Below is a PDF excerpt to finish my thought on the Youtube video where I got cut off talking about the last time I saw John in the flesh. Sorry, but I don’t own the video and I was grateful to get that much. (Thanks, JoLynn Long!)
My book can be found here: Memory Clouds on Amazon
Note: You may have to click on the PDF link to open in your browser or download it.
All Rights Reserved ©2017
In 2010, Terry Lipman directed interviews with Conrad Reeder, Roger Nichols and others, for a documentary about John Denver titled, What One Man Can Do. Unfortunately, dear Terry died not long after this interview (you can hear his questions). Many thanks to JoLynn Long for sharing footage.
Given all the grief floating around this planet, another book about “one woman’s journey” may sound like a snooze, but, at least, I’ve had an interesting life with some amazing characters like John Denver, Ginette Paris, Roger Nichols, Joy Monroe McConnell, Paul Rothchild, Donald Fagan, Walter Becker (Steely Dan), Dorotha Stephens etc., and I’m willing to write about some of it. 😉
Memory Clouds is my offering to the “searching person” book-glut in the market. It’s also about my discovery of goddesses (and gods 😀) inhabiting every bush, every last bottle and circling all the skyscrapers. New Age mumbo-jumbo aside, I also wrote my way out of committing a justifiable revenge act and found some tools to help me bloom again.
Conrad Reeder and John Denver after a scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef near Hamilton Island circa 1986. Photo by Roger Nichols
Some days I’d rather not think about Roger. His absence will always be painful no matter how many years roll by, and when I see him in family footage, my body aches. But, our girls and I are determined to keep going because we are producing a documentary about him and it has to be done.
Recently, I looked at this video again from the Grammy site of me, Cimcie and Ashlee accepting Roger’s Grammy for a Lifetime Tech Award almost a year after he died.
I barely remember this day or the ones leading up to it, but apparently I did this.
However, I do remember the moment I wrote the speech. Cimcie, Ash and I were in Jupiter, Florida going through the property that was going into foreclosure, the home I thought Roger and I would grow old together–where we would play with our grandkids someday. The ordeal was excruciatingly painful for me, but then we got the news from Neil Crilly that Roger won this Grammy. He’d been nominated the year before and lost, a sad day for him (on top of the cancer), and then he died six weeks later.
So, this was a bittersweet moment. I walked into his studio and sat in his chair, looked around at all the gear, books…all his stuff left behind when he’d driven away to Burbank in 2010 with a trailer of more “stuff” for his new job teaching at Video Symphony. His intent was to get the rest of his “stuff” later, but later never came. His diagnosis of Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer happened several months into his new job.
Tears. Sobbing, really. After some time, I picked up a pen. While sitting in Roger’s chair in his office, looking out at our beautiful flowers and the butterflies flitting around, a landscape we’d so lovingly cared for and enjoyed, I stopped crying and the words appeared on the page. I don’t know where all the words I write come from, but I believe those words came from Roger.
Because that’s how he wanted people to remember him: inventive, driven to succeed, passionate about life and fun.
I am grateful for friends who are trying to help us (me and our girls) put something out there on film about Roger’s brilliant mind and beautiful soul. Love will find a way and my thought wrote that.
CONNIE ACCEPTING ROGER’S AWARD
Such a bittersweet day for our family…just like the word in poor Whitney’s song. Life is so very, very short. All future plans are just a possibility–take note young people. A cliché, but so true, “live each day as if it’s your last.”
The girls (really women, but they will always be my girls: Cimcie & Ashlee) and I feel such gratitude for Roger’s award, but…so many buts.
Many thanks to Jeff for helping us get through the day.
This clip is circa 1990…
AND THANKS TO YOU TOO ROGER NICHOLS
photo by Tom Crum
Last night’s moon was tremendous, casting veiny limb shadows on fresh snows. Eerie. A spider web of images projected on untouched canvas. Sweet sleep happened. Cozy as the brew of nectared gods. Barely had time for a dream that night. Didn’t mind at all. Fermented, cemented. River boy (©sjm)
Steve Matty is dead. Writing those words sends a chill up my spine. His birth name has some ‘ski’ on the end of it, but he was always Matty.
