--and how that gave advent to the whole new bohemian culture in cities and on college campuses across the nation that would become the American Counterculture.

Here are all the principal characters, looking particularly beatific, in an iconic photo taken in 1945, when they were first getting to know each other (left to right are Hal Chase, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs) when Jack and Allen were students at Columbia, along with a quote from the book about the impact of drugs on their lives at the time--

It was truly an odd and yet compelling destiny. As the war was ending and twelve million men and women in the US military were demobilizing and returning to their lives, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were perceiving and digestingthe meaning and magnitude of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the uneasy peace that followed as they experimented with illicit drug-induced altered states of consciousnes. They would station themselves underneath the great Pokerino sign, sublimely stoned, Ginsberg in a belted raincoat and a paisley scarf, Kerouac in his seaman’s jacket, and Burroughs in his Homburg, always looking like a bank president in his three piece suit. The sign would cast a pulsing neon glow over the the multi-tiered labyrinth of elevated platforms and the arcades and the chop suey joints and the tropical fruit drink stands and the multitudes of people and cars, and Times Square would transmogrify before their eyes into what seemed a giant surreal room hanging in the space of a dying post-nuclear world. 

A Few Thoughts About The Artist Formerly Living and Known As Prince

When I watched Prince work, I was always reminded of the great auteurs who had done it all, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. But when we filmed him creating and directing the opening to his Lovesexy tour in London in the summer of 1988, it was Mozart who came to mind.

Prince would arrive onstage in a replica of his Thunderbird convertible on a hydraulic lift to the song “Escape,” then he’d go slinking across the stage to “Erotic City,” and would meet up with Sheilah E and the dancer known as Cat at the center of the stage for some shenanigans. It was just three people dancing on a stage, but it was outrageously funky, entertaining and erotic.

His command and control of every element and aspect of the show was consummate. Songwriting. Music. Sound. Production design. Lighting design. Choreography.

As I watched him put it all together and tweak it to his perfection, I thought, Ah, this is what it must have been like when Mozart directed one of his operas. Prince was the Mozart of pop, rock, funk, and soul.

I would never have had the chance to meet Prince if he hadn’t admired my script for the 1987 documentary, Elvis ’56. As a result, I was hired as the writer of what was to be an authorized documentary about his musical life and times. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with him. That summer I watched him launch the tour at Wembley—an amazing spectacle—and followed him as he travelled the UK and Europe.

There was a lot of controversy swirling around him after the Black Album and the naked cover of Lovesexy. As Eric Clapton put it when we filmed him, “You either love him or hate him, there’s no in-between” --and Clapton, an unabashed fan, clearly loved him.

The concerts were events that turned out the crème de la crème of the music world. People like George Clinton, Paul McCartney, and Sting were always buzzing around the show, but the real fun was the after-hours jams in clubs. That was where you saw who Prince really was—a devout musician who loved to melt your face with his guitar.

You could see how he had taken all his influences and made them all a part of his palette. You could recognize Miles Davis, Elvis, Little Richard, James Brown, Sly, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Frank Zappa, countless others. Prince could be any one of them, all of them at once, or none of them at all. Prince was Prince, and he inhabited a prolific world of music and musicians that revolved around him like planets around a dazzling sun. He lived for it.

Prince was outlandishly talented but make no mistake, he could be a very weird little cat. Sometimes I’d think he could only have been beamed down from another planet. I always sensed his troubled youth in the part of him that was so withdrawn and standoffish. Conversation with him could be strained and uneasy. He could be vulnerable in his art, but the walls were up around him everywhere else. He was very preternaturally paranoid, but he also understood the power of mystique. It was Randy Newman, another fan, who remarked to us, “He doesn’t appear to be a friendly fella because he’s so remote but there’s great humor in his stuff so you know he couldn’t be a bad guy.”

His manager at the time, Bob Cavallo, told me that when Prince was nominated for Purple Rain, he was hoping it would be the night that America would get to see that Prince was just a regular guy and really connect with him…but then Prince showed up in his purple sequined hood…and that was that. Prince Rogers Nelson was anything but a regular guy.

Yes, he was vain. I never saw him without those platform shoes except for once when I saw him playing basketball and I couldn’t believe my eyes at how tiny he was without them. They must have been six or seven inches high, and when I heard he needed hip replacement surgery a few years ago, I knew it had to be those shoes.

The world of entertainment is populated by divas and control freaks like Barbara Streisand and Diana Ross—I’d been around a few of them, but I’d never met anyone as possessed by it as Prince. I began to understand it more when I went through the recently built Paisley Park, his multi-million-dollar high-tech creative play land. With its recording studios and sound stages it was his own private MGM, complete with a costume department where he designed his own clothes. Nobody could ever tell him what to do. It was obvious that he needed that to feel safe about unleashing his creativity, but there was an obsessive Howard Hughes dimension to it. I had the same feeling when I went through Graceland after Elvis died—of someone who lived entirely and profoundly in his own world.

At the finale of the Lovesexy shows, Prince would get the massive crowds to shout back at him that God is alive. Eighty thousand people shouting that God is alive would be an uncanny thing to witness anywhere but this was not a revivalist convention in Houston or a pilgrimage to Mecca, this was a rock concert. This was Wembley.

Prince would stand there and take it all in—this tsunami of spiritual energy and love that he was able to unleash—and then suddenly disappear. His worshipful fans never knew about the chute that he went down to the packing crate with wheels underneath the stage. Of course it was specially designed by him. The lid would be closed, and he’d be rolled quickly out to a limousine that would whisk him away in a matter of minutes.

