Grey Flannel

As part of my adaptive reading program, I just finished Mosquitoes-- a much criticized early Faulkner novel which, while flawed, still rewards with unpolished and sometimes erratic youthful exuberance of description. Another claustrophobic August narrative for me-- dank, humid and overripe with the disappointment of human relations. But well worth the effort.

Late last night after a day or two of uncharted sleep-deprivation, I made the mistake of flipping television channels.  Besides my go-to film stations, there is quite a bizarre array of lameness across the board: flimsily-premised game-shows, re-treaded bad 'reality'... it's as though everything has been done... and redone, or the interesting actors have taken a hiatus and left us with the dregs of low-level celebrity who for the likes me are not just unremarkable but unrecognizable.  

Friends of mine are visiting New York, and ask me for suggestions. I'm not in the least tourist-ready, as I once was-- brimming with passion and lists of competing activities and shows... primed for inspiration and  ripe to be dazzled by some fantastic band or gallery exhibition.  It's not just seasonal malaise but a general thing. I mean, my books, most of whose authors are dead, do not fail me.  They also remind of my creative mediocrity and the distance between where I am and where I might have been.

And there are those among my Facebook acquaintances who still post and gush and selfie at myriads of openings and gigs and events-- dress up and do their hair and socialize.  It is a reminder of why the Stones are still touring... for those of us who have found little else to replace what used to be a common and easily-accessed quality music scene. 

Around 2 AM, there was a Nashville songwriting hour program, featuring three young artists.  One had guitar skills, but the songs were utterly cliche'd... another I recognized from the club scene here twenty years back... here he was on television, with his talent yet to sprout... and a third-- the daughter of an old and extremely good songwriter... she-- whom I'd met as a baby-- seemed exhausted by life; her songs, too, were old and not memorable.  I felt a kind of pity for her performance, especially conjuring her father whose genius was undeniable despite extreme stage-fright in his early days which he battled by facing away from the audience.  It was charming because he was brilliant and undeniable. But where am I, I was thinking?

I happened on a brief clip of a Townes Van Zandt memorial songwriter's circle-- with all the best Nashville celebrities from the 1990's... with each performance of a song more heartbreaking than the previous.  I watched and I wept.  Townes was an occasional visitor to New York and the sheer pleasure of having once spent an evening with his humble sense of humor and utter boy-charm was thrilling.  He was a consummate and sad artist.

There are of course a few lights in the August tunnel-- the Os Gemeos murals on West 14th Street, not minding the occasional soaking of a passing rainstorm... the pale moon, translucent over the twilight river sky.... the perfect pitch of a little morning dove who visits my bedroom windowsill nearly every day... just inches away behind the glass.  And what I call the 'grey flannel' days- those occasional weather-anomalies of chilly rain, reminders of the autumn to come, and of those homesick summer camp mornings when we were forced to pull these scratchy uniform components from the bottom of our steamer trunks and wait out the sun dressed like soldiers.  These days make me grateful to be an adult-- to have freedom of time and wardrobe and activity-- privileges we aging seniors take much-too-much for granted.

This morning I woke up with one of those vivid memories one occasionally pulls out of a deep subconcious hat... of a late August trip with an ex to the Jersey Shore.  Difficult to get away without children in those days, but we managed to rent a car and have a couple of unpremeditated days exploring roads I knew from college and he knew from songs.  We were surely at the end of some journey as a couple, although we had some fun... including a night in a cheap depressing motel in Neptune we booked out of desperation-- in the days when one had to drive from place to place to inquire about vacancies: it was after midnight and the desk attendant was annoyed and smelled of cheap whiskey. We swam in a small, sort of fetid pool and then slept poorly in a damp ground-floor room where the air conditioner was ineffective and one felt like a mushroom. 

Anyway, at least the ex got a decent song out of the trip.  I came home with the desolation of another failed relationship, and that deep sorrowful mix of nostalgia and regret and impending loneliness that comes when one distinctly chooses to put something precious behind a line which marks past from present.  There was some love there, or had been... and surely it was I who destroyed it-- I was very good at that.  Although now, so many years hence, I suppose the song still exists, and between us, the thing that replaces everything in the end-- what we had, what we had not, a kind of distance through which we see things both less and more clearly as we log yet another season.

