Cheap Trick

Three nights in L.A.

Jim

Thursday night, August 22

I’d arrived in Los Angeles Monday the 19th. Had dinner at Bob Merlis and Lynda Keeler’s that night, along with some wonderful friends of theirs from Palm Springs. Tuesday night was the weekly “Old Man’s Dinner” at The Park, where 12 of us grey- and no-hairs gathered to commiserate about the state of “Our Beloved [Music] Industry”–as our pal Tom Vickers always puts it–while toasting those who had left it for good (Peter Fonda that week, for rock-rich films like Easy Rider, and Larry “The Mole” Taylor, great bassist of Canned Heat and other artists, who had died that day and with whom I had dinner in New York some years ago along with Augie Meyers and Los Lobos).

Wednesday it was dinner with Tom and Victoria Vickers, in whose “Garage Mahal” back-of-the-garage room I was staying before moving over to Bob’s on Thursday. After dinner I went with Ned Claflin to hit a big bucket of balls at Weddington Golf & Tennis in Studio City, and in a remarkable feat for an old man who hadn’t touched a club in the two years since the last time we went there, I five-ironed three balls into the barrel 50 yards out–though one was on the bounce.

It had all been leading up to Thursday night and the Rolling Stones at the Rose Bowl, as Bob was the longtime publicist for ABKCO, the management/publishing/recording company that owned the Stones’ early catalog, from which the bulk of the concert setlist came. 

I did a lot of work over the years for ABKCO, too, when founder Allen Klein was alive. I wrote several liner notes for his reissue compilations (Herman’s Hermits and The Animals among them) and an essay for a Stones songbook.

I loved Allen–whom a lot of people didn’t. He was incredibly kind to me and even though I was a Billboard reporter, let me hang in his famous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame suite at the Waldorf Astoria during the dinner, as I didn’t have a seat that year. Besides Allen, his Girl Everyday Iris Keitel was there, along with his son (now ABKCO president) Jody, Phil Spector (another dear friend and most generous and thoughtful one), Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham–Andrew having discovered and managed the Stones before Allen took over.

A lot had been said while I sat next to Keith on a sofa across from Phil, Allen and Andrew, swigging from the bottle of Jack Daniels Keith kept passing over to me. It had helped that I’d told him I was close to Bill Carter, the ex-Secret Service agent (for Kennedy and Johnson—and no, there was no conspiracy, and yes, Oswald acted alone, and I know this from Bill, as told to me personally and as recorded in his Get Carter: Backstage in History from JFK’s Assassination to the Rolling Stones, for which I wrote the foreword) who first appears in Keith’s memoir Life on the first line of Page 2, as he had later acted as the Stones liaison with the feds–in effect being the Stones fixer and Keith’s savior.

Like I said, a lot had been said, particularly between Keith and Allen and clearly going back to old grievances and maybe new alliances–while I sat there stoned and getting increasingly drunker wondering when Allen was going to turn to me and tell me to leave. He never did, but when it was time for everyone to go back down to the ballroom for the Hall of Fame jam (“I’m not even going to plug in,” said Keith. “They only want to see some moves anyway!”), Allen came to me and softly said, “You know, you can never repeat any of what you heard.” 

“I know, Allen! Thank you for letting me stay!” I stammered, and I do hope he wouldn’t think I’d broken his confidence by now relating any of this, and am confident he wouldn’t.

But Allen’s been gone now many years, much as I’ve been gone from Billboard–not to mention Our Beloved Industry. While I’d seen the Stones several times under ABKCO’s auspices, I was no longer in a position where I felt I could impose upon them for more tickets. So I hadn’t seen them in at least a couple tours, if not more.

On our drive to Pasadena, I revisited the Memory Motel, to borrow from the title of one of my favorite Stones songs. And that’s kind of what the night became—though they didn’t do “Memory Motel.”

To evoke another Stones song they didn’t do, what could have been the last time I saw them was at Madison Square Garden, 10 years ago, maybe many more. I remember thinking they were good*, but not as good. The first time was memorable for a couple reasons. I wasn’t even writing yet back in 1975, when I saw them at Milwaukee’s County Stadium (The Eagles and Rufus opened). I hadn’t been there since I was a kid and living in Milwaukee–where I was born—and went to Milwaukee Braves games (I actually saw Sandy Koufax hit a home run there–I think he only hit two in his career), and when a friend in New York knew someone who was able to get me Stones tickets, I’m pretty sure I’d taken my high school buddy Greg, who was a Stones fanatic like me. His favorite song was their cover of Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” from their 1965 album Out of Our Heads, and we used to sing along to it over and over in his basement.

At best, everything now is bittersweet, looking back. The Memory Motel houses good memories, and some not so good.

Greg and I did a lot of drugs together in high school, though I don’t think Greg ever graduated to needles like I did. I was a mess before I’d started on drugs, so it was self-medication as much as anything, ending up in two hospitalizations, the second lasting over a year. When I got out I was determined to stay clean, and did so until that Stones show, when I smoked a joint for the first time in a couple years, at least. I always look back at those years of staying straight as The Lost Years.

I realize I’m so old now that I think everything was at least 10 years ago, but it was the night of a Bessman Bash (to be defined later) at Bob’s many years ago now that Greg committed the most ridiculous of suicides, if a suicide can be ridiculous–and I definitely don’t mean to lighten it’s horror by calling it that. Rather, it only makes it more horrible: After all, Greg had remained one of my best friends, though I hadn’t seen him in the 25 or so years, maybe, since I was sent by Cash Box, (the long defunct music trade magazine I worked at full-time for my first two years in New York) to cover an audio tape manufacturers’ trade conference in Jacksonville, where he lived. But he would always call me on my birthday, as he had a savant-like knack of remembering birthdays, such that I used to call him “Mr. Birthday.”

As I understood it from his ex-wife—who had called me during the Bash, but whose message I didn’t play until the next morning–he got in a fight with his older sister, who blamed him for letting the cat out a basement window. Again, I don’t know if I got the story right, but his sister somehow fell through a screen/glass door, the police were called, and Greg was arrested, then at some point, for whatever reason (I heard he was afraid he wouldn’t get hired again for carpentry work in Florida, where he still lived, since he now had an arrest record), he hung himself.

Greg had returned to Madison to help care for his disabled mother, who died shortly before him. I’d been close to his parents, and friends with his sister–now his only survivor–and doubt that she’d ever see this, but she’s had enough loss in her life to see it recounted here, so I’ve left their last name out. But I thought of Greg, and County Stadium, as I entered the Rose Bowl with Bob and his middle son Ben, who works for him and lives near the stadium.

I won’t offer a review of the show—I didn’t take notes–other than to say that it was the best I’d ever seen the Stones, making me glad I always objected to those critics who’ve been asking them to give it up for decades now. My thing is two-fold: If people are willing to spend big money on seeing you, why not? And if you’re a musician who wants to keep playing for people who are willing to spend big money on seeing you, why not? As Ben Sidran told me a few summers ago when I was visiting my mom in Madison, when he acknowledged that while he was working on a new record, no one was going to buy it: “What am I supposed to do? I’m a musician.” Like I’m a writer, relegated to writing for my own sites now: What the fuck else am I gonna do? And besides the great blues guys kept playing until they dropped. Muddy Waters and B.B. King never quit. Tony Bennett still sounds great in his 90s. Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson are still touring in their 80s, and fans still come out in droves.

So so what Mick Jagger just had heart surgery, Charlie Watts is 78, and Keith Richards, now without his gypsy/pirate headband, now looks like a balding, dried-out prune, with his mouth open half the time like he’s about to drool, every now and then breaking into a trademark grin when looking over to bassist Darryl Jones, mostly, or his longtime guitar cohort Ron Wood.

But in no way am I suggestng that Keith, whose stage garb even seemed subdued in Pasadena, wasn’t all there. Evoking another Stones title, he was live’r than I’ll ever be–but more within the music than I’d ever seen him, his lead licks and rhythm chords being right-on at all times. For sure, he had his “moves”–the raised pick hand after a decisive strum, the low kneel worthy of an athletic Jagger prance. And when it came time for his solo segment–“You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run”–his vocals were as spot-on as Jagger’s, and he seemed to be having more fun.

Woody, though, looked to be having the most fun, running about the stage and impishly pointing his guitar at the crowd while playing. And whatever he does to his hair, I wish I had enough left to do the same. Jagger’s hair goes without saying, and while he otherwise shows the same years as we all do in the deep furrows of his face, he likewise sounded no less great than the rest and appeared none the worse for heart-valve-replacement wear.

Speaking of sound, it was great where we were sitting (great ABKCO seats, maybe a quarter of the way back from the stage, low in the stage-left lower level of the stadium seating (Ben had a great seat on the field). And the big projector screen visuals couldn’t have been better in singling out and following the musicians’ in their varied configurations.

Friday night, August 23

Friday night we went out to FivePoint Amphiteatre in Irvine–an hour out of L.A., though it took two to get there because of the Friday afternoon traffic–to see three more Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acts: ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Cheap Trick. We were there for ZZ, since Bob’s worked with them since both were at Warner Bros. Records, and I’ve written liner notes on two of their releases and can’t get enough of them—especially our special guy Billy F Gibbons.

Two things of note happened on the long drive to Irvine, one of which I’ll relate now: Bob had a tape of the late New Orleans R&B legend Ernie K-Doe (“Mother-in-Law”), from the radio shows he hosted on the NOLA community station WWOZ. It was unexpectedly gripping in that K-Doe talked—and talked and talked—like a preacher, but without any substance. It wasn’t word salad, but he went on and on and never went anywhere but around in circles, so I was always on the edge of my seat, wondering if there would ever be a climax—and even though there never was, it was a blast listening to him keep you hanging. Truly brilliant, in an outsider way.

When we finally got to the venue, Cheap Trick had just started, and Ben was a big fan and wanted to hear them. Bob, I, and Bob’s other company publicst Amy Block went looking for the Toppers, but to no avail, so we joined Ben in watching the rest of Trick’s set.

I realize it was kind of odd that I wasn’t the big Cheap Trick fan everyone else was when I started writing, for The MadCity Music Sheet in Madison, Wisconsin, in the late 1970s, when Cheap Trick was the area’s biggest act, and the one we covered the most. Maybe they were too power pop for me, especially since when I first saw them I was listening to country music, mostly, along with punk and new wave.

Cheap Trick was from nearby Rockford, but was managed out of Madison by Ken Adamany along with my pal Chuck Toler. Ken had been a musician—he played keyboards in bands with Steve Miller–and ran The Factory, the club near the UW campus where Otis Redding was going to play when his plane crashed into Lake Monona that day (I was in high school then, but later worked at the State Office Building overlooking the lake, and lived just a few blocks away). In the ‘70s he managed Dr. Bop & The Headliners, an enormously successful oldies show band, which I became close to in a later incarnation.

I first met Ken, I’m guessing, in 1977, probably at an album release party for their second album, In Color, though it could have been ’78, for their third, In Heaven. I remember being introduced to Ken, probably by the Sheet’s publisher Gary Sohmers, and that it was a lot like meeting Bill Carter years later, shortly after I’d moved to New York, maybe in 1982 or ’83 at a press party at Tavern on the Green for his client William Lee Golden of the Oak Ridge Boys. Golden’s Nashville MCA Records publicist Kay West, a brilliant writer who would become one of my favorite friends, introduced me to Bill, a good ole boy from the tiny impoverished town of Rector, Arkansas and now based in Nashville where he continued working with the Stones and was about to manage Reba McEntire to superstardom, and later my Cajun inspiration Jo-El Sonnier to his greatest commercial success.

