Author, teacher, father of seven, really swell guy. I'm a professor at Boston University, where I teach courses in literary journalism, the history of journalism and the history of rock'n'roll [taught for the Department of History].
http://www.williammckeen.com
The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair wasn’t even in Woodstock when it planted its cultural flag 55 years ago.
Woodstock Ventures logo (PRNewsFoto/Woodstock Ventures)
Woodstock didn’t want the festival. Neither did neighboring towns in upstate New York. An industrial park downstate even passed on the opportunity.
So when we look back on that momentous weekend of music, the first hero we see is a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who offered his fields near White Lake, New York, to the high and hirsute concertgoers.
The festival’s four investors saw the horde descending on the concert site and decided to forego profit and turn it into a free-for-all. Though it took years to repay the debt, it was the right decision.
For the record, the business half of the mangement team was John Rosenman and John Roberts, self-described as “young men with unlimited capital.” The music-and-artists half of the team was promoter Michael Lang — the ever-smiling explosion of curls who became the face of Woodstock — and Artie Kornfeld.
(Kornfeld had an interesting career trajectory. He was just a few years down the road from the time he wrote car songs with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Jan Berry of Jan and Dean. After that, he became the producer for the Cowsills, the family band he had brought to prominence. The Cowsills became the model for the television show “The Partridge Family.”)
Certain impending apocalyptic disaster was avoided due to the soothing and soporific voice of emcee Chip Monck, cautioning the crowd about poor-quality acid, and Hugh Romney (aka “Wavy Gravy”), the commune leader who helped feed the masses and care for those overcome by the event and / or drugs.
Romney deserves enormous credit, not only for helping Monck keep a calming and placid lid on the weekend, but for solving the too-real problem of feeding many more guests than were expected. (Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that Romney was married to Jahanara Romney, who — as Bonnie Beecher — had inspired the song “Girl from the North Country,” written by her college-era boyfriend, Bob Dylan.)
That weekend also gave us indelible images of a generation of musicians:
Jimi Hendrix played to the departing crowds on the festival’s last day, delivering a pre-elegiac performance. (He was dead 13 months later.) His version of the national anthem became iconic.
Janis Joplin sang with grit and fervor, lost and fragile and unbearably intimate in front of a half-million listeners.
Sly Stone was his revolutionary self, bringing together the sacred and profrance with a beat you could dance to.
Rain-soaked Joe Cocker passed on a message from the absent Beatles: we get by with a little help from our friends.
Of course, not everyone as at their best. Members of the Grateful Dead still shake their heads over how bad they were at Woodstock. Jerry Garcia once said the Dead always seemed to be at their worst when they had the largest audiences.
Maybe you were among the half million that wallowed in Max Yasgur’s mud. The odds are against it, so what you know of Woodstock comes from the three-hour documentary film — oddly, called Woodstock — released in 1970.
The film crew that worked for director Michael Wadleigh included a diminutive cameraman scrambling around the front of the stage.
That young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, trained his camera on the ecstatic faces and the skilled-and-sure fingers of the performers. He offered the film audience an intimate view of musicians at work. (Let’s tip our hat to Scorcese’s long-time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose innovative editing talents conveyed the weekend’s magic.)
Woodstock was the career-making performance by a new group from San Francisco called Santana. Michael Shrieve, the group’s drummer, had turned 20 just the month before. The closeup images of Shrieve that appeared a year later in the Woodstock documentary showed a creative mind at work — you can admire Shrieve’s ability during his solo, but the camera’s focus on his eyes as he challenges and surprises himself is revelatory.
It’s a rare and wonderful look at an artist at work. More than a half-century after that weekend, we still have that. All those involved in telling the story are heroes of a sort.
Woodstock set a standard still in need of an equal.
This is a remembrance of my mother’s last car, which I have donated to National Public Radio.
My mother wasn’t like the other mothers. To borrow the title from a Steve Reeves classic of my movie-going youth, she was Hercules Unchained. My friends’ mothers (and fathers) were dull, doing the ol’ lives-of-quiet-desperation thing, while mine looked at life as a continual weenie roast.
My mother had a great sense of humor and a love for all things new and fun. Even in her seventies and eighties, she referred to her contemporaries as the old folks or geezers. If we’re only as old as we feel, my mother remained 19 almost all of her life.
Dear Old Dad and Mom
This is not to imply that she was an irresponsible parent. She artfully raised three children. When my father died (young, at 53) the three of us were out of the house, so she didn’t have to worry about taking care of children as a single parent.
She was devastated by my father’s death. Perhaps because it was so sudden and came when both of them were barely in their fifties, she felt life’s brevity more clearly than most and decided to squeeze everything she could from it.
Cars were always important to us. We were a military family and moved a lot. Along the way, Dad collected convertibles. When I was a young boy, we were stationed in Europe and all five of us fit into a Triumph TR-3, despite the fact that the car did not have a back seat or seatbelts. We were a lot smaller then.
My mother once drove 120 miles per hour on the autobahn. Life was a weenie roast, as I say.
When we returned to the States, Dad began his Cadillac obsession. For several years, we had only two legal drivers in the house yet had three cars — two Cadillacs and the Triumph, all convertibles. One of the Caddies was candy-apple red. There must have been something extra in the formula in Detroit the day they painted that car because I’ve never seen a color like it. Strangers approached my father in parking lots to gush over how much they admired it.
But it aged and was traded away. So were the others, always replaced by Cadillac convertibles. Finally — years later, out of the military and in private practice — Dad found another candy-apple red Cadillac convertible, an El Dorado that would qualify us for yacht-club membership. A few months after buying the car, he died.
1973 Cadillac El Dorado
Mom kept the car but rarely drove it. Too painful, she said.
She began her relationships with Chrysler convertibles — first LeBarons, then Sebrings. It fell to me eventually to sell the Cadillac. During a visit, I found I needed a car for an unexpected road trip. Mom told me to take the car and not bring it back. I sold it to a collector in Dallas.
My mother outlived my father by 44 years. Into her late eighties, she still drove. Her last car was a champagne-colored Chrysler Sebring convertible. She was a careful driver, never had an accident, never even got a ding in the door.
When she was too old to drive and moved to an assisted-living place, she gave me the car. It was 15 years old by then. I had to drive it cross country, from my mother’s home in the Midwest, to Massachusetts. The drive went without a hitch and the car turned some heads when we drove through Cooperstown, where I showed my son the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But over the years, the inevitable problems began. I considered it my weekend car. I’d put the top down — even in January, when we’d have an occasional good day — and cruise the towns along the South Shore, where I live.
Its last gasp came when my two youngest sons — just little boys when I got the car — used it to take their dates to the high school prom. They posed in their tuxes by the old convertible. It had one last night on the town.
2000 Chrysler Sebring
After a quarter century, the car still had its looks but became unreliable and, finally, undriveable.
My mother died at 96. I held on to the car. When a mechanic quoted a several-thousand dollar estimate to make vital repairs, I knew it was time to let it go. It was hard to do, I told the mechanic. I had sentimental reasons.
