Author Archives: Michael-Patrick Harrington

RIP Grant Hart

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In the summer between my junior and senior years in prep school, Rolling Stone ran an article on the underground music scene in the US, which included R.E.M., the Minutemen, Minor Threat, Meat Puppets, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and a Minneapolis band described as being power punk pop, Hüsker Dü. In July, the group released a double LP, Zen Arcade. The first listen was devastating. They screamed and sang and road feedback into hell and acoustic guitars into heaven. I felt as if a veil had been lifted. There was a whole world of music that I didn’t know existed before the RS piece, and I wanted to hear it all. The first two R.E.M. albums raised the hairs on neck. Minor Threat scared the hell out of me. My mom banned the Dead Kennedys because of their name. (They still ended up on my turntable!) In the fall, I bought Let It Be by the Replacements, another Minneapolis band. Just the name of the record told me that these guys didn’t bow to the gods of classic rock. But Hüsker Dü led the pack. When they signed to Warner Brothers in ’86, it was exciting: the underground, in all its noisy glory, breaking into the mainstream. Alas, it was not to be. By ’88, they broke up (in a messy way). But the damage had been done: a transcendent R.E.M. broke through the year before, and in 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind (named after a Replacements song) and nothing has been the same since. Hüsker Dü ‘s drummer/singer Grant Hart was more than just the indie Keith Moon; he was an excellent songwriter. Sometimes he toiled in the shadow of band mate Bob Mould, but Grant’s voice was so jubilant, it was hard to forget. I still love and listen to Hüsker Dü. If you want to give them a try, start with the album Brand New Day. It will blow your hair back. RIP Grant.

From: RollingStone.Com:

Grant Hart, Husker Du Drummer and Singer, Dead at 56

By Daniel Kreps

Grant Hart, drummer and singer of the seminal alternative rock band Hüsker Dü, has died at 56 after being diagnosed with cancer. The news was confirmed by his bandmate Bob Mould on Facebook.

“The tragic news of Grant’s passing was not unexpected to me,” Mould wrote. “My deepest condolences and thoughts to Grant’s family, friends, and fans around the world. Grant Hart was a gifted visual artist, a wonderful story teller, and a frighteningly talented musician. Everyone touched by his spirit will always remember.”

The St. Paul, Minnesota-born Hart formed Hüsker Dü – Danish for “Do you remember?” – in the late Seventies along with singer/guitarist Bob Mould and bassist Greg Norton. The trio met when Mould, then a college student, frequented the record stores that bassist Greg Norton and Hart worked at.

“It was the fall of 1978,” Mould wrote on Facebook. “I was attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. One block from my dormitory was a tiny store called Cheapo Records. There was a PA system set up near the front door blaring punk rock. I went inside and ended up hanging out with the only person in the shop. His name was Grant Hart.”

Hart, who previously played keyboards in other Minnesota acts, became Hüsker Dü’s drummer by default: He owned a drum kit – his older brother’s, who was killed by a drunk driver when Hart was 10 – and the band couldn’t find another drummer to join them.

At the onset, Mould largely shouldered the songwriting load on Hüsker Dü’s early albums – the breakneck live 1982 LP Land Speed Record and 1983’s Everything Falls Apart – but Hart would take the lead on early Dü cuts like the post-punk “Statues,” “Wheels” and “What Do I Want?”

Although entrenched in the city’s burgeoning hardcore scene – fellow Twin Cities rockers the Replacements and Soul Asylum would also find nationwide audience – Hüsker Dü didn’t neatly conform to the genre’s look or sound, with Hart often labeled a “hippie” due to his long hair and habit of playing drums barefoot.

While Mould’s songs were bolstered by his trademark urgent and ragged delivery, Hart’s vocals were more traditional, which only mildly smoothed the rough edges of the vociferous hardcore tracks. Their style was on display on songs like Metal Circus’ “Diane,” a song ostensibly about a murdered Minnesota waitress, and “It’s Not Funny Anymore.”

Hüsker Dü bristled against the rubric of the hardcore scene in other ways besides their music: Mould was openly gay and Hart often brought male partners on tour.

“When you’re dealing with a very small orbit, it doesn’t seem like such a big thing. Then, by the time it would be a big thing, the people you’re dealing with have dealt with it,” Hart told the AV Club in 2000. “They accept it, they’re cool behind it, and they’re doing it themselves, but we can’t let the people down in Topeka think that’s the case. And really, it didn’t define much about the band. If anything, it would have been just another question mark, because we were so unlike the stereotype du jour.”

