Out In
The Hip-Hop 90s Night- The Roy Bluff-Laura Perkins Trilogy
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I knew Roy Bluff in the old days, got to know him a little in the late 1980s, when he was just singing for nickels and dimes in front of the Park Street Subway Station in downtown Boston. He was a tall, good- looking guy, longish hair and an unkempt short scruffy beard which could not hide a certain jut-jawed look. Not a city boy look but something out of the plains, a certain Sam Shepard the actor/playwright look, a cowboy, look although he was attired in second- hand work clothes, flannels like a lumberjack, considered de riguer if you were working the subway circuit. I would stop and listen to that arresting hip-hop sound that he produced on his electrified acoustic guitar combined with his old time social concern lyrics like some juked- up latter day Woody Guthrie angel saint as he mesmerized the small crowds (including me) that passed him by. I sensed, maybe at times slightly and at other times more forcefully, that his act, that what he had to say and the way he wanted to say it “spoke” to lots of things that were bothering us, the young and not so young, in those days. Things that needed saying and we needed some kind of angel saint herald to make sense of it all.
I also knew that such an act, such a sound, basically a throw-back to some fathers and mothers sixties high drug culture madness had no chance, nada, of interesting any mainstream record company since they were trying, trying like hell, to dump this genre from their catalogues as so many loss- leaders good for tax write-offs and not much else. I knew this first hand since my girlfriend then was Shana Buck, yes, that Shana Buck if you are at all familiar with the white girl blues mama scene who struggled for years in small cafes, high school auditoria, once a month Universalist/Unitarian church basements and sluggish “open mic” gin mills looking to fill their joints on off-nights before she was “discovered” (and after we had parted ways). That was the scene that stared Roy Bluff in the face. I knew, and after we talked for a while once he saw me around the station pretty often, that he kind of knew it too. Later as he started to move up the food chain in the music business, the niche business created by the advent of CDs, I would review his work for various newspapers and small magazines pushing his name around.
Occasionally, after he got bigger, after he left Boston and based himself in New York City to be near the action I would hear about him and his antics. The ones the world, or rather that niche world that followed him knew about already; the drunken nights, the drunken brawls (not always the same thing as the nights but close), the drugs and that big messy covered up drug bust, the outrageous on stage antics and, of course, the women. But mostly I would hear about this woman, this Laura Perkins, who kind of broke him from some of his self-destructive ways, his booze, dope, and dames ways and who also fended the critics off whose vulture status drove Roy crazy when they didn’t “get” what he was trying to do.
What I didn’t know about, and maybe nobody really did or if so only a few like his road manager/doormat Benny Freed knew, was the tensions between Roy and Laura that led to their recent troubles, and led Roy to some private hospital with an undisclosed ailment. Although I no longer wrote for the public prints I was interested in piecing together the story, or as much of it as I could. I, nobody, could talk to Roy, so I worked an end around. I contacted that old flame Shana Buck, who was now under contract to Roy’s label, Ducca Records, to see what she could dig up. Some stuff, honest information stuff not tabloid muck, from her sources. Shana, always resourceful, dug up a fair amount but has thus far refused to be identified in any way as the source. So what follows is my sketch of what happened between Roy and Laura based on the information she gave me about how to get the information I was after. I bear complete responsibility for what is said below, and what is not. Frank Jackman
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No Limit
He, Roy Bluff, then, back in what he and everybody else called the hip-hop night, back in the late 90s of the last century and the early years of this century, and I quote “could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.” Reason, reason according to one Roy Bluff : Roy Bluff (he actually spoke of himself in the third person like that on occasion), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight bars, when his brand of hip-hop folk-rock became a craze, got a hearing from eager young college students looking for an added sound to their hip-hop repertoire and a segment of young blacks breaking from the nihilistic gangsta rap that was choking off the musical lines of their generation. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, after a long and frustrating studio session, heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach, tapped to the beat, and gave him a shot.
Of course being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night (maybe two but Roy was moving fast, fast as a man could to catch the rising wave so usually the classic one night stand held forth). He would drone on and on about how in the old days (the old beat down, fellahin days eking out dimes and donuts before the passing crowds at Park Street, Central Square, Harvard Square) women might sent a smile his way, or a frown, but no way were they giving keys to some nobody who they hadn’t seen on television, radio, or records. But such is life.
By the way Roy’s real name is Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance, ah, concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths back then and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man,
So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be called beautiful in this wicked old world, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women, lots of women wanting to be with a star. Yes, on that basis he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed Irish sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city.
