Lila, Long And Short

Kenny Edwards

I met Kenny in 2005 through Brian Joseph.  We did a couple shows together at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley and Don Quixote’s in Santa Cruz.   I was starting to tour more, and was hoping to find some new venues singing with Brian.  Brian hired Kenny to play guitar and they had become close friends. We met up in the attic of an old roadhouse my friends were renting.  The third story overlooked the ocean and felt like a creaky old boat with the afternoon sun cutting swaths of sail-like sunlight and shadow across the walls. We sang some songs.  I’d never met Kenny before and I remember having the strange delightful feeling of our harmony locking in right away.  He had that kind of voice.  His pitch would come under and hold yours up.  I didn’t know much about Kenny and he was not one to impose his story or agenda, so right then his long glorious life only glimmered warmly behind his eyes and rang through his guitar and mandolin.

We stayed in touch.  I was looking for someone to produce a record and Brian thought we’d be a good fit working with Freddy Koella, whom I’d yet to meet.  Freddy had just produced Kenny’s solo debut.  And I loved the sound—clear, spare, warm, dark.    We talked about making it work and planned a little tour together.  He came up to Humboldt in Dec. 2006 to play the Caspar Inn and Muddy’s (nothing was ever below Kenny).  We got to know each other better.  He was very easy going.  Clear spoken.  His vocabulary was rich, both culturally and linguistically.   With his own talent overflowing, he was a true fan of music.  He turned me on to Chris Whitley (another gone too early) and Bonnie Prince Billy.  He was enamored of the DYI scene.  I found this fascinating because he’d spent so many years in the industry.  Somehow I always thought, “Can’t he call Linda and have her cut that song, like, tomorrow…?”   But he had a fondness for sleeping on couches, sharing food with people, travelling simply, discussing the ups and downs of the biz.  He toured a lot with his dear friend and colleague Karla Bonoff and would open shows for her, singing his own songs. 

The last time I saw him play was with Karla at the new Freight and Salvage.  He seemed tired, but his playing and singing were as beautiful as ever and is songs were delicate and tragic.  I had only spoken to him on the phone since he had been diagnosed with cancer and we had a long talk.   He was in the middle of chemotherapy.  He was very philosophical about it—was writing a song wherein “the poison was the medicine.”  He said between heartbreak and cancer, heartbreak is harder, because at least physical illness is tangible.  Kenny was dark witted but with a deeply compassionate heart.

I would joke “You are too nice.”  His friends would say of the era he lived and worked in LA, “He was the only nice guy in LA.”   But Kenny worked at being kind.  He had a deep spiritual practice.  Would meditate every morning.  We toured together a bit in the Pacific Northwest the fall of 2007.  I had just had a serious head injury and was close to useless in terms of driving , which he took on generously.   I almost cancelled the dates and hadn’t set up many of the final details so we were winging it.   We stayed one night in Cottage Grove at a Buddhist center.  I remember waking up and seeing him in the next room meditating.  “This is rock and roll,” I thought.  

In Portland we played at a little restaurant (which has since closed) called Albina Green.  The owners were music fanatics who had old show posters from the 60s and 70s plastering the walls.  Their menus were old album covers.  Kenny asked for a menu and was handed an old Linda Rondstadt record.   Inside was Kenny thirty years ago. 

The truth is, you could turn on the radio any time of the day and very likely hear a song where Kenny is playing bass or guitar or singing harmony—holding it all together.  We are lucky with music.  It sticks around.

We cut  15 scratch tracks or so in what we came to call KDC:  “Kenny’s Dirty Cathedral.”  This was his studio apartment behind Karla’s house.  It was simple and deliberate, like Kenny.  There was a bed with a ProTools set up.  In May of ‘08 we moved it to Freddy’s studio “Le Garage” in Santa Monica.  Kenny would come down from Santa Barbara.  Freddy’s whole family loved Kenny like family.  His daughters would come in, “Can Kenny stay for dinner when you are done, pleeeeeeeeeease?”  As I came to meet more of his friends, I realized he had this effect on everybody.  He valued human connection and was loved deeply all around.

After we finished making Letter Home, Kenny gifted me his old gps unit, “The Bitch”—a reminder to keep on the path.

Kenny came through the Bay area a month ago and stayed with me.  He brought beautiful avocados and nice wine.  We caught up as we made dinner.  The sun came out so I grilled some veggies outside, we laughed as my fire kept going out and I tried and tried to rekindle it.  He kept me from burning the falafels.  We sat and listened to Ian and his friend Loren play mbira.  He slept peacefully on our hundred year old Murphy bed.  We woke up, ate breakfast, drank coffee, before he had to hit the road for a gig in Shasta.  I might be reframing things if I said that when I saw his instruments were packed I actually thought for a second “No, wait! Let’s play one last song!”  I don’t think I knew that it would be the last time seeing Kenny.  But I said goodbye, closed the door and came inside and cried.

The world lost a fine musician last week.  The world also lost one of its finest human beings.

Our Relationship

Some things we take for granted.  Daylight.  Roads.  Each other.

