To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Drinkers and Drunks

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge from Jim Fleming. When you can legally drink alcohol, you suddenly have society's permission to operate in that mysterious, autonomous, free zone we call adulthood. Go out for a drink and something might surprise you. People want to see something happen. They don't really know what. They go to a bar for a reason and that's seldom just to drink. And this from a man who spends his life behind the bar of a New York hotspot. But what if the need to drink takes a person to all the wrong places? What if it drives him out of a job? Out of his marriage? And what if he's your dad? Michael Keith's dad never hesitated. His solution? Hit the road. Just get out of the way. Don't fulfill your obligations. Don't meet your responsibility set on. Get out of there. Michael Keith grew up determined not to be like his father. You'll hear today how he turned out as we spend some time today with drinkers and drunks. Toby Chachini grew up in Wisconsin. His family still lives here. But he made his

move long ago to the Big Apple. For the past five years, he's been one of the owners and bartenders of Passerby, a bar in downtown New York. And he claims to have reinvented the Cosmopolitan, the cocktail that's such a hit now. Chachini's collected some of his best stories in a book called Cosmopolitan, a bartender's life. He told Ann's train champs about his bar. My bar is kind of a very odd little duck. It was conceived by Gavin Brown who runs gallery in New York City and he asked me to help him put together a bar attached to his gallery. That being something that was just unheard of before. And I first just told him absolutely not. That's such a bad idea. But he just persisted and persisted. And so eventually, we put it together and it's been five years now. It's a very strange place. Why? What's strange about it? It's a sort of undefinable place really. The entire bar is built on a lighted disco floor. But it's a very, very small bar. It's about the size of a double wide trailer. And every part of it is something that was contributed

by one of Gavin's artists. The disco floor sort of brings people in and they think, oh, I get what this place is. It's a disco. But it's so tiny you can't really possibly dance in there. And the bar top itself is a gigantic slab, an entire walnut tree that was cut by the late Japanese furniture artist, George Nakashima. And that's a completely different visual experience than people would go, oh, but wait, what is this? And then there are a few tables scattered about. It's a very high and low sort of thing. It looks kind of like a dive bar and then it looks sort of like an artsy place. But the bathrooms are ripped apart and covered with graffiti. It's a it's a very, I have problems describing it to people. They're like, oh, what kind of bar are you running now? And I say, you know, you just have to see it. I'm afraid. Well, what kind of crowd comes in? You know, that too is a very different thing. Early on in the evening, since I'm just a wine freak and I try to run a good wine list by the glass, I get a lot of sort of the wine lovers and people just kind of want to quiet

conversation with their friends and a little more of the fashion crowd. And then later on at night, we have DJs and the place starts blasting and it drives the early birds out and brings in a lot of kids from Brooklyn and the East Village and whatnot who want to just thrash about a little bit more. So it also runs the gamut there. Early in the week, it's much quieter on weekends. I can barely stand to be in there. To how wild does it get? Because I mean, the late night crowd you write about can be a pretty raucous crowd, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I try to write about some of the unsavory bits of bartending without making it seem like I'm too bitter. Maybe I am too bitter at this point. It gets pretty wild. I mean, when you get people together who have gone out to make something happen, really people want to see something happen. They don't really know what. They go to a bar for a reason and that's seldom just to drink. So you've got people with this sense of anticipation and expectation and they amped that up by, you know, adding liquor to the mix and you get a lot of behavior that you really outside of two and three year olds could never

believe is going on. Like what? Well, you know, this is on the air too. My mother's listening to this. So you get people taking off their clothes. You get people stealing things. You get people breaking things. You get people just doing things that you cannot believe. People are just walking out of the bar with the tables in their hands. And, you know, I'll stop them and say, what are you doing? And they say, oh, sorry, you know, they have no idea often. It's really is sort of, I liken it frequently to sort of running a daycare at times. It isn't always like that, of course. In the early times, there's some very, you know, intelligent and, you know, well -spoken people that I like talking to, but late at night, it all breaks down and it can just become unbelievable. It's like a certain circle of hell. From some of the stories you tell in your book, it sort of seems like a certain percentage of the customers come in actually probably looking for sex. I mean, there's this kind of public promiscuity that goes on also.