The Metal Circus EP, Hüsker Dü’s first release on the famed hardcore label SST, also marked a turning point for the band’s songwriting as they shifted away from hardcore toward a more expansive, varied sound that incorporated elements of punk, folk and straight-up rock and roll. The result was Hüsker Dü’s pioneering double-LP concept album Zen Arcade – “a thrash Quadrophenia,” David Fricke wrote in his 1985 review – which served as a blueprint for the alternative music scene that would bubble up in its aftermath.

On the landmark album – which Rolling Stone placed as Number 33 on the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s and Number 13 on the Greatest Punk Albums of All Time lists – Hart contributed songs like the classic overdose saga “Pink Turns to Blue,” “Standing by the Sea” and “Turn on the News,” one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

“Maybe the tension of the band, the challenging of one from the other … You hear some live bootlegs, and Bob and I are working so hard to outshine each other that it just lifts the whole thing off the ground with peace and wonderfulness,” Hart said of the group’s dynamics.
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1985’s New Day Rising, released just six months after Zen Arcade, featured standout Hart tracks like the fan favorite “Books About UFOs,” featuring Hart on piano, and “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill.” In December of that year, Hüsker Dü put out Flip Your Wig, which firmly cemented their power-pop sound. Hart’s gorgeous “Green Eyes” and “Keep Hanging On” highlighted that LP, the band’s last for SST before they made the jump to major label Warner Bros.

For 1986’s Candy Apple Grey, the trio zoomed “in on personal relationships and private emotional torment with an impassioned directness that reached a dark apex,” David Fricke wrote in his liner notes to the Huskers’ live LP The Living End, which documented their 1987 tour. The album featured Hart’s “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely,” later covered by Green Day.

While Hart and Mould’s songwriting continued to mature, the two butted heads creatively on the 1988 double LP Warehouse: Songs and Stories: On that 20-song album, Mould wrote 11 songs and Hart wrote nine.

“Point blank, Mould told me when we were working on Warehouse, ‘We’re not going to finish this song and this song because that would make the album equal: ten songs Bob, ten songs Grant. And that is never going to happen in this band,'” Hart said of the breakup.

Although Hart’s drug use was also blamed for the dissolution of Hüsker Dü – “Only one of three drug-abusing people [in Hüsker Dü] was crucified about it,” Hart said – it was the feud between Hart and Mould and suicide of Hüsker Dü’s manager David Savoy on the eve of the Warehouse tour that ultimately led to the demise of the band.

Following his Dü tenure, Hart launched a solo career with 1989’s Intolerance before assembling the Nova Mob, who released a pair of LPs, 1991’s The Last Days of Pompeii and 1994’s Nova Mob. That band’s name was inspired by the Nova Express, a novel by William S. Burroughs; Hart and the legendary beat author fostered a friendship during the latter years of Burroughs’ life, with Hart attending Burroughs’ 1997 funeral in Lawrence, Kansas. Through Burroughs, Hart also became acquainted with Patti Smith, with Hart providing piano on her 2000 track “Persuasion.”

Hart resumed his solo career with 1999’s Good News for the Modern Man. His last completed album was 2013’s The Argument – based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost – but Hart, according to Norton, was working on a concept album based on the life of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski prior to his death.

In 2004, Hart and Mould reunited onstage at a benefit concert for Soul Asylum bassist Karl Mueller, who was battling throat cancer. The performance marked the first time the two Huskers played together in 16 years, and ultimately the last time.

As Norton told Rolling Stone in August after Hüsker Dü’s Savage Young Dü box set was announced, tensions between the band had largely dissipated as they found a middle ground on the business side of the relationship. Norton, though, added that a Hüsker Dü reunion would “100 percent” never happen.

In July, Minneapolis’ Hook & Ladder saluted Hart with an all-star concert with Norton and Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner. The gig featured Hart’s last onstage performance.

“We made amazing music together,” Mould wrote in his tribute to Hart. “We (almost) always agreed on how to present our collective work to the world. When we fought about the details, it was because we both cared. The band was our life. It was an amazing decade … Godspeed, Grant. I miss you. Be with the angels.”

