When
they’re all talking at once I have to conduct them with a pointed finger and a
hush sign……………….LETTER FROM LOTUSLAND
Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and
music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books,
and Songbooks by
clicking here,
or by going to ianwhitcomb.com
LETTER FROM LOTUSLAND
May 2008
The last Letter was so long in the making (and long in the reading, too). In April nothing happened to compare with the London adventures. And I can’t foresee what May will bring me.
So I’m going to try an experiment: I’ll stream through a day in my life -- Tuesday, April 22, which is today — and see what I come up with, trying to be as truthful as possible but also trying to be funny or at least amusing. Trying not to be a blogosphere bore……………..
Of course, being constantly borne back into the past, having been hurled off the boat that carries those shiny, smiley positive thinkers into the current leading to the sunrise of a bright affirmative future, I have to begin with last night at Conrad’s.
Lynne gave me a clipping, a review of Simon Gray’s latest volume of diaries. Gray is a 70-year-old English playwright and a curmudgeon; I suppose that Lynne considers me to be like Gray in manner and, in a B-picture way, I suppose I am. He keeps looking back across the years at the mistakes he’s made; the memory of a party is better than the actual party itself; writing down a worry is a “completely unworrying experience… Yes, I had fun writing down my worry.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Here’s an unpleasant in-flight experience that, by being recorded in all its horrid detail, has been exorcised and made golden, like a bloody battle in a gilded frame.
Gray is sitting next to a woman with a bad cold: “She is now blowing her nose on little shreds of Kleenex about twice a minute, long, thick, wet blows, then she screws up the Kleenex and places it in a paper cup, already bulging, in the back of the seat in front of her. There is an already full paper cup beside the one she has now nearly filled. She is frankly a very disgusting person to find yourself sitting next to on a flight”.
I suspect that when he gets home he’ll smoke his cares away, coughing and gasping so much “anyone who wanted to murder me would simply have to say three funny things in a row”.
I had to read this clipping back home, just before nodding off, because I couldn’t miss any of the Salon activity. From the corner booth I surveyed our assembled tables stretching off into the middle of the cocktail bar. Everyone was engaged in chat and there was no way to tune into all of it, although a few hours later I made a royal progress down the line, lightly squeezing the shoulders of Salonists, cupping my ear to catch a gem, a bon mot.
Up at our end, in the booth, Lynne, from Yorkshire, had been complaining about the lack of liquid disinfectants in America and later telling of the “huge left wing bits” inside her. This was in response to my having just said that Woody Guthrie described himself as apolitical — “Left wing, right wing, chicken wing — I just wanna sing songs anywhere, anyplace”. I’d brought Woody up, you see, because I’m researching him for my lecture at the upcoming Oregon Festival Of Music. You can bring any subject up at our meetings, but you may be ignored or spoken over, like hobnail boots on fresh grass. Will had made a list of diminutives for “Elizabeth”: Bette, Eliza, Lizzy, Lisa, Liza, Betty, and — don’t forget, said Lynne — Lillibet, which was The Queen’s nickname as a child……………………
Yes, it’s not profound stuff but at least they kept off Bush and Obama.
When
they’re all talking at once I have to conduct them with a pointed finger and a
hush sign……………….
Glenn is taking Lynne and Bill to the theatre organ concert at the Nethercutt Museum this Saturday night. I told them they’d have a good time -- though not necessarily because of the quality of music -- if Gordon, the swishy MC, has invited one of his fruity friends to perform. When Regina and I were last there, courtesy of Glenn, we watched the swaying back of an imported Australian organist called Reg as he pumped away at the grand machine. As per the dress code he was wearing a dinner jacket — to start with. But as soon as he’d finished the selection of show tunes, climaxing with “I Feel Pretty”, he spun around and stripped off the formal black to reveal a skintight blue muscle shirt moving to six-pack abs. Then he stuck out his tongue as an affectionate greeting to a young African-American sitting in the front row. The young man, similarly attired, got up and raised his hands like a boxer celebrating a knockout.