There is a ton of that and I wonder about that. It's invariably what it turns into. There's a certain point of the frenzy where it spills over into that where there's enough people in the bar. It's really hot. It's really packed. People are drinking hard and that becomes the thing. The music is incredibly loud. There's something about that that lets people shed enough inhibition that it does become at a point about sex. Whereas early in the evening, it can be about a lot of different things. It can be about argumentation. It can be about simply someone who might be lonely coming out to talk to other people. There's a lot of gradations that lead up to that, but there is a certain point always in the frenzy where it just breaks down into like this raw, unabashed animal search for sex. What's the most utray thing you've ever seen? Man, I've seen a lot. I mean, I've caught people openly having sex in the hallways and whatnot and just kind of stepped past them or said, excuse me to get into the restroom and whatnot. Do you feel like it's part of your job to kick them out at that

point or do you just regard all this as part of the floor show? It depends. I feel like it's my job to keep people from hurting other people or keep people from ruining the environment or being really just grotesque. If they're trying to be hidden or trying, I kind of have to play it by the shades of gray. If I simply say, could you not do that here and they return to their table apologetically fine? If people are throwing pint glasses around, which happens, or just being really aggressive in a way that they want to fight rather than anything else, then it's my job to get them out of the bar, obviously. Those times come along and that can get very scary, actually. One of the things I found most remarkable about your book is how good humor'd you stay about all this sort of behavior. For a lot of people, there'd be something soul destroying about this. For the bartender, to night after night, see people getting drunken stupid, but you don't find that? I think I used to do a lot more than I do now.

In the first few years, it used to really get me down and I think, this is kind of destroying my faith in humanity. Then I just sort of hit a certain point where I decided, I coughed, what I now refer to as my Zen bartender act, where I just sort of let it all roll off of me and realized, people are simply doing what they want because this is the way they get out, all their pent up, whatever, their aggressions, their sexuality, whatever it is, they have to get it out. You have to realize that this is a repository for all of that. If you want to work here and if you want to run it, you have to accept that and you have to realize that you're the animal trainer and you can't blame the animals. Once I did that, it sort of framed me up to kind of just grin and bear it. Do you think people go to bars for different reasons now than they did? I don't know, a generation or two ago? Actually, I've been trying to find a way around this thinking, but I really do think that. I feel like in

the entire past century, in the 30s, 40s, 50s and whatnot, I want to say pre -television, but maybe that's not the culprit. People went out a lot more simply to socialize. I feel like people went out with their friends or even with their families in groups, meet other families and just sort of, you know, I mean, you can blame a lot of different things, derasination of America and whatnot, but I feel like people now, maybe this is just my corner of it, but I see people mostly just out there combing, you know, for sex and for thrills and for kicks. And I don't see as much socializing in bars as I feel like they're used to be. I guess many people drink because they're after oblivion or relief and they don't really care how they get it and other people want status. They want to be drinking the really cool drink of the moment. Are there really people who can taste the difference between a martini shaken and a martini stirred? Oh, sure. Because if you shake a martini, which, you know, there are camps and camps that will

tell you which is the proper way to do it, I always shake martinis because I like them diluted. If you simply stir a martini, you're going to get an intense, intensely alcoholic drink. Whereas if you shake it, it dilutes the vodka down to a point where it doesn't bite your vodka or gin rather whichever you prefer. To a point where it doesn't bite you so when you take a sip, that's easy to taste. A better question maybe are there people who can taste the difference between a vodka and cranberry made with gray goose or made with smurn off? I don't think so. But people are happy to pay the four or five dollars extra for gray goose right now because as you say, that's the going thing. Well, take a drink like the cosmopolitan, for instance. That's a drink that, you know, became very hip sort of synonymous with sex in the city. You invented it or one of the people who invented it and then watched it become incredibly popular and I guess you watched other people begin making it badly. Right. So what do you do when you make a cosmopolitan? It's a really simple drink actually and the bulk of it comes down to fresh lime juice. I use citrus vodka because that's the way I sort of originally