I sit here dumb, and wonder what’s to be done. Matty was one of those lone wolf types with arms in constant motion. His ‘from the hip’ journals are legendary among friends, of which I feel honored to have been for twenty-five eventful years. How do I replace someone who reminded me of who I really am? Impossible.
Jim Harrison (one of Matty’s favorites) describes him to a T. I’m a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less.
(Excerpt from For The Life Of Me, I Just Can’t Make Her Fart)
...I lived off the 101 between Laurel & Coldwater on Moorpark. Vitellos (where Blake’s wife was murdered) was a great place for clams and linguini. Sometimes me and some boys would have some tables full of pizza there, although, Mary’s down on Lankershim served up a good pie. It wasn’t far from Beverly Garland’s Ho-Jo where us music types would bunk up on many occasions.
But I liked the Sportman’s Lodge much better. Not better than the Westwood Marquis where Jim Harrison and I slept and drank, unbeknownst to the other. They had a good pool there tucked away in the foliage out back with chaise-side phones…where Dustin Hoffman ranted in a tirade to his agent one afternoon and all participants gave the little talented squirt a standing ovation. He bought a poolside round for all clappers. If I’d been thinking more clearly I would’ve insisted that we hoisted glass in toast to say, “…here’s to you Mrs. Robinson…” But I forgot. It would’ve been a decent chorus.
I enjoyed staying in Neil Diamond’s guest house just down the street from the Playboy Mansion (never been there) in Holmby Hills a couple blocks off Sunset. I may have been the only pick-up truck driver in LA then, certainly in that neighborhood. Cops pulled me over for a swerve on the Strip once, but let me go when I said I was bunkin’ at Neil’s. Name dropper.
We’d smoke fat honkin’ joints by his pool and talk about French poets a lot, then ring up Dylan to check and see if we were on the right track. Bob would just say, “Quit askin me stuff like that. And, do you guys know anything about peacocks???” Why Bob?? Is NBC buggin’ you?? He’d laugh at that one. But later on when he found out that Hunter had a brood of birds, he sheepishly asked, “He doesn’t let em in the house, does he??” Which meant, Bob did. tee hee…
Everyone should know a pal like Glen d Hardin: The President of the Pacific. Barney and I named him that along with his den called the Shipwreck Lounge….lots of stuff happened there on the corner of Ethel & Sara. Gram Parsons hung there often. Wish I could’ve known him, but then he had to die for some reason known only to him. Phil Kaufman stole the body and burned it in a pyre in the Joshua Tree desert, it was a fulfilled request of Gram’s, I guess. All charges were dropped.
Phil later owned Douglas Corner in Nashville, a hang. Funny how the connections keep connecting the dots. Gary Vincent and the Swamp Honkies played good music there. That goofball Vincent sometimes played in pajamas. We’d go fishing out to JI’s driving in his pink Porsche. Nice visual... ©sjm
Matty loved to bate people and watch em squirm.
Exhibit A.
Tues Jun 28, 2005 3:20 PM ...they never let me testify in your DUI case. I was ready. Had my rap ready. love, steven –
Wed Jun 29, 2005 12:19 PM – Not guilty!!!! Video doesn’t lie! F**k it, it’s’ all a dream anyway. C
Anyway, you get the idea, lots of history, good times and bad. In light of recent events, I think his thoughts on the great beyond are appropriate.
(excerpt from River Mix)
…I’ve been spewed on recently about…rapture. None of my beeswax, choose yer own gods and leave me alone about that stuff. Figure out your predestination and then think that the god who loves you will destroy you. Go ahead. I can’t subscribe to Armageddon. I’ve got bigger things on my mind. Ain’t that right, Jesus?? ©sjm
For some reason known only to him,(to steal his phrase) Matty wrecked his truck coming down the road from his cabin in Wisconsin on the Peshtigo River, dying instantly. In the absence of toxicity, the general consensus is heart attack, based on recent complaints about his arm being numb. In human years he was 54, but Matty said he was really 14. He never told me why he settled on 14, but I can guess. I do know this means I’ll spend the rest of my life missing him.
Don’t know how to end this, so I’ll hand it over to Matty.
“Peaceful sleep within the eyes of Great Spirit is insisted. I hope so…and then to revisit as a peregrine falcon in a steep high dive towards a spinning Earth.” (excerpt from Red Topped Maples ©sjm)
Steve Matty – Poet
Conrad Reeder 