Just in time for Bancamp Friday — "Traveling in Dreams," a new, psychedelically-tinged track from my music project The Corinthian Columns!
John Padgett was the coolest.
Perhaps that’s all that really needs to be said. And perhaps John, who was never one to toot his own horn beyond the occasional posting of his artwork on Facebook, would prefer I leave it at that. But there is so much more I’d like to share about my favorite uncle, who left this world on Saturday at the age of 82. Finding the best words for the best uncle ever won’t be easy, but I’m gonna give it a shot…
John Padgett was many things, including a devoted husband, father and grandfather, an incredible cook, and a brilliant artist whose impressive and ever-evolving portfolio included pop art, op art, photorealist watercolors, Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblages, Xeroxed collages and spray-painted abstracts. He was a music lover with wide-ranging tastes (though his ear naturally gravitated towards anything based in blues, country or folk), a skillful guitar picker, and a soulful singer and songwriter. He was kind, sensitive, gentle, generous, and really funny in that low-key Tulsa-born way of his. And best of all, at least for me, John Padgett was my uncle. I’m lucky enough to have crossed paths with many mentors, angels and loyal pals in this lifetime; but if I had to pick the three men who truly shaped the person I am today, my father, my Grandpa Fred, and Uncle John would easily outpace the rest of the field.
I first met Uncle John in 1970, around the time he married Aunt Toni, my mom’s older sister. John and Toni came to visit us in Ann Arbor, and my most vivid memory from their stay is of standing with John outside the Food & Drug Mart on Packard and Stadium, and hearing him dryly note the preponderance of “Free John Now” flyers bedecking the store’s parking lot. John wasn’t at all like any of the adult men I’d encountered up to that point; I was used to gregarious gents like my dad and my grandfathers, crazy hippies like my mom’s friends, and sports-obsessed straight-arrows like most of my friends’ fathers. But John was quiet, calm. self-contained, and seemed most comfortable just standing back and taking everything in. He had a strong presence, and a definite twinkle in his eye, but he said very little. I was intrigued, and also a little intimidated.
I got to know Uncle John a little better over Christmas 1973, which my mom, sister and I spent at Toni and John’s Spanish-style duplex in L.A.’s Fairfax District. My two most vivid memories from that visit are of him playing John Fahey’s enchanting Christmas album The New Possibility over and over again, and of him introducing me to the mind-blowing world of EC Comics. Uncle John still had all the EC horror and war comics he’d bought back in the early 1950s — along with several copies from Mad magazine’s days — and he very generously let me page through as many of them as I wanted. Comics would never be the same for me after that, and no subsequent childhood visit to L.A. would be complete without me asking John to pull down his boxes of Vault of Horrors and Frontline Combats for another look. Uncle John was likewise extremely generous with his vast stock of art supplies, and allowed me to spend many hours trying to copy or expand upon the images I saw in his comic books.
It was clear to me even back then that Uncle John was a gifted artist, though I didn’t always understand what he was making or why he was making it. I was always especially drawn to his photorealist paintings, most of which depicted Craftsman or Spanish-style houses he’d spotted around Southern California. There was something simple yet wonderfully otherworldly about these images with their soft sunlit colors, the old cars parked in the foregrounds and voluminous palm trees caught in mid-sway in the backgrounds; in retrospect, these paintings of his really molded how this Midwestern kid saw Los Angeles. To this day, whenever I think of L.A., I immediately think of light stucco exterior walls, red clay roof tiles and cactus-studded front yards; and whenever I see a building with all of those attributes, I immediately think of my Uncle John.
It was also clear to me back then that Uncle John was on a different trip than any of the other adult men in my life. Though immensely talented at graphic design, by the mid-70s he’d bailed out of the advertising world and become what we called in those days “a househusband”. My aunt was able to support their family with her state government gig, so John stayed home with their kids, took care of all the cooking and housework, and concentrated on art and other creative projects in his spare time. It was an unorthodox arrangement for the era, but it worked well for them — and I think it subconsciously instilled in me the notion that devoting your life to love and creativity was just as legitimate as sticking to a standard “career path”.
