Now I have known B.B. since around 1966 or so and started photographing him a year or so later.  I wrote a column for the”Oxford Eagle” for years after I moved to Oxford and one of them was about him going to the Kennedy Center. His office asked if it could be used in his concert program so I just it to them.

Then a publisher wanted to have a biography written about him and they contacted me because they liked what I wrote about him in my first book “Between Midnight and Day.”

All of this is to tell you that we have been friends for a long time and share a lot of good memories. In recent years our conversations usually begin with a roll call of who has died since we last saw each other.

On Friday night, my name was not on the ticket list and it was not on the backstage list. It was not on any list at all. I spotted Oxford insurance man Tom Davis who I usually see at B.B. events. He said that he had the name of the person who was clearing people for backstage after the show so  just stepped back and put it in his hands.

So Cinda and I were standing near the bar when a stocky guy came up and asked me what I was doing with the photos under my arm. I showed them to him and said that these two were gifts for B.B. and these others I was going to get signed for myself.

He said “Follow me” and turn to walk away. I grabbed Cinda by the elbow and we were moving through people at a frantic pace. We went into the audience and then made a quick left through another section of audience and then through a curtain and – poof – backstage.

This quick and fortuitous jaunt had followed a whole series of conversations with people who knew nothing at all but still were ready to give advice. No one was in charge but the show was happening all by itself. It was maddening to not be able to locate anyone with authority.

I finally decided that we would stand exactly where we were which was between the stage and the dressing room area. Once he was finished, he would have to pass by where we were.

I could see that house lights were up so I know that B.B. was doing his last song. They rolled a wheelchair out and he was moved from his performance chair. He got as far as the wings of the stage when he was swarmed over by dozens of relatives.

We waited for many long minutes and then I decided that I had to be more proactive on my own behalf so I started towards him. I moved through several layers of people and then he looked up and saw me.

He smiled and said, “I figured I’d see you tonight. I just didn’t know when.”

He motioned for the wheelchair guy to push him forward so that he was next to me. We shook hands and did the roll call about Honeyboy and Pinetop and Hubert and, of course, Etta. We talked about his going to the White House next week to tape a show for the Obamas that will be a PBS broadcast.

I hated to do it at that time and place but I grabbed the photographs that Cinda was holding and handed him a felt tip pen for signing. He graciously obliged with signatures on old and new images. He looked at a 1968 shot and said, “Who’s that skinny guy.”

By this time, the security guards were anxious to move him toward the dressing room so I gave him a hug and a kiss on the forehead.

“See you down the road,” I said and he turned and waved as he disappeared into an elevator.

The whole evening had been so tense and totally beyond my control that I had to catch my breath to realize that I had accomplished everything that I had wanted to do.

As we left, I found myself humming that old Stealer’s Wheel song:

Trying to make some sense of it all,
But I can see that it makes no sense at all,
Is it cool to go to sleep on the floor,
‘Cause I don’t think that I can take anymore
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Here is a summary of what they do:

The Westboro Baptist Church believes that God is punishing the United States because of America’s acceptance of homosexuality and has gained infamy for picketing the funerals of public figures and military members.

Now the Westboro followers are clearly aware that this is a private funeral being held in the middle of the black center of Newark, NJ. They would not be welcomed there under any circumstances and the threat of violence is a palpable reality. Emotions will be on edge for the funeral and it isn’t going to take much for the mourners to turn hostile.

It reminds me a story that Richard Pryor used to tell about Jim Brown, former football star and later music actor. Apparently, Brown walked into a bar where a tough guy was smacking people around.

The guy looked at Brown and said, “What the fuck you doin’ in here? You come close to me and you gonna get your ass whipped.”

Brown turned and closed the door behind him and then started across the room.

He looked at the man and said, “I guess that’s just an ass whippin’ I got to take.”

One can only hope that the Newark people will be fully involved in traffic matters and be really really slow to respond to matters of citizen violence . . .

She seized upon this as an opportunity to listen to CDs that we had stockpiled over a period of time and perhaps there might be a gem or two hidden  away in the offerings.

We put in the first one and listened to a few songs. She rapidly advanced toward the end of the tape and heard a few more. Then the CD was tossed into the back seat and another one was selected out of the box. The process was repeated over and over for hours with virtually no conversation going on between us.