Until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, to give her a name, although he called her “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And he, Roy Bluff he, said without a stammer or any sense of guile that wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.
Usually before a show, a couple of hours before, maybe, right in some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, he would be in a sly grin mood and so, as he set himself up for the night’s work he would go through the maybes. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy as he was at pains to tell all who would listen, mainly the paid help or some media guys who had to listen to get the real story he or she was looking for, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (although he always admitted that she tried like hell to temper them). Roy would laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.
Christ, as Roy thought back to that first night’s meeting, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly. Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along.
As the pair walked in they observed the finishing seconds of the melee between Roy and that customer, saw that, according to what Patty said to Laura at the time, it was just Roy being Roy as part of his growing rough-edged legend, and then stopped at the bar to pick up drinks. As they passed the stage where Roy was starting to tune up his guitar on their way to their table Laura stopped for the second and gave him a look, a look that said yeah I might take a ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac for god’s sake), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself.
Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway.
Maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his second set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing whatever caught his eye before she said that, and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. At least he liked to think of it that way, that he had taken the pledge.
Maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse. Mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage. Laura waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
And maybe, just maybe, Roy would finish up with something he told Laura directly on a “sweet angel” night it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…
One’s Own Private World
Out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over Laura Perkins began to keep a diary. Sure she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her now.
No, now she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, girl, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.
Laura made it clear to one and that make no mistake Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and she needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. As she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. And here is the gist of what she wrote as she explained it to Benny Freed, Roy’s roadie, one night when she was “blue,” Roy Bluff blue. According to Benny she kept referring to her diary as she did so but I think I got it about right:
Laura remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. A typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in his head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.
Then he let loose with this tirade, parts of which he had used before on other tough nights, after some fling or other indiscretion. Reason: Roy Bluff (she thought it odd that he would when blasted speak of himself in the third person like he was some ghost-traveler), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break too when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.
That night he went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. He then said it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.
While he was fuming Laura thought that it was odd about his constant use of the third person since Roy Bluff is not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name was Ronald Smith, but when he finally told her about the name thing after she had badgered him about it she merely said the performance stage, musical performance concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name.
Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.
Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the snows at bay they agreed, Laura laughed as she said this to Benny, to make love that night.
Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late Usually he would bring it up to settle himself right at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the night’s work he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. She could almost recite the list by heart (and Benny, poor Benny could too having heard it every time on the road, including times, dangerous times, when Laura stayed home).
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to Benny of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say).
Roy had laughed to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.
Christ, as Roy described to her one time his thoughts back on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.
Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told Roy one time to put him in his place a little when he was too full of himself that she did not really know who he was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. The truth as she told it to Benny was that she had heard about Roy from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before the Yonkers gig and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigued by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with at it turned out, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.
She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac of all thing she found out later by accident since Roy claimed he was from Wyoming when she had asked him that first night), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he had asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she reflected since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.
That was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All she knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.
Roy loved to give a blow by blow description of what happened after that first night’s introduction. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when Roy was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend who tipped her to Roy’s attraction to women, a few times later on when he was solo on the road), and had reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. That’s the way he liked to tell it to anybody, including Laura, who would listen, neglecting the on the road one night stands that she was painfully aware of through the close-knit music grapevine, when she did not travel with him. But that was Roy.
Then he went on to speak of a something that totally befuddled him maybe. It was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Then the full-court Roy press. Maybe he would say was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Which led in turn to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary), he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this one tough night- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…” And as the tears slowly formed as Laura finished up the quote she floored Benny with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more try.
So the hold Roy had over Laura, over me, wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world, that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter as she had confessed on a previous occasion.
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I knew Roy Bluff in the old days, got to know him a little in the late 1980s, when he was just singing for nickels and dimes in front of the Park Street Subway Station in downtown Boston. He was a tall, good- looking guy, longish hair and an unkempt short scruffy beard which could not hide a certain jut-jawed look. Not a city boy look but something out of the plains, a certain Sam Shepard the actor/playwright look, a cowboy, look although he was attired in second- hand work clothes, flannels like a lumberjack, considered de riguer if you were working the subway circuit. I would stop and listen to that arresting hip-hop sound that he produced on his electrified acoustic guitar combined with his old time social concern lyrics like some juked- up latter day Woody Guthrie angel saint as he mesmerized the small crowds (including me) that passed him by. I sensed, maybe at times slightly and at other times more forcefully, that his act, that what he had to say and the way he wanted to say it “spoke” to lots of things that were bothering us, the young and not so young, in those days. Things that needed saying and we needed some kind of angel saint herald to make sense of it all.