My mother would have understood. When my father’s Cadillac sat rarely driven in the garage after his death, I’d urged her to do something with it. “Maybe we could turn it into a planter in the back yard,” I told her. I’d get a smile but no words.
At least her Sebring has come to a more useful end, in the arms of public radio.
The last gasp: Son Travis and Georgia, his prom date, take the Sebring for one last ride.
Screenwriter Robert Towne died this week. He was a master at his craft and was the genius behind Chinatown, Shampoo, The Yakuza, Tequila Sunrise, Greystoke and Personal Best. He also did uncredited script-doctor work on Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Missouri Breaks and Heaven Can Wait.
Towne had a regular family of collaborators — Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty most prominently.
But he also worked with one of the great directors of the 1970s, that glorious decade for films. Those years gave us some of the greatest work from Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.
And also Hal Ashby, often overlooked when it comes to the great directors of that era.
But let’s look at Ashby’s resume:
Shampoo, Harold & Maude, Coming Home, Being There, Bound for Glory, Eight Million Ways to Die and many others.
Not bad. That’s like my list of favorite films from the seventies (and a couple into the eighties). I think Being There is one of the great American films and the performance by Peter Sellers is a magnificent study in restraint.
These two talents — Towne and Ashby- — intersected in 1973 with The Last Detail, based on Darryl Ponicsan‘s novel.
It’s not always easy to find this movie, so I was happy to see that Prime Video picked it up. It streams there.
This may be the most profane film ever made and Billy Badass Buddusky is one of Nicholson’s greatest roles.
The plot is simple: sailors Billy Badass and Mule (Otis Young) are assigned to Shore Patrol duty in order to escort young Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Naval Station Norfolk to the Navy prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Meadows is a kid, a virgin, an innocent, a guy who hasn’t lived yet. He’s going to prison for eight years for trying to lift some money ($40, if memory serves) from a charity donation box.
Quaid and Nicholson, camped out in a hotel room, doing their part to kill off 300 beers
The three of them have to pass through several states to get to Portsmouth and Badass and Mule decide to give the kid a dose of fun before he’s locked away.
As Billy Badass says, “No fucking Navy’s going to give some fucking kid eight years in the fucking brig without me taking him out for the time of his fucking life.”
Meadows isn’t even 21 so Badass and Mule take him to a bar when they hit New York City. The bartender refuses to serve them and when Billy Badass becomes belligerent, the barkeep threatens to call the Shore Patrol. Nicholson slams his piece on the bar and says, “I am the motherfucking Shore Patrol!”
Perhaps that scene is not as iconic as Nicholson’s diner scene from Five Easy Pieces, but it ought to be.
Nicholson and Young are excellent. Though Randy Quaid had made a couple of fims before this — notably, The Last Picture Show — this was the first sign of what an excellent actor he was. For those who only know him as Cousin Eddie from the Vacation films or for his sometimes-erratic behavior in his private life, his performance as Meadows will come as a revelation.
Badass and Mule don’t want to see Meadows to go off to eight years in prison without getting laid, so they arrange for the services of a prostitute, played by Carol Kane, in her screen debut.
I’m not a press agent for old movies, but I hope I’ve interested you in tracking down this excellent and oft-overlooked film.
Nicholson, Quaid and Towne were nominated for Academy Awards. Alas, there were no winners for The Last Detail. Ashby didn’t even get nominated.
Towne wrote the screenplay several years before the film was produced. Hollywood’s studio czars considered it too profane to film. When it was finally made, it set the record for use of the word fuck in a film.
I often say that the most important reason for the Internet to exist is to provide a platform for IMDB, the Internet Movie Database. Not only does it help us settle arguments about in what earlier film we’ve seen this or that actor, it also has fun stuff like trivia and quotes from films.
So below, from IMDB, some of Towne’s dialogue from The Last Detail.
Rest in peace, Robert Towne.
Buddusky ruminates on Meadows’ fate. The donation box from which he tried to lift the money was for the favorite charity of the wife of the Navy base’s commander.
Buddusky: Boy, they really stuck it to ya, didn’t they, kid! Stick it in and break it off. Up your giggy with a wah-wah brush, stick it in an’ break it off.
The three sailors come across a conciousness raising group and Meadows takes up chanting. This helps when they meet a beautiful woman at a bar.
Buddusky: If this guy gets pussy out of this, I’m gonna eat my fucking flat hat, man.
Mulhall: Yeah, and I’m going to start chanting too.
Meadows: [returns to table with Mulhall and Buddusky] Hey, you guys? Drop your socks and grab your cocks. We’re going to a party.
The New York bartender won’t serve Buddusky and company. He nods toward Young, who is black, and says he would only serve him because the law forces him to. Buddusky threatens to kick the bartender’s ass.
Bartender: You try it, and I’ll call the shore patrol.
Buddusky: I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker! I am the motherfucking shore patrol! Give this man a beer.
Buddusky: Fuck help, fuck fair! Fuck injustice! Don’t you ever just wanna fuckin’ whomp and stomp on someone, bite off their ear, just to do it…? I mean just to do it, just to get it out of your system?
Mule, Meadows and Badass
Badass and Mule ponder what prison will be like for Meadows.
Buddusky: He don’t stand a chance in Portsmouth, you know. You know that, don’t you? Goddamn grunts, kickin’ the shit outta him for eight years… he don’t stand a chance.
Buddusky: ‘Maggot’ this, ‘maggot’ that… Marines are really assholes, you know that? It takes a certain kind of a sadistic temperament to be a Marine.
Badass takes Meadows to an adult bookstore, to prepare him for his deflowering
Meadows: [looking at porn] Are they really doing that when they take that picture?
Buddusky: [pause] Well, kid, there’s more things in this life than you can possibly imagine. I knew a whore once in Wilmington. She had a glass eye… used to take it out and wink people off for a dollar.
Meadows prematurely ejaculates while undressing with the prostitute. She considers her transaction with Meadows to be over, meaning he will remain a virgin. This is intolerable to his mentor.
Earlier, before going to the brothel, the sailors hook up with a woman in a bar. She and her friends offer to take the sailors to a party, but they have no interest in anything other than chanting and lamenting the military industrial complex.
Meadows: If you’re Catholic, do you think it’s, uh, sacrilegious to chant?
Mule lays out parameters for his relationship with Badass.
Mulhall: I consider myself in jeopardy with you, man, understand? In jeopardy. This ain’t no farewell party an’ he ain’t retirin’. Understand? He’s a prisoner an’ we’re takin’ ‘im to the jailhouse. An’ you have a tendency to forget that. You’re a menace, man. You ain’t no simple shit, Bad-Ass, you’re a motherfuckin’ menace. But from now on, MAA can go piss up a rope! You ain’t no honcho! An’ I wanna hear no more of this horseshit psychology jive! No more turnin’ that boy’s head around to prove what a fuckin’ big man you are! You’re a lifer like me! Navy’s the best thing ever happened to me, an’ I don’t want’cha to fuck me up, ya understand?