I thought of it when I heard that he died, how he would be just vanish while his fans were showering the stage with love, and somehow it seemed a metaphor for many things about him.

His death felt like that, too. Poof, he was gone, and his audience had no idea what had happened or where he was, only that they’d experienced something the likes of which they would never see again…

Holly Woodlawn's Walk On the Wild Side

Holly Woodlawn is gone at the age of 69. The last time I saw her we were having lunch in a posh midtown restaurant. It was 1991 and her book had just come out--the aptly titled A Low Life In High Heels--and she was dressed to the nines in conservative but very chic designer wear.

The place was crowded and Holly wasn't happy that nobody in the restaurant seemed to recognize her as a Warhol drag queen superstar. Alas, it had been a long time since Trash made her one in 1970, but whatever disappointment she may have felt was more than cancelled out by the fact that at the same time nobody would have ever suspected that this woman having lunch there that day began life as Haraldo Santiago Francheschi Rodriguez Danhaki in Puerto Rico.

Holly's breakthrough moment in underground film came as a transgender welfare cheat in Trash when she famously copulated with a coke bottle in sexual frustration while husband heroin addict Joe Dallesandro  nodded out on the floor. She became part of the great triumvirate of Warholian drag queens that included Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling who all came to epitomize the strange new celebrity of Max's Kansas City in its heyday, but while Jackie was certainly more talented and Candy was certainly more beautiful, nobody was funnier or somehow more touchingly melodramatic than Holly--or had more sheer moxie--and it was not for nothing that Lou Reed brought her onstage as his first character in his epochal Walk On The Wild Side--

Holly came from Miami, F-L-A
Hitchhiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, "Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side."

Holly had a great story but what intrigued me the most were her first days in New York, when she arrived at sixteen and lived in the Village, knew absolutely nobody, and had no idea how she would survive. She fell in with a group of prostitutes of every conceivable sexual persuasion, lived off the streets, and put her whole being into being a woman. 

 With the whole Caitlin Jenner circus going on and transsexualism all over the mainstream media, it's hard to remember what it must have been like at that time, when there were only a handful of transsexuals living openly. Not that she ever had a choice in the matter, but the courage it took to be herself and live as she did was nothing less than monumental, and as I remember her and reflect on that day we had lunch, what stands out the most is the simple but elemental pride and pleasure she took in passing as a woman.

We'll miss you, Holly. If there's a cabaret in Heaven like Reno Sweeney's, I know you'll be squabbling with Jackie and Candy to see who gets on stage first...

Mad Men's Fitting Finale

After a few days of digestion, the final episode of Mad Men resonates like a perfectly strummed chord.

For the most part, the odysseys of the characters conclude logically enough: Peggy finally in love, Joan losing love to ambition and feminist self-reliance, Roger taking responsibility for his love child with Joan after which it's business as usual as we watch him charmingly cracking a joke in French with Marie Calvet in a restaurant--an age-appropriate woman every bit as flirtatious, elegant and cynical as him, who will no doubt drive him completely crazy. As for Pete Campbell, well, he was always a pathetic creature of his social class and culture and a loser in his romantic life. His decision to take the big job with Lear Jet and move to the Midwest also makes perfect sense, but his effort to reclaim his wife and child is so ardent and sincere that it seems nothing short of a transformational spiritual awakening...

And speaking of transformations and spiritual awakenings, Don Draper finding his way to Esalen and the Human Potential Movement, where we leave him chanting Om in lotus-position on a perfect sun-dappled day in Big Sur,  is a consummate choice by series creator Matthew Weiner. That Don's transit through the tumult of the Sixties would end here mirrors the experience of so many at the end of that decade who found themselves overwhelmed by the burnout of such high intensity times. Needing a dramatic shift in their lives, they found themselves searching for inner peace through meditation, sensory awareness, and the expansion of the powers and energies of mind, body, and spirit. Their ranks included artists and hippies and bohemians but what made Esalen so remarkable was how many middle class teachers, journalists, psychologists, housewives and business men like Don Draper were drawn there. And given the darkness that pervades his soul (and has always made him such a compelling character)  one can hardly imagine any one more in need of inner peace than Don Draper.

Unlike the ending of the Sopranos, there is no ambiguity in where Don's journey ends. It's as if the figure of the man in perpetual free-fall from the Madison Avenue skyscrapers in the series opening graphic has finally landed, and it's easy to imagine him in Gestalt therapy, biofeedback, EST, and so many other adjuncts of the Human Potential Movement (he would have made a damn good EST instructor!). But Don chanting Om and getting in touch with the fundamental vibration is only the penultimate scene, for this is a series about advertising and the real ending is the Coke commercial--shining faces singing "I'd like teach the world to sing in perfect harmony"--one of the classic commercials of the era that completely rips off the look and vibe and very quality of light of Esalen and what it stood for.

Perhaps this is the only ambiguity of Mad Men's finale. Does the commercial infer that Don returns to advertising and makes this commercial? He certainly would have been the perfect one to do it. Or is it Weiner's unambiguous statement about how capitalism and the business of advertising will always co-opt every cultural trend to sell its products?

Perhaps both...A great end to one of the greatest series in the history of television.    

Alex Gibney's Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All

I've never been an Alex Gibney fan but I generally always see his films because he makes documentaries about subjects that are usually of great interest to me.

In 2010, three years after Gibney won an Academy Award for his documentary Taxi To The Dark Side, a bold film about the torture and murder of an innocent cabdriver in Afganistan on a US base, Esquire opined that he could become "one of the most important documentary filmmakers of our time."  Has it actually happened?

