Cat Handler:

You don’t have as much time, but I feel certain you can do this well:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/921532.html

Best,
the stingo

Friday

We were gathered solemnly, the five of us, in the ops lot of the National Folk Festival on Brown’s Island in the heart of Mecca. The shadow of Yamasaki’s Federal Reserve building loomed behind us.  It was Friday night, October 13, 2006, and we were paying rapt attention to the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions (GSIoM).

“All right,” he barked.  “Listen up!  We got rules to review.

“First, never give up your golf cart.  They’ve been stolen in the past.

“Next: Do not give up your walkie-talkie, even to a police officer.

“Third, do not give rides to anyone except performers, especially not to the old, infirm or handicapped.  These golf carts are the property of the National Folk Festival, and we’re here to use them for the performing artists.

“And under no circumstances are you to drive your golf cart up that hill over there,” pointing jerkily to his left. “It looks like a short cut, but it’s dangerous.  You could turn that cart over and damage it.”

We all turned to stare at a dirt road angled up at 45 degrees.  It was full of river rocks, gravel and clay, and lay between two brick walls five feet high, perhaps 20 feet to the top.  It looked like it might save about five minutes of driving time on the way to the Ukrops stage.

“Golly, that looks mighty dangerous to me, Mistah G,” I drawled.  “I wouldn’t even think about going up that thing.”

As I spoke, one of the NFF staffers in a small John Deere all-terrain vehicle gunned his engine in the parking lot, and standing tall, ripped up the hill and pushed over the top.  He cruised easily down the road to the left, erect, toward the Ukrops stage.

We all looked at the GSIoM in stunned silence.

After the briefing, an NFF staff member walked up to the GSIoM, pointed to a large pile of structural steel and signs and vinyl.  “Say, could you fellows please help me move some stuff over here?” he asked innocently.

The GSIoM looked at him coldly and said, loud and firm: “No.”

When he left, the GSIoM looked at me and said:  “He does what he’s supposed to do, and we do what we’re supposed to do.”

But we really weren’t supposed to do very much of anything that Friday night.  There just weren’t many assignments for volunteer artist escorts.  That night was comprised of hours of boredom pierced by moments of terror as the walkie-talkies crackled - but alas, the calls were not for us.

It got so cold that we had to huddle around an old 55-gallon oil barrel filled with scrap wood, roaring with yellow flames.  We warmed ourselves and traded a few stories, like old men waiting for work.  It was there that we learned about the GSIoM’s past - that he’d come back to Mecca from the West a few years back, after trying for 30 years to forget something awful that had happened to him years before.

Then he announced that it was time for a safety briefing.  Down to the Virginia Wine Vendors tent, he said.

A shout went up and we hopped into our golf carts, walkie-talkies at hand, maps at the ready, puttering off down through the parking lot, past the ops trailer, past the bucket brigade and past the volunteer tent. At Fifth Street, we deftly executed a precise and synchronized demonstration of four swarming golf carts in figure eights, backward loops and wheelies worthy of the Shriners.

The safety briefing at the wine vendor was short but sweet.  We lingered near the Times-Dispatch stage to hear the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a Creole band, then headed across the canal to the sweet Texas swing band sounds of the Quebe Sisters Band, from Burleson, TX.  The sisters, Grace, Sophia and Hulda, were all Texas State Fiddle Champions.

We formed a caravan to head back across the canal to the Ukrops stage to hear LeVent du Nord, the French Canadian group out of Montreal, when something peculiar happened.

We had stopped at the ops center to warm ourselves at the barrel fire, and were heading back out when, without warning, the GSIoM took a sharp left at Short Cut Hill, and pressed his accelerator to the floor.  With me riding shotgun and the Fashion Idol of Millions (FioM) in the back, he angled his cart straight up.

He made the first ten feet without a problem.  But the cart stalled out, began to tilt up and back and drift downhill in a hurry.

The FIoM jumped off, shouting:  “I’m outta here!”   I bailed to the right, the cart still wobbling backward.

“There’s too much weight to make it to the top, you ambitious fool,” I cried.  “You’ll kill us all!”

“You’re a trickster!” he shouted, nearly in tears.  “It’s all your fault! You made me do this!  I must get to the top of this hill!”  He was off his head.

The cart rolled rapidly to the bottom.  He spun his rear wheels, and headed back up again.

I shook my head back at the oilcan fire, and looked at the FIoM.

“What’s up with that?” I asked, watching warily as he rolled down the hill, transmission whining and clicking, then charged back up again and again, spinning wheels, churning and spitting out round river rocks, then rolling slowly back down again.

“You don’t know?” she said, incredulous.  “He’s still looking for whatever it was he lost a long time ago.”

“Or, actually, whoever.”

And then she told me a story I’ve never forgotten.

Back in 1968 at age 17, it seems, he’d borrowed his father’s brand new yellow and black-topped Mustang convertible to drive to school, then decided on a whim to skip it all and break free for a joy ride in the country with his best friend.

They headed happily west in the innocent manner of their youth, out Route 60 to Cumberland County, a case of PBRs from Tom’s Jiffy Mart in back, driving lonely country roads in search of lakes or ponds or whatever lay at the ends of Virginia’s rural two-tracks.