Buddusky’s response to a woman’s sarcastic remark about his navy uniform.
Buddusky: You know what I like most about this uniform? The way it makes your dick look.
I was in a state of panic and Duane Moore rescued me.
I get that way — nervous, itchy — when I don’t have a book going. I look over my shelves but nothing speaks to me.
And I had just been on a run of great books and had a series of wonderful reading experiences.
I also have this quirk. If I read a book by an author and really enjoy it, I won’t allow myself to read another book by the same writer until I’ve put five or six books in between them. This helps me avoid burnout.
Even if it’s someone whose books are like drugs to me — Michael Connelly, Anne Tyler, Carl Hiaasen, etc. — I still follow that no back-to-back rule.
So I was stuck. None of the books were speaking to me.
Then I went to the second-hand bookstore at that temple of wonderfulness, the public library.
Browsing the shelves, eavesdropping on the cashier and another customer, I found it. Duane’s Depressed.
It’s the middle book in Larry McMurtry’s series featuring Duane Moore, and the only one in that series that I had not read and did not own. The title was a little off-putting. Who wants to read about someone else’s depression?
McMurtry, who died in 2021, left us a tremendous amount of work and he had published books in several series, taking place across three centuries.
He’s most known for Lonesome Dove (1985), the Pulitzer Prize winning epic about two aged Texas Rangers, Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, in the waning days of the West. //// Spoiler alert: Gus dies in that book. //// The characters were so beloved — by readers as well as McMurtry — that he spun off a couple of prequels featuring the cast of Lonesome Dove: Comanche Moon (1997) and Dead Man’s Walk, (1995) as well as a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993), which concerns Call’s adventures alone, post-Gus, tracking a sadistic killer.
McMurtry also wrote a series of books set in the 20th Century, featuring a screenwriter named Danny Deck. He was the star of All My Friends are Going to be Strangers (1972) and Some Can Whistle (1989) and appeared in several other novels in what McMurtry called his Houston series. Terms of Endearment (1975) was part of this series, and Danny Deck made a cameo, as he did in Moving On (1970), a huge, brawling, deeply wonderful novel about rodeo folk. (By the way, Some Can Whistle was one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. It gripped my heart and brought me to tears. Read it and you will understand.)
There’s a series of four novels known as the Berrybender Narratives, published in the first decade of this century, about a pioneer family. Good stuff.
All of this brings me to Duane Moore.
Duane first appeared as part of the cast of horny teenagers in The Last Picture Show (1966). He was a football player and then a roughneck, and he was apparently headed toward the ol’ life of quiet desperation.
But … surprise. When Duane and the other denizens of Thalia, Texas, returned two decades later, our boy had become a successful oil man. Texasville (1987) brought the horny teenagers up to middle age. The earlier book focused on a large cast. There was Sonny Crawford, the simple, quiet kid who carried on an affair with the much-older Ruth Popper, wife of his football coach. We had Jacy Farrow, the prettiest girl in town, who liked to flirt with anything in a cowboy hat and tight blue jeans. The moral center of the cast, the one who served as the town conscience and mentor to Sonny and Duane, was Sam the Lion. And there were so many more rich characters.
Texasville moved Duane Moore to the center of the narrative and he starred again in Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007) and, finally Rhino Ranch (2009).
As I say, I skipped Duane’s Depressed but reviewed When the Light Goes on its publication, and was shocked at how much I’d missed Duane.
He was a widower in When the Light Goes, which served as an advertisement for elderly eroticism. The characters were what we would call “mature,” but they still fucked like rabbits. Truly a wonderful (and inspiring) book.
I came across the last Duane book, Rhino Ranch, a few years back, enjoyed it immensely but panicked as I neared the conclusion, realizing this was the end of the series..
So when I picked up Duane’s Depressed at the bookstore, it was like walking into the middle of a film. I know what’s going to happen in the 20 years after the events in the book, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment.
Here’s the outline of the story: Duane is a prosperous oil man and his kids are lazy and worthless. They leave the rearing of their children to the housekeeper and to their parents, Duane and Karla. Their grown daughters go off and party in Dallas and leave their kids in front of the television, with Grandma.
So Duane comes home one day, parks his pickup and starts walking. There’s a small cabin on his property, about six miles away from his house, and he finds himself hoofing it there. He’s done with pickup-truck culture and decides he will henceforth walk everywhere.
Naturally, no one can understand his behavior. Duane, you got a perfectly good pickup. What’s wrawng with you, Son? Karla is threatened by Duane’s walking, thinking his walking away is the first step toward divorce. His two daughters think he’s gone crazy. His coked-up son thinks dad’s going through menopause.
All of these lay people think Duane is depressed. He doesn’t think so. He thinks he’s a pilgrim, trying to find a path through this ridiculous catastrophe of life. The cowboy culture mocks Duane for the walking. He upsets his friends by openly seeing a therapist, of all things. The therapist is in Wichita Falls, so Duane gets a bicycle. He also discovers the depths in his soul, thanks to Dr. Honor Carmichael. Nothing sexual happens between them because Duane is faithfully married and devoted to Karla. But Honor and Duane acknowledge their deep attraction. (They eventually fuck like monkeys in When the Light Goes.)
McMurtry’s storytelling is, as usual, masterful. I haven’t liked every book he’s written — the motherfucker published 47 books! — but I’ve loved most of them and have actually reread some of them.
One of my primary reasons for loving Larry McMurtry: It was 1986. I was living alone, recently separated, in a minimalist apartment. I had a mattress on the floor, a lawn chair and a recently acquired copy of Lonesome Dove. The book was my only entertainment. I’d read, then fall asleep and dream I was with Woodrow and Gus. It was sometimes hard to remember what was dream and what was McMurtry’s narrative. Reading that epic novel leads my list of Top Ten Glorious Reading Experiences. (Along with Fanny by Erica Jong, The Nuclear Age by Tim O’Brien, In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason and The World According to Garp by John Irving.)
I was already a fan of McMurtry. A decade before my Lonesome Dove experience, I was working for a magazine and sent him a note, asking if he had a short story we could publish. He replied promptly: “I can’t write short fiction. I just can’t.”
Thank God he wrote such powerful and absorbing novels. He created so many worlds, spanning the 19th through 21st centuries. To me, Duane Moore has been one of his richest characters and a companion for so much of my life.
Books can do that — give us glimpses into other worlds and other lives. I’m lucky to graze McMurtry’s bibliography and find such astonishing people and stories.
Welcome to the season of loss. I’ve lost some close friends recently. At this age, perhaps it’s expected, but that makes it no more welcome.
My friend Tom Corcoran has died. Let me tell you about this wonderful, generous man.
Corcoran in Key West, May 1979
One morning many years ago, I awoke to an interesting message in my email inbox. “I put ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘Hunter Thompson’ into Google and your name came up. Why?”
