Bobby Keys

Jesus, man, my reading pace feels like it has accelerated.

I am ripping through books like my life depends on it. So fast I haven't been able to keep up with keeping you informed.

I'm sure this has created a void in your life.

I've been meaning to tell you about Bobby Keys. Sax player extraordinaire. I devoured his autobiography probably a month ago. Or longer.

It was like eating a cheeseburger. It went down so easy. Because that's the kind of guy he was. Straight-shooter, no bullshit, right in your face. Conversational. Nothing fancy about it. Just the truth.

In part, his life story left me nostalgic for Olden Times. Before everything was scrubbed clean. Sanitized, stripped of character and endlessly duplicated.

I kind of caught the tail end of all that. When I was a kid, you could still order a shot and a beer in a bar without being reported surreptitiously to AA. You could find funky bars with live bands playing funky music. You were guaranteed to run into "characters" in all these places, so you never knew how your night was gonna go. But you knew you would not be bored.

Bobby Keys was raised in Slaton, Texas. 

"But Slaton's a small town, and I could hear this music through my window coming from this place a few blocks away called the Black & Tan Cafe. I was maybe ten years old. So I'd sneak out my window and go through the alleys and the back roads and sit outside this place and listen to the music. I had no idea who I was listening to at the time, but I found out later it was folks like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters and some of those other guys who'd do these circuits of small towns throughout the South. Legends now. But back then, I'd just sit out there in the parking lot and listen to the music."

This was 1954. This could never happen today. You would have to get through 8 layers of security and pay $500 to get that close to people like that. Even to just be in the parking lot, for Christ sake. They'd run you out of there like a homeless bum.

"I was ten years old, it was 1954, and one random day - I guess it was a Saturday - I was just lying in bed at my grandparents' house in Slaton when suddenly I heard this music. Of course, I'd heard this type of music on the radio before, but this wasn't on the radio, man, this was somewhere outside my house! So I jumped up and went outside and there he was: Buddy Holly. Buddy and his guys were playing on the back of a cotton trailer with the sides taken off, just a flatbed wagon. He was playing for the grand opening of a gas station just half a block away from where my grandparents lived. Of course, I didn't know who Buddy Holly was at the time. I was just drawn to that sound - it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone play an electric guitar live.'

These experiences shaped and influenced Bobby Keys, got him into the music biz. They could never happen today. The farther down the road we get from the Olden Times, the more we lose. In bigger and faster moving chunks.

There are lots of rock'n roll stories in the book, well worth checking out. The list of bands and people Bobby Keys played with is legendary. Including, and especially, The Rolling Stones.

Bobby Keys was a legend himself.

What a life.