Credit Karma

Years ago, when I was an emerging bassist with a passion for eighth-note pulse-rock, I was flown to London for a unique opportunity.  The gig was to replace a weak album track for a well-known, high-charting band whose bassist was apparently struggling with issues.  At the time, digital instruments were not common, machine-generated instruments were obvious and the management decided to 'fly in' another player.  For the biggest paycheck I'd ever received, I was to lay down a simple, basic, eighth-note, pocket-heavy part, on what was to be a chart-topping single.  I got to play along to a band whose music I paid for on vinyl, in those days.  The catch was, I had to sign serious documents swearing I would never disclose my identity.  

Of course I was told that my work only 'might' be used on the recording, although the authorship would be attributed to the regular band members.  I signed, received a fat 4-figure check, a taxi back to Gatwick where I boarded a prepaid Virgin flight home. Not even an overnight stay.  In New York City, the music scene for sidemen was pretty male-dominated.  I felt like bragging but I couldn't.  I'd sworn away my rights and I take these things seriously.  So while I banked the check, I was stripped of the notch in my musical belt--the credit, the album listing-- things which musicians crave and hoard like trophies. Still, it gave me some personal swagger.  I felt 'heard' if not seen.  

Some years later, when Bill Wyman quit The Rolling Stones, bassists world-over were salivating to audition for the gig.  I was a young single mother playing mostly bars in the city, unable to tour.  One amazing Saturday night, at a well-known dive bar in the east Village, Bobby Keys came to drink and sit in with our band.  He ended up playing an entire 7-hour marathon night-- insisting, during breaks, that I was going to be the next bassist for the Stones.  I've heard a lot of alcohol-fueled talk in my day, and every single deserving career-bassist in New York was gunning for this miracle opportunity. Meanwhile, a sober Bobby called me during the week-- left messages on my voicemail.  He'd talked to Keith, he said... and sure enough the management called me to schedule. But I declined.  They called again.  I declined again-- I had a young child-- that was my priority. Again, they offered babysitters... other kids were on the road.  Just come... play... Well, I knew I'd be a sideman, not a band member... and did I want the larger-than-life thing? Me-- in a semi-glorified studio apartment with my little boy, my books and my 8-track tape machine?  I was happy. And I couldn't really fathom Mick Jagger welcoming a woman as anything but a back-up singer.  Bobby called back; again and again I declined.  I also knew the shortlisted guys and they were my heroes... it was a place for which I didn't want to compete, nor did I really belong in their company. I mean-- Darryl Jones played with Miles. I worshipped him, saw him every chance I got.

A couple of weeks later I was on 48th Street and one of the store clerks actually noticed me... Hey, he remarked, I read you were on the Stones' shortlist.  Not me, I answered.  But from that moment on, I was given the retail-respect most players were used to.  So while I didn't share, divulge or brag... there were some perks.

In and out of college, it's a thing... people ask.. will I get credit? It seems to make all the difference. I once judged one of those King of the Blues contests at Guitar Center alongside the late Bill Sims and the also late incomparable Hugh McCracken.  Before the judging we had to fill out a form with our 'credits'.  Hugh kept peeking at my pathetic sheet and asked me what he should put down.  He played rhythm on BB King's The Thrill is Gone.  Doesn't that just about knock us all out of the park?  What a humble, quiet genius he was. Credit? Plenty.  

But how about all those amazing pocket-players who graced the old records that made our hearts jump and our feet tap as kids?  Some of them remain uncompensated, unnamed.  I think about them-- about the great talents who died penniless or under-acknowledged while instagram celebrities of this culture are regaled and overpaid for nothing but popularity contracts... hype.  It's hard to even know what these airbrushed people actually look like, let alone sound like, in the naked dark.  

I wake up to my old clock-radio alarm and there's often some ironic reminder of my past.  I Love Rock and Roll.. my dear best friend and bandmate Alan Merrill who struggled and strained for credit for his hit song.  On a morning two weeks ago, 'my' song came on.  Even with the plastic old speaker, I could recognize my bass fingers in a heartbeat.  The song will live; the credit will die.  It gave me a little jolt for about a minute-- me the aging old songwriter/poet whose anonymity is almost ensured.  