“Reg won’t be performing Saturday”, said Glenn quietly but firmly. And that was that. I ordered a bread pudding. And another Burgundy.
And now to this morning.
6.35 am: What were my dreams last night? Regina is saying something to me in her own dream and it’s lyrical and light, a far cry from the nightmares she used to have when the woman next door shouted maledictions over the fence. I offer a suitable reply. Beside the bed sits the Dream Book I’ve kept since March, 1972. The last entry was two years ago, back when we were in exile in Monrovia:
“I accompany Irving Berlin as he sings a fast version of ‘God Bless America’. I play a wrong chord & he gives me a black look. Afterwards I rush to keep up with him as he races down an endless corridor. When I reach him I offer, as we race, a profuse apology, telling him how much I love his songs and how sorry I am about that wrong chord. He says, ‘I don’t know the right ones myself! But you, of all people, should!’ ’’
Get up.
Rollo has to have his pills, as do I. On his walk I always let him decide which way we’re going and on which bush or garbage can he’s going to lift his leg. Sometimes passers-by offer comments like “What kind of dog is that?” and then they proceed to tell us exactly what he is; or else it’s, “Are you walking him or is he walking you? Ha, Ha!” and “Where’s the saddle?”. “Do he bite?” I really hate. The only comment I like is, “He’s beautiful”. Pity he can’t appreciate the “beautiful”. Well, maybe not: it did me no good, except for a thrilling tingle, when I got that tossed at me back in the late 1960s/early 70s.
A smart car pulls up at the curb of a neighbour’s house. A black man in a high bobble hat gets out and starts rummaging through the cans for recyclable bottles for cashing in. This is illegal but he doesn’t care; he has a certain swagger as he works the street. Rollo barks at him. He glares. An elderly black man with a walking stick approaches. He has Uncle Remus white hair. “Yo, bro!” he greets the looter with. I mind my own business, as is proper. Illegal it may be to loot garbage cans but then, the other day, we put out an old rocking chair for the taking and it disappeared in a trice. I visualize the old man in that chair as he rocks contentedly in a steady rhythm while the bobble hatter struts and strums a banjo. The scene makes for serenity, clearing away the clouds. Time to drive to Cal Tech for my swim.
The Element is a tin box on wheels, practical for instruments and dog. They say you can wash it out by simply pointing a hose inside and going full flush. I don’t think I’ll try that — too much of my office is in there, like CDs I’m researching with, and books, and my Huntington (Reader In Rare Books) ID, and the drawing block with no drawings in it as yet. One of these days I’ll do some plein air sketching. One of these days.
So much to do as the seconds rush by to become years. Life was slower in the early 1950s when we sat in the prep school classroom counting the drops as they slid down the pane. We sang, “Nothing to do! Nothing to make, nothing to take!” Now I’m in a rush to get to the pool in order to complete my laps before closing time at 9 am. Don’t want to listen to any more radio bleating about the doomed Middle East so I turn on the CD that Glenn gave me last night, his latest radio show, the one that’s heard in Catalina and certain parts of New Zealand.
A “tribute” to Bessie Smith has her praising her man’s “thing” and how he uses it, Eagle-Rocking her with one steady roll, turning her over for some Balling the Jack. Afterwards Glenn, in steady measured tones tells us that Bessie Smith wrote, “I’m Wild About That Thing” in collaboration with H. Weberman. “I couldn’t find out what the ‘H’ stood for”. Unusual because Glenn always gives us a wealth of facts. Like, for instance, that the “Thing" song was recorded on April 7, 1927 for the Columbia label. He knows the matrix number too.
Nice to spend time in this sealed world of shellac and dates and numbers, where no harm can come to you, except for a crack or a breakage; where Smith’s fatal car crash and Pine Top’s death (caught in barroom crossfire as he ordered the girl with the red dress to get up and boogie to his piano playing) is reduced to the cleanliness of encased history.
