APOCALYPSE WHEN?

My dear old friend Jim Dickinson had a mostly unspoken umbrella philosophy for dozens of principles, theories, hypotheses, hypotenuses and probably hippopotamuses too, that he raised up from pups down on his north Mississippi Zebra ranch. As any self-respecting anthropological ‘pataphysical philosophical prankster prophet of the coming apocalyptic World Boogie would do, he always kept all his plates spinning at once, but all at different speeds, as he allowed the principles and theories that made up this philosophy to organically insinuate themselves into the various projects he was working on until they gradually embodied their own highest essence, and, one-by-one, were ready to be released, for better or worse, like the birthing process itself, into the outside world. The principal principle-theory of that philosophy that seems most appropriate to celebrate slightly more than a half-year after he checked out was called The Good Parts, which was a creative-editing system he envisioned to cut out the boring, mundane, sesquipedalian, cliché ridden stupidity of the ordinary and, very simply, only keep the good parts of the song, album, story, movie, poem, painting, book you were working on. How you actually went about doing that, of course, was not that simple, and hardly ever the same from one project to the next.

That was the truth of the joke, or if you prefer, the joke of the truth. Either way, when all was said and done, actualizing the good parts all came down to a matter of the artist’s own personal taste and aesthetic distance.  If the so-called artist had none of one and didn’t have the patience to wait for the other, they were more likely to cut out the good parts (if there were any) than the bad parts, but ironically, as the buying habits of the great Mass Audience of Apocalypse (MAA) almost always proves, you have much more chance for being rewarded out in the polluted mainstream marketplace for something not very good at all than for something very good indeed, and you have much more chance of being rewarded out in the world for something false than you do for something true, indeed.  This is not something any one of you out there riding along with my indulgence for the theoretical meaning of meaning doesn’t already know is the great chink in the conceit of the marketplace as a true measuring rod for the facade of Democracy.  Lowest Common De’dumbass almost always rules in the marketplace, as the recent phenomenon of empty-headed conformists thinking they were Going Rogue climbed on top of Quantitative Slut Goddess known as the New York Times bestseller list, while the world of corporate consumption mourned the triumph of Tiger Woods lost sluthood.  Of course, we in the cult ghetto would like to believe there are always exceptions to the rules of bad taste.  But always is pushing the river of belief back up the whazoo of stagnant reality just a little too far for even a cosmic Owsley enema to unblock the passage, so let’s just simply say there are exceptions to the rule, and thank our lucky stars for The Big Bungler at least tossing us that bone of contention.  Though if we who don’t-believe-in-anything-at-all believe in anything at this point, we must know those bones are really mistakes in a system that The Big Bungler deliberately designed not to work in the first place, thus providing us poor agnostic-bodhissatvic (turning-arthritic) souls down here on lonely earth the possibility of witnessing an occasional ooh-aww-ooh full court mind swish type miracle to diddle with the foundation of our sacred alienation.  In short, it sort of gives you an edge if you know the critical question we all have to deal with at one time and/or many others is good old reliable To be or not to be. . . Dickinson savored that choice and that edge, but he was the exception to the exception.

It’s not a stretch of personal history, or even poetic license, to say Dickinson and I first bonded in a decrepit Music City brothel, when we were still wet-behind-the-ears 18-year olds.  For whatever it’s worth in the long run, we shared a magical epiphany tossed at us by a mystical Adept pimp — Jim swears was named Archie, but I’m sure was called Fudge. It was the first lesson we shared as linguistic collaborators. A few days before that magical excursion into dialectical debauchery, a mutual friend who had gone to high school with Dickinson in Memphis decided to connect the two of us and hopped into the shotgun seat of Dickinson’s two door black 1950 Ford and they took off down Highway 100, from Memphis to Nashville, and didn’t stop again until they reached my parents’ house up on Love Circle, 200 miles away.  My folks had left town for two weeks in the middle of August because I was safely ensconced in some shitty chain gang type job up in the wastelands of East Jesus, Indiana, and they thought their house would be safe with my main mole little brother taking care of it.  Even before he let me know they had gone and I quit the job — selling $1 photo coupons door-to-door for some traveling flim-flam photographer buddy of the old man’s — and hitchhiked back home, smoke signals had been sent out to everyone I knew that I was throwing a party.

It was 1960, and there was something in the air. . .A couple of months earlier Dickinson had graduated from White Station high school; he had already finished a novel and left his band The Regents behind, convinced that he was “retiring from music.”