Some of us get credit for what we didn't do... taking the rap for a friend.  All those writers who claim they are responsible for anything we find in their poems or work. After a while, resonance is built-in-- a signature... a voice.  I've been reading Javier Marias... he often played with the concept of authorship... in Tomorrow in the Battle..' he ghostwrites for a ghostwriter, shows up with the imposter's identity at a government office.  It gets complicated. 

Didn't you play with Patti Smith, a medical person asked me this week as I got up from his chair? No, I didn't, I replied. Browsing the shelves in Barnes and Noble, she has her own little section.  Kind of amazing. The irony of life-- of fame, of random success or failure... the luck of some draw.  My ex-husband, the poster child of under-acknowledged rock players, was once asked, as we sat down to eat in a restaurant, 'Aren't you famous?'  He looked at me, looked at the flirtatious waitress, and replied... I'm hungry, pointing to the menu.  

To the unacknowledged, undercredited greats, I salute you, my heroes... Heaven stands still.

A Mind of Her Own

I'm finding it hard to sleep.  World catastrophes distort my thought processes; an impending hurricane, the threat of war... they impinge, loom like living shadows.  What is the worst outcome, I ask myself? Death? I have been surrounded by its aftermath; I learned its scent in my parents' bedroom, witnessing their denouement, marveling at the absence of comfort even a lifetime partner provided at the end.  He did not wait for her, nor did anyone honor her simple final requests.  

Suicide has become a devastating unintentional weapon.  When I was a teenager it seemed so innocent and near-poetic.  There was Sylvia Plath and Nick Drake... their deaths seemed to wind the threads of creativity into an organized narrative, with a kind of apotheosis at the end.  

The immigrants haunt my dreams somehow... trying helplessly to find a home in a hostile universe.  The tiny kindnesses of my week are so often offered by those who speak little English but understand the language of human need.  The mathematics of population are broken; there are so many here, and then so many more... where will they sleep, who will feed them? The Turkish fruit vendor who stuffs my bag with things... Happy, he says to me. Happy, as my eyes water. Crossing through Carver Houses on the way home last night, a pair of rats stumbled into the curb-- recently poisoned, they were panicky and deranged. A huddle of teenagers recorded their awkward dance moves on their phones, hysterical; a few of them threw rocks at them.  It was prime entertainment... and they were suffering.. God, what is wrong with me that I can't even bear the discomfort of sewer rats? That I take these things home with me like images burned on my head-screen? A kind of omen?

I woke up with lyrics on my tongue:  'She had a mind of her own and she used it well...' It took a senior minute for me to identify the Stones song which honestly I hadn't heard in years, but the message... kept on playing over and over.  According to my mother I never used it well, nor did I wear it well, in her fashion-critical opinion.  I believed in things... I believed in fate.  I waited for one of the myriad endings of one of my stories to unravel in realtime, with pen dipped in ink, poised-- waiting for the ordained, the handwriting, the lunar device... I rode the train and skipped his stop deliberately... 

Who of us is really using it well?  There are some... but the majority of slide-shows that scroll away-- they are re-runs, or remakes, or tributes... could we possibly have run out of ideas?  Film makers used to cut and cut to fit their dream onto a few reels of image; now there is infinite space and the content not quite as worthy.  I'm tired of biopics and contemporary versions of history and celebrity.  People used to look a certain way; they were iconic and unique.  There is make-up and dress-up and there are roles to play.. but there is also surgery and body shaping and face-contouring and it blurs the edges. The other night I realized I can scarcely tell the difference between Julia Roberts and Kira Sedgwick.  Doctor, my eyes? 

I'm not sure if it's a combination of chronic tinnitus and the subtle motors of technology, but I hear a sort of perpetual soundtrack-- a swelling and then a decrescendo... of music-- chords, harmony... some celestial sort of instrument.  I pick up a guitar and it doesn't synch.  It is either the sound of New York, or my own personal madness.  The inside of my head-- riddled with the kind of messages that undermined the confidence of that star gymnast in the Olympics... the emotional cancel-culture that afflicts the more sensitive among us.  

