Blinded By The Light

On the Origins of Artistic Sensibility

Rembrandt Van Rijn, Self Portrait With Saskia, 1635

I.

The song is going to be Chuck Berry’s “Nadine.”

My old friend, Steve, is head of a well-known local band, The Rockin’ Hollywoods. He will call on me to come up on the stage in a moment to sing as a guest – I’m not too sure how “special.” I’m not a member of his band, but we do this every year as a paean to a time when we did play together, gleefully, as teenagers. We’re both a whole lot older now. While he’s still going strong as a rock n’ roller, I’ve given up on this up decades ago. But not really. I’m willing to get up there. Steve and I have a strong bond, based on a lot of shared memories, most of them happy.

This thing we are about to do now is taking place in a Midwest supper club, an old school kind of place that my parents would have gone to in the 40’s and 50’s. Dinner is usually prime rib served first with what is called a “relish tray.” I am particularly fond of the fresh radishes. There is a rumor that Tony Bennett once sang here in the lounge a long time ago. That is easy to imagine. An Italian owns the place. Adjacent to the oversized dining room is a lounge with a horseshoe bar, a small dance floor and a stage surrounded by a tiered amphitheater of curving, faux red-leather booths. I recall candles glowing on the tables in glass containers coated in that plastic red mesh. You eat dinner first, then walk over to the lounge to drink, dance, and watch the band.

For 50 years, the ‘Hollywoods’ have played old time rock and roll in places like this all over the region. People of my generation love to dance to these three-chord songs from the 50’s/60’s with a heavy back beat and lyrics devoid of irony. This annual supper club gig is a big deal locally, marking the start of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival. It’s Minnesota. It’s unconscionably cold outside. Tonight, the place is packed and swathed in a warm glow. I notice a lot of shots are being poured by the manic bartenders jumping back and forth serving a crowd of patrons leaning on the bar.  Mostly men there – the women are clustered up in the booths. The men seem to be exhibiting a preference for tequila with a Corona chaser. Better to pretend you are in Mazatlán in January than in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The ‘Hollywoods can play anything. They are what musicians admiringly call a tight band. Steve told me once that K.D. Lang once wandered into a wedding reception to listen to them before the hotel management unwittingly threw the loitering Lang out of the ballroom thinking she was a wedding crasher. She was listening for quite a while, Steve said, carefully so. When Steve told me about K.D. Lang, I thought the knucklehead should have saved the damsel while she was being rudely escorted out and called her to the stage to sing something from Patsy Kline, or, better yet, Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Imagine the peerless Grammy winner singing at your wedding or backing her up in the band. Steve could’ve put a surcharge on his bill to the bride’s parents. Tell ‘em she’s an old friend and she owed you.  But it is not in Steve’s nature to play games, in his life, nor in his music. But damn…

Steve’s band has in fact covered some big acts. He has a steel-trap memory (useful when you are trying to remember lyrics when you’re 70). He can quickly name these encounters; the dates, the time, the venue, what they played, and if the main act was a nice person or a jerk. Steve became a good friend of Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys before Carl died of cancer. Carl Wilson, he maintains, was simply the best human being ever. Johnny Rivers, on the other hand, is, well, in the words of “Minnesota Nice,” something a little different. Steve’s band was in an otherwise abysmal 1996 movie with Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz called “Feeling Minnesota.” My old friend lives through these alternating cycles of exhilarating brushes with famous artists and playing at the few dance ballrooms still standing in the Midwest and local VFW halls. He doesn’t seem to care one way or the other where he plays, just as long as he’s playing some place and people are dancing. The ‘Hollywoods are in the Minnesota Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That’s something. Prince is in there, too, ya know.

Steve’s girlfriend told me she expects him never to give up performing and that he will likely die on a stage somewhere. I envy Steve, but not too much. I occasionally wonder what I’ve missed having walked away from this kind of music and mischief 50 years ago, and then what I’ve gained from doing so. For Steve, though, he never looked back or sideways. Leading a band like this is all he could imagine himself doing. That kind of clarity in life is perhaps what I most envy. I never really had that. I was a prisoner of intrusive ruminations that pulled me hither and yon.