© Rolling Stone 2017

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From RollingStone.Com:

How St. Vincent Battled Anxiety and Made Her Best Album Yet

Annie Clark had so much success it literally made her sick. But she channeled that stress into the bold new ‘Masseduction’

By Kory Grow, Rolling Stone

In 2014, Annie Clark’s career could not have been going better. After years of carving out her place as a cult hero, the singer-guitarist – who records as St. Vincent – found a surprising level of success with her fourth LP, St. Vincent, which reached Number 12 on the album charts. Clark toured the world, fronted Nirvana at their live reunion at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and turned in one of the more memorable Saturday Night Live performances in recent years, playing inside a giant box and doing strange choreography between fuzz-guitar outbursts.

“If you want to know about my life, listen to this record,” singer says

But if you ask Clark, that period wasn’t a lot of fun. “I was going out of my mind,” she says. “I was on the road constantly and just trying to keep up with the pace. It was go-go-go, and I didn’t have incredibly well-developed coping mechanisms. I was just trying to keep my sanity.” Clark started taking medication for anxiety and depression. Today, she credits pharmaceuticals with helping her move on to the next phase of her career. In fact, they even influenced her excellent new album, Masseduction (out October 13th); one of the first songs she wrote for the LP was “Pills,” a jittery guitar-scraper with a childlike melody. Masseduction is Clark’s most intriguingly complex album to date. She recorded with producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde), working up a set of songs about sex, drugs and sadness. The music she came up with straddles New Wave, ambient rock and straight-ahead pop, and features appearances by jazz virtuoso and Kendrick Lamar sideman Kamasi Washington, Jenny Lewis, and producer and Dr. Dre bassist Mike Elizondo. Model and actress Cara Delevingne (whom Clark dated before they split last year) guests on back-up vocals. “What sold me on working with Annie was how much she was willing to expose and how ready she was to rip it all apart and go all in,” Antonoff says. “It’s exactly in line with how I like to make records right now.”

Clark, 34, has spent most of the past two years out of the public eye. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy. “I don’t take time off,” she says. “I tweeted this the other day, but it’s true: ‘Work is more fun for me than fun.'” Since St. Vincent, she’s directed a short horror film for XX, an anthology spotlighting female directors, and announced plans to direct a film that would reimagine The Picture of Dorian Gray with a female lead. She also designed a custom electric guitar for Ernie Ball instruments and built a recording studio in Los Angeles.

After she turned in the completed Masseduction, Clark made an alternate, stripped-down version of the LP with pianist Thomas Bartlett (a release date for which has not been announced). While recording in New York and L.A., she would hold herself to epic studio binges, a process she calls “monastic fantastic.” Says Clark, “I’m just totally burrowed and celibate and 100 percent dedicated. I took a nap earlier, which was great. But I don’t really do anything but make things.” The songs she has written can deal with anything from sexual role-playing to suicide. One of Masseduction’s highlights is the sorrowful “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” in which she sings about losing touch with a friend who is bogged down by drugs and depression. “That’s a banger,” she says sarcastically. Some artists might worry about being so revealing on record, but Clark doesn’t mind inviting people in. “It’s just my life,” she says. “Besides, you can’t fact-check a record.”

 

We Will Come Around

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We are now in a low point in American history. But we survived Nixon, we survived George W. Bush. We will always survive. They can force us down, they can call the people protesting Nazis (Nazis!) the alt-left. They can force their god down our throats. They can ignore science. They can try to give tax breaks to the rich and leave roughly 15-20 million Americans without health insurance. They can try to pass draconian immigration laws in a country of immigrants. They can try to stop a woman’s right to choose or a gay couple’s right to marry.

Guess what? We always win in the end. The religious right, the alt-right, the Nazis, the climate deniers – they will end up in the dustbin of history, just like those that opposed the Civil Rights Act and the traitors that made up the Confederacy. Why? Because Americans, down deep, realize that in order for the truths of the Declaration to be “self-evident” and “unalienable,” they have to be true for EVERYONE. There was a time when blacks were slaves and Native Americans were slaughtered and women couldn’t vote and certain churches, mosques, and temples were not protected as promised and African-Americans were separate but not equal and gays and lesbians couldn’t marry. See, we as a country, we come around (often slowly). You may not like or agree with an idea or a law, and you have the absolute right to petition your lawmakers. But down deep, to love this country is to love the ideas it was founded upon. And, yes, some of our Founding Fathers were flawed men – but we are not here to speak of individual flaws. We are here to revel and rejoice in their ideas. To be an American is to look around and realize that that the people at work, in your neighborhood, at the mall, are different than you, yet the same. They are Americans, and they deserve the chance to fully understand what that means. The rights are for all or the rights are for none. There is no in between. Not here. Not ever.