conceived of it. I used to use quanta in the beginning but now I use triple sac because it's virtually the same thing but much cheaper. If you get a really good triple sac like stock or decoyper, I mean, you get a good quality triple sac, a decent quality citrus vodka and lots of fresh lime juice and a little dash of cranberry. That's really the whole thing. Shaken really viciously. It has to be shaken really hard so that that ice breaks up, dilutes the drink, makes it incredibly cold. You want the shards to just float on the surface of it that makes it refreshing. It makes it interesting to the eye and then just a simple twist of lemon above. It's actually a very simple drink but people just demolish it. Okay. So now what's a bad cosmopolitan? The thing I see most often is just that people use roses lime rather than fresh lime juice and it's just nothing like the same thing. You can tell because if you can see through a cosmopolitan then it's not a cosmopolitan. It should be sort of opaque. It should have that not even quite translucent quality that a lot of fresh lime juice brings to it. You've tell this kind of funny story about how you invented the

cosmopolitan and then it became this really hip drink and now you get people showing up at your bar and they ask for a cosmopolitan you make it and they hand it back to you and say no you didn't make it right. Yeah I get that all the time. I think because people like things that are sweet and I mean there's no getting around that and when I conceived of the cosmopolitan I really wanted it to be something that was bracing and tart and fresh and so I get that constantly and I don't even take offense anymore and people say this is wrong this is way too sour. I simply go back and remake it for them with with more triple sec. You know long ago I gave up sort of standing on my honor there. It's it's just something that I don't even bother laying claim to anymore as the inventor of the cosmopolitan just seems silly. I just remake it for them. Toby Chachini is part owner of Passerby, located in New York's far west Chelsea neighborhood. He told Anne Strange Hamps that before he left the bar this morning he'd needed to call on his Zen bartender

self to deal with a toilet sister in that some bar patron had smashed pieces. Chachini calls his book Cosmopolitan a bartender's life. That's Fiddler Eleaning, one of the members of Lilies of the Alley. He and his bandmates came by our studio to talk about the pleasures of drinking and making music. They seemed to go together at least for Lilies Sheila Shigley and Alanine. I have no idea what it'd be like in a bar without music because I don't I wouldn't otherwise be in a bar but I know the difference between playing music with alcohol and playing music without alcohol. Like we have their sessions at cafes versus sessions and bars and there's a different let's say statistically significant difference. What kind of quality is different about the way you mean the way that you play music or the way

that people perceive the whole atmosphere is different and the kind of tunes we play the tempo we play at how much I guess the general term is energy. You generally get more energy. When you play at a cafe it's a little more listening music, a little more nervous, a little more careful. You feel like people are really paying attention to you. Especially yourself. You are paying attention to yourself and if you're a little more relaxed you take my risks. Do you play a different kind of music if you play in a cafe than if you play in a bar? I only play one kind of music being a specialist so to speak but say within that specialty in a cafe we'll play more hornpipe, slower rhythms, more listening music and then we get at a bar we play more fast driving stuff, a little more energy like I said more rhythm, a little popier maybe.

How much does it change things for you as performers? Now I can see where the patrons of the bar are going to be especially after a couple of drinks in a different mood entirely but as performers do you react to the the changing energy levels of the patrons in the bar? I think so. Sometimes I just sing mostly rather than playing an instrument at this point but sometimes the patrons will quiet down and listen and then that changes things because sometimes you're playing away for hours with people just making sort of a general din in the background and then you sort of at least I feel that you're sort of playing or singing kind of for yourselves but sometimes they'll quiet down or a group of them will pay attention and then there is it sort of a heightened electricity about it you know that maybe you're a little bit more on stage then so that's probably part of the changing energy and the excitement of it is that at any given moment everybody could turn around and stare at you whereas they've been just sort of being in the background up to that point. Are there particular pieces that

you find work that way especially well in a bar? Songs clearly. That's definitely it's interesting because it coincides with tradition and Irish music is when they use in Ireland and when you sing you shush the whole bar you actively do so and and people even the audience may want to join in a shushing to get people to knock off their conversations and listen up and people do so willingly and this seems to happen in the US quite naturally even though they have no idea what a tradition of in Ireland would be. And maybe one maybe one reason people listen is because there are words involved you know in a song although when we sing in Gaelic they listen to it might just be the nature of humans when you hear words regardless of whether you're understanding them you feel like listening to what's being communicated but then some of the words themselves are pretty oh pretty emotional too and you know I've seen people react to that. There's something about the combination of attune with the words that just seems to make it extra powerful and they really will stand

