When the dazzle and the glare of the flashbulb cleared, I thought, What the hell am I doing?
There were paper signs taped to the dressing-room doors along the narrow corridor. They read: WILLIAM BELL, THE DIXIE HUMMINGBIRDS, CISSY HOUSTON, SOLOMON BURKE, and ARETHA FRANKLIN.
The door to my room was right next to “The King of Rock and Soul.”
The occasion was a salute to Sam Cooke at the State Theatre in Cleveland, an event staged by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005. This was something entirely different from the induction gala. It was a straight concert of celebration without television cameras or any of that nonsense, and actually promised to be fun.
When I’d arrived for rehearsals, I’d asked to see the running order. I thought I’d get to sing a couple of songs in the first half and then see some of my favorite singers from a seat in the balcony, rather than in the wings, where L. C. Cooke was standing, looking eerily like his brother.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said the producer. “You’re singing after Solomon and before Aretha.”
“What?”
“You’re singing after Solomon Burke and before Aretha closes the show.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Singing after Solomon was hard enough, but I thought people might actually throw things if they had to wait through my set to see Aretha.
The logic was patiently explained to me. “Well, we can’t have Aretha follow Solomon, it won’t look good, and you three are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he said, his voice rising to a note of import.
I’d never thought about it like that.
When The Attractions and I were inducted, I’d considered politely declining the award, as the whole notion seemed contradictory, but my friends and my then wife-to-be were all so delighted for me that to refuse would have felt stupid and churlish. When I saw how much it meant to people who had been out of the spotlight for a while, I changed my thinking a little, but it was just the work of a committee and riddled with strange anomalies and inexplicable omissions.
When asked by a newspaperman why Gram Parsons was not a member, I theorized the Hall was simply becoming too crowded, and offered to leave to make room for him. “That is, if Mr. Henley will join me.”
Peter Guralnick had asked if I would be involved in the Cleveland celebrations. He had just published Dream Boogie, the definitive Sam Cooke biography. I will be forever indebted to him for his collections of essays Lost Highway and Feel Like Going Home, which had me constantly going back to the record shop, as well as for his two-volume life of Elvis Presley, someone about whom I actually knew very little when I borrowed his name. These books and his volume about Sweet Soul Music, as well as works by about five other writers who already know their names, make the poverty and joyless nature of most other music writing so painfully obvious.
I wasn’t about to set myself up to sing “Another Saturday Night” or “Cupid,” so I’d arranged to sing two songs that I was pretty certain nobody else would have chosen. My first song was the Simms Twins’ “That’s Where It’s At,” a record produced by Sam Cooke that I had learned from a cover on the Johnny Taylor album Raw Blues, on Stax.
I had already been singing “Get Yourself Another Fool” for twenty years, having first heard it on my favorite Sam Cooke record, Night Beat. It was among four songs on the album that were written or originally performed by Charles Brown. He would have told you that Sam Cooke intended Night Beat as a Charles Brown tribute record, and he might have had a point.
I’d shared the bill with Charles a couple of times after his comeback at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the early ’90s and wrote the song “I Wonder How She Knows” for his album Someone to Love.
I was pretty pleased with myself for having written a fancy rhyme scheme for Charles’s sophisticated blues ballad style:
You find your tongue is tied
Your words escape and hide
But she’s so patient and kind
She’s prepared to read your mind
That’s all very well ’til you find
Because of the wine you drank
Your mind is just a blank
I sent off my demo and then was asked to call Charles about the song. I was told to call in the late morning, San Francisco time, as he liked to go to the track.
Charles had simmered the lyric over low heat. When he sang it back to me, he had reduced it to the essentials: “I find it hard to think when I drink.”
We agreed to publish this blues version under the original title, and I retained the first-draft verses and melody, titled for the opening line of the song, “Upon a Veil of Midnight Blue.”