Michael-Patrick Harrington
Ambler, Pennsylvania

 

From CNN.com:

DC’s Lincoln Memorial vandalized with spray-painted expletive
Miranda Green

By Miranda Green, CNN

Washington (CNN)The National Park Service is actively working to remove graffiti found spray-painted in red on a pillar of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall early Tuesday morning.
The graffiti was discovered around 4:30 a.m. ET Tuesday and appears to say “[expletive] law,” according to a statement provided by NPS. NPS also found indecipherable graffiti in silver spray-painted over a map of the Smithsonian museums in another area of the National Mall.

Both sites of vandalism are already being actively cleaned up by a National Mall and Memorial Parks monument preservation crew. Cleanup will continue until all evidence of the graffiti is gone, according to the NPS statement. The United States Park Police is currently investigating the incident.

This is not the first time that national monuments in DC have been tampered with. In February, the World War II, DC War Memorial, Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were all vandalized with conspiracy-filled graffiti.

The graffiti consisted of text written in sharpie or magic marker, officials said, and included the words “Jackie shot JFK” and a message related to the September 11 attacks, according to US Park Police spokesperson Sgt. Anna Rose.

Back in 2013, the statues of Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial and Joseph Henry, outside the headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution, were also vandalized with green paint

Conscience not Party

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I’ve tried to stop making political posts. Too many trolls. No debate – just name-calling. But I have to say, for the first time in a long time, I respect John McCain. I always liked him. My dad did too. Vince was a lifelong Republican who despised Bush II. We agreed there, but we also agreed on McCain (and I’m a lifelong Democrat). But when McCain ran for president, he called himself a maverick too many times to count, then said he wasn’t, then pulled Sarah Palin out of the obscurity in which she so clearly belonged. (Thank god for Tina Fey!) While I didn’t want McCain to win, I thought he was a great candidate – until he plainly wasn’t. He became wishy-washy. But last night’s Senate vote earned him the mantle of maverick once again. In the twilight of his time in public service, he served the public by following his conscience, not his party.

The Defenders are Coming!

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Yea! The Defenders are coming in August, and it looks like Misty Knight, Colleen Wing, and Claire Temple will be joining our heroes: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist. (Stick is around too, no pun intended,) Also appearing in the trailer is Elektra, but I think she’s on the wrong side, the evil Sigourney Weaver’s side. This should be cool, even though Iron Fist is a little lame.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_6J9BqgonU&feature=player_embedded

John Lennon and Rolling Stone and Playboy

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Below is an article from Rolling Stone about John Lennon’s history with the magazine.But the long interviews he did with Playboy shortly before his death are nothing less than astounding. He goes from track to track, from “Love Me Do” to the Double Fantasy album. Check them out. I pasted links below to Amazon. (I think they are the same but with different titles). When I was a kid, I read and re-read those interviews so often, the book’s spine isn’t so much creased as caved in; I’m surprised it holds together. But to hear John go song by song through his history is just amazing.

Link# 1 to Amazon: The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono: The Final Testament

Link# 2 to Amazon: All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Here is the Rolling Stone article:

50th Anniversary Flashback: Inside John Lennon’s Long History With Rolling Stone

John Lennon was the ‘North Star’ for ‘Rolling Stone’ since the magazine’s earliest days, and his interviews in these pages made news around the world

On December 8th, 1980, Annie Leibovitz arrived at the New York apartment building of John Lennon and Yoko Ono to photograph the couple for a cover of Rolling Stone. She urged them both to take their clothes off, a flashback to their first Rolling Stone cover, in 1968, when they appeared naked to promote their Two Virgins album. Ono declined, but Lennon was game, and stripped down before getting on the floor near their bed and curling up in a fetal position next to the woman he called “Mother.” “I remember peeling the Polaroid and him looking at it and saying, ‘This is it. This is our relationship,’ ” Leibovitz recalled. Hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of the building.

The image (which in 2005 was voted the best magazine cover of the previous 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors) appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone‘s January 22nd, 1981, issue. It was the heartbreaking end of a 13-year relationship between Lennon and the magazine. In his Rolling Stone interviews over the years, Lennon was startlingly open. He explained the Beatles’ breakup to the world, fought Richard Nixon’s attempts to deport him, shared the stories behind his songs, and talked about everything from his macrobiotic diet to primal-scream therapy. In Rolling Stone, Lennon saw a magazine that shared his passions and his worldview; in turn, he shined a light on the young magazine. “John, more purely than anybody else at the time, symbolized rock & roll,” says Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner. “He was the most natural heir to Elvis. Everything he and Yoko did to support Rolling Stone added a little of their luster. It gave us credibility and authority.”

