Category Archives: Muddled Musings

To TAMI: A Tribute to Rhythm, Beats and White Boy Dancing

can i order disulfiram online I tend to be a music freak. Particularly dead music.

So a story on the TAMI show caught my eye this weekend.

TAMI stood for Teenage Award Music International, and it was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in winter 1964, when I was but a zygote.

It served as a sort of Lollapalooza before it became a label-driven shopping mall. The biggest stars of the country — The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, The Supremes — all showed up for the two-day event.

Organizers knew it would be big — But not this big. Teens mobbed the auditorium, which was built more quiet country-folk celebs who would draw, in a good night, a concert with only rafter seating available. On the rarer occasion, it would sell out.

Not this TAMI. This was going to be different. More than a pre-Lollapalooza, this was more of a pre-Woodstock. Kids traveled across the country for the 60’s legends.

And egos traveled even further. When singers realized how big this could be (there was even going to be a documentary filmmaker in the audience, rare for a concert then), Stars began clashing over where they would be in the roster. Who would kick off? Who would conclude the first night. And the ultimate question: Who would conclude the concert.

While TAMI didn’t feature the Beatles, it did attract the ultimate anti-Beatle band, the Rolling Stone. Sexual, hard drinking and fond of chemical, they were emblematic of rebel times.

On the other was James Brown and the Flames. Huge in the black community, he was one of the early minority singers at the time who had captured the attention of American teenage girl, once thought only the province of rocking teenage boys. He, too, was sexual and fond of intoxicants.

But organizers didn’t see him as a breakthrough performer, even though he, more than the Stones, represented a nation going against the times. Look at today’s music, its stars, its movement, and try to mount a case that James Brown didn’t break mold; he reshaped it.

The two camps argue bitterly over who’s performance would be show’s finale. The organizers — perhaps reflecting on record sales, commercial viability, race, temperament, who knows? — chose the Stones. And it was a terrific performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2XIbJ3J_Sw

In fact, TAMI was full of showmanship. The show was a huge success, and went on to set the template for multi-band shows. The documentary, kept for years on the shelf because of label contract disputes, wasn’t seen for nearly a half a century.

Which was probably good for the Stones. Years later in an interview, Keith Richards said following James Brown’s performance was the band’s single greatest career mistake.

To the undeniable power of dance.

And the inescapable fact that we white boys can’t do it.

 

O Me! O Life! A Verse for the Powerful Play

 

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here, that life exists, and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Am I doing the right thing?”

Not before, nor since, have I asked that question aloud, posed 15 years ago today.

My organs were in. I was flying from New York, on the tick tock clock,  for my double transplant. The doctors prepped me: gown and gurney, hair net and thin blanket. Shivering, cold as hell. Now all that awaited were the new kidney and pancreas down the hall.

I had been waiting more than  year for this moment. A perfect genetic match. A chance. Yet I wasn’t sure that moment. Spencer and Michael had offered their kidneys. My god. Their kidneys. I never told them, but I got two calls that my donor pancreas was in. Tick tock. That we could move forward as soon as a volunteer was ready to be cut.

Twice I told them no. I told them I wanted to wait for the exact genetic match, for both organs, simultaneously. In truth, I was afraid. What if it didn’t work? What if I died on the table? What if Spencer or MIchael died? All because I was unable to deal with my demons?

I was a shitty diabetic. I chose to run from the disease I contracted when I was 14. I barely paid notice to my blood level unless it sank perilously low or soared dangerously high. I chewed sugared gum to fit in with the kids at the basketball court behind Pierce Middle School. They hit up the Good Humor truck every lunch period. I didn’t want to be that one kid who couldn’t chew goddamned bubblegum. I convinced myself that I was like any other kid, that nothing like juvenile diabetes, a disease I’d heard of until I got it, could conquer Ultraman.

Now I’m on the gurney, forced to face the cost of my flight.

“Am I doing the right thing?” I asked my ex-wife, Julie. In all my hubris, I needed reassurance.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But if you want to call this off, we can leave here right now.”

Now, I know. It is the right thing. Better to die on the table than of diabetes’ decay, I said, feigning bravery. The real reason I was ready: Finally, after so much running, I realized  I did not face this alone. Over the years, I’ve discovered, that’s the key to facing what appears so frightening, so insurmountable, so entrenched within. That there’s another option besides facing your demons, or not.

You can hunt them. Corner them. Force them into the light and make those motherfucker pay before you finish them off.

If you are afraid of love, love. If you fear faith, believe. If you are frightened of the dark, get up in the middle of night. Don’t turn on the light. Walk to the center of the room, the center of the dark, and challenge the spirits to show themselves, to take their best goddamn shot.

They won’t. That’s the thing about inner demons. They are crafty, malleable, terrific at making you believe they are actual. Undefeated on the field, they will say, and you are but grass to be mowed.

But that’s a lie. They are cowards.

I was a crime writer the first half of my professional career, and saw real monsters. Michael’s brain tumor. Ronald Gene Simmons, who killed 14 relatives over Christmas because he snooped a note that his wife was tired of the abuse and was going to leave for good. Those are monsters materialized. I cried when one took Michael, sighed relief to see the other executed.

Yet how often do we face such demons? How often do we instead convince ourselves that they’ve become so fierce that we’re not up to repelling them? That we…just…can’t.

We can. It is within us, because we created that darkness. Perhaps let it grow out of control until it appeared in control.

However.

Is this not of our own creation? Is it really that impossible to smite that enemy, god-like and vengeful? The bible loves to preach of demons and gods borne outside our world. Adam and Eve were fine until that nasty serpent pulled up in the fruit cart.

Fuck that. Maybe Adam was just jonesing for some fructose. Maybe if he’d faced his own demons instead of blaming one in a tree, we wouldn’t have ever had to say goodbye to Samuel Flegel. Instead, he rests inside me. I carry him, perhaps because of my own demons.

But, on this day every year, he taps me on the shoulder. He is a gentle but literal reminder. I do not walk among the night spirits alone. That he is here, bow at the ready. That my quiver is full, filled with arrows sharpened by Spencer and Michael and those who were always less fearful than I.

Let’s hunt.

 

 

 

 

Napkin Or No Napkin

Mom and sis went to lunch recently at the Denny’s in Van Nuys, chic dining for this family.

As mom and Caroline took their table, mom noticed a bald man in his mid-40’s enter with a group of other men. The man apparently stared intently at Caroline as they walked to their table. Mom was a little miffed at the rudeness.

As the women ate, mom noticed the man was still staring at Caroline “to the point of rudeness,” mom recalls. It doesn’t take much for mom to express herself, and she shot stares back with a “don’t you ogle my daughter” sternness.

Finally, the man stands up, walks to the Bowles table.

“How is the food?” the man said. “Do you need anything?”

Mom was less pissed; perhaps he was a manager, waiting to go on duty.

“No, we’re fine,” Caroline responded automatically, though pausing slightly because she thought she recognized the guy. “Thank you.”

The man smiled, turned and began to walk away.

Never one to bite her tongue, mom said to Caroline, “I could have used an extra napkin.”

Caroline immediately looked over her shoulder, raised an arm and told the man, “Mom needs an extra napkin.”

The man walks to one of the waiters, says “I got this, Sam,” takes a napkin from his tray and returns to the table.

“Here you go, mom,” Howie Mandell said before walking back to his table.

As Mandell is an avowed germophobe, mom assumed the napkin was clean.