Gardner Remembers: The Lost Tapes
an interview with Creole Myers
(PLUS: Memphis musicologist, Linda Israel’s
mini-biography of the man, “The Growth and Death
of Buddy Gardner”
Corey Mesler
Copyright © 2011 by Corey Mesler
Pocketful of Scoundrel/SmashWords Edition
www.pocketofscoundrel.wordpress.com
www.kuboapress.wordpress.com
In thinking about the past, it’s important to decide how noisy it was.
Todd McEwen
she needs a shot of a very bored God.
Bob Dylan
The Growth and Death of Buddy Gardner
by Dana Illsire © 1975
You know Buddy “Slipshod” Gardner from his later solo work, the early seventies stuff when he latched onto the singer/songwriter craze begun probably by Sweet Baby James. You know him for his albums “Rain and Other Distractions” or “I Was a Child When Smaller.” But this is the story of headier days, days when the Overton Park Shell was a magical place, the later rainbow implied. When Buddy played lead guitar and sang for Black Lung, a blues rock band with a loyal Memphis following. The late Lee Baker, a guitar god himself then, said about Buddy, “He was the best of us. He was a seer, a prophet. That later acoustic stuff is crap, of course, but with Black Lung, Buddy was tapped into something other.”
Back then, Black Lung played the Shell regularly, maybe opening for Johnny Winter, or teaming up with Mudboy and The Expanding Head Band for a mini-festival that would start at dusk and stumble into the early morning hours like a dreamer looking for paradise. Lot of medicine passed about in those days. Lot of prescriptions from the hoodoo man. It was the sixties, people, and in Memphis that meant The Strip, The Shell, The Bitter Lemon. Buddy was known all those places. Hell, Buddy was known everywhere in the River City.
This is the story of Buddy’s taint, the story of Buddy and his pact with the devil. But Buddy had in him a black spot, fed by his desire to make it big, fed by ambition and greed and the sort of misdirected thinking which took Rolling Stone from the hands of the movement and placed it in the hands of the oppressors. The commodifying of the sixties, if you will, as embodied by the soul of Buddy Gardner. Buddy “Slipshod” Gardner, Memphis’ answer to Jerry Garcia, Memphis gift to the world, from integrity and precocity to sell-out.
So much is lost now, so little written down, so little recorded. For those with the stamina to search it out, Black Lung made one album, released on the Pepper label, a little Memphis soul mixed in with their own acid-blues. It was called Turntable Poison. Some say it sounded like The Rascals crossed with Hot Tuna. One cut comes to mind, a piece they played in every set at The Shell, the ballad, “Mr. Handy and Hakel-Bärend.” On the LP they insisted on the extended version with Buddy’s long, side-handed solos, slick as molten lead and the twelve minute drum solo by Skippy Quetzalcoatl, effectively killing the album’s potential sales but insuring the group a spot in infamy alongside the lost tapes of Mudboy and the Neutrons and the missing five hours of von Stroheim’s Greed.
There was also the shorter, “Blues for Wendy Ward,” with its plaintive chorus, “Thank you for at least that sweet ache,” a phrase Buddy made sound like a supplication to the gods. “Wendy Ward” got some air play around the country, on the late night FM stations, a minor flickering fame which only whet Buddy’s appetite for more, for larger radio audiences, larger followings, more groupies, better food backstage. He wanted it all, Buddy did. No one asked him, What is all? If they had he might be here today. Who can say? Pigpen’s gone. Jim, Abbie, sweet Timmy Hardin. Was it the same spirit in the night that whisked away all these mortal souls? I don’t know. I only tell stories.
Buddy got his first musicmaker, a ukulele, when he was a sapling, six years old, a first-grader at Idlewild Elementary. He hung onto that uke as if it was his lifeline, time and time again having it taken from him on the playground where he would serenade a few curious classmates with his bewailing renditions of old Hank Williams songs. The end of most schooldays found little Buddy in the principal’s office explaining why he should get his instrument back and vowing never to bring it again. Until tomorrow.
