Apologies to Fred Ho and Other Famous People I've Offended

           Times obituary here

Fred Ho's Saxophone Liberation Front & Scientific Soul Sessions
from Scientific Soul on Vimeo.

I saw Fred Ho in 1999, at the Walker, in a review called "All Power to the People! The Black Panther Suite" filled with talent and dance, music and joy. Before the show he treated the audience to some personal remarks -  he had gone rock climbing by the St Croix River and he also let us know that he was a dedicated Revolutionary and a Socialist. After the show there were questions from the audience.

My question was, what was a Revolutionary doing in a setting like the Walker, playing to a crowd which was almost all white and comfortably middle-class. I hadn't meant to sound accusing - it was actually a question I had been asking myself, - and still do. After all, I was at the Walker too.

He got very defensive - he explained that, well - they invited him and besides that, he also did a lot of valuable work in the community, which I'm sure he does. Afterwards Marv Davidov remarked to me, "That was a good question and it got a good answer." Marv always looked on the positive side.

I suppose I could have worded my question in a more comradely way. Still, I wonder about people who smugly proclaim themselves as a "Socialist" or a "Vegetarian" or a "Person of Color" or even an "artist' - as if that proclamation, in and of itself, made them somehow better than others.

*****
Eleven years ago one of the top jazz clubs in the country opened up a half a block from my home, (thank you, USA!) The Dakota attracts top artists from around the world and the intimate setting sometimes allows you to meet and chat with them - thus increasing my opportunities for celebrity faux pas.  A couple years ago Ben Sidran, a musician and professor at the University of Wisconsin was there promoting his latest book. He talked about the influence of Jews on American pop music
and popular culture. His lecture was witty, learned, profound and insightful. Occasionally he sat down at the piano and sang a song to illustrate his point. He seemed like the kind of charismatic professor whose classes were always overflowing and whom students sought out afterwards to sit at his feet.

At intermission, I told him what a great comedic sense he had. "Why, you could tour just doing standup comedy," I told him.  He gave a slight grimace and muttered, "I thought that's what I was doing." Then he started out the second set by saying: "Some guy just told me I could be doing comedy..." Oh, well.

In the Twin Cities there's a beautiful and talented jazz singer/pianist with the name of Joann Funk. Yah!  She has a regular gig in the lobby of the Saint Paul Hotel where I saw her last year. Her setup is actually in the lobby, just past the reception desk. There's a small bar and overstuffed

chairs scattered about. Waiters and guests with luggage were constantly passing through. The acoustics sucked. I was disappointed and felt bad for her.

Last March she played an evening at the Dakota which has an incredible sound system. I let her know how much I enjoyed hearing her in a setting like the Dakota. But, she said, she really liked the St. Paul Hotel. I tried to back off and mumbled something about me being comfortable in Minneapolis. Then she went on, the St. Paul Hotel (which has a kind of faded 1930's atmosphere) felt to her like what the Algonquin Hotel must have been like. "Yes," I said "except without Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley or Alexander Woollcott." An old girlfriend once told me, "If there's anything worse than a New York City snob, its a New York City snob turned Minneapolis snob."

You've probably all heard about the time I met Leonard Cohen. I'm sure I said plenty of dumb things but at the time I was drunk and he was stoned so it didn't matter. And when I talk to beautiful European artists in their own language, I become quite charming.

French jazz singer Mina Agossi has become a treasured friend who invited me to Paris to read at the Trianon Theater for her CD release. Thanks to Mina I was able to bring my granddaughter, Marielle, to Europe. I also met Cristina Pato at the Dakota,  a Galician bagpipe player who tours with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. I don't speak Galician, so we spoke Spanish with each other and that worked out. And she didn't invite me to tour with her or to go to Paris, but I did get a big hug and that worked out too.


I was reading some book reviews one night and a particular title jumped out at me: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It brought back heavy memories, night after night circling through streets and bars in a twilight between drunk and hung over. The book by Nick Flynn lived up to its promise. He wrote about his father, a homeless derelict in Boston who insisted he was America's greatest novelist. Nick Flynn got to know his father when Flynn was working in a homeless shelter and his father showed up there.

It was a very good book, so good that it came to the attention of Robert de Niro who made a movie out of it starring himself as the father. Of course you'll never see a marquee advertising ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY so they changed the movie title to Being Flynn. But then, in order to co-promote, they changed the title of the book too.

Nick Flynn was involved in the filming, watching himself being played by an actor and seeing Robert De Niro in the role of his father.  He even brought De Niro to the nursing home to meet his father. Those experiences were the subject of Flynn's next book called The Reenactments: A Memoir. That's a lot of mileage out of one story, but what a story!

I caught up with Nick Flynn at a signing at Beyond Baroque, a multifaceted gem of a writers' center in Venice, CA. When I tried to commiserate with him for having to changed his title, he defended himself by pointing out the the content of the book was unchanged, only the title page and the cover and, of course, you should never judge a book by its cover. Grudgingly, I agreed, but I would not have bought a book just based on the title of Being Flynn.

The truth is, writers, singers, creative people generally, even the successful ones, are touchy and insecure for a good reason. They don't know how it is that they do what they do. It's not like you go to work in the morning and fire up the computer and out comes the data. It's more like you always need to tweak it and last month's tweak may crash the system this month and there's no IT to call. It's an uncertain way to live that puts artists on the defensive. Personally, I'm just as upset by praise for the wrong reason as I am by negative reviews.

