Reflections on Mortality: Fear and Loathing in Cleveland, Ohio

Jesus Christ, what'll come next? I woke up this morning to five voicemails, nine offline messages, and six e-mails, all telling me that Hunter S. Thompson, after sixty-seven years of ranting and roaming this planet like a dinosaur heading - knowingly - toward his own extinction, had finally met with his own Ice Age. He'd swallowed one of his own bullets and left his check, unpaid, sitting on the table for someone else to pick up. Go figure. Another shit-soaked February come and gone…

I hate February. Here, where I live in Ohio, it is the coldest month. The temperature doesn't necessarily agree with me, but February is dimly bleak and ghastly cold - it is the month of winter's death sleep. Last night was particularly frigid; the kind of eternal chill that crawls up under your veins, freezes your bones, and embraces no optimism for remaining warmth.

I wrote that last year: three hundred and sixty five fuckin' days ago. Waylon Jennings had just passed when I spit those useless words out of my feeble mind. Three hundred sixty five days later and not a goddamn thing has gotten better. Three hundred sixty five days later and two more American Originals are gone…forever. Three fucking hundred sixty-five days later and the world is far worse for wear.

365.
Three Hundred.
Sixty Five.
One year.

February. The bitch month that swallowed Mr. Jennings into its cold eternity last year has now lay claim to two more exquisite bodies. Two giants. Two artistic heroes that operated far from the parameters set forth by mere artistic mortals. Two warriors. Two authentic originals whose like we will never know again.

Jimmy Smith and Hunter S. Thompson. Gone. Forever our loss.
Fuck death.

For Jimmy:

Ghost Hands (Requiem for an Organist)

There are hands, and then there are hands. This pair looks like they could wrap around a bottle of beer nearly twice over or grip a lamppost like a baseball bat. Hands like nothing many folks have ever seen before. Long and lean - deft and muscular. The keys of an organ could - of course - only succumb, and then hum, under the demands of such long, dark, and daunting fingers; two impossibly agile and beautiful brown spiders dancing dangerously along uncertain black and white ledges, casting those long, nimble shadows that rush around on the ivory surface, playing tag with the tips of their maker.

The organ breathes out great sighs of tones, coerced by such ambiguous power, setting the debate at hand and then whispering to those who will listen:

Come on now…come on…follow me.

Burrell, who stands directly across from Jimmy Smith and just behind the organ, rises up to meet the Hammond b-3's call with subtle grace, hooking his guitar line to Blakely's boom sha boom snare and hi-hat shuffle and just lets him be pulled along.

It's like ice. So smooth you'd hardly know he startin' to preach.

This wasn't Burrell's first hearing of Smith's absurd talents, but it was the first time he felt his own playing touched by them.

Like ice.

Smith's eyes glow. He never looks down; he simply stares through the music as Kenny Burrell slips and slides through a solo that seems downright nervous when pressed up against the glory coming from those hands on the keyboard. Smith's eyes betray him and roll back into his head. They close. Burrell's guitar tiptoes to a nearly invisible rhythm, no longer intimidated, but rather hypnotized…sucked into the eye of a storm. Jimmy Smith's eyes are pressed shut. They may never open again. And that'd be just fine by Smith, because this is what he wants. Not sight, not smell, only sound. Sight betrays; smells deceive; but sound, sweet soulful funky sound, well that has never let Jimmy Smith down.

He devours Burrell's playing and instinctively regurgitates and accentuates, punctuating what he's hearing - and utterly unaware of the magic, the pain, the sorrow, the smiles, and the joy that lie in his own glorious and majestic ebony fingers.

Dem's the hands of God

Someone actually said that about Jimmy Smith once - to his face, and that's part of the reason why Smith buried his eyes in tightly clenched darkness when he played. After that guy back in Philly - a drunkard nonetheless - looked at Smith's hands - I'z tellin' ya, doze tha Hands of God, lookit 'em, I swears theys glowin' - Smith, superstitious in nature, found himself haunted by dream visions of his playing the organ, looking down at his hands, and seeing them there, alone, severed at the wrists, playing by themselves - detached from his body.

Ghosts hands - he'd called them after that - an they be scarin' the shit out me sometime too.

Ghost hands that deliver souls by the multitudes by caressing a simple organ. Ghost hands that carry the weight of over two hundred years pain. Ghost hands that plowed fields and pulled roots. Ghost hands that couldn't even sit in a restaurant with a white man and touch the same forks and spoons. Ghost hands that explain away so much misery, only to leave their own traces of mystery. Hands of God. And Jimmy, who always figured he might be something different, never knew why he had them. He just knew he had to use them.

It was about a quarter way into the jam session - the one that would weave its magnificence into "The Sermon" - that Jimmy forgot about his hands once more.

