Ever since attending the “Celebration for Young Americans,” Lee Atwater’s Rhythm and Blues Presidential Ball, in 1989, I have been meaning to write about it. I kept extensive notes at the time (I mean, it was such an amazing experience!), and I always thought I would include it, under the title “My Adventures Among the Republicans,” in the anthology I’m still planning to put together
Well, circumstances change, and Rhythm and Blues Foundation founder Howell Begle, who produced the original concert and then saved the film footage from 1000 deaths, was finally able to put it out, first as an hour-long PBS special earlier this year, now as a two-hour DVD released by Shout!Factory.
I wrote this as my contribution to the liner notes for the DVD.
Maybe someday I’ll release my own untruncated version. But I think this represents the essence of the experience in all its glorious confusion and beauty.
In any case watch the concert in either format (check out the link at the end) and dig the music. And be thankful that Howell Begle rescued it from the literal dustbin of history.
The phone calls must have started coming in December. Would I be Lee Atwater’s guest at the “Celebration of Rhythm and Blues” that was being planned for the inauguration of the first President Bush?
At the beginning it was all pretty low-key, as I deflected each request politely but without hesitation. The caller was a friend of a friend, a low-level operative in the Republican Party, evidently – and while I had no interest in parading my self-righteousness, I knew there was no way in hell I was ever going to attend.
Gradually the calls became more insistent, but if anything, that only reinforced my sense of – well, I would be pussyfooting around the subject if I were to simply call it “resolve.” This was one of those rare moments when I had no question that I was Doing the Right Thing, however insignificant, however ineffectual in the greater scheme of things my refusal might be.
Then Lee called himself. I tried to be equally deflective, if no less disingenuous. Maybe we could meet in Harvard Square some time for a cup of coffee if he happened to be coming to Boston. Had he read my novel, Nighthawk Blues? Well, that turned out to be something of a miscalculation. I mean, what were the chances that he would turn out to be among the 2000 or so readers (tops) who had found their way to my single published novel? He appeared to be genuinely affronted.
Read it? he said. He then proceeded to recite a brief précis before delivering an enthusiastic appreciation of its principal character, a cantankerous old bluesman who, like Howlin’ Wolf or Big Joe Williams, for me represented the Life Force.
“Come on, are you kidding?” Lee said with indignant enthusiasm. “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.” And then proceeded to prove it as he reeled off a list of publications even I might have forgotten, including a 1967 interview with Buddy Guy that had appeared in Crawdaddy. “You know,” he said, without so much as figurative wink, “the two of us are a lot alike. We’re just two white guys trying to make it in a black world.”
Well, all right. I very much doubted that I could fully subscribe to that. But I must admit, he got my attention. That was when I began to reconsider my position and, after checking with my father to make sure he didn’t feel I would become part of the Republican Big Propaganda Machine by agreeing to attend (“I mean, Pete, they don’t even know who you are,” my father said cheerfully), I finally relented. And that was how I came to be a guest at the “Celebration for Young Americans” (its proper title), put on almost under cover of night by the Committee for the American Bicentennial Presidential Inaugural, at the Washington Convention Center in honor of the inauguration of President George H.W. Bush.
It would be impossible to describe just how surreal all of this really was. Wandering around the cavernous Convention Center the afternoon of the concert, encountering old friends and acquaintances like Delbert McClinton, Mac Rebennack, Carla Thomas, William Bell, and Willie Dixon, each wearing an expression of incredulity on his or her face that as much as said, What are you doing here? In Willie Dixon’s case the incredulity was underscored by a big Jesse Jackson for President button that required no further elucidation. Over the course of the afternoon and evening I encountered figures like Roger Ailes, Strom Thurmond, and ultra-conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie – now, please don’t imagine I’m claiming any real acquaintance here, but I did get to meet and observe them in their native habitat. I even got to meet the newly elected President. I was sitting in a box with Miss National Teenager and her parents, who in my mind’s eye (and very likely in real life, too) were eyeing me with thinly veiled contempt, when Lee came over and said, “Would you like to meet the President?” What could I say to an invitation offered so graciously? I had met Jimmy Carter in passing at his inauguration in company with James Talley (James had given a wonderful Woody Guthrie-esque performance), and President Carter had started talking to James about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This wasn’t that kind of meeting, but it was, as I say, very gracious, and I chalked it up to one more element of my education, it was all part of My Adventures Among the Republicans.
