The Story of a Song

I sing when I’m alone. I have to; no one wants to hear me.

And the song I sing in the shower, or in the kitchen or while mowing the yard — it’s often this one particular song I choose over the others in my cranial repertoire.

I did not hear the original version first. It came my way thanks to one of my favorite groups, The Byrds.

The Byrds introduced me to lots of things, because the members of the band came from a folk background and weren’t a typical rock’n’roll band.

Thanks to The Byrds, I heard the lovely “John Riley,” a 17th Century English ballad based on The Odyssey.

I first heard the stark and haunting “I Come and Stand at Every Door” on The Byrds album Fifth Dimension. The song was narrated by a child who died in Hiroshima. Now the child appears — “no one hears my silent tread” — to remind us all of the horrors of nuclear war. 

Roger McGuinn

It began as a poem by Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet. American writer Jeanette Turner took a translation of the poem to Pete Seeger and urged him to set it to music. With some help, Seeger did so and then The Byrds took the grim message to us kids.

The song I sing when alone was on the 1969 album by The Byrds called Ballad of Easy Rider, where it was titled “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” 

There have been many variations on the title, and this song also owed its existence in part to Seeger.

I was a serious student of record labels and I saw the song credited “W. Guthrie — M. Hoffman.”

Woody Guthrie, I figured. 

I was an ignorant 14 year old, but I knew who he was. Two years before, I was a junior high student in Fort Worth, Texas. There was a music-loving girl who sat next to me in Mrs Brock’s speech class. She was a non-stop talker and that spring, she was obsessed with Arlo Guthrie, who had just released his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant

Woody Guthrie

“He’s Woody’s son, you know.” 

I nodded; she was cute and I pretended I knew more than I did.

Guthrie — was that the guy who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?

“You know, Woody died the same month Arlo’s album came out,” she said. I nodded again. “I hope Woody got to see Arlo’s album before he died.”

Nothing ever happened with that nice girl, due to my ineptitude with women. But she  began to open me up musically. 

The first album I ever bought — years before — was The Concert Sound of Henry Mancini. Thanks to that nice girl and her recommendations, by junior high I was beginning to listen to Simon & Garfunkel and a few other rock artists. I still had a lot of catching up to do if I wanted to be a card-carrying Baby Boomer.

Two years later, Texas in the rear-view, Ballad of Easy Rider came out (I refer to The Byrds album and not the Easy Rider soundtrack) and there, in a spot of honor near the end of the album was “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” Roger McGuinn, the head Byrd (and the only original band member left at that point) sang the song in his flat-tire matter-of-fact voice.

I was in better company by then. We’d moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and my classmates rated much higher on the hip meter than had my fellow scholars back at Monnig Junior High. [Though the cafeteria at that school served, every Monday, the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever eaten. Also, our football coach, Spud Cason, was the inventor of the Wishbone offense.]

I began listening to a lot of stuff. I discovered Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. And, of course, The Byrds.

McGuinn sang “Deportee” in a somewhat neutral voice, and didn’t need to push any buttons to elicit a response. He wanted us to hear this story, which Guthrie had written as a poem, and he wanted us to feel. He did not want to feel for us.

His stark singing gave the song heart-breaking power. It was also in my vocal range. I think.

Looking for survivors in Los Gatos canyon

What we learned: a plane had crashed in a California canyon. In addition to the small flight crew, there were migrant workers on board, being deported to Mexico after the end of harvest. Without being told the story was true, we could tell this crash had really happened. Later, we’d learn that the plane caught fire and crashed on January 28, 1948.

There was a problem with a gasket in the left engine. As the plane lost altitude, it splintered into flame and the left wing fell off.

Witnesses to the crash said they saw some passengers jump from the plane before it hit the ground.

When Guthrie heard news of this on the radio, he was enraged by the off-hand way the announcer dismissed most of the passengers on the plane. As he told it:

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Guthrie had long championed the cause of migrant workers. One of his best songs, in my mind, is “Pastures of Plenty.”

In the angry verses of that song, Guthrie spoke in the voice of farmworkers addressing those who lived off their backs and labor:

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well it’s North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Further back in my musical history, I recalled third grade in South Florida, on the southernmost military installation on the mainland, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (But that’s another story.)

When the denizens of Air Base Elementary congregated in the cafetorium, we sang Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and other American songs, including the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

When I was a kid, I’d hear rumblings now and then about “This Land is Your Land” becoming our new national anthem. Everybody, it seemed, hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Me, I always liked it because we only sing one verse of the song at ballgames and it ends with a question we can ask ourselves every day: Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?