Much as I’d always loved Uncle John, our relationship and friendship ascended to a new level in my late teens, when I learned to play guitar. Along with accompanying our family’s Christmas Eve carols, Uncle John and I would spend countless joy-filled hours together talking about music and trading guitar licks — I would play the Rolling Stones’ version of “Love in Vain,” and he would respond by showing me how to play the Robert Johnson original. This was around the time where I was becoming really obsessed with the music of the 1960s, and Uncle John (who had witnessed the S.F. and L.A. psychedelic booms firsthand) not only already knew most of the songs I’d learned to play, but often had colorful stories to tell about seeing those artists. (There’s a framed poster from Donovan’s 1967 Cow Palace gig on my office wall that was a gift from Uncle John, who’d pulled it off a wall somewhere in San Francisco and saved it rolled up in a tube for nearly 30 years before he gave it to me.)
Uncle John was immensely encouraging of both my guitar playing and my nascent attempts at songwriting; we even once tried writing a song together — the appropriately titled “Hell, I Don’t Know” — but I was too hung up in those days on getting the words absolutely perfect, and we never finished it. He also turned me on to (and let me tape) many fantastic records from his album collection, which included such crucial artists as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Champion Jack Dupree, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, The Incredible String Band, Tim Buckley, Bert Jansch, Dr. John and Leon Russell, to name just a few. He was also the person who introduced me to Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” a song which forever altered my view of the “Jewish Elvis” and sent me digging frantically for Neil’s old Bang Records 45s at thrift stores. And over Christmas ’87, he took me to Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood, so I could get a pair of cowboy boots at the same place the Flying Burrito Brothers got their Gilded Palace of Sin outfits…
In the summer of 1989, shortly before the photo I’ve posted here was taken, Uncle John came out to Chicago to spend a week with my mom and me. I had just graduated college, but instead of parlaying my degree into some kind of job with some kind of future I’d decided to jump into the deep end of rock and roll, forming Lava Sutra with my friends Jason Walker and Bob Samiljan. Though playing music was absolutely what I wanted to do at that point in my life, in the moments when the amps were off I had to admit that I was experiencing some heavy doubts about my choices; John, having just turned 50, was likewise in the process of sorting through and figuring out some stuff in his own life, and the two of us spent several afternoons smoking weed, drinking Carling Black Label, and having intense discussions about everything from Chet Flippo’s Hank Williams bio Your Cheating Heart to the vagaries of life, love and spirituality.
Uncle John’s visit was totally the tonic I needed; and shortly after he went back to L.A., I wrote a song inspired by our time together called “Uncle John,” which would become a staple of Lava Sutra’s set lists for the next few years, and eventually our first single. The song’s lyrics touched obliquely upon some of the things we’d discussed, but the chorus — “Uncle John, I think your art kicks ass/I think you kick ass too/May you keep on kicking ass until you no longer desire to do so” — was the most important part, a direct and heartfelt message of love and encouragement to someone who had so soulfully given me the same.
Speaking of that Chicago visit — my one attempt to take Uncle John out to “see some Chicago blues” was a total bust. We went to Wise Fools Pub to see former Howlin’ Wolf sideman Eddie Shaw, who proceed to lay on us a set of Blues Bros.-type party-rock so jive that Uncle John (a man not generally given to raising his voice above a quiet drawl) was actually moved to angrily yell “PLAY THE BLUES!” at the stage on several occasions. But after I moved to L.A. in August 1993, we made many far more enjoyable forays together into the world of live music. The very first gig we went to see together out there was Arthur Lee at the Palomino, a show which not only resulted in one of my first freelance pieces for the L.A. Reader, but also led to a lovely (no pun intended) friendship with the Baby Lemonade guys that continues to this day. Uncle John and I saw Jimmy Webb at the Roxy, Tony Joe White at Molly Malone’s, and so many other great gigs.
But best of all in some ways were the many Duane Jarvis gigs we attended around town. As soon as I heard D.J.’s Front Porch for the first time, I knew it would be right up Uncle John’s alley; but what I didn’t anticipate was how wonderfully he and Duane would hit it off. Duane absolutely adored Uncle John, and Uncle John became Duane’s biggest fan, often going to see his shows without me if I had another gig to catch — the entire D.J.’s Front Porch gang had pretty much adopted him as their own “Uncle John” by then — and dutifully informing (and recording it for) me whenever Duane made a live appearance on KCRW or another radio station. John and I even used my 4-track to cook up our own version of Duane’s “Not Young Anymore,” complete with Duane Eddy-esque guitar, which Duane seemed genuinely touched by. Duane moved to Nashville in the mid-90s, but we’d always go see him play and hang out with him whenever he came back to town. The last time I spoke to Duane, shortly before his untimely death in 2009, the first thing he wanted to know was, “How’s Uncle John?”
