So, I get to the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto at 7PM for a 9:00 show (on Sept. 6th) and there’s already a whole scene. It’s the World Premiere of the new and forever “On The Road” — the first-ever screening of the director’s revised and final cut.
There’s a line of black VIP shuttle cars. News trucks with their satellites up. Fans behind barricades. A red carpet. Security. Orange-shirted volunteers by the bucketful. And a line that goes all the way down the street and around the corner. And same as the London premiere, there’s way more yin than yang.
So, I’m scouting it as usual, and the long and the short of it is, I end up weaving my way into the photog’s pit along the red carpet. And I start talkin to this girl from the Daily News — yeah, New York! And along the ground under the rope line are these numbers about one foot apart and that’s where each news person gets to stand. And we’re hangin, and as it gets closer to “showtime” I realize nobody’s really been stepping on the number right next to her, so I do! And now I’m number 28 along the rope with some TV show called “Red Carpet Diary” on my other side. Then suddenly this stern-faced female General appears marching down the line in front of us demanding of every soldier who they’re with. I blurt out, “RockPeaks and LiteraryKicks,” and she goes “Okay,” and keeps movin’ on to the next guy. :-0
So there I am, leaning on the rope glad-handing director Walter Salles and movie stars Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst!
And they end up staying out there a really long time alternating between interviews and answering the screams of fans on the other side — signing autographs and posing for pictures and totally workin’ the room. Turns out they were having technical projector problems inside that were being worked out, so they just had the Stars stay out and keep the slight-of-hand distracting.
And of course my road brother Damo’s found me by this point and he too scams his way into the pit on the rope-line like the magician he is. Then he’s the one who spots they’re finally letting people into the theatre behind us, a cue we’ve been watching for, and we’ve had enough face time with People Magazine so we book it into the room and scootch right up to the Reserved Seats, and I notice there’s a two-spot Reserved on the aisle right behind the main taped-off rows. Thought that looked interesting, so we cop the two next to them, and no sooner do we sit down, than James Franco comes and sits right next to me!
This guy was the greatest Ginsberg ever on film in “Howl” and I tell him so, “You’re gonna go places — I predict!” And he’s got this great laugh and smile, even though he’s all slouching down in his seat and wearing a baseball cap and looking like a scraggly skateboard bum so as not to be recognized. And I ask, “How come you’re not in this?” and he says they talked about it but it just never worked out. And I’m opening smuggled beers and takin’ copious notes and he’s laughin n noddin at crazy compulsive-efficient Brian.
And of course the place is packed and it’s a bit of a wonderfully boisterous late-show TIFF premiere audience, and director Walter Salles comes out for a little howdy-do. He talked quite accurately about this city being one of the great film capitals of the world, not only in the making of films but in the sophistication of filmgoers, and how he was so grateful to have this film debuting to this audience. He talked about how the film was partially shot in Canada and how it was very emotional for him to be back here now. And about how everyone on the crew were co-authors of the film. And how they covered 60,000 miles in the making of it in order to get the right locations. Then he quoted Gary Snyder as telling him one day, “We would drive a thousand miles for one good conversation.” 😉
Then the preview shorts start and the audience is cheering or booing or laughing at the little ads. And one comes on for this James Bond exhibit they’re having at TIFF, and as it ends to dead silence, some guy yells, “Come on, it’s James Bond, people!!” and everyone laughs and applauds. And then some little notice appears about copyright infringement and everybody boos. And I’m thinkin, “This is a great audience!”
Okay, so . . . the new version —
It’s totally different, and totally great!
The entire prior opening is scrapped, and it’s just BOOM right into Dean parking cars in New York like he was a car. And then zoom into the West End Bar with Chad King telling Sal and Carlo that this guy from Denver was in town. 🙂
You would have liked the longer version — but you’re gonna Love this version!
It’s way faster paced, it’s way more focused, it’s way more fun, its way more exciting.
It’s more about the writer’s journey of discovery of his voice and vision and less about all the side stories. It’s more Tom Wolfe than Thomas Wolfe — more poetic zip, less prosaic lag — more broken Benzedrine inhalers and less counted coffee spoons.
The first time, I was so busy following the story and the novel and all the sources and thinking — this time I was more open to the incredible landscapes, visages, car shots, and time-period time-travel. You’re so there, 1947-to-50 New York City – San Francisco – Denver – and on the road, baby. And for instance there’s this killer shot of a misty mountain roadside and you can hear Jack singing his roadsong, and before long out of the white nothingness comes Jack amblin’ along, rucksack on back.
And Garrett Hedlund really does give a pretty darn good performance here. I guess because we know the guys so well, and Marylou was such an enigma, that Kristen Stewart’s character really screamed to life for me the first time I saw it. With that now internalized — I was able to appreciate how electric and magnetic this Hedlund guy was as Dean.
And Tom Sturridge who plays Carlo is similarly engaging. I don’t know how Allen actually moved or spoke in the 1940s, and I don’t think this is really him, but it certainly is a vivid, loveable, endearing Carlo.
And the music is GREAT — the soundtrack is seat-bopping, and the surroundsound is booming! And the original music that runs all through it is super percussive (beat) and catchy and gets ya goin and I love it!
And there’s more voiceovers by the narrator-writer Sal, heard as moody remembrances of things past or excited updates on events present.
There’s no point in, or really way to, annotate all the things that were cut, because sometimes it’s just a line or few seconds of a scene. But then there’s all this stuff added, too — like Dean & Carlo on the bed staring into each other’s eyes and more, and this whole coda after the movie’s over that I won’t tell you about, but it wasn’t there before, and is very effective.
During the first viewing I noticed how much sex there was in it. This time I noticed they seem to be smoking joints in just about every scene! 🙂
And yeah, you Beat junkies, me included, are gonna wanna have both versions on DVD. They are two different Road trips.
So, when the film was over, TIFF Director Piers Handling comes out with Walter, Garrett, Kirsten and Kristen — to huge applause, and screaming, actually — for about a 15 minute Q&A.
Walter talked about reading the book as a teenager in the 70s in his native Brazil when it was under a strict military regime and there was censorship and this book represented all the things they were being denied at the time — “where all forms of freedom were possible. And it stayed with me for many many years. In fact, before making ’The Motorcycle Diaries’ I read ‘On The Road’ again because I wanted to be inhabited by the beauty of that transition between youth and adulthood. It was both what it was telling me, but also how it was written.”
Garrett Hedlund (Dean/Neal) was asked about his research and once again went on about how great it was to meet the Cassadys! “Making this movie was a wild journey, a wild life experience — being such a fan of the Beat Generation and Neal Cassady. And then being blessed to meet John — Neal and Carolyn’s only son — and being able to ask him every question I wanted and hear his stories about his dad. And meeting Michael McClure, and Carolyn Cassady in London, and to get to know this man through the letters and unpublished writings, it was so rich, learning about this person who inspired me so much, and so many others — other Beat writers, rock stars, people who were lost and wanted to go on their own journey to find something much greater than themselves.”
Kirsten Dunst (Camille/Carolyn) — “I read Carolyn’s book, and even though she didn’t love his lifestyle, I think at the end of the day, she really wanted ‘them.’ And she gave up a lot for this man, but sometimes ‘love’ takes you places you wish you didn’t go, to deeper selves. She was very enveloped in this man’s life. She got the short end of the stick in a way, but had the life that she wanted at times.”
Kristen Stewart (Marylou/LuAnne) — “The big question I had going into this was: How did she have the capacity to handle what she handled and still have the life she had that influenced so many people and not have the light go out inside her? And . . . bottomless pit — that’s the answer! There was no end to her giving. She would have been essential now. I know it’s taken a long time to tell the story in film, but she was ahead of her time, and even now, she’s really relevant. She had such an acceptance of others. I feel I got to know her so well that whenever I got nervous and wondered if I was doing her justice, not only did I just have to look up to Walter to know, but mostly I would look up and she was so so so fucking looking over me.”
And the Q&A ends, and the cast & directors exit stage left, and all along I’m thinking I’m totally fine with just being at the Premiere, and already had the red carpet surprise, and hadn’t arranged for any after-party, and Walter or the cast never came and sat near us, and now they’d disappeared behind the Wizard’s curtain, and people were leaving the theater, and I was cool with it all.
But still Damo and I are telepathically plotting our next non-leaving nefarious move, knowing where the rainbow came down and the pot of gold was hiding. Except there were security guards at the stairs to both screen-side backstage entrances.
Each of us at different times made a motion to give up and leave, but the other always made a counter-move to keep it goin’, keep hangin’ on for one last opening, letting the crowd disperse. And before too long it was pretty much only the TIFF staff cleaning the hall and it’s all dark and no one’s there, and all of a sudden I notice the guard at the door the cast exited through is leaving! Ah-ha! I watch her walk all the way up the aisle, and I’m, “This is it. I’m goin’,” and I just walk up the stairs like I live there, push the door, and it swings open! And I see a bunch of people in fancy suits down the hall.
Onward!
Boom! There’s Walter and Garrett and Kirsten and company.
A little awkward at first. We’re bustin in, nobody knows us. I think of a question about that new final coda scene, but as I’m starting to talk to Kirsten about it, the publicity people call out, “Kirsten, your car’s ready.” So that ends quickly. Then I start to ask Garrett the same question, and the same thing happens!! And now all I’m left with is Walter! And he’s talking to the Director of the Festival. But I’m stickin right there and making my presence known. And both of them look at me like, this guy’s not goin’ away. Because also, I don’t want that car thing to happen again!
So finally they start to slightly separate. There’s a pause and a glance, and I’m, “Hey Walter, I’m Carolyn’s friend who was with her this summer in England.”
And thus begins … a whole new adventure …
Big smile. “Oh, man! I’ve heard so much about you!” And we start talkin and sure enough right away the car call comes. And he’s like, “Okay, we’re going to the party. Would you like to join us?”
“Hold on, lemmi check my schedule.” :-0
And he puts his hand on the small of my back, saying in gesture, “Come on, you’re with me.”
And we walk out the stage door and it’s that scene I’ve only seen in movies, where you’re in the quiet inside backstage space and the 2 doors suddenly swing open to the screaming barricaded-off fans packing the sidewalk, and flashbulbs going off, and people reaching out with things to sign and calling, “Walter!” And James Franco’s comin out right behind us and they’re yellin at him too. And I stand center carpet as they each stop and sign a few things quite politely, and give legible signatures and all.
And then it’s into this spaceship SUV limo, and Walter gets in the row right in front of Damo and me, and leans over the seat and totally zooms in on us for the whole car ride even though there’s all these other (important) people in there. And right off we’re talkin’ Mississippi Gene and other one-mention minutia with ease. And Boom I tell him how great the Slim Gaillard guy was! And he says he was the #2 man in Kid Creole & the Coconuts, and how the guy (Coati Mundi) improvised his whole musical performance — and I’m sayin’ back that whole scene was so freakin’ great!!
And I ask him what his motivation was in making the new version and he said he was trying to focus more on the friendship between Sal and Dean. And we’re talking about the editing process — and he’s quoting the French poet Valery, “ A poem is never finished, only abandoned” — as we riff on a mutual love of tweaking, and how the scroll had all those penciled corrections on it, and all the other versions that came later, and we’re having this long nodding mutual-understanding conversation about the powers and joys of editing — while we’re at the celebration of Mr. Spontaneous Prose.
And we talked about how great it is to see the scroll in person, and how the guy who’s its caretaker, Jim Canary, is the coolest, and Walter says he looks like he’s in ZZ Top. 🙂
And he talked about how the audio mix took a long time, and I told him how Great it sounded in the house, and cited the psychedelically surreal Sal-sick-in-Mexico scene — and he and I both said the word “dizzying” at the same time.
Then I said, “Man, you did so much research, you so internalized everything, how come Sal’s not using the spiral nickel notebooks?”
And he said they used “both schools” of notebook, the spiral and the flat-topped, and it just turned out that all the scenes with the spiral got cut, and the scenes with the flat-topped made the final.