Kay introduced me to Bill as William Lee’s manager. Being ex-Secret Service, Bill had an aura of calm competence, mixed with restrained charisma. I wanted to engage him in conversation, and led with the obvious: “Do you work with anyone else?” I said. “Oh,” Bill drawled, stretching it out. “The Rolling Stones….” I didn’t blame him for cracking up laughing when my mouth opened wider than Keith’s at the Rose Bowl. Hope I didn’t drool, but I might well have.

Ken was way cool. Too cool. He wore shades. Then again, he was the biggest music business guy in the MadCity. I extended my hand to shake his—which he pretty much kept raised at his side. But don’t get me wrong. I love Ken. He gave me one of the biggest compliments when I ran into him on Sixth Avenue outside Black Rock—the black skyscraper that then housed CBS Records, of which Cheap Trick’s label Epic Records was a part.

I’d only been in New York a couple years then at most, but Ken told me how proud he was of me for having left Madison for New York and “making it.” It meant a lot to me then, as it does now.

But now we’re back in the hospitality lounge behind the stage at FivePoint, where Cheap Trick is greeting its VIPs. The band left Ken long ago, and not in a nice way. Still, I wanted to reconnect, or more accurately, connect with them as someone who was there way back when.

So I went up to Robin Zander, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, with an eager Ben in tow. We both introduced ourselves, then I boldly told him that I was close to Dr. Bop & The Headliners, not sure how he’d react.

Actually, it went right past him—for maybe two seconds. Then it hit him, and he damn near collapsed in disbelief. He excitedly asked if I knew Ken–and was not at all put off when I said I did indeed–and was further blown away when I told him I worked for The MadCity Music Sheet. And he was happy to recognize that both of us had lasted long enough to meet again after that promo party 40-plus years ago, and that he and Cheap Trick had remained active and fresh, what with three new albums released in as many years.

Meanwhile, Billy F Gibbons was holding court a few yards away—in pajamas! I’ve only known one other star so comfortable in his stardom, not to mention sartorial splendor—Nick Ashford. We let Billy regale his VIP fans until he begged off, being that it was nap time: He would catch a few ZZs during Skynyrd’s set before regrouping with his own to close the show, part of the Toppers’ 50th anniversary tour. He wouldn’t even let Trickster Rick Nielsen waylay him when he vainly tried to chase him down prior to shutting his nap room door.

So we all went out to see Skynyrd, whom I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years, when I took my dear, late friend Roy Horton, the Country Music Hall of Fame music publisher who worked closely with the historic likes of Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Roy was also a musician, and with his older brother Vaughn—also a Country Music Hall of Famer—played in the country group The Pinetoppers, most notably on the 1951 classic “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” which was notably covered by the likes of Patti Page and Les Paul & Mary Ford, and was a Vaughn Horton composition.

Roy was a delightfully impish little 80-plus-year-old when I knew him, and he loved going to shows. He had been instrumental in the formation of the Country Music Association, and while he was the son of a coal mining superintendent in Broad Top City in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania, he was a founder of the Country Music Association and had long promoted country music out of historic publishing company peermusic’s New York office, where he was known for his kindness–and every year sent me a much-appreciated quart of Jack Daniels for Christmas.

I’d been offered a pair of tickets to see Skynyrd at Radio City and was honored, as always, to bring Roy as my plus-one. Turned out we had third-row center seats, and Roy stood for the whole show, loving the attention he got from the pretty young girls upfront.

So I thought of Roy at FivePoint during Skynyrd’s set, but I also thought of another Madison friend who had died too young, and tragically, a couple years ago.

Karen Knodt was a photographer at The Sheet, and took a lot of pictures that went with my stories (as did, incidentally, Debby Hastings, who was also a great bass player and went on to be Bo Diddley’s band leader for many years, up until his death). I particularly remember that Karen took great shots of Elvis Costello, but her favorite band, by far, was Cheap Trick. When I first moved to New York I lived in Hoboken, and Karen used to call every night—but it got to be too much. She might have already moved to Hawaii and would be pretty drunk and lonely and would call late and talk and talk and talk and I just couldn’t deal with it: I was working at Cash Box as the retail editor—my last real job–and had to get up every day to walk to the train to New York, then switch to a subway and be in the Midtown office by 10 a.m. The office, by the way, was a few blocks from Black Rock, so I must have been working there when I ran into Ken Adamany.

But I always did feel bad about losing contact with Karen, so I was very happy when she friended me on Facebook a few years ago. She was still in Hawaii and apparently doing well, playing golf—which we both loved talking about—and working. Now and then she’d respond to a post and I’d respond to her response–and then a few months went by with no communication, to the point where I became cognizant of it, and went to her page, somewhat worried.

Sure enough I saw that Karen’s last post had been some months previous, leading me to fear the worst. It took a lot of doing—she hadn’t left much of a trail—but I eventually learned that she had indeed died, though the cause was unclear, but probably due to some sort of complications from paralysis, I was able to ascertain, following a fall down the stairs. Now, upon closer inspection, I realized that many of her most recent pictures, which showed her painting cheery watercolors of Hawaiian coastal scenery, had been made with her seated in what looked to be a wheelchair, in what looked to be a hospital setting.

All things considered, she seemed to have been happy. But I never found anyone to corroborate, not through Facebook or Google except, finally, for a cousin, on whose page she confirmed Karen’s death, but provided little information otherwise. I messaged her and she never responded.

I think Karen departed before Cheap Trick was inducted into the RockHall. I know she would have loved the Facebook photo of me and Robin, with his arm around my shoulder, from FivePoint.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s set, by the way, was excellent. Even though only Gary Rossington is original; vocalist Johnny Van Zant—brother of original lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, who died in the 1977 plane crash that also killed the band’s Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines, has been its frontman since 1987. All seven band members were tight as ever, and I loved that the two female backup singers—always known as The Honkettes–Dale Krantz-Rossington (Gary’s wife) and Carol Chase, were age appropriate; also worthy of respect was the recognition, via a video scroll at the end of their set, of all the many Skynyrd band and crew members since its inception.

Skynyrd had its own hospitality area backstage, so there was no interaction afterward. We did go back and grab a quick chat with Dusty Hill before he hit the stage for the ZZ set– great as ever, if a bit shortened due to the three-act package—and we did get a little quality time after with the ever-accommodating Billy and Gilly (wife Gilligan).

Saturday night, August 24

On the drive back I was able to focus on that other aforementioned momentous occurrence on the drive to Irvine: I had received a Facebook message on my phone from Lori Berk-Rolat, a dear publicist friend from New York, now living in L.A. and excited about attending Sunday’s annual Bessman Bash over at Bob’s, a tradition, like they say about The Masters, unlike any other. She wanted to know if I’d like to join her, her husband Geoffrey and a girlfriend the next night to see Kris Kristofferson at the Starlight Bowl amphitheater in Burbank. Bob and I had been talking about going to see the incredible Pink Martini at the Hollywood Bowl that night, but Kris takes all, so I emailed his wife Lisa when I got back to Bob’s.

I’ve been blessed to know two saints in my life: Ashford & Simpson’s Nick Ashford, and Kris Kristofferson—both also two of my favorite lyricists. Coincidentally, I’d observed the eighth anniversary of Nick’s death the night before—August 22—the night I went to the Stones. I was lucky to have seen Kris two nights in a row back in April at City Winery and hang with him and Lisa after the shows, and now, maybe I’d get lucky again.

If Kris, 83, is a saint—and he is—Lisa keeps him that way. By now everyone knows his short-term memory challenges, yet there he was on stage once again, killing it, as far as I and the audience were concerned. True, he did sound a bit tired in the beginning, maybe his gruff singing voice even gruffer. But if he was tired, he picked up steam as the show continued.

But I never did hear back from Lisa, so when I got to the venue I went directly to the merch stand and asked the gal selling t-shirts if she could let her know I was there and give her my cell number. We found our seats just as the show started, and I kept the phone out—silenced—hoping in vain for a text, reflecting on how Kris, on and off the stage, is the most unaffected singer-songwriter-actor legend imaginable.

I remembered how Bill Carter had told me years ago, after booking him on a Homecoming homevideo taping of veteran country music stars at the Opry House, that when he offered to send Kris a limo to pick him up at the airport, Kris said, “That’s all right. I’ll just take a cab.” And the time at the BMI Awards Banquet when they gave Kris the biggest honor, the BMI Icon Award, and I had to leave early to go catch John Fogerty at the Ryman Auditorium.

Kris had started eating dinner before the awards presentation, and I interrupted him in mid-bite to apologize for leaving, but that I just had to go see Fogerty for the thousandth time. Kris stopped eating, paused, and I could see what he was about to say in his gleaming eyes: “Gee. I’d like to see Fogerty!” BMI can thank me for convincing him to stay and get his award….

Back at the Starlight Bowl, he was maybe two-thirds of the way through when he paused once again, and said, “This one’s for Jim Bessman!” –and I practically went into shock, if not cardiac arrest. So did my friends, whom I had to calm down so as not to disturb everyone else in the bowl.

 The song, by the way, was “The Pilgrim–Chapter 33,” and I don’t know if it was by design, but I could definitely see myself in a lot of the lyrics. Then again, I can see myself in a lot of Kris’s lyrics, as I’m sure many of us can. Especially “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Loving Her was Easier,” and on this night in particular, “Why Me Lord?” I mean, what have I ever done to deserve his recognition, let alone knowing him and Lisa in the first place? Or Nick, Billy F, Carter, Bob, and on and on?

But I also felt that maybe, with the dedication, they were saying, “Sorry, Jim, but we have to leave right away,” and sure enough, when the show ended and I rushed up to the stage to see if Lisa might be within sight, his fiddler Scott Joss (along with keyboardist/bassist Doug Colosio and drummer Jeff Ingram, the remnants of Merle Haggard’s Strangers—though when Kris was here in April they were joined by Haggard’s sons Ben and Noel on guitars and vocals, since Kris’s set with The Strangers includes several Hagg classics) said that she was hurriedly rushing Kris out of the venue, as everyone was indeed tired from a couple weeks of touring. So I told Scott who I was.

“I know who you are,” he said, to my further amazement. “We were all talking about you before the show!” I humbly told him how thrilled I was with the song send-out and asked him to convey that to Lisa and Kris, and figured that was it, until, returning from the men’s room, I regrouped with my friends and realized that we were in fact at the backstage entrance, and that a car was roped off right at the door.

Maybe Kris and Lisa are still here, I thought, and when a couple came out of the entrance, they confirmed it. Moments later Lisa herself popped out, carrying stuff that she hurriedly put in the car, then rushed back in. She didn’t give anyone an opening for conversation, let alone eye contact. When she came out a second time I sheepishly called out “Lisa!,” which she was either too focused to hear or more likely pointedly ignored. Just as she was about to re-enter the backstage I tried again, a little louder, but loud enough to at least get her to glance in my direction.

