Brian Cullman
No one ever wrote better about the blues than Stanley Booth, who died December 19th in a nursing home in Memphis.
And no one ever wrote slower.
It wasn’t so much that he took his time as that he seemed to be outside of time, looking in.
And paying close attention.
"Believe me," he wrote,” when you’re in a Memphis jail, city or county, you got the blues. When you’re in your cozy room, listening to Robert Johnson’s plaintive tunes, you’re hearing the blues."
He was friendly with long-neglected guitarist Furry Lewis and wandered the Memphis streets that he was sweeping up, which was Furry’s longtime day job. He was in the studio with Otis Redding and Steve Cropper when they were writing “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” looking over their shoulders.
But it was a while before he wrote about either.
And he traveled and lived with The Rolling Stones in the summer of 1969 and was onstage, right behind Keith Richard’s amp, at the concert at Altamont where Hell’s Angels murdered young Meredith Hunter. He was there on assignment for a book. Which he finished fifteen years later, in 1984 (published as The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones). It's still is the best evocation of that band, their work and their world ever written. By far.
When he sent me galleys of his newest book, Red Hot & Blue, I wrote to say that I was already reading the first chapter.
“Whereabouts?” he wanted to know. He needed specifics.
“I’m sitting outside my house with your book in my hands,” I wrote back. “First chance I’ve had all day. School’s out, across the street, and I can hear the kids and the cars, but I can’t see them, and they can’t see me.
“So good to read your writing again. Am sure you know it, but it never hurts to be reminded not just how good you are but all the ways you’re good, that quality of listening and care that you bring to small moments.
"I once brought musician-writer Mike Zwerin to a local dive to hear Steve Kuhn play piano. We were at the bar. Kuhn couldn’t see us, but damn if he couldn’t feel us, or at least feel Mike’s presence there : the playing got deeper, the pauses more intentional, and the notes sat up just a little straighter. He could tell someone was listening and listening deep inside.
"You’ve got that quality in your prose. Of being so deep inside that you can hear the story breathing."
“Mike,” he emailed back a moment later, with the digital equivalent of a sigh. “Mike was my beloved friend. I dosed him with acid and we sailed around London in his VW. I dosed him, but Mike being Mike, not sure it made any difference.”
And that was the last I heard from him till just before Covid.
Then he called.
“She doesn’t love me. She doesn’t love me anymore. What do I do?”
He was hollering. He never hollered on the page. But here, on the phone, he was bellowing.
I had to put the phone on speaker. Held against my ear, it was impossible; it nearly knocked me over. And even on the little iPhone speaker, his voice filled the house. I had to go to the other room so that his rantings didn’t wake my wife. It was early morning.
“I thought this was forever. Forever and always. But now she doesn’t love me.”
I held my tongue. No use saying, this is the basis for the songs we'd listened to all our lives on our heart’s radio. Otis Redding. Hank Williams. Dan Penn. James Carr. Gram Parsons.
"Tell me about her," I asked.
I was annoyed by the early morning drama, but sort of flattered that he’d called me, not Jim Dickinson. Then I remembered Dickinson was dead.
“She’s beautiful. A radiant sort of beauty. Like stained glass beauty. Shining . The way she moves. The way she talks. I could listen to her talk all day. It was like poetry, whatever it was, it was poetry.
“Sometimes she’d read to me. I even wrote a song….
I’m not buying no sunglasses
Tomorrow may not be so bright
But still I’ll go on looking for just a little moon tonight.
How about that? I wrote a song….”
“You sing it to her?”
“Recited mostly. But she got the idea. Even if it wasn’t exactly her style, her world. You know, she listens to other stuff. Billie Eilish, you know…”
“She’s a little….younger?”
“What’s that got to do with it? Love is outside of time. Eternity is eternity.”
But…she’s a little younger?”
He changed the subject.
“You ever been in jail?”
“Salt Lake City. A long time ago.”
“What for?”
“Being a hippie. Having long hair. They locked me up a while, then just as the sun was going down, they let me out, said if I was inside city limits after sundown they’d beat the crap out of me. They didn’t, but I spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder.”
“That counts. Hellhound on your trail. You’ve been inside the blue room.”
He let the silence sit there, then he went back to the girl.
“She wasn’t too young for me, so I never thought I was too old for her. Of course I’m older. I’m older than everyone.
“King David, when he grew old, they’d bring young girls to warm his bed, warm the chill of his bones. It was an honor. King David got warm, and the girls got special privileges.
“But I thought this was love.
“I didn’t want to be a backstage pass.
“I wanted to be the main event.”
Brian Cullman is a writer & musician based in New York and France. He is a three-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing, a regular contributor to the Paris Review, and an editor of Journal of the Plague Years.
Top Photograph: Stanley Booth and his friend William Eggleston, Sons of the South
That's How I Got To Memphis :::: Tom T Hall
When I Lay My Burden Down ::: Furry Lewis
Beale Street Blues ::: Louis Armstrong
Furry Sings The Blues ::: Joni Mitchell
Trance ::: Steve Kuhn
How Can You Mend A Broken Heart ::: Al Green