around and just you can see them just losing themselves and sometimes in the meaning of the song if they understand it or sometimes just in the whole experience even if they don't understand the words. Does it change as the evening goes on especially in a bar where people are going to be drinking and if they've been there for a while they will have had more than one many of them. It does but see they were partaking ourselves so it's hard to know if we're staying and you have some kind of object of comparison between before and after. I'm curious about that playing an instrument I would assume that there's you have to keep a fairly good handle on how much you've consumed. We do. You're right. There's definitely a limit beyond which you become useless. I guess the question is do you know when that limit is because I can imagine that if you've had one past it you might think that you're playing the fiddle better than you ever have in your entire life. Well fortunately musicians are rather tend to be rather self -critical people more so than their audiences and so you'll hear

little imperfections before the audience try to and so you might slack off you're you're imbibing. But you know there are plenty of people who do come at least to the sessions we're talking about that don't drink and some don't ever so I don't think I'd like to think it doesn't keep anybody away who doesn't drink. So certainly you don't need to drink in order to feel the camaraderie to enjoy the energy of the performance. No but it definitely adds something one thought I had there's something like a ritual there's a ceremonial or ritual appeal to drinking and it's not necessarily directly the effect the alcohol has in your behavior as much as the fact that it does have a socially different status than drinking water and it's a special occasion a special place it's this pump or a bar or you're going over to a friend's house in the living room but in any case

it's an invitation and and you break out the whiskey or the beer or the wine and it's not like drinking orange juice and so it makes it a special event and you're sort of clothing yourself in a bit of ritual and it heightens the formality or it heightens the expectations. Change is the way you feel about the evening. That's right. Alining and Sheila Shigley belong to the band Lillies of the Alley. You can learn more about them at their website come to ours and we'll link you there. The address is www .ttbook .org Lillies of the Alley is primarily a vocal group. Here they are with one of those songs that can shush everybody in the bar. It's called The Parting Glass. Till none but me and all

that I've done for one time with till memory now I can't recall. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. If I had money enough to spend and leisure time to sit awhile there is a fair made in this town that surely has my heart be God. The rosy cheeks and room be with I

hope she has my heart in front. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. Of all the comrades there I had they are sorry for my God in the way and all the sweet hearts there I had they wish me one more day to stay. But since it fell into my heart

that I should rise and you should not I gently rise and softly call the night and joy be to you all. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So filled

to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So

filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all.

So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. So filled to me the parting glass the night and joy be to you all. I had heart palpitations I had problems breathing because of damage I had done to both my lungs my throat and my nose my liver certainly wasn't in very good condition I was in very very bad physical shape. How close were you to

dying? I don't know you know the doctors at the treatment facility said that I wasn't far from it. Were you aware of that at the time? Yeah I was I knew what I was doing to myself I knew that I was doing an extraordinary amount of damage to my body and I knew it was going to catch up with me pretty quickly. Every single time you reached for the crack or whatever drug you were reaching for those kinds of thoughts went through your mind? Yeah pretty much at least every time I made the conscious decision to do it you know at a certain point of an ebriation you stopped being able to make conscious decisions you're just sort of on a formal deranged autopilot but most of the time I used I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. Why? Because I had these feelings inside of me rage sadness confusion self hatred and I didn't know how to deal with them and I discovered that if I use drugs and I drank I could kill those feelings and they would go

away so that's what I did. The problem is that when you use that method when the drugs and alcohol wear off the feelings come back and they're greater so you then need more and stronger substances to kill them again and you fall into a vicious cycle and I just couldn't deal with what I felt so I decided to kill it. And then at a certain point you start living a life that is embarrassing and shameful and you decide that you would rather not live than live that way anymore. Your parents met you at the plane and they drove you to a residential treatment program in Minnesota were you wanting to do that were you wanting to stop before you killed yourself or was there a pretty big part of you that wanted to just go ahead and finish everything off. I always thought about trying to stop I never actually believed I could do it so I was just waiting for the end. When my parents finally did take me to that facility the only reason I went was because I was in no condition to resist. They had tried to put me in facilities a number of times over the course of my life and I had always told them