It’s interesting to think that while we walk through life with unrealized expectations of ourselves we have them also, and perhaps more so, of each other.  The audience /performer relationship,  for example.  I have a friend who quit a gig with an artist saying he couldn’t handle how abusive he was to the audience.  Audiences are a sensitive lot, see.  Audiences should be screened for toughness.  Right. 

It’s a really good question, though. What do we want from each other?  What do I want from you?  Respect?  No, no.  That is reserved for basic human relationship.  (The stage has housed some of the most perverse in human activity after all:  remember the gladiators?  Funny, philosopher–emperor Marcus Aurelius became a dissenting voice with regard to these publicly celebrated murder displays not because he found them ugly, but because he found them BORING.)  What else, Love?  No, no, no.  This is not church.  We are not lovers.  Attention?  Hmmm.  Your attention.  Sure, in so much as you would listen to me, the ceiling fan, the loud guy at the bar, the swinging open and closed of the back door, the ice melting in your glass.  I too have become part of your experience in this room.  Yes, me, “What’s–her-name.”

Should I listen to you?  You, in the dark?  You, with the head cold?    I mean, do you want me to?  Not just the shades of your applause—not just the ironic “Free Bird!”  But the rate of your heart?  Listen to your quiet?  Your smiles, your frowns, your text clatter?  Shall I listen to your crying children, your laughing children, your unborn children?  Shall I listen to your abuse?  Ignore it, retort…call the police?  Here is where we have entered a relationship.  Sign here.

But wait.  Maybe it was only our first date.  Maybe you are unsatisfied.  Maybe I offer a kiss goodnight and you just want to go home and forget about it.  Or maybe you want more.  Maybe you bought my CD and will go home and spend time with me.  Maybe you want me to “sign here,” and further our relationship.  Maybe we’ll continue to see each other.  Things will evolve.  You’ll start to know what I’m about to say/sing.  I’ll start to know where you’ll be sitting and in what town.  We’ll talk on Facebook.  We’ll think about raising our (respective) children in the same world together.  (Things are getting serious.) 

Over time this relationship becomes like other caring relationships.  The once defined stage/audience split bleeds across lines and time and into the world.  The sun comes up.  The road is long.  But we have each other.

Run For Your Life

My sister and I used to have dance contests in our bedroom.  When she would dance, I would judge.  When I would dance, she would judge.  Contrary to how this might sound, there was something eerily objective in this exercise.  We were dedicated to the task at hand.  When we were dancing we were the embodiment of the music blaring out of the boom box.  When we were judging we were (albeit 10/12 year old) judges:  sedentary, stodgy, critical, often hammer wielding, judgely judges.  Competing with one another was not the concern. It was one little body against the scorecard.  (She may disagree.)

I’ve remained judgmental.  But dancing does not come so easily.

That’s why, of all the things that Walkmans, and then iPods brought to the world, this has got to be the finest contribution: I can bob up and down, in tight pants, weave through families, formal and informal meetings, picnics, play dates, flocks of birds and business men, cars, buses, bikes, bad boys and girls, in the rain, smiling and sweaty and not feel like a fool.  Easter, I ran around Lake Merritt to the Rhythm of the Saints—which I used to dance to in my bedroom as a kid, 20 years ago. Time moves forward.  Feet move forward. The mind moves forward and backward like the lake, pretending to be still.  Running is my way of secretly dancing in public.

As soon as I’m out the door, all’s well.  I’ve learned to delight in tempo changes.  If the first song is brisk, I walk halftime, to warm up.  If I’m mid-lake and Bonnie Prince Billy shows up, I prance along, a taunting double time.  I used to skip songs that didn’t match my heart rate, now I delight in making them work.  And this is ALL I NEED.  Beats and endorphins.  It’s been 20 minutes and I’ve gone from running from my life, to running for my life, to a life of dancing secretly through the city.  My mind, a steely-still lake top.  

This particular morning my iPod was out of juice, so I actually found a CD Walkman in an old bag hanging on the closet door knob.  Rhythm of the Saints was in it already.  And I grabbed a CD that I picked up at The Low Anthem show in SF last week from the first opening band, The Barr Brothers.  So when the old Paul Simon CD started skipping, in one of my finest moves, I jogged in place popped it out, tore the plastic wrap off the new Barr Brother’s CD with my teeth, pulled the pink disc out of its sheath and put it in the player before it got hit with more than a couple stray raindrops, slipped ol’ Simon into the new CD case and back into my front hoody pocket all the while, in my heart and in my feet, dancing to the imprint of the memory of the rhythm of “She Moves On.”  I keep moving.  I hit PLAY.  New music.  New landscape.  I run around this lake almost everyday, and suddenly, it’s new again.  

As I round the final corner church bells chime right in time and key with the Wurlitzer solo in the last song “Let There Be Horses.”   I have to snap one ear bud out to make sure they aren’t on the track.  The synchronicity is breathtaking.  I stop, in Easter Day awe.  I had to.  I had chased down the perfect moment, after all.  

Then the scorecard flashes before me.  ”That’s about an 8.  For authenticity.  But why’d you stop running?”

Feet move forward, bells swing forward and back, music moves up and down, hips swing side to side.  ”Born at the right time.”