And we’re talking about the changed opening and how the flatbed truck scene is back in the sequence where it belongs, and I ask him about that hokey line he cut from the long version that wasn’t in the book anyway — “Are you goin’ someplace or just goin?”
“I guess I’m just goin.”
And he says it was in the book.
And I say, “No it wasn’t. And I’ve got the Scroll right here,” and start to pull the book out of my bag, and he goes, “No, it’s not said on the flatbed, it’s from somewhere else in the book.”
Ah-ha.
Which is just another confirmation of how this is pieced together from stuff all over the book and elsewhere in order to tell the cinematic story.
And I asked him about the cutting of the “respectability” line and the post Camille kicking Dean & Sal out scene with her getting ready for work the next day, and he said that Carolyn had pointed out she wasn’t a nurse and so it wasn’t perfectly accurate anyway, and that he was trying to zip the movie along and that was something that could be cut.
So, eventually we get to the party, and there’s this whole scene out front of this new club that hasn’t even opened to the public yet, and again I get the hand-to-the-small-of-the-back routine as he pushes me ahead of him behind the red ropes. I knew all along the only way I was getting into this thing was with somebody from the movie, but never dreamed it would be with the director!
And then as soon as we go behind the lines there’s another one of those photo-op backdrops and a line of photographers behind another rope, and they’re yelling “Walter,” and he says, “Okay, take me with these guys,” and enthusiastically grabs me on one side and Damo on the other and the three of us stand there arm-in-arm beaming, Road Buddies, just back from a trip and joyous and crazy and flashbulbs goin off like mad with those cameras that shoot pictures clicketty-click-click-click 20 shots in 10 seconds, zippity doo-dah, snap-snap-snap.
Then we walk into the mob of a party, and Walter leans to my ear and says, “You know the trick with these things? You stay for 8 minutes.”
🙂
And suddenly the publicity handlers are urgently like, “Walter, we have to get you to your spot upstairs.” And I spy this stairway on the other side of the room so I actually lead the crew through the crowd and up the stairs to the private party overlooking the main floor. And there’s the lady in white again, Kirsten Dunst, and the producers from Zoetrope and MK2 and all these other happening movie people.
And the crazy thing is, we’re there about an hour, and he and I talk for about 45 minutes of it! I’m sure one key to us connecting was that I knew this was not a movie about Jack and Neal, but about Sal and Dean, and how we were always talking about the characters and not the biography.
It’s a total replay of when I first met my ultimate hero Bill Graham backstage at a Santana concert in New York when I was about 19, and he and I fell right into this intense conversation about the philosophy of show production, and I could see out the corners of my eyes all these people standing there wanting to talk to Bill who is ignoring them all and just locked in on me as we philosophized for the longest with this crowd of burning eyes surrounding us but neither giving any quarter.
And so Walter and I just riff, nose-to-nose about an inch apart, both to hear and cuz it’s so crowded. And I ask him everything I can think of.
Right away we talk about the different versions of course, and how people are already writing on IMDb and elsewhere about wanting to buy the longer “director’s cut,” and I know what he’s gonna say, and he says it — “They’re both director’s cuts.” 🙂
And he tells me the longer version is for sale in France (starting Oct. 17th, called Sur La Route) and the dialog is Not overdubbed, it just has subtitles that you can turn off. And the shorter one will be out on DVD in North America next year.
I told him the new version was the single, and the other was the album version, and he beamed like Scotty.
And I mentioned how I loved the prior opening he cut where it was Sal singing the “On The Road” song from the Kerouac audio recordings (Rykodisc 1999) and how the screen slowly fades from black into Sal’s feet walking along the dirt road. And he smiles and twinkles and says he loved that, too. He didn’t say it, but we both know Faulkner’s lesson — kill your darlings. And he practices it on a big scale budget. Sometimes you gotta cut your favorite passage for the betterment of the story.
And I asked if there was going to be another edit, and he confirmed that No this was it.
And then some voluptuous blond VIP waitress in a form-fitting black mini-skirt comes around and asks if we want anything, and Walter has his water and says no, but I ask for a beer — and it turns out the party is sponsored by Grolsch! And she brings me one of those big wonderful freezing cold bottles with the resealable cap.
Road jar! 😉
And I asked him if anybody else was at both the long-version London premiere and the short-version Toronto premiere, and he thought a second and said, “Yeah, two people. One of the producers … and you,” and pokes me in the chest and smiles another crinkly-eyed beauty.
So I start telling him all about the outdoor Somerset screening scene he missed and Carolyn’s classic “letter of introduction” and how people brought their entire bedrooms and set them up in the piazza and how it was like seeing “On The Road” at a drive-in except people had blankets instead of cars, and he’s just beaming like a proud father at the visual recreation of his film’s U.K. premiere.
And we got talkin about the purity of interpreting the book, and he was sayin how the novel was free-form, the spirit was free-form, the life was free-form, and so the movie should be as well. And I’m nodding Yes, and chanced a quote from my London review, “It’s a helluva party condensed into 2 hours. It’s a road trip with old friends to familiar places. But you better leave the book at home and be ready for anything.” And he says, “Yes, that’s exactly it.”
And we kept riffin’ on the improv, and he tells me about the older Okie hitchhiker who sings the song about “we were once friends,
but it’s hard when you’re burning in hell,
and it’s hard enough to be in love,
and it’s hard, ain’t it hard to love what you kill,”
that resonates so painfully with Marylou, and he tells me that whole scene was improvised by the actor who just started singing in the backseat of the car, and that he’s an old Kerouac-head and knew the stuff inside out. But can you believe this guy got a bit part in the movie and then created a whole new scene on the spot that made the final cut?!!
I asked him if the “In Search Of On The Road” doc he’s been making for years with scads of interviews and Road research would be a separate release and he said that’s the plan … whenever he can get the time to finish it.
And he went into a riff about how the Beats were the catalyst for everything, and I asked if he’d seen “The Source,” and he rhymed, “Of course,” as we harmonized on how perfectly inclusive and expansive that doc was.
And we talked about the sex scenes, and he said, “Yeah, you can tell Carolyn there’s less now,” and we both smile. And he goes on about how great her writing still is, even in emails. And I say, “Yeah, and she’s still a flawless touch-typist,” and act out what she looks like typing away with all ten fingers while staring off at her giant Mac screen. And he goes into how much he loved her introduction to Neal’s “Collected Letters,” how she describes how painful it was for her to read all those letters, but that she includes them all to present the full picture of Neal and let others see for themselves the most accurate portrait.
And I brought up how I thought the casting was great, and he must be so happy, but how did he come to choose Sam Riley?
He said he tried out 200 Sals!! And he picked Sam because he could listen — that a big part of Sal is taking in what’s around him. He said James Franco tested for it five times and he’s great but it just didn’t work.
And then we fell into this whole talk about friendship, and how Jack and Neal drifted apart, and how that was such a sad part of the novel, and that Walter cried when he first read it as a young man. And then he went off on a parenthetical about how much he loved John Clellon Holmes’ “Go” and how Jack’s character and friendships are portrayed there. And I told him about my 85 days of Camp Carolyn dispatches, and how one of them was a riff on friendship, and losing it, and how it can be so intense and then can be so gone. And he’s nodding, “Yes, yes,” and saying it’s happened to him with friends in his life and that he understands and it’s sad but it’s life.
And I asked him about the dropping of f-bombs, and how that word wasn’t in the novels or letters or anything, and he understood my raising it, but that he felt they were little cues that he could use that would connect the story with a contemporary audience, that it’s not a documentary, and that they were used very judiciously, and he’s right. (But I’ll tell ya, the period sets and costumes and cars and locations are all transportively real!) And he said that in “Motorcycle Diaries” he also inserted stuff that wasn’t literally accurate for the time because it could help connect an audience in the present.
And we talked about the Jack & Carolyn dancing scene in Denver, and I asked about the famous line that’s not in the movie, when Jack said to Carolyn about Neal seeing her first, and he said that it wasn’t in the novel, and that he showed their love without using the words, and I’m thinking, “Boy, you sure did” — the attraction’s so evident in the faces in that scene.
And there’s this great moment where I remember, “Oh wait — I’m mad at you!” And I see his wonderfully wrinkling eyes scrunch up and white teeth shine through the darkness. “The San Francisco epiphany scene after Dean abandons Sal & Marylou on the curb — that was so much more flushed out in the longer version — the picking up of butts from the sidewalk, hallucinating his mother’s face in the store window …” And Walter’s smiling and says, and “Yeah, I loved that, too … but I was trying to make it shorter.”
“Why?”
“Cuz if we could get it down to 2 hours then theaters can run 4 screenings a day instead of 3. It’s gives it more of a chance and longer theater life. It’s good for the film.”
And he introduced me to the guy from Zoetrope who was the person who first connected “On The Road” to Walter — and boy did I thank him for that!
And we talked about the rollout and how it was going to all these film festivals first to have proper cinephile debuts in different countries all over the world. He started listing them all but I couldn’t keep track and hadn’t heard of half of them.
And he confirmed that the release dates and rollout stuff was not his thing, and he put up his hands saying something like, “That’s not my dept. I just leave that to them.”
And I complemented his choice of no title in the beginning — it just starts “New York, 1947” and Boom you’re right into the movie and on the road, and he twinkled, knowin’ he’d played the solo sweet.
And I mentioned how poetically beautiful the landscape shots were and he said they shot those on a long second unit trip across the country afterwards.
And I told him how great Viggo was as Bull/Bill, and how in the movie you first meet him over the phone and just hear his voice and how I thought it was a recording of Burroughs himself. And he went on about how great it is to work with Viggo and how he insists on flying coach on airplanes and always requests a compact car to pick up and drive himself, and how the whole time they were filming his scenes he never broke character even back at the hotel, and that in the mornings the crew would arrive at the location, and Viggo would already be there on this own in costume, sitting in Burroughs’ chair reading Celine.
And I let him know how much I loved the Steve Buscemi scenes, which got huge laughs in both London and Toronto, and him driving the car really slowly then calling it “a perilous journey!” And Walter said, “Oh, I’m so glad you caught that. Yeah, that was fun,” and he had a big smile on over those scenes.
And we also got personal. I got to thank him, actually twice, at length — how the Beat community is blessed that he was the man at the helm, that he was the guy to finally do this. And all the research he did, the complete emersion for 8 years. That we couldn’t have had a better man do it. And he was so grateful to hear this. And the whole time we’re standing eye-to-eye, inches apart, not even blinking, but staring into the depths of each other’s souls the way Neal and Allen do in the film.
And he went on about, “I feel like I know you after hearing about you all this time. It’s so great to finally put a face to what I was thinking,” as he leans back, holding up his hands and framing my face.
And he was so jazzed and thanked me, actually twice, for going to such lengths to see both versions — and that we could talk about the differences. And I could so honestly say how much better, more alive, faster tempoed, and more fun the new version is.
And we musta hugged in one way or another about 50 times during the night.
I still can’t believe I’ve seen this movie twice, been to two premieres, and seen both the long and short versions! And it’s still four months away from theaters!
For the London premiere Adventure in the outdoor courtyard at Somerset House — go here.
For the New York City premiere and afterparty Adventure — go here.
For video versions of this and other “On The Road” stories — go here.
For a complete overview of all the Kerouac / Beat film dramatizations including clips and reviews — check out the Beat Movie Guide.
For an excerpt from my book about the ’82 Kerouac Conference in Boulder — “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” — check out Meeting Your Heroes.
For more from the Boulder Beat Adventure Book — check out Who All Was There.
A very abnormal thing happens — it’s post-movies Wednesday night (August 15th) when Carolyn & I normally part ways for our own offices and computers, but by fortune we met up in the kitchen and started talkin about the movie premiere tomorrow night, and I’m tellin her how I’m all excited about being in this palace with 2,000 Jack people, but it’s sold out, and press is totally allotted for, and I’m telling her my elaborate plans for sneaking in, or scoring a ticket out front, but that I have to be there, and suddenly she’s, “Well, I should write you a letter to get in. I wanna know what you think of it.”