When we were young we overestimated our power.  I'm not sure if it was the era-- after all, we changed history with our demonstrations and music-- but we walked tightropes with confidence.  I used to obsessively watch my son's basketball games-- as though my presence could change their outcome.  We all do this-- we witness sports; we yell and root.  Recently I spent 5 hours watching a damn tennis game. Afterward I thought of this block of precious time, and I wondered at the end, lying on one's final bed, if one doesn't demand a refund.  

We do the best we can with the diminishing value of the contemporary, the desperate audiences searching while all around our structures are crumbling, our political world sways and we are threatened with daily horror.  I remember when love to me meant the patient impatience between lying-downs.  Then you have a baby and passion is whispered and things are spoken in beds... discovery and adventure are shelved and you find intimacy between sheets of a Memory Motel of your own invention.  Personally I miss not just the bedmates but the sounds-- the subtle music of foreign cities.  To write this into a song obsesses me, and I am failing.

For those of us with a mind of our own,  we cope with some unavoidable bitternesses; we fold our clothes and prepare our version of a coffin.  We assess the sad world-- count the suicides, the murders, the disappointments and failures-- pile them beside the things we have created... our children, our books and music... and we finally choose to believe, in a world where nothing is good enough, that we were just that. 

 

Everybody Knows

Sunday claustrophobia can creep up relatively unnoticed, like a stray cat with no voice.  The day's television newscasts were relentlessly alarming... not just the Afghan crisis but the hurricane which felt like a terrifying deja-vu.  For those of us with the disease of crippling empathy, it's difficult to convince ourselves that the sidewalks are actually safe; we are the lucky Americans at whom no one is shooting, and we are at least spared for now by the scourges of Mother Nature.

The reservoir at sunset was as smooth as an ice rink.  Not even ducks and geese disturbing the surface as though they were collectively observing the world catastrophes-- the fires and the floods, wars and famine-- sitting it out and celebrating the uptown calm of urban habitat on a summer weekend.  

Indulging in my pandemic television habit, I caught the Elizabeth Murray documentary, Everybody Knows, assuming the Leonard Cohen reference... who knows, I was mildly distracted since I've seen this one before.  I remember Elizabeth; I visited her studio once and was not as much impressed as inspired because she was one of those fortunate people with both a calling and a pathway.  Not only did she rarely doubt her work but she seemed to know exactly where she was going.  Also she had a wonderful husband-- the second-- but he 'got' her... and there is nothing better in this world than a partner who is truly that.  

Seeing the art world of the 70's and 80's is always jarring... there was clarity and importance.  There were critics and gallerists who had a point of view.  There were women gallerists who understood their artists-- who supported and promoted in just the right way-- not intrusive and not pushy and corrupting.  Art from the beginning was generous... it was expressing something without thought of compensation.  Yes, there were commissions and grants along the way but somehow it was the audience who profited, not the dealers.  It was the art world, not the art market.  I loved New York... the studios and the musicians practicing in drafty lofts... making my way up steep flights of old wood, kicking aside the garbage and scraps of fabric that littered the hallways... work was being done.  People with cigarettes hanging from their mouths were mixing colors and hammering things, with vinyl on their turntables-- the shiny black discs often spattered and fingerprinted with pigment.  

I remember being invited to a fancy dinner honoring the sculptor Noguchi who arrived wearing a flannel shirt and khaki pants.  One of his friends took me home to a raw space in Soho where I sat on an old mattress and watched him peel back canvas after canvas like a desert rug merchant.  It was a dream of enchantment-- like seeing the Stones in a small club with barely anyone there... the palpable sense of invention to a backbeat that came from some deep ground soil like audio Delta mud.  I left his place feeling my insides painted.

The death of Charlie Watts this week was another knoll in the endless dirge of my generation.  Like most bass players, I longed to share a stage with him.  In the early 90's when Bill Wyman had had enough, I was sounded for the audition.  Of course they were a male-dominated organization and I couldn't imagine it was anything but tokenism, and I refused.  Besides, I'd been called for famous auditions and the 'stars' were rarely there for the first elimination.  I wasn't going to fall for it.  Their sax player called me day after day-- I'd been lucky enough to share an all-night stage with him, and he pressured me.  Their manager...  but I had a child in nursery school... I couldn't leave.  We've got babysitters, he said... but it wasn't my 'trajectory'.  I wasn't like Elizabeth Murray and those other people with a 'team'.  I was alone, doing two jobs-- three jobs, sometimes.  And this is not about me... 