Music runs deep in Steve’s DNA. His mom, who I confess was an attraction for me at the tail end of puberty, sang in the Big Bands and maybe even knew Peggy Lee, a North Dakota native. Peggy Lee sang in the circuits around here back in the day. Steve displays a bit of his mother’s good looks and plenty of her natural grace on the stage. I remember his mom most vividly getting out of the family station wagon in a bathing suit on a hot afternoon, and I’m thinking about that right now as the Rockin’ Hollywoods finish up a beloved Sam Cooke standard and I’m being called to the stage.

While he rarely plays drums these days, Steve began as a drummer. As a kid, he worked in what we used to call a neighborhood “dairy store” where one task involved cleaning and preserving the tall cylindrical cardboard drums that wholesale ice cream came in. He started pounding on those things with his hands and then with some drum sticks when he was 14. His mom noticed. So did his dad. Eventually Steve wanted Ludwig drums just like Ringo Starr’s. His dad thought the whole thing was a highway to hell. His mom held opposite views. The drum dispute between his parents was eventually resolved according to custom through intervention by the local parish priest, and in Steve’s favor.

Steve’s parents eventually divorced, which was rarely done in the Catholic Church at that time. I was raised by a single working mother so a father being gone was for me the natural state of things, and I always thought Steve’s dad, a decent man basically who I once had as a basketball coach, was nonetheless a bit dyspeptic, restless, unhappy, a polar opposite of his glamorous, graceful and outgoing mom. To me, Steve didn’t seem at all divorce-wounded by what must have been at the time a terrible mess in his home. I never asked him about it; that wasn’t done either. He just seemed really happy to be sitting behind those sparkling drums of his, diligently practicing “Wipeout” and a drummers’ move called a “rimshot” which eventually became his moniker.

Rimshot bought his drum kit at a place called “Dalgren’s” in downtown Minneapolis. Drummers went there. Guitarists always went to “B-Sharp Music” on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. I wanted to play guitar. B-Sharp (love that name) was owned by a colorful figure by the name of Jim Lopes, a Mexican complete with Zapata’s mustache, turquoise rings on a lot of fingers, tight pants, heeled boots, custom leather jackets (sometimes a sharkskin suit), and magnificently quaffed and oiled black hair. We never knew there were any Mexicans this far up north in the 60’s, being, as we were, the products of south Minneapolis and its suburbs of Norwegians, Swedes, Irish, Italians, Germans and Poles. Everybody in our world was white and uncool.

If Steve’s dad had come along on the fateful day of the drum purchase, he would have tolerated Dalgren’s but if it had been B-Sharp, it would have confirmed in his feverish Italian mind that the highway to hell starts right here with Jim Lopes. I’m convinced they would have come to blows. At B-Sharp, you didn’t simply buy instruments from Jim: he always staged a complex dance of negotiation and required doses of flattery. Jim never posted prices on anything in his store. Steve’s mom, who probably knew Gene Krupa and all kinds of musicians caught up in all kinds of unusual situations, might have just shrugged and resigned herself to the tawdry business of bargaining her way with a shrewd Mexican toward a set of drums for her beloved son. At any rate, this was all avoided. Steve got his kit elsewhere. I went to B-Sharp, with my mom to face this scene.

Jim Lopes was strategic, and you couldn’t help but like and admire someone like him who became so successful in the penultimate Land of the Gringo. He supplied all the local bands, honoring them with their band posters prominently displayed on a collaged wall in his store. He gifted guitars to The Beatles when they came to play in Minneapolis in 1964, and I’m surprised the irrepressible man didn’t corral John Lennon into autographing equipment at his store.  Jim ran with all the local DJs. I have no doubt that he was on speaking terms with Dick Clark and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he knew Colonel Parker or, say, Wolfman Jack. A few local musicians, some of whom played in bands Jim outfitted, eventually become producers and performers behind Prince. For all I know, Jim may have sold to Prince his first guitar. If he didn’t, you could count on Jim to be adept at leaving that impression without exactly saying one way or the other.