And I’m like, “Yeah.”
And she’s like, “Okay, I’ll do it now,” and I hand her a pad & pencil and she writes out a late-night plea for me to get into this thing as her eyes & ears since she can’t make it.
And then, by the time I get up in the morning, she’s handwritten a whole new killer “letter of introduction” for me to carry with as the revised Plan A!
So I go in to London. But problem is: the last train back out tonight is 11:38PM — about the time the movie’s ending. This is gonna be dicey. So, I time myself from the station. It’s 2:10PM at the Waterloo train platforms . . . and 2:17 when I’m at the doors to Somerset House — the palace where the film is to screen in the outdoor courtyard. 7 minutes walking.
I do a thorough pre-scout for getting-in plans B thru D, but have to remember it’s Plan A that must work and solve all. So I go to reception thinkin I can get somebody from the film fest to come down and between the letter and me, convince ‘em to let me in. But reception says, No Go. You gotta take any delivery to the messenger center, which is outside, down around the corner, down a dark dingy alley that hasn’t been cleaned since before the war, and it’s spooky old New York. And I get to the end of the dark tunnel where my letter’s goin nowhere, but then I bump into the messenger crew. And all my life, including at MTV, I could groove and work with the top executives and have all the mailroom guys who love me too. And so Boom — I’m back in Mailroomville, and groovin with the cats, and we’re talkin New York and New Orleans, and Assam is right into helping me, and brings me two different envelopes to choose from to put my loose letter in, and says he’ll take it right up.
I walk outta the dark tunnel back into the glorious sun over the Thames with the breeze and river air and head back to reception where I said I’d wait, and get up there and I know there’s gonna be nothing happening for gawd nose how long, so I go out on the terrace over the airy river, and no sooner am I out there than I see Assam again! And he’s already dropped it off and says they’ll come find me in reception. “Okay!” So I go back in, plop myself down in a comfy, pull out my Bible — the scroll version — and am just gawkin’ around when I see a smiling face seem to pick me out of the crowd. “Are you Brian?” she asks as I notice she doesn’t have a ticket in her hand.
“Hi,” I stand up.
“We’d love you to come tonight,” she says in the cutest English accent I ever did hear!
And I walk outta there at 3:10, an hour after I landed, with my name on the guest list.
😉
So the next problem to solve is the departure — and having beers for the post-movie writing thinking train ride home. I wanna be (close to) straight for the movie, but afterwards I wanna celebrate. And I check every store on the block and of course in this godforsaken regressive country you can’t even buy beers to go after 11. So, whaddya do?
Me, I go back into the venue and start talkin up the cool bar manager at the only bar inside as they’re setting up. I explain my situation. She’s sympathetic. And I’m like, “Kay, what if I paid you for two beers now — cuz I know you’ll be closed at T minus D-hour — and you keep ‘em on ice, and I’ll grab them as I’m running out the door for my last-train-outta-Dodge.” And she winks, and says, “Cool.”
Done.
Next: Make the scene. This is a one-time-only gig. In a big cobblestone courtyard. Oh yeah, so I buy one of the padded blankets they sell there, which turned out to be a total savior turning the ancient London cobblestones into a soft field. And I start talkin to all these girls. And this is the whole bloody point. There’s TONS of ‘em! I mean, mostly girls. I mean, way mostly girls. Like, at the start of the line goin in, there was maybe 5 dudes in the first 40 people. !! The total opposite of what we’ve always thought to be the Beat audience.
And I’m talkin to them and a bunch of them say “On The Road” is their favorite book! Huh?! Crazy, man.
And funny — Kerouac and Keith — you’d see these globetrotting hipsters coming through the portico into the courtyard and a very easy smiling question was, “You here for ‘On The Road’ or the Stones?” whose 50th year photo retrospective is also in the same palace at the same time. The Rock n The Road. Sympathy For The Dharma. 19th Nervous Beatnik.
After first scouting the empty yard for where I wanted to experience it from
— dead center, really close — I meet up with this girl I’d met literally last night on Facebook, and we’re yakin, and she’s near the front of the now really long line — in fact there were two really long lines “queuing” to get in.
I now know the security search routine — so I pick the fastest guy and the shortest line, and Boom suddenly I’m one of the first people in the naked courtyard, and just Zoom myself right to exact Dead center. And then all the girls catch up and I end up in the middle of this crew of 12 of them! and everything’s rollin right along.
And so we’re rappin the universe, and how they love the adventure of Jack’s books, and the language it’s written in, and the openness, and the road adventures — and not only is this crew from all over but they travel all over!
And we’re yakkin an’ jammin an’ yiffin an’ yeah-manin, and the whole time over the crystal PA they’re playing this great ’40s & ’50s jazz for the two hour party before the movie, and then — “Oh — there’s Al Hinkle!” Or at least the guy who plays him in the film. He’s no big movie star, and he’s not in it or the book that much, well he is, but he’s not that vocal, but he’s totally THERE, and pretty much the only other guy on the bus. And Carolyn remained really close friends with the Hinkles throughout the decades & madness they all lived through and I’ve recently gained a lot of respect for survivor Al — the only major character in On The Road besides Carolyn who’s still alive.
So I walk up to the actor — “Al Hinkle! I know you!” And he starts beamin’ while processing “Not only does this guy recognize me, and not only as the part, but as the guy behind the part.” And we’re talking about him meeting Al at the wrap party in S.F. and what a nice and still cogent guy he is, and how he taught the cast how to do the benzedrine inhalers, which they got first-hand-right in the movie, and of course we snap a snap in the crazy courtyard of some King of Somerset or whoever this palace was built for.
Oh, and before the screening a few of the actors came out for a little interview segment, and Al / Ed Dunkel, actually Danny Morgan, said, “I don’t really know why I’m here, I’m barely in the movie. I actually only did the catering on this.” 🙂 Then the host says, “Well, when Danny comes on screen we should give him a big round of applause.” Then the movie starts and everyone gets sucked right in, but about a half-hour later when Al / Ed / Danny gets his first scene a whole bunch of us remember and this silly applause breaks out all over the courtyard. 🙂
And, man, here’s the crazy part — we’re seeing On The Road …at a drive-in movie screen!!
Except there’s no cars, it’s blankets instead. But we’re outside with this giant screen and the breeze is blowin and people are munchin on munchies and they’ve brought in any manner of pillows and bedding and picnics and boxed wine, and there’s gay encampments, and loving hetro couples on pillows, and passels of girls like this is some chick flick.
And speaking of that — Kristen Stewart definitely wins the Most Improved Character From The Novel Award.
Okay, so here’s the thing about the movie:
“On The Road” is only the skeleton this film is fleshed out around. It is not simply the novel made into a movie. Director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera WAY expanded it. For starters, they used The Scroll, not the ’57 edition as the working blueprint. And then all sorts of little touches were added from Neal, Jack & Allen’s letters, Carolyn’s book, the two different LuAnne interviews, “The Town And The City,” Jack’s audio recordings and articles and notebooks, Allen’s “Denver Doldrums,” “Dakar Doldrums,” and the “Martyrdom and Artifice” journals, John Clellon Holmes’ “Go,” and Gifford & Lee’s “Jack’s Book” — all noticed specifically. In other words, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in the novel. But it’s all based on first-hand accounts, not solely Jack’s account as told in that one book, scroll or not.
And it also does not tell the novel chronologically. It jumps around — not in a bad way, cuz it’s all part of The Grand Duluoz Legend, and it’s all different refractions of the same light — but it’s not the novel On The Road as a linear film. It’s an interpretation based strongly ON that novel, but it’s not a literal filming of the storyline. It’s a work of art, its own work of art, a new work of art based on an old work of art.
There’s lots of cool things about it. I don’t want to “spoil” it for you, but many of the specific scenes in the novel that always stood out for me are in the film. And since it’s so non-linear, you don’t know what’s coming next. And it’s, “Oh wow! It’s this scene! No way!” It’s so funny-cool that way. Something that Jack might spend a couple paragraphs on in a 300-page novel could be 3 minutes of the 137 minute movie. And things he might cover over 20 pages aren’t included at all. It’s kind of a series of choice scenes portrayed.
And the cameos by Terrence Howard and Steve Buscemi are to die for! That two of my favorite actors are in this in such weird and wonderful ways is just great.
And Viggo as Bill Burroughs! Holy shit. Maybe the best part of the film.
And the music is GREAT. Yer gonna love it if ya love it.
There’s some problems, big and small, but I’m not gonna mention ‘em cuz maybe you won’t even notice ‘em. It’s its own work of art, its own statement, its own piece. It’s new and different and will stand (or fall) on its own. But the movie of “On The Road” now exists. And here it is. It’s more large than small. It’s more new than old. It’s more timeless than dated.
How this is gonna play for other people will be interesting to see. But here’s a wild example . . .
So, I gotta leave — it’s this whole trip. I time it out during the pre-movie layabout. Gotta be on the Strand by 11:30 to get a cab to the 11:38 last-train-outta-Waterloo. I need 5 minutes to find the bar manager and grab those road jars. It’s gonna take 5 minutes to get from where I am in dead-center of Woodstock to that bar. Plus a 5 minute buffer. No matter what’s happening in the movie — I gotta move at 11:15.
So, I execute the exit — and my girl’s in her closed bar with my two giant beers on ice like champaign. And I see the great final shot from the tunnel leading to the street while walking backwards, then turn around and run out onto the Strand but it’s late night Nowheresville in London and there’s no freakin cabs! Then I spot one but he cuts down a different split in the road, so I run across the street to where he’s heading and there’s this moped thing they all ride here right in front of me and with my left hand I’m circle-waving him to keep going past while my right hand is stretched out back flagging the cab. Perfect execution. In the door. “Waterloo Station.”
I’m thinkin I’m making good time, get to the steps under that great statue still thinkin I’m doin’ good, but look at watch and it’s 11:36! Bolt up the stairs nearest the platform the train always leaves from but for some reason tonight it’s at the other end of the freakin station! So I jog the entire length of Waterloo Station through the crowds, then fly through the gate, flash-confirming I’m getting on the right train.
You come in at the back of the train and of course all the seats are full, so I’m speed-walkin past it and luckily look up ahead and see Neal the brakeman starting to wave his flag and flash his flashlight just before he blows his whistle, and I go, “Shit,” and jump on, and before I’m out of the doorway the doors close! 5 seconds to spare! 10 if ya count that first door I walked past. Yet another close last-train exit execution!
And of course there’s no seats! Like, why don’t you run another frickin train after this one? Their economy sucks, and they force everybody to close up shop at 11:00! I don’t get it. Like, how old are children who have to be in bed by 11? Does this country not think adults live here?
So, I walk through the entire train … all the way to the end of the very front car to find the very last seat. Sit down, all crazy. I’m five minutes out of the movie, five seconds from missing the last train, and I’ve got an hour to write, and two cold ones to drink. Perfect. I’m write into it. Then after a few stops the nice woman next to me starts pickin up her stuff to get off, so I break from my reverie and say, “Were you in at something good in London tonight?”
And the woman goes, “Oh, I was just at this outdoor film that went on and on.”
:-0
Thousands of passengers leaving on hundreds of trains and I sit beside someone who was at the premiere!! “Wait a minute — were you at Somerset House?! So was I!” And we have a little “how funny!” as she’s standing up to get off — but the point is, she didn’t say, “I was just at this great movie.”
There’s gonna be the Beat world’s reaction, and then the non-Beat world’s. Beat people in general are gonna like it — cuz it’s On The Road and so much more — with a well portrayed Allen and Bill as well as Neal & Jack. People who have only read the one book and have it emblazoned in their brains may have trouble with how it’s been expanded, or edited by the limitations of the medium. I have no idea how non-Beat-familiar people will respond. Not a clue. I think if you were predisposed this way, you’d already be there.
Oh, and there’s a whole lotta sex in it. The things that are said and the things that are shown, for The Puritanical American Rating System, this is gonna be an “R” fer sure. I mean, there’s hand-jobs, oral, gay, straight, three-ways, you name it — and f-bombs, which actually were not in the casual vernacular of the time the way they’re used in this film, and certainly not in the novel. This is definitely an adult movie. Which, if you know your On The Road, was a very G-rated book, other than the subject — the sex is all off-page, and the language is clean. The movie — not so much.
