coke & music is a very special combustion. oddly, i have a story about that but, unlike most of em, it involves me as a performer.
I have an OK voice, decent style & command, but no range and terrible stagefright from blowing my lines in a school play when i was 12. My youngest son's mother, a Nevada lounge singer, helped break me out of the stagefright because friends had heard us harmonize and one asked us to play their wedding reception. It worked, we broke a lot of songs like Pride & Joy, She's No Lady and You Look Wonderful Tonight down into two-parters and ended up getting asked to do a few other events. Once i got the bug, we also participated regularly in the Monday blues nite at a local club with a friend of ours, Natman, who looked like Scatman Crothers but played like Hendrix, but i never took my eyes off my Kathy's or the fear would creep in.
We weren't actually going to show up this one Monday, but Natman called to say he had a special treat. Nevada drug laws had changed recently to make as little as an 8ball qualify as sale weight and, for a while, that knocked the hell out of the quality of flake being sold around Reno. Natman called us to make sure we were coming to blues night cuz he'd just come up from LA and had some puro Peru that would shonuff zoink us out. I brought along a bottle of XO Kathy gave me for xmas (both Natman and i prefer evening out our powders w cognac) and we was gonna have ourselves a time.
We all got way high, too high i guess, because i don't remember none of what next happened. Kathy was all over me when woke up up next day and i was all wtf and she kept talking about she didnt know i was such a monster & #### and i'm even more wtf?! Apparently, Natman had done his share of the bluesy side of Hendrix that nite and was kickin' it and i had done nothing w him but do lines & shots out back and our arrangement of Bonnie Raitt's
Love Sneakin' Up On You. He called me onstage amid his Hendrix set and started in on
Hey Joe. I was just barely unzoinked enough to remember we had once done this as a two-parter (he had helped us arrange the 2parters on the wedding songs) with me as Joe and Natman as the guy asking what he's doing w the gun, so i took up the Joe part like i sposeta.
Well, sumn i dont understand, whether it was the chance to finally cut loose and/or being that high, happened to me but i started free-styling when Natman asked me if i shot her about precisely what happened that night and i guess i ended up doing five minutes on puttin' away this woman done me wrong, with Natman firing his licks inbetween. Apparently the most incindiary moment of my artistic career happened then and i dont remember a moment of it. All i know is that, for my last years in Reno, women were approaching me and rubbing my chest and doods were wowing me about that night. Alls i can say is
!