Me and Pickens and the Conspiracy

Chapter One

Don't Let Them Catch Your Gaze

Maybe the best thing about drinking with Pickens is that he won't stop as long as you don't. It's like those wrestling bears that you used to run across at those weird little rest stops along the smaller highways in northern California. You would always hear that the bear would only squeeze you about as hard as he thought you were squeezing him. I don't know if that's true. I never did and never will wrestle a bear. There were always the stories, though, of the tough guys who would come along from time to time with the idea of teaching a bear a lesson.

Let me say here and now that I was never going to teach Pickens Klay any lesson about drinking. I've been called lots of things, "lightweight" among them.

"Socially awkward" is another one. I'm pretty sure that I'm just shy.

Well, I would usually head up to Flynn's around four in the afternoon so that I wouldn't have to struggle with small talk. Most weekdays would be empty enough so that I didn't have to sit right next to anybody and there would be enough folks so that I didn't have to make awkward chitchat with the bartender. Usually it was a pretty, young girl and I hated the idea of making them feel obligated to entertain me. Most of the time I would have a major crush on them by my second or third visit on their watch. The really pretty ones didn't usually last for more than a month or two.

Flynn's advertised as a restaurant, a grille. It was a dive bar that served a little bit from a menu to keep their liquor license legal. I've never understood how that works. I've never really been interested. Smoking had been prohibited for several years but you still left Flynn's reeking of tobacco after a minute or two in the place. There were four or five little round tables and an L-shaped bar with seven or eight stools, usually with at least one or two of them broken.

The first time that I made eye contact with Pickens was when I looked up to see who had played Clarence "Frogman" Henry on the jukebox. He might have been testing me. Within a month I knew his name and I knew that he drank rum. Well drinks, usually rum and coke. I'm pretty sure that he usually had a crush on most of the pretty bartenders, too. Of course I found it admirable that he didn't seem to flirt with them. Maybe it's just that he didn't make me jealous.

By the time that we actually spoke to each other he seemed like one of my closer friends. I think we talked about hot rods. Either that or Donald O' Connor movies. Pretty soon I was getting there by three or three thirty. I wasn't really drinking much more, I was just having fun.

It was probably close to a year before I had any idea about just exactly who Pickens Klay really was. Neither us was at all the type to ask, "What do you do?"

It could be that I'm not comfortable telling strangers that I'm a writer, knowing that their next questions are all going to be about what I write and how I manage to support myself. I don't much think so. I'm pretty sure that if I practiced law and wore suspenders and drove a new Audi that I still wouldn't go for the "What do you do?" stuff.

Pickens? I suppose that he had official reasons not to lay all his cards on the table. Practical ones, too. This story that I'm warming up to tell you could get a fellow shot or locked up. Or both.

By the time that he mentioned the CIA I had already figured out that my pal had been around several blocks. I mean he knew stuff.        

Small Ponds, Big Egos

Now, nobody appreciates a little self esteem more than I do. That said, cocky musicians, conspicuous consumers, conceited beauties and swaggering athletes leave me cold. It's a big old world out there and everybody's a local act somewhere.

Elvis stood and talked to me until he was late for his movie shoot. He was Elvis!

Life is way too short to spend time with folks worrying about how smart they are, how rich they are or how pretty they are.

The beauty is in the soul, the heart. The riches are all over the ground. Seashells and broken 7 Up bottles. The prettiest music comes from the mockingbird. Beethoven knew it. All the great ones know where the best melodies are to be had.

Yeah, you're special. Everybody's special. Lord Buckley told us.

Hey, Roomie!

It was at what I remember to be the first gathering of the new Americana Music Association and we were at some little lodge in Lake Tahoe. Beautiful setting and a lot of really nice folks but the dirty politics of the music biz was being assembled for the benefit of the New Nashville. I'm slow. I thought I had finally found my niche.

I was there with my pal, Walt, and what we did find was our roommate for the weekend, Doug Sahm. I had worked with Doug when the Sir Douglas Quintet had played the Star Spectacular in 1965 or '66 in Clearwater. He had been a small time rock'n'roll star then. Now he was a legend.

We had so much in common and everything was fun. He never shut up. He never slowed down. We talked about wrestling, Hank Penny, Amos 'n' Andy, baseball and coffee. At one point I was chatting in the hallway with Al Moss as Doug sauntered up to us. Wanting to help me out and enhance my standing in the alt-country community, Al asked Doug, "Do you know Ronny Elliott?"

Doug wrapped his arm around me and exclaimed, "He's my roomie."