I look forward to experiencing this many more times, under many different circumstances, in many different mindframes, with many different people, and how it’ll continue to reveal new colors and angles with each new Road adventure. It’s a memorable, expansive dramatization. It’s a helluva party condensed into 2 hours. It’s a road trip with old friends to familiar places. But you better leave the book at home and be ready for anything.
Paul Simon certainly exceeded my expectations last night!
He and his two bands only had a couple warm-up gigs in Dublin before bringing back “Graceland” in front of 50,000 people in the most famous park in the English capital of Europe.
A 2 hour show became 3 hours, and he started at 7:20 to avoid the power-cutting curfew that befell Bruce and McCartney the night before.
And speaking of that, it was wonderful that the Simon audience and all the opening acts were like a folk festival and not a rock concert in that it was easy to move around and there were very few drunk loogans.
Of course I experienced it from my standard 7-people from the front rail in front of the stage with 49,900 people behind me.
And as usual I unified a whole krewe of surrounding people, making friends and turning it into a large group party with Russians, Jamaicans, Americans, Dutch people with their Dutch cigarettes, and families-full of Brits.
The show was really expansive — Jimmy Cliff fronting Paul’s band for “The Harder They Come” and “Many Rivers To Cross” into Paul & Jimmy dueting on “Vietnam” and “Mother & Child Reunion.”
Ladysmith Black Mambazo opened their part with two a capella songs that were reverence-evoking hymns and had the place jaw-dropped and hushed silent.
And then Paul comes out to join them for the very Zulu “Homeless” — which came across not about street-people or tragedy but how we are all persons of the planet — not one location.
And the Graceland stuff is just RIPPIN’ ! “Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes,” “I Know What I Know,” “Boy In The Bubble,” “Crazy Love,” the wild energetic zydeco “That Was Your Mother” — and the whole 2 hour+ show builds to this monumental “Gumboots / Graceland” peak.
And in the middle of it Hugh Masekela comes out — the 73-year-old legendary trumpet & flugelhorn player from South Africa who does a “Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela)” and then pretty-much steals the show with this riveting Beat-poetry meets scat-Zulu with Coltrane-sax and Miles-horn on “Stimela (Coal Train).”
And “The Sound of Silence” was positively spooky in how its sound made utterly silent this enormous crowd who had just been dancing in exuberant reverie for hours — but suddenly it was church-quiet except for the faint collective harmony of people whispering the hymn along with the preacher.
And dobro master Jerry Douglas came out for “The Boxer,” and bluegrass fiddle player Gabe Witcher from the Punch Brothers for “Dazzling Blue,” and all these special guest African women singers . . . it was just uber-special, and of course I was right in front of the stage with a killer world-beat krewe.
Oh, and the weather was just Perfect even though it’s been the rainiest summer in the history of the British Isles and had rained on every other big concert held there this month.
A month of rain in 12 hours
can’t dampen the Spirit
of a lifetime of experience
or the experience of a lifetime.
Two compatible souls a generation apart,
Somehow related, somehow unjaded, somehow not faded,
Still giggling unburdened, still freely unherded,
Two jazz cats still flowing, still riffing, still reading
the mind of the other.
Tis a play devoutly to be wished,
On Shaky Willie’s garden stage,
Halfway around the Globe,
In a comedy of the present and a tragedy of age
Where laughter is the direction and wine is the line.
==========================================
For a video tribute done for Carolyn’s Memorial on the one year anniversary of her passing — go here.
For the London “On The Road” premiere Adventure in the outdoor courtyard at Somerset House — go here.
For the New York City “On The Road” premiere and afterparty Adventure — go here.
For a complete overview of all the Kerouac / Beat film dramatizations including clips and reviews — check out the Beat Movie Guide.
For an excerpt from my book about the ’82 Kerouac Conference in Boulder — check out Meeting Your Heroes.
Whatever the particulars of any all-encompassing multi-day music festival you’ve been to — this one takes place in New Orleans. When the festival music is over each night, instead of driving into a traffic jam or walking to a campground or checking into some generic hotel, you’re living in history and set loose in New Orleans. And with apologies to New York, this is the REAL city that never sleeps.
And it’s a music town with more great clubs than you’ll ever be able to hit with shows that start at all hours of the day and night so you can be hearing live music until the sun comes up if you want.
But the Fest itself is something that takes place over two consecutive weekends at a “Fairgrounds” that’s normally a horse racing track.
They’ve been doing it for over 40 years and have got it down masterfully in every regard. And because it’s so good, people keep coming back and a group mind of kindness has evolved and runs through everyone from the groundskeepers to the headliners. I call it “The Random Acts of Kindness Festival” because that’s what it is.
Whereas most festivals give booking preference to out-of-town acts, Fest is the opposite. Rather than being shut-out, local musicians come home from world tours to be central figures, doing 2 shows on a slow day. This is a celebration of The Musicians’ City, and nobody misses the party.
The Festival Grounds:
This was the big beautiful surprise to me — how much I LOVED being on those grounds. It’s only open 8 hours a day — from 11AM to 7PM. And the most fun days are the two Fridays and the Thursday when you kinda have the place to yourself with about half the crowd of the weekends.
That The Grateful Dead are the most ubiquitous band represented on t-shirts, flags etc. (“I saw a DeadHead sticker on a stop sign.”) makes sense because DeadHeads created their own culture within their audience-world. The same thing has happens at Fest — in large part because the same people have been going year after year.
It’s hard to convey — but it’s utopian. Every single person is SO nice you won’t believe it. It’s a music festival for cool adults. And the field is designed so brilliantly — again, over 40+ years of evolution.
At each end of the giant oval they have a main stage. One of them had your Bruce, Petty, Beach Boys, Eagles — and the other end had your Florence & The Machine, Bon Iver, My Morning Jacket, Fiest — so all the young people into the newer music are at one end, and the slightly older demo is all the way at the other.
Then in the middle there’s a Congo Square stage with sort-of more all black artists, and another stage that’s basically bluegrass styles and wooden music, and another stage that has traditional New Orleans music. Then there are 3 main giant tents that have rows of chairs for about a thousand people or more — one that’s all gospel, one that’s all blues, and one that’s all jazz.
There are 12 stages in all, all running simultaneously. And you can get anywhere really easily and quickly. The opening day I was listening to Bon Iver at one end of the fairgrounds, looked at my watch, headed to the Beach Boys at the far end and was there in four minutes!
And the festival is famous for running the stages like clockwork — I’ve never experienced anything like it in a lifetime of going to shows and festivals. Sets start and end the minute the schedule says they will. And all the performers buy in, and nobody overruns their slot — except sometimes the final headlining acts of the day will run a few minutes past 7:00. Or in Bruce’s case, 25 minutes past. 😉
At the two main stages they mark off an enormous area in front of the stage as standing room only — so, the people who want to bring chairs and camp out for the day can’t take the area right in front of the stage. And it causes turnover in the standing area cuz people don’t wanna go and stand there the whole day.
95 different local restaurateurs are providing the food so it’s all different and really good and not your normal food vender crap at all. Like, you can’t buy a hotdog or hamburger anywhere on the site! And there’s about a dozen giant tents selling beer to go, and also booths that sell champaign and wine.
And there’s about 40 gazillion port-o-potties, plus this giant grandstand building with regular porcelain bathrooms if that’s your need.
But those are all just the physical amenities — what’s really special and unique is the mindset of everyone who’s there. You could say it’s like being at a church revival in that everyone is joyous and extremely polite and reverential and in love with each other like everyone’s on ecstasy or something. And friendly — my gawd! Most everyone has traveled from somewhere far away to be in this special place and so you’re all united in the mindset of joy and gratitude and camaraderie with like-minded music lovers. I also call it “The Good Ears Festival.” And I thought I knew a lot about music, but holy heck! I am such a musical novice!
The thing I missed the most when it was over were the people — both the soulful locals and the intrepid visitors. Fest is not peopled by the idiots on Bourbon Street or young loogans chasing the pop band of the day, but rather by people with really broad musical minds who travel to hear musicians from all over the world they’ve never even heard of playing and blending every strata and style of music imaginable.
It’s Dr. John playing with Bruce Springsteen. (above)
It’s Ani DiFranco playing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
It’s Pancho Sanchez playing with Terence Blanchard.
And it’s a festival full of people who “get it.”
One of the most interesting things I noticed was — there’s all these stages going on with vastly different styles of music and in front of every one of them people are having epiphanistic experiences. You’ll be having yours somewhere — and meanwhile someone is in tears of salvation at a gospel show, someone else is catching some South American band you’ve never heard of saying it was the musical highlight of their life, others are second-line dancing in finger-waving joy at a party at a brass band stage, others are jaw-dropped in rapture at some one-time-ever jazz combo, and others are standing playing air guitar at some thunderous blues stage. And when the day is over and you think you’ve been in the magic spot for the best possible music — every single person you talk to will have been at an entirely different series of performances and feel exactly the same way that they were at the once-in-a-lifetime magic moment spot.
And with the shows all being held in daylight — in a complete contrast to almost every performer’s regular gigs — they can see the faces of everyone in the audience, and respond in energetic kind. They’re performing in our house — at a great party. This isn’t their concert in some arena. This is in the people’s field on sacred ground at a special festival with an audience who have more discerning ears than just about any other place the musicians ever play.
It’s hard to grasp just how big and awe-inspiring and fun this whole thing is. I’m trying to put it into words, but you really can’t. There’s something literally divine about this place — something intangible, transcendent, spiritual, and life-affirming that has to be experienced to be believed. And even then you won’t believe it.
The Night Shows — aka “The Jazz Fest Endurance Test”
So, what happens is — you get out of Fest a little after 7:00. Which looks sumpthin like this, if you’re the last person leaving: 🙂
As soon as you walk out the gate, you’re in this residential neighborhood of old houses — most of them bungalows with nice big peopled porches — and in this couple block area there are numerous street parties going on, including around a corner bar named Liuzza’s that’s selling beer and Bloody Mary’s out a back window faster than you could sell ice cream in a desert.
The general rule of thumb is to hang with these hangsters for a while and let some of the crowd melt back into the city and then you can jump on a bus, or streetcar, or cram in a cab with a buncha other crazies and for $5 each head to the Quarter.
One of the many Jazz Fest evolutions over time has been advent of a site called JazzFestGrids.com which lists in a grid form starting from before Fest until after it’s over, every club in the city and every show they have every day and night. It makes it super easy to scan through every show in the city to pick your poison for the evening’s dosing.
It seems like there’s about a hundred clubs and they almost all have 2 or 3 shows a night — basically an 8:00, an 11 and a 2AM show. So, if you don’t make it to two different clubs in a night you’re sort of slacking off. But at an absolute minimum you go somewhere and hear something that blows your head off.
And a great n hilarious thing is — so many of the shows are not even bands! They’re just 3 or 4 different cats from different combos who are playing together that night in a one-off. It’ll be some jazz horn player from the west coast with some rock drummer, some blues guitarist, and some B3 funk player. Then, after the set, they all gotta leave because they’re each going to some other gig to play with a completely different line-up for the next time slot. And this goes on for two freakin weeks!
But you have to pace yourself because you gotta be back at work at 11:00 the next morning. And have proper footwear.
That’s why I call it “The Jazz Fest Endurance Test.” 😉
Here’s the artists / bands / ensembles I caught at New Orleans Jazz Fest over the last week . . . Thursday, April 26th, 2012 (1)
— the Honey Island Swamp trio – at the Ogden Museum of Art
Friday at Jazz Fest (11)
— The Classic New Orleans Revue – with “Carnival Time” Johnson and all these other famous musical voices of the city — the perfect grounding start to Fest – from right in front of the front audience rail with the early Fest dancers
— James Andrews (Shorty’s brother) – just rocking it in the Blues Tent including second-lining around the room
— The Dixie Cups singing “Iko Iko” and “Take Me To Church On Time”
— Seun Kuti (Fela’s son) only for a couple of songs, but he was great!