Sliding down one particularly treacherous slope, they fishtailed out in mud and leaves three inches deep at the bottom, sprawled into a ditch, and tumbled the convertible over sideways in a 360-degree rotation.

A shower of foam, half-empty cans, full six packs, cigarette butts and ashes floated eerily about the interior for what seemed like hours suspended in space.

When the car at last settled back to earth on its wheels, he could hear a muffled voice calling his name from afar.  He opened his door, walked around the car, looked through the woods and under the crushed Mustang, but could not locate his friend.

There was nothing to be found anywhere, except for a faint and pervasive scent of misery.  It grew more pungent by the minute.

He looked in the back seat and found his friend stuffed halfway into the trunk from the inside, still calling his name.

They limped slowly back to Mecca, the front end of his father’s brand new Mustang pointing in one direction while the wheels headed in another.

The following few weeks could only be called an unmitigated disaster of mythic proportions.

Already bounced from three high schools, his father withdrew him from the fourth, then booted him from home, throwing Jack Purcells, yellow pants, seersucker pants, white ducks, bow ties, blue blazers, wing tips, khaki suits, half-full bottles of J.T.S. Brown, LPs and 45s of obscure soul singers, Safeway nametags pinned to starched white aprons, McCarthy-for-President bumper stickers, and finally, his beloved madras shorts, out onto the lawn of his formerly pristine West End pied-à-terre.

His mother wept openly as she watched him limp, Barry Lyndon-like, out onto Monument Avenue to hitchhike west, carrying a paper bag stuffed with a few belongings, a broken-handled guitar case under his arm.

Worst of all was when his precious girlfriend, the beautiful Betty Black, whose bleached blonde hair, frosted like straw the color and texture that alike he loved  (The hair that he worshipped from near and far!  The hair that stood tall and taunted him in a frozen and laminated “Poof!”  The golden lacquered hair of his now-lost youth, clandestinely rolled up in soup cans for the desired effect, three cans of aerosol hairspray hissed upon it daily!), promptly and ruthlessly dropped him.

She said she wanted a success with which to share her sun-bleached hair, and most certainly not a failure like him.

“My Mumma says you’re born to lose even if you are dying to win,” she cried, slamming the hollow, eight-paneled suburban door in his face, her flaxen locks impervious to the breeze now fluttering inside.

He was crushed, sullied, and sunken to rock bottom.  He stared at the concrete floor of her suburban 1968 West End veranda, hoisted his guitar case with its broken handle under his arm, and ambled slowly down the streets past the cul-de-sacs that circled the center of Mecca.

He wallowed in excruciating pain for three days, sleeping at first on the sweetly curved but rock-hard mahogany benches of John Russell Pope’s Broad Street Station, befriending the clerks at the all-night diner there, and begging for change from rail travelers during the day.

He hitchhiked to Virginia Beach, and dozed under the arching, windswept trees and shrubs on the dunes of 81st Street, panhandling in front of Grumpy’s restaurant across Atlantic Avenue from the socially-acceptable if shabby genteel Sinclair Hotel, trying to strategize for what looked surely to be a very bleak future.

Once, the FIoM said, she was lounging on the beach of nearby Sandbridge at night with a friend.  She remembered it was 1968 because they were talking, outraged, about the recent, savage and unexplained murder of Bobby Kennedy, when a teenage guest known as “The Ace” (now a carnivorous attorney “defending” the rights of impoverished Hispanics in an obscure Southwest Virginia coal-mining town) came running across the top of the dunes from their cottage, shouting out loud: “Come quick!  Come quick! - It’s the GSIoM!  He’s under the steps outside! He’s drunk and he fell!  He says he’s…he’s…he says he’s…’The Great Messiah!’  Under the steps!”

After that, all that anyone in Mecca heard of him was that he’d headed west.  Whether he’d read Walker Percy’s assertion that in the South, we go north to escape, and west to die, is still unknown today.

Saturday

We were working our way slowly in the golf cart Saturday, through a crowd of 90,000 people sprawling across Brown’s Island, nudging a few here and shouting out warnings there.

“I could pick their pockets, and they’d never know,” the GSIoM said.

We were on our way to the Ukrops stage, but our progress was slowed because every fourth person wanted us to stop, to slap the GSIoM on the back, to shake his hand and to talk.  The very picture of modesty, he obliged them happily.

Traffic backed up.  People groaned.  Someone kicked the cart.

But there were the shouts of recognition, the name-calling and the references to obscure music and performances from the past.  A reporter from the local newspaper interviewed the GSIoM, not knowing precisely who he was, but from the attention paid, was sure that he must be someone.

Two women ran up to the cart to kiss him, hug him, and scream:  “GSIoM!  We’ve seen you hundreds of times!  Where are you playing tonight?  And when?”

“Hop in, girls, and we’ll discuss that while we play doctor,” he grinned.

But the walkie-talkie crackled.  It was Rounder in the control tower, barking directions for the evening like an anguished dog.

We had four assignments, most of them simultaneous: At 6:15, one cart was to be at the Ukrops stage to deliver artists to the Comcast stage.  At 6:40, two carts to the Genworth Stage to hustle artists to a CD signing at the Comcast stage; at 6:45, two more carts to the Regions stage to drop off artists to the Ukrops stage; and at 7:15 two carts to the Genworth stage to await further instructions.