The high bourbon-mark - as it were - of The Regents career was one night in 1959 at the National Guard Armory when we opened for Bo Diddley. That night there was this slight contract dispute. Bo Diddley - who was several hours late when he got there - he looked at the contract. Richard Sales - who was then president of TKO, putting on the dance - he had this contract. He says, “Now you’re taking one break - you’re here late already - now you’re just gonna take one break.” And Bo Diddley says, “No, I’m taking three breaks.” Richard says, “No, no - look down here in the contract - it says you’re taking one break.” Bo Diddley reaches in his pocket and he gets this little greasy square of paper and he unfolds it about twenty times and - sure enough - it’s the contract. And he says, “Yeah.” - he folds it back up and puts it in his pocket - “it says that in my contract too but I tell you what.” He points at me and says, “You could have been Bo Diddley,” - he points at Stanley and says - “or he could have been Bo Diddley, but I am Bo Diddley and Bo Diddley is taking three breaks.”

He took three breaks and we played the breaks. He was way up on a pedestal and (Danny) Graflund was trying to climb up there and get to him - so he could play his maracas - wearing a six-pack of beer on his head like an Indian headdress. It was a spectacular moment.
We then launched into a cataclysmic medley of “Bo Diddley / Who Do You Love” and the fate of our souls - and livers - was secured forever.
Bo Diddley never came down - he stayed up there all night - and he looked down at one point, we were playing “Smokestack Lightnin” I think - and kinda gave us the thumbs up. Y’know, I thought I had it made at that moment.

He had a maraca-player named Jerome Green and I decided that I was gonna get my first ‘theatrical’ autograph. So, I went into the bathroom in between sets. Bo Diddley is still up there but Jerome and Clifton, the drummer, went in the bathroom. Jerome was sitting in the urinal - with a hairnet on over his pompadour - reading a Batman comic-book. He autographed my guitar case - my Silvertone guitar case that I bought from new and wish I still had - “Jerome Green, Bo Diddley Band.” If Bo Diddley were here tonight, he would say. . .”

Within two weeks he would go off to Baylor College in Waco, Texas, to become a theatre major, and unbeknownst to him at the time, become one of the first CIA acid guinea pigs. We wouldn’t see each other again until four years later, in the summer of 1964, when he arrived with his “child bride” Mary Lindsay at our mutual friend’s wedding at the infamous Hotel Texas, in the stench laden shadows of the historic Forth Worth stockyards.   A mere half year earlier Jack & Jackie and Lyndon & Lady Bird had all stayed in that same hotel – the same hotel they filmed Giant in in 1955 — before the President and his party boarded Air Force One the next day at Kelly AFB to make the short hop to Love Field in Dallas, for what would become the beginning of that long weird trip ahead, from the Book Depository to the grassy knoll and on. . .

Another four years passed before we hooked up again. I had written a novel of my own by that time, and was camping on an old college roommate’s couch in midtown Memphis, finishing a second one based on my half-crazed experiences working another shitty job as an undercover industrial trade spy for Coca Cola, when it occurred to me I actually knew a real writer, someone I could talk to about the shit I was doing. Which was when we first started hanging out in earnest and reading our writing to each other.

One afternoon, he passed a small, frog-shaped pipe to me as he began offering feedback on what I had read to him. His comments seemed totally irrelevant, yet they spun my head 360-degrees and bought me a ticket on the first tangent to catharsis.  It was almost as if he had explained what an apple was to me, and for the first time I suddenly understand the composition of an orange. In some unintentional way, it seemed like Dickinson was showing me how to perceive my own process.  But when I thanked him for the insight, he exploded (like the drums on The Replacements’ I.O.U. would years later) and barked, “You’re doing it yourself!  THE TEACHER IS THE ENEMY!”  Though most fairly conscious seven-year-olds suspect that the moment they first step into a classroom to be indoctrinated into the system, I had never heard it put more bluntly.  But maybe the profundity of what we both took for granted came from the weed.  It often did, in those glorious days.

Dickinson laughed at the suggestion.  For six months, he explained, he had been driving out to pick up Mary Lindsay at the Germantown stables where she trained jumping horses.  While waiting for her to finish, he would wander around, ducking into barns, tack rooms - any place where no one else was around.  He would always notice the spiderwebs.  At first it was instinct, he rationalized, not knowing why he began collecting them.  But as the webs grew into a huge ball of filth, inspiration took over.  When the ball got big and hard, he actually washed it.  Then dried it.  And dried it.  And dried it.  Then let it sit out in the sun for a month.