— Chuck Leavell & Friends including Bonnie Bramlett – whole set from 5th row center
— Bon Iver – great diversity in players & sounds
— Beach Boys – nuthin’ but hits – John Stamos joined on percussion
— Cubano Be-Bop – with Pancho Sanchez and Terence Blanchard
— Joe Krown – Wolfman Washington – Russell Batiste trio
— Robert Randolph & Family Band – from the front row of the VIP balcony
— The Grateful Dead’s Bill Kreutzmann, with Little Feat’s Paul Barree & Fred Tackett, Anders Osborne, Papa Mali, Billy Iuso – doing Friend, Franklins, Dixie Chicken–Tennessee Jed, Lovelight :-0 — from the center VIP podium
Saturday (7)
— Jon Cleary – thinking he sounds a lot like Dr. John, then he sits in with The Doctor for his entire set tomorrow!
— Voice of the Wetland Allstars – Dr. John, Tab Benoit, Cyril Neville, Johnny Sansone, Johnny Vidocovitch, Anders Osborne, etc. – dead center 20 feet from the front of audience rail
— Cee Lo Green – doing “F… You”
— Carolina Chocolate Drops – doin’ “Goin’ Down The Road Feelin’ Bad”
— Midnite Disturbers – with Stanton Moore, Treme Brass Band and others
— Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – dead center 20 feet from front rail
— Allen Toussaint quartet – in a 50-seat jazz club
— Trombone Shorty – leaning on the front of the stage for the whole show!
— Karl Denson, Stanton Moore, Will Blades – essentially standing on the stage over Will Blades shoulder at the Blue Nile
— Herbie Hancock with 4 different ensembles involving Terence Blanchard, Kermit Ruffins, Dr. Michael White, Ellis Marsalis, the Treme Brass Band, and others – 10 feet from front of stage at Congo Square at sunrise to start International Jazz Day. 😉
Monday — Tipitina’s “Instruments a’ Comin'” show (9)
— two different 100-member marching bands! – from the curb beside them
— Donald Harrison and the Tips Band – playing Miles Davis outside – from the sidewalk next to them
— “Wolfman” Washington – aaa-ouuuu – and then Henry Butler backed by Wolfman & band doin’ Prof. Longhair – on front rail of tiny Tips
— Galactic – joined by Glen David Andrews, and Corey Glover – on front rail
— BIG – russell Batiste – Ivan neville – george Porter band – 3 feet from rail
— Dirty Dozen Brass Band – middle of half-full house
— Honey Island Swamp Band – with Papa Mali, an 11-piece band doing “Gotta Serve Somebody” – from middle of half-empty room at 1AM on a Monday night
Tuesday — “New Orleans Musicians For Obama” (12) Entire benefit experienced from front row of VIP balcony!
— Caesar Brothers Funkbox – doing “Love The One You’re With”
— Kermit Ruffins – joined by Irvin Mayfield and Leroy Jones, including a jumpin’ “Iko”
— Claude Bryant – the guy I sat with.
— Fathers & Sons of the New Millennium – The Batiste Family Band
— Dumpstaphunk
— Papa Mali with Trombone Shorty, Cyril Neville, Kipori Woods, Rockin’ Dopsie and others
— Wolfman Washington, joined by Deacon Jones for “Statesboro Blues”
— Rejected Youth Nation
— Brass-a-holics
— The Meters reunion, with Dr. John in for Art, and Big Sam
— Cyril Neville’s Funkalicious – from the floor
— Marcia Ball with 8 horn players and Marie Muldour – from the floor
Wednesday (3)
— The Iko Allstars – in the Rusty Nail courtyard
— Absinthe Minded – doing “Got Stoned And I Missed It” by Jim Stafford at inside bar at Rusty Nail
— Honey Island Swamp Band – in Rusty Nail courtyard
Thursday — last day at Jazz Fest (10)
— Dukes of Dixieland – guy on brass clarinet ! doing “Wonderful World” and loads of Louis Armstrong songs!
— George Porter & his phunk band Runnin’ Pardners – 3 feet from front rail
— Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk with Ian Neville on guitar – all the waiting Florence fans totally blank-faced to George and Ivan! 🙂 – 10 feet from rail
— Ani DiFranco with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band ! — best surprise of the day!! – never would have got to hear them if not for Ani
— Esperanza Spalding – started 40 min. late then upright bass didn’t work! 🙁
— Florence & The Machine – the audience was like being at a high school dance at an all-girls school
— The Iguanas – great – Latin-Caribbean blend
— Jimmy Buffett – “Margaritaville” and “The Last Man Standing” – the last song I heard at Fest 🙂
— guy on grand piano doing “The Weight” for Levon at Jean Lafitte’s – the oldest bar in America – everybody gathered around the piano singing along – last (non street music) song I experienced in N.O. 😉
That’s 64 total artists/bands/ensembles, almost all of whom had additional masters join them on stage – for an average of 8 different all-star bands every day for 8 daze!
on a dosey-doe night of subterranean hideaways and pirate characters right outta “Treasure Island” and hanging in the Blue Nile next to Will Blades the young Hammond B3 master as he works the keys and valves and peddles to Karl Denson on sax and Stanton Moore on drums on a stage so small the players could shake hands without getting up,
and after the magic music’s over, I’m thinkin I should just go to Congo Square now for the Herbie Hancock all-star sunrise concert that we were all staying up for — they’ll be people there early setting up so it’ll be safe in this historic park as sunrise blossoms in this ever-blooming city.
So, I go in search of a cab, and this couple from Michigan are lookin too, and we finally find one. I get in the front, the couple in the back, and Boom!, we’re off to the Quarter to drop them off and then take me to Congo Square!
Everything’s gone blissfully since I’d been in New Orleans for four daze. I call JazzFest “The Festival of Random Acts of Kindness” because that’s what it is. The traveling out-of-towners are my kinda people, and the locals are blowing my mind in their friendliness and positive approach to life.
So, we drop off the couple, and the unofficial rule-of-thumb during JazzFest is — when there’s multiple people in a cab, everybody pays 5 bucks. So, we stop, and the cabbie asks the couple in the back for $10. The dude only has a 20. And the cabbie says he can’t break it — which registers as weird. “What working cabbie late at night during JazzFest can’t break a twenty.” Then he asks me if I have a 10. Which, even in my crazed haven’t-slept-much-and-just-seen-God-Yolanda-and-Bruce mind — strikes this old New Yorker as odd and that he’s trying to get me to pull out my money to see what I got. If this little moment and insight hadn’t have occurred, I may not have acted fast enough on what was coming ahead.
The couple come up with a 10-spot, pay the cabbie, get out, and we start driving to Congo Square, which is just on the other side of Rampart from the Quarter. I realize if I’m headin to the park for a while I wanna load up on some beers n smokes, and ask the guy to stop somewhere along the way. This actually gave homeboy his opening. “You want me to take you to a place that has beer and cigarettes? Yeah, okay, I can take to you a place that has beer and cigarettes. I take you there.”
And even though he’s got a scarred and scary face, everything’s gone so perfectly over the four wild daze in this great city of New Orleans, I’m goin’ with it, and we’re actually having a nice long talk about Yolanda Adams. Gospel music. The grace of God. And he says he knows of her, and we’re talkin The Spirit and how music and spirituality and this city go together.
I have a vague sense of how far Congo Square is, and it feels like we’re kinda goin’ too far, and I eventually said something but he goes, “No, it’s just up here for the place with beer and cigarettes.”
Finally he turns off Canal somewhere, and on the corner we’re turning there’s an open 24-hour store with neon beer signs and everything, and I’m lookin at it n goin’, “Hey, that place looked like it had beer & cigarettes.”
And when I turn back to the new road ahead, we’re now driving underneath a freeway — way-the-hell far away from the Quarter and Congo Square — and it’s completely black for as far as you could see. There’s a tall brick wall running along the entire right-hand side of the street, no streetlights, everything under the freeway is black — and suddenly all the warnings I’d read about crime in the city came flashing back. This is it.
He says, “There’s a place up here with beer & cigarettes. I take you to it.” … after we’ve just past one. And I immediately look at the door for the handle. And of course it’s an unfamiliar car and it’s totally dark and I figure I only got one move. Like, if you grabbed for something and it wasn’t the handle . . . he’d know what you were doing.
So, I’m secretly eyeing the door trying to figure out the handle while still looking up ahead where it’s just black dark nothingness as far as you can see, all the while pretending like I don’t think anything’s wrong so he’s not suspecting anything.
The guy’s going fairly fast, and I’m thinkin jumping out would prolly result in injury. Like — you could end up worse off.
But there’s nothing ahead and it’s only getting worse by the second.
Then he unexpectedly slows down — at the first opening in the tall brick wall — and starts to drive into … a cemetery!
At 4 in the morning.
In the worst neighborhood in America.
At the slowdown on the corner I think, “This is it” — and lightning-reach for the dark shape I’ve guessed is the door handle, pull it, and thank God the door opens! I hear the guy yell, “Hey!!”
I look down and it’s a gray gravel-dusty road surface, and in this nanosecond-flash realize that the ground is stationary and is just sitting there like always — only the car is moving . . . so I’m just stepping out onto that solid ground.
I fling the door wide open, and step out of the car just like you do every time, but bending knees a bit and shooshing right into it like letting go of a bumper after taking a hoppie in winter in Winnipeg, and barely even spilling any beer from the Blue Nile cup!
I immediately run back to the corner of the totally black road under the underpass and it was like the horror days of old New York — just scary as shit. He’d taken me into the middle of the Treme which is freakin’ Harlem circa ’75 and there’s homeless encampments and no lights and nuthin but slimy black scariness in every direction.
To my left is a 10 foot brick wall and a cemetery, behind me is a badguy and miles of blackness, and to my right is a lightless ghetto. All I could see were the lights of distant Canal Street straight ahead the way we came, two long city blocks away.
I’ve just been diagnosed with a bad heart, I haven’t slept in a day, and I’m in the middle of the worst neighborhood in The Murder Capital of America.
I only got one chance — maybe I’ll die tryin’ but it’s all I got. So, this very white guy in shorts starts running through Harlem at 4 in the morning — the hour of which may have been my saving grace because it was Sunday night into Monday morning and my old New York life taught me that this unique time deadzone is usually devoid of even the badguys.
I won the 1500-meter foot race at River Heights Junior High, but that was a lotta beers n butts ago. But I got no choice and no other chance or direction home. And so I’m just running this black-of-night marathon towards the light, and apparently the whole time with my freakin beer in my hand! But fuck it – I didn’t wanna die of thirst!
And I’m running it like a football player for a touchdown, reading the field in front of me, watching for anyone coming out of the darkness or any car coming at me or anyone coming from behind.
And about a hundred feet from the lights of Canal the guy drives back lookin for me just as I was expecting him to do sooner, but when he sees me at the lights he actually yells, “Hey you owe me money!” before he screeches away. If I hadn’t gotten as close to the corner as quickly as I had I believe the phrase would have been, “Give me your money.”
I kept running.
And made it all the way home for a refresh and what-the-hell-just-happened?!?!, and back out the door for Herbie at sunrise. Nuthin was gonna stop me. I was still one of the first people there and right at the lip of the stage for my hero Herbie Hancock, plus Terence Blanchard, Ellis Marsalis, Kermit Ruffins, The Treme Brass Band, a massive African drumming collective, Harry Shearer and a buncha others including me blessing International Jazz Day at its very birthplace.
No bastard’s gonna stop me when Herbie Hancock is on the line.
Every big city in the world has a jazz festival — but when someone says “Jazz Fest,” unless otherwise qualified, they’re referring to The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival that’s been running every year since 1970, including the year after k. And btw, New Orleanians don’t utter the name of that storm, much like John Lennon fans will never mention the disease that killed him. There’s a lot of funky customs in this gumbo of a culture that the rest of us just ain’t accustomed to.