The Cleveland concert got under way with one after another stellar performance, until it reached the two-thirds mark and the whole evening took a surreal turn. Solomon Burke was revealed, resplendent on his throne, to huge acclaim, only for him to make the following dramatic announcement: “Sam Cooke gave the torch to ME!”
A wave of applause offered Solomon a dramatic pause before stating, “And tonight, I am handing it on”—drum roll—“to my son.”
And Solomon didn’t sing!
He just sat there, gesticulating and exhorting the crowd to go wild as his deputy sang the next two numbers.
His son was a fine singer, but he wasn’t Solomon.
I wiped the sweat from my brow in the wings and thought I might yet get away with this if I could get through my first two songs without tripping on the footlights, as, for my third number, I had been drafted to sing one of Sam’s biggest hits, “Bring It on Home to Me.”
I had not sung that song since I was nineteen and hadn’t known any better, only this time I would have a fighting chance, as I was to sing it with Otis Clay, a real gentleman whose records I’d first discovered in Japan, where he had a dedicated following.
“Bring It on Home to Me” was originally recorded in two-part harmony. I was singing the Sam Cooke part. Otis was taking the line originally sung by Lou Rawls. Crazy as it sounds, we pulled it off in style and the stage was set for the Queen of Soul.
My old pal Peter Wolf was there to sing The Valentinos’ “Lookin’ for a Love,” which Sam had produced and The J. Geils Band had revived into a big hit.
Peter had almost got us both stabbed in an after-hours bar deep in Alphabet City, one very early morning in 1978, but these days we would more likely talk the evening away, swapping rare Merle Haggard songs over a Persian supper. Peter always arrived bearing a book that I needed to read, like the biography of Teddy Wilson that I didn’t even know existed.
We made our way up to the balcony and watched Aretha glide effortlessly through her songs, but almost everyone was surprised when “A Change Is Gonna Come” was not the final song of her set.
Given the personalities involved and the scale of the bill, there had been a constant stream of schedule changes and negotiations throughout the day but, until now, no one was really sure how the show was supposed to end.
A screen was lowered in front of the curtain and a filmed tribute to Sam was shown as the stage was reset again and the entire cast summoned backstage. The stage manager announced, “Okay, Solomon’s going to sing ‘Change,’ and when he gets to the last chorus, you lead everyone out”—pointing to me and Otis Clay, the only two people who happened to be wearing evening dress.
The film concluded, and the curtain rose on Solomon once again on his throne. He began a sensational version of “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Everyone was looking at everyone else with expressions that said, I’m not going out there.
But as the song was steered to a massive crescendo, Otis and I were tapped on the shoulders as a cue to walk out. We’d taken but two steps when the same hands yanked us back into the shadows just as Aretha emerged at a speed from the wings, without her shoes. It was clear that she was not going to let Solomon steal the show, and was absolutely wailing from the moment she entered.
Now that Solomon and Aretha were trading lines, we were definitely not going to get in their way.
By the third time around, Solomon was in tears and had his hands up, imploring to the heavens, while declaiming, “Bring the boys home, bring the boys home,” and we were all finally pushed out into the spotlight to join them—two of the best singers of their generation singing together for what turned out to be the very first time.
I had already written “The Judgment” for Solomon to record on his album Don’t Give Up on Me. I’d stood in the vocal booth with him at the suggestion of producer Joe Henry, until Solomon had the measure of an odd turnaround I’d written that could have easily been the undoing of a great vocal take.
On the night that I was presented with the ASCAP Founder’s Award by Burt Bacharach, Solomon was scheduled to sing the song live for the first time but departed from both the words and the tune after just half a verse, delivering an impassioned sermon on the subject of judgment, but barely singing a note that I’d written.
Joe Henry was leading a band that included Solomon’s Italian concert harpist, and he signaled for them to just keep playing the changes. Pete Thomas was behind his kit and I saw him shake his head. Pete knew what to do from bitter experience. At times like that, the drummer just follows the singer.