Finally after about four hours of misery, she turned to me and said, “I never know that there was so much crappy music in that pile.”

I shrugged my shoulders said, “The sad part is that we are only hearing what has come to the top as the best of the best.”

The truth of the matter is that not very good material is written for blues singers at this time. The smaller blues labels do not staff the personal to find gems from their own collections and so mediocre music continues to be the best that is being offered.

I don’t think that the musicians are limited in their talents. Certainly Marcia Ball or Gary Clark Jr or Sue Foley or Curtis Salgardo has the ability to bring forth a commercial song that would have lasting power in blues.

I try very hard to not accept free CDs at a blues festival or convention. I feel that this gives the person the right to contact me a few weeks later to see how much I liked their disc. I am not a very good liar and so I try to fluff some neutral words that is neither encouragement nor a shove off the pier.

Hope springs eternal . . .

I wish that I could see better times ahead but, alas, I do not anticipate another “Stormy Monday” “Long Distance Call” or Wang Dang Doodle” to come jumping out of the box of CDs that I am accumulating again.

I wish that I had good advice to offer at this point. Perhaps we should just advise these young writers to retreat into a world that they know and where they feel comfortable.

*  *  *

I met her as the tech store

She gave off all that heat

I gave her all my passwords

She had the nerve to hit “delete.”

A good day . . . a very good day . . .

“Hey there, Mister Waterman. . don’t you worry . . . I got you . . .

I read a small article in today edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the last six Northwest Airlines Airlines skycaps had been relieved of duty and would be placed elsewhere in the airport. It was really no surprise because the Northwest skycaps were heavily unionized while Delta skycaps had much less protection.

So I wondered about my friend Harold Morrison . . .

I got to know Harold when I arrived early for a flight and he asked me what I had in the boxes that I was checking. I told him that I made my own line of blues shirts and I took them off to sell at festivals. That must have been in the late 1990s when there were plenty of blues festivals and I was doing at least six or eight every summer.

Harold was wiry thin and he reminded me of major league baseball player Ricky Henderson. He had the same energy and he talked fast so you had to pay attention to what he was saying.

The first shirt that I gave him was Memphis blues legend Albert King and when Harold held it up for the other skycaps to see, I knew that love was in the air. I followed up with a B.B.King,  a John Lee Hooker and then I gave him an Etta James shirt for his wife.

I skipped over the Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, and I gave him a Muddy Waters instead.

I don’t want you to think that this was a one way relationship because Harold took very very good care of me. He somehow had the knack of looking up just as I was pulling alongside the Northwest curbside area.

He would point to me and yell, “Don’t you worry . . . I got you!”

So I would take out of my ticket and pull my suitcase and boxes to the curb as Harold didn’t look at me but whispered, “Where you going today? How many you checking?”

He might have 15 people waiting in line but he would turn quickly, take my itinerary, process my boarding pass and I was out of there in seconds.

When I wrote “Between Midnight and Day” in 2003, I made sure that I arrived early so I could give him a signed copy. And when I wrote B. B. King’s biography (“B. B. King: Treasures”), he held his signed copy for a long time and just shook his head.

On those occasions when I got to the airport and he wasn’t working, the other skycaps would note, “You Harold’s man” as if we shared a certain stature.

Well, airline tickets have become expensive over the past few years and the number of blues festivals has dropped significantly, and and I don’t get to see my friend very often.

The last time I spoke to him, he said that he didn’t know if he was going to survive the merger with Delta. But he wasn’t unhappy because he said that he had over 30 years in with the Union and his wife had been after him to retire.

I’m going to ask the skycaps at the Memphis airport if any of them has a phone number for Harold. I’m not going to let it end this way. The last thing he said to me was,”If you sitting on Northwest miles, you better use them up because Delta is going to downgrade whatever you’re holding.”

I’m going t0 miss Harold, I really am. Sometimes I would arrive at the Northwest sidewalk and it would be jammed with travelers inching their suitcases toward the check-in desk.

I would unload my boxes and luggage with a heavy heart and then I would hear his voice rising over the terminal sounds . . .

“Hey, there Mister Waterman, you just come on in here behind me. Don’t you worry, my friend . . . I got you!”