My luck continued. Not only did she see me, not only did she recognize me (I had my haircut earlier in the week, first time since I was out here last year, and would have looked somewhat different from when they saw me in April), but she said, “Jim! Come here right now.” It wasn’t a command, but I took it that way—happily so. I apologized to my friends and quickly followed her into the backstage room where Kris was sitting with only one other person.

She asked if I’d heard my dedication and I told her how totally blown away I was, or something to that effect, then brought me over to Kris. But before I could get in even the quickest over-the-top adulatory drool—they all must have been exhausted, and she was clearly in a hurry to get them out—she this time did command me to take Kris to the car and not let him stop to sign anything or pose for photos. So I suddenly transitioned–after muttering to myself, “Why me, Lord?”–from fawning fan to sober security man.

Now I’ve been around security for 40-plus years now, so it’s not like I don’t know how to get a guy in a car. But Kris is the king of kindness—it’s ingrained in him, and sure enough, someone called out to him and he naturally stopped, wanting to accommodate, as is his second nature. But no matter how many years I’ve been around security, doing it is not my nature, period. So I was more than a little bit proud of myself that I sternly told Kris to get in the car and that whether or not I said it loud enough for him to hear, he did indeed slide into the front seat, next to Lisa, who had already buckled herself into the driver’s seat. I have no memory at all of what I said to them in thanking them both profusely, but whatever it was, I’m glad they both laughed.

Now I’m tempted to say that having a song dedicated to me by Kris Kristofferson, and then doing unexpected security for him after the gig, was the night’s highlight, if not the entire L.A. trip’s. But just getting to see Kris is as good as it gets: Like I said, I have been blessed to know two saints in my life, Kris and Nick, and like Nick, whose song lyric focus can be summed up by the title of Ashford & Simpson’s 1973 debut album Gimme Something Real, Kris’s songs—and his singing of them–cut to the core of human experience and emotion.

And like the Stones, Kris never lets age or illness stop him from doing what he does so singularly: perform what I consider some of the greatest songs ever, with the same realness and conviction that he had when writing and recording them.

Speaking of the Stones, I should note, in case anyone is hip enough to wonder, that Kris did not perform “Blame It on the Stones” (the lead track from his 1970 debut album Kristofferson), then again, I’m sure he was playing somewhere else the night of the Rose Bowl. The song is typical Kris, then in his mid-30s, defending the then young generation from perplexed parents projecting their own ignorance and irresponsibility onto the Stones.

The next night was the fabled Bessman Bash, where the likes of Phil Spector, Billy F Gibbons, Sandra Bernhard, Peter Asher, John Mellencamp, David Mamet, Jonathan Richman and Farrah Fawcett have graced us with their presence (“Farrah Fawcett?” I said, incredulously, when informed by a publicist friend that the event could make Rolling Stone, only to be told, incredulously, that she was the woman I’d just given directions to the bathroom.)

I was glad musician Tom Kenny, best-known as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, happened to be at the Starlight Bowl the night before and heard my shout-out–so I’d have another witness to back up my story, since I could still barely believe it myself.

“You’ve been building up to the Old Man Dinner Band!” joked Pete Thomas, Elvis Costello’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer (whom Charlie Watts had once asked to meet after seeing Elvis open for the Stones), the Old Man Dinner Band (a.k.a. O.M.D.B.) made up of musician regulars at that weekly Old Man’s Dinner at The Park. The O.M.D.B. was one of two bands Pete (a.k.a. The One and Only Pete Thomas, as Elvis always introduces him at shows) was drumming in that night at the B.B.

Coincidentally, it was Elvis’s birthday that day, and the next day, when I would fly back to New York, would be both Bob’s and Valerie Simpson’s.

I would think again of Val as I flew back on Monday, as it was immediately upon landing from the flight back in 2011 that I learned that Nick had died—and I went immediately to their house in my shorts and t-shirt and carry-ons.

I’d emailed Val before leaving, thinking how lucky I’d been to see Ashford & Simpson perform twice over the years at an outdoor summer street festival in L.A. And now flying back again, I had another unforgettable concert experience, three to be exact.

Our Beloved Industry.

Madcity 2016—Corky Siegel & Howard Levy, Le Fete de Marquette, Otis Redding, Ben Sidran, sudden death and Bernie Sanders

Jim

Mad3

I was at the Delta Terminal at LaGuardia early morning July 14 waiting for my nonstop to Milwaukee when I saw that fellow music writer Joe Bosso Facebooked how he loved Grand Funk Railroad growing up, and how he couldn’t understand how the critics hated them.

I laughed out loud.

I had hated them, too, at the beginning, when me and the guys sat around smoking pot, guzzling beers and sniffing glue nonstop to “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home).” But everything changed when they started having hit singles like “Bad Time,” “The Loco-Motion” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Soul.” A million years later I was privileged to write the booklet notes to the box set Thirty Years of Funk: 1969–1999 and become big friends with frontman Mark Farner. Joe, who rightly called GFR “a total kickass band,” had just interviewed Mark, and drew an ambiguous response from the esteemed Ira Robbins-co-founder of the late, great Brit-rock/new wave-oriented mag Trouser Press-who observed that 150 music writers had been invited to meet the band at the beginning at New York’s Gotham Hotel.

“Exactly six journalists showed up,” Ira tallied, then cited the famous block-long billboard in Times Square promoting the Closer to Home album, at a cost of $100,000. He seemed to be suggesting that Grand Funk’s success was due much to marketing; for sure it wasn’t press adulation. Not wishing to cause my usual Facebook firestorm, I merely stated, “I wrote the notes for the box set. Mark is a sweetheart and great as ever,” prompting Ira to kindly reply, “You’re a midwestern partisan, you are!”

“On my way back to Wisco as we speak!” I wrote back, and it was now time to board.

It was my third annual July trip to Wisco, as I call it, to visit my ninetysomething mother in Madison. I didn’t plan anything when I went back two years ago, but I got lucky: My high school buddy Andy Linderman, now the renowned blues harmonica player Westside Andy, had a gig on July 4 at Waupun–a tiny town 50 miles northeast of Madison mostly known for being the site of the state prison–and I tagged along. The annual Celebrate Waupun festival had two stages–the blues stage, that Andy was part of, and of all things, a Cajun music stage, the big name being Feufollet, a Lafayette band I’d first seen there in the late 1990s when they were all kids. They’re young adults now, after personnel changes including the addition of Kelli Jones-Savoy, the hugely talented wife of my dear friend and huge Cajun music talent Joel Savoy from nearby Eunice, The Cajun Prairie Capital.

It turned out that Feufollet was playing one of my old Madcity haunts, the Crystal Corner bar, a few days later, so I got to see them twice while I was in town. But also playing the Cajun stage was of all people, Jim Schwall, guitarist for the Siegel-Schwall Band, one of the main reasons I got into writing about music in the mid’70s in the first place.

I’d first seen Jim at The People’s Fair rock festival in Iola Township some 140 miles north of Madison, which took place in late June of 1970, when Siegel-Schwall played sometime between 1 and 5 a.m. Saturday morning, the second day of the weekend festival. As I’ve written here elsewhere*, it was life-changing. I think Andy was at the fest, but I know he’d originally turned me on to them and I instantly became a devotee, turning everyone I knew onto the band and seeing them again scores of times throughout the next decade. I wrote about them extensively when I began writing about music, and continued after moving to New York in the early ’80s, eventually positioning myself to oversea the CD reissue of their entire Vanguard catalog.

Jim’s Siegel-Schwall partner Corky Siegel became one of my closest friends, but I never knew Jim that well. After moving to New York he moved to Madison, so I missed out on getting to know him better there. So I was thrilled to get to see him and hang out a bit during the day at Waupun, where he was playing bass in Madison’s Cajun Strangers.

“There’s a theory that there are 35 blues bands in Madison, and 28 blues musicians!” Jim told me, by way of explaining how and why he and so many other Madcity blues players end up playing regularly or sporadically in so many local blues bands. I can’t remember what band Andy was playing with, but I know it wasn’t his, and that like Jim, he played in a number of local blues bands as well.

I was smarter last year in planning my trip, but that’s because I knew well in advance Elvis Costello was playing in Madison with The Imposters–their own gig during a couple days off from their tour opening for Steely Dan. I wrote about the show—and it’s significance to me and my career—here last year*; another high point of last year’s trip was getting to hang out again with Jim, at the Atwood (Avenue) Fest.

This year I was hoping maybe Jimmy Liban was playing somewhere. Jim Liban, another great blues harmonica legend, from my hometown Milwaukee.

Of all the artists—and they probably number in the hundreds if not thousands—whom I saw and loved and supported in my writing career who deserved and didn’t get the widespread mainstream recongition they deserved, none ranks higher in my estimation than Jimmy Liban. Luckily, he put out a record a couple years ago, I Say What I Mean, and I made it my Album of the Year in examiner.com. He hadn’t had a record out in God knows how long, and wouldn’t have had not a young (relatively) guitar player named Joel Paterson, who had played with Jimmy when he was cutting his own musical teeth in Madison, decided, now that he was well established in Chicago and had started his own indie label, to put out an album of Liban originals.

I Say What I Mean did get Jimmy a gig in Europe, and also took him to Memphis for the Blues Music Awards. But remember: This is the blues, so there wasn’t much else. When I called him a few weeks before booking my trip, he told me that he was in the middle of a one-year hiatus from playing—though he had promised a friend that he’d play his wedding, and was honoring that commitment. When the year was up he’d decide if he’d want to play again, but for now, it just wasn’t any fun any more, essentially playing the same Milwaukee haunts for the same Milwaukee people. I shared his frustration, and added it to my own.

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That left Corky. I went to his website and sure enough, he had a gig on July 16 in Fort Atkinson, a 45-minute or so drive from Madison, at Cafe Carpe. I booked the trip, flying to Milwaukee and taking the Badger Bus to Madison. That first night, it turned out, was the start of the four-day Le Fete de Marquette festival, in of all places, Madison’s Central Park. I didn’t even know we had a Central Park in Madison, and that it was a walk from where I used to live on South Hancock Street a few blocks back of the State Capitol. I went there with my old pal Jeff Laramie, owner of the booking agency SRO Artists, who used to be second in command at Mountain Railroad Records, home of artists including Jim Post, Steve Young, a pre-Timbuk3 Pat MacDonald and Spooner–which was fronted by Doug Erikson, later to become Duke Erikson of Garbage, and had on drums Butch Vig, also of future Garbage and Nirvana production fame.

It being Madison, I smoked some pot, followed Jeff and wife Terri around and was blown away by the music (like the festival name suggests, it focused on French-related music), and the one artist I remember seeing is Cyril Neville. I only wish I remembered the conversations I had with Jeff and Terri because I know I had at least five ideas for great stories/commentaries, and I was too high to take down any notes, none of which likely would have made sense had I done so. I at least remember one thing that I think Jeff said, that echoed my thoughts on pre-Democratic Convention Bernie Sanders.

I of course supported Bernie’s positions, but I didn’t support Bernie. He lost me from the beginning on vocabulary ,three words in particular—the first being revolution. I don’t care what he meant, revolution connotes violence. If it doesn’t scare a lot of people to death outright, it puts them way the fuck off.

Bernie’s second bad word was obvious—socialism. Again, even though I doubt most people can correctly defin it, socialism scares people and puts them off, especially since it still widely and wrongly connotes communism. Maybe America is ready to elect a socialist, not to mention a Jewish socialist. I just didn’t want to bet the Constitution on it.