Solomon was such a showman and powerful presence that hardly any of the dignitaries in the room even noticed the difference, but the band was mortified and pretty angry. Solomon put his hands up and said to Joe, “I didn’t want to tell you. I just didn’t learn the song.”
Over the next years, I would get little notes in the mail from Solomon from time to time, just a few lines sending his love and good wishes and checking on the welfare of my young sons, who he insisted he had adopted as his nephews.
Solomon and I must have waited together in that corridor in Cleveland for twenty minutes before Aretha appeared with her Instamatic, but the story made a good introduction when I called the Queen to ask her to appear on Spectacle.
After that, I went straight into my pitch.
I said I didn’t want to go through every detail of her life and career, but I had the feeling that she sang differently when she accompanied herself, and I had never heard anyone talk to her about playing the piano and what it meant to her as an artist and singer. For a moment, I could tell that she was intrigued.
For as long as Aretha and I chatted amiably, I could really visualize her doing the show. We even had the Apollo available on a day or two after her upcoming Radio City engagement, so there would be no need for her to make a special journey to New York, as she is famously reluctant to fly.
She signed off with “That sounds great. Call this number,” and gave me a set of digits.
It was a week before the proposed taping date that we had to accept that Aretha’s people would neither confirm nor deny that she was coming, and we had to let the venue go or blow our budget.
Luck and generosity had a lot to do with our success in getting such great guests and me not having to pretend to be interested in someone simply because we had a television slot to fill.
When I went on the Conan O’Brien show to publicize Spectacle, he grabbed me by the shoulders during a commercial break and said, “How do you get those guests?” Then, with mock hysteria, “You’ve no idea what it’s like, night after night.”
I hoped he was kidding me, but I had watched a couple of those guys become like the polar bear in the zoo, pacing up and down their small enclosure, getting mean and neurotic.
I was singing a duet of “Don’t Fence Me In” with Madeleine Albright that night. That’s the kind of entertainment that you cannot buy, because it only happens once.
Madame Secretary would go back to reflecting on what she had learned about the way power is wielded in the world, while I would be doing my best for world peace by traveling to Paris to don my Chief of Police costume and, in that role, rough up Sting every night in Steve Nieve and Muriel Teodori’s opera Welcome to the Voice at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
The guest list for the next season of Spectacle started to take shape. We always needed to give the broadcasters some big names to justify being able to experiment a little on all the other shows.
Thankfully, Bono and the Edge agreed to kick off the recording of Season Two. I don’t think the Edge had ever had anything as loud as Steve Nieve on his side of the U2 stage, but they both threw themselves into the spirit of the afternoon like good pals.
We then built a handpicked group of Allen Toussaint, Nick Lowe, and Richard Thompson augmented by Pete and Davey from The Imposters and Larry Campbell on guitar, to salute Levon Helm.
I doubt Levon would have agreed to do the show if he had realized that it was a tribute in disguise, but everyone on the bill held him in such high regard that the evening wore these intentions quite lightly.
Richard led off, peeling the paint off the back wall of the Apollo with his solo on “Shoot out the Lights.” Then we all took turns singing and telling stories, building the group, chair by chair, until everyone was on the stage together, playing “Fortune Teller.”
Levon’s health was already failing. I feared he would not be able to sing, and on the day of the show, he greeted me with little more than a whisper.
“The doctor says, I can’t sing. I CAN’T SPEAK,” he proclaimed, confounding the medical advice with a hoarse shout.
The show had all been scripted to point to Levon’s finale. Now it threatened to be a silent movie.
I had to think quickly. His drums were his second, if not his first, voice, so I proposed a questionnaire in which I listed drummers that I knew Levon loved and asked if he would respond in rhythm.
I worried that it might seem ridiculous, like a scene from Mister Ed, but Levon dug the idea and we went ahead.
I reeled them all off:
“Earl Palmer!”
“Spider Kilpatrick!”