Back on the radio, pundits are
wondering whether the old war hero will trounce the semi-black and the female
and end up as Chief. So I try another CD, one I found as a freebee in “The
Independent” when I was last in London. Newspapers are doing this in a desperate
attempt to keep readers. Every day classic
movies are offered on DVD; on CD we got classic 20th Century poets.
It just fell out of the pages, great works landing with hardly a noise.
An excruciating Thames Estuary-accented bluestocking female academic introduces the likes of TS Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon reading their most famous poems. She apologizes for their “rather quaint way of speaking”, meaning they have educated accents and pronounce clearly and beautifully while she is nastily nasal and toneless. Philip Larkin she approves of since he’s from the North and isn’t posh and spent his life buried in a library in god-forsaken Hull.
Now in the Element, as I progress slowly in rush hour traffic down Lake Avenue towards the Cal Tech pool, following Bessie Smith and her thinly-veiled phallic appreciation, amid mad Mexicans interlacing on bicycles and hard-faced black business women steering even as they address the phone in their ear, Larkin recites “The Whitsun Weddings”.
He speaks in such a conversational manner that he sounds not a bit like my idea of a great poet but more as if he’s telling me over coffee or a beer about a railway journey to London. Sounds like this: “That Whitsun I was late getting away — not till about one-twenty on the sunlit Saturday did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, all windows down, all cushions hot, all sense of being in a hurry gone…” Yes, yes, and how about another pint, now? Don’t worry; I’ll get it — just hold the thought…
Sailing along fine but now he gets poetic. I mean — I don’t understand: the flow of the story has become stuck in a brackish pond: wedding girls on the cool platform, hitherto amusingly
“grinning and pomaded” in “parodies of fashion” are now “posed irresolutely, watching us go, as if out on the end of an event waving goodbye to something that survived it.” Out on the end of an event? But I let the words wash me on, as teachers have told me to do with poetry, and soon I’m back in the hot train passing poplars casting long shadows and an Odeon and someone running up to bowl, as we hurry towards London, “shuffling gouts of steam”.
Nice, oh very nice — and I’m whisked deliciously back to the early 1960s and a hot summer day of my own with wincing sweet memories of loves that never came to be. And as we arrive, and I’m deep in a dream even here in the horrid blatant present, Larkin casts darkness once again: he talks of this “frail traveling coincidence” (what coincidence?).
“And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain”. Yes, it’s seductive over the speakers in the morning rush hour, and it waves away today but I don’t quite understand. Still, I take comfort in something old H.D Thoreau said,” Every man will be a poet if he can”. Well, I tried once. I tried to deceive Alan Ross, the poet-editor of “The London Magazine” into accepting a song lyric of mine as a real poem. You don’t fool me, he laughed. He was a friend and had published my prose articles. But he was guarding the secret of poetry closely and he wouldn’t explain.
Is it about how you lay out the lines? In the above poem I haven’t laid them out as Larkin did. He broke up his seeming conversation so that on the page his voice looks like a poem. But in the car he sounded very chummy indeed and might offer me a Silk Cut or a pink gin.
This is the song I tried to foist off on the editor: I’ve tried to make it look poetic:
Why do I get in a sweat?
Under this fat there’s a soft furry cat
Craving for you to set free…..
The waltz that you promised to dance with me---
I’ve been waiting all evening in vain.
You’ve danced with my friends even strangers too
While I watched through the cold window pane.
You know I would treat you so tenderly
We would fly round the room then we’d soar.
But you seem to surmise a rather odd look in my eyes
And I’m back on the sidelines once more.
The Cal Tech men’s locker room, in grey and off-white, is hangar-like and empty. Paint is peeling and flutters down like confetti at a Hilary gathering. Time has passed it by and I like that. In period lettering on one wall are past Track & Field records by long-dead athletes — A.E Housman would love to peruse and imagine; a warning notice that was already up, in equally dated lettering, in the mid 1980s when I first got into the Cal Tech pool, is still there on the other wall: “Lockers Are Being Broken Into By A Thief”. Well over twenty years later and the thief is still at it.
