I, too, am a journalist. A few years ago, in the course of trying to track down the ever-elusive Sly Stone, I ended up in Los Angeles, spending time with various musicians. One man I met was a musician named Dewey. A black man in his sixties, living in a cottage on the estate of a far more famous musician. Dewey had spent time in Little Richard’s band; he’d written “Farmer John,” which became the anthem for East Angelinos — he’d done a lot of stuff. We sat outside, drinking Mickey’s Malt Liquor, him playing guitar African-American style, sans pick. Later that week I threw a barbecue at the house I was renting, and Dewey came over. There was an old piano; half the keys didn’t work, but Dewey, somehow, managed to play around them — what sounded, sounded less like RnB than Thelonious Monk, but that wasn’t at all a bad thing.<\/p>\n
I failed, utterly, to find Sly Stone. But I took with me a CD Dewey had given me — songs he’d cut in 1961 or so, with the Raylettes. I was just starting out, and not at all connected; told him I wouldn’t be able to do much with it. So I don’t regret that I never did.<\/p>\n
What I do regret is that when, six months later, the man who’d introduced me to Dewey told me Dewey wanted to get in touch, I never did. I was overworked, or lazy, or too full of self-loathing to think back on the by-then blown assignment (I never did find Sly Stone). I didn’t think about Dewey again for a year or two, until guilt got the better of me, and I did sit down to write, and wrote, and googled Dewey’s name for the address and — if this were a short story I’d tweak the ending because it’s so utterly obvious — found Dewey’s obit instead. He’d died of lung cancer; I remembered the cough.<\/p>\n
Submitted by: Alex<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I, too, am a journalist. A few years ago, in the course of trying to track down the ever-elusive Sly Stone, I ended up in Los Angeles, spending time with various musicians. One man I met was a musician named Dewey. A black man in his sixties, living in a cottage on the estate of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iregret.net\/wp-goodies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}