What I didn’t learn until much later was that “This Land is Your Land” was an angry answer song to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” That uber-patriotic song infuriated Guthrie. 

The original chorus to what became “This Land” was: “God blessed America for me.”

And, in another key verse, Guthrie may have been supplying a Marxist answer to Irving Berlin’s jingoism:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

Some might say his songs were bitter, but to me they carried the fragrance of optimism. We can do this, we will endure. Those were the sentiments I took away.

Often attributed to Guthrie: “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it.”

But then: “Deportee.” There was no optimism there, just human beings whose lives were devalued because of their skin color. 

The passengers, the friends scattered like dry leaves, do not even earn the dignity of being known by name. They were “just deportees.”

The plane’s manifest named the crew, but for passengers, they were listed as a group of “Mexican nationals.” The passengers were buried in a mass grave.

Demonize the immigrant, demonize the undocumented. It’s the American way. The more things change, they don’t.

Guthrie wrote the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” poem on his kitchen table, within hours after hearing of the crash. He didn’t write it as a song because he was beginning to lose his musical ability, as the degenerative neurological condition known as Huntington’s disease began its destruction of his body. He was beginning a long, slow decline that within a few years would leave him without his voice.

It took 20 years to kill him.

A decade after the crash, Pete Seeger was on a campus tour, singing the songs that had gotten him blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

At Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, he did his show then gathered afterward at the home of a member of the college’s folk song club. Seeger played more songs, the students played some songs, and Seeger was about to fall into slumber on the couch, when one of the students — it was his living room — said he’d taken a poem of Guthrie’s, the one about the plane crash, and set it to music.

Pete Seeger

Martin Hoffman based his melody on a Mexican waltz, which made such sense with the words. Seeger listened as Hoffman sang “Deportee” but didn’t say much. He was tired.

But when Seeger got back to New York, he called Hoffman and asked him to send a tape of him singing the song, so he could get it copyrighted, with authorship split between Guthrie and Hoffman. That was 1958.

And then Seeger began performing the song. Judy Collins recorded it. Arlo Guthrie recorded it, as did Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. And so did The Byrds.

Recently, a 1948 recording of Guthrie talking / singing “Deportee” has been unearthed. He was losing his ability to sing, but he got through it. It was not long after the crash and he wanted to make sure his poem would live longer than he would.

Hearing that voice from 70 years ago, despite Guthrie’s pain and ravage, the  song that began as a poem still has its power.

And the question returns: “Who are these friends who are scattered like dry leaves?”

It began with a poem, so it’s fitting that a poet answers the questions in the song. 

Tim Z Hernandez is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is a renaissance man, producing art in a variety of media.

Tim Z Hernandez

Hearing “Deportee” had the effect on Hernandez that it had on me, but he did something about it. He set up a website to solicit donations to his project to make a documentary about the crash and the plane’s passengers.

He found out who those dry leaves were and he told their stories. No longer were they “just deportees.”

Hernandez produced an excellent and compelling book a few years back called All They Will Call You (University of Arizona Press, $13.35).

He deserves to add “historical researcher / journalist” to his list of talents.

Where the passengers had been listed a “Mexican Nationals” on the manifest, he now offered names and stories of the passengers — what their lives were like, what dreams they had, how their families carried on.

With his poet’s license, he indulges in speculation about the last moments on the plane, but he has researched the passengers enough to know them and his conjecture is not out of line.

Hernandez is transparent in the book, bringing readers into his interviewing process and gathering stories from descendants of the crash victims.

Across the decades, Hernandez answers the song’s question about the doomed passengers. Guthrie would approve of this other poet’s work.

Writer Joe Klein called “Deportee” Guthrie’s last great song before the disease crippled him. Guthrie recorded it with only the whisper of accompaniment, chanting the words, unable to sing as the disease began its torturous dance on his body.

Martin Hoffman in 1970, a year before his suicide

The words waited a decade before they were found by Hoffman and his Mexican waltz, which gives the song its razor edge of tragedy and beauty.

One evening in 1971, Martin Hoffman walked through his neighborhood and knocked on doors, telling his friends how much he appreciated them.

Then he said goodbye.

The next evening, he played guitar, took a slug of Scotch, then went into his bedroom, pulled out his double-barrel shotgun from under the bed. He put the barrel square in front of his face, then pulled the trigger with his big toe.

The song leaves us another mystery.

With the grace and beauty of a poet, Hernandez tells the story of the passengers, the small crew, Guthrie’s life and work and Hoffman’s short and tragic time on earth.