I told this unknown correspondent that I’d written books on Bob and Hunter and was, in fact, in the middle of writing another book on Hunter. He’d killed himself the year before and I wanted to write the first whole-life biography of Hunter Thompson. I wanted to talk about his work and the real man, whom I’d met years before and with whom I maintained an intermittent correspondence. To much of the world. Hunter Thompson was a drug-addled clown. I was revolted by that and sought to write a book that would focus on his art and craftsmanship.
So anyway — after the email from a stranger, then came the phone.
After several minutes of banter, Corcoran revealed that he knew Hunter well. He’d babysat Hunter during the time he lived at Jimmy Buffett’s Key West home in the late Seventies.
In return, Uncle Hunter babysat Corcoran’s young son, Sebastian. Hunter was reliable, if eccentric, caretaker. A bullhorn was essential to his surrogate parenting style. (For more details, read Outlaw Journalist.)
So now, years later, a pre-breakfast email and a phone call. A Potsdam conference was in order.
Corcoran lived squarely in the middle of Florida. I was upstate at the University of Florida, so I took a day off and made the two-hour drive to meet this guy.
Visiting Corcoran was like two middle-aged men having a play date. He had so much stuff – books, art prints, mementos – that he had two houses, side by side, to hold it all. I also discovered that in addition to a rich archive – this dude saved everything – that he had a steel trap mind.
While everyone around him had been snorting coke and getting drunk, Corcoran had managed to remain relatively clean and sober.
There’s no doubt that meeting Corcoran enriched my book. Historian Douglas Brinkley served as Hunter S. Thompson’s literary executor. After Thompson’s suicide, there had been a lot of books devoted to the iconoclastic writer. But Brinkley said my book stood out, in part because I was the only one to deal with the “missing years” of Thompson’s life in Key West.
All credit, of course, to Corcoran.
I was nearly finished with that book (Outlaw Journalist, available wherever fine books are sold) when Corcoran began telling me that I needed to write a book about Key West in the Seventies.
He even showed me a message from Thompson, dated less than two months before the suicide, suggesting that such a book must be written.
“Why don’t you write it?” I asked.
He was too close to it, he said. It needed to be written by someone on the outside. It needed to be me, he said.
It didn’t take a lot of convincing. I’d married a woman from Key West and both of her families went back several generations on the Rock. I had always wondered what a life hatched there would be like.
Yet my wife spoke of “getting out” of Key West, as if it was something bad, a place to be avoided. It was paradise, yes, but also dangerous.
As I thought about that era and considered the writers working and playing in Key West, I began to see it as a parallel to Paris in the Twenties, when Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and the others redefined the landscape of American literature. Key West in the Seventies even had Thomas McGuane, the writer so often called the “new Hemingway” that he probably flinched at mention of the name.
Even before I’d read a book by McGuane, I knew who he was. Like Thompson, he was a writer so famous in his era that even people who didn’t read books knew who he was.
McGuane in 2010, on the Raw Deal Ranch in Montana. I took this picture.
McGuane was portrayed as that drug-crazed new Hemingway they talked about in all the magazines, the one who was doing all that crazy stuff and getting married every 20 minutes or so down there in Key West.
That had been the public portrayal, at least. I’d seen what being a celebrity writer had done to Thompson. Yet I knew McGuane and his friends not only survived but prospered.
Whether that press portrayal was accurate or not, it intrigued me enough to want to know how McGuane, novelist/poet Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and the others lived their lives.
Hunter Thompson playing front-yard football with Sebastian Corcoran in Key West in the Seventies.
I’d gone on to read their books and saw writing this book as an opportunity, among other things, to revel in their work.
I saw the potential of the story that Corcoran had told me. After generously giving me the idea, he stepped back. I think he had no interest in being the focal point of the book. That part was my idea.
That book, Mile Marker Zero, could not have been written without Corcoran’s monumental help, cooperation and steadfast kindness.
After Outlaw Journalist, I wanted to write a book with a happy ending. (Spoiler alert: Hunter Thompson kills himself at the end.)
I saw the Key West book as a redemption story. After earning fame as the greatest drug and alcohol user of his generation, Tom McGuane got sober. After being wed three times in 18 months — once to my dream woman, actor Margot Kidder — McGuane was thirty years into what he called a “jubilant marriage” with Laurie Buffett. (Yes, Jimmy’s sister.)
That was the story I wanted to tell. Redemption. A happy ending, on a Montana ranch.
But as I wrote the story, weaving together the adventures of McGuane, Harrison and Chatham, I realized it was really a book about Tom Corcoran and how he held together this world.
Over the years I’d worked on the books, I learned all about Corcoran’s life, including his marriage to Judy. They’d had problems — don’t we all? — but in his case, that relationship was unresolved. Judy went missing. She was with friends, sailing on a spectacular afternoon in the Keys. Everybody jumped in the water to take a swim. All were high.
They never found Judy.
So much for a happy ending. Before I turned the manuscript into the editor, I sent it to Tom, for fact-checking and editing suggestions. Corcoran was a brilliant writer and when he gave me a compliment — “You write like a pro, Bubba” — it made my heart soar like a hawk (Apologies to Thomas Berger for that one.)
When he read the section about Judy, he was taken aback. He’d told me the story but didn’t think it would be in the book. I was ashamed of hurting him and said I’d take it out.
“No,” he said. “That’s part of the story.” This was followed my a long sigh. I offered again to take it out but he said the story was mine to tell.
We remained friends. When I was in cancer treatment, he sent me messages of support … and some good books.
He died of cancer, but we never knew he was sick. It wasn’t like him to share his pain. I have two extremely wonderful big brothers (one’s a brother in law, but he’s been in my life since I was 9.) But Corcoran was a big brother to me. I admired him so much.
I wanted to be like him when I grew up. To quote Paul Simon, “Who’ll be my role model now that my role model is gone?”
Tom Corcoran with Judy and Sebastian in the Seventies.
Perhaps I ramble, so let’s gather the facts: Tom Corcoran has died. He was gifted as a writer, a photographer, a songwriter, a pal and a human being. He touched so many people and we all loved him.
Maybe I should just end this with the ending of Mile Marker Zero — one of our nights together, when we went out to dinner and had another evening of spectacular conversation.
Here:
Tom Corcoran now owns two houses, side by side, in a central Florida town at the outer reaches of Orlando’s gravitational pull. His adult son, Sebastian, lives in one, presiding over Corcoran’s huge, moody Russell Chatham lithographs and some of the artifacts from his life and career. Corcoran lives a few steps across the manicured yard in the house he reserves for his other possessions – a magnificent collection of books, more lithographs, more of his beautiful photographs of a golden age of Key West.
Corcoran in 1979, working on the screenplay for Cigarette Key in Buffett’s apartment, where his collaborator, Hunter Thompson, was bunking.
Corcoran sleeps here.
It’s hard to find a seat. The place is more warehouse than home. It is also where Corcoran works. There are no couches, no tables, no bar stools. The dining room holds most of the inventory for his small publishing business, The Ketch and Yawl Press. More books and boxes of Jimmy Buffett calendars, another Corcoran enterprise, fill the living room.