Then came the nail in the coffin: one more cart to the Ukrops stage at 6:45.

“Good God Almighty!” he cried.  “Did you get all that? I didn’t understand anything.  WTF did he say again?  Should I call him back? What’ll I do?”  The fear of failure was palpable in his voice and in his eyes - even through his sunglasses.

His hands were shaking and he was sweating mightily.  He dropped his clipboard and lit a cigarette.

“No problem. I’ve got it all written down.” I said.  “Nothing to it.”

“That’s right,” he said, relieved.  “We’re old hands at this.  You and I know how to handle this stuff, don’t we?”

I said:  “You gotta get all the carts together back at The Shack at 6:30 to handle the logistics. We’re short one cart for what they want us to do.”

“Copy that,” he said, and began snapping orders into his walkie-talkie, sounding like the cruel, feral, and extinct tiger-striped wolf of New Zealand.

“I don’t care if you have to throw ‘em off the bridge or sling ‘em under the coal train,” he screamed into his walkie-talkie.  “Just be there at 6:30!”

He turned to me, strangely calm, and surveyed the crowd.  “Do you think they’re here?” he asked.   The sunlight was glistening golden off his silvery white hair and beard.

“Beats me,” I said.  “There must be a hundred thousand people here now.  How would you find ‘em anyway?”

He nudged through the crowd in his cart, pulling up at the Ukrops stage for a prime view of Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go, then switched off the ignition, and propped his feet on the dash.

“Let’s see,” he said, perusing the event schedule.  “Where are we headed this afternoon?”

We looked at the schedule.  There was a veritable cornucopia of American music on five stages spread out along the banks of the James.

There’d been Don Vappie and the Creole Jazz Serenaders at the Ukrops stage just before Chuck Brown started; then Willie King and the Liberators, followed by the Skatalites over at the Times-Dispatch stage; and Bob Cage, Tobacco Auctioneer over at the New Market stage.  All of these performers were aligned for us within a one-mile stretch and a two-hour period.

While the GSIoM pondered his agenda, the FioM filled me in on his exploits, post-Mecca, back in the late 1960s:

It was a long and lonely train ride west, she said - just him, his paper bag and his guitar.  In the Norfolk rail yards, he’d found a westbound freight, hopped aboard a Southern Railroad boxcar, and settled in.  He pulled his guitar from its case, and worked his scales.

After three days, she said, the train slowed near Wichita, and he hopped out.

It was 110 degrees and a dry wind was blowing ashes in swirls all around him. The smell of burnt wheat lingered in his nostrils.

He gazed around at a flat and barren landscape punctuated by grain elevators and a few 1930s skyscrapers.  The Arkansas River, sluggish, muddy and polluted, rambled slowly through the city.  He was especially drawn to the golden grain - the fields of wheat waving lazily around the city.  It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He found a menial job on the line at the Coleman factory, rhythmically testing the blue and yellow globes on hundreds of lanterns daily.  He located an efficiency apartment in the College Hill section of town, which really wasn’t much of a hill at all (and there was no college, actually), but it looked a lot like Mecca’s West End, full of modest 1930s Colonial and Tudor-style homes.

He was surprised one summer afternoon to hear a knock at his front door.  He found his neighbor outside, a 62-year old with whom he’d had few conversations, asking a simple question:

“I’m putting together a trip to New Mexico to go fly fishing.  Do you want to go?”

It turns out that he had moved in next door to the trout master of Kansas. For 40 years, George had been driving 16 hours through the night to fish the Rio de Los Pinos in the San Juan Mountains of New Mexico.  The trip took place every June, at the dark of the moon.  It lasted about a week, although some of the 30 or 40 individuals from four states who convened there stayed for two to three.

This was, in fact, a fly-fishing school made up of seasoned veterans, some second generation.  Their numbers were dwindling and George was recruiting.  The GSIoM signed up.

By the campfire on their first night out, he met a short man with dark, slick hair, heavy black glasses and the intense gaze of a genius.  It was Bill Lear, a high school dropout who’d invented the car radio back in the 1920s.  He’d sold the patent to Motorola for a generous sum and was now struggling with a new concept: a way to deliver music on demand inside a car.

“Can’t use a turntable, ’cause it skips on bumps,” Lear said.  “And I can’t find a gyroscope that’ll steady it economically.”

The GSIoM looked at him shrewdly.  “Have you thought about tape?”

With that query, the Lear eight-track stereo cassette was born.  The GSIoM became vice president of sales and marketing for the new company - and a millionaire overnight.

But in his spare time, he was honing his guitar techniques.

In 1970, he and Lear took the Grand Tour of Europe. They wound up in a Swiss airport, where they stopped to admire a new and short-lived fighter jet, the P-16.  For the entire tour, Lear had been complaining about commercial air travel.  “You feel like you’re in a cattle car,” he said.  “And it’s slow.”  Worse than that, the genius pilot with the eighth grade education pointed out, “You’re not even flying - you’re being conveyed.”

