This was you back then…1974.

Kevin Lillis, onstage, King's, Harvard Square, 1974

Kevin Lillis, somewhere in Cambridge, 1974

Would this be you now…Cantab Lounge, 2012?

Kevin at the Cantab 2012, appearing with a no-name mystery band. A total stealth operation.

I mean, how many left-handed fretless Fender bass players are there named Kevin Lillis?

“Kevin, come in from the cold.”

Himself again, Cantab 2012

“Too old to die young, too young to go, How I ever got this far, the good Lord only knows, I’ve been around the horn and back so many times that now I’ve found, I’m too old to die young now.”

John Lincoln Wright 1947–2011

He saw it coming. In his 20′s John had a notion of what would take him out and that inevitably it would have something to do with booze. One of his best lyrics turns on the line:

“I’m one drink closer to heaven. Lord, get me out of this hell.”

He also lived with a stoic foreknowledge that, no matter what he achieved, his life was bound to end in personal failure:

“In 1965 I said I’d never get out alive, that I’d burn myself out before my time… Then the years went by so fast … I’m too old to die young now.”
(Also quoted by Steve Morse in his excellent Boston Globe obituary). (click to continue…)

by Bill Henderson

Hola, baby, it’s been a long time.

Read about you the other day, baby, going to Washington with your husband and all. Very cool. It’s nice to know you’re still alive after all these years, and that you weren’t ruined by me, by us, by our big awesome summer and all that weird shit we did up there in the hills. Thumbs up, baby.

Bizarre, isn’t it, remembering the way we lived. Like how we were squatters and all — and in a friggin ruined Hollywood mansion! Think what mindless balls it took to crash in that dark, moldy old wreck with the rats and memories, condemned, no plumbing, no electric, yellow police tape and all.

We lived it, didn’t we, baby. We were all that and more.

You know, baby, I’ve been thinking and thinking, replaying those days in my mind, but it’s like an old movie that keeps breaking and getting put back together again, each time a little bit different anymore. And then one day you can’t find the story. That’s partly the reason for this email, is that I can’t find our story.

All these years I’ve been trying to remember things in a way that makes sense. I spend whole days going back over things you explained to me. Like how I was The Fool and my rune was Blank and my palm was fucked-up but awesome. And some days you were the Empress and others you were the chick that holds the lion’s jaws shut. And one particular day I’ll never forget, when the sun stayed up all night and we slept in the grass and you kissed my palm and said I was bound to do something big, be somebody really really great someday. Remember that?

I guess I’d better hurry, baby, know what I mean?

Some things I’ll never begin to understand, but it’s okay. Do you remember teaching me to fly? And how to defeat attackers with only the power of my thoughts? Remember how we made the earth quake at night? Holy shit, we jacked the world by its axis! Did we actually do those things, baby?

Remember “the others?” How some days they hid and wouldn’t speak to us? I still don’t agree with you that they were ghosts. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’d say more like antimatter people. Remember how we thought we’d created them? We just weren’t sure why. Guess that’s a nut we’ll never crack, but what the hell baby, we were young, right?

Say, did you ever hear the story of the day you left? Yeah, that day, baby. That god awful screamer of a day. The day I said those things to you, things no woman should ever have to hear, and you gave it back to me just as hard, cutting me over and over in your little accent, in French, in English, cut, slash, this way, that way till all I could see was my life in blood red darkness? No, I didn’t like what was going on inside my head that day, not one bit. I’m sure you remember how I turned away in the middle of it all and took off up the stairs. That’s where the story ends for you, right? But there was more, baby, a lot more and here it is:

I got to the top landing and vaulted straight over that gap where the floor had fallen away and it was a straight shot three stories down to the basement floor. I never even noticed it, just went over like a high hurdler, and kept going. Up, always up. I kicked footholds in the walls to get to the roof, and didn’t stop till I had scrambled out on the widow’s walk. I would’ve gone even higher if I could’ve because it was closer to heaven. High was good and pure and I was desperate to find an altitude high enough for my thoughts to peel away and disintegrate.

