Between the Notes

Episode #11 - Me and Rickie Lee

March 22, 2023 Jack Sharkey Season 1 Episode 11
Between the Notes
Episode #11 - Me and Rickie Lee
Show Notes Transcript

After interviewing scores of rock & roll icons over the years, this is the story of how one afternoon spent hanging with a personal rock & roll icon in Memphis was at once a fabulous fan moment and a melancholy realization that all that glitters is not gold.  

This is going to be a slightly different episode because I want to share a unique and personal experience I had a few years ago with a childhood – specifically a teenagehood – hero of mine. But first I want to talk about Jimmy Fallon, because he’s got a little something to do with this.

 

I’m not a huge fan of Fallon, I want to be, but I kind of think behind all the cute boyish charm there’s something lurking that just doesn’t connect with me, try as I might. And like, oh, well, I’m sure Jimmy Fallon is not broken up by this.

 

Anyway, this goes back maybe three years ago or even more at this point, Covid has kind of made us all lose our ability to frame time anymore. I had gotten in touch with the subject of this episode to set up an interview, and everything but the time and place was agreed to. Literally the next week, Fallon dressed up as this musician and had all kinds of fun at his expense. But it also made the guy busier than he’d been in a long time, so our interview was pushed back like three months. I’ll post pictures of the Fallon bit on the Facebook page so you all can see what I’m on about. I can say firsthand that even though the attention was somewhat appreciated, he found being the butt of the joke a bit hurtful.

 

Anyway, this little interview, one of scores of interviews I’ve done over the years became a very strange adventure for me. This is going to be a long episode, so get a cup of tea and some beef jerky and settle in.

 

Without making a judgment on the actual quality of the writing, I do my best writing between one and four AM, which totally sucks because I also do my best sleeping during the exact same time. It can be annoying, but the piece I’m about to paraphrase was written – with very few edits – after I bolted awake on a Wednesday morning at 3:00 AM and wrote it in about twenty minutes. I’ll spare the entire piece here but I will post it up on the Facebook page and the podcast website in its original form just because its maybe my favorite piece I’ve ever written. Here we go…

 

I lost another friend a year ago or so. Don’t feel sad for me, we were probably more acquaintances than friends even though this guy was a part of my life for almost fifty years. In the last few years we had a loose virtual friendship and a couple of fun hangs on his home turf in Memphis.

 

I first met him when I was in 8th grade. He was a member of a band that most regular people didn’t really like but once you got past the over-the-top lead singer, the band was very, very good. 

 

Growing up, music was more than an escape, it was a place of safety – if only for three minutes at a time. It also gave me a way of fighting back without the consequences of actually having to fight, which generally didn’t work out well for me. This was the foundation of a contrarian streak that occasionally makes life difficult but at least gave me some level of control. For better or worse, it helped develop a sterling bullshit meter and a solid eff-you attitude. On the positive, as a life skill, music turned a very lonely life into a flow of comfortable solitude devoid of a need for outside approval. 

 

Through it all there were a few bands that made a difference. Rickie Lee was in the first of those bands. My mother even forced my oldest brother to see them the summer before Freshman year. It was a great show. August 3, 1974. I remember dates because I saved ticket stubs until I lost them in a divorce – technically they got burned but nevertheless. Sadly, it would be the only time I would see them live as by the time I was independently motoring to shows, Rickie Lee’s band had lost relevance to me. Funny how that works. Yet, as corny as they became over the years, there were always a few songs I’d return to time and time again.

 

For the next three or four decades, I lived my life, had a few careers, and made a bunch of friends and contacts in all corners of the music industry.

 

Which brings us to a long-in-the-tooth house in a sketchy neighborhood in Memphis Tennessee, where I got to spend some time with an old friend I had never met…

 

Seriously, this next part is not bullshit. You might think it is but it’s not, so stop rolling your eyes.

 

September 4, 2021, on the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend, my significant other and I cracked open a bottle of wine and settled in to listen to some music. I was suddenly in the mood to watch an old CD of an old favorite band of mine in concert at Royal Albert Hall in 1976. I had gotten the CD as a gift maybe ten years before and hadn’t ever watched it. Ricky Lee was the rhythm guitar player. We got about twenty minutes in and switched to something else. The sound and video quality was terrible, and the performance just seemed so dated and quaint. I just didn’t feel like sticking with it, in spite of the fact that there was a time when the band making this music meant so much to me. 

 

A few weeks later, I realized my old/new friend Rickie Lee had been silent on Facebook for at least long enough for me to notice he wasn’t around. I hit his Facebook page and there was the news. He had passed through the Halls of Karma in the early morning hours of September 5. A victim of a bad heart and COVID. I was really saddened because Rickie Lee was a light of joy with his comments and stories. I was also completely knocked cold by the part of the story you think is bullshit but that I can attest is not. 

 

A few years earlier I drove out from Nashville to Memphis and knocked on his door at the appointed time for our oft-delayed interview. I was going to hang with a guy from Black Oak Arkansas, which is a very high level of cool to a guy like me. The place was old with a cool sort of Southern funk that made it all seem okay. It was also a little scary in that wonderfully eccentric way Southern neighborhoods can sometimes get. On the other side of the door was a dog that surely would bite my face off if given the chance.

