37. Can’t Be Livin’ In The Past, Baby
The Year Of Paying Attention
Since the two best seats in the house had not been snatched up, and since I know a boatload of music lovers who’d jump at the chance to come with (as they say in Chicago), I completed my online purchase. And maybe I gloated a little. Then I shot an email to a good friend, who couldn’t come. That happened a few times over a few days. When I ran out of good friends, I started on the pretty good friends. Time passed. My pretty good friends were unavailable. Then I started contacting people I hadn’t seen in awhile, thinking, this is great, a chance to catch up. Nobody could make time to catch up. As the night of the show approached, it became a masochistic contest — how many turndowns could I collect? Quite a few, as it turned out. Irked and resolute, I and my two tickets went forth alone.
The moment he came on stage, I remembered why I’d been excited — John Hammond, Jr. is the real deal. A solitary figure banging on a weathered guitar for an eager crowd, the seventy-five-year-old son of the legendary New York music producer was in top form.
The evening had gotten off to a dubious start with opener Teddy Thompson, another son of a famous father, guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson. Teddy admitted he’d met Hammond only that night, and marveled at how great he looked, for an old guy. Teddy thought he was offering a compliment. Out of respect for his father, I’ll keep my opinions of Teddy’s music to myself. Gazing around City Winery from one of the two best seats, I spied mostly old people (i.e., people my age), with a few young people (Teddy’s age.) There were canes. I wondered when I’ll get my cane. Dr. John had a cane. Nothing wrong with a cane. Irritated by Thompson and impatient for Hammond, I resolved to stick around for three or four numbers, then shuffle home. I was bummed by the doddering crowd, the insolent opening act, the empty seats at the edges of the club.
Blues audiences have certain characteristics. This crowd was all white, suburban in feel, frumpy. At the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where the Blues Tent is among the largest and most popular, I noticed how guys, dressed like it’s Hallowe’en and they’re tick-or-treating as Hell’s Angels, stake out their turf and settle in to drink like delinquents while bellowing “Yeah!” Bandanas and paunches abound. There’s a paucity of good humor, an absence of joy, more of a “let’s git loaded and party” vibe. If you’re a blues fan, I’m not talking about you. Please.
I was introduced to blues music the same way every white American boy in the 60’s was, by the Brits — The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Animals, Cream, white English rockers who revered Black American artists I’d scarcely heard of: Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton.
As a teenager Hammond went to hear seminal bluesmen, those still alive and kicking, and dropped out of college to make music. He led a band that simultaneously included Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, for five days anyway, according to Wikipedia. Hammond didn’t get very famous.
As his set progressed I thought about the records I bought by white musicians, before I heard of the Black artists who inspired them, originators like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell, Leroy Carr. (If you didn’t know Pink Floyd took its name from two blues artists, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, now you do.) Mid-set Hammond described going to a Black Chicago blues club to hear Sonny Boy Williamson with two of the white guys I’d been thinking about, Mike Bloomfield, a guitarist of commanding power, who overdosed in 1981, and harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite, who is said to have quit drinking, and is still playing. By now I wasn’t going anywhere. I felt a little bad for all those friends who blew me off. Their loss. Hammond launched in an original, You Know That’s Cold, and sang,
“You know that’s cold, when your woman says you’re too damn old,
Can’t be livin’ in the past baby, maybe it’s just time to go…”
He finished the set, and everybody stood up to give him a standing ovation. He scooped up his harmonicas and slipped them into the pocket of his slacks, grabbed his guitar and dobro, bowed again, and walked off the stage. The lights came up. The crowd gathered up its belongings, one or two took hold on their canes, everyone a bit buzzed with a good feeling. There’d be no encore, and that was all right. The set had been solid. We were old, it was late, and we were going home. Can’t be living in the past, baby, it’s just time to go.
***
Usually he makes me laugh, but listening to Calvin Trillin read the introduction to his Jackson, 1964 And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America made me angry.
Some days back, Sarah published an essay online, titled White Mirror in Baltimore County, her thoughts and personal experiences with the police and racial injustice. Just hours after the piece appeared, two people, mentioned in passing in the essay, posted comments online, angry at how they’d been portrayed.
“A tempest in a teapot,” I repeated to Sarah, until finally she asked, “What does that even mean?” Having read Te-Nehisi Coates and Claudia Rankine in recent years, I recognize my own ignorance. I was one of those liberals who, after the election of Barack Obama, thought, gee, maybe we’re becoming a post-racial nation after all. Events since then highlight my naive and embarrassing incomprehension.
Calvin Trillin has long been a favorite, and when I read a review of this new essay collection, I was on the New York Public Library website in a flash, and, wonder of internet wonders, I was listening to Trillin himself read the book’s introduction minutes later. So stop complaining about the Internet.