The GSIoM pointed to the Swiss P-16 on the ramp and said:  “Why not convert that aircraft to a ‘business jet’?  With two pilots and five passengers, you could fly point A to point B at will.”

On that day, the Learjet 23, with its stubby wings, rakish windshield, sleek tiptanks and the same power plants as an F-5 fighter, was born.   It offered astonishing performance, climbing to 40,000 feet in just over seven minutes. In one early publicity flight, the GSIoM and Bill Lear made a round trip between New York and Los Angeles in 11 hours and 35 minutes, including refueling stops.

The GSIoM was made a millionaire twice over.  He began buying up the golden wheat fields surrounding Wichita.  He kept working at his guitar with gigs downtown.  He built a loyal following and a reputation as the city’s best guitar-slinger, bar none.

By the year 2000, he quit his job at Learjet, sold his farms and flew back to Mecca in his private Lear 23, painted a high-gloss, Day-Glo yellow inside and out.

“Light the candle and stand this thing on its tail!” he roared to the pilots as he settled into the cabin with his collection of guitars and titanium briefcase jam-packed with cash.

He’d accumulated a fortune in the golden fields of Kansas, and he wanted to go home.

Saturday Night

The rendezvous at The Shack in the ops parking lot came together without a hitch.  We were all there on time, and the GSIoM made his assignments.

There was only problem: the fifth cart needed at 6:45.

“What are we gonna do?” I asked him.

“Watch,” he said.  He tiptoed around the parking lot like Bugs Bunny, looking through spare carts, and then let out a long, low whistle.

“Ah.  Here we go…”

He returned driving a golf cart clearly marked “M.F.I.C.” and said:  “Hop in! We gotta go!  They’re waiting for us!”

I sat down, and the FioM whispered the rest of the story in my ear:

Betty Black had not fared quite so well, she said sadly.

After she’d booted the GSIoM from her mother’s home in ‘68 without a second thought, she came across an older man in Mecca’s Fan District.  He’d been discharged by the Navy for assaulting a non-com, and was hanging on Harrison St. beside The Village, selling bags of pot to strangers.

He’d stopped Betty casually on the street, and opened up his Navy-issue pea coat to reveal twenty ounces of marijuana in plastic bags.  “They’re $12 each, but for you, I’ll make an exception,” he said.

His eyes gleamed like onyx.

She swooned.  It was love at first sight.  She took off with him and never looked back.

His name was Tom Racy.  He was descended from one of the First Families of Virginia.  One of his ancestors had served as a chaplain to “Stonewall” Jackson, and it was said that Jackson’s amputated arm was buried on one of the Racy farms near Chancellorsville.

The blissed-out couple found a farmhouse off Mountain Road in Glen Allen, named it “Ozone” and moved in together.  It was conveniently located near the Interstate, the train station and the Trailways bus stop.  Business was booming in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Tom was making money hand over fist.

Their parties would have embarrassed even Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in their outrageousness.

“He may be a pirate,” Betty used to say, “But he’s my pirate.”

They adopted a couple of dogs: a Doberman they called “Dolt,” and something else they named “Zero,” who was clearly the smarter of the two.  “Zero” proved his worth one Thanksgiving afternoon when he arrived at the farmhouse after a 24-hour absence, a fully cooked and stuffed turkey in his mouth.

The couple fawned over him for this act from that day forward, and forever looked down on the “Dolt.”  Tom wondered whether the full bottle of Mateus that he and his friend Lusty had forced down the “Dolt’s” throat that night outside of Phil’s Lounge had actually harmed the dog as a pup.  But then he shrugged, hoisted his pet raccoon onto his shoulder, and rolled himself a fat joint.

Things took a turn for the worse one evening when Tom returned from a business meeting at the Pit Stop on Patterson, every bone in his right hand crushed.  It had somehow found its way into a vise, with extreme prejudice applied.  He began to entertain second thoughts about the business in which he was engaged; Betty was about to bear a child, the first of two daughters.

Tom cashed out of the drug business, bought an Alfa Romeo dealership in Mecca and flourished for a time, until, alas, the Italians announced that they’d no longer be exporting GTVs and Spiders to the states.

They both descended into a deep depression.  He sold his remaining Alfas, saving his favored 1965 GT convertible.

One sunny Sunday morning in 1995, Tom and Betty and kissed their daughters goodbye, hopped into the GTC with the top down and roared off to Nags Head for a day in the ocean.

Betty’s bleached blonde hair blew unnaturally in the breeze.

They ate lunch and shot a few games of pool at Sam & Omie’s, then hopped back into the GTC.  Without hesitation, Tom drove straight across the Beach Road, gunned the 1600 cc engine, listened to its dual Webers purr, screeched the Michelins in second gear one last time, kissed his wife goodbye, and drove straight off the end of Jennette’s Pier into the ocean, laughing like a madman.

“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he was heard to shout on their way down.

After all the passenger pick-ups and drop-offs on Saturday night, I found the GSIoM face down in a ten-dollar Fishboat from the CroakerSpot booth down by the Times-Dispatch stage.

The Fishboat is an appetizing and abundantly layered mixture of thickly sliced french-fries, salt, ketchup, deep-fried lake trout, a huge slab of cornbread, with grilled onions and peppers splayed across the top.