that if you put me into a treatment center I will leave and you will never hear from me or see me again and I think I would have followed up on that threat. So after you got fixed up a little bit at the treatment facility what made you stay why didn't you just carry out your threat from earlier and walk. Because I started to feel better and I hadn't felt better in a long time in many many years and once I started to feel a little bit better physically I wanted more of that I got hungry for that feeling and then I started to get some objectivity on how I had been living and why I had been doing it. And I decided that I didn't want to die. I was scared of dying. I was young I was 23 years old and I don't believe that when we die there is anything else you know we die and that's it. And when I started really really being able to think with a clear mind about the decision that I was making I decided I didn't want to make it and I couldn't follow through with it and that I wanted to do what I could to stay alive. At the same time you had really mixed feelings about this

place. Could you talk a bit about what it was that rubbed you the wrong way about this treatment program. Most if not every treatment facility in America uses the 12 step model of recovery. 12 step model is based heavily on a belief in God or a higher power. There is no specification as to what that God has to be or what that higher power has to be but you need to believe in order for that system to work and I don't believe I don't believe in God. I don't believe in any form of higher power and thus I didn't believe that a system based on those things was going to work for me because that's what they use in that treatment facility. There were some problems I wouldn't do what they told me to do I wouldn't believe in what they told me to believe in and they were very skeptical as to what I told them I was going to do to keep myself clean. So how did that manifest itself I mean how did you behave when you were there what kinds of issues came up. I mean how did I behave sometimes I behaved well and sometimes I behave poorly.

The real issue was okay if you're not going to do what we tell you to do what are you going to do and I had to figure that out that was what I used my time in that facility to do is figure out how I thought I could keep myself clean. And I eventually arrived at what I call my own 12 -step program and the first 11 steps of that program mean nothing and the 12 -step is don't do it. I believe that addiction in many ways is a process of decision -making that has spiraled out of control and I believe that every time I am in the presence of alcohol or drugs that I have a decision to make and that decision is am I going to use or am I not going to use. And I believe that if I could learn to control that process of decision -making I could stay sober for the indefinite future and that's what I've done. So you don't buy the basic A -A -10 that you are powerless over your addiction. I believe that if I allow alcohol into my system I am powerless but I don't believe I am powerless as to whether

it gets in there or not. I know that I don't have any desire to have a drink. I've never wanted to sit and have a casual beer in the afternoon sun or a nice glass of shardonnay with dinner. When I think about drinking I think about obliteration and annihilation. In that way I don't believe I can control alcohol once it's in me but I do believe I can control whether it gets in me or not. And I believe that every time I am confronted with alcohol I have a decision to make and that decision is am I going to use it or not? Am I going to put it in my body or not? And I believe I have complete control over that process of decision -making. At one point in the book there's a kind of argument between you and a couple of the counselors and you tell them that you think A -A encourages addicts to think of themselves as victims. But I mean that's what a lot of people would say an addict is is someone who you know through bad combination of genetics and upbringing has a disease.

I don't buy that. I think addiction is a process of decision -making. I think if you talk to any drug addict they will and if they're being truthful they will admit yes they knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew what they were doing was hurting themselves. They knew it was hurting other people and they knew in many cases it was illegal. But they went ahead and made the decision to do it anyway. Diseases don't make decisions. A disease doesn't tell you what substance you're going to use, when you're going to use it, how much of it you're going to use and where you're going to get it. That's not a disease. That's not a function of a disease. That's a function of a process of decision -making. And I don't think anybody is responsible for our individual decisions other than ourselves. I don't think it's fair for an addict to say something besides myself made me pick up that bottle. Something besides myself made me pick up that pipe. Something besides myself made me pick up that needle. We make the decisions to do those things and I believe addicts need to learn to take responsibility for those decisions.