The relationship started with Rolling Stone‘s first issue. When Wenner needed an image for the cover of RS 1 (November 9th, 1967), he saw a publicity shot of Lennon as Private Gripweed in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War. “It was a day before deadline,” says Wenner. “This was the best thing we had on hand. It was incredibly fortuitous, symbolic and prophetic of the future.”

A year later, Wenner heard record stores were selling Two Virgins in a plain brown wrapper, since Lennon and Ono appeared naked on the album’s cover. Rolling Stone editor emeritus Ralph Gleason suggested the magazine contact Beatles publicist Derek Taylor and ask to see the images in full. “They said OK and sent it over,” says Wenner. “It was as simple as that.”

The cover – accompanied by an interview by Jonathan Cott – caused a national scandal. Featuring Lennon and Ono naked from behind (the full-frontal shots were inside), it hit newsstands on November 23rd, 1968. A New Jersey postmaster general stopped issues from going to East Coast subscribers. One San Francisco newsstand employee was arrested for selling obscene material. (nude beat-le perils s.f., declared a San Francisco Chronicle headline soon after.) Wenner was exuberant. “The point is this,” he wrote in the next issue. “Print a famous foreskin and the world will beat a path to your door.”

Lennon realized Rolling Stone was the perfect medium for communicating with his fans. He wrote an account of the chaos that surrounded the proposed 1970 Toronto Peace Festival, and when Lennon and Ono staged their “Bed-in for Peace” in Montreal in 1969, Rolling Stone writer Ritchie Yorke was by their side. “It was the early days of John and Yoko together, and John was anxious to make his own statement,” recalled Yorke, who died in February. “I was very impressed by what he was trying to say.”

A year after the Bed-in, Lennon and Ono went to California to study primal-scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov. They decided to stop by the Rolling Stone office, a tiny loft space above a printing press in San Francisco. “The office was totally agog,” says Wenner. “The Beatles were like distant gods. People didn’t meet them.”

Wenner and his wife, Jane, wanted to show Ono and Lennon around the city. Let It Be, which chronicles the band’s contentious studio sessions in 1969, was playing at a theater. Somehow, none of the four had seen it. “The ticket taker did a double take,” says Jane. “When Paul sang ‘Let It Be,’ John began to cry, and then Yoko started to cry. Pretty soon we were all crying. They were just so raw from the primal-scream therapy.”

Around this time, Wenner was gently urging Lennon to agree to an interview. Finally, in late 1970 – eight months after Paul McCartney had announced the breakup of the Beatles in a press release – Lennon decided it was time to talk. Wenner was summoned to New York, where Lennon and Ono talked to him for four hours at the office of Beatles manager Allen Klein. “My goal was to get the story of the Beatles from his point of view,” says Wenner. “The story of the band’s breakup really hadn’t been told.”

What he got was one of the most revealing interviews in rock history. Lennon showed sides of himself the public had never quite seen: grown-up, clear-eyed, even a little bitter. He admitted to using heroin, blasted the utopian “myth” of the Beatles, and outlined the band’s breakup in shocking detail: “That film [Let It Be] was set up by Paul for Paul. That is one of the main reasons the Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.”

The 36,000-word interview, divided into two cover stories in early 1971, was front-page news all around the world. The New York Times devoted massive space to the more explosive quotes the paper ran next to a surreal drawing of Lennon ripping a ball and chain from his head. “This was the first time we really broke news,” Wenner recalls. “That was the single launch that shot us into the big time.”

The interview captured both Wenner and Lennon at pivotal points in their lives. “I was just 25,” says Wenner. “He had just turned 30. Being in the Beatles is not an experience you can fully integrate and assimilate and understand and put into perspective when you’re that young and it just stopped. Similarly, I’m still a young kid just learning journalism.”

In the following years, the magazine was side-by-side with Lennon in his new cause: fighting the Nixon administration’s attempts to deport him for his anti-war efforts. Rolling Stone ran editorials and covered the legal battle in detail. In 1975, Lennon’s deportation order was reversed. “We couldn’t have done it without you,” Lennon and Ono wrote to Rolling Stone in October ’75. “Thanks to all the wellwishers who sent cards, ‘grammes, gifts, etc., for the great triple event (judges decision/baby Sean/on J.L.s’ birthday)!!!”