One afternoon in our little lodge room Doug was trying to describe the little towns in New Mexico to me. "You know, they ride into town two or three times a year, kill a cowboy or two and they go home."

"We need to write a song, man."

He just looked at me. We did play some and we did mess around with some ideas but we never got back to that. I saw him one more time after Tahoe. He was given a special award at South By Southwest later that year. "Hey, my Florida boys," he shouted when Walt and I ran into him at the Broken Spoke. That was my first SXSW. I got home and wrote South By So What for the new record. The chorus ends with the line, Somebody tell Sir Doug I said hello. Pretty clever line, I thought. We decided that South By So What should be the radio single. 

Doug passed away the week that it was released to radio. Turns out to be the saddest thing I ever wrote. They don't make 'em like Sir Doug any more. Never did except for that one time. I never throw anything out, though.

Can You See It From Here?

Well, I suppose we all worry about our property values. I happen to live across the street from the mayor. I knocked on the front door and suggested that he and I go to breakfast together as soon as Occupy Tampa got rolling. He said that he was going to Tallahassee but that he would call me in a day or two and we would go. I'm still waiting.

All I hope for is a peaceful RNC in our little town. One where no property is destroyed and no kids with cracked skulls. I can't describe myself as much of a political type. I don't think that Jesus or Buddha or Woody or Will Rogers would want much to do with any of this. 

During his campaign I asked a friend what he thought about Bob Buckhorn. "Well, he doesn't have a mean bone in his body," was my friend's response. I voted for him and, to tell the truth, that was one of the major factors. It's true. He doesn't seem to have a mean bone in his body. I can't say that I like statements about "brute force" describing our city's official response to protesters, however. That seems mean and it doesn't seem wise. Let's welcome everyone to Tampa with open arms and let's have a party.

Pray for peace and search for truth.

24 Turns 80

Definition of class. Go Barons!

http://soundcloud.com/ronnyelliott/24-turns-80

The Last One Standing, My Heroes

Most of my heroes have gone. Have I just gotten old and jaded or is there a real shortage today? Who is going to stand up for the disenfranchised, the soldiers home from unpopular wars, the poor, the prisoners?

Stand up. Use your love, use your power.

Best I Can Do

Never really that big a Sinatra fan. I suppose that I prefer Dean Martin and it annoys me that he never seems to be taken seriously as a singer. Although I would be thrilled to have huge royalty checks in the mailbox on a regular basis, I don't think that I would have appreciated ol' blue eyes adding a lot of yeah, baby and I'm talkin' s to lyrics to "make the song his."

He should have written more of his own songs. He was, in fact, a fine writer.

Now when I do someone else's song I always hope that either they never hear my version or that I haven't ruined anything for them. They certainly ain't gonna have the aforementioned royalty checks in their mailbox!

A lot of my songs dance around the personal and the autobiographical but that's just because I don't have much of an imagination. This song of Walt's is what I have always wanted to say. It's real and it breaks my heart.

When Heroes Come Calling

When I answered the phone and the high pitched voice said, "I'm looking for Ronny Elliott," I calmly replied, "This is he." Don Garlits introduced himself politely and asked if we might go to lunch during the coming week.

Shoulda' been a dream, right? Here was my idol, "Big Daddy" Don Garlits asking me if I'm available to go to lunch. I was writing an automotive column for the Tampa Tribune at the time and he was in the process of promoting his first autobiography.

It gets better. As we pulled out from his house in Seffner, he asked, "Would you mind if we went by and picked up Connie Swingle?"

Would I mind? Would I mind! Geezus! Connie Swingle. Another hero. The lunatic, beatnik drag racing genius. When Mr. Garlits came back to the car from rousing Connie, he told me that Swingle was sharing the house with a dancer, you know, a dancer, and that there were mirrors on the ceiling in the bedroom. I'm gonna have to level here with you: that's probably about as wild as my life has gotten. I'm a simple man. I do, however, have an active imagination.

Now, Connie had been in Tampa, serving in the air force, when he began to hang around Don's Speed Shop on Nebraska Avenue. He was making a pretty decent living with his illegal street racing adventures. It soon became obvious to Garlits that Swingle had special gifts. When he got burned badly for the second time, he decided to turn the driving chores over to Connie.

Several years prior, after his first serious injuries, he had reluctantly given up the driver's seat to a young, amateur stock car driver, Art Malone. Malone had gone on to establish himself as a professional race driver in many categories. His heart remained with the fire breathing fuel dragsters, though, and he was soon competing with his former boss.

Chuck Berry High School

We need to be careful about the heroes that we pass along to the next bunch; the kids, the ones who wait in line to decide what to do with the planet. Seems to me that Jesus, the person, was a nice guy. Sweet and funny, concerned with the plight of the poor. Poor himself and brown, too.

