Don't want nobody who won't dive for dimes
Don't want no speedballs 'cause I might die tryin
Throw me a line, throw me a line
'Cause there's a fat man in the bathtub with the blues
-Lowell George, Fat Man in the Bathtub
What to write on the last day of my 58th year?
Blood pressure's back up, 153 over 96 right after Slane woke us up hollering for his breakfast. Guess it's time to blow the dust off that self-care checklist that was working so well before P and I found ourselves back in the same physical space and the party began anew.
I had that nuclear annihilation dream again, the one where we are at some social function on the Gulf Coast, it's dusk, and there's a huge flash offshore and we all stop to gawk at the mushroom cloud, veins of lightning and fire coursing upward to the stratosphere, with this space of a few pregnant seconds before the shock wave hits and I wake up.
Maybe you have that one as well. I need to quit reading the newspaper.
Before I fell asleep last night, I found myself pondering the fact that Lowell George, the self-destructive genius behind Little Feat, has been dead now forty-two years, almost to the day. Obese and drug-addicted, poor Lowell ate a large pizza by himself while on tour, went back to his hotel room, and died of a heart attack. Maybe it was the pizza. Maybe it was all the drugs and booze.
But then I recalled a happier moment, my first encounter with Little Feat, some four years after Lowell George died and the band splintered.
I was a sophomore at USC, a very poor, non-scholarship AFROTC cadet with a hint of a southern accent in a West Coast milieu, trying to find my way in a huge city and already on my third change of major.
One of the upper classmen, Barry Wilkinson, hosted a beer-soaked party at his apartment one Thursday night. I was drawn by the free Budweiser. Barry was part Errol Flynn, part Dean Martin, tan and acne scarred with a pencil-thin mustache and a little bit of a midlife paunch to go with the cigarette he always held between his fingers when he wasn't in class or on the parade grounds. Barry was one of the cool kids in the cadet corps, a little sadistic to us underclassmen but also funny and charismatic.
Late in the evening, Barry took charge of the turntable and pulled out a well-worn, scratchy copy of Waiting for Columbus, a two record offering of Little Feat in concert before Lowell George's demise, when the band was at its peak.
The band takes the stage for the first song, Fatman in the Bathtub, quoted above. I am hooked.
Actually, Little Feat was a perfect fit for a lost twenty-year-old, would-be Southerner living in Los Angeles in the early 80s. A band comprised of some of Southern California's best studio musicians, and led by George, a musical prodigy from Hollywood who'd once been a member of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, Little Feat's cool Southern blues gave their songs a feel that was closer to New Orleans or Memphis than Los Angeles. Californians pretending to be delta bluesmen.
That all resonated with me. By that time I was living in maybe my twentieth venue, but had cleaved to Atlanta as "home" after spending four years in the Cobb County suburbs, even though I came from a very old Los Angeles family that to this day raises our next generations there.
Atlanta was the promised land, the place to which I'd return after my sojourn here in Babylon finally ended. Even in what could have been my hometown, I was never at home, always longing for some Southern shangri-la.
And so over the undergraduate years that followed, I would (badly) sing along with Lowell George, with the sort of feeling one experiences when they play one's national anthem at an Olympic event.
Well, you can drop me off on Peachtree
I got to feel that Georgia sun
And the women there in Atlanta
They make you awfully glad you come
I said watchin' them planes
I wish I was on one [those last two words drawn out, with feeling]
I'm sittin' here thinking 'bout my crazy dream
If I could only be there tonight
Whoa, Atlanta
Whoa, Atlanta
I said oh, oh Atlanta
I got to get back to you
I ended up raising my hand in my senior year at SC and volunteering to attend pilot training in Columbus, Mississippi, everyone's last choice but for me that much closer to the mythical homestead.
Maybe I also saw in the lyrics on Waiting for Columbus adumbrations of some of what was coming in life.
So you do what you want
And pretend again that it's time to roam 'cause you can't go home
Yeah, there's been a little of that. Or the singer's ode to an uncle who had the temerity to leave home and be happy, as described in Time Loves a Hero.
Now my aunt she is sad and lonely
She'll never know that she drove him away
As a coward I admire his courageous ways
Well they say that time loves a hero
But only time will tell
If he's real he's a legend from heaven
If he ain't he's a mouthpiece from hell
Looking back, it did take a certain callous courage to step away from an existence sapped of meaning and joy, to risk everything for what turned out to be the one good thing in this life. Wondering where that bold adventurer made off to these days, as I wring my hands over how to sustain this work model with an office a thousand miles from Tara and the lovely P.
Cortes, maybe it's time to burn your ships.
Another digression. I blame Covid.
As soon as I had the eleven dollars pulled together I purchased my own copy of Waiting for Columbus, and pretty much wore the grooves out during those last couple college years. Then it was off to pilot training, and later the band joined me by cassette in my Jeep Wrangler, top down and barreling across the New Mexico desert in the dark while I was at Fighter Lead-In Training, singing along with Dixie Chicken.
I've seen the bright lights of Memphis and the Commodore Hotel And underneath a street lamp, I met a Southern Belle Well, she took me to the river where she cast her spell And in that southern moonlight, she sang the song so well
If you'll be my Dixie Chicken, I'll be your Tennessee Lamb And we can walk together down in Dixieland Down in Dixieland
The CD provided the soundtrack for law school years later, with me feeling like I'd finally arrived in the Promised Land in Athens, just an hour's drive up the road from the Big A. My boy was getting to breathe that same verdant air and wander those same leafy hills I'd known as a child.
So how'd I end up in Panama City? Long story for another day, friend. Let's just say another's Jimmy Buffett soundtrack drowned out Lowell and the band, made me lose myself for just long enough to make a rather fateful vocational decision from which there wasn't any turning back after a while.
But it all turned out okay, didn't it? I listen to Radio Margaritaville on the farm, have made my peace with all that, credit a bad decision years ago for ultimately leading me to Peg and to all this.
And as I write this, Little Feat is belting out the blues on Spotify, as I stiff-arm starting my billable day in this beautiful place.
Barry Wilkinson's long dead from a heart attack, gone eleven years now. His roommate Bret, another party beast but with a kinder soul than Barry's, also dropped dead of a heart attack on a nature hike a couple years ago. And, of course, Lowell George, the original fat man in the bathtub, let his lifestyle overcome him at age 34.
Damn, I need to exercise a little more, drink a little less Jameson's and a little less coffee, start treating this race as a marathon instead of a sprint. Year 59 starts tomorrow. Here we go.
Comments