The third word was establishment. Bernie kept railing against the establishment, much as I did when I was a teen high school radical in the late ‘60s. Except this ain’t the late ‘60s, and now I’m the establishment—and I’m not ashamed of it. I always love President Obama’s line from the 2008 campaign, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for!” And I’m proud of who I was in the ‘60s in Madison, when there was an awful war going on and a Selective Service draft and a generation gap, and to suggest, like the Bernie or Bust people, that now Obama and Hillary Clinton and I are essentially the same as Nixon, well, I’ll have none of it.

And now I’ll add a fourth word, one that has to do with what Jeff or I did or didn’t say: rigged. Yeah, Bernie, like Trump, riled up his followers by claiming that the “system” is rigged, when he was losing a good fight fair and square. Here he only reinforced a main paranoid tenet of American culture since the JFK assassination, that everything that happens that’s bad is a conspiracy, then, with Trump, helped extend it by giving his followers free reign to believe that winners are corrupt and therefore win unfairly, hence their victories are illegitimate. This breeds cynicism, incivility, unwillingness to compromise, a belief that if you don’t get everything you want, nothing is preferable.

Now by no means an I saying that Hillary is spotless, or that I like her, though it turns out that I do, very much–having in fact hated her eight years ago when she ran against Obama, having been a Clinton hater long before then. But she earned my respect and eventual admiration for sucking it up after losing, campaigning for Obama, serving as his Secretary of State and now winning the nomination fairly and handily as the candidate far and away most supportive of the President–which Bernie was to a lesser extent, his chief supporters to a far lesser one. Again, I support Bernie’s positions, which are closer to mine than Hillary’s, and I recognize her weaknesses and shortcomings as a candidate–but in relation to Trump, they’re virtually nonexistent, and the differences between her and Bernie are likewise truly miniscule. All this said, I do hereby salute Bernie for doing the right thing at and since the convention, and am relieved that the bulk of his followers do appear to have similarly sucked it up.

I just wish I could remember the other stuff we talked about, but that old Madison Green—not to mention a new addition in the Madtown Mule—a beer infused with lime and ginger made by Capital Brewery, that I drank an entire mule team of—-made me forget everything except the sight of people as old as me who still lived in Madison and still went out to hear music, and that it was such a great setting in a park in the middle of the near East Side with the majestic State Capitol building visible in the sunset, the Capitol that you can see from miles away as you near Madison on the Badger Bus, that I used to walk through on my way to State Street and the University-area music clubs when I lived there and wrote for The Madcity Music Sheet and was a stringer for Variety before moving to New York.

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I do remember one other thing, part of the Bernie discussion, that I myself came up with and gave to a girl that we were talking to, a friend of Jeff’s, that I know she never acted on, that I should have—a t-shirt slogan: “Vote conscientiously–not your conscience.” If anyone who reads this is so inclined to print up and sell some shirts, honor compels you to cut me in.

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I returned to the festival the next night to meet up with Rockin’ John McDonald, my friend of over 40 years—as long as he’s had his beloved I Like It Like That oldies radio show every Saturday night on Madison’s listener-sponsored WORT-FM. I thought I was cool wearing my orange New York Public Library t-shirt, but RJ topped it with his vintage blue Dr. Bop and the Headliners entry. That day, by the way, I returned for the first time since leaving my third job with the State of Wisconsin in either 1978 or ‘79 to the old State Office Building on 1 West Wilson, overlooking Lake Monona, where I worked two blocks south of the Capitol.

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I needed a birth certificate, as I was suddenly thinking of fleeing to India and didn’t have a passport. I walked into the building and thought I’d stepped into The Twilight Zone: Not everything was the same—there was a security station in the lobby that wasn’t there in the ‘70s. It all looked brighter outside, too. But the institutional flooring and hallways were the same, and it was a step back in time that I recently depicted here.

I can’t remember, but I think my office was on the second floor; I think my second job with the State, a file clerk at the Division of Corrections, was on seventh floor, and the first, where I was a reader/typist for a blind man at the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, was also on an upper floor.

The clerk at the Bureau of Records, of course, was my age 40 years ago, modified in the passage of time and mores by arms full of tattoos. When I was done I walked out and got to the lobby and stopped, giving in to the stupid impulse to go back and tell her that I used to work in the building 40 years ago. She feigned interest.

Since I worked there, and long after I left Madison, they built a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed convention center, the Monona Terrace, behind the State Office Building, on the Monona shore. They put in a plaque on the terrace in memory of Otis Redding, who died when his plane crashed into Lake Monona on Dec. 10, 1967. I was with my friend Beth, whose husband Tim Onosko, the renowned futurist/author, was one of my dearest friends and supporters, an older brother/mentor. Tim died of cancer a few years ago. Pancreatic. I thought he’d beaten it and will never forgive myself for not knowing he hadn’t, though Beth assures me it was okay, he didn’t want anyone to know. Except I should have known and it wasn’t okay.

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We went out on to the terrace, and I sat on one of the benches surrounding the Redding plaque and looked out onto the quiet, still waters of Lake Monona, silently wondering what might have been. What might have been had Otis lived, and Tim. Had I stayed in the Madcity.

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Saturday mid-afternoon I took my mother’s car and drove to Fort Atkinson with my 21-year-old niece Ariela to see Corky and Howard at Cafe Carpe. We got there while they were doing soundcheck. I hadn’t seen Corky since he was in New York four years ago to play Lincoln Center Out of Doors with Dr. L. Subramaniam. I don’t remember the last time I saw Howard, but it was probably at one of his gigs at the Association of performing Arts Presenters (APAP) some 10 years ago, maybe.

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Corky and Howard play together a lot, but this was the first time I’d see them—and I was bringing along my niece Ariela, 21, who’s a classical piano student at New York’s Mannes School of Music, who was also in Madison visiting her mom (my sister). After greeting Corky, his wife/manager Holly and Howard, Corky echoed my excitement over her getting to see Howard (as well as Corky), who does things on a 10-hole diatonic harmonica—i.e., play it chromatically by conceiving an “overblowing” technique–that no one else knows how to do, let alone articulate. You really don’t need to be a musician, let alone understand music, to know when you hear Howard play that he’s doing something that sounds great, but makes absolutely no sense technically speaking.

Howard tried to put it in piano terms for Ariela–but even that was ridiculous.

“I make my mouth do the stuff my fingers would do,” he said. I doubt she understood him. I certainly didn’t.

“I’m not really thinking about this,” he added, speaking, I supposed, of his harmonica. “I visualize the piano.”

He might just as well have been speaking in tongues.

It was at Café Carpe, a wonderful little café/bar/listening room—-maybe 50 seats–in a century-old brick building on the Rock River with a screened porch overlooking the water, owned and operated by regionally renowned folkie Bill Camplin and Kitty Welch. Holly raved about the pumpkin pie; the carrot cake was definitely the best I ever had.

On the wall of the music room was a bumper sticker that read, “I may be old but that’s okay…I got to see all the great bands.”

Bill introduced the show with a Hitchcock like “Good evening,” then asked how many in the SRO room were musicians. At least half raised their hands. I can’t imagine any of them understood what was going on with Howard, either, other than it was, using Bill’s words, “absolute magic.”

Comedic, too. Corky walked to the stage from the back while playing harp, Howard doing same a few paces back in a goofy processional. On stage they tried to out-footstomp each other while Corky played and sang Little Walter’s classic blues “Mellow Down Easy,” leading into a blues harmonica battle between the two.

They went on to trade solo pieces, both on piano and harmonica and sometimes both. At one point Corky laughed out loud at a Howard harmonica solo, which was entirely appropriate considering he was essentially defying all science, such that all one could do was laugh out loud. Howard said that the harmonica is the only instrument that you can pick up upside-down when you’re drunk and not know it. That sort of made sense, but really, it was like listening to Albert Einstein’s feeble attempt at relating with the village idiots.

Then Howard did a Beatles medley including “In My Life” and “Michelle,” his chording so complex that melodies were sometimes barely decipherable, as if he were somehow blowing into a kaleidoscope. “America the Beautiful,” with harp in right hand and left playing piano, segued into “This Land is Your Land,” then he shifted to both hands playing piano and Corky returning, playing harmonica before they sat together at the piano bench duetting—or more accurately, practically crawling over each other while changing hand position, Corky’s at first in between the taller, lankier Howard as he wrapped around him from behind, then the two with their hands alternating before Corky picked up a harmonica, then Howard did the same, each now playing harmonicas with one hand, piano with the other, in left-right-right-left hand mirror image. They also handed off solos on harp and piano and back and forth to where it became dizzying to follow the dazzle.

But that wasn’t all: Howard also played a bass harmonica, penny whistle and on an encore, an angklung set of tuned shakers. But when he doubled the melody on harp and piano simultaneously, well, mouths were agape, and at least in my case, still is. He and Corky walked off together to Siegel-Schwall’s “Hey, Billie Jean,” each finishing the other’s phrases.

The first half of the trip now done, the rest would focus on the few friends in Madison I have left who are still alive, our conversations invariably concerning our respective cancer treatments, except that in Robin’s case he added a new wrinkle to the medical history in having dropped dead at the Minneapolis airport a few months ago—luckily within short distance from a defibrillator. Of course I asked the expected question, i.e., Did you see anything on the other side? Rob’s answer, of course, was no.

Tom, whom I worked with at the State Office Building (same with Rob), seemed to be coming along great after intensive treatment for throat cancer. He was skeletal two years ago, and now he’s playing soccer and drumming in a band.

I had lunch with Chuck Toler, who was partners with Ken Adamany back when I first started writing. The money they made managing Dr. Bop & the Headliners went into developing Cheap Trick. We called Ken, who sounded great. Ken owned The Factory, the nightclub Otis was going to play the day his plane went down in Lake Monona.

Next day was my last—Tuesday, July 19–and I’d end it with some old-time club hopping starting at Otto’s Restaurant & Bar, near my mom’s, where Westside Andy and the Glenn Davis Duo are playing every Tuesday evening during the summer outside on the deck/patio at 5:30 p.m. I’d checked Andy’s schedule before flying out and saw that he was playing every night I was there, all out of town gigs except for this one. He recognized me immediately in his side view mirror when I snuck up on his car after he parked.

It was the second week in a row that an old friend had surprised him, the first being a gal we knew from high school whom he hadn’t seen forever—whom I haven’t seen since—who looked great, who had married the brother of another high school friend, but the husband had died—death being more and more the operative word in these kinds of conversations. Back from a recent Stockholm swing if I heard right–alwasy a 50-50 proposition at best–Andy was still playing with any number of local blues groupings, this one being with Davis, who plays guitar and kick drum and sings. Like Corky and Howard, they turned to Little Walter with “Just Your Fool” while I was there, which was about an hour or so before heading downtown, Andy’s latest album Blues Just Happen in hand, to the Cardinal Bar. I used to hang out there a lot 40 years ago, when it was my corner bar and a straight-friendly gay disco with the best dance music in town.

