by KUBOA
BG: Bill Cosby. Never mind.
Like Richard Nixon, I was born in a house my father built, a basement he poured. A sandlot diamond behind the house where I got a splinter once in my rear. The bigger boys laughed. A street of gravel with ditches for drainage: Eighth Street. And a cocker spaniel bitch named Cyrano.
Born with eyes the color of the sea, green and mud, a dull roiling behind a semitranslucent screen. Born in a matter of minutes, so fast the nurses were dubious, the doctor almost late.
The town was Lewiston, New York, a carbuncle on the gritty side of gritty Niagara Falls, New York, the former honeymoon capital of the United States, a country which, like Niagara Falls in microcosm, had lately fallen into disrepair. Now, Niagara Falls, Ontario, just over the national border, where my mother's incredibly large family hailed from, was bright and brisk and clean and gardeny, the shiny flipside of its American counterpart.
I’ve seen the great falls frozen; I’ve seen it turned off as if there were a giant tap. I’ve stood on a rocking boat deck beneath its monstrous incontestableness. Where I was born is a grey little town, a pustule on the side of grey little Niagara New York. The Canadian side had the greener grass, we all knew, even as late at night, in our trundle beds, we felt the thrum in our veins of a power larger than kings, a warbling of just what the earth has in mind, though it stayed, of course, just beyond us.
I longed to be from the Canadian side; I longed to be Canadian. I thought my mother's family was just about the most exotic thing I could imagine (and later in school I used her heritage as if it were some bizarre ethnic upbringing, as if one side of my family tree was hung with Hottentots, or Eskimos), and my Canuck uncles, who were all big, strapping, lumberjack men, who could hold seven or eight nieces and nephews on their backs, were the ideal of manhood with which I constantly compared my scrawny, allergic, weak wristed self (No upper body strength, my tennis coach would later tell me).
Actually I have few memories from Lewiston. We left there when I was four, to Memphis, Tennessee.. What memories I do possess are clouded as if suspended in aspic, dream recollections, impressionistic and shadowy. I remember Cyrano. (He got hit by a car? He died of old age? At any rate he was gone before our move south). I vaguely remember the baseball diamond. I remember comparing peepees with the girl down the street; I even remember her name (well, of course I do, my first sex) which was Sandy. I remember, as if from a bad dream, a life lesson dream) getting a hellacious shock from our electric football game. This was a flat metal gameboard which you plugged into the wall and it vibrated and your defensive and offensive formations danced together (or apart) in random, chaotic tremblings, until the player with the ball (a small plastic chip) was shaken off the playing field. I think I piled rubber bricks on the game (although rubber shouldn't give you a shock, should it?) and was jolted into an acute awareness, which obviously left its impression. I believe this is my clearest memory of Lewiston: a healthy dose of 120 volts.
Is this what you want? (laughs) Does anyone care?
Moved to a city beside a great rolling river, the color of my eyes at dusk, mud flecked with green. A city of irony and pity, a Bluff City.
Actually, at first we lived in Raleigh, which is kind of like to Memphis what Lewiston was to Niagara Falls, except, at that time, Raleigh was an emerald isle, a rolling, green neighborhood, with lots of kids and bikes and vacant lots to collect pop bottles from, pop bottles that could be turned into cash. I lived in Raleigh till 2nd grade. We then moved to what we call the cool zip code, 38104. Midtown Memphis.
CM: I thought you went to Idlewild in 1st grade. It’s been written you went to Idlewild.
BG: It must be true then. Who’s writing my story? (laughs)
Ok. As has been documented my first musical instrument was a ukulele. My dad bought it for me, I think at Guitar and Drum City, which used to be on Summer Avenue in Memphis. I was, I don’t know, seven, eight.. I didn’t take any lessons or anything—I’m not sure my folks could have afforded them. But, when I picked up that little stringed toy, really, it was as if I knew it already, as if I’d been there before, in a dream, in a previous incarnation, Lor might say.
Lorelei Enos: Your soul, your old soul.
BG: Right. It taught me to play, whatever came to me from the ozone of the past. I think the first thing I picked out on it was “Feelin’ Alright.” Can that be right, timewise? I don’t know. Maybe it was “Baby Let’s Play House.” I remember doing “Baby Let’s Play House” at school, on the blacktop playground of Idlewild Elementary, for Mike and Mark and little Patty Grabenhorst, on whom I had the worst kind of crush. I think I wanted to play music, initially, to please her, to catch her attention. Isn’t that always the way, man, we fucking men, looking for female approval? Patty Grabenhorst. Just saying the name is like a spell to me. Man, I wonder where that chick is today—she must have grown up to be something. She moved away before high school, but, already you could see the beauty there. She was, um, saucy. Saucy at ten. Hey, that’s a great song title. Wait a minute.
Ok, yeah, so I was playing this Elvis song for my friends and some teacher heard it and blew a gasket. (laughs) I mean, I guess “Baby, let’s play house,” is not something you expect a little boy to sing to a little girl. And I got my uke taken from me and a call was made to my parents. My mom hit the roof—she was the kind that got embarrassed by such things and that, to her, was the ultimate disgrace, to be shown up in front of other grownups. My mom threatened to smash my uke and Dad had to cool her down and, I think, it was later that night I got it back. I started right in, learning new songs. Thinking up new songs. I had this record player, you know, with the lid and the swivel arm made of plastic, and a stack of 45s, some I bought at Corondolet in a sealed stack—you know? Five 45s for $1, and you could only see the top one. And it would be something halfway tempting, some Jerry Lee or The Cascades. But the others were groups you’d never heard of. But, that didn’t matter to me. I listened to everything. At that time everything was equal—my taste was still developing. So I was indiscriminately borrowing from everywhere, from any 45 that came across my little portable spinner, it was all equal, you know, it was all music, Lee Hazlewood or Howlin’ Wolf or Roy Orbison or Serge Gainsbourg. I remember I had this Terry Callier 45, “Look at me Now,” and I thought it was every bit as good as “Rock Around the Clock” or the Sun stuff or “Lemon Tree”—(laughs)—I didn’t know, man, I mean it all seemed good to me. And I taught myself to play it all.
CM: This was what year?
BG: Lessee, I was nine or ten so…
CM: And that’s your earliest musical memory?
BG: Yeah. Oh, naw, no. I mean, I was about five and my parents had this set of records, this Reader’s Digest set, and there was this one song that I fell in love with on it, used to go around the house, scatting it, at five. It was “I Can’t Get Started” by Bunny Berigan. I don’t know. I can still play that one.
CM: So, you grew up in a musical house? Music was part of your everyday life?
BG: (laughs) Shit, no. Why would that follow? I mean, we had this console thing, whatever the hell they called them, big as a basilisk, a monstrous thing that had a radio and record player. I used to lie on the couch in the dark and listen to FM 100 on that thing—my parents, well, if they thought about what I was doing at all, probably thought it was better than TV. Better than My Mother the Car, or whatever. I mean (laughs), c’mon, look at all the space that fucker took up and all it did was play the radio or your LPs. Funny, looking back on it. I only remember my mother playing Englebert Humperdink. I still love “Please Release Me,” man, that song makes me cry. And those old big band records. Shit, I like that old stuff, Glenn Miller, the Dorseys. Later, I got into FM 100, when it was a force, when it played stuff that inspired. They played us, I think the first place to play us. Anyway, ha, that stereo. Naw, my parents didn’t play much music. My dad, of course…
CM: Tell me about your dad.