I also knew that such an act, such a sound, basically a throw-back to some fathers and mothers sixties high drug culture madness had no chance, nada, of interesting any mainstream record company since they were trying, trying like hell, to dump this genre from their catalogues as so many loss- leaders good for tax write-offs and not much else. I knew this first hand since my girlfriend then was Shana Buck, yes, that Shana Buck if you are at all familiar with the white girl blues mama scene who struggled for years in small cafes, high school auditoria, once a month Universalist/Unitarian church basements and sluggish “open mic” gin mills looking to fill their joints on off-nights before she was “discovered” (and after we had parted ways). That was the scene that stared Roy Bluff in the face. I knew, and after we talked for a while once he saw me around the station pretty often, that he kind of knew it too. Later as he started to move up the food chain in the music business, the niche business created by the advent of CDs, I would review his work for various newspapers and small magazines pushing his name around.
Occasionally, after he got bigger, after he left Boston and based himself in New York City to be near the action I would hear about him and his antics. The ones the world, or rather that niche world that followed him knew about already; the drunken nights, the drunken brawls (not always the same thing as the nights but close), the drugs and that big messy covered up drug bust, the outrageous on stage antics and, of course, the women. But mostly I would hear about this woman, this Laura Perkins, who kind of broke him from some of his self-destructive ways, his booze, dope, and dames ways and who also fended the critics off whose vulture status drove Roy crazy when they didn’t “get” what he was trying to do.
What I didn’t know about, and maybe nobody really did or if so only a few like his road manager/doormat Benny Freed knew, was the tensions between Roy and Laura that led to their recent troubles, and led Roy to some private hospital with an undisclosed ailment. Although I no longer wrote for the public prints I was interested in piecing together the story, or as much of it as I could. I, nobody, could talk to Roy, so I worked an end around. I contacted that old flame Shana Buck, who was now under contract to Roy’s label, Ducca Records, to see what she could dig up. Some stuff, honest information stuff not tabloid muck, from her sources. Shana, always resourceful, dug up a fair amount but has thus far refused to be identified in any way as the source. So what follows is my sketch of what happened between Roy and Laura based on the information she gave me about how to get the information I was after. I bear complete responsibility for what is said below, and what is not. Frank Jackman
**********
No Limit
He, Roy Bluff, then, back in what he and everybody else called the hip-hop night, back in the late 90s of the last century and the early years of this century, and I quote “could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.” Reason, reason according to one Roy Bluff : Roy Bluff (he actually spoke of himself in the third person like that on occasion), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight bars, when his brand of hip-hop folk-rock became a craze, got a hearing from eager young college students looking for an added sound to their hip-hop repertoire and a segment of young blacks breaking from the nihilistic gangsta rap that was choking off the musical lines of their generation. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, after a long and frustrating studio session, heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach, tapped to the beat, and gave him a shot.
Of course being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night (maybe two but Roy was moving fast, fast as a man could to catch the rising wave so usually the classic one night stand held forth). He would drone on and on about how in the old days (the old beat down, fellahin days eking out dimes and donuts before the passing crowds at Park Street, Central Square, Harvard Square) women might sent a smile his way, or a frown, but no way were they giving keys to some nobody who they hadn’t seen on television, radio, or records. But such is life.
By the way Roy’s real name is Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance, ah, concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths back then and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man,
So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be called beautiful in this wicked old world, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women, lots of women wanting to be with a star. Yes, on that basis he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed Irish sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city.
Until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, to give her a name, although he called her “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And he, Roy Bluff he, said without a stammer or any sense of guile that wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.
Usually before a show, a couple of hours before, maybe, right in some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, he would be in a sly grin mood and so, as he set himself up for the night’s work he would go through the maybes. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy as he was at pains to tell all who would listen, mainly the paid help or some media guys who had to listen to get the real story he or she was looking for, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (although he always admitted that she tried like hell to temper them). Roy would laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.
Christ, as Roy thought back to that first night’s meeting, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly. Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along.
As the pair walked in they observed the finishing seconds of the melee between Roy and that customer, saw that, according to what Patty said to Laura at the time, it was just Roy being Roy as part of his growing rough-edged legend, and then stopped at the bar to pick up drinks. As they passed the stage where Roy was starting to tune up his guitar on their way to their table Laura stopped for the second and gave him a look, a look that said yeah I might take a ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac for god’s sake), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself.
Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway.
Maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his second set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing whatever caught his eye before she said that, and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. At least he liked to think of it that way, that he had taken the pledge.
Maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse. Mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage. Laura waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
And maybe, just maybe, Roy would finish up with something he told Laura directly on a “sweet angel” night it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…
One’s Own Private World
Out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over Laura Perkins began to keep a diary. Sure she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her now.
No, now she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, girl, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.
Laura made it clear to one and that make no mistake Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and she needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. As she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. And here is the gist of what she wrote as she explained it to Benny Freed, Roy’s roadie, one night when she was “blue,” Roy Bluff blue. According to Benny she kept referring to her diary as she did so but I think I got it about right:
Laura remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. A typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in his head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.
Then he let loose with this tirade, parts of which he had used before on other tough nights, after some fling or other indiscretion. Reason: Roy Bluff (she thought it odd that he would when blasted speak of himself in the third person like he was some ghost-traveler), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break too when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.
That night he went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. He then said it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.
While he was fuming Laura thought that it was odd about his constant use of the third person since Roy Bluff is not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name was Ronald Smith, but when he finally told her about the name thing after she had badgered him about it she merely said the performance stage, musical performance concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name.
Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.
Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the snows at bay they agreed, Laura laughed as she said this to Benny, to make love that night.
Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late Usually he would bring it up to settle himself right at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the night’s work he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. She could almost recite the list by heart (and Benny, poor Benny could too having heard it every time on the road, including times, dangerous times, when Laura stayed home).
The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to Benny of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say).
Roy had laughed to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.
Christ, as Roy described to her one time his thoughts back on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank church basements and crowded three table cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.
Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told Roy one time to put him in his place a little when he was too full of himself that she did not really know who he was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. The truth as she told it to Benny was that she had heard about Roy from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before the Yonkers gig and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigued by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with at it turned out, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.
She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred, a Mainiac of all thing she found out later by accident since Roy claimed he was from Wyoming when she had asked him that first night), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, also attracted. Later, just before he started his second set he had asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she reflected since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.
That was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All she knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.
Roy loved to give a blow by blow description of what happened after that first night’s introduction. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for Patty too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when Roy was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend who tipped her to Roy’s attraction to women, a few times later on when he was solo on the road), and had reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. That’s the way he liked to tell it to anybody, including Laura, who would listen, neglecting the on the road one night stands that she was painfully aware of through the close-knit music grapevine, when she did not travel with him. But that was Roy.
Then he went on to speak of a something that totally befuddled him maybe. It was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Then the full-court Roy press. Maybe he would say was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Which led in turn to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary), he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this one tough night- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was…” And as the tears slowly formed as Laura finished up the quote she floored Benny with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more try.
She
Belongs To …
When a writer for Rolling Stone or one of those
music-oriented magazines you see flooding the newsstands and supermarket check-
out counters asked Ben Freed, the longtime road manager for Roy Bluff, the
famous hip-hop-infused folk rocker, off the record, for his take on the Roy
Bluff-Laura Perkins flare-up he answered like this:
Sure I knew Roy Bluff on his way up,
and Laura, Laura Perkins too when she came on the scene to help build his
legend, but I will speak of her later. I knew that if he kept plugging away
with his lyrics, his lyrics that spoke to our weird times, the late ‘90s, to
the time of the seemingly end-time great plague in this world, wars, injustice,
inequality, that he would break through the thickets of the music business and
rise to the top, kicking ass and screaming all the way. I knew that if Roy just
kept to his words, to his music, and left the other stuff alone he would be
immortal. That other stuff being a huge reservoir appetite for high- shelf
whiskey, high-grade dope, mainly marijuana but later, cocaine and some opium, and any grade women. But that
was what made him Roy, the other stuff, and it was not until later that I
realized that without the other stuff, without living on edge city, without the
high-wire act of his life that he could not produce those words that spoke to
us. Nada, nothing.
I first met Roy one night as he was
working his way up in the music world at the Café Algiers in New York City, in
the Village, where he was working out the kinks for a major tour that Ducca
Records, a label that had just taken a chance on him and had signed him to do
an album. The album finally produced the tour was put together to gain exposure
for him in small concert halls and large hotel ballrooms and to promote (sell)
the records, oops, CDs. So I had been
among the small group that showed up that night as he warmed up for the long
haul road trip.