Sadly, the answer to that question wasn’t always a positive one over the last decade or two, as Uncle John was beset by some serious health problems including diverticulitis and various forms of cancer. But he always kept plugging along, Uncle John-style, making art and music when he felt well enough to do so, and continuously performing all kinds of magic in the kitchen. Just about every meal Uncle John cooked was a perfectly balanced masterpiece, but his holiday feasts were legendary. His stuffed mushrooms, which made an appearance every Thanksgiving and Christmas, were my favorite — tender, juicy and savory morsels of multi-layered, life-affirming flavor — and he was of course kind enough to show me how to make them.
When Katie and I went out to L.A. this past July to celebrate Uncle John’s 82nd birthday, he was unfortunately no longer able to cook, play guitar or make art, and frankly wasn’t well enough to do much more than sit and watch TV. But he caught a burst of energy out of nowhere on the last day of our visit, and we got to spend some serious quality time together. In the morning, I interviewed him about art and music for a video documentary about his life that his son (my cousin) Whitney is making; and in the afternoon, John, Whitney and I hung out in their garage studio, going through those boxes of old EC comics together one more time. I knew, given his prognosis, that this was probably the last time I’d see him, but we didn’t talk about any of that stuff. Instead, we just hung out and bullshitted about Jack Davis, Graham “Ghastly” Ingels, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Johnny Craig and other great EC artists. In retrospect, I can’t think of a more appropriate or wonderful way to have spent a final hour together.
This Christmas, like I do every year, I’ll pull out my own EC comics and look at them while listening to Uncle John’s original copy of John Fahey’s The New Possibility, which he passed along to me about 25 years ago. And I’m sure I’ll cry, like I’m doing now, but I’ll also smile; because for fifty years, I was lucky enough to have the greatest, coolest, most righteous uncle ever, and that’s a gift I’ll always be thankful for.
Farewell, Uncle John. Thank you for everything. And whatever and wherever’s next for you, may you keep on kicking ass there, too.
Let me begin this piece by saying that my wife and I and those nearest and dearest to us are all currently Covid-free, for which I'm immensely grateful. (We'd also like to keep it that way, which is why we're both working from home right now, and venturing out only for walks and limited errands.) Let me also say that we are both lucky enough to be gainfully employed right now, and to live in a lovely rental house with a bird-and-tree-filled back yard, and we're quite cognizant that we have it pretty good compared to a lot of folks in this country and world right now.
So when I say that this is the first summer in our ten years together where we haven't taken a trip somewhere — even just for a long weekend getaway — I'm not asking you to feel sorry for us, but rather to understand why my brain suddenly seems to be more obsessed with traveling than ever. Now that our country's woefully inept and stubbornly idiotic response to this pandemic has turned cross-country travel into a decidedly dicey prospect for the foreseeable future (and has understandably rendered Americans persona non grata in quite a few countries), my mind is all a-churned with dreams and notions of where I'd like to go next, as well as memories of past trips both pleasantly mundane and profoundly life-altering. Thinking is the best way to travel, as the Moody Blues once sang, and I've certainly been thinking a lot lately... about traveling.
Memories of some of those "pleasantly mundane" journeys were kicked loose recently by the discovery of the above matchbook. For several years now, Katie has included a bag of vintage matchbooks among my Christmas stocking-stuffers; I always love sorting through them, picking out my favorites, and generally losing myself in the mental images of long-vanished bars, steakhouses and hotels that these tiny prizes conjure up.
This one from the Downtowner Motor Inn of Vicksburg, Mississippi initially eluded my notice, probably because its monochromatic presentation caused it to get lost in the shuffle amid the gaudier, foil-printed promotional items in my most recent bag o' 'books. But a few weeks ago, when I absent-mindedly grabbed it from the "okay to use" pile, I was immediately struck by combination of the adorable kitten (as I am a sucker for such things) and the flirtatious wink that accompanied the slogan "Hev Fun". And then there was the image and message on the inside:
"Commercial men and other pets welcome"? Was this an artifact from some sort of brothel that catered to traveling salesmen?