“Zigaboo Modeliste!”
“Jimmy Lee Keltner!”
Each one received an entirely different fill or tattoo of affectionate approval.
It was sad to hear Levon’s great voice so damaged by the years, the smokes, and by cancer and its treatment, but on that evening his spirit and humor seemed inextinguishable.
Snow had been falling steadily all around the Ramble that night in Woodstock. It was 2006. Diana and I had traveled up there with our friends Bill and Susan Flanagan, meeting up with Allen Toussaint and Joshua Feigenbaum on the approach.
It transpired that Allen had not seen Levon since 1970, when he had made a rare journey out of New Orleans to work with The Band on their live recording Rock of Ages.
A.T. arrived only to find that the attaché case with his horn charts had not made the journey, and he had to get to work writing them all out again from memory. He obviously pulled this off in style, as the record testifies, and the recollection set everyone at ease as laughter rang around the den that acted as a holding area for performers who were to appear that evening in Levon’s barn.
Levon put his hand on my shoulder and walked me away from the rest of the group. His voice was raspy but less strained than I had anticipated, given his struggles with throat cancer. He looked me in the eye and said quietly and seriously, “I just wanted to say that your friendship meant a lot to Rick.”
I swallowed hard and didn’t know what to say.
Rick Danko’s singing had been one of the reasons that I felt I might be able to be in a rock and roll band. His nervy and emotional style convinced me that all you had to do was open up your head and something good might come out.
Danko had died in 1999. What puzzled me was that what had passed between us could have constituted friendship, unless it was in that lonely place that their estranged bandmate Robbie Robertson had once cinematically described as “a goddamn impossible way of life.”
I had met Rick and Levon just a couple of times. The first occasion was one grim night in the mid-’80s when I’d made my way to the Lone Star Cafe on Thirteenth Street in New York City to see what was billed as “The Band” but was actually just Rick and Levon and a gang of cohorts. Neither of them was exactly at his best, and the show was a bit chaotic, but when Danko sang “It Makes No Difference,” everything fell right into place.
I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself out on a fire escape with the two of them, and swung between being dumbstruck in their presence and running off at the mouth, the way people sometimes do when they are excited.
There was a logical part of my brain that took in that the circumstances in which these guys were playing were unworthy of their talents, but the delight in meeting them and Rick’s openness and enthusiasm overcame my misgivings.
The next time our paths crossed, I tumbled through a door into the private dining room of a fancy Boston hotel in 1989 to find the party in full swing. Rick and Levon were by then part of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, along with Nils Lofgren, Joe Walsh, and Billy Preston.
Levon welcomed us in. “Would you like some gumbo? We had it FedExed in from New Orleans.”
I’d heard of people shipping lobsters from Maine, frozen steaks from Texas, and even pineapples from Hawaii, but I never imagined that anyone would take the time to post soup.
Pete Thomas and Levon got along famously. They would speak in that secret drummer language that might as well be Ancient Greek to the rest of us. Pete came back from a late-night hang to report that Levon’s idea of a party was to order everything on the room-service menu and then invite enough people into his room to demolish the assembled trolleys full of food and drink and then let the games begin.
By the time that tour ended, everyone else in the troupe had made a tidy profit, but, needless to say, the hosts of such parties went home in the red.
It was years later now.
All of the mischief and misfortune had taken its toll on Levon’s health and his bank balance, and some bitterness had set in.
The Midnight Ramble had begun as a way of keeping the bailiffs from the door and quickly become a main attraction and a beacon for musicians willing to travel up to old Woodstock.
Levon’s daughter, Amy Helm, was drawing up a list of acoustic songs with which she and her father and some of the other members of her group, Ollabelle, were going to open the evening.
I asked, “Can I sit in for some of the songs?”
Amy said, “Which one?”
I said, “All of them.”
In the end, we just ran through a Stanley Brothers number and Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” with Levon singing in a thin but still robust version of his remarkable voice.