There are two chairs in the larger of the three rooms devoted to his library. One is a remnant from Buffett’s Waddell Street apartment. Corcoran could put a plaque on it and sell it to the Hard Rock Café: “Jimmy Buffett Sat Here.” It could also say, “Tom McGuane Sat Here” or “Hunter S. Thompson Sat Here,” but so far, no one has devised a theme restaurant built around literature.
In the office, where Corcoran writes his novels, there is a desk chair and a small chair for visitors, usually covered in piles of manuscript pages.
Tom Corcoran was long ago priced out of Key West, and lived in Fairhope, Alabama, for several years. Eventually, he found work writing about automobiles and became editor of a magazine about the cult surrounding the Ford Mustang. That job brought him back to Florida and he settled smack dab in the middle of the state this time. He published three books about cars, but knew it was time for him to realize that long-dormant ambition to be a novelist. His muse, of course, was Key West.
He couldn’t afford to live there, but when he left the magazine job, he moved to the Keys in the Nineties, buying a home on Cudjoe and finally beginning to write the novels he’d always planned to write. They were mysteries set in Key West, built around a photographer who knew the island and all of its history. The character, Alex Rutledge, gets pulled into solving crimes.
“How much of Alex Rutledge is Tom Corcoran?” a visitor asks.
“Quite a bit,” he says.
Corcoran with Hunter S. Thompson on Sugarloaf Key, during their collaboration as screenwriters
In his fiction, he’s dealt – tangentially, mostly – with a lot of the real mysteries of Key West, including the disappearance of Bum Farto. He has not, and will not, write about the disappearance of Judy Corcoran. That would cause a raft of pain.
When his first novel, The Mango Opera, was published, his friends lined up to praise his books with dust-jacket blurbs that would be the envy of any American writer: Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Buffett. He became one of the best mystery writers in America. Though he does not sell books by the truckload, as does a Michael Connelly, he earns the praise of such masters of the craft. Connelly called one of Corcoran’s books “the reading highlight of my year.”
He gave up the Cudjoe Key house some years back and now shares the twin houses with Sebastian. He goes to the Keys a half dozen times a year, usually staying with Dink Bruce. He also writes songs with John Frinzi and Keith Sykes. He still collects a handsome royalty each year for a few minutes of collaboration with Jimmy Buffett three decades ago.
Out at dinner, he is kind and solicitous to his young waitress. The talk turns to music and Corcoran’s dinner companion tells her, “This dude wrote songs with Jimmy Buffett.”
“Really?” she asks. Though he’s grandfather age to her, you can see that celebrity remains a powerful aphrodisiac.
“Not only that,” the companion says. “He once wrote a movie with Hunter Thompson. And he’s a big-time mystery writer.”
“Really?” It’s drawn out three or four extra syllables.
It’s dark in the restaurant, so it’s not clear if Corcoran is blushing, but the smart money is on it.
He tells her a few stories about Buffett and Thompson in the old days in Key West. She’s smiling, ignoring all of her other tables.
“I’ve never been,” she says. “Key West, I mean. I’ve lived in Florida my whole life, but I’ve never been.”
“You should go.” Corcoran’s matter of fact, serious even. “It’s not what it was in my day, but you should still go.”
She smiles.
“I can’t finish this,” he says, nodding toward his plate. “Could you bring me something to pack it up in?”
“Yes, sir.”
Back at his house, he’s getting out of his car when he hears a hello as a bicycle speeds past in the dark. It’s Sebastian, home from an evening with friends. Corcoran walks over to his other front yard.
Tom Corcoran as I knew him
“Hello, Son,” he says. “I couldn’t eat all my dinner. Would you like it?”
“That’d be great,” Sebastian says. “I haven’t gotten around to eating yet.”
“It’s Italian. It’s good. I just wasn’t that hungry.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Corcoran turns back toward his other house. “Goodnight, Son.”
“Good night, Dad.”
But Corcoran isn’t ready for bed just yet. If he didn’t have a visitor, he might be at work on his next Alex Rutledge novel. Instead, he looks through his files of photographs of Key West. He’s published one book, a limited-edition art book, of black and whites. Now he’s contemplating a companion book in color.
The photographs are sharp and vivid, not faded and blurred with time. Corcoran examines each one carefully, seeing occasional flaws, remembering the instant each photograph was taken.
Here’s McGuane, serenely high from the look in his eyes, with Richard Brautigan and Guy de la Valdene. That was on Duval, he thinks. Here’s Hunter S. Thompson, probably in 1978 or so, looking over a manuscript page in Buffett’s apartment, sitting in that chair that’s in the next room. And speak of the devil, here’s a young and hairy Jimmy Buffett, wearing the smallest of cut-off shorts, hanging off the side of his sloop.
Must’ve been 1974 or thereabouts. He wasn’t the multi-millionaire entrepreneur then, but aside from the hairline and the income, Corcoran isn’t sure all that much has changed.
He treats everything with surgical care: photographic prints are in plastic slipcases; valuable books have mylar covers. He has a whole bookcase devoted to his Key West collection, many of them rare, precious and beautiful.
You should turn this into a museum, the guest says.
He nods. “Perhaps I will.”
It’s well after midnight when he finally puts away the pictures and announces he’s ready for bed.
He locks the front door, turns out the lights, crosses the hall to his bedroom, and gets between the covers.
Thinking about Key West again invigorates him, but he’s tired, so he falls asleep quickly, slipping into a dream before very long. Soon, he could see the blue water.
Chicken Skin Music was the title of a Ry Cooder album of long ago. The title referred to music that gave you chills.
Since we waste time on social media with lists, I decided to list the songs that unfailingly give me this feeling.
Goose bumps. Hair on the back of the neck. That stuff. Nearly all Celtic music does that to me. It must be my ancestors calling.
But for the list. I’ll try to be specific and point out the parts of songs that affect me so.
This is just today’s list. Another day might be radically different.
Great collection of songs here. You can thank me later for giving you this wonderful afternoon of listening. Click on the title to hear the music.
Let’s start with Ryland Peter Cooder.
“Rally ‘Round the Flag” by Ry Cooder. He sounds like the last survivor of Chickamauga. He can barely mutter the battle cry of freedom, but he’s determined to try. This might get us off to a slow start with our musical program, but so what? I believe that’s Van Dyke Parks on piano. Great slide playing, of course. (Ry Cooder, duh.)
“My Back Pages” by the Byrds. The whole thing, but especially McGuinn’s evocative solo. We could also add “Chestnut Mare.” To me, the solo carries the emotional weight of the brilliant lyrics. This has become my motto — I was so much older then; I am younger than that now.
“Series of Dreams” by Bob Dylan . Especially his buildup to the fade and the fade. There’s something swirling and mythic and wonderful about this song. I always put it on repeat. I’ve often played it four or five times in a row.
Aretha Franklin
“The Dark End of the Street” by Aretha Franklin. There are so many great versions of this song, from James Carr‘s original to the version by the songwriter, Dan Penn. (The Clarence Carter version is below.) But the bridge of Franklin’s version takes us to Jupiter. It’s truly, deeply otherworldly. And that desperation: “They’re gonna find us, they’re gonna find us.”