We'll all miss Charlie.  We have so much of him left behind... and I was also lucky enough to have stopped into Ronnie Scott's during the 80's when he was playing his 'heart' with various local jazz musicians.  He had his calling, and a pathway.  I wonder whether these youtube sensations with their hot licks and their virtuoso renditions of Bonham and Moon, the nine-year-olds who weigh less than an average bass drum but can play every single fill on every single Foo Fighters track.... do they have a pathway?  When you asked Charlie about his playing, he replied simply he liked making people dance.  

Circling the reservoir tonight there were few runners... as though everyone had returned to their nests for the evening to witness more of the drama on CNN.  It is compelling, disturbing and difficult to ignore.  Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen sang, for the last time, at some point... and yes, we all know he had a co-writer... which matters little, because it is sort of the anthem at the bottom of my catalogue-- the funereal hymn, the accompaniment to every tragedy and nightfall and sunset... I could write endless alternate verses but it wouldn't matter... it suits the time-- the Plague, the racism, the economic divide... infidelity... failed and fragile love-- he covered it all.  For the rest of us-- the 'remainder' I think is the technical word for what is left after the subtracted... what we leave undone does little good and unfortunately not everybody will know.  

Sticky Fingers

 I was newly 18 when the Stones released Sticky Fingers.  Converted by the second track and totally romanced by Wild Horses, it was clear the album was going to take precedence on my little dormitory stereo in those innocent days before headphones.  Plus you could hear Brown Sugar and Bitch blasting across quadrangles everywhere.  Still, it was the cover that really obsessed me, the art student who had hung out at Max's with fake ID and visited the Warhol studio on several teenage occasions.  It was clever-- it was pop, it was tongue and cheek, and it was ultra sexy.  There were racy promo photos of Mick wearing nothing but the album placed just so across his hips.  

My Mom often used the expression 'sticky fingers' when she suspected one of us girls had raided her purse or the refrigerator.  Never me-- I was inclined otherwise... not a pilferer, nor a tattler.  In my first year of college I caught a roommate red-handed in my underwear drawer.  Confusing and a little creepy.  She cried and returned  a stash of 'borrowed' things, none of which were of much use to her.  It was her pathology, our Psych-major neighbor explained.  

After I had a baby I learned the true and literal meaning of sticky fingers.  They were everywhere... windows, appliances, stereos, bookshelves.  My little monster once 'mailed' a peanut butter sandwich in the VCR slot.  Nights were spent wiping things down-- after all, these things spread germs or grew bacteria, or whatever.  Babies put anything and everything in their mouth and then they transfer to their hands and paint the walls.  

The pandemic admonished us of the potential threat in human fingerprints; I have often thought back with nostalgia on those innocent baby-juice days as I learned to wipe off surfaces, doorknobs and other touchables.  Admittedly I'm not too fastidious.  But being alone here for extended hours and months, I've done a sort of unintentional categorical inventory of things.  I've discovered possessions, cds, albums, books-- old letters and photos-- rocks and minerals, souvenirs... things I recall with some vagueness.  Like an associative exercise, one thing leads me to another-- a Colin Blunstone album, a love-letter from a deceased drummer, a set of strings from some rockstar or other... I've never been one to actually catalogue;  I loaned so many books and albums over the years-- many never come back.  During recent months I've come upon these 'gaps' like a missing tooth... and I wonder, besides my own careless generosity, what visitor or overnight guest might have slipped something into a pocket, then let themselves quietly out while I was sleeping off an all-night gig.

My first husband felt entitled to my things in a charming sort of way.  After all, he is non-materialistic and would give anyone anything.  When I pulled out a vintage album on which he played, I found the vinyl had been lifted and a burned cd with a handwritten note left in its place.  But that was a focused appropriation.  In a way he 'owned' his work.  Here I'm missing Dylan-- Hendrix... Faulkner... Pynchon... baffling.  Sticky Fingers-- the actual zipper version-- appropriately (?)-- has been removed.  