I’ve been hearing about Jazz Fest ever since I first came to America in 1980 — always longingly, envious of those who went and returned with stories of a modern Woodstock set in an ancient world to the melodies and endless flavors of jazz.
For the first time, the path is cleared for me to go, and I’m goin’!
When I first opened the NOLA Jazz Fest website with the endless list of acts appearing this year — the first name that jumped right out at me from the blurry haze was gospel singer YOLANDA ADAMS — seemingly in all-caps even though it really wasn’t. This is the musical artist I’ve most wanted to experience live in the world — and she pretty much never does live concerts in non-religious settings.
And the second name that jumped right out was ESPERANZA SPALDING — the young jazz prodigy who’s actually touring everywhere this summer, but I’ve never seen her — and the whole idea of seeing these artists in the musical city they most admire is the lagniappe, as they call an extra special gift down in Nawlins.
So, this is the beginning of the journey to see Yolanda, and Espe, and Springsteen, and Petty, and Dr. John in his hometown, and the new local voice of Trombone Shorty, and the pedal steel rock of Robert Randolph, and The Beach Boys with Brian Wilson, and all the various Neville Brothers, and Herbie Hancock at sunrise in Congo Square, and dozens of geniuses whose names and sounds I’m only getting to know.
I’ll lay down here what I can get down as it goes down down there. But it’s all Up from here.
——————-
Waking up in Canada — it’s 2 degrees.
Going to sleep in New Orleans — it’s 72 degrees,
of separation
from Neil Young’s high school,
to Louis Armstrong’s Airport.
In the jingle-jangle morning I come rollin into Nazareth
Feeling like some half-past Dead
playing on the day stages and the night clubs.
Sorry New York — but you got Giuliani-ized and capitalized and poke-in-the-eyes blind;
This is the Real City that never sleeps.
I don’t know where my home is
I’m like a Bird
And I’ll fly away — to where my soul is.
————————————————-
I get to Atlanta – go to use laptop – it’s totally virus infected – dead, useless. “Oh no, I really wanted to do some writing on this trip.”
Get to NOLA, research only Apple store in town – gonna screw my whole day and gawd knows how long to fix.
I think in the AM — maybe should just try again.
And Lo, the magic of Nawlins!! Homeboy’s working like a lucky charm!
Imagine, John.
I am now a disciple of this India House Hostel – coolest place I’ve seen since Amsterdam. It’s like somebody was on acid for a month painting this place. Huge crazy party with Aussies, Vancouverites, Oregonians. I’m home.
The address of the house I grew up in in Winnipeg — 112 Queenston.
The address of the house I’m living in in New Orleans — 112 Lopez.
It’s so obvious. 😉
About midnight I go roaming nocturnal NOLA streets for some beer. Jazz joint Chickie Wah Wah (named for old Nawlins song) is done for the night, but I go in to scout the room, meet the owner, he says “Where ya from?” Apparently I said the magic woid “New York” – where he was born and raised – and we fall into the Stories of Old New York – and so he locks the front door – and me his cat and his giant dog hang till 4 AM – him playing all these choice recordings he’s made over the years, tellin insider stories of many of the local musicians I’ll be hearing in the next 8 daze – feeding me local Abida beer the whole time on the house – and showing me the water mark 6 feet up the wall where the flood came to.
It’s hard to stand on a street in a normal neighborhood in some city like the one you’re in right now and know that it was water over your head everywhere. Everywhere. Ya just can’t really grasp it.
Off to meet Ambassador Asher at the Pennsylvanian Embassy and my first N.O. music night – the Honey Island Swamp Band at the gorgeous art gallery. But this whole city is an art gallery.
Will share more as the paint is applied.
But I don’t think it ever really dries into a static picture here.
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A Tale of Four Cities —
I wake up in this hippie hostel – coolest place in the world – for the OffBeat – those who can’t afford to travel, but who can’t afford not to. They’re all passionate and crazy and sharing and giving and trusting and beaming and hugging.
Then I go down to the Convention Center / Big Hotel area and it’s people almost scared of others, looking away rather than turning and smiling, people who are painfully aware they’re not in their hometown and are clearly uncomfortable and wary.
Then I go to this fancy affair at the Ogden Museum of Art – and oh-my-gawd the contemporary art is unbelievable!!! — I’ll post pics when I can. Better than a lotta stuff I’ve seen at MOMA & such. But besides that and the Honey Island Swamp Trio crowd there’s all these New Orleans blueblood museum members — the cufflinked manicured pretty men, and the dimpled mannequin-pretty blonds with their cherry-sized rings.
And then running through it all are the happy faced black people who all look about 20 years younger than I think they really are. Their city was wiped out and their government did nothing to help prepare for or fix the disaster and these locals who lost everything or their family members did are just raging with joy rather than bitterness. I don’t get it. If that happened to my city I would not be accountable for my actions I’d be so insanely mad.
So . . . there’s these four wildly disparate groups and significant percentages of the populous of New Orleans at any given moment.
And I’ve been dancing in all four circles and haven’t even been here 24 hours yet.
B.A. Neville
—————————————————————
Meet friendly old white-haired black man, with many a tooth that has long since been liberated, and we’re talkin ‘bout the flood and how he coped, and how so many areas were bone dry and others had water to their rooftops.
And then we get around to music and I figured he must have seen the original Meters, and he goes, “Have I seen The Meters? The Meters played ma high school dances. They were *our* band. I grew *up* with The Meters,”
and you can see him drifting off to that romantic idyllic land of childhood with Art Neville n the boys at his school gymnasium, and I’m getting goosebumps just listening to him, and I look down at my forearm and they’re all the way from my wrist to my elbow as I’m listening to his warm time-traveling reverie, so I hold my arm up and say, “Look at this,” to show him how I’m truly feeling his story.
He looks at my arm and goes, “Yeah, mm-hmm. Well, look at me.”
And he holds up his brown arm next to my beige one — and we’ve both got raging dueling goosebump arms in the hot New Orleans sun.
———————————————————-
First day at Fest — and it was “Fun Fun Fun”
I intentionally and beautifully opened my Jazz Fest with the perfect choice from the 12 stages — the New Orleans Classic Revue with all these old original cats playing all the traditional famous songs of the city. Into James Andrews — Shorty’s brother doing this insane jazz set, walking the band thru the crowds and everyone second-lining.
Into The Dixie Cups including Iko Iko and everyone waving hankies in the air.
Into African Seun Kuti (Fela’s son) doing this wild happy dancing African juju music.
into being 5th row center in the Blues Tent for Chuck Leavell and friends including Bonnie Bramlett doing a wild blues talking song with Chuck and a massive horn section collage of Bonerama and the N.O. Nightcrawlers.
Into Bon Iver — 9 piece multi-instrumentals — great for the kids – the ones with ears attracted to this place. 😉 The bookings are frickin brilliant.
into the climax of the Beach Boys’ 15-piece band greatest hits jukebox. Singing us out of the festival grounds with it’s “Fun Fun Fun” in the sun. And that’s a big — Oh Yeah!
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Robert Randolph — House of Rules, New Orleans —
front of the VIP balcony, the low rail leaning over the floor, dead center, and with a personal waitress and seats — and did I mention seats? Which are rarer in this freakin town than any kinda herbs you can imagine!
An’ so, RR wails, 20 chicks from the audience on stage shakin’ it to “Shake, Baby Shake,” general mayhem, fist pumping air, show ends, but Musical Jones still not satisfied.
And there’s still sumpthin brewin’ . .
Head out the door — good luck catchin a cab in a peak Friday French Quarter!
But . . . ! :-0 !
“The Republic, please,” for the Grateful Dead-Little Feat members’ new ensemble — and a glorious frock for the flock it is too!
Get there using last $7 on cab, but it doesn’t matter cuz — there’s a huge “SOLD OUT” across the box office window.
Way-bummer.
But head to the doors not givin’ up —
and then
confusion in the Midnight Hours —
and when heads are turned I’m in the out door !
😉
climbing into a skyscraping Franklin’s Tower, and a . . . Dixie Chicken sailing into Tennessee Jed ! and then back to Dix-ie-land!
Who saw that comin?!
Then Papa Mali comes out and they Pigpen a 15 minute Lovelight.
and it’s 3AM on the Crescent Coast.
and I’ve slept 12 hours since Monday.
————————————————-
Home after Day 2
Experienced:
Jon Cleary — a lot like Dr. John — meaning Great! Very New Orleans sound and soul.
into front n center for The Voice of The Wetlands All-Stars — the 9-piece all-star group with Dr. John, Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne, mighty master Johnny Vidicovich on drums, Johnny Sansome on Parker-like harp solos, some guy wailing on electric fiddle, and a washboard solo in the middle of a rock song!
into up front for Cee Lo Green doing his hit “F You” which was actually pretty darn good. I’m not fan, but there was a palpable positive groove goin’ on there.
into Carolina Chocolate Drops who I loved cuz they’re really instructional — explaining the music or (weird) instruments played or the song in its historical context in a very low-key way like they’re playing in your living room — not non-speaking horn players or big-gesture rock stars.
into the Midnight Disturbers — this all-star ensemble that only forms once each year for JazzFest and had Galactic’s Stanton Moore on drums, and the Treme Brass Band out front, and all sorts of famous horn players whose names I didn’t catch.
Tom Petty had started but I go to The Gospel According to Jazz cuz besides they’re great — a drop-dead be-bop sax player and George Duke but neither of them were listed on the special guests and no one was in the tent almost like it was cancelled, so I went back to join my friends at the front for Tom Petty.
And it’s sardine-packed around the perimeter but I know there’s space where I’m goin’, and do the old weave-thru-the-openings and made it all the way back to my old Wetlands buddies front and center 20 feet from the rail with a ton or room to dance (and smoke and drink and hug and make funny faces) for the whole 2nd half of Petty’s occasionally psychedelic set which included J.J. Cale’s Traveling Light.
Thing I Learned — is that at every stage it is absolutely magic for the people who are there at THE place in the world they should be. People are jumping up and down losing it to the Treme Brass Band. Cee Lo Green is hosting a dance party for all his close friends. Biker-dudes are high-fiving each other at some rare song Tom Petty plays after he talks for 5 minutes about how special New Orleans is.
And 8 hours a day there’s 12 of these stages manifesting magic at every one of them.
————————————————————————————————
I am completely puckin puddled.
I was front row center for every act I wanted to see today.
:-0 I’m freakin’.
Not expecting this – but the ecstatic transcendental moment happened at Springsteen, 2nd last song, “Rocky Ground” into … “When The Saints …”
I was trying to hold back from crying even during this “Rocky Ground” then just gave up trying when he went into Saints.
It’s about the gifts of God – however you name the thing that is way bigger than us.
And I was maybe 10 feet back from the front rail, dead center, with tons of room to dance.
I know. It’s insane. A long story – but started with meeting new old family in the same location for Tom Petty last night.
Me and this krewe were both people of our word and returned the next day. ☺
So – get totally set up with the brothers – no, one brother, and his girlfriend, and their veteran couple pals.
It’s this Stanley Tucci doppelganger and just as hardcore cool as you can get – and we’re locked in.
So, when I had to leave the front to go see my girl Yolanda in the middle of the day and into the start of Bruce, he was like, “That’s your spot,” pointing down definitively.
So, 45 minutes into Dr. John I split to hear my Savior. I audio recorded the whole thing.
oh yeah and so – Yolanda is an almost All a black audience.
I’m the only white guy in front of the stage.
And we’re all Baptist testifying and A-men-ing.
And the black folks are completely grooving on me, almost leading the stand-up and dancing.
It was … amazing. Absolute dead center, five feet from rail, but nobody’s even there and I actually sit in somebody’s seat when I want, and she ended by insisting that everyone get up and dance – and I’d been just about the one guy doin’ it from the start – it’s all these gospel people in the seats they carried in with them.
Go to Bruce when she’s over – the back of the track prolly two football fields from the stage – is just impassably packed.