Tuesday summer early evenings at the Cardinal now are turned over to Ben Sidran’s “Salons for Secular Humanists, Arch Democrats and Free Thinkers,” in which my old friend Ben, Madison’s renowned jazz pianist/author/composer who cut his teeth in The Ardells, a Madison band made up of UW students in 1961 that also included Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs—and Jos Davidson, who would go on to play bass in an early Siegel-Schwall configuration. Ben also played in the Steve Miller Band in the late ‘60s.

He was on break when I got there and ran into Stu Levitan, president of WORT-FM’s board of directors and head of the Madison Landmarks Commission, whom I’d hung out with at the Marquette fest when I met up with Rockin’ John. He told me that Ben was at the front of the bar. Sure enough, Ben was sitting by the window, engrossed in a conversation. So I stood nearby waiting for him to look at me, though I wasn’t sure he’d recognize me, it had been so long since I’d seen him in New York. I know the last time I saw him in Madison was at a Dr. Bop gig, since we both would be called up to sit–and drink–at the ultimate oldies show band’s famous onstage Celebrity Bar.

So I stood there waiting, then noticed a familiar looking woman looking at me like she’d seen a ghost—which would have made sense had she recognized me. Except who’s going to recognize me here now? I thought, and usually people who think they recognize me are soon disappointed when they find out I’m not who they hope I am.

Except that now this woman was smiling broadly and seemed certain it was me, and suddenly it dawned on me that she was right! It was Lynette Margulies, frontwoman pianist/vocalist of jazz-pop group Four Chairs No Waiting back in the day, whom I hadn’t seen since back in the day. I have no idea how she recognized me, but really, I should have recognized her right off.

Lynette immediately interrupted Ben and told him who I was, and he practically fell on the floor. “It’s old home week!” he said when he regained his blance and composure, and sure enough, he’d been locked in conversation with another old Madison journo friend who also lived in New York and was in town visiting. As for Lynette, she remembered when I reviewed Four Chairs when I was stringing with Variety just before splitting for New York—and will never let me off now for not recognizing her right away.

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(Photo: Lynette Margulies)

As for Ben’s second set, it really was fabulous—almost all new music by him and and his guitarist Louka Patenaude, bassist Nick Moran and drummer Todd Hammes. Loved the song “College,” especially the line “that’s the place…where I went wrong”–that is, if I read my notes correctly—always a 50-50 proposition at best.

“Who didn’t go wrong in college?” Ben asked when it was over. “And if you didn’t go wrong in college, you missed a huge opportunity!”

“Too Much, Too Late,” he said, was “in the spirit” of his “guru” Mose Allison, which made me think of how I always look at Corky as my guru, though I should add that Simon Burgess is my actual guro, or teacher, in Filipino martial arts.

“It’s the ‘singles’ show!” Ben joked, “just the hits tonight!”

Again struggling to decipher my notes, I can’t tell if someone asked about Steve Miller, or if Ben brought it up on his own. He did say how everybody asks him about Miller, and observed how Miller’s been playing “the same 12 songs for 40 years,” no doubt because of the big bucks he gets paid to do them.

Here Stu, who later explained that he was just quoting Ben from one of Ben’s books, called out something on the order of how those big bucks also paid for Ben’s graduate education so he should shut his mouth, and for sure, Ben’s stint with Miller included his lyrics to “Space Cowboy.”

“At least write a song!” Ben continued, speaking directly to the absent Miller. “It seems like such a waste.”

At least Ben sure made it seem that way from his end, considering the quality of his new songs. I’d been sitting with Patenaude’s proud mom, and he sat with us for a few minutes after the show.

It’s like learning,” said Patenaude, a youngish cat who’s played with Ben since the mid-2000s. “It’s really loose and fun. He tries something out and sees if we feel it and if it works.”

Ben then told me that he rarely makes it out to Manhattan any more.

“There’s no reason to come to the city any more,” he said, though he does get to Brooklyn, where his son Leo, also an esteemed musician/composer who co-produced the Oscar-winning song “Al Otro Lado Del Rio” for the soundtrack to the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, lives. And while he’s working on a new album—and Stu said that the whole first set was new songs that were also great—Ben said that he realized there was no point to it, at least in terms of today’s record companies, airplay and traditional music business marketing.

But what are you going to do? I asked. You’re a musician, and a musician makes music. I’m a writer, and a writer writes—even though I just lost examiner.com, my main outlet, that barely paid. I still have this site, that I have to pay for. But what am I going to do?

Stu, meanwhile, is working a on a book about Madison in the ‘60s, and I again ask you, Stu, to mention that I was one of the Memorial 101 who were suspended from James Madison Memorial High School for protesting Kent State. Before closing out the night—and trip—down the street at the Essen Haus to catch a little of jazz concertina player Brian Erickson, I walked over to where the cigarette machine used to be next to the front door, where I picked up a copy of The Madcity Music Sheet the night I got back from a week’s vacation in Nashville on Memorial Day in 1977-—my first time there—when I dropoped by the Cardinal to hear folk legends Malvina Reynolds and Rosalie Sorrels. There was a stack of giveaway papers on the cigarette machine and I picked one up and paged through it—then just a single sheet of newsprint folded over twice–saw an ad for Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes (with guest Ronnie Spector) appearing in town at the Stone Hearth, and went because I was a huge Ronettes fan and understood where Southside was coming from musically.

I met Gary Sohmers, the Sheet’s publisher at the Southside gig, and not knowing anything about me other than that I’d come to the show after seeing it highlighted in his paper, he asked me to write for it. I told him I flunked out of high school. “It doesn’t matter!” he said. And that’s how my career began—and now, some 40 years later, it still doesn’t matter. The only difference is that there was no cigarette machine now at the Cardinal.

I told Stu and his girlfriend how great this night had been, indeed, the entire trip–in terms of seeing so much fantastic music. She said maybe I should move back to Madison–the perfect setup for one of my favorite Sandra Bernhard lines, Sandy, of course, being from Flint, Michigan.

If you can make it in New York, says Sandy, you’ll be a failure everywhere else.

A warm Rock and Roll Hall of Fame salute to Steve Miller and Paul Stanley

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New inductee Steve Miller did us all a big service Friday night at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he criticized the organization for neglecting female rockers during his acceptance speech, revealed its mistreatment of inductees during his press conference, then lambasted the publicist for trying to cut him off.

As for his first complaint, I always like thinking I was kicked off the Hall of Fame Nominating Committee years ago because I always spoke out in favor of Lesley Gore, Nancy Sinatra, Joan Jett and the Shangri-Las—not to mention males like The Turtles and The Hollies (Jett and The Hollies have since gone in), even though the form letter giving me the boot (along with a number of others) claimed that they wanted people who were more knowledgeable about 1970s rock—no matter that I’d written the first book on The Ramones.

So good on you there, Steve. Then again, as I’m from Madison, Wisconsin, I know how you inspired my homegirl Tracy Nelson’s signature song “Down So Low”–even if you did break her heart.

As for the RockHall’s treatment of inductees, he slagged the entire induction process backstage, in press accounts accusing the organization of disrespecting “the artists they say they’re honoring, which they don’t.” Here he specified licensing agreements between the show and inductees, and how they only gave him tickets for him and his wife while making his band and their wives fork over $10,000 per.

What I loved most, though, was how when the event’s publicist tried to stifle him, he stood his ground-—and then some: “No, we’re not going to wrap this up–I’m going to wrap you up,” he said. “You go sit down over there and learn something.”

What I’ve always hated about these award shows, or for that matter any major media extravaganza, is the way that media is herded and controlled (see Donald Trump media pens) like sheep—even if most of the time we are. Of course he wasn’t so much sticking up for the press and against big-event publicists as he was for himself and fellow RockHall inductees, but even an indirect slap at media manipulation, even among the most manipulatable, is to be applauded.

“This is how close this whole show came to not happening because of the way the artists are being treated,” he said, holding up two fingers very close together. And then he did wrap it up and walk off.

The RockHall tried to act diplomatic afterwards via a statement: “Rock ‘n’ roll can ignite many opinions,” it said. “It’s what makes it so great.”

Now there’s one big crock of shit statement! It’s the music that makes it so great, and it’s the many opinions that makes the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame so despised! In fact, it’s those opinions—a good many if not most of them stupid—that makes defining rock ‘n’ roll apparently impossible! Another new inductee, N.W.A.’s Ice Cube, makes my point.

“The question is, ‘Are we rock ‘n’ roll?'” Cube said in an acceptance speech in which he proclaimed that N.W.A. and hip-hop belong there next to the Beatles, Elvis and Chuck Berry, “and I say–you goddamn right we rock ‘n’ roll.” His explanation? “Rock ‘n’ roll is not an instrument. It’s not even a style of music. It’s a spirit that’s been going on since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock, and yes, hip-hop.”

You may have noted, as I most certainly did, that he left out country. Not many country stars are in the RockHall, with Johnny Cash the only one coming quickly to mind outside of Bill Monroe and Jimmie Rodgers—both inducted as “Early Influences.” Seymour Stein always argued for Conway Twitty, whose career began in the 1950s with the rock ‘n’ roll chart success of hits like “It’s Only Make Believe.” I’ll always remember my late, great friend Dave Nives, who held various marketing and a&r indie label gigs and correctly ascertained, after I brought him a CD by polka legend Eddie Blazonczyk, “This is real rock ‘n’ roll.”

Ice Cube didn’t say “polka,” either. But he—and N.W.A. mate MC Ren—got into a tiff with 2014 inductee Gene Simmons over the very point at hand.

KISS’s Simmons had told Rolling Stone that he was “looking forward to the death of rap,” that rappers didn’t belong in the Hall of Fame because they didn’t play guitar or sing—much as Phil Spector once told me that “rap music” is actually an oxymoron. In The New York Times shortly before his induction, Cube said he respected Simmons, “but I think he’s wrong on this, because rock ’n’ roll is not an instrument and it’s not singing. Rock ’n’ roll is a spirit. N.W.A is probably more rock ’n’ roll than a lot of the people that he thinks belong there over hip-hop. We had the same spirit as punk rock, the same as the blues.”

Here he invoked the “spirit” characterization of rock ‘n’ roll, that once again, takes precedence over the music itself. He added in his induction remarks that “rock ‘n’ roll is not even a style of music,” with Ren answering Simmons directly: “Hip-Hop is here forever. Get used to it.”

Never the type to suffer in silence, Simmons tweeted Saturday: “Respectfully, let me know when Jimi Hendrix gets into the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame. Then you’ll have a point.” The next day Cube retorted, also via tweet, “Who stole the soul? Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Chubby Checker help invent rock & roll. We invent it. Y’all reprint it.”

Simmons’ final reply: “Cube, I stand by my words. [I] respect N.W.A, but when Led Zep gets into Rap Hall of Fame, I will agree with your point.”

Rolling Stone, covering the exchange Monday, quoted from a 2014 Simmons interview with Radio.com: “A few people decide what’s in and what’s not. And the masses just scratch their heads. You’ve got Grandmaster Flash in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Run-D.M.C. in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? You’re killing me. That doesn’t mean those aren’t good artists. But they don’t play guitar. They sample and they talk. Not even sing.”

But KISS and N.W.A. did have one thing in common, in addition to the capital letters. Neither band performed at their induction. As Cube told the Times (and echoed Miller), “we really didn’t feel like we were supported [by the RockHall] enough to do the best show we could put on.” In fact, the members of N.W.A. actually cut out early without taking questions.