“Mother Country” by John Stewart. Especially the second verse about the blind man in the sulky. I don’t like narration in songs, but John Stewart pulls it off. From the opening strum, this song has me.
“This Whole World” by the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson’s moment at the end, when the instruments drop out and it’s just him. Or maybe that’s Carl Wilson. They give us this whole world … and they bring it in under two minutes. This is beauty and craftsmanship.
“Gulf Coast Highway” by Nanci Griffith. She kept re-recording this, but she got it right the first time (in the 1988 recording) with Mac MacAnally. When she gets to the final verse, I nearly go into a coma. If only she’d spelled her first name Nancy, she would have been perfection.
“Candy’s Room” by Bruce Springsteen. After the whispered introduction, Max Weinberg’s drums explode into the song and create one of those Great Moments in Rock’n’Roll History.
“Sweet Old World” by Emmylou Harris. Just about everything on the Wrecking Ball album gives me chills. It’s that Daniel Lanois fellow, her producer. He knows how to push those buttons. For more Emmylou chicken skin, listen to her Christmas album as Neil Young flies in from Mars to warble ‘hallelujah’ in the background of “Light of the Stable.”
“Four Strong Winds” by Ian and Sylvia. The whole damn thing. A nearly perfect recording. Ian Tyson gets the testosterone boiling. This is a beautiful blend of male and female voices. Sylvia Fricker sings so beautifully on “Someday Soon.”
The Beach Boys
“Add Some Music to Your Day” by the Beach Boys. A pleasant enough song until midpoint, when Brian (or is it Carl?) sings, “Music, when you’re alone, is like a companion for your lonely soul.” Then he soars. Poultry time, my friends. Pawk, pawk.
“Bugler” by The Byrds. Sung by Clarence White. A boy tells us how his dog, his best friend, died. This reminds me so much of my childhood in Texas … and that old movie, Biscuit Eater. (Don’t get me started on Old Yeller.) When one of our family dogs died, we were not allowed to utter the dead dog’s name again. Dry your eyes and stand up straight — Bugler’s got a place at the pearly gates.
“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. Yes. Every time I hear it, I’m slayed. I’ve never been able to hear this without turning it up. I especially like it as the song roars toward the conclusion and Dylan makes that sound, as if he can’t himself believe what he’s in the middle of doing. Fucking awesome. Every time I hear it.
Clarence Carter
“Making Love (at the Dark End of the Street)” by Clarence Carter. He used only one verse from the original “Dark End of the Street” and spends the first part of the song preaching about cattle copulating. Never have I heard the ridiculous and sublime so well married in a song. After talking about mosquitos fucking, he manages to achieve some kind of majesty at the end of the song. Chills. And marvel: how did he do that?
“Hello in There” by John Prine.Thinking about my late grandparents. Prine’s whole body of work is chicken skin music. Sometimes, his songs are so good that I can’t listen to them. I’m afraid I’d collapse. On The Tree of Forgiveness (2018), his last album, there’s a song called “Summer’s End.” It destroys me. From beginning to end, John Prine had it.
“2000 Miles” by the Pretenders. The way Chrissie Hyde’s voice rises as she sings “it must be Christmastime.” I have a firm tactile memory of this song — driving cross-country through a blizzard to see my children. I always associate this and Dylan’s Infidels and Emmylou’s Wrecking Ball as cold-weather albums.
Carlene Carter
“Me and the Wildwood Rose” by Carlene Carter. The best and most autobiographical song on an album dealing with her considerable family legacy. The last verse moves one to tears. Great storytelling. If you loved a grandparent, you’ll understand.
“The Lakes of Ponchatrain” by Trapezoid. Feel free to assassinate me while this song is playing. It’s so beautiful, I won’t mind. Really. The dulcimer solo carries home this song of doomed and impossible love.
“Mama Tried” by the Everly Brothers. On the great Roots album, this follows a snippet from an Everly Family radio broadcast when Don and Phil were in single digits. That moment, when the broadcast ends and the opening of this Merle Haggard cover begins, is one of many high points on that great album. Also: a slow remake of their early song, “I Wonder if I Care as Much.” Sorry, Merle, this is the odd moment when a cover version beats your original — but just by a badger hair.
The Beatles
“Hey Jude” by the Beatles. My favorite Beatle song, especially for the fade – and for the time and place where that song came in my / our history. This song is so connected to that tumultuous, overwhelming year, 1968.
Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. The whole thing. A cop-out, I know, but when I hear “Wouldn’t it be Nice” — especially the fade –- “Sloop John B,” “God Only Knows” and the rest of it, I’m both exhilarated by the beauty of the music and saddened that the world is without the angelic voice of Carl Wilson. Carl could even take a weak song – Mike Love’s “Brian is Back” comes to mind – and turn it into a thing of beauty. When I hear them fading away at the end of “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” they truly are forever young.
“Spanish is the Loving Tongue” by Michael Martin Murphey. The singing and playing is beautiful and the song even manages to overcome one verse that is spoken, not sung. I’m a mushpot, so this one always gets to me. You know who you are.
“Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. Sorry to be so obvious. This is the best Phil Spector record that Spector never made. Phil would have crammed this whole world into a shorter record. Too bad how it ended with Phil. I’d like to see his remix of this. I bet he’d bring it in under three minutes. It would be a tight, claustrophobic record.
“Highwater (for Charley Patton)” by Bob Dylan. One last Bob song. This is of a piece with “Series of Dreams” and “Blind Willie McTell.” This is Dylan’s whole history of the doom and dread of the 20th Century. I’m utterly drained after every listen.
Marvin Gaye
What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye. The whole thing. When I got the original LP, I thought, “This album is so great that if there isn’t a Side 2, I’d still be happy with it.” That suite on Side 1 is so beautiful, especially when Gaye preaches and begs us to save the babies! save the babies!
As I contemplate the many pleasant afternoons in my life, oddly enough, it’s one of the non-carnal ones to which I often return in memory.
It was an afternoon in the Tune Town record shop in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was still in my twenties, a young dad, and I was there to pick up a book I’d lent to the guy behind the counter, Bill Lloyd.
Bill Lloyd in his Foster & Lloyd days.
Yes, thatBill Lloyd, A few years later, he was half of Foster & Lloyd and on his way to his career as one of the most admired, beloved and respected musicians in Nashville.
But on that day, he wanted to return my copy of It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a book of essays by Jon Landau, who had forsaken writing about music to become Svengali for Bruce Springsteen.
I went to pick up the book but luckily the afternoon went as I’d hoped and elongated. It became an adult playdate.
You’ve got to hear this, he said — again and again.
It was a weekday, so the store was essentially ours. A few customers came and went, but Bill kept pulling records from under the counter and popping them on the store turntable.