At twelve Buddy had graduated to electric guitar, a gift from his father, Al Gardner, who had played clarinet with a dance band called Dick Delisi and the Syncopators, at the Vapors Supper Club in his own mis-spent youth. Buddy’s mother, Elise, could only pull at her hair and clap dishpan hands over her ears when the noise emanating from Buddy’s room began. To her it sounded like the can-opener on warp speed.
Buddy drew from everywhere, listening with equal fervor to Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Hoagy Carmichael, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Bill Haley, Lonnie Donegan, Howlin Wolf, Eric Dolphy, Skip James, Shostakovich. Music fed Buddy the way most of us grew up on oatmeal and peanut butter. And he absorbed it all, filtering it through his sensitive system to come out his delicate fingertips as liquid electricity, a sound even today many guitarists cannot duplicate and few can even explain.
By thirteen he had his own band, made up of less-skilled classmates at Snowden Elementary. They called themselves Regulation Footwear and soon were playing gigs at high school dances and other social occasions, at Clearpool, even at an end-of-school year rally at the Overton Park Shell, foreshadowing later triumphs. Clearly, it was Buddy people came to see, Buddy who garnered them engagements with older audiences. Regulation’s drummer, poor Gyp Leach, could barely keep time on his Sears drumset, taking lessons after school at Guitar & Drum City, just progressing past a four-four beat. But word was spreading about this precocious guitarist who sounded like a coup de foudre, this scrawny, pimply 8th grader with licks like a junkyard dog. Buddy Gardner.
It was Jim Dickinson who dubbed Buddy “Slipshod,” not because Buddy was a sloppy player but because he put together such sloppy groups around him. It mattered not to Buddy who was playing behind him. He was lost in the ether, playing for his own private gods, letting the Lydian reverberation carry him away, the sound coming from his own self, you see. Oh, of course, he knew when the bassist was faking it, or the drummer tripping over himself to keep up, or the rhythm guitarist playing the same three chords over and over, hoping his stroking would be lost in the thunder. Buddy knew it, but he didn’t care. He was soaring. He was making music, Memphis music, as sacred a calling as one could imagine.
Eventually, Buddy found his grounding, a group almost as flexuous and capable as Buddy, though few could approach Buddy’s genius for the ineffable, that secret other place he could go with his music. Black Lung was born in the mid-sixties in an abandoned gas station when a bass player named Crafty Connor was introduced to Buddy through the coagulant Sid Selvidge. Memphis music bred Memphis music, is how Sid describes it today.
Crafty, who had a face like moits in wool, attended East High where he had picked up the bass guitar (and put down his flugel horn much to his parents’ disfavor) when he first heard Jack Bruce play. He wanted to be part of a power trio. He wanted to be part of the best power trio Memphis could build and he wanted to build it. He called Sid who said, “Well, you could do a lot worse than hooking up with this young guitar kraken, Buddy Gardner.” Crafty called Buddy. Buddy called Skippy Quetzalcoatl, who had a drumming lineage like no one else’s. His father had been a drummer and his father before him and back and back. Beale Street whispers the name Quetzalcoatl, late nights when the horns have died down and the wind sloughs around shop corners and up alleyways. It whispers the name like a mojo, a bit of song never transcribed, a bit of the old magic.
The abandoned gas station stood on a corner in midtown Memp
his like a sepulcher, but it was soon to be transmogrified into a holy place, a place where anything could happen so beware. A place as bright as Sun, as holy as Stax. It is where Black Lung was born. Today it is a Taco Bell. But some know. Some still pass it by and cross themselves, hearken back to the days of divination, the days when music could save a dying nation, a nation bent on its own self-immolation.
That was the sixties. Even in Memphis, an outpost planet. A tributary, if you will.