————————————

I had an email from a woman who worked with Harold Morrison as a Northwest Airlines skycap. Someone had told her about my blog and she found it and printed it out for Harold. Then she sent me his phone number.

That makes it a good day . . . a really really good day . . .

—————————————

I read a small article in today edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the last six Northwest Airlines Airlines skycaps had been relieved of duty and would be placed elsewhere in the airport. It was really no surprise because the Northwest skycaps were heavily unionized while Delta skycaps had much less protection.

So I wondered about my friend Harold Morrison . . .

I got to know Harold when I arrived early for a flight and he asked me what I had in the boxes that I was checking. I told him that I made my own line of blues shirts and I took them off to sell at festivals. That must have been in the late 1990s when there were plenty of blues festivals and I was doing at least six or eight every summer.

Harold was wiry thin and he reminded me of major league baseball player Ricky Henderson. He had the same energy and he talked fast so you had to pay attention to what he was saying.

The first shirt that I gave him was Memphis blues legend Albert King and when Harold held it up for the other skycaps to see, I knew that love was in the air. I followed up with a B.B.King,  a John Lee Hooker and then I gave him an Etta James shirt for his wife.

I skipped over the Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, and I gave him a Muddy Waters instead.

I don’t want you to think that this was a one way relationship because Harold took very very good care of me. He somehow had the knack of looking up just as I was pulling alongside the Northwest curbside area.

He would point to me and yell, “Don’t you worry . . . I got you!”

So I would take out of my ticket and pull my suitcase and boxes to the curb as Harold didn’t look at me but whispered, “Where you going today? How many you checking?”

He might have 15 people waiting in line but he would turn quickly, take my itinerary, process my boarding pass and I was out of there in seconds.

When I wrote “Between Midnight and Day” in 2003, I made sure that I arrived early so I could give him a signed copy. And when I wrote B. B. King’s biography (“B. B. King: Treasures”), he held his signed copy for a long time and just shook his head.

On those occasions when I got to the airport and he wasn’t working, the other skycaps would note, “You Harold’s man” as if we shared a certain stature.

Well, airline tickets have become expensive over the past few years and the number of blues festivals has dropped significantly, and and I don’t get to see my friend very often.

The last time I spoke to him, he said that he didn’t know if he was going to survive the merger with Delta. But he wasn’t unhappy because he said that he had over 30 years in with the Union and his wife had been after him to retire.

I’m going to ask the skycaps at the Memphis airport if any of them has a phone number for Harold. I’m not going to let it end this way. The last thing he said to me was,”If you sitting on Northwest miles, you better use them up because Delta is going to downgrade whatever you’re holding.”

I’m going t0 miss Harold, I really am. Sometimes I would arrive at the Northwest sidewalk and it would be jammed with travelers inching their suitcases toward the check-in desk.

I would unload my boxes and luggage with a heavy heart and then I would hear his voice rising over the terminal sounds . . .

“Hey, there Mister Waterman, you just come on in here behind me. Don’t you worry, my friend . . . I got you!”

So I wondered about my friend Harold Morrison . . .

I got to know Harold when I arrived early for a flight and he asked me what I had in the boxes that I was checking. I told him that I made my own line of blues shirts and I took them off to sell at festivals. That must have been in the late 1990s when there were plenty of blues festivals and I was doing at least six or eight every summer.

Harold was wiry thin and he reminded me of major league baseball player Ricky Henderson. He had the same energy and he talked fast so you had to pay attention to what he was saying.

The first shirt that I gave him was Memphis blues legend Albert King and when Harold held it up for the other skycaps to see, I knew that love was in the air. I followed up with a B.B.King,  a John Lee Hooker and then I gave him an Etta James shirt for his wife.

I skipped over the Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, and I gave him a Muddy Waters instead.

I don’t want you to think that this was a one way relationship because Harold took very very good care of me. He somehow had the knack of looking up just as I was pulling alongside the Northwest curbside area.

He would point to me and yell, “Don’t you worry . . . I got you!”

So I would take out of my ticket and pull my suitcase and boxes to the curb as Harold didn’t look at me but whispered, “Where you going today? How many you checking?”

He might have 15 people waiting in line but he would turn quickly, take my itinerary, process my boarding pass and I was out of there in seconds.