He guided me through an afternoon of songs — wonderful, swirling music, stuff I’d never heard before. With the record shop at his disposal, he took me through his world, and played me stuff from Buddy Holly’s demos, recorded in his apartment just weeks before his death. He introduced me to The Dictators Go Girl Crazy and I became a lifelong fan of Handsome Dick Manitoba. I was stunned by the import-only White Trails by Englishman Chris Rainbow. That was a thrilling collection heavily influenced by the Sunflower / Surf’s Up era of The Beach Boys.
I kept notes in the plain pages at the back of the Landau book. Within a couple of years, I’d tracked down and bought all of the records Bill played for me that day.
I love adult playdates and now I feel as if I’ve had another rewarding musical afternoon, this time with Bob Dylan.
Dylan’s new book,The Philosophy of Modern Song, is sort of like that long-ago afternoon with Bill Lloyd, only without the music. (I hope a soundtrack album to Dylan’s book is imminent.)
Bob Dylan
It’s as if we’re seated on the floor in front of the turntable, and Dylan is flipping through his albums saying, You’ve got to hear this.
He’s picked out 66 songs from all across the musical map, and he tells us about them. There are no details about recording and only once or twice does he examine the songs from a professional songwriter’s viewpoint. He never indulges in self-reference, about a particular song’s influence or ways in which he would approach the same material.
So it’s not a discographical reference. Like a lot of Dylan’s prose, it’s fanciful, often hilarious, and notoriously unreliable. We assume the recording details at the front of every chapter are correct, but all bets are off when it comes to his flights of fancy.
And he takes such flights frequently. With several songs, he goes off on wild tangents.
Consider this meditation on footwear, which I excerpt I from his commentary on “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins:
There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants and dresses combined. Ray Price’s keep walking back to him. Betty Lou got a new pair. Chuck Willis didn’t want to hang his up. Shoes reveal character, station and personality. But for all that shoes revealed, they did not give up their secrets easily. [Consider] the white buck, a shoe so proud if its immaculate surface that it came with a small brush to buff any blemish from existence. And one can’t forget blue suede shoes. Has ever a shoe proclaimed its frivolity more joyously? Has any article of clothing ever said more plainly that it wasn’t meant for the farm, that it wasn’t meant to step in pig shit? Poor Carl Perkins, watching Elvis Presley sing his song “Blue Suede Shoes” on TV in 1956 from a hospital bed. At that point, Carl’s version had sold a million copies, but a car accident slowed the momentum of Carl’s career and it never truly recovered. Elvis, on the other hand, was all sullen eyes and sharp cheekbones, backwoods-born but city-livin’, truck-drivin’, hip-shakin’ with a feral whiff of danger. Carl wrote this song, but if Elvis was alive today, he’d be the one to have a deal with Nike.
Feral whiff? It’s writing like that that makes me wish Dylan published prose more often.
Turns out he’s not just the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he’s also the master of the Dad Joke.
These vamps are like transcriptions from those off-the-wall monologues Dylan used to deliver when he hosted his Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. The book is much like the show in the sense that he wants to educate us about the music that made him.
A treatise on the bluegrass music of the Osborne Brothers’ 1957 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?” somehow morphs into a discussion of heavy metal music. He concludes the two forms of music have a lot in common: “This [bluegrass music] is speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship.”
He loves tall tales. Discussing Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou,” he references Linda Ronstadt’s hit version of the song. “A lot of people cite The Dickson Baseball Dictionary as listing ‘Linda Ronstadt’ as a synonym for a baseball,” he deadpans, because the ball “‘blew by you.’ When Herb Carneal announced a Twins game and the opposing team’s batter would take a strike off a fastball, Herb would giddily exclaim, ‘Thank you, Roy Orbison.’”
There’s no such entry in my edition of the Dickson book, but why quibble. I’m not sure Dylan’s writing would last more than a couple of minutes in the fact-checking department of The New Yorker. Those carnivorous Keepers of Truth would roll up the manuscript and toss it in the dustbin. But who cares? Dylan’s obviously having fun.
Except when he isn’t. There are a couple startling essays on music than turn tragic and unforgettable. You’re laughing along with his word play and then suddenly shocked into silence.
Ry Cooder
Somewhere, Ry Cooder is blushing. Dylan lavishes the great guitarist with Himalayas of praise. His chapter on “Old Violin” reminds me that I need to rethink Johnny Paycheck. I’m suddenly questioning if I missed something in the singing of Perry Como. And what love Dylan’s shows Judy Garland.
The artists range from hillbillies to rappers, with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby thrown in, alongside The Clash, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and artists you’ve never heard of. He cares little for political correctness and says, at one point ,that as a field of knowledge expands and is stretched tighter, the skin of society becomes too thin for the comfort of ideas.
There’s a lot of pocket wisdom in the book and it’s as if he just used the premise of writing about records to reveal this wonderment of prose writing.
Note: There are no entries for The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones or Dylan.
It’s a beautiful book, filled with oddball and esoteric illustrations. The cover features Little Richard, Alis Lesley (she called herself the Female Elvis) and the great and doomed Eddie Cochran.
As much as I love hard copies, I supplemented this purchase of paper with the audio version of the book. I heard Bob was doing part of the narration. He ends up doing his fantasias, which sound like coffee-shop beat poetry read aloud. His segments have a different audio texture than his other narrators.
And what a cast of collaborators. The lineup includes Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright and Renee Zellweger.
Helen Mirren, part of the narration crew
You’ve got to hear this. Bob doesn’t point us to any of his recordings, but he does include some contemporaries — Willie Nelson, Cher, Jimmy Webb and others — and, of course, honors the forefathers of rock’n’roll: Little Richard, Rick Nelson, and Johnny Cash.
But — and here’s where you need to take notes — he introduces us to recordings that mean so much to him: “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” an unreleased song, recorded by Jimmy Wages in 1957; Harry McClintock’s 1927 recording of “Jesse James”; and “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1924. I know I’ll be tracking down “Doesn’t Hurt Anyone” by John Trudell, released in 2001 … one of only two songs from this century to make Dylan’s cut.
And that makes sense. Bob Dylan is, after all, a pure product of America. He is the American musical experience wrapped up in the bones of sinews of one human being, and he wants to share his love with you.
I was at a tender and impressionable age when I discovered the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever.
John Cheever’s grave in Norwell, Massachusetts. It’s adjacent to the parking lot for a place called Cheever Tavern.
They were life-changing.I was introduced to O’Connor by my mentor, Starkey Flythe.
Starkey was Georgian and Southern Gothic, so that was a natural development of his preaching to me.
I often refer to working with Starkey as my graduate school. He was a lovely man and the world is poorer without him.
Here is a short film of Starkey reading one of his poems. It’s a beautiful piece of work. Go to the link, then scroll down to “For My Absent Friend.” https://www.williammckeen.com/news/
I read O’Connor’s Complete Stories in one long inhale. With my friend, Harry Allen, we conversed as if we were characters in her story “Greenleaf.” She gave us a new language. She was a wonderful writer.
Oddly, her novels didn’t move me the way her short stories did.