I marvel at his achievement. The storytelling tribe can do great things, right past wrongs, and find the truth behind the stories.

If just for a moment, Hernandez brought those friends back to life, honoring them by giving us their names and telling their stories.

All They Will Call You is a beautiful piece of work.

Click on the cover to order.

The passengers: Ramon Perez, Jesus Santos, Ramon Portello, James A. Guardaho, Guadalupe Ramirez, Julio Barron, Jose Macias, Martin Navarro, Apolonio Placentia, Santiago Elisandro, Salvadore Sandoval, Manuel Calderon, Francisco Duran, Rosalio Estrado, Bernabe Garcia, Severo Lara, Elias Macias, Tomas Marquez, Louis Medina, Manuel Merino, Luis Mirando, Ygnacio Navarro, Roman Ochoa, Alberto Raygoza, Guadalupe Rodriquez, Maria Rodriguez, and Juan Ruiz. The pilot was Frank Atkinson and the co-pilot was Marion Ewing. Both Atkinson and Ewing were deeply experienced and flew with distinction in the Second World War. The regular flight attendant had called Atkinson that morning and said she was unable to fly. Bobbie Atkinson — the pilot’s wife, newly pregnant — said she would fill the flight-attendant role. She’d get to spend more time with her husband. There was another passenger: Frank E. Chaffin was with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was to escort the passengers back to Mexico. His job was to make certain the farmworkers got safely home.

Farewell to a Beach Boy

Sometimes, I feel as if I am on dead-rock-star speed dial.
Ever since publication of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay a quarter century ago (and which you can order here), I get calls from reporters before the body gets cold.

Brian Wilson

And sometimes, the body is still warm.

After Hurricane Katrina, I got a lot of calls from journalists putting together obituaries. Problem was, Fats Domino wasn’t dead yet. He was rescued from the attic of the house where he’d hunkered down. (Or, considering he was found in the attic, let’s make that hunkered up.)

When Maurice Gibb of the BeeGees died, I was happy to talk about the beautiful harmonies those Gibb brothers spawned. Yet the AP reporter didn’t quote my comment on what I thought was one of the singer’s greatest achievements (“He fought a valiant battle against a receding hairline.”)

When Brian Wilson died earlier this month, I missed the call from the BBC and by the time I returned the message we’d passed another full news cycle. I’m not as diligent about responding during the summer.

The Los Angeles Times didn’t call me, but quoted me anyway. In this piece, they had me saying something I have no memory of saying and affiliating me with the University of Florida, with which I have not been affiliated for 15 years.

The Beach Boys in 1970, around the time they recorded Sunflower. Left to right: Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Alan Jardine and Dennis Wilson.

It’s just as well that no reporters reached me, since I was blubbering like a baby.

It was a huge loss to the world of music and to my life. Brian has been a part of my world for decades.

All right, I wasn’t really crying. At least I was lucky to get the news from my pal and fellow Brian Wilson believer, Wayne Garcia. Wayne named his firstborn Brian. I’ve never gone that far, but that’s mostly to avoid saddling a child with “BM” for initials.

Brian was the only Beach Boy I never interviewed. In my Saturday Evening Post days, my mentor Starkey Flythe and I collaborated on a profile of the band for the magazine. “The Endless Summer of the Beach Boys” was credited to Samuel Walton, one of Starkey’s pseudonyms. (A plethora of pseudonymns gave readers the impression the magazine had a large staff. This was a time, my friends, before the world at large had knowledge of Walmart and its founder, with whom we shared that pseudonymn. Starkey also masqueraded as F.X. O’Connor. I liked the pen name Captain Asparagus, which I’d seen in a local zine.)

Starkey and I followed the Boys through a couple of gigs to get material for the story.

During the stay in Cincinnati on their annual summer tour, we had dinner with Mike Love and his wife. Mike is a divisive figure with fans, but all I can say is that he was a charming dinner companion, even if he did not accept my revised “California Girls” lyrics for my proposed “Prehistoric Girls:”

Well, neanderthal girls are hip, I really dig the skins they wear
And the cro-mangon girls, with the way they stalk,
They knock me out when I’m down there
The Midwest savages’ daughters really make me feel all right
And the Mayan girls, with the way they kiss,
They keep those temples warm at night
I wish they all could be prehistoric girls


Mike gave me a hard pass. (And yes, I know I am bending science history to put together this paean.)