 Along with Ken Burns, Barbara Koppel, Alan and Susan Raymond, and a few others, Gibney has certainly become one our most ferociously ambitious documentarians. On the night my friend Donny Markowitz won an Oscar for Best Song, Jack Nicholson told him, "Kid, when you win an Academy Award, this town pretty much bends over and spreads its ass for you" (or words to that effect), and since 2007 Gibney has been able to fully capitalize on the award, attaining the enviable and exceedingly rare position in the world of documentary film of being able to do pretty much what he wants to do.

 A solid craftsman whose ambition and guile often exceed his actual talent, Gibney has accomplished this by making films about controversial can't-miss subjects that range from the mediocre (Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream) to the very good (Mea Maximum Culpa: Silence In the House of God), along with uneven films about musical and cultural icons like Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, and James Brown. Think what you will of him but perhaps his greatest contribution has been to make coherent films about very challenging subjects like Enron, Jack Abramoff, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Scientology (albeit from a polemical point of view with an agenda that is decidedly leftist) but nothing he has done has ever really knocked me out.

Until now, that is. 

Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All, his two-parter being shown on HBO, is without doubt his best work to date.

From fade in to fade out, every choice works. The footage is magnificent. The songs are perfect signposts and epiphanies. The narration is a fine mix of people blending personal insight (family members like Nancy Sinatra, Tina Sinatra, and Frank Jr.) with incisive cultural and musical commentary from people like Terry Teachout and Pete Hamill (but where was Gay Talese??) and how much better of a formula to hear these people over picture rather than to see them. Perhaps best of all, Gibney gets completely out of the way and lets the material speak for itself. His style can get heavy-handed and there isn't a scintilla of any of his fingerprints on a single scene--always a hallmark of fine filmmaking.

The film ends with a historical montage of New York cut to the finale of Sinatra's great swan song, "New York, New York" (what else?)  that is nothing less than stunningly moving (at least for a New Yorker), and one walks away breathless at the sheer magnitude of the man, his life, his art, and his times...

A great film that I can't wait to see again.

Kudos, Alex. 

Baggar Vance, Where Are You?

I'm not a golfer but I need Baggar Vance to help me get my swing back.  The same way that the mystical caddy played by Will Smith helped Rannulph Junnuh (Matt Damon) realize that all he had to do was to get out of his own way to reclaim his golf game in Robert Redford's 2000 film--and in doing so, reclaim his life--I need that spiritual teacher to somehow get me back on track.

When I first saw The Legend of Baggar Vance I thought it was a fair to middling work that had some good elements, but after watching it recently I think it might be Redford's greatest film. From fade in to fade out it seemed a perfectly realized work: acting, writing, cinematography, casting, music. Mostly it was the emotional power of the movie that floored me. No doubt because of the kind of year I've had...

Junnuh is Georgia's most promising young golfer before going off to the First World War. He returns traumatized, a different man, and all he can do is let everything fall away, including his beautiful girlfriend Adele (Charlize Theron).  Living a shadowy life on the outskirts of town, all he really wants to do is drink (I can relate). Adele is trying to recover her family's lost fortune by holding an exhibition match between the two greatest golfers of the era, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagan, with a a grand prize of $10,000, at the golf resort her father built as the Depression struck, but she wants a native son to amp things up for the local Savannah population, so she sets in motion a scheme to get Junnuh to play. Junnuh flat out refuses at first... but then starts entertaining the notion. He's trying to hit golf balls, shanking and hooking them with no control whatsoever into the dark void of the humid Georgia night, when Baggar Vance (Will Smith) appears--a mysterious traveller with a suitcase who announces that he will be his caddy.

This is when things get interesting because Jeremy Renner's screenplay (from Steven Pressfield's novel) is based on the Mahabarata, the part of the Bhagavad Gita where the warrior hero Arjuna (junnuh) is frozen with fear before a great battle, and the god Krishna appears as Bhagavan (Baggar) to help him find his path and become the warrior he was meant to be. 

And so begins the epic golf match. Junnuh plays poorly at first and after the first round is far behind, but in the second Baggar helps him find his "authentic swing" and he catches fire, playing brilliant golf effortlessly. He makes up a lot of ground and, miraculously, by the third and final round it's a three way competition. And then Junnuh takes his will back, disregarding Baggar's advice. He starts playing poorly again, and shanks the ball deep into the forrest. When he finds the ball, Junnuh can only stand there in anguish. It seems utterly impossible that he can ever hit the ball and get back onto the fairway and into the match.  This is where Baggar finds him, caught in the throes of a full blown flashback of the war, completely unravelling--and this is where the moment of reckoning occurs. It's time to lay his personal demons down, he tells Junnuh, and just be the golfer he was always meant to be…."Now strike that ball, Mr Junnuh, and don't you hold nothin' back."

The movies that make us cry do so because they touch some visceral personal or universal truth or situation. Though I've never been to war--except for the one raging inside me--I felt that I understood Junnuh's pain as well as his fear. For me it had been a year when jobs and projects vaporized and nothing lined up no matter how hard I tried. Ideas and inspiration came and fell away just as quickly. Maybe it was my age, maybe it was the world. Maybe the fact that the industries I've always worked in have been contracting and changing for a decade and I no longer knew where I fit in. Everything was in some transition, everything was unknown. My mother was at the end of her life and I dreaded her passing. And there was my son, struggling terribly in school with his ADHD--and there was me, watching his self-confidence erode as my own seemed to be vanishing along with his. My wife was worried about both of us.  I was trapped deep in my own thicket of fear, confusion, and depression, and the shot out seemed increasingly hopeless.