Back then, Chas Sprawson, the art dealer, had wangled us passes into the pool by posing as a visiting mathematics professor with me as his assistant. Neither of us can add up very well, let alone subtract. Later I discovered that Huntington Library Readers are eligible, so there’d been no need to go through the deception in the Cal Tech office that had had me trembling like I used to at prep school when, say, I’d been accused of “deliberately and malignantly” turning on taps in the changing room and leaving the scene. “One of the worst examples of sabotage I’ve seen in a long career”, said the headmaster prior to his caning me on the thigh.
I shave at a chipped basin in the washroom area. The carefully-written want ad on the partition separating basins from urinal stalls is still there, I’m glad to see: “Call (818) 555-2230 — muscular men only!!” The usual trousers-down-at-the-ankles person is occupying the end cubicle. Never a sound from him, no fart, no heaving, no ecstasy, no nothing. And he’s still there when I leave. Day after day this is the situation and it never gets resolved.
There’s nothing to write about the lap swimming. Because such swimming is boring. But the sky is bright and blue and the mountains sit the same as ever. “They’re very old, those mountains”, said my real estate man when I bought the house hard by the San Gabriels in 1979. “Very old indeed — and that’s why they crumble and move every now and then”. I like to look at sky and mountains while I’m doing the beastly boring laps. Today I have a little bother getting a lane. Common courtesy suggests that a swimmer should welcome a lane-sharer. For several laps I try to get the man’s attention but he is heads-down oblivious, a very serious swimmer. Finally I get into the lane and he’s forced to acknowledge my presence. He stares at me incomprehensibly from behind his goggles. He is Asian. “Do you mind if we split the lane?” I say. “You go leave pool at once!” What? An elderly man in the next lane intercedes. “He is new to this country --- just proceed in the normal way” And I do and there is no trouble.
At last the task is over and I can get ready for breakfast, lovely breakfast -- to the accompaniment of drastic newspaper stories. Nothing like enjoying an omelet as you read about disasters in foreign lands.
Meanwhile: “Turn Water Off To Conserve Water When Using Soap” is another sign I puzzle over in the shower room. Have done for years. And also: “Please Dry Off In Drying Room”, Today I find this Drying Room. The sign is in Art Deco.
I push open the door. Inside is nothing but old dynamos and giant magnets and test tubes attached to rubber hoses, like Dr Frankenstein’s lab. I thought that Cal Techies were into space exploration and finding a substitute for gasoline. Get on with it!
Back under the shower I’m forced to listen to guttural utterances from the other shower room. A brute, a Turk built like a brick shithouse, is there every morning at this time, hawking up phlegm, a fearful racket. Is it to annoy me or is it due to a condition inherited by the Turk from his land of origin? I steal his towel.
On the way out I pass the guard desk. Carlos is sitting cross-legged, chair pushed back against the wall, like Henry Fonda in “My Darling Clementine, only he’s not Fonda. I know what he’s going to say -- and he says it: “Warming up out there, eh? We’re so lucky!” In the dog days of August he has, “Hot enough for you?” I like him for his predictability, I like him because I feel safe knowing that seasons will change and so will Presidents but Carlos will stick to the script.
Carlos! Another Carlos commandeers the bar at Conrad’s, site of the Salon. This Carlos is subversive, not a supporter of our group. And I’ve tipped him nice bills to win him but lately he’s reverted to his old ways. Maybe the money ran out, like in a parking meter. Anyway, last night we arrived to find our corner booth, the HQ from where I reign, occupied by a couple, deep in fried food. No way could waiters start to build our table line from the booth to the end of the room. Members had to make do with separate tables for two, as if in secluded island outposts. Carlos, it turned out, had given the HQ away to a mere couple before our own waiter, Javier, was aware of the mischief. We fumed on our islands until the fried food couple, taking their time as they shared jokes with Carlos, vacated.