But I do my routine all the way around the crowd to my secret side-front entrance, buy a six pack of beer n some waters, an’ put em in a bag of ice, and head into the Woodstock field of Bruce heads, a half-hour into his 2½ hour show.
and weave my all the way through to my family at the front — where I could almost touch him when he came out into the audience.
And it was All Gospel. I mean, parts of it, and the way I heard his spirit-reaching songs. He was singin’ about Jesus and saviors and Spirit . . .
and so … I had never been brought to tears yet in the whatever-it’s-been here roller coaster … until the 2nd last song of the final night of this first weekend.
Oh – and he’s gone all Nawlins – replacing Clarence with a 5-line horn section a la this city of horns.
And doing all these old classics of the city and the Spirit.
The one guy who made tears roll down my cheek.
I couldn’t even see for a while.
I’m just sayin’.
Now heading to Trombone Shorty in a club and a little dosey-do into Herbie Hancock & friends at Congo Square at sunrise.
There Is a God. And he or she lives in New Orleans.
—————————————————————–
in a dreamy North African opium den
dim lights, a starry ceiling, curved tent-like rooms and arches —
nuthin but musicians and vipers and vampires
standing beside a stage smaller than your kitchen
playing to a floor smaller than your dining room
with sax giant Karl Denson blowin large, groove giant Stanton Moore crackin drums, some new cat on the B3 right beside me pullin the levers and pumpin the keys, and some BB King kinda guy sittin on the side rippin oldtime guitar
as the song evolves and peaks —
and then the tide goes out and it gets lowdown but doesn’t breakdown
just Stanton and the B3 making the waves with different off-beat crashes that wane to a flat surface then splash up again and everybody gets wet and goes “ahhhhh!”
along the coastline of Frenchmen Street at 4AM.
———————————————————-
Happy International Jazz Day!
As sunrise lightens the French Quarter’s quiet streets and shuttered windows
and the bright colors of the doors come back into view
I head into adjacent Congo Square
the birthplace of this thing we call Jazz.
I’m in there way early — maybe 20 people in the square as Herbie works it out with the young drummer, just playing grooves and pushing each other around the sound.
MAN can that guy play the piano!
Then standing right on the line of African drummers all dressed in white summoning up the spirits and sounds of the Earth below into the sky above.
And Harry Shearer’s hosting, and some woman tells a brief history of the Square and how it all started on this sacred ground centuries ago.
And there’s more of these old-school New Orleans bluebloods serving pink champaign and dressed to the 9s at 6 in the morning.
Then Herbie takes us dancing with the “Watermelon Man,” and in flows his old band from back in the day, and Terence Blanchard on trumpet, and the master clarinetist Dr. Michael White, as they take us all out for “A Night In Tunisia,”
and then Kermit Ruffins took us for a walk on “The Sunny Side of The Street” before The Treme Brass Band instructed us most clearly to “Do Whatcha Wanna” — which I believe is the official anthem of New Orleans.
Or at least it should be.
———————————————————–
How about Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody”
for 15 minutes — by an 11-piece funk rock band?!
including a guy playing a long harmonica solo with one hand and the Hammond B3 with the other, blending the two sounds in his own most singular duet.
And about 10 minutes in, a guy comes out and does a spontainteous rap around the theme and suma Bob’s lyrics.
at Tipitina’s last night — the Instruments a Comin’ benefit show — where the night started with nearly an hour of two marching bands outdoors with about 100 young players each all on instruments bought by the Tips Foundation.
Before Honey Island Swamp Band ripping Dylan, it was Galactic (with Corey Glover from Living Color) and Wolfman Washington (with blind piano master Henry Butler sitting in) and then this all-star one-off with Ivan and Ian Neville, Russell Batiste on drums, and the legendary George Porter on bass — and for all of it I was front row leaning on the stage.
And out where the marching bands were, there was this whole scene with the audience and the evening’s musicians mingling on the sidewalk talkin music n love. And the amazing thing is — I’ve only been here about 5 daze and had a TON of different friends out there to talk to!
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You know that seat on the edge of a horseshoe balcony overlookng everything that’s just the perfect distance from the stage? That was my seat last night. 😉
The day I got here, I pre-scouted Generations Hall where the Obama benefit was to be held, and met Herman the house manager who gave me a tour thinking I was with the Democrats advance team. sho nuff.
The big day rolls around and I head over way-early also cuz there’s some problem with all the tickets and they have to be refunded and then resold as a donation to the Obama campaign.
But I get there and of course foreigners can’t contribute to political campaigns — so since we had bought tickets in good faith in advance, they just let all non-Americans in for free! Unreal.
So, I’m just about the first person in this massive 3,000 capacity former warehouse — now 3 large upscale performance spaces connected together with wrought-iron balconies and multiple weird hang out areas.
From the pre-scout, I knew the floor in the big room would be packed and standing only, and around the horseshoe balcony there’s a line of chairs overlooking the floor and at the stage.
I go up and literally have the pick of any seat in the house and chose the very best one with a pillar to my back and just the right distance from the PA & stage. And it comes with a little table!
Of course the balcony turns out to be the VIP / $500 a ticket place — now with guards at the bottom of the stairs, but I’m already up with an open buffet featuring all these different Cajun delights by some famous chef, and my own bartender! One of the performers, Clyde Bryant joins me (“Oh, hi. I’m Bryan without the ‘t’.”) and he shares the evening’s schedule. 😉 ah-ha!
Before the ticket screw-up they’d sold over 2,500 tickets. But with the mess-up, lots of people never came and I asked the doorman with the clicker at the end of the night and he said only 886 people came in! So it was very space-friendly.
Obviously the musical highlight was the reuniting of all the original Meters except for the most elder Art who’s not in great shape and Dr. John took over the keys and they played the song of every moment of my trip — “Right Place at The Right Time” ☺
Everybody who played had other people come out and join them creating innumerable one-time-only combos all night — Trombone Shorty and Big Sam blowin in and out, Cyril Neville banging everything all over the place, Deacon Jones rippin guitar, Rockin Dopsey doin’ the splits, Leory Jones wailin’ thru n thru . . .
Allen Toussaint doin’ that song about Never Leaving New Orleans.
The Caesar Brothers doin’ a funk Nawlins “Love The One You’re With.”
Kermit droppin’ a huge “Iko” bomb.
and Marcia Ball playing with EIGHT horn players, then joined by Marie Muldour who is actually much blacker than she appears and was getting down and bluesy dirty.
and once again a lot of the musicians were hanging in the courtyard and I got to thank a hero of mine Ziggy Modeliste for changing drumming and being the de facto bandleader of the massive crazy reunion, and suma the horn players for evoking The Spirit and making me dance — which is what this town was born to do.
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By Far the two most common shirts seen around New Orleans JazzFest —
#1 Grateful Dead; #2 The Beatles !! — The best live + the best studio bands!
The Most Common Instruments played besides the foundations —
#1 trumpet; #2 Hammond B3 ! played on every freakin’ stage! Unquestionably my favorite specific instrument ever constructed – and I got to stand over new master Will Blades’ shoulder as he wailed on it, valves, pedals n all, at the Blue Nile. 😉
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Back on terra Canada – ou and my ears are still ringin’.
My body feels like I just played two football games a day for the last week.
I was so jazzed on the jazz I never realized I was a punching bag running a marathon – except people were standing along the route passing out beer instead of water.
JazzFest is like Facebook where you make friends with just the click of a smile.
And I got hundreds of ‘em.
And I know right where they’ll all be next year – cuz no one who ever goes to Jazz Fest doesn’t go back.
😉
It’s Friday, May 15th, 1998, our final port of call, Valletta, Malta, the ancient capital, site of The Great Siege, home of the thousand-year-old Knights of St. John, the nomadic Christian healers who were granted refuge on the island by the Emperor of Spain in 1530 for the rent of two Maltese Falcons a year, and where hundreds of these noble Knights’ brass & marble tombs checkerboard the cathedral floor where Mom fell and broke her shoulder in two places and cracked her kneecap across the middle.
Okay, so what happened was . . .
We’d gotten off the ship late, about 1:30 in the afternoon, having slept through our morning shore excursion, and we were just taking it easy on our final island day before disembarkation in Rome. We took a cab from the ship for $11 American dollars, the Unofficial European Currency, and rode past the old walls with cannonball and mortar wounds spanning 5 centuries of wars, past the wide moat now a pasture and garden, to the head of Republic Street, the spine of the Valletta hump.
We walked along the sporadic sidewalk having a celebratory time, reflecting on the trip in a comfortable flowing last day groove. It was so obvious we were having a good time together we were even talking about how good a time we were having together talking.
The old predominantly-pedestrian streets were uneven and Mom kept stumbling a little, having to watch either the ground or the stores, but sadly never both. We stopped by a friendly bank and looked in a phone book for my old superintendent who returned to Malta and I found about 30 Paul Grima’s in town. The tour continued.
We walked into the beautiful side rooms that stretch off the nave and each is a complete work of art unto itself with sculpted ceilings, statues, plaques and design. We reached the last one, the furthest point toward the altar we could, and climbed up the final two stairs to listen to the Cathedral’s heart, and I smile and whisper, “We should take a picture.”
Mom says, “Okay. Let me take one of you,” as she usually does. I pulled our disposable and by now only camera out of my black sidebag and hand it to her. She looks at it, holds it up like generally framing a shot, and I go, “Maybe take it from back there,” pointing to the wider perspective. Mom says, “Okay,” and starts to walk there forgetting we’ve gone up the two shallow church-style steps and suddenly tumbles forward, her white sun-protecting suit timbering straight down like a tree, her left knee cracking the cold marble first, then she bounces toward the other side, her right shoulder pounding hard into the slab, her hands splay, the camera slides and her head crashes into the stiff wide brim of her Tilley hat, sunglasses go flying and she’s crying a winded “Ouuuuuu.”
As soon as she comes to a stop, she rolls from her right side to her front, then over on her left. I’m still on the top step watching in split-second shock, running quickly through, “This isn’t happening,” “She’ll be okay,” “Am I seeing this?” “Noooo.”
“Oh Brian, I think I broke my shoulder,” she says, and I run down beside her.
“You didn’t break your shoulder. I didn’t hear anything. You kind of rolled into it.” But she wasn’t looking so good holding her right arm and all. “I’ll go get an ambulance. You stay still. I’ll be right back,” and I ran off, jogging through the peaceful, somber church, trying not to alarm either praying parishioners or swiveling sightseers. I ran to a guy at the desk of the pay-for-a-Caravaggio museum wing. I tell him mom’s just fallen and we need an ambulance and this sort of throws him for a good Malta Minute but he says he’ll call. When I run back to Mom it seems a whole bunch more people have suddenly entered the church, probably on a bus tour from our cruise I figure as I cut across the floor as invisible as a streaker, then right in front of me a woman with a panicked look comes running out of the room where Mom is. I tell her its okay, I’m her son, an ambulance is coming, and keep running past her.
A few people are now gathered: a blond Dutch girl steps forward saying she’s an officer from the Rotterdam and helps in the comforting. We roll her on her back onto the oh-so-solid marble floor. A middle-aged man in a blue work shirt rushes in with the guy I told to call the ambulance and he cocks his head sideways and looks at Mom slowly. “Is an ambulance coming?” I ask.
“Yes, yes. I am in charge of the church,” the super-looking man says.
“Well?” I ask, and they both rush out to either call or to check on it.
We keep Mom stable, gathering in her stuff. People come in, see this woman on the floor and some just go right on with their touring, examining the walls and statues quite leisurely, then stealing glances at their fellow traveler wounded on another tour of duty, felled in the crevasses while following in the paths of the ancient masters, reaching for the holy chalice, the source, the peace, the memory, the answer to take home and live by – or to die as we try by.
Fortunately we were up near the heart hearth in the furthest little side room of the church or we’d be obliged to set up a ticket booth to control the crowds. It became the St. John’s pilgrimage of the day to see Mom. Then in the distance we finally heard the cavalry’s bugle (or “ambulance siren”) cutting across clip-cloppitty Malta, breaking like a beacon of daybreak over our nightingale’s knightbed.