The shot that Junnuh hits is exactly what it needs to be--perfect--vaulting him right back into the match, and then Baggar stuns everyone by leaving Junnuh before he plays the final hole. It now hardly matters who will win because whatever happens, Baggar knows that Junnuh will be fine. As Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita, "All roads lead to me in the end."

Like Junnuh, I  feel that somewhere there is another run waiting for me. My moment of reckoning is coming, and when it does I want to strike that ball and not hold anything back, but it will not happen unless I can lay my baggage down.

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Baggar Vance, where are you?

Dear Rudy

Dear Rudy, I heard that you don't think President Obama loves America and I'll be brief and perfectly frank. You were always a smug, arrogant, pompous, sanctimonious, hectoring demagogue. For a moment it seemed you were humbled by divorce and cancer, and then came 9/11, when history tapped you on the shoulder and you stood in front of those television cameras and said everything that we needed you to say. For a few critical weeks here in New York, you were somehow able to speak to the rage and loss and fear and despair we were all feeling. For those few weeks when you turned into our Winston Churchill, it was easy to forget that you were one of the most divisive mayors in the history of New York City...But then time passed and alas, you were Rudy Giuliani again, inevitably the same smug, arrogant, pompous, sanctimonious, hectoring demagogue.  

Reflections on "Lyin' Brian"

How we love to watch the mighty fall... 

As Brian Williams star comes crashing down, call his story about being on that helicopter that crashed in Iraq whatever you like--embellishing, fabricating, lying. It's far more interesting to conjecture about why he might have done it in the first place.

Maureen Dowd, never a shrinking violet, uses the word "pathological" as she wonders in her column why on earth a guy who already had the "premier job at NBC News" would feel "that he needed Hemimngwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up," citing his "reach for celebrity" and, as one NBC reporter tells her, that "there was no one around to pull his chin when he got too far over the top."  Maybe. She also makes the obvious point, as have many others, that network news has for so long now been "part of the entertainment, branding and cross promotion business" that it's really quite absurd in this day and age to expect anything like accuracy and objectivity in network news. 

Personally I lost all respect for network news during the reporting of the crack "epidemic" way back in the 1980s, when all three networks in a wild stampede of sensationalism routinely fabricated stories about "crack babies" that fed a national hysteria and scored the highest ratings since Watergate. I haven't trusted them since.

Certainly It's ironic--perhaps delusional?--that at a time when the most bold-faced lies are told on a daily basis from the pinnacles of government to churches to the world of business, we should still expect honesty, integrity and accuracy from our news anchors, non-fiction writers, and academics. But we do. 

Speaking of Watergate, it marked the zenith of respect for the media in this country, when the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the lies of Richard Nixon to account, leading to his resignation. Woodward has since gone on to become one of the most respected doyens of American journalism, publishing book after best-selling book about politics and government.

When I was researching the John Belushi story for my last book, I had occasion to carefully study Wodward's book Wired for the accuracy of its reporting about Belushi. How accurate was the book?  All I will do is quote Penny Marshall, one of scores of people he interviewed, who were shocked by the book: "It makes you wonder if Nixon might have been innocent."

But still, even in a world where Bob Woodward, one of our paragons of journalistic integrity, is really no more credible than a tabloid entertainer--Kitty Kelley with a Pulitzer--one has to wonder what Williams was thinking.

Being on television in front of millions, was it just pure hubris to think no one would ever call him on such a story? And his claim to "misremember" is the most absurd of all: Despite complete chaos and shock, people in war zones are in such a state of hyper-vigilance that they tend to remember everything.

I suspect that Williams has been telling stories like this his whole life in one form or another. Sure, he might have thought that coming off as Sebastian Junger might have made him cooler, more heroic, giving him a leg up against the competition, but he probably told the story for the same reason anyone ever tells a tall tale: it's just a better story than how it really happened. And if you tell a story over and over for long enough, it can become very real in your mind. Much more vivid than the truth. That may be pathology, but it's also human nature. 

I don't know what happened, but I do know that this is not the end of Brian Williams. Our national celebrity obsession dictates a second chance for him, and forgiveness is as much as part of the celebrity equation as schadenfreude.

As Muhammad Ali liked to say, the measure of a man is not taken when he's on top. It's what happens when he gets knocked on his ass that counts...

Brian Williams will be back, but one way or another he'll never be the same.

ISIS and the Burning of Moaz el-Kassabeh: History Through the Flames

To be burned alive has always been one of history's greatest nightmares. 

When the Buddhist monk Thich Quanc Duc set himself on fire sitting in a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963 to protest the repression of the Diem regime, the Pulitzer-winning photo by Malcolm Browne allowed the whole world to witness his self-immolation in abject horror. That someone would voluntarily subject oneself to such a fate stunned all who saw the image and called attention to his cause. "No news photo in history has generated as much emotion as this one," commented President John F. Kennedy at the time.

The same will be said about the footage of the burning to death of the captured Jordanian pilot First Lt. Moaz-el-Kasabeh by ISIS on February 3, 2015.

There is so much one could say about the obscenity, the unfathomable cruelty of dousing a man in a cage with gasoline, setting him on fire, and video taping his agony for broadcast on television and social media but words would fail. Instead I'll direct my comments to the charred images of dead people said to be the victims of coalition air strikes. "An eye for an eye," the ISIS video pronounces, as justification for this act. 

It's true and tragic that anyone with a knowledge of history could never deny that fire and its effect on human flesh has always been used as a weapon of warfare, terror, and torture. The Catholic Church routinely burned Jews at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition. Whole cities were sacked and burned in Europe for centuries. The Plains Indians often roasted their captives alive. Hitler's SS burned people alive in synagogues.