KISS had long been shunned by the RockHal nomcomm, and by the time they finally were inducted, also chose not to perform, due to dissension among band members. This was hardly unusual: Paul McCartney didn’t even show when the Beatles were inducted in 1988, proclaiming that “after 20 years, the Beatles still have some business differences, which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.” And none of the Sex Pistols were present in 2006 when they were inducted, Johny Rotten, contending in a handwritten letter that the RockHall was “a piss stain” and noting that the band would have to pay $25,000 to sit at a main table. And even at last week’s ceremony, inductee Chicago’s Peter Cetera didn’t show, and Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos, who did attend and perform, complained on Facebook after how the other three originals had forced him out of the band.

“The spirit of rock ‘n’ roll means you follow your own path regardless of the critics and your peers,” Paul Stanley had said in his KISS acceptance speech, ironically presaging Cube’s speech Friday night: “Rock ’n’ roll is not conforming to the people who came before you, but creating your own path in music and in life. That is rock ’n’ roll, and that is us.”

Stanley also observed that KISS had stuck to its path for 40 years.

“Here we are tonight basically being inducted for the same things that we were kept out for,” he noted, and nodded to the fans. “Let’s not forget that these people make it all possible. We just benefit from it.”

I was reminded how, many years ago, I interviewed Paul for a Billboard KISS special, and told him that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was irrelevant without KISS.

“You know, we have our own Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he said. “It’s in the record store bins.”

And really, what’s in the bins is what makes rock ‘n’ roll so great.

Tales of Bessman: I remember Elvis

Jim

elvissheet1

“Two Beers and no dope.”

‘Scuse me while I quote myself. Probably the best lead I ever wrote—certainly the most inspired.

It had to be a week or two before the triumphant return of Elvis Costello to Madison, this time headlining the U.S. tour with Nick Lowe and Mink DeVille in Spring, 1978, six months or so after Elvis played Bunky’s, a tiny showcase club just off-campus, on his first U.S. tour in late November, 1977.

It was a landmark occasion in my then brief career as a music journalist, which had begun a year or so earlier. Yet by now I was editor of The Madcity Music Sheet, which came out biweekly and had some national and a lot of local music coverage and concert listings.

I remember how we all had gathered around at the Sheet headquarters one day reading Melody Maker—one of England’s major music newspapers–and marveling at a small piece about Elvis Costello getting busted for busking outside a London convention of CBS Records executives. He was protesting that his U.K. records hadn’t been picked up for release in the U.S. In short order, he signed with Columbia (thanks to A&R rep Gregg Geller, later a dear friend whose wife Hope, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus and also later a dear friend, became his publicist) and came to the U.S. with his band The Attractions.

Then, maybe as now, Madison, Wis., was a perfect layover for touring artists, situated between the major markets of Chicago and Minneapolis (not counting Milwaukee). Madison had a huge university campus, and we got a lot of baby acts on the way up, as well as major acts who could play theaters or the Dane County Coliseum.

The biggest guy in the biz was Ken Adamany. He’d played keyboards for Steve Miller and Luther Allison, owned The Factory nightclub where Hendrix played and Otis was supposed to when his plane crashed into Lake Monona—near where I used to live.

But now Ken was a manager. He managed Dr. Bop & The Headliners, to this day the most fun band I ever saw (“almost too much entertainment,” as bandleader/drummer Dr. Newt Bop used to say). They were hugely successful in the area and Ken funneled his earnings from them into a band based in Rockford, Ill.—Cheap Trick.

Everyone at the Sheet was big time Cheap Trick fans—except me, of course. I appreciate some of their later hits, and now that they’re nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the weakest year yet, understand if they go in. But for me they were always too cartoon-y—though I’m the guy who wrote the first book on The Ramones, so go figure. But Elvis Costello & The Attractions they weren’t.

The Attractions, of course, didn’t exist when Elvis’s first album, My Aim is True, came out. I was so exited to get it, but I remember not really getting it on first hearing, except for “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes.” But it all came together on second hearing, and when Sheet publisher Gary Sohmers found out he was touring, he convinced Bunky’s—without any opposition—to book him.

Bunky’s really was the best. All the best rock, jazz, comedy. They even had George Jones, who did show up—and I was the one who was drunk. It was like Madison’s version of The Bottom Line.

And it was such an exciting time for me in music. After I got out of hight school (I was Class of ’70, but didn’t graduate with it) and the breakup of The Beatles and the emergence of FM radio and progressive rock, I switched over almost entirely to country music. But I was hip to punk rock and new wave, and had started writing a little for the State of Wisconsin Department of Administration newsletter—DOA Today, believe it or not—more or less to help out a friend in the Bureau of Personnel who was doing all the work and complaining that he had no help.

I worked in a small office in Personnel, in a federally funded entity called Project Skill—whose mission was to find employment for people with disabilities (which, ironically, I was one). I’d taken a week’s vacation in Nashville (my first time there), met my Cajun country hero Joel Sonnier (now Jo-El Sonnier), came back and went to the corner bar that night, the Cardinal Bar, to hear folk legends Malvina Reynolds and Rosalie Sorrels. There was a stack of giveaway papers on the cigarette machine—The Madcity Music Sheet—and I picked one up and paged through it—except that I think at that time it was just one sheet of newsprint folded over twice. I saw an ad for Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes—with guest Ronnie Spector—appearing at the Stone Hearth, which was down the block from Bunky’s, and I went because I was a huge Ronettes fan and understood where Southside was coming from; I would later write liner notes on a Southside compilation and become close friends with Phil Spector.

Ronnie had duetted with Southside on his first album (I Don’t Want to Go Home, 1976), so the year had to be 1977–since she toured with him the following year. The show had to be a week or two after I returned from Nashville, which was on Memorial Day. I didn’t know Gary, but I recognized him at the show and went up and told him I was there because I saw the ad in his paper. He told me to write for it. Just like that.

I told him I flunked out of high school. “It doesn’t matter!” he said. And that’s how my career began—and now, some 40 years later, it still doesn’t matter.

I started writing about Jo-El and country music, Dr. Bop, Milwaukee’s blues-rock band Short Stuff, my Chicago blues-rock heroes the Siegel-Schwall Band, and anything else I wanted—pretty much same as now, and throughout my career. But thanks to The Ramones, Sex Pistols and especially Elvis, I also covered punk and new wave.

Especially Elvis. We all loved how he released singles with picture sleeves and non-album B-sides, how the U.S and U.K. album versions were different, how My Aim is True had “ELVIS IS KING” spelled out in the tiny checkerboard squares on the album cover, how the red “COLUMBIA” label on the discs was changed to “COSTELLO.”

And for a certain type who felt alienated growing up in the ’60s and had only rock ‘n’ roll as his friend (read: me and no doubt a good many other male rock journalists, if not all), Elvis was the second coming of John Lennon or Bob Dylan or both put together.

“When I first started out, I thought I had two seconds to get people’s attention and be remembered,” he said at a packed appearance at New York’s main public library last month, during a conversation about his just-published memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. “I said things that were edgy and found that [music journalists] liked it–and thought they’d leave me alone to write songs.”

We identified everything about him, from his anti-glam, bespectacled look (so often misidentified as nerdy) to his sound (hard-edged organ and guitar over relentless rhythms) to his themes of “revenge and guilt,” to repeat a famous phrase he used in his only interview available in the early part of his career.

I remember that the day the follow-up album This Year’s Model came out, a record store on State Street cut out a few of the pigeon-toed Elvis portraits from the first album and taped them on the sidewalk with arrows pointing the way into the store. I remember the Columbia college rep having a little press party at the Concourse Hotel across from the State Capitol to celebrate the release of the new albums by Elvis , Eddie Money and Billy Joel—and may somewhere still have the Columbia nail care set they gave us.

And I’ll never forget how the Columbia girl, when I told her how thrilling it was to hear the new Elvis album, responded: “Elvis and Eddie Money are good—but a new Billy Joel album is an event.”

Like I said, that show at Bunky’s was pivotal. It was a tiny club, maybe 200 seats if I remember right, and I stayed for both shows.

Also during his current tour behind his memoir, Elvis recently recalled how Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen introduced the first Bunky’s show. Nielsen actually got footage from the conversation and posted it on Facebook with the caption “Kind words from Elvis Costello. I have a picture from the night in Madison, WI that he’s referring to…”

This is the picture:

NielsenSheet

In the clip Elvis revealed how much he and The Attractions loved Cheap Trick and listened to them on tour.

“Because they had a couple of very good looking fellows in the band and Rick with his sort of cartoon look with the guitars of many necks, you forget what great songs they wrote–and we loved them,” he said. He then recalled how he and the band had “made our way through the snow and wind to Madison, Wisconsin, and Rick got up and actually sort of explained myself and the Attractions to the local audience–who were poised with pitchforks and flaming torches at that point—and said that we were people he recommended personally and helped us get over with the local crowd. Those people up in Wisconsin, they can get nasty in the cold weather!”

Of course we weren’t really poised with pitchforks and flaming torches. But there was indeed an enormous sense of anticipation bordering on shock, and Elvis, now with The Attractions, didn’t let us down.

Even now I remember it was most of the songs from My Aim is True and several from the then unreleased second album This Year’s Model including “You Belong to Me.” The performance roiled with the ferocity of Steve Nieve’s churning keyboards driven by the rhythm section of Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas, and Elvis spitting out the lyrics and slashing away at his guitar—and on “Less Than Zero,” carving out a “swastika tattoo” with his index finger as he snarled the phrase.

I’m pretty sure he was drunk, only because he seemed so angry—though not without at least some reason.

“I’ve seen the police in England, and I’ve been to Madison, and I’ve seen the police,” he observed at one point, unprompted. “And they both have guns.”

He must have done “Radio Radio,” but if he didn’t, he definitely said, “In England, there’s only one station, and it plays the same thing. In America, there are many stations, and they all play the same thing.”

And in much the manner that he famously gestured the Attractions to stop playing on Saturday Night Live in December, 1977, he cut them off dead halfway into a song at Bunky’s late show with a slicing motion, then pointed to a couple guys against the back wall who were talking.

“Hey, you back there, talking to the person next to you. I see you. When I go to see someone I go to have a good time, not to talk!” he steamed. Maybe he wasn’t drunk—though I recall he took a drink or two from admirers up front. As for me, just those two beers and no dope–and a show that was so riveting and eventful that when I asked Gary if we could put out a special issue in advance of the Costello/Lowe/DeVille concert, he readily agreed.

The show was at The Orpheum theater, across State Street from The Capitol Theater (now the Madison Overture Center for the Arts), two blocks from the State Capitol. I remember when I got there I ran into Jim Post, the great folk singer-songwriter who collaborated with Siegel-Schwall and as half of Friend & Lover, had the immortal 1967 pop hit “Reach Out of the Darkness.” Jim lived near Madison, and told me he was there entirely because of my “two beers and no dope” lead in our Elvis special.

My lead piece, by the way, was also titled “I Remember Elvis.” It began thusly: ” November 30, 1979. Bunky’s. Elvis Costello. Two beers and no dope. I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

I hearby apologize to Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Orpheum, incidentally, was also a couple blocks from the Quisling Clinic on Gorham Street. Elvis might have done “Green Shirt” that night. It was on Armed Forces, his third album, which would come out in January, 1979. He was always doing new, unreleased material in concert, even in the beginning.