The GSIoM’s beard was buried deeply into it like one of the horses he’d fed back in Kansas, the ones that chowed down on their grain, nose deep in a feedbag.

All of a sudden he looked up, his eyes bulging, and issued a muffled cry:

“Mmmmrrrgghhfff?!!!???”

We were shocked to see him mobbed by a bevy of blondes, ages ranging from 5 to 35 years.  They were calling his name and reaching out to touch him.  They were squealing and laughing, shouting that before she died, their Mumma had always told them they’d find him at the NFF.

“Here he is!  It’s the GSIoM!  He’s really here!” they crooned in glee.

They were the golden-haired daughters and granddaughters of Betty Black.

First they circled him, and then they over-ran his golf cart, chanting his name, kissing him and proclaiming themselves his biggest fans ever.  They hopped in on top and over him, legs and arms akimbo.

They piled in the front and in the back, the smaller on top of the older, some jumping on top of the roof, all the while chanting his name, and reaching out to him, screaming in delight, as if their future were no longer deferred.

They took off in his golf cart off down to Fifth Street, scattering to the wind whisky and wine bottles, beer cans, clipboards and then the four precious walkie-talkies, out in every direction — up, down, front, back, left and right — the golden girls hooting and cackling in the darkness as they headed back to Short Cut Hill, scene of Friday night’s debacle.

The GSIoM was in heaven.

We followed and watched them weave through the crowds, as the girls sang over and over, to the tune of “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo:”

“He’s the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions!

“He’s the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions!

They dashed toward the danger of Short Cut Hill with glee.

The GSIoM slowed his cart down, then angled it in front of the hill for a direct assault.  He counted heads in the cart, estimating the total weight.  He was gritting his teeth and sweating profusely.

He glared back at me.  “You idiot!” he snarled.  “It takes more weight, not less, to get up this hill.”

With that, he gunned the cart, sweetly squeezed the golden thigh of Betty Black’s oldest daughter, and roared away, bouncing mightily, up and over the hill.

At the top, he looked back down on us all in the parking lot, cavalierly tipped his baseball cap, grinned squarely and pointed to his teeth, then rode off into the blackened night toward the orgiastic promise of the green-glowing Ukrops stage.

The crowds on the road now joined in the chant:

“He’s the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions!

“He’s the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions!”

The Skatalites were just finishing up their last song of the evening.   When the cart, piled with glistening descendants of Tom and Betty Racy, reached the stage, total silence greeted them.

A short Italian dullard in a tailored black suit, thin white cotton shirt and skinny black tie reached down to a velvet-lined guitar case and handed the GSIoM his favorite Telecaster.

He looked at it warmly, and gave it a kiss before stepping out into the green lights of the stage, two hundred thousand waiting eyes looking up to him, anticipating they knew not what.

Betty Black’s daughters and granddaughters stood in awe, their collective blond hair glowing chartreuse in the blinding light.

He struck a chord: “Thwaaannnnnnnngggg!”  The Telecaster purred like a tigress.

The crowd roared.

“Y’all talkin’ to me?” he screamed into his microphone.

Fifty thousand people on his left wailed:  “The Great Messiah!”

On his right, fifty thousand more screamed:  “Under the Steps!”

“The Great Messiah!”

“The Great Messiah!”

“Under the Steps!”

“The Great Messiah!”

“Under the Steps!”

Over and over they beseeched him, until he launched into a blistering 45-minute set of Psychedelic Dixieland tunes.

It was electric, and it was good.

A hundred thousand people chanted in unison for three encores, communing together as he harmonized with the stars above.

The daughters and granddaughters of Betty Black collapsed backstage in orgasmic delight.

Then as quickly as it started, it was over.  The girls hugged him.  He kissed each one.

When he was finished, the GSIoM looked over at me and winked.  “Don’t y’all be tellin’ me how to get to the top of this hill,” he said, wagging an index finger.

Whatever it was that the Guitar Slinging Idol of Millions had found back in 1968 under those steps in Sandbridge, then in the stark yellow wheat fields of Kansas, and later, on the babbling trout streams of New Mexico, he had made it available to all from this stage of the National Folk Festival that he now owned, he alone with his guitar.

He hopped back into his golf cart, surrounded by the sweet, singing, glowing daughters and granddaughters of Betty Black

And so they nudged on, carts against the crowd, nosing noiselessly into the future.

All:

I have spoken recently by means of that enduring modern convenience, the landline, to one James Feral “PoochieDred” Gerloff, in re: the HST film debuting next Friday, July 18 at the Westhampton Theater 2 in Mecca’s gilded, leafy and soothingly tranquil West End.

Mr. Gerlf opines that he would prefer to attend the Friday evening event, as his Saturday schedule is full of odd and benevolent requests, like the appearance at a pit-cooked barbecue held in a smoke-filled quonset hut out on Jeff Davis Highway, the vegan political activist fundraiser to benefit the plight and destiny of the poor, much-maligned pig, the lengthy mediation session between the two North Carolina factions currently squabbling pettily over the correctness of clear or red sauce, and of course, the recently announced study group chaired by James A. Baker that is at this very moment pondering the future of the Chesapeake Bay Oyster — and more specifically, the much-sought-after-for-its-

I. Star Time

“So now ladies and gentlemen, it is ‘Star Time!’ Are you ready for ‘Star Time?’

“Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time the hardest working man in show business, ready to sing:

“‘I’ll Go Crazy,’

“‘Try Me,’

“‘You’ve Got the Power,’

“‘Think,’

“’If You Want Me,’

“‘I Don’t Mind,’

“‘Bewildered,’

“’The million-dollar seller, ‘Lost Someone,’

“’The very latest release, ‘Night Train,’

“‘Let’s Everybody Shout and Shimmy,’

“Mr. Dynamite, the Amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames!“

– Introduction, “James Brown, Live at the Apollo,”
Oct. 24, 1962

The first time I heard James Brown in the early 1960s, he was wailing and crying into the dark, humid, summer Mecca twilight from a crisp and tightly organized 31 minutes of live vinyl magically imbued with pure, visceral, syncopated bliss.

I like to think of that moment as akin to that of the man on the banks of the Mississippi, many years earlier, whose ears pricked up in ecstasy at the sound of Louis Armstrong blowing his cornet from a riverboat heading downstream at midnight.

He hooked me – a white teenager living in relative comfort in the West End of the former Capital of the Confederacy – on the music of African Americans singing their way through centuries of unspeakable anguish.

A Jewish record producer once told me that this phenomenon – of ‘60s whites addicted to black music – was known in the business as a form of racism, but I don’t think so.

It was an epiphany, a realization by way of music that our own white establishment did not have the first clue about the inspirational power of the human heart in conflict with itself. Or, if they understood it, they feared it gravely.

Three seminal live albums from that time punctuate this epiphany eloquently: “Chuck Jackson on Tour” (with a cover shot of the singer in his uptown, iridescent, sharkskin suit), “Otis Redding Live in Europe” (a white suit on the album’s front, a pink suit for the back), and “James Brown Live at the Apollo” (no suit at all – just a heavily sweating, pompadoured black man in white silk shirt, pleading painfully into his microphone).

They form the three caryatids supporting the mythic pediment of rhythm & blues today.

And James Brown, whose perfectly formed live album came first, oozing an affirmation of life and love, strength and sorrow, disappointment and redemption, stands front and center, a Buddha borne to us via the ragged streets of Augusta, Ga.

Black or white, we’ve all suffered through the years with death, divorce, wars, tragedies, and multitudes of joys turned miseries. But no matter how difficult the times, we’ve found solace always in the knowledge that we can pop “Live at the Apollo” onto the turntable, into the cassette or the CD player, and by the time he’s done, we are too.

At the end of those 31 cathartic minutes, no one walks away unpurified.

I’ve listened to it thousands of times, in Mecca, in Deltaville, in Warrenton, and in Kansas, Kentucky and Carolina. It does not disappoint – ever.

His music is this powerful:

One very successful, retired businessman in Mecca, an acquaintance who turned me on to that first James Brown album in 1963 – now a doting father and grandfather living well near River Road – once confided in me his sole regret after 60 years on earth. It occurred famously at a 1965 concert hosted by the K.A.’s of Randolph Macon featuring James Brown and the Famous Flames. When J.B. ripped off his cufflinks and threw them out to the audience, my friend missed catching them by one inch.

He confessed it with a grimace, his eyes downcast. He was sorely dismayed.

Everyone wanted a piece of James Brown back then, it seems.

II. Are You Ready for the Night Train?

When that live concert at the Apollo was recorded, its final song had just been released as a single. James Brown introduced the tune himself to a screaming, squealing, hysterical audience:

“You know I lost someone?

“But I know where I’m gonna find ‘em…

“All aboard?

“All aboard?

“All aboard – For ‘Night Train!’”

In a rumbling and rhythmic tour of the eastern seaboard that he must have known painfully well by way of the segregated ‘50s and ‘60s, Mr. Brown took us to the cities that made him famous, and that he, in turn, made famous for us in return.

So here, we have a few words from the newspapers in each of those towns – their eulogies in the days after his death on Christmas 2006, the victim of congenital heart failure at age 73:

Miami, Florida!

“In the ’60s, that era of strivers and change, Brown made himself an icon not simply of black success, but of black self-determination. And for as much as people wore out their shoes dancing to hits like Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag and I Got You (I Feel Good), for as much as they pumped their fists to sociopolitical anthems like Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud, it was that sense he gave of being self-contained, unbought and unbowed, that set him apart.

“That’s why, when Martin Luther King was shot and more than 100 American cities burned, Brown could go to Boston and ask angry black people to stay cool — and they did.

“It was more than that he was famous and had hits. How many riots did the Supremes ever head off? If Miami was on the verge of racial warfare, would anyone call Beyoncé?”

Leonard Pitts, Jr.
The Miami Herald

Atlanta, Georgia!

“The Famous Flames played for at least two hours — punctuated once or twice by James walking out to the microphone (shirtless, with a towel around his neck) to announce he’d be joining them pretty soon, which only served to whip up the crowd more. Around 10:30 p.m. when the announcer said something about welcoming “America’s Soul Brother Number One,” the place erupted in a frenzy of sight, sound and sensuality.