In late 1980, after Lennon had taken half a decade away from the spotlight to raise his son Sean, word came that Lennon and Ono had completed Double Fantasy, and would agree to an interview at their apartment building, the Dakota. Wenner again assigned the story to Cott. Lennon was optimistic and blunt during the interview, full of enthusiasm and strong opinions. “[The press] only like[s] people when they’re on the way up, and when they’re up there, they’ve got nothing else to do but shit on them,” Lennon said. “I cannot be on the way up again. What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I’m not interested in being a dead fucking hero.”

Cott accompanied Lennon and Ono to the recording studio as they worked on a remix of “Walking on Thin Ice.” They would finish it three nights later, minutes before he was killed. “The night they met, they made Two Virgins,” Cott recalls. “Their first and last dates were both musical collaborations. I find that extraordinary.”

Like much of the country, Wenner learned about Lennon’s shooting from Howard Cosell’s announcement on Monday Night Football. Wenner walked across Central Park to the Dakota in
a daze to join a throng of mourners. “There was a bit of singing and people holding candles,” he says. “People genuinely didn’t know what to do.”

The next morning, the Rolling Stone staff began work on a tribute issue celebrating Lennon’s life. “They were mocking up [cover] photos with John’s portraits,” said Leibovitz. “I said, ‘Jann, I promised John the cover would be him and Yoko.’ And Jann backed me up. I said it was the last promise.” In the following years, Wenner grew close to Ono, and Rolling Stone became a leading voice in the campaign against handguns. Even in death, Lennon is still an important part of the magazine. “He put the imprimatur of John Lennon on this magazine,” says Wenner. “And he remains a North Star for us.”

 

Patti Smith pays tribute to her late friend, playwright Sam Shepard

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Patti’s words cut like steel through the rain.

 

From the New Yorker:

Sam Shepard and Patti Smith at the Hotel Chelsea in 1971.Photograph by David Gahr/Getty

 

My Buddy
By Patti Smith
August 1, 2017

 

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

“Gogol was Ukrainian,” he once said, seemingly out of nowhere. Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.

He sent a message from the mountains of Bolivia, where Mateo Gil was shooting “Blackthorn.” The air was thin up there in the Andes, but he navigated it fine, outlasting, and surely outriding, the younger fellows, saddling up no fewer than five different horses. He said that he would bring me back a serape, a black one with rust-colored stripes. He sang in those mountains by a bonfire, old songs written by broken men in love with their own vanishing nature. Wrapped in blankets, he slept under the stars, adrift on Magellanic Clouds.

Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.

In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same institution where Samuel Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and, in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.

Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving. From then on, I visited him, and we read and talked, but mostly we worked. Laboring over his last manuscript, he courageously summoned a reservoir of mental stamina, facing each challenge that fate apportioned him. His hand, with a crescent moon tattooed between his thumb and forefinger, rested on the table before him. The tattoo was a souvenir from our younger days, mine a lightning bolt on the left knee.

Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you there.” I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors—saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.
We had our routine: Awake. Prepare for the day. Have coffee, a little grub. Set to work, writing. Then a break, outside, to sit in the Adirondack chairs and look at the land. We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation. We knew each other for such a long time. Our ways could not be defined or dismissed with a few words describing a careless youth. We were friends; good or bad, we were just ourselves. The passing of time did nothing but strengthen that. Challenges escalated, but we kept going and he finished his work on the manuscript. It was sitting on the table. Nothing was left unsaid. When I departed, Sam was reading Proust.

Long, slow days passed. It was a Kentucky evening filled with the darting light of fireflies, and the sound of the crickets and choruses of bullfrogs. Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep. A sleep that led to an unwitnessed moment, as love surrounded him and breathed the same air. The rain fell when he took his last breath, quietly, just as he would have wished. Sam was a private man. I know something of such men. You have to let them dictate how things go, even to the end. The rain fell, obscuring tears. His children, Jesse, Walker, and Hannah, said goodbye to their father. His sisters Roxanne and Sandy said goodbye to their brother.

I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff. The rain fell, obscuring tears. I knew that I would see Sam again somewhere in the landscape of dream, but at that moment I imagined I was back in Kentucky, with the rolling fields and the creek that widens into a small river. I pictured Sam’s books lining the shelves, his boots lined against the wall, beneath the window where he would watch the horses grazing by the wooden fence. I pictured myself sitting at the kitchen table, reaching for that tattooed hand.

A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. “He dreams of horses,” I told the lion. “Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.” I headed to the French border, a crescent moon rising in the black sky. I said goodbye to my buddy, calling to him, in the dead of night.
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