“Green Shirt,” of crouse, has the line “‘Cause somewhere in the Quisling Clinic/There’s a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes.” I doubt many in Madison would have known that Norwegian leader Vidkun Quisling was a Nazi collaborator whose name is now synonymous with traitor—as Elvis most surely would have. For Churchill used the word in a famous wartime speech, and “Green Shirt” came two songs after Armed Forces‘ overtly political “Oliver’s Army.”

Vidkun Quisling was executed for treason in 1945. The Quisling Clinic was founded by cousins of Quisling, including Dr. Gunnar Quisling, who served in the U.S. medical corps in World War II and took part in the Normandy invasion. Eisenhower awarded him the Legion of Merit for developing a foreign body locator—a device used to find shrapnel in wounded servicemen–and as he was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist, he also perfected the gas masks used by soldiers wearing glasses.

The Quisling Clinic, with its blonde brick, flat roofs, rounded corners and the ocular window near the entrance, was a striking example of “Art Moderne” architecture. As for “Green Shirt,” it has always struck me as one of the great examples of what makes Pete Thomas such a great drummer: hear his “bap-bap-bap-bap-bip” on the snare after Elvis sings a line. In fact, on the whole song Pete’s drumming is as much a part of the arrangement as Steve’s swirling keyboards.

I came to New York the day after Christmas, 1981. I think I took the Dog. I had a few friends at record companies and MTV from working for the Sheet and stringing for Variety and found out from one of them that Elvis was playing New Year’s Eve at the Palladium, NRBQ opening. The day of the show they released some tickets and I got front row center, balcony.

A few months later I started working full-time at the now-defunct record business trade magazine Cash Box, and two years later I left and began contributing to Billboard for over 20 years. I was lucky to see Elvis, write about Elvis and get to know Elvis and the Attractions during these years.

I can say that Pete is universally acknowledged as the nicest guy in the business, let alone greatest drummer. Steve somehow remains the keyboard boy genius, shy and quiet but very funny, who cracks me up every time I see him. Imposters bassist Davey Faragher is also a great guy and talent, whom I got to know well through Pete, with whom he plays in the fab L.A. country shtick band Jack Shit when they’re not on the road elsewhere.

I never got to know Attraction Bruce Thomas much (no relation to Pete, if you didn’t know), but he’s a Bruce Lee authority and respected my interest. This was after the first time I introduced myself to him, in the Ritz balcony when he was still with Elvis and the band. I told him who I was and that I was with Billboard and was a huge fan. “Fuck off!” he responded, quite emphatically, and it was wholly appropriate.

As for Elvis, well, no surprise for you, I’m sure, to learn that he’s far and away the most intelligent artist I’ve ever been lucky enough to know, let alone interview—though I really haven’t interviewed him formally in a long time. He hardly needs journalists like me any more to get his message across. But you can’t ask for a more forthcoming person on any level, really. Even with his tonnage of artistic output, on the occasions when I’ve emailed him—and I try to respectfully keep them rare—he often responds within minutes, sometimes with an intricate chapter length treatise. Anyone who’s seen him speak on TV or in person knows that he can just spout off the most thoughtful discourse spontaneously.

After I left Madison I rarely returned. Only to see my father a couple times before he died and shortly after for his funeral, and after that, for the memorial for Dr. Bop. Then two summers ago I went back to visit what’s left of my family, and when I saw that Elvis was performing in Madison this last July—with The Imposters—I scheduled another trip to Madison around it. I saw it as an opportunity to bring my career around full circle, and was prepared for an event of unparalleled self-awareness, if not discovery.

It’s not like I have a lot of friends left in Madison. Most of them are dead by now, or have moved on in other ways. But I did have one friend, Robin Gates, whom I’d brought to see Elvis at Bunky’s. He and his wife Jan had bought tickets for the show right away.

When I got to Madison I called my friend Tom Herman to see if he’d be my plus-one. I’d worked with Tom at the State, and am forever grateful to him for allowing me a leave of absence to see if I could make it as a journalist. Then again, maybe I should blame him.

Either way, when I called him, not only was he up for it, he reminded me that I’d brought him to Bunky’s that long ago night as well. Then it turned out my sister Ruthanne wanted to go, which caught me by surprise. She does a classical music show on the University of Wisconsin public radio channel, and I never thought she’d be interested in Elvis–despite his excursions into classical music.

I’d last been in touch with Elvis a few months earlier and let him know I was considering coming to Madison to see the show. I’d seen Pete only a few weeks earlier when he was in New York drumming with indie rock band The Weepies, and told him it was pretty much a done deal. I knew I could get in through Pete or Elvis, with a plus-one for sure. But now my sister wanted to go, and I didn’t want to exploit my friendship any further—though of course I was fully prepared to.

I waited until noon day-of-show to call Pete at the hotel. No surprise they were staying at the Concourse—as they were playing at the nearby Overture Center. It was July 23, and one of only a handful of dates that Elvis and The Imposters were doing by themselves apart from their summer tour opening for Steely Dan.

“What kind of fucking hole are we in?” Pete answered, in reference to the hotel. I wish I could somehow fully convey his accusatory befuddlement and tongue-in-cheek exasperation, for I had no choice but to bust up laughing. He did the same and told me to get there at ten-to-three and we’d go to the venue for soundcheck.

I got to the Concourse on time, and as I walked in Elvis’s longtime road manager Robbie McLeod was at the counter. He didn’t know I was coming.

“This place is so weird,” he said, after I explained how and why I was there. All I could do was sheepishly gesture to myself and say, “Hello!” It explained all he needed to know about Madison and me. Steve and Davey showed up shortly and while neither expected me, nor were they surprised. Pete came down, as always in shorts, prompting Robbie to joke about his ever-casual street attire. Steve and Davey were now talking to four gals who were also staying at the hotel, who’d driven down from Minneapolis for the show.

And then we got on the bus for the long drive of maybe two blocks to the Overture. I hadn’t been on the bus with the guys in almost four years to the day when we went from New York to the Gathering Of The Vibes Music Festival at Bridgeport, Conn.’s Seaside Park. Actually it was just Pete and Davey: Steve went on Elvis’s bus, and when we got there, he was dressed in some goofy black Civil War preacher’s outfit, for lack of a better way of describing it. “How are you, my good man?” he asked after I boarded. Then he started laughing, in tacit acknowledgement of how ridiculous he looked and sounded.

On the bus now Pete and Steve were locked in conversation about all the ice cream Steve kept in the fridge. Minutes later we were entering the back door of the Overture, shortly before Elivs arrived and joined us on stage. He remembered I was going to be there, and immediately went about working up the set list with the band while I stood, stage right, five feet or so back from Steve’s Steinway. Elvis loved the piano sound Steve was getting on “Almost Blue,” which was gorgeous, to be sure.

I’d witnessed this before, soundcheck with Elvis and the Imposters, at Atlantic City on New Year’s Eve a couple times. It’s pretty extraordinary, to say the least. They do a good hour-plus sculpting a set that may or may not resemble what they actually do a few hours later in concert.

Three things really stood out this time. When he rehearsed the Bacharach-David classic “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”—a song he performed on the 1978 Stiffs Live tour and album but never in the U.S.—he said that for 38 years he’s been singing it wrong, something to do with an improper placement of the word “just,” which in Dusty Springfield’s classic version does shift position before and after “don’t know.”

Then, looking at his set list and seeing “Chemistry Class,” he muttered to himself, “You’re fucking kidding me.” I chuckled, to myself. Needless to say, it didn’t make the cut.

Toward the end there was a song that Davey was uncomfortable with. As I didn’t take notes—I was a guest, not a reporter–I cant remember what it was. But Elvis, who’s been telling audiences on his book tour how he taught himself to read and write music when he began composing non-pop pieces, sang the song solo for Davey, reciting each guitar chord change along the way—and there were a great many of them.

“Chemistry Class,” by the way, is from Armed Forces. Shortly after Elvis played Bunky’s, Rockpile, with his producer Nick Lowe, played there. Elvis’s and Nick’s visionary manager Jake Riviera was at the show, and a a party after, told me that Armed Forces, which hadn’t been released yet, was Elvis’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had no reason to doubt it, and if Armed Forces wasn’t as impactful as Sgt. Pepper’s, it was stunning nevertheless, and Elvis would go on to write hits with Paul McCartney.

“When we recorded Armed Forces we listened to a lot of records while we were traveling,” Elvis said in the recent talk where he spoke of Rick Nielsen and Cheap Trick, citing Bowie’s “Berlin records” and Abba records—which, he noted, might not “seem a likely fit for a lot of people”–and Cheap Trick and Wings. “That was our jukebox,” he said, and it made a lot of sense in that Armed Forces was heavily produced pop in comparison to the stripped down intensity of This Year’s Model.

I reminded Elvis of the Cheap Trick/Bunky’s connection during dinner in the catering room. Someone mentioned the Minneapolis gals, and he was taken that they drove all the way down for the show. Of course, I wanted it on the record that I flew in all the way from NYC.

“But you’re weird,” said Elvis. Then he sweetly showed me a few vintage pictures from Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink that he had on his phone. And I use the word “sweetly” on purpose, for this is the same guy who nearly 40 years ago had two Bunky’s SRO audiences on the edge of their seats, if not peeing in their pants.

After dinner I went out to meet Tom, Rob and Jan and my sister. Walking around the lobby I kept looking around for other people I knew from Madison whom I hadn’t seen since Bunky’s or the Orpheum, but there was no one. Then again, maybe I hadn’t factored in that they would all most likely look a lot different, as I know I unquestionably do.

I did take notes during the show, but they weren’t very good. I was just to into it, being a fan, enjoying the moment. Later I picked up the set list online:

1. “Wake Me Up”
2. “Watching the Detectives”
3. “Accidents Will Happen”
4. “Human Hands”
5. “Flutter & Wow”
6. “Little Triggers”
7. “Country Darkness”
8. “Bedlam”
9. “Watch Your Step”
10. “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”
11. “Everyday I Write the Book”
12. “(I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea”
13. “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”
14. “Lost on the River #12”
Encore:
15. “The Long Honeymoon”
16. “Almost Blue”
17. “God Give Me Strength”
18. “Shot With His Own Gun”
19. “Another Girl in My Head”
20. “Alison”
21. “Church Underground”
22. “Motel Matches”
23. “Stella Hurt”
Second encore:
24. “Jimmie Standing in the Rain/Brother Can You Spare a Dime”
25. “Ghost Train”
26. “American Without Tears”
27. “I Hope You’re Happy Now”
28. “High Fidelity”
29. “Brilliant Mistake”
30. “Pump It Up”
31. “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”

As you can see, it was a monster set. Probably two-and-a-half times as long as their opening sets with Steely Dan, which looked to be pretty much the same each night.

Somewhere along the line Elvis said it was his own first show in Madison in 33 years, if I heard it correctly. I’m glad I left town when I did.

When he and The Imposters kicked in on “Watching the Detectives”—the set’s second song—I was watching my whole career pass by: His index finger-squeeze accompanying “it only took my little finger to blow you away” brought me back to Bunky’s and “swastika tattoo.” A comment about “15 clowns and one big red one”—clearly about the Republican candidates—reminded me of the first Spectacular Spinning Songbook shows on Broadway in 1986, when even then he did a bit about the “sin of Trump.” And a story about listening to the radio and hearing Dark Side of the Moon and “Stairway to Heaven” evoked hearing the same things on radio stations everywhere.