“What I saw that night was clearly dangerous stuff, exactly what the elders were warning us against: The combination of a driving beat, the sexual innuendo in his lyrics (at least those you could understand), the potent mixture of alcohol (on sale in the arena) and the raw energy of Brown’s stage presence lit a fuse.

“Good gawd, he was good!

“I had never seen anything like it and, in 40 years of concert-going, still haven’t. The Godfather was in full command, of the Flames, of the stage, of his dancers and of the crowd — especially those two white boys in the audience.

“As management consultants like to talk these days, I was experiencing a transformational change. So was, it turns out, American culture.”

Mike King
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Raleigh, North Carolina!

It’s still enough to give you goosebumps — the way James Brown huffs out “Raleigh, Nawth Carolina” as he sings about the Night Train, vintage 1962. Little old Raleigh, some may have thought of it, but in his soul classic Brown groups the Tar Heel capital right up there with Miami, Atlanta, Washington and other stops along the line.

“And don’t forget New Orleans, the home of the blues.” Could Raleigh have been in better company, or have gotten a better advertisement as a place where soul music, smoking hot R&B, was part of the culture? As much as he could with that one brief reference, James Brown put Raleigh on the “happening” map.

“When “Night Train” came along, the man who became known as the Godfather of Soul was heading into the prime of a career that was supposed to take him, on New Years Eve, 2006, to the stage of a blues club in New York City. But this famously energetic showman — the leaps, the knee-walking, the sweat-drenched frenzies of emotion — finally could summon his performer’s fire no more. Death came early on Christmas morning, from a sudden onset of pneumonia at the age of 73.

“Many would rank him as the very greatest at what he did, which was not simply to thrill audiences with his stagecraft but with a music that was one of America’s signature late 20th-century sounds. It flowed from Brown’s experiences growing up black in rural South Carolina and on the poor side of Augusta, Ga., and was the inspiration for many performers to come, both black and white. His music evolved over the decades, so that it always sounded fresh, but never lost its raw force. Never were horns and saxes put to better use in their back-up role as Brown urged his fans to get into their funky dance groove. He didn’t have to urge very hard.

Editorial
Raleigh News & Observer

Washington, D.C.!

“Generations of musicians listened to James Brown, looked at him and took what they could, regardless of the kind of music they played. Much imitated, he was ultimately inimitable. Someone once suggested Brown was to rhythm what Bob Dylan was to lyrics, and there’s no arguing that when it comes to foundations of American popular music, Brown is right there with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Dylan — creators whose innovations changed everything around them.”

Richard Harrington
The Washington Post

Uh, Richmond, Virginia, Too!

“Before the mid-1960s, Brown performed an unknown number of times at Jackson Ward’s Hippodrome Theater and made several appearances at the Landmark Theater, then called the Mosque.

“Beginning in 1969, Brown’s local appearances were covered extensively by The Times-Dispatch and The Richmond News Leader. From that year until 1974, Brown had at least 10 concert dates in Richmond, sometimes giving two shows a night. He gave his first show at the Coliseum in 1972.

“In 1969, Richmond Mayor Phil Bagley Jr. proclaimed Dec. 7 — the day of two concerts by Brown — “James Brown Day.” Bagley said he did so because he had been told Brown was considering retirement and might not return.”

Larry Hall
The Richmond Times-Dispatch

Baltimore, Maryland!

“Over the years, Mr. Brown had some personal troubles, including drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and unpaid taxes, that didn’t sink his career, but somewhat stained his image. In the late 1980s, while under the influence of drugs, he intimidated people at a public gathering before leading police on an interstate car chase. He spent more than two years in prison and a work release program. Earlier in his career, Baltimore gave him some trouble by banning his performances in the mid-1960s for possibly inciting riots. In the 1970s, he spent two nights in the City Jail on a contempt charge related to his ownership of a radio station that faced serious financial troubles.

“Whatever his woes or demons, they seemed to disappear once Mr. Brown stepped onstage. He was, first and foremost, a consummate entertainer.”

Editorial
The Baltimore Sun

Philadelphia!

“He was never a protest singer, but always an advocate of education and increasing black economic clout. He purchased a string of radio stations in the mid-1960s, and in 1966 approached Vice President Hubert Humphrey to propose using his “Don’t Be a Dropout” hit as the centerpiece of a stay-in-school campaign for urban youth.

“Encouraged by activist H. Rap Brown to become more prominent in the black-power movement, Mr. Brown the next year released “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a watershed moment in America’s racial conversation. And his trademark holiday song didn’t bother with maudlin sentiment, instead focusing on the needs of the urban poor. Its title: ‘Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto.’”

Dan DeLuca
Philadelphia Inquirer

New York City!

“Mr. Brown had his first Top 20 pop hit in 1963 with “Prisoner of Love,” a ballad backed by an orchestra. But before those sessions he had done a series of shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the one on Oct. 24, 1962, was recorded. His label had not wanted to record the shows; Mr. Brown insisted. Released in 1963, “Live at the Apollo” — with screaming fans and galvanizing crescendos — revealed what the rhythm-and-blues circuit already knew, and became the No. 2 album nationwide.