My old neighbor used to come by every night and slip something into his pocket.  He took wine bottles from our local liquor store, too.  Sometimes he'd steal cookies and food.  When I'd question him, on the way out, he'd reply 'you don't need THAT'.  Much of his 'loot' were compact jazz box-sets he loved.  Slim and Slam.  Bud Powell.  He was a famous photographer and a great man who had entered the last stage of his life.   He was confused.  I was a little flattered that he wanted my things.  Go figure.  His fingers were literally sticky from the stolen cookies.  He left prints. 

Modern technology is clean and sterile.  No inky prints on our letters-- no rumpled paper and foodstains on manuscripts.  We are reminded, in the pandemic, that phones carry germs.  Everyone is sanitizing their hands to near-death.  When we voted, we were given our very own stylus/pen which went home with us.  God forbid anyone should exchange body fluids.  

I can't help thinking sex has suffered-- it's messy and sticky.  Obviously hook-ups and random meetings have been squelched although surely there is an underground culture of touching and physical intimacy.  For the rest of us, monogamy is favored.  I found it ironic that the Stones' 'mouth' logo which first appeared on the Sticky Fingers album is now being commonly used on a mask which inherently messages 'anti-tongue'.  We haven't seen many real smiles on the street... lipstick sales are understandably down-- cosmetic tooth procedures no longer prioritized.  

When I was about 15 I went to a concert and one of the musicians brushed my arm on the way out.  He gave me a wink, as though it was intentional.  I could swear I felt it, like a sort of warm glow, and did not wash that spot for a week until I was forced into a school swim.  Our Mom used to tell us how God touched every baby before birth just above its mouth and left that cleft mark.  There's a certain magical transference that happens when someone touches you... talks with their hands-- plays your guitar and leaves marks on it... shares some moment with you that leaves you with a physical souvenir.  

I miss my old neighbor... I miss my old sense of hospitality.  Christmas is here and very few people will see my tree which, after setting it up alone, left my hands fragrant and syrupy with its resin.  I miss my missing things... tonight I'd put Sway on my turntable if I still had it.  I can get it on youtube... not the same.  A few of my beloved decorations are not in the box-- more victims of my neighbor?  There were undoubtedly times when I'd take things down and give them away.  

We have all been a little sterilized by this pandemic.  We fear one another, we hesitate-- we wash and scrub and hold our breath.  We disguise ourselves and pretend maybe to be cleaner than we are.  Most of all I miss being 'touched' by someone-- a random meeting or conversation where you exchange and leave a sort of mark on someone.  These things do not happen with the same frequency.  I worry our culture is a little too digital and premeditated... less fleshy and flawed and mud-spattered.  White-washed and clean, smelling of disinfectant... do not forget how bloody are our beating hearts, how sticky the fingerprints of our childhood and parental memories, how fragile our souls which pass so easily through the layers of latex and surgical cloth and flesh.  

Tonight I looked again in vain for the Saturn/Jupiter conjunction.  It's up there, like most things, even though we can't see them.  Not touching, but putting on a little bi-millennial show for us--  reminding us that this too shall pass, this 2020 mess.... just about a moonlight mile on down the road.

Blurred and Muddy

Another Saturday post-gig late-night.  All musicians have these hours where you are wired and tired but never that good kind of closure-exhaustion like doctors have after a successful surgery.  It is we who feel cut open and badly sutured too often-- we are the operators, but we are also the patients; we suffer from our own performance-- we criticize and rehash and wonder how we ever got the idea of standing in front of a drinking crowd while we pour out our hearts and try to make our instruments speak our angst.  Why would anyone want to do such a thing-- public humiliation, emotional guillotines, our own version of original karaoke of ourselves without a prompt?