This kid, Tina Brooks, from the Bronx was onboard with his tenor saxophone. He's a good one Jimmy - he'd been told. So when he stepped into the pulpit vacated by Burrell and his guitar Tina was ready. He eyed Smith, fingered his horn, savored the tang of its reed, said the Lord's Prayer to himself, and started honkin' - good. Announcing himself with runs of flair punctuated by ecstatic assertions of just simply being there - in that room with Burrell, Smith, the young Lee Morgan, who was to preach next with his trumpet, and alto man Lou Donaldson - Brooks unwittingly steals his moment for the longest sermon on the cut. He can't help himself, he can't stop the flow. Everything that he'd ever buried within escaped him through his horn; from under pads and silver, caressing brass, and escaping into the air. Tina thought he might cry. All of this coaxed on by the organ man's call.

It's an amazing solo and Smith falls into a familiar moment where he drifts up and away from himself, dancing on the air that inflates with the soul being poured into every note. And he sees those hands - his hands. The hands that have scooped up the water and the ash, and worked them, worked them long and hard, with such graceful skill, that finally the organ was breathing life into it. He steals a peek at Brooks and swears he sees him glow - and then the eyes plow shut again. Locked. Keep 'em closed. Jus' play.

And play they do. In recorded music it's a mere twenty minutes and ten seconds worth of blowing, but there had to be more, no one doubts that. There just had to be more.

Lee Morgan traces Brooks footsteps for a moment, trying to catch up to a bit of that fantastic, magical essence. But it's fleeting and indifferent, so Morgan nods as he plays from the pulpit, acknowledging Brooks, and basking in the power that everyone now feels, but nobody is willing to mention.

As Morgan plays his peace he squints his eyes closed - and then all eyes are closed. Smith's constricted so tightly that you couldn't pry them open with a crowbar. Burrell's fluttering between open and closed, dancing as lightly as the fingers on his guitar. Donaldson is in the corner waiting his turn, caressing his horn like a lover he's leaving, eyes serenely shut. Brooks, the kid, looking exhausted from his turn, is resting his eyes, but also wanting to open them so as to see as much of this as he can - so he'll never forget. And Blakely, sticks in hand, wobbles on a faux leather stool not unlike the ones that sprout out of the floors and line the bars at any of the million different joints he's played in, only his is shorter, stubbier, and, this particular one, harder on the ass. His head wobbles with the old seat, his eyes closed in a wide smile.

Everyone seems inspired by the challenge Tina Brooks has laid down, although it is, without a doubt, one that rests on the steady foundation that Burrell, Blakely, and Smith have built. And the room lives, comes alive, and explodes with the passions and energies of these six men who couldn't even shit in the same toilet as a white man in half the john's across their own country. Yet, their blues becomes jazz as it turns from reflective to joyous, from gregarious to meditative, but never ever becoming angry - that's not what these blues are about. This is the music of escape, the music of freedom, a freedom that can only happen when those instruments are warm with the breath and touch of men who make them do magical things.

"The Sermon" startles to this day with enthralling musical tenacity and its buoyant fortitude, but it probably wasn't any surprise to Smith as he sat there at the organ during those sessions. He'd been there before, and for Jimmy Smith every time he laid hands on the keys it was the just the beginning of another spiritual journey. After all, they weren't his hands anymore; they were the hands of God.
God's Hands, PT. II

It was pure miracle, the writing of Hunter Thompson. That's the only way to explain it.

Pure miracle. Unreal… otherworldly… inspiring… exasperating… insane…beautiful… beautiful…beautiful…

Having read every published word the man ever wrote, I still wish I could have even approached even one beautiful sentence of Thompson's in my own work. I haven't, and I never will. So be it.

He was. That's all that matters now.

He was.

Rest in Peace you deviant bastard…you didn't set the bar high; you tore the motherfucker down and beat the posts into rubble with it. Then you burned the entire mess into ash.

Rest in Peace you deviant bastard.

Reflections on Mortality: Fear and Loathing in Cleveland, Ohio

A brown Jay Gatsby." It is a simple line that will forever mercilessly haunt me. "A brown Jay Gatsby." Simple words. Hunter S. Thompson wrote those words in an astonishingly lyrical essay about Muhammad Ali - nearly thirty years ago. And now I've returned to them, one of the many, many times I have, in search of something - and they still only haunt me. "Like a brown Jay Gatsby." Those words, the very heart of the piece; the core of a poetic series of Thompson paragraphs that, in a mere eight hundred words or so, damn near perfectly defined the pedantic complexities of our American lives, our dreams, our fears, our joys, and our shame. "Like a brown Jay Gatsby", damn that line! "Like a brown Jay Gatsby" are the words that sent me off into this writing life, leaving me no trail upon which to ever escape. Damn those words. They can make a man crazy.

I wrote that nearly two years ago…and it means more to me now than then…

Why? Who knows? It just does.

Fuck Death.

Farewell Jimmy…I hope that my words may someday swing as your music always has. But I know it won't.

Farewell Hunter…I hope that someday my words may become eternally poetic, as yours always were. But, alas, I know it will not.

Fuck Death.

Live forever boys…live forever!

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