Throughout it all there were two constants. The first was Lee’s unfailing enthusiasm, which I saw overcome even the most intransigent resistance of the most skeptical of the musicians – well, it wasn’t just his enthusiasm, it was his courtesy, his graciousness, his respect, and (just as with his expressed regard for my writing) the genuine deference he paid to both their person and their art.
The other constant was the magic of the music. Now this was not, as you might imagine, the most responsive of audiences. If there was clapping, it came – unintentionally – on the off (the “proper” one and three) beat. If there was applause it was generally tepid, even after the most passionate performances. But for whatever reason — and Howell Begle, whom I met for the first time that night, has always theorized it was the respect with which they were treated (not excluding either pay or amenities) and the ceremoniousness of the occasion – the musicians almost to a person seemed to rise to the occasion, and the performances almost without exception were inspired and self-contained in a manner that transcended their surroundings. (“I’ve never felt so much a part of things,” said one artist, referring specifically to the thrill of sharing an experience like this with so many of his peers.) But you can be the judge of that for yourself.
I continued to see and hear from Lee over the next eighteen months or so, even after he got sick with a brain tumor that would kill him at forty, just two years after the Inauguration. I saw him on Beale Street in Memphis with Rufus, Carla and Marvell Thomas and Polly Walker, who with her husband, Cato, was an integral part of the B.B. King story from the beginning. It was the evening of the Republicans’ Lincoln Day Dinner, for which he had hired Marvell to provide the entertainment, and while I’m sure Lee enjoyed himself among his fellow pols, on Beale Street he was truly in his element. He called me when he was forced to resign from the Board of Trustees of Howard University and said what I’m sure he said publicly many times, “You know being on that Board was the greatest honor that could ever happen to me. I understand why those kids protested my appointment – hell, I would have been out there on the protest line if I had been them – but I wish they could have understood how much I could have brought to the school.”
He was nearly as proud when he put out his album, Red Hot and Blue, named for both the Dewey Phillips radio show that announced the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the barbecue chain in which he was a principal investor and which was the site of the late-hours after-party following the Inaugural Ball. The album was an all-star affair featuring lead guitar by Lee and B.B. King, and guest vocals by Carla Thomas, Chuck Jackson, Isaac Hayes, Billy Preston, and Sam Moore, with profits assigned to various charities explicitly benefiting black youth. “Rhythm and blues is all-American music,” Lee wrote. “It’s the best music this country has ever produced, the most totally American music there is….and we are committed to ensuring that our children and future generations will have a chance to enjoy it as much as we have.”
How to explain it? I can’t. I have been challenged over the years with respect to both my own hypocrisy and Lee’s. There was no way, said one acquaintance, a well-known cultural critic, that Lee could really have appreciated the blues, given not only his political beliefs – which in the end I think were negligible – but his political actions, which were not. Think Willie Horton and the whole Dukakis campaign, which Lee himself recanted for its apparent racism and “naked cruelty” in a public apology in Life magazine shortly before he died.
When I think of Lee, I think of his intensity and enthusiasm, the inexcusable glee with which he cut down opponents and the undeniable love and respect he showed the musicians and the music. Don’t ask me to square the two – all you’re going to get from me is an inconclusive meditation on the multifariousness of the human experience. “I don’t think anything is more helpful to the body politic or to the people in general than music,” Lee wrote in the liner notes to the album. “Music is harmony and harmony is what we are seeking in politics and in life.”
“It’s a dream come true,” he said on the night of the Inauguration.