The glass in the widow’s walk had been gone forever, so I went through one of the frames, then stopped myself before stepping off into the air, I pulled up and balanced on the ledge, toes half on, half off, swaying, looking down at the chaparral. A Santana was blowing that day–what a view, baby, I’m sorry you never got to see it. Mulholland and the hills beyond. Catalina clear as a jewel. LA stretched out all flat and smoky, planes drifting in real slow like dragon flies, and behind me,The Valleys, then blue mountains as far as you could see.

I couldn’t go out like that, it’s not in my blood. Although I have to say–I just might’ve done it anyway, baby, if I’d known the truth. But you should know one thing: when I climbed back down, something was different and I felt it. I was back from the end of the world, and flooded with new energy, and I had only one thought in my mind: that thought was you. I knew I would make it all up to you, I knew I would love you good forever and ever. Clambering down those walls I was a man on a mission––to hold you in my arms, to tell you that nothing would ever again be like it was, to show you the future and how awesome the rest of our lives would be.

But the joke was on me, baby, wasn’t it? You were so gone it was like you’d never existed. Not even a trace. Legend.

I bet you never heard the punch line, either, baby. How late that day, in the purple hour, the whole beautiful wreck, our Hollywood mansion, started rattling and shifting and bucking, literally, I swear to God. Then it heeled over into the canyon and went down, down, down like an ocean liner on a dive to the ocean floor.

I ran into a hippie once who claimed the whole damn property, the house and estate, once belonged to a silent movie star, Rudolph Valentino, and Valentino had ended up raped and burned alive there by some cracked-out weirdos. The place was cursed, the hippie said. But years earlier, when Valentino was still young, he and his posse had huge parties on the lawn, where the most famous people in Hollywood would hang out for days, drinking and toking, balling in the grass, watching the sun slide down into the ocean. Kind of like us.

That day, though, it all went over the bluff, gone in sixty seconds, and yours truly with it. Man, what I wouldn’t give for a video of that.

Baby, did you ever hear of a story called “The Fall of the House of Usher?” Awesome. I keep reading it over and over, can’t put it down. The writer, Edgar Allen Poe, had to be some kind of stoned genius. I think I could read every story he ever wrote, but I doubt I ever will. How many are there, do you think? Probably too many. I’ll never have the time. I used to have a “someday” list I kept, but this will just have to go on my “never” list–the things I’ll never do. Or never do again.

I think I’m finished, baby, my season’s over. Everyone’s gone, and I’m finally knowing in my bones I’ll never, ever do anything like these crazy, beautiful things we once did. Nothing ever happens twice, does it. Yeah, it’s that simple. Like, there’s no way in all eternity we’ll be able to have that summer over again. Not that we’d want to–and don’t get me wrong, I don’t, of course. But we couldn’t if we did, see?

And yet–kidding now, but–wouldn’t it be awesome for a day? I mean, say we had a couple of those transformation tanks, like in the movie “Avatar,” and we could crawl in, go to sleep, and wake up on our planet again, up in those same hills, just like we were back then, young, stoned, fearless. Seriously, wouldn’t that be a trip?

Well, just a thought. One of those thousand million thoughts I have about things that’ll never be, stuff I’ll never understand, stuff that maybe even never was.

Mirabelle (love writing your name like always). Mirabelle, Mirabelle, Miri. Little Miri, my girl, my heart, my life. I promise you I don’t want you back, I swear it, and I swear I’ll never ever bother you again. But I need to tell you about this one thing, baby, this state I’m in all the time now, because only you would get it. It’s as if that old Hollywood shambles of ours just fell down yesterday and I went with it and I’m still pinned under it at the bottom of the canyon where it all piled up forever, and the others, if there ever were any, have vanished, dissolved, run into the cracks, whatever. I’m alone down here and I’m stunned, I’m trapped, I may be dead. There was this mega rupture that ended the universe, but the sound it made can’t carry over the years. So I’m just waiting in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for the truth to flicker up in my face, but something keeps telling me to forget it, nobody’s ever going to find me. Ever.

You feel that way, sometimes, baby?

Love you forever.

Sarah Palin, like a growing number of 21st Century US candidates for high office (including a past President) speaks her own brand of English––Saranglish?

Like I always say, speaking is the verbal end of thinking. Here is Sarah’s thinking about Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican Teaparty guy: “Marco Rubio started and kinda taking on the establishment and mavericky, going rogue, you know, doing it.”

Subtle thinking, I would say. Some kind of mavericky code.

Or maybe you’re just supposed to look for the key words. Seriously, if I were Sarah, why bother to construct a sentence? Just yell, “Marco Rubio…taking on the establishment…mavericky…going rogue!”

[Click for Part 1]

Ry Cooder hit New York in the winter of 1970 opening for Captain Beefheart, a bigger name at the time, in support of his first record, Ry Cooder. As obscure as it was, I had already discovered that record (I worked at a radio station) and I can still say today, it was one of the most important finds of my life. I scrambled to set up an interview.

Ry Cooder then (1970's)

He was just a kid and so was I, but what struck me about him was how fully-formed he seemed. He had found his life’s work, defined it, settled into, and was succeeding in it--all at the tender age of 23.

Ry Cooder now

Here again is Ry Cooder at age 23. (Note: this is Part 2 of 2. It lasts about 25 minutes. To hear Part 1 click here.

Ry Cooder 1970 Interview, Part 2:

Some Odds & Ends

Here are a couple of cuts from that first album, Ry Cooder.

Available Space is probably the first Ry Cooder cut I ever heard. I had no idea how it was done.

Goin’ to Brownsville is one of my favorites because it features Cooder on mandolin, an instrument dear to my heart.

One of the best free sources of Ry Cooder’s music is, oddly enough, YouTube. You can bounce all over it and find Ry Cooder in this band, that band. It’s worth taking a look just to find gems like this Little Village video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6cNgEADGjM

Little Village was the short-lived supergroup –– Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, John Hiatt, Jim Keltner –– that made one CD, in 1992, and only performed live a few times. Here they are on the Tonight Show in ’92, performing “Fool Who Knows.” Ry Cooder is on your right, wearing a headband. Singing is Nick Lowe (who wrote the song), with his hair in a perfectly ridiculous do (oh well, he’s English).

The “Van Dyke” Cooder mentions a lot in both parts of the interview is Van Dyke Parks, a famously talented and eccentric musician and producer at that time.

Finally…

After the interview, Cooder shared a few tips with me on playing bottleneck –– for example, how to hot-rod open G tuning by dropping your A string down--and tuning your low E up--to the same G, giving you a growly unison G drone. I went home, punched out the bottom of a Coricidin bottle, and started practicing. Two years later, in Boston, I added bottleneck to my guitar mix in a bar band called Crow’s Nest.

If you want to hear how I put Cooder’s bottleneck secrets to work, here is a demo cut by songwriter Arthur “RT” Miller, a friend from New York, who had a free session at Longview Farm Studios, west of Boston, and needed some musicians. He called me and I pulled together some Boston guys I knew--notably Rooster Van Dyke, bass, and his buddy Gerard on drums. They were one of the best rhythm units I had ever heard (listen, if you don’t believe me). I took along my Fender, my fiddle, and the cheap wreck of a “surfer” guitar I used for electric bottleneck--garish sound, awful action, both great for my brand of bottleneck.

Admittedly, the cut is noisy, production raw, and folks, I was no Ry Cooder, that’s for sure. Still it’s fun to listen, 40 years later. There’s a certain hm, exuberance. We were having some fun (probably way too much fun). But what the heck, this blog IS called “1 Writer’s Life,” and that it is. If you have the patience…enjoy.

Sheltering Pines. Demo. Arthur “RT” Miller (song and vocal, keyboards), Rooster Van Dyke (bass), Gerard (drums), Bill Henderson (bottleneck guitar). Session: Longview Farm Studio, 1972.

[Click for Part 2]

Ry Cooder, circa 1970

Ry Cooder, was in New York, on tour with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. He had just put out his first record (see below), and from the moment I heard it, I was hooked on whatever he was doing. I wasn’t even sure what it was, but I wanted to do it, too.

As a producer at WBAI-FM New York, I grabbed the opportunity to set up an interview, at a Holiday Inn in on 57th Street.

Me at WBAI, 1970. One my right is Caryl Ratner, below me is Paul Schaffer.

Ry Cooder's first record

Listening to it after all these years, I realize the interview has taken on the patina of history. Ry Cooder has not only made great music, but also affected ths history of American popular music by popularizing obscure roots virtuosos like Joseph Spence, the Bahamian guitar genius, and the brilliant, forgotten Cuban musicians featured in the movie, The Buena Vista Social Club, on which he collaborated with German director Wim Wenders.

Students of rock history will be particularly interested in the steady flow of specifics about the emergence of roots music, the LA recording scene of that time, and his account of the making of his record––which still amazes me.

Here is Ry Cooder at age 23. (Note: this is Part 1 of 2. It lasts about 20 minutes. Part 2 will be coming in a few days.

Ry Cooder 1970 Interview, Part 1:

I love it when actors fool me. Jared Harris, for instance. I first saw him on Madmen, as the twerpy, creepy Englishman installed to run Sterling Cooper when they sell out to a UK mega giant.

Later I caught up with The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett) in which he plays “Captain Mike,” a rowdy, hard drinking Irish tugboat skipper. There was something familiar about the actor. Who was he? I looked it up on IMDB and…lo and behold, it was the same guy––the twit from Madmen.

Jared Harris, it turns out, is the son of the late English star, Richard Harris, who died in 2002. Richard Harris (right, in his last major part––Dumbledor in the Harry Potter movies) was called by the BBC, “…everything a bad-boy Hollywood star should be: a handsome, boozing, brawling, womanising, jet-setter whose moody magnificence brought glamour to even his weakest movies.” I’d say Jared comes by Captain Mike honestly.

But what about the Madmen twit, Lane Price? Where does that come from? As John Lovitz used to say in the old SNL “Thespian” sketches, “It’s ACTING!” If you’d like to see him NOT acting, here’s a clip of his appearance on a recent Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Just heard Tom Rush sing “Child’s Song” on A Prairie Home Companion. Tom Rush was one of the “original folk” performers who rose to prominence during the sweet, brief ascendancy of 70s acoustic music–which produced some fine haunting tracks by Joni Mitchell, the early James Taylor, James’s brother Livingston, Jonathan Edwards, Boni Raitt, and others.

“Child’s Song” (written by Murray McGlaughlin) never failed to move me back then. Partly it was Rush’s moody performance, but the message seemed so right. It reached deep into my own feelings about growing up, leaving childhood behind, sallying forth into the great world with all its adventures. But above all, it was about the bittersweetness of it all. Of Leaving. Leaving––them. And leaving against their will.

Right on, I said to myself back then. Leave! You have to. You love them, but they’re a mess. They’re all wrong, so you just have to say a gentle goodby and go.

Tom Rush has been singing that song for 40 years now. His sons are grown. He’s looking forward to grandchildren. In the banter with Garrison Kielor (who thank God did not try to make a duet out of it), Rush made jokes kids these days, how they don’t rebel by leaving, they rebel by coming home, and so on.

His darkness was lighter now; and the rendition was pleasant, a bit more uptempo than what I first heard in 1968. It was almost, well, perky. Whatever first moved Rush to love that song and sing it back then has lightened up. It’s behind him now.

I’ve been listening to it for 40 years, and maybe it’s just because I’m on the other end now, with children grown and gone, but it’s interesting to log my current reaction, particularly the to lyrics. I still like “Child’s Song,” I do. But I can’t help it: that kid who’s singing such a poignant goodby to his f-ed up parents, he strikes me now as impossibly measured in his studied kindness. He’s so much more enlightened than those poor old dysfunctionals, and more than just a teenz condescending about it.

But to be brutally honest with myself, I guess that had to be a piece of me back then, didn’t it? Boy, I must have been insufferable.