I've had about enough of the Thomas Edison stuff and I believe that it's time that we painted over some of the Thomas Edison High School signs and put the sign painters back to work. We need some Chuck Berry High Schools and some Captain Paul Watson federal courthouses.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to have light bulbs in the house and I'm partial to my record player, too. I'll give him some credit for some of his work but I want kids to learn the whole story. Not only did Tommy borrow heavily from Nikola Tesla for his technical work on AC but he seems to have cheated in competition with his rival, George Westinghouse, who was the champion for DC.

At any rate, he invented the electric chair as a gimmick to scare the general public into his corner based on fear of direct current. He sent his PR lackeys out into the countryside to demonstrate death by electricity. They would pay the neighborhood toughs to round up stray dogs to be electrocuted on steel sheets for the benefit of the local press. We remain the only first world country to boast of capital punishment.

 

Meet Harry

Have I introduced you to my pal, Harry Hayward? He was drunk before it was fashionable and sober before it was important. He is crazy and he had about the best dose of OCD that I've ever seen long before any of us knew that such a condition existed, much less had a name. Everybody should have a friend who will stand behind them and stand up for them like Harry has done for me. He wears a hat well and most folks don't.

                                               Ronny Elliott& Harry Hayward ca. 1970

He should have been the biggest thing in show business. In this universe a few of us get to brag about seeing him perform and working with him. Fortune and fame would have made him very hard to live with.

Wall Of Something

Record producer. Record producer. Record producer. What the hell is a record producer? The term meant nothing to any of us until Phil Spector self-promoted himself into pop culture history. Before Phil we had Mitch Miller or any suit with a job at a major label who happened to know how to play the piano. At the small, independent labels we had A&R guys or independent producers who made records at their own expense and then when something stuck to the wall, stole all the royalties from the kids who were just thrilled to get onto American Bandstand and hear their songs on the radio. Beat bolting fenders onto Buicks, settling down and raising kids.

Suddenly we all heard about this "wall of sound" and read about the first teen tycoon. They were fine records, too. He bummed around and got cheated until he learned to do the cheating himself. He opened the door for Leiber and Stoller and Johnny Otis and lots of guys who had already opened the same doors for him. Now there was a mystique. Now there was a RECORD PRODUCER.

The sad tragedy that ended the Phil Spector story was a long time coming. It was pretty predictable.

Everybody of a certain generation knows of Jerry Wexler, John Hammond, George Martin, Bob Johnston and Jack Nietzsche. We can thank Phil Spector for that.

The Red Scares

We would all like to think that those terrible days of fear mongering are behind us, that we have matured as a society and that we can all accept the ones who are different than us. Look around. Fear remains the number one tool of the fascist. It's not the commies any more. We moved on to welfare queens, fags, latinos, and today's number one menace: TERRORISTS.


We need to take back our government at all levels. We need a Department Of Peace and we desperately need to take care of our people. We are number 27 in infant mortality at this point. That's not right.

                                                          We're better than this.    

                     Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.            

Making Hay Out Of Jack

I suppose that I can take or leave Jack Kerouac in the big picture. When it comes to snappy quotes, however, he is, line by line, my favorite. He seems to have summed up most of my basic philosophies and given me plenty of titles to work with. For that he has my undying, pardon the pun, gratitude.

Good Guys

Hey! If the better translation of Jesus' claim is really, "I am a son of God," then he was pretty much talking the company line that the Buddha had laid down much earlier. Nothing in the bible says that he was married. Nothing says that he wasn't. He hung around with Mary Magdalene and he may have married her. Turns out that there is no evidence that she was a working girl. That was a different Mary. Popular name.

We do know that he didn't much care for the bankers of the day. He didn't think much of the rich folks who didn't take care of the poor, either. If any of the narrative attributed to him is close to accurate, then we might expect that if he showed up today that we might catch a glimpse on a local newscast of him sharing loaves and wine at a peaceful Occupy event. I truly doubt that he would have any interest in politics but I am sure that he would not approve of our infant mortality rate in this country or the profits made from war.

Be nice and help others, especially the ones who can't take proper care of themselves. It's not rocket science.

Woody Guthrie recognized the link between the historic Jesus and the social movements of his day. Things haven't changed much. Maybe they have and they've changed back. This was at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, four or five years back. Let's change it again. Let's fix it.

Memphis

"Folk music. Remember when that crap almost caught on?" Probably my all-time favorite Martin Mull quote. As a kid I was always scared to death of folk music. The media was always working to make fools like me worry that rock'n'roll might be replaced at any moment. They worked it with calypso, too, so I was never much of a Harry Belafonte fan.