Amy and Levon took turns playing mandolin, and I just watched their hands to follow the changes, playing rhythm and adding a vocal harmony where I could.
Levon eventually made his way behind the drum kit and led us in a terrific version of The Band’s “Don’t Ya Tell Henry.”
The wit of his playing was never more apparent than when he’d start hitting accents on odd beats until the groove was so loose that it seemed the wheels might fall off. I once tried to describe how he’d set things in motion again by saying he was “like a tap dancer in the corner of a rapidly flooding room.”
I can’t do better than that now.
While the show got under way, Allen Toussaint had been sitting quietly in the corner of the backstage den, sketching out impromptu horn parts for my then unreleased song “The River in Reverse.”
Allen eventually took over on the piano for Earl King’s “Sing Sing Sing,” but then he placed the charts in front of the startled horn section and we proceeded to play a song that no one had ever heard before.
A couple of weeks later, I went down to a club on Forty-second Street to sit in with Hubert Sumlin on “Hidden Charms” at an anniversary salute to Howlin’ Wolf. The band was led by Jimmy Vivino, and the vocalists ranged from Eric Mingus to David Johansen, but the thing that made the evening so fleet and swinging was the presence of Levon behind the kit.
The Imposters and I were playing the Casinorama in Rama, Ontario, when the news came through that Levon Helm had died. That happened to be Hawks territory, where he and his cohorts had cut their teeth backing up Ronnie Hawkins back in the early ’60s—before Dylan “went electric” and they became “The Band.”
We played “Tears of Rage” that night, before the patrons went back to the tables. It was heartbreaking to hear Pete Thomas faithfully play all of Levon’s drags and fills and think about all the time we’d both spent listening to those Band records, trying to work out how the hell they were doing what they were doing.
The last time I’d seen Levon was a year after the Spectacle taping. His voice had recovered enough to sing a couple of numbers a night, and he and his band had ventured west of the Mississippi for the first time in years, and eventually he made it up to Vancouver. He and Larry Campbell invited me to sit in again.
Singing “Tears of Rage” that night was a supernatural experience. Logic told you that Levon was placing everything just where it was supposed to be, but there seemed to be all the time in the world between every backbeat, and it set you free.
The final number of that edition of Spectacle was “The Weight,” on which we were joined by Ray LaMontagne, who had stayed in New York all week after taping his episode of the show with Lyle Lovett and John Prine, just so he could sing one verse of the song with Levon.
The entire cast played on that number, and everyone took turns at the mic, apart from the man we most wished could. Whenever I’ve seen the tape of that performance, I always get a kick out of the big grin that Levon gives Pete Thomas halfway through the first verse.
I realize that we’ve been pretty lucky. The rarely interrupted dialogue between Pete and me is not something that everyone can sustain. Even with us, things blew apart and blame had to be placed.
• • •
IT WAS A LOT to ask one artist to carry an entire Spectacle episode, and some guests preferred to be in a “guitar pull,” like the show we’d done in Season One in which John Mellencamp, Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Norah Jones each sang in tandem or in turn.
The comparable show in Season Two featured Ron Sexsmith, Sheryl Crow, Neko Case, and Jesse Winchester.
If I could only preserve one moment from the twenty shows that we made, then it would be Jesse’s rendition of his song “Sham-a-Ling-Dong-Ding”—the memory of how a frivolous pop tune defines a young love.
I had loved Jesse’s voice since I’d first heard it in about 1971. I’d learned all of his songs to play just for myself in the hush of night and to get myself out of painted corners in unwelcoming clubs. I found his song “Black Dog” so unnerving that I used to dare myself to listen to it with the lights out. Jesse could write what you might call a gospel song like “Quiet About It” that found a place for doubt and made faith into a struggle of will that admitted frailty and uncertainty.
I’d gone to see him at a club in London when I was just starting out. I saw him standing alone just inside the door and I steeled myself to go up and thank him for writing his songs, or whatever words I managed to stammer out. He was the same gentleman when I met him again nearly forty years later.