Trillin’s introduction does a good job of describing how racism was, in his words, “taken for granted,” with no need for Whites Only signs, the country clearly segregated while lip service was paid to equality. “The people who think they’re white” is how Coates describes people like me. Even though the American ruling class considered Irish immigrants inferior, along with Italians, my two ancestor groups, today nobody wonders if I’m a citizen, or presumes I’m a criminal, or questions what I’m doing in my neighborhood late at night. It’s easy to forget about everybody who isn’t like me, those made to feel like outsiders and worse.
Sarah was commiserating about the online essay kerfuffle with another author friend, describing the angry complaints. “That’s how whiteness works,” her friend said, sympathetically.
***
I don’t live in a snooty building, but it has snooty amenities: pool in the basement, gym on the first floor, doorman, concierge, package room. (Maybe it is a fancy building. I don’t feel like a fancy person…) For my first quarter-century in residence, I was not a pool person. Ridiculous, really, to ignore a big, warm resource an elevator ride from my apartment, with its clean-ish locker room, hot-ish sauna, a punching bag hanging in a corner for pugilists, and rows of rarely-used chaise longues, surrounded by leafy plants that survive on indirect light from high windows.
I like Joseph, the lifeguard/manager, who greets me warmly, by name, every time I see him, now that I’ve become a pool guy. I can’t place Joseph’s accent, but it’s not New Yawk. Scores of fellow residents, some neighbors for decades, their names unknown to me, come to swim laps, or play ping pong in an alcove room, or teach their kids to swim at the shallow end, or take the waterobics class Joseph leads. He somehow remembers everybody’s names. It’s his superpower.
Not long after my pool guy transformation as I walked home from the subway, the evening sky dimming, I saw coming the other way the Red Bus, versions of which circle tiny Roosevelt Island collecting and depositing people at the tram, subway, supermarket or various apartment buildings. Inside stood Joseph, looking my way. I waved. He returned my wave, with enthusiasm. Someone observing us would presume it was an unexpected, joyful sighting between two dear old friends. Days later, walking to work through the lobby and peering at the pool below, gazing in wonder at the residents swimming early morning laps in their lanes, I spied Joseph, who promptly waved with the same manic gusto. I waved right back. Thereafter I sought new opportunities for manic waving.
Observing the lap swimmers got me thinking — I wanted to be confident in the water. I could swim, but not very well. So I purchased an online swim course, studied the downloadable booklet, and watched the videos. I would no longer feel like a drowning monkey after two laps. I would develop form, swim with ease and confidence, and protect my knees from injury. I would develop the long, lean physique of the swimmer.
I commenced my new routine, Joseph buzzing me in, always the same exchange, “How are you, Joseph?” “WONderful, Timothy.” Yesterday afternoon I buzzed in, and Joseph led the exchange. “How are you, Timothy?” “Dandy,” I said. “How are you?” He had a gleam in his eye. “Dandy!” he replied. He had appreciated the variation. We’d attained a new level in our relationship.
For Pool People, Joseph is the sun around which we, his planets, revolve. There’s the Guy Who Doesn’t Swim But Grips The Edge and Moves His Legs. I avoid his lane, respecting his process. There’s the Guy Who Swims Well with the Goatee, who seems to hang out doing nothing in the pool after swimming. There’s the Pugilist, trim, quiet, who smacks the bag, but doesn’t use the pool. There’s the Handsome Calm Guy I’ve seen for probably twenty years or more — he looks around my age, and when our paths crossed recently, he bid me “Good morning,” and I replied in kind, overriding the unspoken rule, one I like, that nobody talks to one another in the locker room.
There’s the Dad with the Little Boy, and last night there was the Gaggle of Waterobics People, led through their paces by Joseph. Consistently respectful of my personal space while swimming, there was the single occasion when, as I finished a lap, Joseph called out firmly, “Timo thy— you have to get out of the pool now. I’m closing in ten minutes.” I stopped at once.
I’m not too far along in the quest for ease and confidence in the pool. I study the videos, and try to remember the form I’d going for, and I have a snorkel the video instructor recommended to make progress easier. I also have a tiny waterproof music player with earphones that my friend Russ sent me, which I thought I’d never use. I figure I look like an idiot compared to the trim guys in their Speedos calmly racking up laps without a bunch of equipment. More than once, splashing quietly down the lane, I’ve inhaled a little water through the snorkel, and stood up to cough like a drowning monkey. “Are you alright, Timothy?” Joseph calls from the pool’s edge. “I’m okay, Joseph,” I assure him.
Next week: Do You See How Old He Is, Boys?