Well, not quite... but as this fantastic 2016 post from the Cardboard America blog reveals, there was definitely some adult-oriented action going down at Downtowner Inns in the 1960s and 70s. Founded in 1958 in Memphis, Tennessee, the Downtowner Corporation built motels in cities across the United States, usually within close proximity of major downtown hotels, arenas and convention centers. (The company's Rowntowner chain, introduced in 1967, concentrated on suburban locations.) While these were affordably-priced motels designed to target budget-minded tourists, businessmen and conventioneers, they definitely had more flair than you would have typically found in the Holiday Inns and TraveLodges of the day. Many of their buildings sported colorful, pop-art-inspired Mid-Century exteriors and signage, like these Downtowners from Kansas City and Albuquerque:
(The Downtowner Inn pictured at the top of this post is the one in Vicksburg, MS where my matchbook came from. Though that postcard doesn't catch the property from its most flattering angle — probably because management wanted to show off its expansive parking facilities — you can see that plenty of bright colors were used on its exterior, as well.)
Several Downtowner Inns also contained cocktail lounges and restaurants where things got a little more raucous and rowdy than at your local Howard Johnson's. Singles gatherings seemed to be a pretty commonplace occurrence, and some, like Tony's Restaurant at the Downtowner in Springfield, Illinois (pictured above), featured go-go girls; "modern dancers" Terri and Donna at the intriguingly-named Velvet Swing in the Atlanta Downtowner (advertised below) may have also been among their number. It's unclear from further research I've done whether or not the Vicksburg Downtowner offered similarly risqué entertainment options, but I'm guessing that the winking matchbook was an allusion to the affirmative.
I never stayed at a Downtowner as a kid (at least, I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I had), but going down the Downtowner rabbit hole brings back fond memories of the handful of cross-country road trips my sister and I (and sometimes our mom) took with our maternal grandparents during the 1970s, most of them across the South; we even stayed overnight in Vicksburg once, on our way to New Orleans from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Nothing terribly exciting or truly momentous happened on any of these trips (unless you count the time I left some newly-purchased 45s in a bag in the back window of Grandpa Fred's Buick LeSabre, with warp-tastic results), but the mental images I have from them still fill me with a sense of joy and well-being.
I remember feeling safe, comfortable and content in the air-conditioned splendor of that massive four-door sedan, watching the world go by as we played various word-association and -guessing games, or listened to my grandfather talk about the historical importance of places we were passing; though whenever he stopped the history lessons and started uttering the name of of every restaurant that came into view with long, drawn-out syllables ("Pooooonderooooosaaaa... Aaaaaarthuurrrr Treeeaaachers... Shooooney's Biiiig Booooy...") it was a sure sign that he was getting hungry.
I remember things like the brief ripple of excitement I felt whenever we pulled into the parking lot of the motel where we were going to spend the night, wondering what our room would look like, and anticipating the blissful evening of TV-watching and pop-drinking that would shortly ensue. Or feeling honored whenever my grandfather asked me to make a run to the ice machine, a device so wondrous that I immediately scoped out its location at every place we checked into. (Of course, the pop machine was almost always in close proximity to it, making such reconnaissance that much more important.)
And while I was a notoriously picky eater in those days, I always enjoyed going out for dinner with my grandparents at whatever restaurant or lounge was attached to the hotel. Though not fancy by any means, these establishments usually tried to at least give off a whiff of class and maybe even a little touch of the exotic to lift the spirits of the weary traveler. They were mellow (though maybe things got swinging there later on in the evening), dimly lit, with piped-in muzak and plenty of dark wooden paneling. I'd order my hamburger or fried shrimp, sink back into the tufted leather banquette, sip my ginger ale (with a maraschino cherry if the place was really classy), and imagine that I was a man of the world stopping briefly for refueling on the way to my next international adventure...
I miss those kinds of joints, all of which seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, replaced long ago by sports bars with blaring flat screens and chain restaurants of dubious quality and even worse service. I miss my grandparents. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss road trips. I miss traveling across the U.S. without worrying about running into bare-fanged MAGA bullshit at every turn. And I miss living in a nation where I don't wake up wondering what kind of grievous, infected, suppurating wound we're going to inflict upon ourselves today...
But I can still travel with my mind, and mean to do so until it's cool for the rest of me to hit the road again. So tonight, as I'm falling asleep, maybe I'll ask Grandpa Fred to steer the LeSabre towards the nearest Downtowner Inn. After all, you've gotta "Hev Fun" while you still can.