Now the Algiers was a smaller club
than he would play on tour although frequented by serious music aficionados and
some hanger-on second level celebrities, you know Village-wise artists and
musicians like Manny Ray and The Kinksters and off-Broadway denizens like Mike
Ester and Fiona Florin. During the break between sets Roy headed for the bar
and his couple of shots of then low-shelf whiskey and a beer chaser. I, sitting
at the bar, offered to buy him a drink in appreciation for what was a good
performance, one that touched me at points, one that “spoke” to me in ways that
mainline hip-hop artists did not at that point. He accepted and we talked
further and then we talked later after the show when he again hit the bar. The
long and short of it was that after a few nights of that at the Algiers I
became something of a roadie for him (unpaid at first and then when he hit
overpaid). So yeah I knew Roy for a while, a while before he hit it big, and
before he met Laura on the way to hitting big. Roy, as everybody knows is more
that capable of speaking for himself, of defending himself and his actions,
small and large, infantile and immortal. So let him fend for himself.
Laura deep down was another story,
and many a lonely Roy-ing night (a term shared for the care and protection of
one Roy Bluff and his frailties) we shared a bottle or a joint, probably both,
and commiserated over that man. One night, one night in Kansas City, after the
show at the famous Hi-Hat Club, and after a particularly tough Roy-ing period
for Laura when, against all good judgment, he had almost hit her when she tried
to temper his furies she laid out some stuff for me about their relationship,
about how it started and so I want to tell you my take on her story, on her
flaming love for the Roy. And yes I had
a thing for Laura, still do as little good as it does me, so let’s get that off
the table right now. Here goes:
As always with Laura she was a
little hesitant even after a few drinks to speak openly of her troubles, her
sorrows, having been brought up in a tight-lipped Irish-Catholic household just
outside of Yonkers. Tight-lipped as I knew from my own experiences with my I-C maternal
grandparents was just another way of saying that you did not air your dirty
line in public. And so Laura hesitated although she knew, or should have known,
that I had strong evidence either from not being blinded by Roy or that he told
me in his more lucid (read: not drunk or stoned) of what was, and was not,
happening between her and Roy.
She started out talking about a
diary that she had started keeping the previous few months out of some sense of
just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of
thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes
and going out and starting over. She pulled it out of her purse because she
said she wanted to look up some stuff that she might have forgotten or had put
a certain way as she wrote it out so that I would know what she felt at the
time. As she read aloud to me one entry
she laughed, a gorgeous Laura laugh, an infectious laugh she had when she was
in high spirits and that everybody took shelter under. She had, like many a
lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense
diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of
age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy
and reticent by nature, needed some way to express the confusions that made up
her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another
turning point, what to do, or what not to do about boys. She had had that
figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to
do with her life was what ailed her. I blushed a little when she detailed some
of her early sexual explorings, although she only made a couple of explicit
references. Metaphor unlike with Roy, Roy when non-lyric producing, who swore
and talked obscenely almost automatically, being her forte in talking about men,
love, and sex.
So mainly Laura kept the diary
because she felt she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy
Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp
now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had
made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and an acre of ganja
(dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or she
fumed maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew
she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head
full of liquor and dope (cocaine, girl , snow you know the drill, or should),
came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence
the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.
Laura made it clear, painfully
clear, and drew a circle in the air as if to make sure there was no mistake
about her feelings, Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man
ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years
before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one
Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and Laura
needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing.
Laura said that as she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she
began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the
prospect of love was in the air. Nights then when she was not “blue,” Roy Bluff
blue.
Laura spoke of how she remembered
back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting
point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken
and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had
told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying
to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. I thought as
she mentioned it a typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve,
maybe before. I had used a variation on
that theme myself when younger, maybe high school younger, testing some young
thing, testing just to be testing like testing the limits of outrageous
behavior was the be-all and end-all of any relationship.
It had been a tough night before a
half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty
brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising
star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon
snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid
that mix in Roy’s head sometimes, or hers
too when he introduced her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his
pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his
momentary fashion interest.
The way Laura explained the way Roy exit
was pretty stark but was pure Roy when he thought he was telling some kind of
home truths. Reason: Roy Bluff (he was prone, as many
people noted, when he was sucking air, when he trying to get out from under some bad boy
thing, to use the third person to distance himself from the crapp he was
dishing out), a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time
finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely
half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank
church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help
defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight,
when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze. Got his big ass
break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to
need a midnight drink, maybe two, and
heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.
He went on and on about how being a
record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving
him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say
they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at
the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch
the rising wave. The she confided in me something she did not think I knew. Roy
Bluff is not his real name, although she said out of some male vanity, or
something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs
gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron.