Breakfast. Today is an egg day and I will have it at the Coffee Gallery, our local social centre for Altadenans. Food and drink are only a part of the scene here: paintings for sale hang over us, toys and books are on the shelves, the laptop mobile office workers are already heads down and looking in. As I move in to order my usual omelet (the way Chef Jeff likes to make it) I see and hear a scruffy man in loser’s clothes telling the world via his cell phone that he is buzzing with business: “I got productions ready to go, go, go-go! You name ‘em, I got ‘em. And you know what? If you green light the movie I’ll make you head of production with your very own office!”
I take
a spot near the Round Table by the door. Like my Salon this has a Chief and he
is Steve, a town councilor. Every morning he presides for hours, sketching
housing developments or else reading the paper, cocking an ear and every so
often joining the heavy table talk. We all know there are problems in our world
today but here, at this round table, all are solved daily. If only the
Establishment would venture here and listen in. But you’d never guess from their
clothing and cars that these are mighty minds. And mighty angry as well.
However, Fly, the South Seas islands barista up at the counter, doesn’t appreciate the brainstormers. He mutters, “Just my luck the stereo’s bust when I need it most for burying the bullshit!”
Meanwhile, a black woman in dreadlocks and a dark pinstriped business suit has the floor at the Table: the subject, as ever these days, is Obama. “ See, he’s all positive energy --- he understands people out there are vampires and will pull you down but he’s here talking stuff that ain’t been talked for years and he goes with the signs of the times and we all can feel the change, I mean FEEL the change”. “It’s palpable”, adds Steve. “Whatever” says the woman and, having made her speech, leaves the Coffee Gallery.
As I eat the omelet I read in the “Los Angeles Times” about car crashes and gang slayings and Tibetans clashing with Chinese and each bite gives satisfaction. Here’s a full page ad for a new movie, “Iron Man”, showing a metal male with a perfectly proportioned body; and here, opposite is a photo of kids splashing in the sea at Dockweiler State Beach watched by their parents. All are fat as Xmas pigs and, thankfully, fully-clothed. It strikes me that if you were invading America all you’d have to do would be to push Americans in a line from coast to coast and there’d be a domino effect. All fall down and go phlaaatt.
From mid-morning till mid-afternoon there’s not much to relate. I’m coasting, acting automatic -- making the bed, putting away dishes, getting out of Regina’s hair, writing my journal in the free-standing office in the back garden. Ah, the journal! There’s where the unvarnished truth lies — or as close as I’ll ever get -- soon to be buried in the Huntington Library Archives. And if any future scholar ever opens them there’ll be a hard job breaking the code of my scrawl. Even I can’t decipher it. So what is the point of the journal I’ve kept since 1972? Let’s not get into Samuel Beckett territory.
Around 4pm, as the bloody sun starts beating down again, I start assembling records for tonight’s show at LuxuriaMusic.com in Frogtown. I meant to survey protest songs of the 1930s, songs for political action, of coal miner strikes and textile worker strikes and of standing steady with the union and of Woody Guthrie in stiff pungent underwear and his patron trying to push him into a hot bath, and then we’re diving into a left-wing New York night club to hear Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit”, written nearby by a white Jewish schoolmaster of reddish persuasion, describing a burnt black body hanging from a Dixie tree. And all the while the ghost of Lenin is cackling, “Such self-loathing liberals will hand us the microphone with which we will proceed to bludgeon them”.
But I find a way to procrastinate on the dreaded protest survey. In the garage I stumble on a hitherto hidden cache of vintage 45 rpm singles, favourites of mine that I’d bought with my own money in the 1960s, piles of them, dusty or sticky, but longing to be spun once again.