That first session, so it is told, was as if energy itself had been created in that concrete empty shell, where grass pushed through the floor, straining to catch these new vibes, this new electrical Jubal. Buddy cut loose as if he had been formerly playing in a straightjacket. And Skippy and Crafty—later re-christened Castor and Pollux—created a bottom like a sheol torture chamber, like Thor and Loki at war. The crash and thunder coming out of that old Sinclair station was music from the beginning of time, the music the apes heard which made them men. Music, soul-deep. Collective unconscious-deep. They cohered, they veered away and came back, like the trajectory of stars. Buddy’s solos were like fluid silver; he was re-inventing the electric guitar.
It was around this time that Buddy began writing songs. He was shy about it. No one knows how many he wrote before he brought the first one to the group, the one that would later be their most requested song, “I Love my Aunt Jemima.” Soon, though, he was bringing in songs in coacervations, as if he had eons of them bubbling up. That first acceptance by the group opened the floodgates and Buddy Gardner became something of a songwriting machine. Other artists recorded many of his best things, a blessing, and he became a regular at Hi Studios, at Sun and later at Ardent. He was covered by many of the Mid-South’s biggest stars. And later by some of the country’s: Elvis Costello did “Lemmy Caution’s Incubus.” Van Morrison made “Blues for Sid and Shirley” a staple of his live performances. Led Zeppelin, for God’s sake, did “Procapé All Night,” Jimmy Page being an early fan, as is written.
Just for the record Buddy wrote these hits for other stars: “Buttermilk Thighs,” “Blues for Sandra Leathers,” “Wrong for the Right of Way,” “Arcade Late-Night Blues,” “Open Channel D,” “The Sins of Monk Cassava,” “They Bribe the Lazy Quadling,” “Patience Hell, I’m Gonna Kill Something,” “The Nice and the Good,” “Strawberry Fields for Only a Little While,” “Take me for Granted, Please,” “Surfing the Big Muddy,” “The Rules for Hide and Seek,” “Young Avenue Blues,” “Picnic in Overton Park,” “Chin-Chin in Eden,” “Turn on Your Love Lights but Turn that Damn Stereo Down,” and on and on.
Buddy and the boys were off and running. Soon they were one of the most sought after acts, playing gigs everywhere the area offered, in clubs, at outdoor festivals (happenings), and, of course, their famous half-aborted rooftop gig on top of the Sterick Building downtown. Officer Mike “Mooncalf” Milton, one of the arresting officers, recalls to this day how polite Buddy and the band were as they were being ushered into police cars while the mob roared. “Buddy Gardner was a gentleman in a jerk business,” Officer Milton remembers.
This mildness, this Southern gentleman perception, follows Buddy to this day. It’s hard to find someone to speak ill of him, even those he later abandoned or stepped on on his way to the top. He is often compared to courtly though dipsomaniacal photographer Bill Eggleston, a friend of Buddy’s from those acme days. The cover photograph of Black Lung’s Pepper Records album, Turntable Poison, is an unaccredited Eggleston photograph. (It is, of course, a weathered Sinclair sign, imbued with the enchantment Mr. Eggleston brought to all his work, a divergence quite inexplicable.) Buddy was loved, revered. He was not held to the same rules as everyone else. So it goes with the great. And when Buddy started using drugs, mixing bennies, reds and laxatives in dangerous quantities, no one was there to question him.
Of course, drugs were part of the scene then. They were everywhere. In the back of every minibus, in the bathroom of every nightclub, at practice sessions, in the homes of every groupie.
And Buddy had his groupies. The twins used to joke that Buddy played for scrimption and blow jobs. This has some truth to it—the money wasn’t great in those days, asking for more money seen as bourgeois or worse—but the women were wonderful. Buddy, though, let it be said, played for one pure reason in those halcyon days. He played for the rush, for the approach to the godhead. It was religion to Buddy. He sought the perfect note, the one that would bring about rapture.