Now I find that after forty eight or forty nine years of playing my beloved rock'n'roll that I'm a folksinger. I don't want to offend anyone here. Not everyone agrees with that. I do whatever it is that I do, whatever it is that I've always done. Unlike all those sensitive artists who don't want to be pigeonholed, stereotyped or classified, I'm always anxious to be a part of anything. Unlike Groucho Marx, I'm dying to join any group.

I'm off to Memphis this week to play Folk Alliance. I can't wait. I walk up to those little huddles in the hallways and blunder into all of the,"What model Taylor is that?" Nobody has to tell me that I don't fit here. These are nice folks, however, and honestly, I don't fit anywhere.

  

Hillbilly Music Comes Back To Tampa

In 1966 I tried my best to put together a real rhythm and blues band. I wanted horns, keyboards, girls in short dresses and somebody who could do a split at the crash of a cymbal. First a piano player would quit then none of the girls would show up. I finally ended up with three drummers and me, a bass player. Fortunately one of the drummers could play guitar and he taught another one a little bit. Voila, a band. Obviously we couldn't play the r&b that I had hoped for so we began to write hillbilly songs. I mean, let's face it, I had always been writing hillbilly songs.

We named that band Your Local Bear and one of our first shows was on a bill with Jimi Hendrix. Timing is everything in the music business and I'm something of a wizard at it. The Byrds were yet to record Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and the Eagles weren't even a grain of cocaine on the counter top.

That band failed spectacularly but I loved it. The smoking remains morphed into something that we called Duckbutter. It was full of magic and sweetness and bad taste. Folks around here still have their favorite Duckbutter stories. The myth out shadows the band here. So what? Here's some of that stuff with some of the Wally Watson Band onboard.

Mud From The Bottom Of Barges

My wonderful friend, Rebekah Pulley, needed a story for a classroom assignment. She turned on her camera and this is the first one that came to my mind.

 If you need a dumb story, call me. I've got a million of them. I love you all very much.

The Raveons return to Tampa from the Bahamas, 1965.

Oh, I Was Loved

We moved from Birmingham to Tampa when I was six years old, my mom, my grandmother and me. It was my idea. Every summer Grandma would take me back up to visit the aunts and uncles and cousins. The highlight was always working in Uncle Murray's watermelon patches. He would pay us in silver dollars and we were pretty sure that we were rich. Closest I ever came, actually.

I learned pretty much everything that I know during those summers. My grandmother, Lottie, was the finest person I ever knew. She loved more than you can imagine, more than I can describe. 

We spent our money at Cobb's Hardware and at the drug store. That's where I first discovered Hep Cat's Review. It cost fifty cents, twice what the other rock'n'roll magazines cost.

George bought black hair dye after one payday. He wanted to look like Elvis. It turned his hair green and Aunt Noot's pot purple. George didn't look a thing like Elvis He still doesn't.

I miss Grandma every day.

Duckbutter!

If you lived in Tampa/St. Pete or if you were in Miami in the late '60's and early '70's you know Duckbutter. All of the innocence and all of the naughtiness of the era was embodied in this lame brain, hillbilly, punk outfit. We were supposed to be famous. Big deal!

We were a real rock'n'roll band. We worked with Canned Heat, Dion, John Mayall, Van Morrison, the Chambers Brothers, Michael Bloomfield, Dave Van Ronk and the Allman Brothers. We toured with Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, the Coasters and Bill Haley & the Comets. Bo Diddley wanted to produce us. So did Berry Oakley.

A Duckbutter show had comedy, magic, drama and rocked and rolled like nothing else. It was dumb and it was sweet.

This is a medley that we put together for Phil Gernhard, our producer. It was recorded on a little Sony stereo deck that we borrowed with a little help from Terry Kane. The usual lineup for the band is here: Harry Hayward on vocals; Gary Dobbins and Pete Yorkunas on guitar; Doug Wingate on drums; and me on bass. In addition, Steve Hill is playing piano and Spencer Hinkle is playing congas. Pete doubled on banjo, too.

When we walked out of Electric Lady after recording the "real" record a month later, Phil grumbled to me, "Your demo is better." It was. It is.

Letter From A Birmingham Jail

I grew up in Birmingham. I remember the "White" and the "Colored" drinking fountains and restrooms. We will never be free until we're all free. That's still true. Dr. King was working to combat poverty and injustice among all of the races when he was gunned down. He spoke for the 99%. I loved him with all of my heart and I love the brave souls who are doing the same today. Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.