An orange jumpsuited ambulance guy comes in and is very nice but says he can only take her to the Malta Hospital, in fact also letting slip in his broken English that that’s the only way he can get paid. All along Mom’s been saying her shoulder’s broken and her knee really hurts — but she wants to go back to the ship and no where else, and is determinedly sticking to this despite her pain, horizontal countenance, and the insistence of the uniformed ambulance corps.
So finally the little orange Maltian handwrites a note that I sign saying we refuse to go to the hospital, and then he and the super and everybody in the room gets swept up in the spirit of this lady in white on the middle of the marble floor and we all begin working to get her back to the ship.
The Maltian wheels in his stretcher past the newly assembled two-bus throng, and after great anticipation it’s Mom and I who emerge from around the granite column curtain, get wheeled through the crowd, then out into the white-light square where the ambulance’s warning lights have been spinning on this sunny and peaceful May afternoon.
They wheel Mom to the curbside cab I caught, and she hops into the left front seat beside the driver in this English-style car and country. The extra-nice driver reminded me of the poet Andy Clausen as he joyfully drove us out of the square and down the hill to the Rotterdam. After we lowered a grimacing Mom into a slippery wheelchair she leaned over and asked me in a whisper if I gave the driver a nice tip.
Then this prick of a white-suited Security asshole from the ship said he wouldn’t help lift her up the few stairs because he was afraid of being sued or something, so, ignoring him, I quickly grabbed the cab driver, a T-shirt vender, one of the Indonesian crew, and myself and we lifted the chair up the few stairs to the gangway, and we were finally back on Mom’s ship.
The Indonesian crewmate pushed her to the Infirmary where Linda the nurse I’d talked to as we pulled into Gibraltar and after Barcelona was on duty. After Mom found out we had spoken, she always wanted to get a tour of the ship’s Infirmary – only not this way.
It turned out the ship’s doctor was from Brockville, Ontario, the insurance company was from Waterloo, and the patient was from Oakville! After the X-rayed perspective, the doctor came in with the old “I have good news and bad news.”
“Tell me the bad news first,” Mom said, without the slightest hesitation.
“Your right humerus has two fractures up near the shoulder, and your left patella (kneecap) has a one-sixteenth inch crack through the middle,” he says, with a pause. “The good news is both can be repaired.” But Mom never even heard good news part.
They stabilized her onboard and she traveled the rest of the way in a bed of pillows in our cabin. As soon as we get to port, they said, they’re sending an ambulance along with a local port guide expert translator to take us to an English speaking hospital in Rome. All is well if we can just “hold ‘er steady,” as we mariners say.
That night was the ship’s formal Farewell Dinner in the dining room, so we had it delivered, and the next day was a full day at sea before disembarking in Rome on Sunday morning. (Cruiselines often schedule the final day of long cruises as an “at sea” day so everyone can pack their formalwear, pull their voyage-ravaged selves together, and get rid of the last of their money onboard before the early morning disembarkation.)
I made my final rounds around the ship during Mom’s painkiller downtime, and as part of my closing night ceremonies I laid me down on the off-limits front bow beneath the scattershot stars until after several soaring flights of peace they eventually sent someone with a flashlight to fetch me – and Lo it was the same Dutch officer from the fallindown cathedral! So we had a warm final twinkle like the stars, and my final evening of “The Mediterranean Mellow” cruising peace sailed off into the distance.
It was all to end in more ways than one as soon as we rolled down the gangway and were placed in the back of the first ambulance. Linda the nurse stuck her head in the open side door like we were trapped on a helicopter landing pad at a M*A*S*H unit. With the chaos of disembarkation raging all around us, she squeezed my arm goodbye and wished us luck and I got choked up trying to say “Thank you” and she knew how close to the edge I was all along.
There was some momentary delay in us pulling away and just before the side door slid closed for good I hopped out and asked the closest red blazer holding a clipboard, “If I need any help with this while I’m here, where should I call?” sort of surprised he hadn’t offered, and damn glad I wrote the number down correctly.
Things were mostly tolerable until the moment the ambulance doors closed and we pulled away from the ship. Then it turned out there were no actual shock absorbers on the ambulance, so it was like riding on steel wheels over cobblestones in a Middle Aged carriage. I kept reassuring Mom a smooth street was ahead but one never came.
I had been looking forward to seeing Italians again ever since my great hit in Florence, and sure enough, the attendant was a stunning 19-year-old Cindy Crawford, and the driver was jet black-haired Alec Baldwin. Except they spoke maybe 7 words of English between them, but then who really cares? Cindy’s chewing gum about a foot from my face and starring at me like I’m a pet in a cage. She leans over and says something to Alec with bad-day-at-the-office enthusiasm, and he echoes in downtrodden kind.
Something seemed askew but everything was new so I didn’t have a clue.
We get to the hospital, and within seconds realize no one in the emergency room can speak a word of English despite their earnest efforts to learn English by immediately lighting cigarettes and starring into our medical report from different angles. In less than a minute I’d whispered to Mom, “Don’t worry, we won’t be staying here,” and went off to find a telephone.
I put 500 lire in the lobby box, but of course the number the redcoat gave me was out of order. Okay …. Glad I got it down right. I head into the Admissi Officio or whatever where the only girl in the entire place with as much as fragmented English is chain smoking behind bulletproof glass. Between drags we reach some port supervisor who assures me that the Holland America ship we just got off is not in this port. “You know, that ten-story ocean liner with 2,000 people that just disembarked?”
“Aaaaaa, let’s see … hmmm … nope. Not here.”
So finally I spelled it real slow, he found it, and we got connected to a Holland America Port Agent who made it perfectly clear they weren’t supposed to deal with passengers and left us hanging for hours under the exposed ceiling wires and broken lights dangling above us in this hellspital. While we were waiting for nothing to happen, we watched stray vulture-dogs prowl around the entrance, and I went to the only bathroom, which had no soap, paper towels, or toilet seat.
We were left waiting at first in what Mom finally realized was the Operating Room. There was a light overhead and the basic operating equipment of a Third World country in the 1940’s – cotton curtains, a ceiling fan with dust caked on the side that spins, paper towels for “scrubbing”, and cigarette butts on the floor.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, while Mom was up being X-rayed, someone in the Emergency Room unzipped her purse and stole her wallet with all our Canadian money and God knows what else.
For the last two hours we were there, they left her on this stainless-steel gurney, which after a while we managed to turn into a seat by propping two of the big suitcases behind her so she had something to sit against.
About three hours later an ambulance arrived, immediately demanding $1,200 U.S. up front to take Mom to the Rome-American Hospital. When we finally fight it all out and we’re ready to get out of hell, the “doctor” in the ambulance tells us its illegal to take luggage in an ambulance (a lie) and demands we either take it out or he’s driving away (with the $1,200). Another fight ensues – there’s Mom on the stretcher in the back, three Italian assholes out front, with some stressed-out department store mannequin wannabe “port agent” strutting like a pigeon on a cellphone who said in her broken English as soon as she arrived, “We don’t care about you,” and later when I mentioned that no one in the thousand dollar ambulance could speak English while transporting an English patient to an English hospital, she said, “What do you expect? You’re in Italy. Learn Italian or go home.”
So, it was super so far. We called a cab in the form of a van and had to pay it $130 (U.S.) up front to take our luggage and me the 45 minutes to Rome.
Mom was stabilized on the painkillers the ship had given us. There was now some teenage boy who hopped in the ambulance as translator and I get in the cab with the luggage and off we go from Hell to Rome, which may not be that far a trip, depending on your view of Rome. 10 minutes in, the cellphone in the van-cab goes off and it turns out the ambulance doesn’t know where the Rome-American Hospital is….
So the ambulidiot tells the luggage van to drive in front of him, then puts on his siren full blast expecting the van driver to part Italian traffic until we’re kamikaze-pinballing along rural Roman roadways past sheep and abandoned 19th century homes and I begin wondering how we would ever have gotten there if we didn’t have our illegal luggage.
About 3 PM we finally arrive at the Rome-American Hospital and the Admissions woman smiles and asks in nearly perfect English if we’d like a room with a couch-bed so the patient and I could stay together! Mmmmmmmm-
Mom completed her hat trick of X-rays, but this time finds herself in a state-of-the-art photo facility. I find her lying on a stretcher with a big smile on between two friendly Italian male nurses, Luigi and Marco. The first of several excellent orthopedic doctors comes by, confirms the two chips off the old humerus and the sidesplitting kneecap, and for the first time Mom’s talking about having the operation here instead of getting home as fast as we can.
Later that night the Chief Orthopedic Surgeon walks in and Mom immediately starts choking on her dinner. “I didn’t think I was that ugly,” he smiles, sticking out his hand. “I’m Dr. Falez.” ( “Our Savior,” in Canadian.) He’s just finished two years at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix and Mom has an immediate good hit off him. He’s a nice friendly bilingual bicultural intelligent speedy and happening kind of guy. We like him.
Then in comes the big-smiling globetrotting Danish sleep doctor (or “anesthesiologist”) which is exactly what Mom used to do at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They discussed methods, drugs, pioneers, and he explained how nowadays there isn’t the long and drowsy recovery period since they give patients shots to wake them up again immediately afterward.
Mom has confidence, I drink the wine they bring us with dinner, and surgery is set for 7 PM tomorrow – our first full day on dry land in weeks.
On “Operation Monday,” Mom couldn’t eat because she was going under a general anesthetic due to the dual operations – both hemispheres, both halves. A) she had 3 broken bones floating around inside; B) she’d been on painkillers non-stop for 4 days; and C) now they were now starving her all day! It turned out she got to have a “trip” in Rome after all. “Look! There’s a spider coming down on a web,” she said pointing, and I’m squinting at thin air.
“Look, there’s a pair of them sliding on ice. I’ve been watching them for a while.”
“Oh, I’m not even going to point these ones out. These are my private ones,” she says smiling into the corner.
It was so cute. She was seeing all sorts of movies on this flight, and seemed to be enjoying a window seat.
Around 6:15 the white team came in and wheeled her off. I kissed her goodbye, wished her luck, and she said, “I’ll see you when you get back.” 🙂
While she was gone I repacked our luggage until 9:30 when I heard a paradiddle of many men’s shoes in the tiled hall and the doctor and his team came bursting in the big hospital door with beaming smiles and hands outstretched saying the operation went well and that I can go down to Intensive Care and see her. They explained the procedures – two screws here, a wire wrap there – and they were out the door again in a minute.
I went down to see her but poor old Mom was scared ‘cause she was really trippin’ now. “I feel like I’ve eaten a whole bunch of ice cream, and I just couldn’t eat anymore,” she said. “Where am I?”
We hung for a while in The Zone, I held her hand, we smiled and she felt better. After a while I pointed out how, “All the other patients were sleeping quietly and maybe you could be a good girl and do that too.”
“Noooo. No, Brian. I’m so full.”
She slept the night, and I went back to the hotel room, I mean hospital room, feet up on our private balcony listening to Aretha strokin’ the spirit while sipping colorful tequila sunrises over banquets of spring flowers, scripting melodious flights of Italian impressions in the lines of a leaf-green notebook.
When morning had broken the recovery began. With the patient stabilized, I bolted in and did the old Rome-In-A-Day routine, spending two hours in the Sistine Chapel, catching the most amazing building in town – St. Peter’s Basilica – went roamin’ the Roman Forum, combing the Coliseum, contemplating on some columns crumbling in a park, drinking Heineken overlooking plazas of tourists and dregs dressed in Roman soldier’s garb posing for pictures. At the Spanish Steps, the locals cheered an amazing amazon model in a spandex leopard-skin bra and ultra mini-skirt, shoulder tattoo and spiked heels stalking up and down the Steps. Then I meditated in a park on a hill overlooking the city, and finished up at the old Washington Square Park-like Trevi Fountain of youth.
The next day Mom was okay to go so we flew up the Italian coast, over the Alps, and back to Toronto in four palatial Business Class seats.
Everything seems stable for the moment, and Mom seems to be in great spirits.