During the Second World War the flamethrower became a vital weapon used against Japanese soldiers holed up in caves on Pacific islands like Iwo Jima--the effect from the Japanese point of view was unforgettably rendered by director Clint Eastwood in his 2006 film, Letters From Iwo Jima. Air forces commonly dropped incendiary bombs during this war: the burning of London, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. How many Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped in 1945? 

And then came the jellied product called napalm, invented by Dow Chemical and  first used by the US military in Korea but hardly on the scale that it was later used in Vietnam...

The point is easily made, then, that yes, nobody's hands are clean--war is a dirty business.

But even so, what ISIS did to Moaz el-Kassabeh--not just the savagery of the act itself but the fiendish intention to exploit and disseminate these images as a form of psychological terror--is beyond the pale. Should we watch or turn our heads away?  

After seeing it, one becomes enraged, more persuaded than ever that ISIS is indeed evil, and that it should be defeated, eradicated. And when one looks at the burned corpses displayed by ISIS as the reason for this act of horror, all one has to do is think of those who burned to death in the Twin Towers--or leaped to their deaths to avoid it--and the terrible thought arises: They started this…and what happens henceforth shall be upon them.

And thus will more death by fire be justified; and thus will more history unfold through the flames.

For Phil Hoffman, On the Anniversary of His Death

Hard to believe it's been a year since Phillip Seymour Hoffman died.

I certainly can’t say that I knew him well but I knew him well enough to call him Phil. I knew him in his salad days as an actor in New York and have always felt connected to him since because we shared the same therapist. In fact I saw him regularly on Thursday mornings for years. He’d be coming out, I’d be waiting to go in. Some days there would be a pained look in his eyes as he emerged; other times a wry ironic kind of smile on his face. I would later recognize many of these expressions in so many of his unforgettable portrayals on stage and screen as his brilliant career evolved.

We knew each other from the same circles of recovery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a particularly difficult period of my life that it seemed I would never emerge from, and no matter his mood or expression there was always a friendly nod of encouragement—a recognition that somehow we were there to face the very personal demons that drove the engines of our alcoholism and addictions—and underneath that was an acknowledgement of how very difficult this work was, and that we were kindred souls on the same path. We rarely spoke except to say hello but when we did we always looked into each other’s eyes and made contact. That's the kind of guy he was...

One day at a meeting I was sitting next to him and for some reason I turned to him and said, “You’re only as sick as your secrets, right?” Of course it’s a well-traveled axiom of recovery--some would call it a cliche--but there's a profound truth contained therein and  it seemed perfectly apropos to our peculiar connection. “So I’m told,” he said with a rueful laugh.

I’ve thought of that exchange many times since his death. I always felt that whatever those secrets might have been, Phil was able to use them masterfully as the palette of his art—that is, until he no longer could.

After he died it was particularly painful to see the media turn him into the poster boy of the New Heroin Epidemic. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a new one every decade, with the same numbing misconceptions and prognostications about heroin addiction and a new "plague."  After his death addiction "specialists" conjectured about how a new generation of anti-opiate meds might have saved his life. True enough, which made his death by overdose even more tragic Many others have wondered what on earth he was doing with so much dope, saying that it surely confirms some kind of death wish.  Of course, any addict who ever fantasized about the reassurance of a large supply finds this easiest of all to understand, and he was not helped on that final run by ready access to a nearby cash machine with such a nice balance.

For my part, I’ve tried to understand why Phil’s death has hit me so much harder than the deaths of so many of those doomed and beautiful icons of my generation, with the possible exception of John Lennon. Perhaps it’s because somewhere inside of myself I’ve always retained the illusion that if only I was rich or successful or accomplished enough I wouldn’t have the problems that I do, and that I’d be safe from the danger of relapse. Somehow Phil’s death has blown that fantasy away forever.

Of course, my heart broke for his friends and family—especially for the children who will grow up without him—and for the loss of his immense talent. But mostly I was rendered breathless by an awareness of the sheer amount of pain he must have been in—it’s shattering, unfathomable, yet terrifyingly mundane in the lives of addicts—and by a visceral feeling that whatever it was that he was talking about in that room on those Thursday mornings so long ago had somehow overcome him and knocked him off that path we were on.

Or very likely not talking about, for the maxim always seems to ring true: we are, alas, only as sick as our secrets.

American Cool, Pt. 2: So What?

As it develops in jazz circles, Cool expresses an attitude of easy defiance; of not caring what other people think of you; of thumbing your nose at the world and casting your fate to the wind and damning the consequences, whether relating to the drug laws or anything else. Cool is being able to be cool even after losing your cool, about being so cool that you don’t even have to be cool…

Elements of all of these ideas coalesce powerfully in the jazz world of the 1930s and 1940s, as swing and later bebop provide jazz with a dangerous and seductive outlaw allure. Bebop is fundamentally the music of rebels and underdogs, played in dark smoky clubs by musicians in dark shades who turn their backs on their audiences as they turn away from society, erecting a wall of ironic detachment behind which they can make up their own rules and use narcotics as their drug of choice, all of which invites retribution from police. Cool is Charlie “Bird” Parker, the tragic genius and living personification of hipsterism. 

The hipster "is to the Second World War what the Dadaist was to the first," writes jazz impresario Robert Reisner. "He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and over-civilized to the point of decadence…He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions--so what values are left for him?--except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, 'be cool' and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends this bullshit and finds it in jazz."

