PINETOP PERKINS IN THE GARDEN!
August 15th, 2006 admin
When I moved to Austin, Texas last year, I resumed two hobbies I had missed for more than ten years. Listening to live music and growing large tomatoes. Austin people made it east. They started giving me things the minute I got here and have yet to stop. Gin and tonics, barbecue, concert tickets, party invitations, and, from my neighbor, a huge piece of land where my daughter and I created Mother’s Day Farm.
The tomato project began in August, when I planted Brandy Boy tomato transplants, shuffling in the humidity, sweating the shape right out of my straw hat, listening to an old black man’s voice from the back of the apartment building next door. My neighbor told me the voice belonged to a fairly well-known blues musician. She remembered his name as Top-Hat Somethingorother.
I re-embraced live music portion by going to the Broken Spoke bar on my 48th birthday to listen to what had been advertised generically as A Night of Blues Piano. Back in the days when I had no trouble staying awake, I had played blues piano myself.
And who should show up but Top-Hat Somethingorother, who down at the piano and revealed himself to be Pinetop Perkins, the best blues pianist in the world! When I was 17, he was playing with Muddy Waters’ finest band and I was playing along with him, though I had to stop all the time to move the arm of my turntable back to the beginning of the track. It was that long ago. To Pinetop Perkins, it might as well have been last week. He was 94, and he hadn’t lost any of it, even though his hearing aid was on the fritz. In an age of floating, dweedly piano solos, his left hand like the door of an old Cadillac slamming shut. As I sat there, breathlessly clutching a cold beer bottle, all the mediocre music of the past thirty years was washed from my soul and I was clean.
Having Pinetop Perkins for a next-door neighbor is an astounding confluence of fate, as well as an ongoing thrill. A certain kind of person would feel the same way-Mick Jagger, for instance. He paid his deep respects to Mr. Perkins backstage at the Stones concert here last month. There are pictures to prove it.
Possibly because he has high-toned admirers, and also because I’m incoherent in his presence, Pinetop Perkins continues to ignore me, even when I bake cornbread for him in the hope of promoting a Tuesdays-with-Pinetop relationship. It ain’t gonna happen, but so what? I remain the neighbor in the garden in the back, the one with the unhinged smile, thinking how can this wonderful thing be happening, even when it isn’t exactly happening, but rather, is.
Also, the Brandy Boy is the best tomato I’ve ever grown. I don’t know who invented it, but creative genius was involved.
