From: Lois
Sent: Friday, December 08, 2000 12:09 PM
Subject: Good Work  

Let Danforth know that his article is a huge success.  I have one woman who is convinced that Danforth is a former member of Cream who actually lives in Ward.  Danforth has created a stir and, as editor of the magazine, I couldn't be more pleased.

I would like to know if it is O.K. to use the title A Bitter Bastard for this and any future articles that Danforth may write.  We used it as a heading for his last piece because everyone thought it was damn funny when we read it in the article. 

We would like to extend the invitation to Dan to write for a regular column for our magazine.  If he gets sick of it, we are not going to hold him to a contract or anything.  Talk it over with him and see what he says. 

Take care, Greg, and buy Danforth a beer for me.  The old geezer has done well.   

Lois

#

God Bless Jesse Garon
Strapping Danforth Shows Holiday Cheer  

I went to Denver to buy some string. It was a couple days before Christmas and people were flinging change around like it was the end of the world. All up and down 16 th Street , Salvation Army bells rang to raise the dead. Little children, money from mom's purse in hand, crept up, dropped coins in the can and ran back to mommy. Mother and child walked into the nearest food court.  

My favorite street musician is dead. His name was Lucky and he sat on the steps of Tom's Tavern on Pearl Street in Boulder with a black alto saxophone. He was a large man and his knees didn't bend. He sat with the horn resting on his gut.  

In the hazy mornings, before the crowds made their way to this most charming of Colorado pedestrian malls, while keepers of kitschy shops put out their open signs, Lucky would start off a tune; usually “Over the Rainbow.” The lonesome sound would echo up and down the empty street.

Lucky spent a lot of time talking to college kids. Around the CU crowd, it was a status symbol to tell first-had stories about Lucky. Once, at a bus stop, I heard one college boy say to another that Lucky had cancer and was about to die. A couple weeks later Lucky's spot at Tom's Tavern was empty. I heard they buried him with his saxophone. That's pure garbage. I know for a fact that he pawned his sax for an afternoon with his son, the product of a broken marriage and the possession of a mad, spiteful mother who charged Lucky $100 an hour to spend time with his only child.  

That was several years ago. Now, in Denver , a couple days before Christmas, I came upon a guy who could give Lucky a run for his money. He sits on the steps of a 16 th Street Mall Plaza where business people gnaw hotdogs.  

The bastard is a dead ringer for Elvis' Dead Twin Brother, Jesse Garon Presley. He's older than me, which puts him near the senior-citizen status, which puts him near the age of Elvis. He has an ugly grey beard. He wears a fishing hat and all his clothes are the color of a sidewalk. His accent pins him as a Southern Man. He plays a beat-up guitar. When I sat down he was singing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” I could barely understand, but it was damn obvious that this guy loved beautiful mornings. “Aoh whoat a beoutifoal moawring.” Just like that.  

His next song was “Summertime.” As the song plodded along with little kids tossing change in his guitar case, it became obvious that Jesse Garon Presley was not happy with his lot in life. A pretty girl with a small backpack and a cell phone walked by just as he sang, “Your daddy's rich…” He spit in her direction. Why was Elvis the lucky one? Whey did Vernon and Gladys send little Jesse off to live with Uncle Kent in Sullivan , Indiana while they groomed Elvis for a life of comfort and fame? Why did they tell the world that Jesse was stillborn?  

Just when you think Jesse Garon is gonna snap, gonna smash his guitar over the head of the next pair of hand-holding lovers who stroll by, he sings the line, “Don't you worry, everything's gonna be all right,” and the anger evaporates. The song ends and Jesse Garon takes a break, waiting for the next crowd to tumble off the shuttle bus.  

So what if no one applauds a street musician? So what if the money's bad? So what if freaks crawl out of manholes to request “American Pie”, jam on harmonica, offer you crappy vodka? So what if you play in the cold? Strings go out of tune, cops hassle you, peckerheads in suits tell you to get a job, and you sleep in a dumpster?  

People got it all wrong. The streets make you stronger. It's Vegas that kills.  

That last song I heard him play was “Tobacco Road”. Written by John D. Loudermilk (1976 inductee in to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame), “Tobacco Road” is loosely based on Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel of the same name. The novel itself documents rural poverty of white southerners. It has been condemned by critics as an “exaggerated exploitation of fanciful liberal politics,” and praised by others as “a superbly written glimpse at the lives of a forgotten people.”

Whatever the case, it turned into a song which included the lines, “I was born in a dump…Gonna leave. Get a job…Blow it up. Start over again.” As performed by the Nashville Teens, Jefferson Airplane, David Lee Roth and Lou Rawls, the song comes across as a bitter cry against a crummy (if imagined) upbringing.  

In the hands of Jesse Garon Presley, the song becomes (mostly) a celebration . Presley turns, “It's home/the only life I've ever known” into “It's home/the only life I WANNA know.” In the line, “Only you know how I loath/Tobacco Road,” “loath” MIGHT be “love”. Jesse's accent splices the two words together…loathve.  

Jesse Garon is jealous of Elvis, yes. Jesse Garon gets sick of his gig. Jesse Garon knows exactly where he came from and what he has to look forward to, which isn't much. But Jesse Garon is alive and Elvis isn't; and, by God, it's gonna be a happy Christmas.
 
Who's lucky now?

--Strapping Danforth, January 2001