Ultimately, Cool is Miles Davis, who records a series of sides in 1948 and calls it The Birth of the Cool. Miles is an angry young man, and as Jazz Cool languishes mostly underground in a subculture of hipsters throughout the forties and well into the fifties, nothing expresses it more than the expression of seething world-weary disdain that Miles so often uses--“So what?” In 1956, the expression becomes the name of a song on his album masterpiece, Kind Of Blue.

The importance of Jazz Cool is hard to overstate.  It becomes a central sensibility in the literature of the Beat Generation, which finds its way to a mass middle class white audience during the 1950s. One would only have to ask someone like Clint Eastwood, a jazz-besotted teenager at Oakland Technical High in the late 1940s, about the Cool of Miles Davis to gauge how important an influence Davis was on Eastwood’s own outlook and development and place in this story...

American Cool, Pt. 1: THE PRESIDENT OF THE TENORS

What is cool? Who is cool? In today’s world, the word itself is such a universal part of the lexicon that “cool” has become one of the first words learned and used by children.  But what does it really mean, and where does it come from?

 A single moment and image bring it all into sharp focus. It’s June of 1992 and the candidacy of Bill Clinton is in trouble when he appears on the Arsenio Hall Show in Ray Ban Wayfarers, gleaming sax in hand, grinding out a serviceable rendition of Elvis Presley’s classic, “Heartbreak Hotel.” The moment is carefully designed to deliver one very important message about the candidate to the youth culture of the time: Folks, this is not George Bush, and this is not Ross Perot. Call him what you will—draft dodger, womanizer, marijuana dabbler—but in every sense of how American culture has come to define the notion, call him cool. “It’s nice to see a Democratic candidate blowing something other than an election,” quips Arsenio to the candidate, whose campaign really begins to gain traction from this moment…

Just how deeply this image is embedded in the DNA of American pop culture is made strikingly apparent by a montage of a few of the great avatars of the attitude, all in the requisite dark shades: Miles Davis, James Dean, Bob Dylan, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Johnny Cash, Michael Jordan, Brad Pitt, P. Diddy, Jay-Z. All of them are remarkably different individuals, yet each one is an undeniable exemplar of the idiom...

 The origins of Cool in western civilization go back to England and Beowulf and Shakespeare, to English literary metaphors that describe Cool as being about composure and lack of emotion. But as Cool develops in America, it’s really the African cultural tributaries of meaning that provide its spiritual power—and, ultimately, its controversy. If Europeans define the term as primarily the ability to remain calm under stress—as something akin to Hemingway’s famous definition of courage as “grace under pressure,” for example—“Itutu,” or “mystic coolness,” is one of three pillars of a religious philosophy created in the fifteenth century by the Yoruba and Igbo civilizations of Western Africa. Within these cultures, the sensibility of Cool contains meanings of conciliation and gentleness of character, of generosity and grace and the willingness and ability to defuse fights and disputes, as well as physical beauty.

These traditions profoundly impact the African Diaspora through the experience of slavery and beyond in America as Cool becomes an attitude and a pose for African Americans to deal with the pitfalls of discrimination, negative self-image, guilt, shame and fear. Through the culture of jazz and the singular personality of saxophonist Lester Young, it becomes nothing less than a state of being. Our story really begins right here. Prez, as he is called (the President of the Tenors) is an incandescently stylish and inventive musician deeply wounded by the racism of the time and the first to use the expression—“that’s cool, man!” Prez is the first to wear sunglasses at night. He’s the sole inventor of the lexicon of jive, coining such staple expressions as “the Big Apple” and “you dig?”  

As the fashion designer Christian LaCroix rightly observes, “the history of cool in America is the history of African American culture,” and as this single musician comes to personify it, Cool is the word used to describe his light, relaxed tone, a hot riff or a lilting melody he plays, but also the way his trousers break over a particular pair of crepe-soled shoes as he indulges his predilection for sharp pinstriped suits of impeccable elegance, silk double breasted vests, and pork pie hats... 

Sailing With Robert Stone

Bob Stone was my favorite contemporary novelist. When I learned that he passed away on the same day as Anita Ekberg, I immediately thought of him as a young man watching Fellini's La Dolce Vita at the old Thalia theater on Broadway, which is where he would have seen it when it came out in 1960. Stone loved movies, and he no doubt reveled in the famous scene where Ekberg wades into the Trevi Fountains in all of her babe-alicious glamour and anoints Marcello Mastroianni. How I would have loved to ask him about his impressions of that scene and its impact on him. Had you told him, "Bob, you're going to die on the same day as Anita Ekberg," I suspect he would have had something very wry to say about it...

I was twenty one and already working in publishing when I read Dog Soldiers, his second novel which won the National Book Award. I was stunned by its scope and emotional power, and by Stone's tremendous sense of economy and control. It was like Joseph Conrad had taken acid, gone to Vietnam, and written a tale about heroin smuggling that personified the entire dark side of the American misadventure there and exposed its strange juxtaposition to the counterculture--but ultimately, like all great novels, it was about the human heart and soul and the eternal struggle between darkness and light. These were his great themes. Wallace Stegner wrote that he "writes like a bird, like an angel, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on the stars."  

Stone was my kind of writer and I sought him out, interviewing him after A Flag For Sunrise, his novel about Central America, came out; and then after the publication of Children of Light, his novel of Hollywood and cocaine. He was a fascinating person to interview, and always very kind and encouraging about my own work, but it wasn't until I interviewed him for my book Can't Find My Way Home that I felt I truly got to know him. He was summering on Block Island and invited me out and over the course of a memorable day shared with me in great detail his experience of coming to California in the early 60s, meeting Ken Kesey in the Stanford Writing Program, and participating in the birth of whole psychedelic counterculture--the part of his life he would later chronicle in his great memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. 