His real name was Ronald Smith, but as he told her later when he finally
admitted to the name change, the performance stage, musical performance concert
artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just
when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night
after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a
Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that
manly name. Depending on the day and whether he was looking for sympathy or not
he either lost that fight to some giant or he won against that same giant using
some juke moves.
So the hold Roy had over Laura, over me, wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world, that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter as she had confessed on a previous occasion.
[What Laura did not know which I
did, and which she did not find out until later, after the night of our talk
was that Ronald Smith was not Roy’s real
name either but Zebulon Jordan. The way I found out about it was the night, let’s
see, yes, the first night he was busted for dope he tried to use Ronald Smith
when I attempted to bail him out and the hick cops in Louisville couldn’t find
that name at the address given on their computer and were going to hold him
over until they could get something better on him. He coped to the Jordan name
that night. All of which is neither here nor there now, except as the ten thousandth
perfidious Roy thing, since he has had his name legally changed to Roy
Bluff.]
Roy continued on that line about the
women he had had as he practically boasted to one and all that he had run
through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads,
especially a couple of wild red-headed sisters, college students, young
professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his
dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be
expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was
on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. Laura
said that was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.
Later full of bad booze and sorrows
Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she,
Laura Perkins she, whom he called his “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel
when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten
the best out of him. And waxing a little poetic he said wherever the winds
would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that
was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that
sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely
waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him
and others. They did, to keep the Butte snows at bay, Laura laughed as she said
this and I blushed, make love that night.
Then she moved on to a pet peeve. Roy
used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had
been happening a lot more of late. Usually he would bring it up to settle
himself down at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his
head, and he was in a sly grin mood. (I knew about the maybes to since I was
his “sounding-board” many nights when he was unsure of his performance level,
unsure where he stood with Laura.) As he
set himself up for the night’s work he would start. The maybes being a little
game that he, previously nothing but a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with
himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura
Perkins, got under his skin.
The first maybe was that Laura was
not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let
him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his
excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell
to temper them and made a point, a strong point to me of not wanting to discuss
those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some
sunnier days into what she had to say). She said Roy had told her he would
laugh to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met
and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, judgmental was just not the
way she was built. She said she had let a little grin form on her face in
recognition of that trait, a trait that she told me she was particularly proud
of.
Then Roy would describe to her his
thoughts on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand
beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first
major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small
concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank basements
and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at
the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him
about it, told him loudly.
Roy, having been drinking (and
smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the
worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told him later that
she did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear
Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she
had persuaded Laura to tag along. The truth was that Laura had heard about him
from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a
few weeks before and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigued by what
she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had
slept with as it turned out, and slept with after Laura’s entry into his life
when their paths crossed on the road times when Laura stayed home, was the one
who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the
intrigue.
She had given Roy a look, an honest
look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy
from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred although he had told her, truth,
that he was from Wyoming), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and
all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started
his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a
drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to
buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. Funny she
said since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at
the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like
he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or
two.
That was their start. After Roy had
finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the
fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but
rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All
she knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last
time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. Roy would
always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not
have occurred except for her and by implication that if she left him he would
fall back on his wicked ways.
Then Roy would move on to a blow by
blow description of what happened after that. He would start with maybe it was
that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when
after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be
sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had
been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was
her man (she said he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was
what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that )
and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were
the days when he was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that
female musician friend), and reasoned what guy who was starting to get a little
positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy.
But after that he said he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they
later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, never told
her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened. A patent lie, no question.
There was a maybe
that totally befuddled him. It was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets
that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She
only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his
public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she
was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told
him about a man, an older man (older being twenty-five she being eighteen at
the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the
wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with
gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to
confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten
her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She
said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were
doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Then Roy would give the full-court
press. Maybe it was as they grew closer,
as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started
rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to
protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters,
grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long
as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics
and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their
evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe
praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters
that they, yes they, had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say
“sell-out.” Yes, she had protected him from the scavengers as I had, maybe
better since she did not have to deal with them like I had to.
Which led to maybe it was the
soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of
the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on
stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town,
nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or
west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against,
the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to
break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe too it was the tough years,
the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the
gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody
wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad,
very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical,
although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had
to be hospitalized (and not long before she started keeping that diary), he
almost did so out of some hubristic rage. She waved him off when he tried to
explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the
discussion.
Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking
contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this- and she quoted
it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering
night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing
muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just
was… “And as the tears slowly formed as she finished the quote she floored me
with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would
give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more
try.
Damn.