When I wrote “Between Midnight and Day” in 2003, I made sure that I arrived early so I could give him a signed copy. And when I wrote B. B. King’s biography (“B. B. King: Treasures”), he held his signed copy for a long time and just shook his head.

On those occasions when I got to the airport and he wasn’t working, the other skycaps would note, “You Harold’s man” as if we shared a certain stature.

Well, airline tickets have become expensive over the past few years and the number of blues festivals has dropped significantly, and and I don’t get to see my friend very often.

The last time I spoke to him, he said that he didn’t know if he was going to survive the merger with Delta. But he wasn’t unhappy because he said that he had over 30 years in with the Union and his wife had been after him to retire.

I’m going to ask the skycaps at the Memphis airport if any of them has a phone number for Harold. I’m not going to let it end this way. The last thing he said to me was,”If you sitting on Northwest miles, you better use them up because Delta is going to downgrade whatever you’re holding.”

I’m going t0 miss Harold, I really am. Sometimes I would arrive at the Northwest sidewalk and it would be jammed with travelers inching their suitcases toward the check-in desk.

I would unload my boxes and luggage with a heavy heart and then I would hear his voice rising over the terminal sounds . . .

“Hey, there Mister Waterman, you just come on in here behind me. Don’t you worry, my friend . . . I got you!”

He was mayor in April, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated and riots broke out in many cities. Someone told White that James Brown was in town to play Boston Garden the following night so White contacted Brown and made arrangements for the concert to be moved up a night. Then he contacted the television stations to get one of them to televise the concert. Everyone of them refused until he got WGBH, the public television outlet, to broadcast it. Since their fare was Julia Childs, NOVA and Masterpiece Theater, they were an unlikely choice but they did a splendid job and Boston remained calm while rioting broke out in other cities.
Mayor White’s other brush with fame came when the Rolling Stones flight from Canada into Boston was rerouted to Providence, RI, by bad weather. They had no other available night for rescheduling the show so they were not going to get on stage until a delay of many hours.
Rhode Island was in no hurry to get the Stones through Customs but once they hit the Massachusetts state line, White had arranged a convoy of state trooper vehicles to rush them to Boston Garden.
They finally hit the stage at about 1:00 AM and that show remains the only time that the Stones have rewarded an audience with an encore.

I was managing Bonnie Raitt back in the early 1980s and living alone in the Hollywood Hills. Bonnie was also not hanging out with anyone at the time so whenever she wanted to see a movie or go to a certain restaurant or hear some music, I got the call to be the designated date.

So I get a call from her that Etta James is playing at The Palamino in North Hollywood and she really wants to go. I say that’s fine and I pick her up and we head for the Palamino. Now the club is not in a very great part of the city so your best bet is to park as close as possible.

Bonnie and I go in and Etta has saved seats at the front table. She rocks through the first set just fine and invites us to spend some time with her in her trailer.

Now I suddenly remember that there is a great meat market just a few blocks away so I tell Bonnie that I’m going for a ride but I’ll meet her back at the table. I cruise on down the street and when I reach the block where I think the market is located, I slow way down to check if it is open.

Suddenly, I have a police car flashing its dome lights right behind me. I freeze behind the wheel and then I have a cop at my window.

He orders me out of the car and asks me if I have been drinking. I tell him that I have not been drinking but he wants to do a field test on me. He tells me to stand with my legs apart and my head tilted back and then orders me to touch my nose with my left middle finger. I arc my finger toward my nose and eventually feel that I have touched my cheek.

Then he drags me onto the curb and tells me to walk the crack in the sidewalk. Now my balance is not so great under the best circumstances and I am really nervous. I hit a couple of lines and then a miss a couple.

OK, he says, and tells me to put my hands behind my back. Wait a minute, what is happening here? He twists my wrist until I am buckled with pain as he handcuffs me and then I am thrown into the back of a North Hollywood Police car.

I try to explain that I had brought someone to The Palamino and she’d be looking for me to give her a ride home but they are not listening.

They walk me into the station were I see that it is absolutely jammed with Latino kids. They are stripped to the waist and gang tattoos are everywhere. I am the only Anglo in the place. I am ordered to get on my knees and put forehead against the wall. There is a constant roar of profanity around my head.

I lose track of time but I must have been there for 15 or 20 minutes when a sergeant walks into the room. He is obviously the Watch Commander and the officers listen when he talks.