(Later, in the 1990s, I thought about sending Mike new lyrics to be paired with the “Catch a Wave” music: Get your keyboard and go internet surfin’ with me. The scary thing is, Mike might’ve gone for that one.)

We had a great afternoon interviewing Carl Wilson and Alan Jardine. I still have a song in my head that Jardine was writing about polypeptides. (This was in the days when the Beach Boys were uber-creative, before they were doomed to life as an oldies band.)

Dennis Wilson onstage, 1973.

Dennis Wilson did not want to be intervewed but asked us to his room to watch TV, then ride with him to the concert venue, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Colliseum. He was a wonderful guy. I ended up interviewing him three times over the years and he was always enchanting and hilarious. He was generous with his time and talent.

I never interviewed Brian, but perhaps that’s just as well. Starkey interviewed him when he was on the West Coast for another assignment. He said it was the weirdest interview he’d ever done. Brian was in his chain-smoking 340-pound period.

Starkey told me he’d mentioned me to Brian.

“Brian,” he said by way of introduction, “I bear greetings from your biggest fan.”

“Who’s that?” bathrobed Brian growled.

“Bill McKeen.”

Brian pondered for a minute, searching the fulsome settlings in his brain. “Never heard of ‘im.”

I have been a Beach Boys fan for nearly 60 years. I discovered them during that lost period after their initial fame and before they were rediscovered as an oldies act.

If you truly love the Beach Boys, then they drive you crazy. You know they are / were capable of greatness. And you also know they can / did produce some sub-par stuff.

Years ago, a writer for the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville wrote something like this:

We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t stop people from wearing spandex pants to the mail. The Beach Boys will drive you crazy that way.

I wish I had kept that artice so I could acknowledge the writer and get the quote right.

I hardly ever listen to the early Beach Boys stuff, much as I liked it. Yet when I learned Brian died, my hand — working independetly from my brain — reached into my record bin for All Summer Long (1964).

Cover of a Smile bootleg

Some of those early albums (OK, Shut Down Vol. 2, All Summer Long and Today) were marred by needle-lifting skits that I despise. At least the one on All Summer Long is kind of funny.

I prefer the albums of the “lost years,” after the huge early fame and after Brian’s magnum opus, Smile, went down in flames (which he resurrected in 2004). Those albums were all commercial flops but they remain pure and beautiful healing music: Smiley Smile and Wild Honey (both 1967), Friends (1968), 20/20 (1969), Sunflower (1970), Surf’s Up (1971) and Holland (1973). I leave out only So Tough (1972) because that album was a mixed bag — and short. (In my old age, I’ve grown to appreciate it more.)

So when I feel like listening to the Beach Boys, those albums are the ones I reach for. The band’s last album, That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012) had some of the most sublime moments in the group’s history. The last three songs on the album are heartbreakingly beautiful. The last song on their last album was, appropriately enough, called “Summer’s Gone.” It was grandly depressing and majestic.

A fan’s alternate cover for Pet Sounds

I have reverence for Pet Sounds (1966). Listening to it is often difficult for the emotions it churns up. It has been an indelible part of my life since I was in a teen-ager with an 8-track in my Opal, with Pet Sounds on a continual loop. That tape stayed in the player for a year, and I heard the album so much it seeped into my sinews. Kind of like Steve McQueen in The Blob: this thing absorbed me and became part of my essence.

The album is so good that I can’t listen to it. It takes too much out of me.

Plus, I don’t have to listen to it. Every vocal, every note, every banjo strum, every drum bash, every belching tuba and barking dog is stored in my head.

There’s a lot to be said about Brian. He had an odd (no surprise there) solo career that included the occasional brilliant piece of original work — That Lucky Old Sun (2008) — and intriguing albums devoted to George Gershwin and Disney music.

The Wilson brothers are all gone now. To me, the Beach Boys ceased to be when Carl Wilson died in 1998. With no Wilson onstage, there were no Beach Boys. What’s out there on the road is Mike Love with a very good (I’m told) Beach Boys tribute band.

So. Brian is gone.

We toil in melancholy, but as Brian’s music often helped me to do, I find some kind of joy inside the sadness.

Click on the cover to order the book.

I used the Beach Boys to frame my story of Los Angeles music in the 1960s, Everybody Had An Ocean (which you can order by clicking on the cover at left) and here’s how that book ended:

“Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever.”

And now, for fun, here are my favorite Beach Boys songs in chronological order. I realize no one gives a shit about this, but I like to amuse myself.