I find “Having A Party” sung by Ronnie Mitchell on the obscure Blue Cat label, 1964. A white promo copy — I’d got it in Seattle that year, on the brink of my pop stardom, when Jerry Dennon, my recording manager let me have a few minutes inside his record distributorship warehouse. It was understood that I could loot at will — for a few minutes.
In the garage, from other piles, I select Lloyd Price, Fats Domino, The Stokes, Fats Waller, Bob Lind, Buck Owens, George Morgan, Vicki Carr, Billy Cotton, Tommy Steele….. I’d have enough stuff to hold back the whole gang of whining, complaining Stalinist folkies!
The list is made, the big legal briefcase filled, and off I go in the Element heading for Ripple Road in Frogtown, a strange place bounded by two freeways and the L.A River, home of Wonder Bread and Dolly Madison Cakes, and a pickle factory. Hardly a soul lives there, save for the occupants of the 1914 wooden apartment building (trucked in from elsewhere) where LuxuriaMusic.com operates from. At night a noir life commences when local Mexican gangbangers shoot each other up --- but you’ve heard much of this before, in earlier Letters. I told you about the night that, seconds after my broadcast, a machine gun rat-tat-tatted just outside the building.
The less said about dinner at Astroburger, up the road off Fletcher, the better. Often I have a party with me — Will and his guitar, Mary and her noisemaker, and others. Tonight I was alone, with my Woody Guthrie biography, a work tool. The intractable Argentinean waiter with the dyed black matador hair (who I tried to win months ago by speaking of tango and Carlos Gardel) refused to accept that I was dining alone and kept trying to get me to move to a bigger table. So I ate my gyro and fried zucchini in an unsettled state, taking in with every bite more of the revolting behavior of cultural hero Woody Guthrie: how he ripped up Burl Ives’s sheets, while guesting at the folk singer’s apartment, by sleeping in his sharp-toed cowboy boots; how he attempted three times to steal silver and gold objects at a society woman’s party but was foiled each time.
From 8pm to 10pm, as usual, I broadcast from the littered room in the Frogtown apartment. Chuck rides the controls as, perched in a flexible plastic chair, I hand him 45s from the other side. “Having A Party” is every bit as good as I remember it and I’d forgotten there’s a ukulele driving the band along. Ukes have been the catsup on so many old hits from Guy Mitchell’s “Singing The Blues” and Johnnie Ray’s “Just Walking In The Rain” to Connie Francis’ “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”.
The chat room traffic is heavy but hardly any of it is relevant to my show, probably because Regina isn’t there to monitor and control. She left earlier for San Diego and a vintage dance festival. I drink as many cups as water as I can stomach in the hope that this would curb the clicking I hear when speaking. I haven’t got false teeth so what’s causing this awful noise?
But then what does it matter? Chuck has tallied up the current listenership: it wavers at 88. There’s a sudden dip when I talk about words like “Negress “ and “Jewess’ and say it’s a pity they’re no longer allowed.
In the second hour I’m shattered by a series of pistol shots quite near, just after I’ve played Bob Lind’s “San Francisco Woman” which mentions seeds and stems and maintaining and drinking wine from paper cups and washing without use of machines and the sound whirls me back to glorious summer days in the mid I960s with my hippie girl friends like Dale Vann (last heard of as an inmate of a mental asylum) and Jackie Hyde (who left me to marry Arlo Guthrie). The smell of the sycamores reminding me of thrills to come………..
Pistol shots! Are the gangbangers gaining entry; are they coming up the stairs to get satisfaction for all the slurs I make on them and other ethnics? Is this the End Game?
No. It’s only Chuck having fun with his sound effects. But the damage has been done; my nerves are writhing like a speared snake. Only a double shot of Jack Daniels can cure me and I shall down my medicine at home while watching, as pleasurable penance “Wasn’t That A Mighty Day? — The Story of African American Gospel”
And so, cleansed and reeling, to bed.
Ian Whitcomb
is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all
of his CD's, DVD's, Books,
and Songbooks by
clicking here,
or by going to ianwhitcomb.com