"Innocence is a funny thing," he told me. "It made me feel like I had found a special and worthy place."

His childhood had been challenging, to say the least. Abandoned by his father, his mother was a schizophrenic ex-school teacher, always in and out of institutions before he was sent to a Marist orphanage--all of which begins to explain the loneliness and isolation that frames his work.

 "One minute it seemed I was on the streets of New York, the next minute in the baths at the place that later became Esalen, naked with these people, smoking marijuana and watching the fog roll in off the ocean, and these hard feelings and attitudes just started melting away. At that moment, the early 60s, these august institutions seemed to be losing confidence--the universities, the corporations, the very fabric of the state--everything seemed like it would fall over if you pushed it, like it was up for grabs. And there was Kesey, who was really a born shaman, a great adventurer…"

Stone held me, spellbound, as he told his story. We were several miles off Block Island on a sail boat when he wrapped it up...

"From the beginning, deep down, I never felt that drugs were a good thing, but they were something wild and open and free," he concluded. "But nothing is free, and the biggest mistake we made was thinking that these experiences could be."

The sun was setting, suffusing the horizon in color, making me think of those rainbow-orange sherbet sunsets some of us had known back in those days.

"I would always wonder how it was that this party I had gone to in 1963 had somehow followed us out the door and down the street and was filling the world with Day-Glo colors and all manner of motion. I would wonder how we could get back to that party, back to that garden."

There was a profound wistfulness about him as he gazed off.

"Even now I do."

 Don't we all, Bob? Farewell to a fine man and a great novelist...

SHADES OF BILLY

Been reading Fred Schruers recently published biography of Billy Joel and for the most part enjoying it very much. It's a good time for the book given Billy's string of record-setting shows at Madison Square Garden--clearly there's still a huge amount of interest in him, especially in the New York area. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is when Billy runs into his ex-manager Frank Weber in a parking lot out in the Hamptons--the same Frank Weber who robbed him blind of untold millions--and instead of accosting him angrily (or decking him) as many would have done, says hello and asks him how he's doing. That's Billy.

I always really liked Billy because he was a really nice down-to-earth guy with a good soul. I first met him circa 1968 when he played our high school dance with his group the Hassles.  At the time his stage personality was more memorable than the music they played. A few years later he came to play my college in upstate New York. This was circa 1972, when Billy was just starting to build a foundation after the debacle of his first album with Artie Ripp.  I remember going to his motel to say hello. We liked to welcome all of the incoming bands by getting them good and high before they played but some of my friends got his band so wasted that they could barely play (Billy didn't appreciate this too much)... 

I wrote about Billy here and there over the years and during the music vid era shot a cool little doc around the making of his album The Bridge. Although it was not one of his favorite  albums by any means, it did contain his gorgeous duet with Ray Charles, "Baby Grand"--his love song to his piano, and arguably one of his great ones. It was around that time that I found myself drinking with him in the bar of a Holiday Inn upstate along with some of his crew where he was getting ready to kick off his tour. I'm relating this episode because it's not in the book.  It's the kind of thing that probably happened to him hundreds of times but it's something I'll never forget.

Billy was fun to drink with because he loved to tell stories. Of course he was a born storyteller and also probably one of the best-read high school dropouts in America so he was damn good at it. The story he  happened to be telling was about the tie-breaker game for the American League East pennant, played at Fenway Park between the Red Sox and the Yankees on October 2, 1978--one of the most tense and dramatic games ever played. Billy was playing in Boston and being a huge baseball fan there he was sitting in the stands with his Yankee hat on when Bucky Dent--or "Bucky Fucking Dent" as he would be forever known to Boston fans--hit the pop fly that somehow made it over the Green Monster for the three run home run that plunged a knife into the heart of Red Sox Nation.

As a foul mood settled heavily over the stunned crowd a Boston fan saw fit to display his feelings by snatching the Yankee cap off of Billy's head and racing away down the aisle with it, to the delight of the crowd. And Billy, being the pugnacious fellow that he is--"Never take shit off anyone", he always tells his audiences--took off after him, tackled the guy, grabbed the hat back…And there they were, duking it out before the security guards raced over and stropped the melee before a riot broke out and escorted Billy out to his car, where another riot of sorts ensued as his car was surrounded by throngs of furious Sox fans thirsting for the blood of the first Yankee fan they could get their hands on, and this one happened to be a rock star from Long Island.

While Billy was telling the story nobody was paying attention to the lounge singer setting up with his electric piano, but when he broke out into the familiar strains of "Just The Way You Are" it stopped Billy cold. The song was Billy's first Top Five hit and a Grammy for Song of the Year, but it was also perhaps the most syrupy song in his whole catalogue, and this guy was ladling it out with such goop that it seemed a parody of everything that Billy probably always wrestled with about the song, precisely because it became the staple of wedding and lounge singers.

It was pricelessly funny, exactly like Bill Murray would have done the song in his lounge singer guise on Saturday Night Live--except he was serious. He had no idea Billy was there, who could only watch, a bemused grimace spread across his face...

 Billy waited until the set was over and went over and blew the guy's mind by graciously thanking him for doing his song.

That was Billy...