Not sure how I came to John Cheever, but Starkey was probably the culprit.
Cheever wrote of a different world — the New York suburban life of highballs and infidelities. I again inhaled his collected stories (The Stories of John Cheever) in one gulp.
Decades later, I read the massive book straight through again. When I moved to Massachusetts, I was amused that I settled near Braintree and Quincy, Cheever’s old stomping grounds.
Flannery O’Connor
I have a friend who coaches the tennis team at Thayer Academy, the school that expelled Cheever.
I’ve been in a Cheever mood recently and discovered that I’m working one street over from Cheever’s apartment on Bay State Road.
He taught at Boston University for a while. Then, curious about his burial, I discovered he is in the First Parish Cemetery in Norwell. It’s right across the street from where son Charley works as a food runner. (The Tinker’s Son — frosty libations and swell vittles.)
So I played hooky from grading yesterday and found his grave. It’s a few feet away from the parking lot for a restaurant called Cheever Tavern.
There it was. This great writer’s grave is next to a parking lot. He’s buried next to his wife, Mary, and his son, Federico. Federico was a celebrated professor of law. He died while kayaking in 2017.
There is no great meaning or burning epiphany to report, but finding Cheever’s grave was deeply moving.
The Tavern wasn’t open, but I go by the place a couple of times a week, so I’ll drop in for a Scotch in honor of those two masterful storytellers.
John Cheever in the 1970s. He spent a couple of deeply unhappy terms teaching at Boston University before his career revived with Falconer and The Stories of John Cheever.
Cheever Tavern looks spiffy, and the menu might be too rich for my blood.
There is no entrance on the main street.
The tavern is behind a convenience store and a coffee shop, and you have to drive around back to find the joint.
I’ll let you know what it’s like, assuming the maitre’d doesn’t kick me out for being a lowlife.
My book was called Outlaw Journalist in the English-speaking world. The title was a little more cumbersome in French. I saw that a review of the book appeared in a French publication, so I copied and pasted it into Google Translate and this is what I got. I particularly like the phrase “monkey emeritus.”
Hunter S. Thompson was the inventor of gonzo style: journalism written by a living pharmacy, a way to crack the American dream without skimping on LSD, peyote, Tequila, Chivas Regal and other amphetamines, a columnist who is featured as the character Principal’s reports.
The excellent biography by William McKeen does justice to this monkey emeritus.
The cover of the French paperback features this Al Satterwhite photograph, taken in Cozumel in 1974.
The monster was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, a city providing half the world’s bourbon. Adept of creative vandalism, the juvenile seeks to silence his demons by engaging in the Air Force. Editor of a cabbage leaf for sport pilots, it is already the bombing and the chameleon. He was fired in 1957 for “rebel and superior attitude.”
Here grouillot to Time columnist bowling Puerto Rico goalkeeper villa in Big Sur, freelance for The Observer in Latin America. Adept of hitchhiking in bermuda, the character loves shooting rats with a 357 Magnum. Reader Hemingway at the time of Bob Dylan, this atypical madmen consonant with a new generation of columnists. They call Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Terry Southern. Their way? Integrating the psyche of a journalist in the article itself, deal with the real weapons of fiction. In this new journalism, Thompson adds a kind of intimate caving with whims and exciting. Set in 1964 in San Francisco, he lives between the world of psychedelic hippies and the leather community while the Hells Angels, which he dedicated in 1967 an essay memorable him to be beaten by those crazy bikers. “Journalism, he said, pays for our continued education.
Now camped in his hut in Aspen, Thompson throne with his eternal cigarette holder and his Hawaiian shirt in the woods elk stolen Hemingway. Looks like a kind of Walt Whitman redesigned by Robert Crumb. The brilliant crazy wrote to President Johnson asking him to be appointed Governor of Samoa before embarking on one of his terrible raids journalism. Will pay for the presidential candidates of 1968: Richard Nixon, his staff Antichrist, “a nightmare of intrigue, bullshit and suspicion”, and his rival Humphrey, “an ignoble body electrified.
“Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai” (Iggy Pop)
Freak. Described by one witness as “a cross between half-mad hermit and a Tasmanian devil”, this psychotic Celinian is recruited by the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine, which he made the beautiful days. There he publishes Loathing in Las Vegas, the story of a drift distorted through the game city, wrote to the Dexedrine and bourbon during the summer of 1971. Journalism vision, stretched, torn by lightning psychotropic, as if the Stones put music in the Apocalypse of St. John. The legend of gonzo Thompson begins to take shape. The man, safari hat covers the presidential campaign of 1972 or the fall of Saigon, and sometimes signed “Martin Bormann” on hotel registers, becomes a character in the comic strip Doonesbury Uncle Duke, a reporter with the glasses of ‘Aviator seeing bats everywhere.
After 1976, Thompson patina. Cocaine him gnawing nostrils. His wife Sandy left him. He was fishing for tarpon in Key West, is the portrait of Muhammad Ali, hangs out with Jim Harrison or John Belushi, then resumed a weekly column in the Examiner. Working in his kitchen in the middle of televisions turned on, the super-freak of the Reagan gently invite to vote for Bill Clinton, whom he lent “the loyalty of a lizard who lost his tail.” The man who loved to “dedicate” his books with a bullet becomes the totem of young Hollywood, revered by Sean Penn or Johnny Depp, who will play in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But, less a prisoner of his mythology, the old hunter scalps in 2005 will choose the end of Hemingway’s heroes: a .45 caliber gun in his mouth. “Hunter did not commit suicide, Hunter followed the Way of the Samurai,” says Iggy Pop. Consistent with this life pyrotechnic is the gun that his ashes were eventually scattered.
Hunter S. Thompson: journalist and off-the-law, William McKeen (Tristram, translated from English by Jean-Paul Mourlon, 496 p., 24 euros).
I’ve been a fan of “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel” from the start.
Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel
The only way the show could be better would be if there was an option that allowed me to leap into the screen and run away with Midge Maisel.
That sort of happened the other night.
In my dream, Midge and I were reporters for an unknown news venue — wasn’t sure if it we were working in a newspaper or a television newsroom — but we made a great team. Midge was so good that she was offered the job of Rome bureau chief.
She refused to take the job unless I came as deputy chief.
I’d say my dream came true, except it didn’t. It remained a dream. I woke up in Massachusetts, not Italy.
Still, it was a satisfying dream.
Rachel Brosnahan (Midge) and Alex Borstein (Susie, but also Lois on “Family Guy”) were the first to reap rewards. But what an ensemble this has become. Tony Shaloub is great as Midge’s OCD Dad, Kevin Pollak is brilliantly irritating as her father in law and Marin Hinkle (Midge’s mother) has emerged as a secret weapon, stealing lots of scenes this year.
Lenny Bruce (played by Luke Kirby) has been in the show from the beginning, but this season ::::::::::SPOILER ALLERT :::::::::::: he finally crashed the custard truck with Midge.
It’s a great show and I love it. **Sigh** If only it was real. I’ve never been to Rome.