 

Rickie Lee answered like an old friend answers the door. In the cosmic space of a few seconds, I went from 14-year-old fanboy to unimpressed eminent hipster to moderately successful writer and back again. We headed out for lunch at a Mexican place around the corner he said he loved to go to. When we got there, there was no Mexican place but one of those non-descript Southern quick serve sandwich joints. I asked how long the restaurant had been there instead of the Mexican place and was told “about four years.” It was two blocks from Rickie Lee’s house. I found this to be most amazing. 

 

The stories started before our sweet teas arrived and they didn’t stop. You know how a lot of people have logorrhea anymore because they are the most important person in the world and have lost all empathy with their listener? Those people and their non-stop talking abut themselves make socializing sheer torture. Rickie Lee was absolutely NOT that guy. His stories were fascinating, and he knew when to break a sentence to let the two-way conversation fly. He was honestly interested in what I had to say about music, myself, his band or whatever else. A one-hour lunch lasted two and a half hours.

 

Stories of the road, stories of other musicians, what it was like to be a bona fide rock star in the age of the Rock Star. Since he was the principal song writer, I got insight into some of my favorite songs, what they meant, how they came about, whatever band stories there may have been about the song. More than once he told me ‘now, no one has ever heard this story and I’d like to keep it between us,’ and I truly believed him. Listen up my babies, it was FUN!

 

We drove around Memphis for a bit just talking. After a bit we headed back to his house where we decamped to his bedroom/music room and then the fun began.

 

I got to strum on Stevie Ray Vaughn’s white Strat Rickie Lee had bought a few years earlier. There was a whole backstory between Stevie Ray and Rickie Lee and this guitar, but I’ll be damned if I can remember it – there were simply too many nuggets flying around the room to catch and retain them all. 

 

Fifty-plus years of band history floated around my eyes. Studio out-takes and unreleased tracks hit my ears and I was a kid experiencing great music for the first time. The pure joy Rickie Lee had at each track was refreshing if not a little foreign to me. I’ve become this stoic bore of a person who learned long ago not to share joy with other, lest they take advantage. Watching Rickie Lee interact with emotion to what we were hearing, seeing, and talking about was simply a great and unforgettable joy. I was jealous because somewhere along my journey I’d forgotten how to be unabashedly joyful.

 

I never published the story I went down there to write. I have fifteen pages of notes, three rough drafts, and three hours of recordings. But it all seemed too personal, like some private gift that was meant just for me and no one else. Maybe I was making a smart editorial decision, or maybe I was making a selfish decision to keep this experience all to myself, but when I heard Rickie Lee has passed I felt compelled to talk about it. In fact, part of the genesis for this podcast was that day I spent in Memphis getting to know my joy again.

 

But the real reason why I never published the story goes like this…

 

I left there many hours after I had planned for the four-hour trip back to Nashville. I was struck with a singular emotion I wasn’t able to shake. I was sad. Not for me – I had a great frigging day. A serious lifetime snapshot day. But like so much in life, this snapshot came with the joy of the yin and the tribulation of the yang.

 

For all of his youthful exuberance, there was melancholy in the air around him. He was the principal songwriter of one of the biggest American bands of the early 1970s, but he’d often circle back to the acts who had opened for his band who went on to achieve monstrously greater success. Springsteen, Bad Company, KISS, Kansas, to name a few. They were all there on the show bills framed on the walls of his little house. 

 

He was literally living hand to mouth, but he was still happy and it just seemed so unfair. There was a sadness that he and his bandmates had been taken advantage of every step of the way. Especially when it came to money. He was sad about his own decisions that led him down his own particular and unique path. In short, he was no different than me. Or you. Or anyone for that matter. It was just on a different scale. Our culture has put such importance on fame and celebrity, but those very things are often the things that destroy the person seeking them – but we don’t care as long as we’re entertained, if even for a little while.

 

Music is a miserable mistress. She is never satisfied. She only wants you to have eyes for her, yet she’s capricious in her pursuit of her own interests. The musician’s life is a lonely, solitary life for the most part. Not because of the music but because of the industry that developed around it. Music is a tough row to hoe that’s made even more troubling by the fact that our most sensitive and vulnerable people chase her without knowing she is an unachievable muse. She always wants more. The bean counters want more. The audience wants more. But when you can no longer deliver on the promise of your musical youth, you are placed on a shelf maybe to be remembered someday by some guy who used to be a fan but had eventually moved in other directions. Ten thousand seat arenas turn into smelly biker bars twenty miles from town. No one is necessarily wrong (well, except the thieves), it’s just the way of the world, and I can only hope there is a place on the other side of the Halls of Karma that offers the joy and peace our musical friends so deserve.

 

The art, music, conversation and food I shared with my friend Rickie Lee were a highlight among a long and interesting lifetime of highlights. I never published my interview with Rickie Lee Reynolds of Black Oak Arkansas because what I experienced with him on that day and in the years to follow were very personal to me. I felt an obligation not to use him to further my own career such as it is. Maybe that’s bullshit because anything I would do is just not that important but kindness dictated that what we shared was ours and ours alone. Then he passed and I felt compelled to tell his story from my eyes in my way. I wanted to share the gift he gave me.

 

Everybody wants to see Heaven, but nobody wants to die. I hope my lifelong friend and recent acquaintance is experiencing everything on the other side that he dreamed of experiencing here in this plane.

 

Thank you Rickie Lee. For the music, for the solace, for the art, for the enthusiasm, for the twisted way of looking at this tired old world of ours.

 

The honor was all mine.