You will note the absence of “Kokomo” on this list. This is not an oversight. Brian was in California and was told about the “Kokomo” session in Atlanta only 24 hours before the studio was scheduled. He was unable to make the session. Brian was also absent from the recording of “I Can Hear Music” in 1969. That was during a rough period when he had trouble engaging with the human race, and marked sort of a changing of the guard. The Master (Brian) had taught his young grasshopper (Carl) well.

Carl Wilson became the leader of the band onstage and in the studio after Brian withdrew to his room in the late 1960s.

Both “Kokomo” and “I Can Hear Music” feature Carl’s angelic voice. It was funny to see the flurry of posts by fans after Brian’s death. Seems like everyone posted “Kokomo,” a song on which he did nothing.

So here is my list, though no one outside a lunatic asylum cares about this:

1962: “Surfin’ Safari.”
1963: “Surfin’ USA,” “Farmer’s Daughter,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl,” “Catch a Wave,” “The Surfer Moon,” “In My Room,” “Our Car Club,” “Boogie Woodie,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Car Crazy Cutie” (musically identical to “Pamela Jean”), “Cherry Cherry Coupe.”
1964: “Fun Fun Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “This Car of Mine,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,”* “I Get Around,” ” All Summer Long,” “Hushabye,”* “Little Honda,” “We’ll Run Away,” “Wendy,” “Don’t Back Down.”
1965: “Do You Wanna Dance?,”* “Good to My Baby,” “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” “Dance Dance Dance,” “Please Let Me Wonder,” “I’m So Young,”* “Kiss Me Baby,” “In the Back of My Mind,” “The Girl From New York City,” “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “California Girls,” “You’re So Good to Me,” “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”
1966: “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?,” “You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” “Sloop John B,”* “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No,” “Good Vibrations.”
1967: “Heroes and Villains,” “Vegetables,” “Little Pad,” “Wind Chimes, “Wonderful,” “Wild Honey,” “Darlin’,” “Aren’t You Glad,” “I Was Made to Love Her,”* ” Let the Wind Blow,” “Mama Says.”
1968: “Friends,” “Wake the World,” “Little Bird,”** “Be Still.”**
1969: “Do it Again,” “I Can Hear Music,”* “Cotton Fields,”* “I Went to Sleep,” “Time to Get Alone,” “Our Prayer,” “Celebrate the News,”** “Cabinessence.”
1970: “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,”* “Slip on Through,”** ” This Whole World,” “Add Some Music to Your Day,” “It’s About Time,”** ” Forever,”** “All I Wanna Do,” “At My Window,” “Cool Cool Water.”
1971: “Long Promised Road,”*** “Feel Flows,”*** “‘Til I Die,” “Surf’s Up.”
1972: “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone,” “Marcella,” “All This is That,” “He Come Down,” “Cuddle Up.”**
1973: “Sail On Sailor,” “Steamboat,”** “California,”# “The Trader,*** “Only With You,”** “Funky Pretty.”
1976: “Palisades Park,”* “In the Still of the Night.”*
1977: “Mona,” “Johnny Carson,” “Good Time,” “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” “The Night Was So Young,” “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” “I Wanna Pick You Up,” “Airplane.”
1978: “Sweet Sunday Love.”
1979: “Good Timin’,” “I’ll Be in Heaven When My Angel Comes Home,”*** “Love Surrounds Me,” ** “Baby Blue.”**
1980: “Goin’ On,” “Sunshine,” “You Are So Beautiful.”**
1981: “San Miguel.”**
1985: “I’m So Lonely.”
1986: “California Dreamin.’ “*
1993: “Fourth of July.”**
1998: “Soulful Old Man Sunshine,” “Loop De Loop,” “Sail Plane Song,” “Barbara.”**
2001: “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,”*. “Devoted to You.”*
2012: “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” “Isn’t it Time,” “From There to Back Again,” “Summer’s Gone.”
2013: “Fallin’ in Love,”** “Wouldn’t it be Nice to Live Again.” **

All songs by Brian Wilson, usually with a collaborator (or two). The exceptions are (*) songs written by people outside the group. Other songs written by (**) Dennis Wilson, (***) Carl Wilson and (#) Alan Jardine.

These are in order by release date. “San Miguel,” for example, was recorded in 1969-70, but not released until 1981. “Fallin’ in Love,” another Dennis Wilson gem, was recorded in 1971 but was left off of Surf’s Up (one wonders why) and did not appear on a Beach Boys album until the Made in California anthology in 2013.

A nice tribute.

Farewell, My Friend

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.

Playdate with Bob Dylan

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, that Bill 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.

You’ve got to hear this.