I’m waiting for Melissa, watching a video of me playing organ with some of the best bluesmen in the New York City area—why, look, it’s thedailygrowlerhousepianist playing the piano, at a studio in Times Square, filmed over a year and a half ago now. I’m amazed by myself. In the corner of my eye is a very cute little-person woman—a midget woman, but I know they hate being called that. I can’t imagine what you could call me that would insult me. A motherfucker? Nope. I never had any sexual feelings for my mother. I assume she was sexual; if she wasn’t, OK, how the hell did I get here? Out of a test tube? God, it seems like only yesterday when the scary people were casting allegations of demonic foreboding against “test-tube babies.”
Seems like only yesterday, too, when we were all discussing, myself in cynical whimsy, cloning. Was it possible? I remember a book about a man who claimed he was a clone. We conjectured about what it would be like to clone yourself every 55 years or so, you know, a continuous being yourself in a totally cloned existence.
“Hi, who are you?”
“Hi, I’m you, that’s who.”
“Well, you do look like me.”
“And you look like me, too.”
“So, how does this work? Since I’m the real one….”
“Who says you’re the real one? I’m the real one, my friend.”
“What’a you mean you’re the real one? By God, I’ve been the real one since that early morning in that hospital in that prairie town that had a song written about it.”
“A song about a lone rider riding out across this prairie, the wind blowing hard, whipping a dusty whip in lashes ‘round his head, then in chilling slices down his body, his body bent against that strong wind, a west wind coming east, a shoveling wind, a shoveling and pitching wind, shoveling and pitching the dust of the ancestors all back in the face of his history.”
“Riding away from absolute fate; the fate of being blown in the wind.”
“Dylan once lived in Gallop, New Mexico, you know.”
“Of course, I know. My wife introduced me to Bob Dylan and I introduced her to Dylan Thomas—and my wife and I never went to the White Horse…I didn’t go to the White Horse until after my divorce, after I’d met another woman and had fallen in love once again after once again after once again and again, always falling in love, even when I was married.”
”Absolutely.”
It’s only a couple of clones talking; clones who are themselves again, one the real one, but unable to be the real one with another real one there thinking he’s the real one, too, and he is and the other one is, too, and that’s the way with families of clones of themselves who are clones, too. A clone is writing this. Can’t there be evolutionary cloning going on all the time?
I remember when my brother got his heart transplant people discussing whether if my brother got a Hindu heart would that make him a Hindu. Or, did the new heart turn him from a rather cynically witty verbalist into a soft-hearted altruist? Does a heart have anything at all to do with the psyche?—and, of course, the answer is yes; your solar plexus affects the beat of the heart; the beat of life being lived. So I'm waiting for Melissa. I wonder if she's a clone?
Spade Cooley
At one time in the past world that name, Spade Cooley, was known worldwide. There were three gentlemen (some might argue that point) from Oklahoma who are given credit for the invention of the music that became known as Western Swing: Bob Wills was one; Milton Brown was one; and the other is that name that was once known worldwide but now echoes in the memories of old folks getting’ ready to die and even then it echoes so dimly it's not much ever heard anymore. Funny how Bob Wills of those three dudes came out the most immortal so far.
This third guy was born in the hard-times Oklahoma Panhandle but left early during the Great Depression (and Dust Bowl) and headed with his family West, ending up in the State of Oregon at a place called Paddle Creek (sic). Only after he got to California did his star begin to rise, first around Modesto as a fiddler, then being heard and invited to Los Angeles where he was befriended by Roy Rogers who hired him for his back up group the Sons of the Pioneers.
Spade Cooley the fiddler became Roy Rogers’s best friend; they pal-ed around all over together. And soon Spade broke off from Roy and formed his own band and then got booked in a big space in Santa Monica and soon Spade Cooley was just as popular as his coevals, Bob Wills and Milton Brown; in fact, more popular than either of those guys; why Spade Cooley became a movie star even. Milton "Brownie" Brown died early but Bob Wills was soon in Los Angeles, too, and Western Swing had become by then a hugely popular venue and a chance for talented Okies to get rich.
Spade put together a small unit at first, with an accordion and a harp—Spade named his band members as though they were Oklahomans even though one of them was from Brooklyn—like Pedro De Paul on accordion. Soon, the small group developed into a full size orchestra and soon Spade had a big hit, “Shame, Shame on You,” and soon, too, Spade had bought a mansion on Ventura Boulevard in L.A. and a ranch out on the edge of the Mojave Desert. He also had a yacht and a several cars, over 100 Western-style suits and over 150 pairs of boots in his huge closet, eventually building everything up into a fortune of 15 million dollars. Spade Cooley. Have you ever heard of him?
Spade’s lead singer was Carolina Cotton, and she got so popular, she quit him and went out on her own and Spade, a ladies man in the true sense of the word, a man of constant affairs of the genitals, and soon a heavy drinker, and soon an alcoholic, found a replacement for Miss Cotton in a girl named Ella Mae, a cute built blonde, who though solid of body and curve was a loser as a singer, though Spade kept her in his band until he married her, knocked her up, kicked her out of the band and told her to stay home and raise their kids and leave the music biz to him. They had two kids, a girl and a boy. The girl’s name was Melody. Soon Spade’s life took a turn downward. The alcohol gripped him tighter and tighter every day and with each tightening grip a boiling jealousy was released from old Spade’s soul like a volcano going off. It got so bad, Spade made Ella Mae confess she’d had an affair with his old pal Roy Rogers—yep, she’d run off to Palm Springs with Roy and screwed him there—10 years before, she confessed. Then Spade got it in his whiskey-soaked mind that Ella Mae was joining a sex cult where homosexuals and heterosexuals mafficked with greased ease in and out of all the holy of holies in the Satanically satin-lined porn room.
By 1960, rock and roll had put an end to the Western Swing craze and old Spade was out of the business, though he still had his worth, 15 million bucks, and he still had his mansion on Ventura and his ranch on the edge of the Mojave. He took up real estate development and also began making plans to build an amusement park called Water Wonderland out near his ranch in the desert area of L.A., a huge waterpark for which the old Okie fiddler actually got interested backers and had designs drawn up.
In the meantime, Spade was I.V.-ing whiskey, putting heebie-jeebies in his bloodstream, jacking off over the sexual promiscuity he imagined his wife indulging in, and with the King of the Cowboys, too--the King of Western Swing's hot wife and the King of the Cowboys--and why not throw Trigger in there, too...oh, it's a good story. Spade forced his daughter Melody to watch him as he flipped on out finally, spinning into an outerspace only the hidden map in his brain knew the whereabouts of, a spinning into that was kicked off by Spade, in front of his daughter, while Ella Mae lay bleeding on the floor from where Spade had bludgeoned her down on her back, when he leaped up in the air suddenly and came boots-down-first smack-dab in the belly-button middle of Ella Mae's stomach. She went unconscious. Spade held a pistol to his daughter's forehead as he declared he was calling an ambulance and the police...it's a hell of a story and I've found it on the Internet in a small book form (see link at bottom of post). Check it out. It's one of the great L.A. crime stories of the sixties.
By the way, they laid the Great James Brown out at the Apollo Theater all day today here in NYC. James Brown, a real god, man; no fable; a legend, yes, but a legend witnessed from birth to death by a whole generation that is still kicking against the pricks in my stratospheric world, that world of the constant full moon floating above me morning, noon, and night.
for The Daily Growler
The Spade Cooley Story:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/spade_cooley/index.html
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