December is the darkest month.
This is inarguably true from a literal standpoint (according to science, which the majority of us still believe in, these are unquestionably the shortest days of the year), but there's a metaphorical or even metaphysical aspect to December's darkness, as well. Sometime when I was around 11 or 12, I began to suspect that the bright, festive lights of Christmas and Hanukkah were not just lit in celebration of the holiday season, but also to keep something ominous at bay — much in the way that a campfire is lit not just for warmth, but also to ward off any fearsome creatures that may be silently lurking in the shadows.
This suspicion first really took shape for me on December 3, 1979, when 11 concertgoers were trampled to death while trying to see The Who at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Before that infamous incident, music had always seemed pure and magical to me; I probably couldn't have articulated it as such at the time, but I essentially saw music as a transfer of positive energy from performer to listener that elevated both. The only times I'd vaguely (if at all) sensed that there were any darker forces embedded in or around it were whenever I heard "death songs" like Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep" or Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" on LA's oldies station KRLA, or imagined I'd picked up a whiff of something spookily portentous in the songs Buddy Holly recorded shortly before his plane went down in Clear Lake, Iowa. But that stuff was all from an era long gone; the immediacy of The Who concert tragedy, and the knowledge that these kids (who could have easily been me, my friends, or their older siblings) died while trying to experience what was supposed to be a joyful communal experience, seriously freaked me out. And that this horrific event had happened just three weeks before Christmas ("The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!") forever disabused me of the naive notion that music or the holidays were somehow magically impervious to the awful intrusions of real life.
Still, there was so much positive and exciting stuff happening in my life that December, the unsettled feelings I experienced in the wake of The Who tragedy didn't linger long. My mom, sister and I were gearing up to move from L.A. to Chicago at the end of the month, which was thrilling in itself; but on our way to the Windy City, my sister and I would take a holiday detour to New York City, where we would spend Christmas with our dad and then-stepmother. I had been born in NYC, but since we'd moved to Ann Arbor when I was just a little over a year old, I had never consciously experienced the wonder of the Big Apple during the Holidays — and holy moly, did it ever deliver.
(Summer 1979 photo of Max's Kansas City, taken by Buzzcocks drummer John Maher)
My memories of Xmas '79 play back like a montage of stereotypical romantic "Christmas in NYC" images — attending the Rockettes' Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, watching the ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center rink, buying roasted chestnuts from a vendor on Fifth Avenue, checking out the Christmas window displays at Macy's and Lord & Taylor — mixed with even richer, more life-affirming experiences. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing for the first time, fully opened my eyes to the beauty and grandeur of the city's 1920s and 1930s architecture (Was that a Babylonian frieze atop the Fred F. French Building?!?), enjoyed the city's wealth of incredible radio stations and record stores, and learned about Max's Kansas City, which was located kitty-corner across Park Avenue South from my dad's apartment building. I had read a little about punk music, and was already digging some bands classified as "new wave" — Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s — but hadn't yet felt remotely connected to any of it. But from my nocturnal perch in the living room window of my dad's south-facing eleventh-floor loft, I could watch the local scenesters coming and going from this legendary NYC nightclub, and feel like I was somehow part of the action, even if I was way too young to actually get inside.
I'd visited NYC a few times before, but my decades-long love affair with Manhattan really began during that trip; in retrospect, it's not too much of a stretch to say that a large part of the person I am today was forever molded by the six or seven amazing days I spent there that Christmas.
We went back to NYC for Christmas 1980, but the vibe and experience was entirely different. December's darkness had again fallen brutally hard, this time via John Lennon's assassination in front of the Dakota. It was horrifying enough that Lennon had been killed, and that his artistic light had been cruelly snuffed out just when he was beginning to let it shine again; but the fact that it happened in the city that he'd called home for the better part of a decade, which both embraced him as one of its own and — because he was one of its own — acted like it was no big fuckin' deal that he and Yoko could occasionally be seen around town, seemed to have genuinely shaken the Big Apple to its core. (Yeah, sorry about the pun, I know...) This New York Daily News headline really sums it up: It's not just John Lennon Slain, but John Lennon Slain Here. New Yorkers took that shit personally.