What I Love About Jack Bruce

Been listening to a lot of Jack Bruce's work since he passed last weekend. I've always loved the whole palette and package of his talent, but what I keep coming back to is not the unparalleled virtuosity of his bass-playing whether rock, blues or jazz-inflected,, but Jack as songwriter and especially Jack as vocalist. It's the Jack Bruce-Peter Brown compositions like "As You Said" that have been blowing me away more than anything. It's the only song he ever played cello on in the whole Cream catalogue and it sounds and feels like nothing else, before or since. The melody is so haunting, the vocal filled with such passion. When he sings the last line--As you said, I'll never come again, again, again--with such unearthly emotion, it's like some shattering truth about life itself, how fleeting and beautiful it is…

RIP Jack Bruce, his like will certainly never come again...

Wavy Gravy at the City Winery, New York 10/20/14

He came on stage at the City Winery walking his rubber fish. Not at all unusual for Wavy Gravy, of course, who has been walking that fish on a leash since the Grateful Dead asked him to lead a Mardi Gras parade decades ago--and, as Wavy explained to his audience, "I didn't want to go first!"  This audience duly laughed because they get the humor--even the logic--of Wavy walking a rubber fish on a leash, but I've seen him walk that fish clear across the United States, and the expressions of complete befuddlement on the faces of people who don't know anything about Wavy and his humor. People who just see this old tie-dyed clown walking a rubber fish on a leash down Fifth Avenue...

Once I was  with him in a Seattle TV station where he was going to be interviewed on an early morning talk show, and some very straight-laced elderly ladies from a local  gardening club also waiting to go on in the green room were puzzling over just what the hell this guy thought he was doing with that fish anyway when all of a sudden the fish went bolting across the room to the TV screen, dragging Wavy right along with it. See, it was raining that morning, and the local weatherman was doing his broadcast in rain gear on a dinghy in a lake...and yes, the guy next to the weatherman was fishing.

Do I have to explain that the fish Wavy was walking just suddenly went berserk after the bait on that hook? It's hard to even describe the expressions on the faces of these ladies when he did this. That was when I truly realized that Wavy Gravy isn't just doing the character of a man who would walk a rubber fish everywhere he goes. He IS that character. That's what makes him so special, so funny, so touching. This 78-year old "Hippie Icon, Flower Geezer, and Temple of Accumulated Error" is like hearing about Santa Claus and then having to face the startling realization that Mr Claus is very real indeed, so what next?

I hadn't seen Wavy since the Woodstock Festival of 1999--the one that was set on fire. Of course he's gotten old but he's lucid as hell and was in great form. His show was a joy, There was no particular order to the material though his wife, Jahanara--"Mrs. Gravy" as he calls her-- did make him write themes and subjects down in a book he had with him onstage.  His style has always been freeform with segues that cut up his life into bite sized nuggets of memory. Call them what you will--anecdotes, routines, stories he's been  telling for years--and what gradually emerges over the course of a performance is a hologram of his life and times. And what a life and times it was that transformed Hugh Nanton Romney into the person that BB King would call "Wavy Gravy"...

It was all there in the performance in one form or another: his boyhood walk with Albert Einstein (and the smell of the great physicist that he would never forget), the early years as a poet and stand-up in the Village, the folkie days at the Gaslight, the Pranksters and the Acid Tests, the Hog Farm and the era of the great bus caravans, the anti-war movement, Woodstock, the trek to India, the Nobody For President Campaign, the anti-nuke demonstrations, becoming a clown, all indelibly rendered with figures like Dylan and Bill Graham making cameo appearances.

There were bits that were new even to old hands like the time Marlene Dietrich came to see him at the Gaslight and left a perfect red ring of lipstick around a coffee cup, which Gaslight owner John Mitchell then carefully put up on the shelf. A Dietrich worshipper, Mitchell was going to preserve the cup forever as a treasured souvenir, never in a million years imagining that the guy who cleans up would just, well, clean it up. The story ends with Mitchell chasing the janitor down MacDougal Street with a scimitar. As Wavy likes to say in conclusion to some of these bits, "You had to be there,"  And now we were.

Almost as an aside, Wavy mentioned his work with the Seva Foundation, which he founded with Ram Dass and Dr. Larry Brilliant to combat preventable blindness in the third world. He does this never to blow his own horn but merely to illustrate what people can do when they put their minds to it--"putting their good where it will do the best," as Ken Kesey described it. To date Seva has saved the sight of three and a half million people, and I found myself thinking, not many people can say something like that. We're very fortunate indeed that he's still alive because so are his good deeds. That's what he's always been about.

Savor that Gravy while you can. I hate to think of a world without him.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog!

You might say, to paraphrase the Cracker song, What the world needs now is another blogger, like I need a hole in the head. Of course, Cracker was talking about folksingers. I happen to be a folksinger too...but lucky for you I’ll spare you that. There will be no clips of me singing Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” I promise.

I have a new website, so why not a blog? It’s part of an overhaul that will include Twitter, Instagram et al. designed to get me more into the social media game. My wife Laura and her coterie of digital media advisers have been strongly encouraging me to do so. You might even say she’s been up my ass about it. They tell me, “Digitize, then monetize!”

Of course, my nature is to isolate, remain completely silent and hide from the world (which is probably why I became a writer in the first place) so I’m innately resistant to all of this kind of self-revelation and promotion. I can’t help that it all seems terribly crass to me, but it’s a new world and I like to think I’m one old dog that can be taught new tricks. I also think it will be a very good way to get back into the habit of daily writing and connect with people.

Of course, whether or not anyone gives much of a fuck about anything I have to say is entirely another matter. As for my subjects, anything will be fair game. I will write about my work, my passions for things like music, books and film, what’s going on in the world, and anything about my personal life that strikes me as interesting... 

So, again, welcome to my blog, and bombs away...!