He nods at me and says, “What have you got on him?” They grab me under the arms and pull me in front of the sergeant. He glares at me and pulls out a breath analyzer. “Blow into this straw and I mean hard!

I draw a breath and blow as hard as I can for long seconds. He resets the machine and orders me to do it again. I pull as much air as I can and blow into the straw until I am gasping.

He looks at the dial and he is enraged. He turns to the policemen who brought me in and he is livid.

“He blew a double zero. He blew a mother fucking double zero twice. You assholes are wasting my time. Get him the fuck out of here!”

So they send me up to the front desk but now they can’t find me a ride back to my car. But they know that their ass is in major trouble if the Watch Commander walks in  and I am still there.

So they give me a ride back to my car and I burn rubber getting back to the Palamino. I walk in and I can see Bonnie sitting alone at the front table with Etta doing her second set.

As I start to sit down, Bonnie is really furious and she unloads on me. “Where the hell have you been? You were supposed to be taking care of me tonight and I have been stranded her with every ass hole in the world hitting on me.”

I was arrested, I said, and before she could launch another attack, I showed her my arms where the handcuffs had left welts and deep red grooves cutting into my wrists.

Her eyes pop wide open and she is under a full head if steam about calling a lawyer and getting the ACLU involved in this. No No No, I am trying to say. I just want to get out of here . . . period.

So we gather up out belongings and give Etta a wave that we are leaving.

I think that was the final episode of my being enlisted to be Bonnie “date du jour.”

I was doing my best but I ended up being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I was contacted by some people doing a documentary on the famous Club 47, a Cambridge folk club in the Sixties that started many careers and is still in business albeit with a name change to Passim’s.

I was the house photographer there, offering them access to my work in exchange for free admission every night. Well, nobody wanted what I had so I just put it away and the years turned into decades.

When they contacted me, I thought they were kidding.

Do I have folk photography from the Sixties? (Say it with the Robert DeNiro voice of “You talking to me? You talking to me? You must be talking to me because I don’t see nobody else here.”)

So I start to send images . . . lots of images. I am sending Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Jim Kweskin and Tom Rush and Phil Ochs . . .

I am like a gun fighter in the middle of the street with both guns blazing away . . . and I am never going to run out of bullets.

I send them Skip James and Eric Von Schmidt and Geoff Muldaur and Mimi Farina and Maria Muldaur and Fritz Richmond . . .

I am on a roll and firing away with more and more . . .

I found a Bob Dylan at the Club 47 and Taj Mahal and Mose Allison and Rev. Gary Davis and Eric Andersen and the Chambers Brothers . . .

They surrender . . .

They send me an email, “Enough! Enough! We can’t take any more!”

I don’t even quibble about the money. They tell me that it is a ‘favored nations’ payment which means that every photographer gets the same with no negotiating. It’s $240.00 per image which is very OK with me because they are taking a whole bunch from me.

So the moral of the story is that you might be able to jazz me and you might even be able to rock me but never . . . never . . . try to folk with me . . .

These are hard times for Kodak which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. They have been notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have 30 days to raise the price of their stock or they will be de-listed which means that they could not be publicly traded any longer. The current price is Kodak stock is sixty-five cents. That’s right . . . sixty-five cents buys you one share of what was the greatest film and optics company on the planet.

Some years ago, Kodak held a press conference to ask for government protection against Fuji Film, which Kodak said had heavy financial support from the Japanese government and posed a threat to Kodak sales both in this country and overseas.

Some reporter at the press conference noted that there were eight photographers covering the event. He took it upon himself to ask each one individually what kind of film they were using. After all, these guys were only going to use the best.

The result was hardly surprising; all eight were shooting Fuji. They had all been Kodak users at one point but just moved on to Fuji because of brighter colors, sharpest contrast and other quality issues.

There was a time when the Kodak Instamatic was the camera to have. Millions of memories are archived away in closets and dresser drawers.

But no more. Kodak was overwhelmed in the avalanche of digital technology and just never caught up. They closed the film division and tried other aspects of visual media but it was way too late.

But the yellow bags . . . it’s an amazing thought to recall that every roll of color film in the entire United States was mailed to one lab to be processed.

Time moves forward . . . and the picture is not pretty . . .