One night, after a triple billing at the Shell (Black Lung was the middle act that night, sandwiched between the lesser talents of Rubdown and Barry and the White Panthers), Buddy wandered backstage after his set, still in that trance he seemed to enter when he played, and was greeted by a statuesque blond with eyes the color of the Wolf River at Sunset. She stepped into his path like a gunfighter.
Buddy looked deeply into her. She was an equation he could not quite decipher. Her eyes stayed on his. She was bewitching him and even Buddy, already high from making music, was not immune.
Today people still talk about Lorelei Enos with a wary reticence. “Not much is known about her,” you hear people say. “She came in on a bad wind and left on another,” one roadie told me. “Lori was beautiful, a beautiful person, a beautiful body, but she was half siren. She couldn’t help it,” another groupie remembers. “She was Satan’s mistress,” a musician, who wishes to remain anonymous, summed her up.
That first night Buddy went home with her. What happened there is shrouded in mystery, except Skippy recalls Buddy saying, “She had the most beautiful sex I’ve ever seen. It tasted like mushrooms and ginger ale. And its musk stayed on me for days, like it had gone subcutaneous, like it had replaced my own body odor.”
Perhaps this was her hex: Ruthah: The perfume of Immortality.
Others talk about the size and welcoming essence of Lorelei’s breasts. Buddy was mothered; he fed there like a suckling, like a child. It wasn’t love but it was something between the sacred and the profane.
Some say Lorelei was responsible for the beginning of the slide downward for Buddy, filling his head with ideas of stardom, of leaving the backwash of Memphis and making it in a real town like L.A. or Boston. Buddy listened to Lorelei, we know that, for better or worse.
Let’s hearken back to a happier image. A small recording studio. A three-piece band, occasionally four when Jim Dickinson stops by and plays a little keyboards. A 20X20 room covered in egg-cartons. The preternatural silence beforehand. The prelude. The creation of something new. From where there was nothing something now exists: songs, recordings, an album.
The making of Turntable Poison was a liminal time, a time of congruity, or grand passion. The melding of the three (sometimes four) musicians was a Synchronicity. It can happen more than once but it happened at least once for Black Lung. It’s there on that vinyl circle, waiting for the needle like a junkie.
And for anyone lucky enough to find that masterpiece in someone’s garage sale, in some second-hand record shop (where I hear it can go for upwards of a hundred dollars or more), at some friend’s apartment, there is knowledge passed. Because anyone who hears Turntable Poison hears right away what could have been, what should have been. What was. The album smokes. It tears down ceiling tiles. It disrupts fish in their blue aquarium lives. It calls like a squonk in the wee hours, in the time between sleep and dawn. It disrupts phone lines, calls old girlfriends and makes them want you again. It stirs mud and makes bouillabaisse. Black Lung fashioned alchemy, friends, at least once, in that small studio, over a period of 72 straight hours without sleep, so the story goes. They laid down 43 minutes of catalytic reverb love. Some of you understand.
(And, an aside: they did not feel it necessary to include that one song on the LP by the drummer. An uncommon display of wisdom for the times but a good thing. Skippy could no more sing or write a song than fly.)
Listen to “Blues for Wendy War
d.” Listen to “In Real Time Nothing Happens.” Listen to “A Marriage of Rue” or “Hayley Mills’ Underpants.” It’s there. Under the surface like a chthonic river. Memphis Mojo. The only kind of magic that matters.
So, why would Buddy turn his back on the band after that triumph?
There are as many theories as theorists. Buddy wanted success, bigger success. He tasted perfection with Turntable Poison but it was local perfection. The album, though notorious today, an insider’s treasure trove, a collector’s grail, did not sell outside of Memphis. No major label bought the rights to it. Still, even this late, one wishes, with the advent of the compact disc revolution, that it would be reissued.