Jim practiced in his business what psychologists call a “variable reinforcement schedule” that kept you always coming back for more.  Psychologists have demonstrated in the lab that if you want a pigeon to keep coming back to peck at a target, the most sustainable way is to arrange its feed on a schedule that constantly varies. Sometimes the food is there; sometimes not. There seems to be no discernable pattern of reward; you never know from instant to instant if the grain will roll down the little chute next to the target. So, the dumb birds keep pecking. One day Jim would give you a tremendous deal on a Fender amp and the next he wouldn’t budge or sometimes even talk to you. And there was no discovefable pattern to this, and it applied to every product in his store from gigantic amplifiers to guitar picks and sets of strings. But we kept coming back. Jim was a formidable man. He sold me a guitar when I was 15. Somehow, I had it in my head that getting a guitar from B-Sharp Music implied a level of authenticity for what you were doing as opposed to getting one from a Schmitt Music chain store in a bland suburban mall. For me, buying a guitar at B-Sharp was a Christening into The Tribe of Rock and Roll.

My mom, Gertrude, understood this somehow. A lot of the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what Gertrude thought or understood of the world, but she had good instincts about a lot of things and really wanted me to get my bearings in life. She was raising me alone and was hyper-alert to any slight signal of an emerging enthusiasm coming from her sullen adolescent son. She said she would match any money I had saved from caddying and agreed to drive me clear across town to Jim’s shop located in a neighborhood neither one of us had never set foot in. IOt’sz in Northest Minneapolis, nor far from the art studio I now occupy.

I tentatively waved my $200 in front of the great man for a tricked-out cherry-red Gibson, an ES 335 with a Brazilian rosewood neck, Humbuckler pickups and a Bigsby bridge and wiggle stick. He laughed and said $250. Gertrude, standing right by me, was not amused, and an awkward silence followed.

My mother could be tough. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota.  Her father lost everything in the Great Depression (I think it was a hardware store) and she left on her own for Fargo  - the Big City - where she got work as a secretary. This was unheard of at the time. She subsequently made her way alone again to Minneapolis in the 40’s, in those days a very radical move for a single young woman. She was a tenacious survivor but also very insecure. While rather taciturn in demeanor, she could also be episodically quaking.  While stubborn and independent to an extreme, she also was, as I would later discover, cloyingly dependent, needy and worst of all, passive/aggressive. No matter: we were now in a War Zone and her hackles were up and Jim looked intransigent.

I didn’t have any agency here; I didn’t have 50 extra dollars, nor did Gertrude. When Gertrude thought something was bullshit, she would set her jaw a certain way and utter her favorite phrase, almost coming through her nose like she was cleaning out her sinuses: “Oh Fooey.” She probably had never in her life met someone like Jim. I wasn’t sure how all this was going to go down, so I took a step back. Gertrude had set her jaw all right, but thankfully she kept a fooey to herself.

Jim walked away and started talking to another customer. Gertrude then went over to Jim and said something I couldn’t hear. Jim came back and took my $200, but he looked at the two of us and said a case for the guitar would be extra. A lot extra. This hit me as a gratuitous insult, and I started wishing I was at Schmitt Music. More awkward silence. More jaw-setting. Jim walks away. We stay put.

Gertrude is looking up at the high wall of guitars on display, a glistening galaxy of gumdrop colored instruments ascending high to the ceiling. I’m examining the wall collage of bands and wondering if they, too, had to go through this ordeal. We wait. Jim suddenly comes back, reaches behind the counter and puts the case up on its glass top, opens the case by loudly and theatrically flipping the steel latches, and plunks in the Gibson down into the customized yellow velvet liner of the case. Done deal. He smiles. I guess we were at the right moment then in Jim’s cycle of variable reinforcement. I think Jim and I shook hands, but not Gertrude. We were quiet on the way home. The only thing I remember her saying was the obvious: “please take care of it.”

Steve now had his drums, and I had my cherished Gibson. I had been Christened. Steve and I would start a band.

The annual supper club “Nadine” performance is a celebration of the band Steve and I founded in 1965 called The Defenders. Steve picked the band’s name from a popular TV show. I hadn’t given the name a thought, although I always wished I could have come up with “Dire Straits” or a local rival’s group’s name: “The Last Rites.” Love that. To this day when I’m driving around, I will often try to invent great names for bands. Just today, for example, it was “Billy and the Bad Mechanics.”