I could feel the shift in NYC's mood from the previous December almost as soon as we landed at JFK. Whereas the energy of Xmas '79 was very much the glitzy, disco-fied giddiness of a city still very much on the defiant rebound four years after President Ford had told it to drop dead, NYC circa Xmas '80 felt like a gigantic, barely-stifled sob. We made the rounds again to all the traditionally festive places, but there didn't seem to be much to actually celebrate; Ronald Reagan had been elected six weeks earlier, John Lennon was dead, and even this fourteen year-old could sense that an era was ending, and things were about to take a serious turn for the worse. It seemed like everywhere I went, every radio station I dialed in, was playing John and Yoko/Plastic Ono Band's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a song of hope that now felt like a funeral dirge; and each time its kiddie chorus rang out, that choked sob of the city seemed poised to spill over into a gushing rush of heartbroken tears.
As I always did back then, I turned to the radio for escape, for deliverance from the gloom — though this time, with my station-changing hand perpetually poised to act in case of yet another spin of "Happy Xmas". There was one song in regular rotation on WPLJ which kind of snuck up on me; a song so low-key, I may not have even noticed it the first few times I heard it. It was "Skateaway," a single from Making Movies, the third and latest album from Dire Straits. I had liked "Sultans of Swing" during its hit run in late 1978 and early 1979, but I wasn't exactly a Dire Straits fan (in fact, I was completely unaware at the time of the existence of Communiqué, the band's second album). "Skateaway" changed that.
I didn't know that the song and album had been produced by Jimmy Iovine, who'd been behind the board for several of my favorite records from the last three years (including Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes, and Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Up Escalator), or that Mark Knopfler had been widely hailed as a new guitar hero. For the moment, all that mattered was the song's slinky groove, its clearly NYC-derived images of a rollerskating girl "slipping and a-sliding" her way through the city's traffic, and the way its music and lyrics gradually built to a spiritual celebration of the enchanting lure of urban life and the transcendent power of song.
Listening to "Skateaway" on headphones now, I'm struck by what a strange beast it is. With its tossed-off shuffles and last-minute fills, Pick Withers' drumming is wonderfully idiosyncratic in a way "they" haven't allowed rock drummers to be for decades, but the echo placed on his drums sounds unnecessary (and at times maybe even a little "off"). Aside from Knopfler's soaring single-note accents during the chorus (and his volume swells during the extended outro), Springsteen keyboardist Roy Bittan seems to carry most of the melodic weight of the song, while the admittedly impressive chicken-picking that Knopfler performs during the verses sometimes almost seems to have wandered into the wrong song. Vocally, Knopfler seems like he's laconically talk-singing a la Bob Dylan or J.J. Cale, but upon closer listens it becomes clear how much effort (and variations in tone and energy) he's putting into his performance. But heard all together through the half-dollar-sized mono speaker of my stepmother's radio/cassette player, it cohered into something spellbinding, evocative and irresistibly transportive. And more importantly, "Skateaway" allowed me to glimpse a little light amid the darkness I felt that December.
The song has been in my head again a lot lately, even soundtracking some of my dreams. I suspect it has something to do with this time of year, and the knowledge that so many of my friends — and so many people in general — are badly struggling right now. The appalling corruption of this current Presidential administration (and the equally appalling behavior of its staunchest supporters) would be tough enough to swallow under any circumstances, but that's obviously only part of the equation. So many people I know are wondering if it's all going to be downhill from here with their own lives, this country, or our civilization in general. Some are wondering if they'll ever work again; others if they or certain loved ones will even be alive to see next Christmas. I know that those kind of questions, never exactly easy to bear, become especially heavy during the darkness of December; and I certainly have no answers. All I have is a Christmas wish, which is that they (and you) will be able to find some daily comfort and joy amid the darkness — even if it's just via a song that, for a few minutes at least, will let you skate away. That's all.
There's something about films made and/or set in the New York City of the 1970s that always keeps me coming back for more, and the same goes for the London of the same period. Maybe it's because childhood visits to both of these cities vividly imprinted themselves upon my fragile eggshell mind; while these were clearly not easy cities to live in, the vibrant energy of citizens going about their daily business against a backdrop of faded grandeur and crumbling glory captured my youthful imagination in the same way that Hubert Robert's paintings of "life among the ruins" would later fascinate me. Though there were signs of decay everywhere, there was also beauty in that decay — a beauty so profound that even a midwestern boy raised on TV and the intrinsically American philosophy of "newer is better" couldn't fail to notice.