One of the things that makes the book kind of hard to read is how consistently hard you are on yourself. I mean you are now. You don't cut yourself any slack at all. You don't think maybe you're too hard on yourself? No, not at all. I think I'm very realistic with myself and very honest with myself. And the simple facts are that I lived in a way that was shameful and embarrassing and pathetic and weak. And the only way for me to get better was to come to terms with the fact that I did that and learn how to not do it again. I think it was what I needed to do. I don't think that everybody needs to go about it that way. I think people need to figure out what's right for them and what works for them and then use that. But for me to get better I had to take the attitude that I have and I don't think I'm being hard on myself at all. James Fry has been clean and sober for over 10 years. His memoir is called A Million Little Pieces. Fry spoke with end string champs.

That's a tune called Whiskey Before Breakfast. There are a lot of songs about alcohol or what happens when we drink too much of it. We'll listen to one of the best later this hour, Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Michael Keith survived a different kind of alcoholic violence from James

Fry. His father was the drunk in the family, which didn't stop Michael from loving him and wanting to be with him during what turned out to be a marathon on again, off again, five -year road trip. Michael Keith tells the story in his memoir The Next Better Place, a father and son on the road. His parents had been divorced for two years when his mother first thought of letting Michael live with his father for the summer. Maybe she should have known better. He managed to convince her that he would take care of me this time. He'd lived only a few blocks away and she was trying to support all three of us. I have two sisters and she was trying to do that on a waitress salary and it was terrible. She could barely feed us. So he said, look, I can help out this way. I'll feed Michael and he'll be close by. And I had an affection for my father despite the bum and drunk he was. So she said, reluctantly, all right. Well, two days later, we vanished. On the way to California. On the way to the golden age. You have to have wondered. Why? Why? Yeah, why did I do? Why did I? Why you and why your mom and why your dad? I mean, it's a complicated question. Oh,

it's a very complicated question. And my sisters are all always kind of scratching their head and wondering why me and not them. But I think it was because I was a boy and it would be easier for him to be out on the road with me. I was the eldest of three of us. And I wanted to be with him. You know, I had this connection. Well, in any way, a boy's place is with his father. Well, yeah, it was kind of that. It really was cliche that it might be. It was that sort of thing. And I felt it too. And besides he had been kind of filling my head for months with the glory of California. And I had this thing in my mind that I was going to see movie stars and hop along Cassidy. Everybody as we went west. And I was just absolutely mesmerized by the prospect of going out to California. So it was an easy sell on his part. Now, I don't want to give it anything away. You did, in fact, get to California nine months later. It's the getting there that is the story. Yeah, we never had money to just get on a plane or a bus or a train. It was always in little increments. And the first increment was from Albany, New York to New York

City. Not very far before he had no more money. And we stayed there a while at one of his friend's house while he did many labor jobs. And even then we didn't have enough for a ticket. So we finally just set off on foot and walked across the George Washington bridge. This whole business of traveling with your dad is not so simple as that. It's not as though the two of you were hand in hand all the time. Oh, no. You moved into a hotel in New York City. And basically he left you alone. Yeah, as a matter of fact, and it wasn't that he wanted to do that, but circumstances were such that he had no choice if we were going to have a roof of our head. His friend who managed the Oxford Arms, this little hotel, put him up in a closet of a room because he was going to work as a maintenance man and took me in with his wife up in their apartment. They had just recently lost a child, and I think they were looking for someone to fill in. And it was a terribly awkward situation, and his wife was extremely hostile toward me. And I thought her to be some kind of a horrible witch

I was really frightened of her. Well, this was kind of a setting the stage for what was to come over the next nine months as well. You were taken in a number of places, but I guess what you learned at this point is how to get along. Absolutely. If I developed any skills at all, it was adaptive skills. I had to adapt to a situation. It wasn't easy early on, but in order to survive, you have to do the best you can to get through circumstances that aren't particularly wonderful. But this is not just learning to be away from your mother to summer camp for a few months. Hardly. Ray took you out to Coney Island. Yeah, Ray took me out to Coney Island with a couple of teenage boys, and there was what today we would call a molestation sort of situation. Even though back then, it was not something talked about very much. As I got older, I realized what was happening. Fortunately, it didn't get real bad, but by today's standards, these two people would probably be serving time.