Steve recruited for the The Defenders. When we started, we were just a few boys from a Christian Brothers high school sitting around in a basement fooling around on various instruments bought or borrowed. In the beginning, we thought making music might be like creating expressionist art: throw the colors around and something wonderful will eventually emerge and we’ll be invited to the Ed Sullivan Show. No.

One Saturday morning in some kid’s basement, showing considerable irritation, Rimshot, sitting behind his drums with his arms tightly folded, excoriated us for showing no discipline and therefore demanded that we actually begin a song in unison, on his mark, and, well, stay within our respective lanes to support the overall tune and all end at the same time. 50 years later, I laughed out loud when I saw something very similar happen in a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers practice session that was captured in a documentary. Petty’s disgusted drummer spits out, in effect, something like: Straighten up, goddamnit – we’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!  In a similar vein, Steve wanted us to execute an Old Master painting - tight and disciplined - a Vermeer interior.  In short, he was demanding that we become professional musicians rather than a bunch of lazy teenagers. I think we passably got through “Johnny B Goode.”

Our first real engagement was for a small party at the home of a classmate who would eventually run (unsuccessfully) for governor of Minnesota. But we had a problem. While we had amps, guitars, drums, and a 10-item song list, we didn’t have microphones. Steve, like Odysseus, is man who is never at a loss. The Catholic Church, the whelping crate in which we were raised, was a wealthy institution that placed a high priority on making sure its message got out clearly. Therefore, most of the churches had state-of-the-art sound systems. As a former altar boy at Annunciation parish in South Minneapolis, Steve knew the church’s microphones - the exact brand and model number. He knew his way in and out of the place. The plan was to “borrow” the microphones Saturday evening after confessions and Mass, apply them to our noble cause, and return them that same evening ahead of Sunday services. No one would know. 

At the party, halfway through “Louie, Louie,” we got interrupted by our friend and patron, the nascent gubernatorial candidate, who informed us that Father is at the front door and wishes to speak to us. We go up and stand around shuffling our feet while the priest patiently waits for our confession to pour out to him on the front porch. Steve suddenly takes the full rap. To my surprise, Father lets us know we can go ahead and finish out the party with his microphones. Then we are to promptly return the microphones. Then he’ll see us about Penance.

I’ve always wondered if this was the same priest who intervened on behalf of Steve’s drums. I’ve got a lot of beefs with Catholicism and the Catholic Church, but the priest’s act will always be for me one of great magnanimity. The Christian Brothers who ran our high school would have simply kicked the shit out of us right then and there. Whatever we got paid that night, I like to think we put in a healthy cut in the basket at Sunday Mass, but I don’t remember (we probably didn’t). Today, anytime I am in a church (which isn’t very often), even on vacations wondering through gothic cathedrals in Europe, I always notice right away the microphones. I can be at any wedding or funeral and I’m not paying attention; I’m checking out the microphones and wondering how I would get them out of there (and back, of course).

In 1965, it was common for a group of 15-year old boys to start up a band, particularly after seeing The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. But what grabbed me at the time, and by far the coolest thing I had ever seen, was Roy Orbison singing “Pretty Woman” on a show called “Shindig,” Roy in sunglasses with a receding phalanx of guitar players behind him each illuminated by what you took to be street lamps cutting through the dark, kind of like the set Jimmy Durante used to use when he was signing off at the end of his TV show. In art they call this “chiaroscuro,” startling light and deep shadows, the kind you see in the paintings of Caravaggio. It floored me.

Another stop on the Road to Damascus was the Knights of Columbus Marion Ballroom near my home in the suburbs. They had teen dances on Fridays. The place had an expansive wooden dance floor with a long bar on one end where you could order a plastic pitcher of Kool Aid or a bottle of Cream Soda. The first time I walked into the darkened ballroom, a local group called The Accents were on a break, but their instruments were lit up and arrayed as if on an Aztec altar and we were just waiting for the human sacrifice to start. The drum kit had what you would call a candy apple red finish like you would sometimes see on hot rods - you were tempted to lick the surface. It was high up on a raised platform and down below little red standby lights glowed like devil’s-eyes on the black and silver amps. The white Fender bass propped on a stand sported these enormous chrome tuning keys that reflected daggers of light coming from canisters suspended from a rod running across the ceiling above the stage. Some serious eruption was going to take place here.