I recently finished reading Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours, a fascinating and occasionally frustrating book that is less of a history of the original psychedelic era than a series of free-associative essays about why and how LSD impacted popular music the way it did. One of the best aspects of Chapman's book is the way he lays out the differences between American and British psychedelia — not just stylistically, but also culturally. In his British chapters, he repeatedly underlines just how dingy and drab life was in post-WWII England, especially when compared to the space-age shininess of life in the US; and how even at the height of "Swinging London," most of the grumbling grey city still felt barely a few years removed from the traumas and deprivations of life during The Blitz.
If Chapman's book didn't exactly turn me on to any great psychedelic records that I wasn't already aware of, it did lead me to The London Nobody Knows, a haunting documentary filmed in 1967 by Norman Cohen (but apparently not released until 1969), which was based on the 1962 book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher. Narrated by James Mason, who also serves as the film's tour guide, the film explores London's seamy underbelly (and its Victorian remnants) at a time when the wrecking ball of progress was really starting to kick into high gear.
Chapman cites The London Nobody Knows as being particularly illustrative of how shabby the city really was, even at the peak of its pop cultural influence, and the film certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. Though a few sequences here are speeded up a la Benny Hill for comic relief, the London we see here is a bleak place, indeed, one filled with rusting Victorian urinals, rotting pubs, splintering tenements, toothless street performers, and open-air markets filled with wriggling eels and shady pitchmen. The few minutes devoted to the city's fashionably-attired youth seems almost jarringly out of place, like they were only added (and possibly under protest) after the producers begged to see some of the mods and mini-skirts that London was famous for.
Again, though, there is beauty in the decay — and with his dry wit and seemingly unflappable countenance, Mason is perfectly suited to guiding us through it. Whether wryly cocking an eyebrow at the ugliness of the newer buildings along the north side of the Thames, or begging the pardon of a market patron that he's inadvertently bumped, he comes off more like a savvy local than a movie star. In one particularly moving sequence, he unselfconsciously sits down with several senior residents of the local Salvation Army, and lends a sympathetic ear to their hard-luck stories. (I'm guessing he prudently chose not to mention his own brush with Thunderbird wine.)
My favorite moment in the film, however, is a non-Mason one: A shirtless street performer of indeterminate age hectors passerby to bind him with a length of heavy chain, from which he then performs a Houdini-like escape. While the man's performance is quite entertaining in its own right, and certainly harkens back to an earlier London — there were almost certainly escape artists doing the same trick on the city' streets in the 19th century, if not hundreds of years before that — what blew me away was the realization that I had actually seen this very gentleman in action, seven years after this sequence was filmed. While I knew that I would recognize some of the London I experienced in '74 in this film, I had no inkling that I would actually recognize one of the people I'd encountered while I was there.
That year, my sister and I were living in Leamington Spa with my father, who was on sabbatical at Warwick University. On weekends, we would often take train trips to other parts of the country, and of course London was on our hit list. While my most vivid memory from our London trip is of ordering a plate of ravioli at a restaurant, only to find that there was nothing inside of said ravioli — London dining was significantly less worldly than it is today — our visit to the Tower of London also stands out for me, and not just because of the thrill of coming face to face with nearly 900 years of English history. On our way to the Tower entrance, we came upon this very same shirtless gent, who had attracted a rather sizable audience with his salty pronouncements and his impressive feats of escapism. (There was also a younger partner working with him, who was similarly swathed in chains and locks.) After busting free, the man passed the hat, and then cussed the crowd out for not putting enough into it. "There's not enough in here to get me into a pay toilet," he cried. "I hope every last one of ye gets bloody diarrhea tonight!" Oh, how my sister and I howled with laughter; I think I even asked my dad for a few coins to contribute to his cause, simply because I was impressed that anyone would loudly wish diarrhea upon a group of tourists.
Obviously, that's the sort of thing that sticks with you for decades after the fact, and when my wife and I visited the Tower of London last spring — her first visit, and my first time returning since 1974 — I half-expected that this guy would be standing outside the tube station, haranguing us into tying him up. He wasn't there, of course; I'm guessing he'd be around a hundred years old today, if he's even still alive. Still, it was a real thrill to see him again in this documentary, and to feel viscerally connected for a second to the London of 1967, even though I didn't actually experience the city until seven years later.
Anyway, watch the film. You won't regret it.