Nothing I can locate on the new Time Warner line-up.  Of course, once I get used to numbers and a system-- -they change it.  Nothing is ever familiar these days; even my dial-tone tonight seems wrong.  PBS is usually good for a 4 AM film--- but at the moment they are once again showing this Muddy Waters/Rolling Stones/Chicago from 1981.  I've seen this before--- several times, although somehow I've never been able to stay with it.  Tonight I'm a little desperate for distraction, can't face Facebook or my voicemail… tomorrow the gig won't be quite as raw as it seems in the immediate 'wake' hours; I need to feed the distance.  Suddenly 1981 seems kind of innocent.  Muddy is the young/old Muddy I remember meeting at the Bottom Line.  I sat on his lap that one night--- on his hard, trunk-like legs and felt his calloused rough hands.  I was kind of a girl.  Bob Dylan sat in, too, that night-- not on him but with him, although Muddy seemed to care little for Dylan who was in one of those periods where he'd lost a considerable amount of star power.  Hard to imagine.  

The Checkerboard 1981 seems like a hold-over of the 70's.  People were still badly dressed; Mick has on some kind of lame orange-colored v-neck track suit or sweat pants.  He is chewing gum while Keith swills his Jack and looks still like the old Keith in his white Oxford shirt.  Muddy seems not all that impressed by the Stones although he seems to enjoy repeating 'Mick Jagger' in that great Muddy accent which post-Adam Levine has new irony.  Mick is goofy and mugging for maybe some girl.  Of course the whole night is a set-up.  I read somewhere the Stones asked the club owner to let in mostly black people and he could only muster like 10.  They show the waitress numerous times… the whole table-seating thing is annoying and obtrusive.   Muddy is unflappable.  He is rough and raw and always the same--- just right--- never slick, always gets you.  All these forgettable rap lyrics we incessantly hear … all the Jay-Z dynasties and unbreakables and niggahs… and Muddy says You don't have to go and it is enough.  Mick mugs and imitates and even wails a little, but there is something silly and childish even with Keith and Ronnie licking out.  It was better before they got up there.  But it took all those people sitting in to make us realize how much better it was before they got there, even though no one would have filmed it.

There is something still innocent about these rockstars going to a small club, even with the film crew and the set-up and the girlfriends and the entourage and the bottles of Jack flowing and the bullshit.  There is still something innocent because the music is still live and no auto-correct or backing tracks and it's American black music from the time just before Hip-Hop and it feels rootsy and folksy and direct and important. This is a document-- not so much editing and we hear the music, we know the truth.  It is a truth that obsesses the Stones, and Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, Clapton--- all the white rock stars.  And there is Muddy… same as he ever was, with his big face and big hands, and his You said you loved me baby…why don't you call me on the phone when people still had those big black receivers and curly cords and you had to be home when your baby called and it was important and magical.

1981---before AIDS was discovered-- people still had the 70's recklessness and the time factor in relationships because there was no email or texting and no overkill.  There was still the 'waiting'.   Songs and records and tapes and radio were important.  John Lennon had just been killed--- we were still in shock, but in a way that marked the end of the 1970's...   I remember that year so well--- as I entered Central Park today for my gig--- I thought about how none of that Strawberry Fields hype existed, none of the shitty folkies sitting around playing Lennon songs for tourists and cheap photo ops of the sundial with flowers and John and Yoko memorabilia.  John still wandered our streets and peeked into local bars and shops.

I had just moved into this model's apartment--- it felt like a palace-- it had double-height ceilings and a brick wall and a sleep loft and a tiny balcony.  I knew I'd be the happiest I'd ever be in that place, and I was.   Right at that moment when Mick was onstage at the Checkerboard, I had my appendix out and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were down the hall and we'd hang out on the hospital roof.  Everything was perfect.  My love affairs and my stray dog and my apartment and my new bass guitar and the gigs at CBGB's.

Tonight those PBS Stones (and I, too, for that matter) have all since finished with their future babies and those kids are grown, and except Keith, most of the wives and girlfriends have separate lives… they are gray and wrinkled and changed, and the money flows, the Jack Daniels has maybe stopped-- -the gum-chewing silliness.  Our Muddy is long gone, and only the memory of his wooden hands is with me… and the sameness of his performance--- always Muddy---hard again, hard always… just the recording quality changing… but the blues, despite the millions of bands who claim to own it and feel it and play it… the blues will always belong to Muddy…and John Lee… and Albert and Freddie and BB… like a primary color.  We pay tribute, we learn, we listen… but like the past we can't change what preceded us-- no surgery or remixes can alter what was, clear as clear, pure as pure.  Everything but muddy, no matter how we try or do not try to muck it all up.