Since I was too shy to ask a girl to dance, I just squirreled myself away in a corner and watched the band get up there and swing into it. I was stunned at the powerful sounds pouring out of the amplifiers, as loud as big jets on a runway, deeper and richer than anything you would ever hear on a record. I thought the floor was bouncing. The pagan vibe was a big draw. So was Tommy Nystrom, the drummer whose name I took note of, a heavy-set fellow with a double chin who had a soaring soprano voice that just killed it on Gene Pitney songs. He was also a killer on the band’s only original radio hit, a blues dirge in a minor key called “Why?” I went back to school on Monday with a mission. Steve and I were completing each other’s sentences on forming a band, images were merging and swirling around in my head. I would be sure to signal to Gertrude my emerging enthusiasm.

The Defenders was spawned within the study hall and hallways of a repressive Christian Brothers all-boys institution named Benilde, and I’m surprised that our band was not snuffed out early by the administration’s religious fervor, propensity for violence, and the place’s pervasive jock ethos and suffocating conformity. I went to the same school that several years later was to graduate David Carr, the late writer and New York Times journalist. Carr referred to our high school as a place where any display of individuality was viewed as a sure sign of psychopathology. But Carr was lucky. In the years just preceding his attendance, many of us just tried to get through the school day without receiving a beating from a Brother or from a phantasmagorical array of deranged and sadistic lay teachers. Carr was spared this abuse because by the time he graduated, Vietnam was winding down and the Brothers, most of whom (I have become convinced) had joined the order in the 60’s to stay out of the draft, had left to go live with their girlfriends – or boyfriends as may have been the case. The new crew there in his time may have been dispiriting, but markedly more sane.

Carr never had his head banged into a locker or thrown head-first through the heavy ash double doors of the study hall. But us Brothers’ Boys, as we were called, class of 1968, sure did. On my first day of class in 1964, I made the mistake of dawdling at my locker after the bell had rung and the principal, a tall, beefy Irishman with a simmering temper, picked me up by my shirt collar with one hand and pinned me up against a locker, my feet dangling and searching for the floor in the manner of what water polo players admirably refer to as the eggbeater motion. I was about to get punched, I think, when some visitor, a paper salesman or something, entered the building and saw us. The principal let me down, I hustled off to homeroom, now with an acute awareness that I was not in a school per se but in some sort of penal institution.

The menacing atmosphere of an all-boys catholic high school in the 1960s fostered a fierce bond of comradery among us inmates, and on weekends we learned to numb ourselves from the reign of terror with Colt 45, typically procured from somebody’s older brother or cousin who was over 21 and legal. The Defenders served as a salve as well – in fact, it was my salvation. In school, we tried to get back in all kinds of ways, as the oppressed everywhere invariably do. Rimshot, bless him, had the audacity to recruit to The Defenders the school’s straight-arrow top jock, who, to everybody’s surprise, wanted to play bass in a rock and roll band.  This must have caused a frenzy with the coaches.

Over the years we have developed a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome about all this, regularly showing up at class reunions smiling and buying drinks for our former tormentors. As I get older, I’ve tried as best I can to see the place more fairly, and, you’ll see soon enough, that’s very hard for me to do.

Earlier, while watching The ‘Hollywoods set up on stage at the supper club, I was remembering the lunch room when Steve and I crossed signals on who was supposed to wipe down our assigned table, and when it didn’t get done, the next day I got nailed to the yellow concrete block wall by a lay teacher supervising the lunch room, a Nazi named Gerry. Over Gerry’s shoulder that day I saw Steve giving me a look that seemed to say: oh god, this is going to be ugly. Thinking of the stolen church microphones, I decided that this time I would take the rap.  Steve got the hell out of there.

Gerry taught PE and Health. He always wore this strange, pale grey warm up suit that had a rubbery sheen to it, something that an astronaut might wear in the break room at Cape Canaveral. In fact, Gerry bore a slight resemblance to John Glenn. Gerry also had this habit of walking slowly around the borders of the gym while we played within the lines, stopping periodically to tap the toe of his bumper-style tennis shoes on the floor. He was always stalking us, and the toe-tap seemed to relieve some sort of pressure in him, or else, as I was told, it was his incurable athlete’s foot acting up.