Also, any successful artist has usually made lots of sacrifices to get where they are. They've played dives a lot worse than the St. Paul Hotel. Mina Agossi has played all over the world, she's been knighted by the French government, but she still had to give in to her record company and use a really dumb cover on her album, Red Eyes, in return for having complete control over the content. Please note, Nick Flynn, that she kept the title she wanted; she did not exchange gritty and depressing for pseudo-existentialist. In your position though, for Robert De Niro, I'm sure I would have done the same thing.

Mr. Cohen and Me

I stepped into an avalanche,
it covered up my soul;
when I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn, learn to serve me well.
.....
When I am on a pedestal,
you did not raise me there.
Your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare.
I myself am the pedestal
for this ugly hump at which you stare.
....
You say you've gone away from me,
but I can feel you when you breathe.
    from "Avalanche" by Leonard Cohen






1n 1963 I lived in New York; just out of college and I had absolutely no idea what the world was all about or where I was going. I knew that some drugs were scary but I liked to drink a lot. I knew I had to have a job so I went down to an agency. They sent me off to a company where they told me, in effect, "Mr. Shillock, you seem to be a middle-class white boy with a college degree: here's your desk; here's your telephone and your ashtray. We'll bring you some files." Things were simple for white boys in those days.

Evenings I hung out in the Village with friends from college.  One night we were sitting at a table next to a table with two men - one of them a short dark man with soulful eyes in his late 20's. Some of the women at our table started talking to them. They leaned over to talk to us and soon we moved the tables together.

The shorter man was a Canadian poet: very intense, savvy with an ironic edge. He was impressive, even aside from the fact that he had published 3 books of poetry, that he lived on the Greek island of Hydra and that he was in New York for the publication of his first novel. He described partying with the literati and the strange feeling when his novel, such an intimate part of him for so long, suddenly took on a life of its own. He was Leonard Cohen, of course, and the novel was The Favorite Game.

After a while we all went up to one of the women's apartment where she had some pot. I started drinking and we were all smoking. I remember talking to Leonard about John Updike, whose novel had just been reviewed in the New Yorker. I liked Updike, Leonard Cohen didn't. After a while I passed out on the floor. I woke up the next morning and left the apartment while the others were still sleeping.

The occasion was memorable and some of the women corresponded with him a few times. I didn't think much about him until 3 years later when I saw Beautiful Losers reviewed in the Times. They mentioned the author was a Canadian poet who lived in Greece and I wondered. Then a couple years later Songs of Leonard Cohen came out with the photo-booth picture of him on the cover and yes, it was the same man I had talked to in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village.

There were some beautiful songs on the album. His next one, Songs from a Room was darker, harder to grasp. It wasn't until my mid-life crisis, though, and Songs of Love and Hate that I began listening to Leonard Cohen obsessively. LP record changers didn't have a Repeat button, but if you jammed the pickup arm and taped down the sensors it would play the same side over and over. 

I did that with Love and Hate, all day, particularly with first side which began with "Avalanche". The imagery was so powerful and vivid that I felt the song was all about me.  My suffering became an aesthetic experience, My pain was turned into such beauty that it took on a significance that made it seem worthwhile. Mr, Cohen, in those days you saved my life.

And in the middle of my life, the first poem I wrote was:

                                         Quasimodo's Love Song.

You have raised me to this pedestal
where I kneel
like a figure in some dark allegory.
See my naked hump: it stands for Passion.
Chastity is the raking scourge.
Virtue: the hurled thump of paving stones;
and Grace, that I cannot hear
the pantomime of taunts and jeers
from lips babbling over black tongues.

Gypsy girl, mine is not the passion
of that sweet Jesus who loves us all.
He floats in the air with his arms outstretched
while I on my pedestal, kneel to protect
the onion shoot
that sprouts in the darkness between my legs.

Esmeralda, my love is no dumb show;
it grunts and moans at every blow.
It is strong and rank as the sewers of Paris.
It is alive and festering like these pale frogs
that pop from the pustules of my reopened wounds.

(which, in retrospect, seems more cathartic than aesthetic.)

Fast forward to the year 2,000,  to Tucson, AZ. My friend Joni Morris from Minneapolis had set up a reading for me at a place called the Velvet Teacup. We practiced several pieces together and I told her my story about meeting Leonard Cohen, which she hadn't heard before.

The reading was advertised for 6:00 pm on an Easter Sunday. Joni and I showed up at 4:00 with the sound equipment but the place was locked. We rapped on the windows - silence, We shaded our eyes to look through the glass - darkness. We stood outside with our gear, feeling like an outtake from Spinal Tap. Finally Joni took off with some change to find a pay phone to call the manager. The manager said: Sorry, it was Easter and they were closed until 8:00 pm. He had given the staff the day off to be with their families.

Now, everyone should be so fortunate as to have a friend like Joni, someone who is quick witted and who will be totally unscrupulous on their behalf. She said to the owner:
"Look, have you ever heard of a poet named Leonard Cohen?"
"Certainly," he said, "he's a wonderful poet, a great singer-songwriter"
"Well," Joni explained "the man who's here today is a close friend and associate of Leonard Cohen's and he came all the way to Tucson to do this reading."
The cafe owner was mortified. "I'm so sorry," he apologized, "I'll have somebody right there to open it up. Oh, please tell him I'm so sorry he had to wait out in the hot sun."

Blatant name dropping and celebrity mongering, of course. My excuse now is that, if other people are so impressed by it, that's their fault as much as mine.

Seconds after Joni came back from making the call, the barista, abruptly snatched from her family table, came roaring up in her car. She stormed into the coffee house, straightened the tables, wiped stuff up, and let us in. We set up but didn't have time for a sound check which, it turned out, we didn't need. The show went well and we called repeatedly for everyone to be sure to tip the barista. And after a while she did come around.

She heard we were from Minneapolis and asked us if we knew Prince.