“James Brown and the Famous Flames toured nonstop through the 1960s. They were filmed in California for the “The T.A.M.I. Show,” released in 1965, which shows Mick Jagger trying to pick up Mr. Brown’s dance moves.

“By the mid-1960s Mr. Brown was producing his own recording sessions. In February 1965, with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” he decided to shift the beat of his band: from the one-two-three-four backbeat to one-two-three-four. “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat,” Mr. Brown said in 1990. ‘Simple as that, really.’”

John Pareles
The New York Times

Boston, Massachusetts!

“Even though Mr. Brown had his last chart single in 1985, his popularity endured. The churning polyrhythms of such songs as “Cold Sweat” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” imbue them with a freshness that has kept them a mainstay of classic hits radio formats and commercials.

“Mr. Brown received numerous formal honors. Cash Box magazine named him best pop male vocalist in 1969 (the first African-American so honored). The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included him among its inaugural inductees in 1986. He was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2003.

“Yet the greatest tributes to Mr. Brown were and are less conventional. The rhythmic intensity and daring of Mr. Brown’s music made it uniquely influential.

“’JAMES BROWN is a concept, a vibration, a dance,’ he declared in the liner notes to his 1991 boxed set, ‘Star Time.’ ‘It’s not me, the man. JAMES BROWN is a freedom I created for humanity.’

“He had an enormous impact on rhythm and blues and soul. All but single handedly, he created funk. And through his numerous recordings sampled by rap artists, he provided the rhythmic underpinnings for hip-hop.”

Mark Feeney
The Boston Globe

And Don’t Forget New Orleans, the Home of the Blues Now!

“There will be no more soulful strides back to the microphone. The good foot has been stilled. The Benjamin Banneker of funk — he who built the clock to which the music grooves — has himself exited the realm of time, 73 years after he entered it. He leaves the world much more funky than he found it.”

Jarvis DeBerry
New Orleans Times-Picayune

III. “I Believe There’s Someplace I Didn’t Go…”

Midway through “Night Train,” and the grand litany of stops along the way that he knew so well by heart, James Brown made a confession:

“I believe there’s some place that I didn’t go…

“But I’m comin’ on home now!

“Yeah! Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeahhhhhh”

On December 30, 2006, he came home to Augusta, Ga., to the James Brown Arena off James Brown Boulevard, not far from the bronze life-size statue draped in an American flag, erected to him just a few years ago.

Modern Augusta never really has been much of a city; it is, rather, a very bad metaphor for the dichotomy of two ways of life in America today.

The James Brown Arena is directly across from the historic First Presbyterian Church where, on that day, an all-white wedding was taking place.

Then there is the Bobby Jones Expressway, and the Augusta National Golf Course, designed by Jones in the 1930s, and home to the Masters. The course is at the heart of the white and leafy suburbs of Augusta, surrounded by opulence and wealth, by suburban Tudor mansions, by manicured lawns, and by multiple SUVs in driveways. White through and through, the golf course and surrounding homes have served as models in planning for escape from the realities of urban cores coast-to-coast.

A few blocks away is the concrete, treeless jungle where James Brown grew up with a shoeshine rag and a hambone. The houses are crumbling, some burned out. On each corner are churches. In between are the lifelines: the grocery stores, plate glass windows replaced by plywood sheets, graffiti scrawled everywhere. People wander aimlessly, the void of poverty sunken in the empty sockets of their eyes.

But more than 8,000 people were on hand at the James Brown arena on Dec. 30, dressed in their Sunday best for his “Homegoing.”

Jesse Jackson was praying for him. Dick Gregory was eulogizing him. And Al Sharpton was appropriating him.

Mr. Brown was laid out before us all in a 24-carat gold casket lined with white satin. He was dressed in black with a red shirt and sequins, his third change of clothes in as many days. I half expected him to jump up out of the casket and sing: “Pleeease, Don’t Go!”

It was difficult to see a man of perennial motion lying so quietly in such a state of absolute stillness.

There were 25 five-foot-wide wreaths of flowers flanking him on either side, along with a life-sized painting with a heavenly blue background.

“I met him first in 1955,” Jackson was saying. “Most performers did two concerts then, on different sides of the tracks. But James made white people cross over to the black side to see him. James did not cross over…the music crossed over.”

“There’s a difference between a homecoming and a homegoing,” said Gregory. “There are two doors in life. The small door is the homecoming. The big door is the homegoing. You came into this life through the small door, clean, with no prejudice, no anger and no hate. You pick that stuff up along the way. And if you picked up any of that craziness, drop it now!”

“You don’t understand James Brown until you’ve been down to ‘Georgia-lina’ like he said,” said Sharpton. “You have to be here and understand how he was born not at zero but below zero. Because you judge not the distance of a man by where he is but where he begins. And nobody started lower and went higher than James Brown did.”

But I prefer Steven Vincent Benet’s words at the death of another 20th century genius, circa 1940:

“You can take your hats off now, gentlemen, and I think you had better,” Benet wrote. “This is not a legend, this is a reputation – and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”

(Editor’s note: Here we have the beginning of a delightful tale that’s part Marcel Proust, part Henry Miller and total George Mahaffey.

We look with acute anticipation toward more from the author in the future.)

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