God help you if you forgot your socks for PE. Gerry once grabbed a sockless kid by the name of Gary and put him through “The Red Owl.” The class forms a long line with our legs spread so as to create a tunnel through which the hapless miscreant had to crawl through on his hands and knees on the hard tile floor. As he passed under each of us, we were ordered to slap him on the butt. Gerry would remind us, applying the pedagogy of The Schutzstaffel, that if we didn’t slap hard enough, it would be OUR turn in the tunnel.  I saw Gary’s red ass in the shower afterward. He was crying but trying very hard not to.  I think the hot water on his backside stung him terribly. I looked away. Gary didn’t sit down for a week and I latter threw up because I’d never hit anyone so helpless and was so ashamed of myself for doing absolutely nothing to stop it. I didn’t tell Gertrude. She had sent me to this place to be saved and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

On this particular day in the lunchroom, Gerry’s face was two inches from mine. He was grinning. I was surprised by how calm I had become suddenly, and I found myself clinically examining Gerry’s old acne scars, having no idea what he was going to do. I thought if he hit me, I would lean forward and bite his face, a thought that almost caused me to burst out laughing. Years later, when I saw the movie, “The Silence of the Lambs,” I thought: Yeah, that’s how I would have done it - just like when Hannibal Lector locked on to the guard’s face between the jail bars. Gerry also had a perfectly round head accentuated by a close hair crop. In health class Gerry told us that it is important to turn the heads of newborns every half hour in order for their skulls to develop a perfect roundness as they grow - a fulfillment of Gerry’s apparent desire to form a master race of perfectly round cranials. Gerry’s head was indeed very round, a ballpeen hammer of a head when seen at a distance, and close up in the lunchroom it felt like I was about to be fully absorbed by a pocked moon. Yeah, I thought, if he does anything, I’m going to take a big bite of this cheese.

To my surprise, Gerry just gave me detention and sentenced me to an additional week of table wipe duty. Maybe being calm helped. A year later, a very dear friend of mine wasn’t so lucky. Gerry took him down to a coach’s office in the basement, and in this dungeon pistol-whipped him with the whistle Gerry always wore on a woven lanyard around his neck. My friend confesses that he is still roiled by rage at this humiliation 50 years after it happened. Forgiveness for the things done to you in childhood is a sentiment that seems especially refractory. Maybe it’s easier when you are abused as an adult and can mull things over rationally then maybe file a lawsuit. I learned early that I am not Nelson Mandela. If I saw Gerry today, he would be frail and in his 90s.  We would not do Truth and Reconciliation. I wouldn’t hesitate to cross the street and deck him. At any rate, I cling as strongly to this fantasy as I do to my intention to lock on to his face with my teeth. None of this has faded with time. 

At the Supper Club, I am now looking at the microphone and remaining hopeful that I can remember the lyrics to “Nadine.” If I can’t, Rimshot will be at my elbow, reminding me once again to sing directly into the microphone, and he’ll whisper prompts in my ear should I go astray on the words. I look out at the crowd, a raucous group with lots of baby-boomer gray hair sprawled across the booths and swelling the space around the bar and the dance floor right in front of me. I look down. There is a couple who I swear must be in their 90’s. What the fuck! Her top is bestrewn with sequins and she’s wearing tight jeans and is fresh off the beauty parlor with a big frizzed hairdo colored silver-pink. He’s in a plaid shirt, a Pendleton, one that Bing Crosby would have worn at Christmas. They are looking up smiling beatifically as I adjust the microphone.  Will I be doing this at 90 with my wife, Anne? I hear some of my friends in the crowd catcalling my nickname, “Al.” OK. Let’s do this.

I’m not sure how Nadine got picked for me by Rimshot and The Rockin’ Hollywoods. Steve just gushed once that the lyrics were some of the best he’d ever encountered, and he would know, and he thought I might enjoy belting this out.  He’s right. Nobody writes rock songs like this anymore:

                  “I saw her from the corner as she turned and doubled back

                   She started walking toward a coffee-colored Cadillac.

                   Pushin’ through the crowd trying to get where she was at

                  And I was campaign-shoutin’ like a southern diplomat!”

