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About Beginnings

What is it about people in your life? Your grandmother, my grandfather (when I was about six I was cutting the lawn, did a horrible job, he was watching, and said “Tom, is that a good job?” I said “no”, he said “if a job was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well”. I cut that lawn five times before we both agreed. And never forgot it.). And then there was Katie Cole!

Who was Katie Cole? Isn’t that a question!

Katie Cole was a friend of my sister’s. She was beautiful, and sparky, and would get in your face at the drop of a hat. She was a year older than me, and all the way through high school I was very shy, and secretly drooling.

In college I was going to be a history teacher. I knew I needed to be planning something, and that was the closest thing to interesting. I had a professor who would teach periods by reading from the journals of the people involved. It made it come alive. I got into jazz, and started to sneak out of the house and go to the city to a small club on Divisidero called “The Both And”. I would hang in the alley and listen, and the people in the club knew I was going to get killed out there so they started letting me in and I would sit in the loft with my hardly shaving white face looking over the railing. I saw Miles Davis, and his historical quintet stopping time with his intensity, Philly Joe Jones playing different times on both sides of the cymbals, Jon Hendricks without Ross and Lambert. I saw legends on a 10x20 foot stage in a room not 30x50. The life those people could put into it. I hung out enough so that I knew Dizzy Gillespie’s bass player Chris White, and he knew me. Gillespie, now that guy would play. The amazing intensity it takes to get a quiet thing across, is something I am still learning. The precise, exact, calm, slash of a quiet thought with no reservation, and not twice.

Well, as you’ll recall, times were changing. And I ran into Katie. She would get me to take her to the city, and drop her off at the longshoreman’s hall, or some place, and I would go listen to jazz. But Katie being Katie, it wasn’t long before we were going to the Fillmore, and then Winterland. I would watch her putting lights in her shoe, and laughing as only she could do.

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This was a period with Viet Nam, and I was watching history. I realized, like, the western expansion of the continental United States was a political strategy necessary for the security of the nation. But it was done by marketing the west to families with nothing. Dreams of freedom and becoming landed gentry, were sold to factory workers, on ground with no infrastructure. For that to happen the buffalo had to go, and the Indians, where young men, my age, to have a dance with Katie, had to count coup, and steal horses. I had no idea what I had to do to have a real “date” with Katie. I was her ride, she had her boyfriends, and I was jealous. The buffalo were gone, and the culture destroyed, as it must be, with viciousness that made “the white man’s burden” a worthy dream. And we were in Viet Nam, and I had to decide. Ken Kesey lived in town, and Joan Baez. Dylan played a coffee house, and wrote about “where rivers freeze and summer ends”, which didn’t happen in Calif., John Hammond Jr., and Robert Johnson, and Gary Davis, Sleepy John Estes, all sang with a kind of emotion that was amazing. How could they wait until tomorrow to play a note, and then it was exactly right?

Well, all this was going on, and I had a couple of friends who were taking guitar lesions from the TV, and one night I picked up a guitar and made a couple of notes. Those two notes, the way they related to each other, and that you could play them, the same two notes with different attacks, or different times between, and they would feel different, made more sense to me than anything I ever had known. There was a kind of reality about those two notes I never knew could exist.

Katie had me listen to Sandy Bull, a New York guitar player, and John Fahey, who had just come out with what was the first independent record, and it was a hit. Bert Janch was an English guitar player, who later was with a group called Pentangle. He would run his guitar rhythms against his vocal like storm waves, icy grey-green against a breakwater on an overcast day. Branches exploding at 60 below zero. His honesty and humanity was staggering. These people were all making sounds similar to what I was hearing in my head. The amount of motion Joan Baez or Dylan would make with their guitars. Amazing. Dave Van Ronk. Leadbelly had been in prison, and the Governor of Texas visited, Leadbelly sang “if I was the Governor, and the Governor was me, I’d write him a pardon, and let him go free”, and the Governor did. There was Erik Satie. And Bitches Brew.

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Life churned.

Life wasn’t about a job, or what was in a book, nor was history about somebody’s journals, as human as that might have been. Life was in the fields of the south, or blew across Utah, where you could stand and feel like you were on a basketball floating through space, or in Boston, or New Orleans. Life was with kids making the same confrontive kinds of decisions I was. With coal miners who had to get drunk to crawl down a hole in the ground they had watched fall on their brothers and fathers, and die of black lung. Life was with the old cowboys, on the street with their grandsons in Jackson, broke, waiting out the snow storm which kept their jobs from starting, or the sailors on the Calif. coast. Friends getting married, having children and the wonderful looks in their eyes; and their wives not much wanting me around.

And there was some kind of rhythm to it all. Not very symmetrical, but you could hear it. And I wandered looking, and trying to play it.

Sitting on a curb in Boston crying because I had just “sold” something (the music) for some food, to people I couldn’t get to hear. I felt like a whore. And then learning the magic, those points far, far apart, but absolute, as I began to be able to get them to hear.

Katie Cole had opened that door. It is a universe I in some senses still live in. And I never really did thank her.

Time passes. The moon and the earth and the sun all move. This small forgotten galaxy changes in its relationship with the rest of the vastness of what is the physical universe. And people change too. One moment is, and then it is not.

About four years after those early San Francisco things I ran into her. I had a Jaguar (car), and we went to the beach. We made love all that night, it was the real thing. A dance on the beach in the moonlight. 40 years later, I still smile thinking about it.

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When I dropped her off at dawn we looked at each other and it was like seeing a heart beat or two too many had passed, and there was a gulf, and somehow something had changed and we didn’t know what it was. She said “I feel like a hot house flower in your world, I don’t think I could survive”.

What was odd was that it was her world I was living in, or that one she showed me. I went by a couple of times, but we couldn’t find anything to talk about. I ran into her in a supermarket after another three of four years, she had gained a bit of weight, and married a professor from Stanford. I think now she is a grand mother, I hope she and her husband love each other.

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