But now, Buddy wanted to be Hendrix, Clapton, Erik Brann, Zappa. That he settled for being Livingston Taylor is the story’s twist, what gives it verisimilitude. Life is unpredictable, like a chemistry experiment. Like The River.
Skippy and Crafty were not even angry with Buddy, to hear them tell it today. Skippy works at Ardent and Crafty is a driver for UPS, but they recall those grand days with Buddy with something like ardor. “He was way ahead of all of us,” Skippy says. “His energy came from someplace else.”
At any rate in early 1970, having witnessed the death of some of the gods, Buddy Gardner turned his back on Memphis, moved to L.A. with Lorelei, who then just as suddenly disappeared. Like a genii whose work is done. Some say she turned to making porno films. Some say she works in television. Some say she went back to perdition from whence she came.
But it was in L.A. that Buddy transformed himself into a folk artist, a singer/songwriter with a heart on his sleeve and an ace up it. He was as mellow as yellow, as smooth as California sunshine. And as empty as a bird’s nest in December.
His two albums, “I Was a Child When Smaller,” and “Rain and other Distractions,” were mega-sellers. Buddy made it. He made it big.
For a price, yes.
Those last songs, dripping with feigned self-pity, seem apocalyptic in retrospect. “Allison All Gone” and “Goodbye to the Shell” especially appear to comment on Buddy’s desire to burn his bridges, leave his Memphis past behind, forget his roots. And, of course, then there’s “Burn my Bridges” and “Forget my Roots” off the second album. Even Buddy’s skillful acoustic playing can’t save those albums from their own wallowing, from their stooping to the lowest common denominator.
Of course they sold. They were huge. Buddy played with Carole King, with the L.A. Session, with Linda Rondstadt. He was revered, honored (Grammy for “Song for L. Enos,” 1971), patted on his self-satisfied back.
But it was all so vacuous. And, what for a Memphis musician is worse, so soulless. Buddy had gone to hell, many in Memphis thought, though no one said so. There was, for a homegrown prodigy, still respect, pride, a sort of sweetly sad valediction.
When Buddy was buried in L.A. that was the final blow. His parents flew out for the interment but no one else from Memphis went. It is said there were many celebrities there. I hope so. I hope he drew a crowd at the end, a healthy gate-count.
Jack Nicholson was there. Debbie Anspach, Donald Sutherland, Larry Hagman, Candice Bergen, Dennis Hopper, Jagger, Ringo. Some said Dylan was there, in disguise. It was Dylan who was later quoted widely as saying, “Buddy could have been bigger than me. He had Old Harry on his side.”
With bigger success came more drugs, more women, more more. Death.
The official ruling was death by asphyxiation, choking on his own vomitus. It began to seem coroners handed this out to rock stars by rote. Janis and Jimi set the standard; anything less would be unseemly, not up to snuff. Next to his naked body were the cliché syringe, bottle of Jack Daniels and a sheet of lyrics, a half-finished song to be called, apparently, “Wendy Ward Redux,” as if at the end he tried to return to past glories and died trying. The penultimate line read, “You left your coppery skin behind.” The final line, though difficult to decipher, seems to say, “Come back to me—“ and the last word is either “you” or “youth.”
Either way a sad epitaph.
But Buddy’s gone gone. It’s a sure thing. He burned brightly once but then seemed to just peter out like the Sixties itself, like a wind-up thing of wonder, a mechanical play-pretty. He ran down. Signposts to Gehenna: Altamount, the violent deaths of Jimi, Janis, Reverend King and Bobby Kennedy. Nixon.
Ironically, Buddy “Slipshod” Gardner died on the same day, January 27, 1973, that Nixon officially ended the war in Southeast Asia.
I miss Buddy.
So much is gone, so many rainbows have faded away, and so many brightly painted faces now show the skull beneath. As John said, “The dream is over.”
But he (who is gone gone, too) also said “Love is all you need.”
Both are true. And, dreamers, lovers, children, both are lies.