Frankly I prefer The Everly Brothers, who Steve and I always refer to as “Don and Phil.” Linda Ronstadt once said she didn’t just love Don and Phil; she revered them, which is exactly how we feel. Steve will sing Don and Phil with me privately when gathered with friends at a house party, just me on an acoustic guitar. He has this amazing ability to harmonize, a skill Steve learned in the Annunciation grade school choir, and a talent that fully emerged unplanned at a Defender’s practice session one day when we were trying out an obscure song called “Wine, Wine, Wine” (“You get a nickel. I’ll get a dine. We’ll go out and buy some wine, singing….”). Steve spontaneously broke out in harmony on the chorus. I love harmonizing with Steve, but the rapturous intimacy of Don and Phil songs would not go over well in a crowded, jacked-up supper club at Winter Carnival. The Everlys are better around a fire with a few friends. Whenever I hear or sing a Don and Phil tune, I think of roller rinks, old coke machines, leggy girls in tights with red lipstick, pink skin and scarves tied around their heads defiantly knotted on the base of their chins.  That isn’t the vibe tonight.  Too much tequila has made the rounds.

There is an unshakable baseline in Nadine that causes your spine to throb, like factory floor heavy machinery, and it’s coming at me now from the bass player behind me and the sax guy over on the left. Doug the drummer is putting out a machine-like beat of crisp little explosions from his snare drum. In this heavenly din, Steve is whispering to make sure I sing directly into the microphone. But I don’t know if I can even open my mouth. This must happen to people during deep meditation or on an acid trip: You are suddenly, inexplicably, disassociated from yourself. You float about in some state of bliss. I am shocked this is happening to me now, and it’s barely controllable. And it’s all so ridiculous. I haven’t played in a band in 50 years, I’m a man who is 70 years old, but this strong groove has completely overtaken me. I just want to listen to this wall of sound and pulsing beat coming up behind me and be left alone with it. So, I prolong my entry to the first verse, and move around a little. I look over at Steve, and he is looking really, really nervous, like in the lunchroom over Gerry’s shoulder: oh my god, this could get ugly. I have to shape up quickly and start singing.  2,3,4, Now!

It's a good thing “Nadine” is easy to sing. It’s almost a recitation followed by a short chorus of bellowing: “Nadine! Honey is that you?” But the poetry of the lyrics is compelling if you listen closely.  I am particularly fond of the last verse:

                              “She moves around like a wave of summer breeze

                               Go, driver, go-go, catch her for me please.

                               Movin’ through the traffic like a mounted cavalier

                              Leaning out the taxi window, tryin’ to make her hear!”

Moving around like a wave of summer breeze is how I remember Sophia Loren walking down the village street in the movie “Two Women.” I sometimes see my wife in these terms when she’s roaming around the house in yoga pants while I’m sitting pretending to read the paper. I go a little weak in the knees.  For a shy, awkward 15-year old kid new to life’s passions, or now an old guy grasping at the shorter strings of life, the whole notion of a man so hell bent on finding the object of his desire is arresting - this madman who declares he

                              “Caught a loaded taxi, paid up everybody’s tab

                               Flipped a 20-dollar bill and told (the driver) catch that Yellow Cab!”

He is the agent of an audacious breakout. Springsteen sang that everybody has a hungry heart. The wedding crasher sang of a constant craving. After marriage, kids, grandkids, and a buttoned-up career in corporate America, some piece of me still dreams of wildly chasing a Nadine, careening through the streets of Manhattan, caterwauling out the window of a speeding cab.

Maybe that’s what the 90-year old Bing Crosby wannabe on the dance floor in front of me is feeling also. That might explain his beaming smile looking up at me when I finish and then over at his dolled-up wife as the band brought Nadine into a smooth close. Maybe it’s why my Rimshot will keep doing this until he falls flat on the stage. Maybe it’s why against all odds you run for governor. It’s definitely why you form a band. It may be why Jim Lopes loved to wheel and deal and why Gertrude wasn’t going to leave there without her precious son carrying a guitar – in a case. It’s why you’d be willing to steal microphones from a church or bite a Nazi in the face. It’s why I paint. What are we anyway other than our deepest yearnings? The desperation we all live with is not always a quiet one. Given a chance, at the right time and in the right circumstances, each of us will holler out in our own way:

“Nadine, honey is that you?

  Nadine, honey where are you?”