The Imposters, meanwhile, sounded terrific, as always. They’d already done a few dates with Steely Dan, but this was one of the first—and only—shows they were doing on their own during the short stretches of off days from the Steely Dan tour.

What was incredible was that they hadn’t played together in the three years since the end of the Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook shows. I don’t know how much rehearsing they’d done or needed to do to get back into the groove on songs that they’ve played for decades, but I do know Pete’s work ethic: He books himself into a studio and plays to tapes for days on end in preparations for anything he’s involved in. A true pro in every sense of the word.

I continue to try to make sense of my mostly unintelligible scribble from that night. I was glad he followed “Detectives” with “Accidents Will Happen,” lead track from Armed Forces. I always liked it when he opened shows with it—which he often did—since the opening words are “Oh, I just don’t know where to begin,” and it showcases Steve so well.

Then again, so did just about everything. He played a lot of piano—most notably, maybe, on “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” which did make the cut. The latter part of the set proper picked up steam with “Everyday I Write the Book” and “(I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea,” but I really lost it when a guy got up and started dancing on “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and the crowd sang the responses in the second verse: It really brought home why I was there, that after all this time Elvis—and his first album—were still relevant, and by extension, perhaps, so was I.

The first set of encores—Elvis’s sets of encores are like the second half of the show—began with an “Imperial Bedroom suite” of that album’s “The Long Honeymoon,” which had him singing at the mic without his guitar, and “Almost Blue,” Steve playing piano like he was painting a picture. It also included two songs from his 1998 album with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory (the hit “God Give Me Strength” and “I Still Have That Other Girl”) and a few songs just with Steve—sort of a reprise of their 1996 tour as a duo, including the compositionally complex “Shot With His Own Gun.” There was a lot of applause-instructing pointing by Elvis to Steve throughout the show, but especially here.

The first encore—nine songs altogether!—also had a solo acoustic mini-set including “Alison,” and a long piano ballad version of “Motel Matches” which Elvis just sang the shit out of—no surprise since the song requires such vocal precision, and Elvis is the rare vocalist capable of it. The second set of encores—eight more songs—ended rapid-fire rock with the traditional closers “Pump It Up” and “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”

Like I said, it was a monster set, and monster show. Even the band felt so, and Elvis did, too, in an email response a few days later. I don’t know why, but the place was only half-full. And when I brought everyone backstage after (it was a rare instance where I had an all-access laminate allowing me to do so) it wasn’t the typical clusterfuck—to use a word I detest but is fitting in this case—that it would have been in New York. Rather, it was pretty much just Pete, Steve and Davey in their small dressing room.

Steve Tannen, of The Weepies, was there, too. He’d driven up from Iowa City, where he and wife/fellow Weepies principal wife Deb Talan and their three young sons live. It was a three-hour drive, an hour less than from Minneapolis, so I guess I was still the weird one of the group. I think there were a couple others, and it was a blast. Everyone posed for pictures, and the guys couldn’t have been nicer. I was so impressed with Steve and the story of how the Weepies survived and thrived during his wife’s cancer treatment that I ended up writing a long story about it.

Then Robbie brought Elvis in. He looked exhausted. He might have come in anyway, but I’m pretty sure he did it just for me, as it’s not like he knew anyone else there, and there were no music bizzers to meet-and-greet—surprising, in that I figured there would at least be some radio or retail or something. Then I realized that I hadn’t come out of my Bunky’s reverie and was still living in the days of music business past, when all those things existed.

I might have had three beers and no dope.

My sister offered to take a picture of me with Elvis but I said no, and I didn’t want to ask him to pose with anyone. He would have done it, of course. But he was still finishing up his book. He’d just done a monster show. He had to phone home. I’d gotten plenty enough from him for one day. One career. I’d gone home, but it wasn’t his home.

The one thing he didn’t do, that I was hoping for, was “Green Shirt.” I almost said something about it at dinner and am glad I didn’t. He probably would have called a second sound check in between bites and learned it.

The Quisling Clinic, by the way, is now the Quisling Terrace Apartment Homes, having been restored, converted and added onto since I left town. It was originally built in the 1890s as a house, acquired in the 1940s by the Quislings and renovated as a clinic, with alterations and additions, in 1946, taking it into the Art Moderne style.

The Capitol’s now the Overture, and Bunky’s is long gone.

Elvis is now on the road touring his book, with a new round of solo performance dates to follow.

Nothing’s scheduled with the Imposters, and there’s no telling when—or if—I’ll ever get to see them again, in Madison or anywhere else.

Tales of Bessman: The first times I saw The Dead (and Siegel-Schwall)

Jim

Admittedly, it would have been more fitting to listen to Workingman’s Dead on Labor Day Weekend, but since I just acquired a copy of the recently released three-CD Grateful Dead: Dick’s Picks Vol. 18–Dane County Coliseum, Madison, WI 2/3/78 Uni-Dome, University of N. Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 2/5/78, and it’s a long weekend, I figured I’d give the whole thing a spin and see if it was as good as I remembered.

Yes, I was at the Madcity show. We at The Madcity Music Sheet—my first music writing gig—were big Deadheads.

Not sure how many times I’d seen them before—or after, for that matter, though I did see them many more times, most memorably with Dylan at Giants Stadium and at least once with Bruce Hornsby.

The first time was April 26, 1970, some 25 miles north of Madison at York Farm in Poynette, Wis., the last day of the three-day, post-Woodstock/Altamont Sound Storm rock festival. I remember the show being great, but that’s about it. What I can tell you about it now comes from various attendees’ online recollections and an excellent Lost Live Dead blog account I just discovered (along with great photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society website): They topped a bill of regional acts including Tongue, Crow, Illinois Speed Press, Rotary Connection and Baby Huey & the Babysitters, and played three sets (nearly six hours), including a 20-30 minute “Dancing in the Street,” with Jerry having shaved his beard, perhaps, an attendee surmised, because of the drug bust earlier that year in New Orleans later immortalized in “Truckin’.”

After the second Dead song (it’s one of those relatively few Dead shows where the set list doesn’t exist) the band sought an I Ching, “the grey book,” Bob Weir said after a different one was passed forward (according to one Jerry Klein in The SetList Program website). The band then knelt down together in the center of the stage, tossed coins, read results, and then arose “laughing and hollering” and launched into “Other One,” with Wavy Gravy sitting ecstatically on top of a bank of speakers on the far left.

I digress. The second Wisconsin rock festival came exactly two months later, in Iola Township, some 140 miles North of Madison and 80 miles West of Green Bay, on June 26-28. I was there for the whole thing—whatever that means—and now must rely on an excellent two-part blog account The People’s Fair—which the festival was called–and The Battle of Iola, which is what it became.

According to a Saturday report in Madison’s Capital Times referenced in the blog, the festival, at the beginning, resembled “one of those medieval fairs that preceded the urbanization of Europe and its subsequent Renaissance [with] bubbles [that] were very much in style and they floated through the frisbee-laced air.” Despite the lack of toilets and telephones and “an abundance of mosquitoes,” thousands had gathered together “to reaffirm their own culture far from the boarded-up windows of State Street”—this an allusion to the era’s antiwar protests-turned-riots that frequently left many shops on Madison’s main campus street with shattered glass.

But the “carnival atmosphere,” one correspondent noted, substituted LSD for cotton candy. I distinctly remember gobbling down acid, psilocybin, mescaline and speed and wandering around complaining that I couldn’t get off.

Friday’s schedule, it says, included Melanie, Paul Butterfield, Taj Mahal, and Buddy Rich. Of these I vividly remember seeing Butterfield, though I can’t remember if they were right before or after Siegel-Schwall. I think it was before, and I’m pretty sure both acts were on sometime between 1 and 5 a.m. Saturday morning. Butterfield was great, but Siegel-Schwall was lifechanging: To this day, I’ve never seen a better band. Corky Siegel remains one of my biggest influences and closest friends. I was with Jim Schwall two months ago back in Madison. Everything else about Iola may be a purple haze, but I remember Siegel-Schwall, whom I would see countless times after, like it was last night.

Looking at the blog, I see the Amboy Dukes—Ted Nugent’s early band—played Saturday along with Brownsville Sation, Crow and Buffy Sainte-Marie, and no, I wasn’t one of the group of guys near the stage who affectionately yelled in unison, “Buffy. We want to fuck you!”—nor did I remind her of it years later at a press dinner in New York. Local bands who played included The Tayles, Oz, Tongue, Fuse (featuring future Cheap Tricksters Rick Nielsen and Tom Peterson), Soup (Appleton rock trio led by late guitar legend Doug Yankus) and Short Stuff—the wonderful Milwauke blues-rock band starring the great harp player Jim Liban and keyboardist Junior Brantley that I also became close to.

I’d forgotten about Iggy and the Stooges, who played just before sunrise Sunday morning. I remember them now, but I can’t remember if I heard the gunfire.

The blog recounts rumors of “shakedowns, beatings and rapes by bikers in attendance.” Just before 7 a.m., people began throwing bottles at the bikers at their campsite at the bottom of a hill to the left of the stage. A few bikers mounted up and charged, guns blazing. Three people were wounded, none seriously. People in the crowd estimated between 40,000 and 60,000 started leaveing, though I stayed to see Chuck Berry and Ravi Shankar. But after Iola, “the brief era of mass, multi-day festivals in Wisconsin was over.”

But back to Dick’s Picks Vol. 18, specifically February 3, 1978. Pigpen had died in 1973, and now the band had Keith Godchaux on keyboards and wife Donna Jean Godchaux on vocals. Before I even took out CD1, I studied the box to see if they did any of my faves, and sure enough, from the first Dead album came “Cold Rain and Snow,” though it was slowed down from the LP version, with a pretty guitar solo, but not as intense. Also from The Grateful Dead was a good job on “New Minglewood Blues,” from the Cedar Falls show.

The Madison gig also yielded a great “Good Lovin’,” and “Looks Like Rain,” which flowed from the first disc’s opening “Bertha.” This disc also had a couple tracks from the band’s in-between show Feb. 4 at the Milwaukee Auditorium, including an excellent take of “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.”

The second disc was all Madison, with a fabulous “Estimated Prophet” blending into “Eyes of the World” (the extended groove clearly showing the band’s avowed Coltrane influence), then merging into “Playing In the Band,” “The Wheel,” and back to “Playing In the Band.”

From the Iowa show came another favorite, “Deal,” also a terrific “Scarlet Begonias,” which fused into “Fire On the Mountain.”

So was it as good as I remembered? I can’t remember. But it’s really good. And when I finally looked at the booklet, I saw it had pictures from Keith Wessel, whom I worked with at The Madcity Music Sheet, and a review by the late Michael St. John, whom I also worked with at The Sheet as well as The Emerald City Chronicle.

So Dick’s Picks Vol. 18 essentially took me back to my beginnings as a writer. Onwards, now, to Siegel-Schwall ’70, which, by the way, is available thanks to my talking pal Tom Vickers into reissuing it and the entire Siegel-Schwall Vanguard catalog in a 2001 box set.

Here’s a fave track from Siegel-Schwall ’70: