Adventures in the Hollywood Skin Trade

On childhood Sundays Jiminy Cricket crooned “When You Wish Upon A Star,” as Disneyland came on the TV. Chilling. This song was performed by Cliff Edwards, also known as Ukulele Ike. Cliff was a funny little, frog-faced man, born in 1895 in Hannibal, Missouri. He left school to become a vaudeville crooner. Taught himself the ukulele and recorded hits like “California Here I Come,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams, and “Singing’ in the Rain.” Cliff was responsible for millions of ukuleles selling in the 1920’s! My mom played the uke, and it was the perfect axe for campfires and boring car trips. “Aint A Gonna Rain No More,” she’d sing. Indeed. Cliff Edwards went on to star in films, but his personal life was “Hollywood” messy. It began to rain hard on our little crooner.

Cliff paid alimony to three former wives, went through bankruptcy four times, and suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. He hung out at the old Tam O’ Shanter, near the L.A River, trying to get voice-over gigs. He ended up in a home for indigent actors, and died in a charity hospital. The body was unclaimed, until Disney bought a burial plot. Yikes, Ike.

Couple this American vignette with my earlier story of Bobby Driscoll…the voice of Peter Pan…dying in a vacant lot in New York…further adventures in the Hollywood skin trade. You might say: why dwell on the dark side? I say, what happened to my childhood dreams? Where’s the star we’re supposed to be wishing on? Mommy never told me Jiminy Cricket could bleed…etc. Farewell Never Never Land.

Now Consider Sterling Hayden. Actor: The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Johnny Guitar, The Godfather. Dozens of great flicks. He stood six feet five and sailed round the globe with his children in a three-masted schooner. The author of two great sea books. One of the most popular character actors to appear on TV talk shows - he sat there with cigarette smoke whirling up into his Captain Ahab beard and told it like it was. I saw him on the Johnny Carson show, declaring: “Just give me a cheap room overlooking the Hudson, a mattress, and a typewriter, and I’ll write you one hell of a novel.” Last seen on a barge in Paris - bottle of Johnny Walker between his legs, declaring how it made him feel to fink during the McCarthy hearings.

And… Liz Taylor, who resided, briefly, a few miles from us, in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel in El Paso. I imagine her looking out at Juarez, Mexico, with a salty Margarita in her hands. Liz chased furious love through her furious seasons. Her ghost stands looking out the penthouse window…day-dreaming of James Dean dying ‘neath the Tree of Heaven, near the old Jack Ranch Café in California. She begins to sing: “Oh, his Porsche car was burning, as the hawks took to the air”…..fade to oblivion.

(A few little stories behind the songs on Mesabi.)

Hard Rain

I was the kid playin’ football, in a Catholic school

Deep down in Mexican town…

(Listening to)… “Don’t Think Twice Its All Right”

From the wild Mesabi Holy Ground….

Mesabi

Coming soon: Bob Dylan’s 70^th Birthday. The magazines are trotting out the tribute writers and the cover issues. The complex fascination with The Bard has been building, ebbing, and building again for over fifty years. And the booing. The critics are lining up, on either side, to do combat. Maureen Dowd (N.Y Times), and others, say Dylan shouldn’t have played recently in China, where his “set list,” might have been censored. Did her sell out? Why didn’t he do the so-called “protest songs?” Why would he appear in a commercial for Victoria’s Secret and few years back? The Wall Street Journal said he should quit the stage. It’s Shakespearean.

The criticism is meaningless against the depth of the Dylan’s catalogue, and his un-impeachable influence on modern song. But we’re lost here, Bob. Everybody expected you (and Leonard Cohen & Paul Simon) to be GONE by now…and we ain’t had much luck replacing you… and it’s irritating to some folk in the media, and to all young writers who ache to be…artistically relevant.

I’m looking back at my childhood. On the coming record. The institutions which forged my youth: Church, Hollywood, Mexican Border Towns, and Bob Dylan. Back then it was folk music, for me, and 6 o’clock mass, and beat poetry, and Jai Alai and horse racing. The 60’s! Dylan exploded the folksong – and when the pieces came down, they fell all over me. Symphonies, fugues, and foxtrots loaded with resonant folk-roots melodies and lyrics which expanded our notion of “the word,” by cooking up new potions distilled from folklore, beat poetry, French mystical verse, and blues wisdom. And much more. Rimbaud meets Ramblin’ Jack. It sounds as fresh today as did forty years back.

The Mexican Border? Gone to hell. Hollywood? Who cares? And the 6 O’clock mass? The Catholic Church has finally gone morally under. 200,000 sexually abused altar boys (I’m unscathed, folks) can now feel a little better – the Holy Fathers came out with a million dollar study last week, which stated that there was no pedophilia plague inherent within the Church; it was all due to the permissiveness of the 60’s! It was Woodstock, and all those nude bodies and wild songs that drove these predators in priest’s collars over the line. Hell, maybe Bob Dylan was to blame. Again.

The new record, Mesabi, opens with a kid (myself) absorbing early Dylan while attending a Catholic school “deep down in Mexican town,” Los Angeles. The album ends with a version of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” with guest artists Lucinda Williams and Calexico. Dylan bookends the deal.

This is a birthday salute to Bob. Long may you run, sir. The songs will live long after the legends, and the boo’s, and the diseased and antiquated liturgies fade, like the border-mariachi horns echoing in my blood.

William Burroughs' Backyard

“This is the fish pond,” said Tom. Our guide. Tom now lived in the William S. Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas. “William would tap his cane on the stone. The fish would come to the surface. Then he’d feed them. After Burroughs died the fish were left alone for four years. They didn’t perish. They survived. Carp are carnivores, you know. They ate their minnows. Two snapping turtles come out of Burroughs creek every summer and stay in the pond. They cull some of the carp.”

It sounded like a Burroughs story. Or perhaps: “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” by Edmund Wilson. We walked further into the back thicket of overgrown, untended plum and pear trees. Snake terrain. Burroughs placed targets on the trees, or hung up spray paint cans in front of canvases, and shot at them. Shotgun art. Further into the grove his fans had planted a line of trees in the shape of phallic symbol.

“Didn’t the neighbor’s mind?” I asked. “Gunshots? Snapping turtles? Cock and balls?”

“Someone built William a giant gun silencer,” said Tom. “You could only hear a slight pop pop pop when he fired at the trees.”

We moved on. There was a rusted car in the weeds. “That was his Datsun,” Tom said. “Bill didn’t drive his whole life. So he decided to learn. At age 80. He couldn’t see over the wheel and kept hitting things. Disaster. His friends drove it out here into the weeds and abandoned it. We have to drain the oil and gas out one of these days.”

We walked back towards Burroughs’ cottage. On the right hand side of the house were the cat graves. “William would sit in his room and write, looking out over the graves. Russky was his favorite.” It reminded me of Hemingway’s Finca Vigia in Cuba and the line of cat graves by the swimming pool.

We went inside and ate homemade pizza. We’d appeared at a concert and seminar with the great boxing writer, George Kimball, and George was staying in the Burroughs house. His medications were lined up on the bedside table. George has been diagnosed with a virulent form of disease that was eating him up, but he’s still out there writing books and doing gigs. He’s published at least four books in the last few years. Chain smoking Lucky Strikes and very much alive. If George was “going out” he was certainly going out on his feet, throwing jabs and hooks for a furious fifteen rounds. He was damn sure a serious writer. As was Mr. Burroughs, who tapped his cane, bringing the goldfish to surface.

It was the raw hangdog end of a Kansas winter. Two fine writers: Burroughs and Kimball. Outside the wind hissed gently through the row of trees pocked with bullet holes. We drank a few glasses. Toasting great writers, carp, cats, and snapping turtles. And the art of George Kimball. And Burroughs’ cane. Still tap-tapping in my dreams.

Farewell Never Never Land - Song #3

When I was sixteen, or thereabouts, my father rented a five acre ranch in Topanga Canyon. Near Malibu. One day at the racetrack he bought me a broke-down stakes horse named My Chief. We paid one silver dollar (a gelding worthless for breeding) and took him back to the little hobby ranch. Next, my father bought a herd of black-faced sheep. He built a barn, and bought more horses at the L.A. horse and mule auction. Then, at the racetrack and in the card rooms, he proceeded to gamble his way into bankruptcy. He went to jail. The paint peeled off the barn. The race horse strangled to death in barbed wire, and mountain lions ate the sheep. If we’d had an old grey goose I’m sure it would have died at the bottom of the well, standing on its head, because our Nursery Rhyme childhood was turning mighty Brothers Grimm. Know what I mean? But wait.

One day, before it all went down, I was hanging out at The Topanga Canyon market. I saw a nervous little guy standing by a garbage bin. It was the former child actor, Bobby Driscoll. Grown up. Haggard. Sullen. Maybe strung out. He’d been the voice of Peter Pan, and played the cabin boy in Treasure Island. An icon for us kids. I walked over and told him that I’d really liked his work in Treasure Island. He was the best actor Disney ever had. He turned slowly and said, “Go away, kid, and leave me alone.” Jeeze. Mommy never told me Peter Pan could turn mean. And bleed.

It was a two-second coming of age. The race horse in the barbed wire. Peter Pan strung out. Dead sheep in the meadow. Cows in the corn. Fast forward to two years ago. I picked up a book called The Semina Culture, about a Beat-Art movement which transpired around Venice Beach California in the 1950’s. Jazz, hard drugs, and collage art. Actors and musicians and junkies. Most of them died young. A few, like Dennis Hopper, moved on to success. There’s a page or two on Bobby Driscoll. How his acting career bottomed out, then he made art. He was a good artist, but the junkie yen took its toll. His downward slide was Promethean.

The conclusion to this tale, children, is this: some kids playing in a vacant lot in New York City, in the early 60’s, found a body in the weeds. No one identified the corpse, so it’s buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Potter’s Field. A perch for migrant crows. Years later they realize it’s Bobby Driscoll. I think he’s still there, in Potter’s Field, near Riker’s Island.

But cheer up! And as the credits roll, your troubadour begins to sing: “Second star to the right, straight on ‘til morning, my little friends. There’s an island called Neverland, where childhood dreams never end….Farewell Never Never land….Goodnight Bobby.”

(This is the third song on the coming record.)

When the Legends Die (Song #2)

When I was a child my grandmother took me to her weekly painting lessons. A dozen old women with their easels in a hothouse room crowded with ferns, cactuses, and little dogs. Classical music seeped out a red Bakelite Zenith radio. The women hummed and threw paint on the canvas. They had runs in their stockings and splotches of paint on their aprons. Cigarettes. Black coffee. Ancient Bohemian spirits. The aroma of oil paint and kerosene mixed with preludes and waltzes and coughing dogs. A few years later my grandmother painted me pictures of Muhammad Ali and Jim Taylor. We were buddies. She gave me her mandolin, bought me a banjo, and cooked me prime rib and apple pies. Americana.

I was the kid in the room with heroes tacked up over my head. Pictures ripped from magazines. Grandma’s paintings. At first the walls were covered with athletes. As I became a teenager, the athletes were given over to folksingers. First the Kingston Trio, then the real stuff: Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, Tim Hardin, Peter LaFarge, Fred Neil and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. Oh, those lived-in faces. Beautiful beat-up guitars. Brazilian rosewood with scratches and wounds; cigarette burns; bullet holes. Guitars absorb every situation they work in. These dream photos depicted my legends and heroes. Icons of the Minstrel Trade. I wanted that life, but didn’t have the guts and heart for it, until I’d been to West Africa and seen war, and also the miseries of life in an academic setting.

In a pawn shop in San Luis Obispo I picked up a 1946 Martin D-18 guitar and went search of the folk crusade, not knowing it would take forty years and a lifetime to arrive at a watering hole where you could sit down and rest your camel, re-string your guitar, and contemplate whether you were a troubadour.

I woke up one day In Switzerland, recently, and realized I’d gotten too familiar with some of my heroes; too cranked up on the legends. You have to accept the song, and give up on getting to know the singer. You could get hurt. Don’t get too close to the stage, kid, don’t mess with the mystery. Heroes are human. They could hurt you. And hurt themselves. I had this vision (I’d been there) of a songwriter alone in a kitchen on Christmas Day. Drunk. His children didn’t call, and love was a half-remembered bottle of vintage wine. Between the idea of a hero, and the reality of human struggle, lies a shadow that might cripple you. Art can go there. But watch out. Beware the kickback of alchemy. The line between mystery and self destruction is a tight rope where heroes fall, like old Karl Wallenda. The parking lot below is mighty hard. Even wire walkers can’t fly.

It all started with my grandmother painting bohemian dreams. I’m sure it did. And the song “When the Legend’s Die,” will be the second song on the new album.

Mesabi - series of dreams #13

The Mesabi iron range runs across the top of Minnesota. Biggest iron ore pit in the world up there. Bob Dylan was born nearby, in Duluth. In the dead of winter Duluth is a bastion of weird old immigrant America. Freezing waves pounding the shoreline. Rusted freighters sulking out on the black ice. Raw, hard country. Beer tastes different in winter. Like yellow blood tingling with Slavic iron shards. It’s a long way from New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville and the rest of it. Dylan’s family later moved up to Hibbing. Hibbing, today, is a 1940’ movie set. Intact. Dylan worked in his old man’s hardware store; pounded rock and roll on an upright piano in the high school auditorium. He ran away to Minneapolis, and then to Greenwich Village. You know the rest. Fifty years ago.

I was the kid listening to Dylan’s early vinyl on my Uncle George’s record player. The kid in the room with heroes tacked up over my head. As The great vinyl wheel spun round with its holy prayer… The records keep revolving around in my soul. Nostalgia? If that’s a holy and bygone house of art and music, then I’ll live there. Art time is frozen and has no clock value. No expiration date. All the great classical composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi … lived (mostly) during the 1800’s. What the hell happened? What’s happening now? Armageddon or the great Aquarian shift?

We are rowing through the doldrums, far out at sea. No wind to touch our sails. No movement. Jon Parales wrote a recent piece in the Herald Tribune about the “dumbing down” of the modern lyric. So can someone tell me why, on Dec. 3, The Wall Street Journal devoted two pages ,with irreverent cartoons, to a rant of why Bob Dylan should quit the stage? It was a cruel piece, and I can only guess why the paper, carried around in the computer bags of international bank and marketing types, would deem it necessary to spend two full pages contemplating the question.

I would say that: drunk, crippled, half dead, or 200 years old, Bob Dylan should be left alone. You don’t have to attend the show, folks. He’s been attacked since 1963, it never seemed to bother him, as he constantly reinvented himself and redesigned the modern lyric. Better that the Wall Street Journal had covered Leonard Cohen’s recent triumphant concerts at age 75. If age is the question. The truth is Dylan’s very presence, whatever shape he’s in, scares the hell out of a current generation of writers who will never measure up. There is nothing significant for music journalists to write about, so… attack the maestro. Sigh…Babe Ruth will not leave the stadium, and the little leaguers want inside.

My song Mesabi begins the next release. It speaks of my childhood; and Dylan’s. The spark. Coming this fall.

(The next series will deal with the new songs. Amen.)

Auld Lang Syne

Walking through a snow storm in a Swiss Village. Singing about the girl from Ponchatrain; dark hair falling in jet black ringlets across her lovely shoulders. Raise a flowing glass to her memory! Then I’m humming Auld Lang Syne, wondering what it means. Or what we want it to mean. Old acquaintances. Olde Thymes. Olde love. Days of long ago. Another year. A goodwill drink. Songs imbedded in seasonal cheer. Buried in soul and bone. The spark of memory. Childhood recollections. Melodies ringing through the family house. Tradition. Or a French horn in a rescue mission, played by a soldier in the Salvation Army Band. Auld Lang Syne! Times past, yet remembered. Bad times. Better times. Should ole times be forgotten?

Now, blocking the snowy road - an apparition in a black hat. A sheepherder. Italian? He walked with a herder’s staff. Basque? Dignified. Biblical. Behind him a flock of sheep, turning the corner of a farm pasture. At least one thousand sheep. One pack burro. Four Border Collies, nipping and keeping the herd in line. On they went, until they disappeared down a side road, up into the low snowy hills. The last row of sheep drifted by, with a woman herder guarding the rear. Humming a song. An old herding song. Was it the melody to Auld Lang Syne? A chilling, warm coincidence on a winter’s road. Or maybe I’d just imagined the melodies were similar. This might be how Bobby Burns found the melody and the verse, two hundred years ago.

The Scottish bard Robert Burns is credited with Auld Lang Syne, though he admitted he’d collected the words from “an old man.” The melody is believed to come from an older traditional Scots song. Auld Lang Sine issues from “the folk.” The herders. Tinsmiths. Minstrels. Old men. Celebrants of the road. Folk. The eternal evolution of traditional song.

A drinking song. Ale or whiskey. Wine or tea. Water. What matter? A song of raising glasses in reverent toast to old friends and reminiscences –for old time’s sake. Lifting a cup of kindness. We have crossed the rivers of time, and the seas between us broad have roared…but yet…

We remember the jet black ringlets falling on naked shoulders. Death. Love. Loss. Recollections staining the bottom of the glass. Dregs melting into memory. Feelings of kindness, humility, and forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves. Years. The longer we endure the less we know. We are circling back, year to year, into the womb of the haunted earth. Earth which resonates with songs of the season. Songs passed down from old man to young man. From Robert Burns to Guy Lombardo. Back to this village road covered with snow. A melody and a memory, handed down from the folk, hummed to the beat of an old drummer on a Scottish road, on down to the jazz drummer in a New Year’s bar in New York... or measured out to the snowy muffled feet of two sheepherders and their biblical herd.

Cheers!