my life and times

Now here’s the Crazy Eddie story. It starts in the studio, “Out of Hand,” that I shared with Doug Sheridan, an Irish fiddler and sculptor of some renown. I was doing stained glass work. Doug, at the time, was into copper. Doug came into the shop one morning still laughing at a story he’d heard the night before at Lindburg’s, a local pub. It seems one Crazy Eddie had had an adventure, which he’d shared with fellow pub crawlers. after one had said, “Hey Eddie, what happened to you and that woman in the Cadillac.”

Well, what happened was this. A well dressed, middle-aged woman had approached Eddie in the bar a few nights earlier and said she had a problem. She was supposed to be home in Texas the next evening, and she couldn’t make the long drive by herself and get there in time. She offered Eddie money and a plane ticket home if he’d drive her. Being Eddie, he said “What could go wrong?” or something to that effect.

So she and Eddie packed up in the Cadillac, her to the back seat to sleep, and Eddie in front, driving. Eddie had no map and no clear idea how to get to Texas except it was south and west. So he headed west on Highway 60, and for some reason unknown turned left on Highway 37 at Monett and headed toward Arkansas.

All went well until a little town named Seligman, near the Arkansas line, when the woman woke up and, totally forgetting the bargain she’d made the night before and the man she’d made it with, started screaming and beating Eddie about the head. Eddie tried to defend himself the best he could and finally got the car stopped at a closed gas station. It was almost dawn.

At this point the woman passed out again and Eddie was left puzzling about what to do next. He saw a phone booth next to the gas station and decided he needed advice, and the best place to get it might be from the woman’s family. He brought her purse into the front seat, rummaged about, and found her home address. Rummaging more, he found a large wad of cash and, thankfully, a fistful of change. He got on the phone, called information, called the family, and found they were not surprised to hear from him.

“She’s a total drunk. She gets like this, runs off somewhere and hires someone to bring her back. Then she pulls this kind of a stunt. It’s just what she does,” he was told. He was also advised to look in the trunk of the car where there were cords left there for just such an event.

“Just tie her up so she can’t hurt you or cause a wreck,” he was told. “Bring her on home, and we’ll pay your way back.”

So Eddie unlocked the trunk, got the cords and got the woman tied just in time, for then she woke up and began screaming again. It was at this point that the Seligman police arrived on their local rounds.

It took about two hours, Eddie said, for them to haul him in, untie the woman, determine her condition, call her folks, and get him (and her) on the road again. They were, he said, the worst two hours of his life.

That’s the guy I met in Phoenix. And he was gone before I could verify the story. So it’s still a story. But I met Crazy Eddie, By God!

Los Angeles really is the city of the angels. No kidding. And they were all, visible or not, at Hollywood Forever to give us a grand welcome. I can’t tell you how thoroughly peculiar it is to play in a place where the acoustics are so good, and the audience so receptive, and the ambiance so perfect, and yet all that is overwhelmed by the fact that just outside, resting, one hopes, peacefully, are Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille and a host of other legends of early Hollywood Cinema. Hallowed ground, that. I was working seriously on assuming the proper air of humility when I walked into the auditorium, when the crowd arose and delivered a standing ovation. I kept looking behind me to see who it was for. I mean, I hadn’t even done anything yet. But they were all kind, they truly were, and there were several familiar faces in the audience, including Dale Dickey and husband, and John Hawkes with two musician friends, who came up and played a couple of numbers betwixt and between. And Winter’s Bone producer Alix Madigan brought her mother, and Dusty Smith of Roadside Attractions brought some colleagues, and Matt Sullivan, head of Light in the Attic, which published the WB soundtrack. And my dear and treasured songwriting partner, Robin Frederick was there so we could show her what we did with her songs. Altogether a splendid and satisfying event. We camped out at Matt’s house, which is just a street over from the venue, and slept, those of us who couldn’t hear the rock music coming from a party down the street. The following morning we arose early and headed east on the Long Drive to Phoenix.