It was the odd thing to realize that so many people in the audience were hearing him for the first time; such was the modesty and self-effacing nature of his art that he remained a well-kept secret to many.
Even at rehearsals, his voice caused the room to vibrate.
I looked to our stage manager, Gena Rositano, who we had borrowed from the set of SNL to keep us rolling steadily through all the changes with her calm but firm command of the scene. I saw her wipe away a tear.
On the show itself, it was not hard to sense the impact of the song on the theater audience. I looked to Neko Case and saw a tear roll down her cheek. When Jesse finished singing, I joked that the show was now over. I didn’t really trust myself to say much more, as I knew it would undo me.
It seems that this one televised performance did bring more listeners to Jesse’s shows in the all-too-brief remaining years of his life. The last time I saw him perform was at an entirely unamplified concert at the Rubin Museum of Art on Seventeenth Street. It was a perfect ninety minutes of grace, humor, and beautiful balladry.
If he had ever wanted more reward for his gifts, there was not a single trace of the bitterness he caught so well in others in the words of his song “A Showman’s Life”:
A boy will dream as children do
Of a great white way, ’til the dream comes true
And a phony smile in a colored light
Is all there is to the showman’s life
Nobody told me about this part
• • •
MY OWN SONG about recorded memories was called “45.” It counted the days since the Second World War, the way my Nana’s generation did.
It measured life in the revolutions of a 7-inch record and how those discs were eventually divided up like photos torn from the family album of a broken home; the branches of a tree that have fallen to the axe.
There’s a stack of shellac and vinyl
Which are yours now and which are mine?
I must have written the song on that birthday, but kept it until I next entered the studio in Dublin to record When I Was Cruel.
I started that album as a solo enterprise armed with a cheap drum machine, a Danelectro six-string, and a Sears and Roebuck amp, trying to find a new way to play rock and roll with looped beats and a fuzz box.
By the end of the sessions, I had accidentally formed a terrific band called The Imposters: Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve, joined by Davey Faragher, a swinging bass player who could sing like a bird.
By the time we taped those Spectacle shows, The Imposters had made four albums; completing the assignment in Dublin, recording in Mississippi, Hollywood, and New Orleans before making a nine-day wonder called Momofuku at Sound City in the Low Moan Zone of Van Nuys.
We’ve toured the world, opening for The Rolling Stones at Soldier Field in Chicago in subzero temperatures and in the heat of a Glastonbury summer afternoon, and in the moment I am writing this sentence, The Imposters have been my band longer than The Attractions.
For the ensemble numbers in the final show in Season Two of Spectacle, the band was augmented by Roy Bittan and Nils Lofgren of the E Street Band.
I’d say that Bruce probably threw himself into his Spectacle episode with more gusto than any other guest. We actually ran out of videotape after two hours and we were still talking about Bruce’s early career in the Jersey clubs and arguing about the virtues and vices of Catholic school.
We huddled in the wings and asked if he wanted to carry on, and we ended up shooting four hours of tape, enough material for two episodes, including impromptu performances of “Oh, Pretty Woman”—which it turned out neither us knew as well as we imagined—as well as the songs that we had actually rehearsed.
I reminded Bruce of the impact of the Darkness on the Edge of Town show I’d seen in Nashville in ’78. He replied that he’d tuned in The Buzzcocks and other sounds from England because someone had said he was too romantic about “the street.”
I said, “Who said that?”
“You did,” said Bruce with a grin.
Bruce had led a lineup of Pete Thomas, Tony Kanal, Steve Van Zandt, Dave Grohl, and me in a salute to Joe Strummer at the Grammy Awards in 2003.
Those things are usually a road crash—and believe me, an earlier proposed lineup containing a couple of mismatched singers and an acrobat would have stood the very good chance—but the only thing that could have made the number better would have been if Joe had been there to sing it himself.