“We’re smoking it now,” he cackled.  It was the kind of infectious howl that could instantly start a crescendo of out-of-control side-splitting, tear-stained whooping for dear sweet life, even in a morgue.  Which was when I realized that the right half of my body was totally paralyzed!

“Mine too,” Dickinson whispered.

When I asked how long it would take for the numbness to go away, he admitted he didn’t know.  “This is the first time I’ve ever smoked it.”  By this time he was laughing so hard tears began rolling out from under his glasses, down his cheeks.  This was obviously a man who relished leaping head first into the unknown and spitting in the face of the void.  Despite a surge of fear rushing through the half of my body that wasn’t paralyzed, I suddenly started laughing too.  And couldn’t stop.

When Mary Lindsay finally came home from the stables five or six hours later, she found us sitting there, still unable to move, but still laughing like we had found Uncle Remus’ fabled Laughing Place and would never get out of it.

I’ll definitely miss that laugh. It was absolutely contagious. I’m sure I became so addicted to it over the years that whether it was conscious or not I not only must have played to it in my writing, but in some astonishing ways probably always will. Though the order of the time frame is little cloudy now, it’s all there, from all those afternoons we spent hanging out together (because he worked nights at John Fry’s Ardent Studios teaching himself to run the board, and beginning the transformation that would take him from an out of work novelist and boogie-woogie piano player to one of the most influential off-beat raconteurs, cultural historians and music producers of the next four decades), to continually staying in touch by letter and long distance, up until the last five or six years, when we dropped the letter and talked on the phone regularly two or three mornings a week (right up to the day before he went into the hospital for the last time). Mostly we were kicking around what people we knew were doing or not doing with their lives, going back to ideas we had shared over the years about different events, writers or performers, laughing over our mutual nightly fix of Chelsea Lately, attempting to collaborate with each other on various projects, ranging from a blues opereX centered around the King assassination, to a hard core Private Investigator tv series set in Memphis - with a character based on his alter ego Little Lorenzo narrating the action — to him enthusiastically agreeing to edit a special music issue of Smoke Signals. . . Basically it was an unfinished lifelong jam session, integrating the personal with the deeper philosophical meaning of those immortal words that that grand pimp had laid on us, to the absurdity of his father sending him off to college — with a lesson to remember for the rest of his life — after he heard what a low rent dive his son had frequented in Music City, to what happened to him when he finally went off to college – always what happened to him at Baylor – to pondering whether the presence of the ghost of James Dean had drunkenly wandered into our friend’s wedding when the band played The Eyes of Texas instead of the wedding march in the same ballroom they had used 11 years earlier to shoot Jett Rink’s classic pathetic – looking back alone on his life — drunk scene in Giant, to seven years later Richard Pryor calling Dickinson’s house looking for me to come back to NYC (after I had just escaped) to work with him, to Jerry Wexler blowing the opportunity for Atlantic to sign Pryor after I brought That Nigger Is Crazy to him on a silver platter, to Jim being in the right place at the right time to play piano for the Stones on Wild Horses, only because Ian Stewart couldn’t stand playing minor chords and the song began in B-minor, to the whole crazy Dixie Flyers recording experience down in Miami, to the stolen at gunpoint first interview (of hundreds & hundreds he did) in his career that (the then rock journalist) Lenny Kaye did with him (for some Men’s mag) when he came to NYC to promote his first album Dixie Fried. . . I’m sure most of these incidents will be in Search For Blind Lemon, the memoir he worked on for years, and finished right before he got sick.

The final words he left behind to calm his upset family and friends was a perfect summation of the situation if there ever was one. Though I wasn’t bedside in-person at the end, I can still hear his laugh in my head like an internal tuning fork, singing out, “I’m just dead, I’m not gone.”

MG

The Godfather of postpunk mutant funk, Jim Dickinson was (and still is) a Contributing Editor to Smoke Signals.He can be found singing Mark Unobsky’s ASSHOLE in the spring 08 issue and singing Dave Hickey’s BILLY & OSCAR in issue 09#1-2 . His work can be found and purchased from http://www.zebraranch.com/ The two cuts enclosed here – HARD TIMES and WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR are from his recently released album Dinosaurs Run in Circles.