I suppose shooting these shows at any time in life would have seen us look back a few years later and note those that we had lost.
Lou, Levon, Jesse Winchester, and Kate McGarrigle have all left us since we spent that time together. I’m glad we had the tapes rolling while we were talking about Doc Pomus, playing “Tennessee Jed,” harmonizing on this song or that and even shedding a tear.
Then the money began to run out.
A planned show featuring Ry Cooder and Mavis Staples had to be abandoned.
I offered to rescue our shortage of shows by interviewing myself in character.
I’d done a short form of this for French television with the help of a fake mustache and had seen Oliver Reed do another edition of the same show to spectacular effect, ridiculing himself in a way that made Howard Stern sound like Mr. Rogers. I wanted to put myself on the spot, ask myself those big English philosophical questions like:
“Who do you think you are?”
“What year did it all go wrong for you?”
“Don’t you agree, you’re a sellout, a hypocrite, a charlatan, a dilettante, a bigot, a socialist, an elitist, a misogynist, a has-been, and a talentless egotist?”
I would have liked to see how I’d have wriggled out of that kind of interrogation.
Instead, we enlisted the Esquire music correspondent and actress Mary-Louise Parker to interview me at a Masonic Hall in Toronto.
Mary-Louise is a well-informed and spirited music commentator given to wild statements like “Imperial Bedroom makes me want to get drunk and fuck the wrong person.”
What red-blooded songwriter would not take that recommendation over two impenetrable columns of pursed-lipped disapproval in The New York Times?
So, we managed to make twenty of these shows and that was probably enough.
People really seemed to like what they saw, but I was truly astonished by how much they liked it. I might be in the supermarket queue in West Vancouver and the most unlikely-looking people would come up to me to say how much they enjoyed the conversation with Lou Reed.
Many of the other shows had seemed relatively light to me, but I suppose this does not take into account what passes for talking on television these days.
Speculation about Season Three began to reach me before Season Two had finished airing, but it never seemed likely to get free of all the political and financial wrangling that goes on behind the scenes of every show. We had verbal commitments from both Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, but our failure to be able to confirm recording dates meant that it was impossible to book any other guests.
The ideal wish list of such guests seemed very obvious to a lot of people, but I had the inside dope on why many of those candidates would have never considered doing the show.
I had already spent six hours interviewing Joni Mitchell for a Vanity Fair article. It had been an extraordinary experience. She was fascinating and opinionated and had no problem speaking about her life and work. She recited her dreams and I complimented her in beautiful passages from her own lyrics:
Dressed in stolen clothes she stands
Cast iron and frail
With her impossibly gentle hands
And blood-red fingernails
She smoked cigarettes all afternoon on the veranda of a hotel that would still tolerate it, and we even managed to quarrel when I implied that something she had said had been “diffident,” and she took violent exception to my use of the word, until I had to remind her that I was not a record company stooge or one of her enemies in the press but just another songwriter. Near the end of our time together, I asked her who her peers were. “Dylan for words. Miles for music,” she replied modestly, perhaps truthfully.
To attempt to repeat such a conversation in front of the cameras would have been an utter contrivance.
I asked Bob Dylan to do Spectacle backstage at his show in Vancouver, knowing full well that he would never agree to appear, but then, at that time he was taking the broadcasting world by storm with his Theme Time Radio Hour. I told him that I’d had to go into television, as he already had radio sewn up.
When Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan came to see my show in Santa Rosa, I knew in my heart that Tom would have been a reluctant guest, but I had to ask, offering to turn the Spectacle studio into any kind of playhouse he desired.
The moment I even mentioned the word “television,” Tom backed away in mock alarm. It was as if I had produced a Taser from my pocket and had a cattle prod concealed in my coat.
He looked so stricken that I immediately felt terrible for suggesting such a thing.
But then, Tom had already helped me run away with the circus back in the mid-1980s, and I was forever in his debt.