And I never mentioned it to my father because I was completely embarrassed by it, and so I could relate to the fact that the kids who are molested are very reluctant to ever say anything about that. There's such terrible embarrassment over the whole thing. And I was always fighting this feeling that I was a man, and as you were in 11 -year -old man, about 75 pounds, if that. But it's funny reading your stories. You're very clear then. You're very clear now. He was a drunk, and he was not a very responsible man. Not at all. But it is also clear that he would, each time you went through one of these situations, somewhere in the back of his mind, I guess, realize it was time to go. Maybe there was something better than this down the road. He was a person who could not make the best of where he was. He just couldn't turn that into a productive, positive thing. And that mostly had to do with the fact that he never really knew, even when he was sober, what he wanted to do, these were all

illusory. He fancied himself things that he could not possibly obtain, and then compound that with his affinity for the bottle. It would be quick that these places would turn sour. So it was then the opportunity, the promise of something, somewhere else, that launched us on the road again. And there you'd be walking over the George Washington Bridge. Exactly. You know, I often say he was a great role model, because he was antithetical to what you would want out of a parent. So I would look at him and I would think, I don't want to be anything like that. So it became very clear to me that I had to go in another direction and be a responsible human being and stay put in places and have a normal life. The story has a happy ending in one sense. You have no right to be as successful as you are. You didn't go to school, basically, for your entire teenage. I did not. In the aggregate, I probably went to six

years' worth of school. But you've ended up with a radio career that was successful. With an academic career that was successful. How in heaven's name did that happen? Well, again, it goes back to my father being a good role model for someone I didn't want to be. Even at 13 and 14 years old, I wanted to make something of myself. I didn't want to end up that way. So it was clear in my mind that I had to get off the treadmill to oblivion and, you know, take a stand. And so I did finally do that by going in the army, convincing my father to let me go in the army. And it was in the army that... You had to do that because you were only 17. He had to sign me in. He had to sign me in and he did so reluctantly, because in many respects he was losing his meal ticket, you might say. And so once I got in the service, I was able to apply myself. And I knew that if you behaved or you performed a certain way, you could move up. And I did so. And during the time I was in the military, I got my GED.

High school equivalency. Given that I had never seen high school and barely saw middle school, that was a big achievement for me. And it told me one thing, you know, you can do this. You can pursue education. And when I came out of the military, I did just that. And I also had the GI Bill to help me. And kind of chipped away and ultimately got the PhD, which for someone who never went to high school or middle school was kind of an unusual thing. Well, looking back with that in your pocket, it must be astonishing even to you. It is. And in some respects doing this book is a lasting testimony to, you know, that you can overcome adversity. You can find a way in life, despite the fact that you get off to a real, real shaky start. And I often think it was a great deal of good luck to have gone the direction I did go. Because I think if back then you asked anybody how I was going to turn out, they would have said probably like his father. Michael Keith, Coliseas Memoir, the next better place.

Star Dust melodies is a book no one can read from cover to cover. Each chapter is devoted to a classic American popular song. And sooner or later you're going to crack and head for the stereo system. Well, maybe we can help you out. The book's author is Will Friedwald. He talked with Steve Paulson about that booze drenched saloon song, Lush Life. He says the composer, Billy Strayhorn, had great musical ambitions. He really wanted to be, you know, like a cold porter or no coward. He wanted to be one of these guys that wrote words and music and had shows and had his name above the title of a Broadway show. And the ironic thing is that, of course, Strayhorn did wind up being a very, very bad alcoholic. And the life that he was ultimately describing in the song turned out to be very much his own, which is, you know, obviously not something

he could have foreseen, you know, when he was 21 and when he wrote it. I used to visit all the very gay places, those come what made places, where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life, to get the feel of life and jazz and cocktails. The girls I knew had sat in some great places with distinct races that used to be there. You could see where they were washed away, but too many through the day, 12 o 'clock days. So when he actually wrote it, he was not an alcoholic. No, it became sort of a self -fulfilling prophecy, you might say, because the song is all about drinking away your sorrows. Right, exactly. It's a saloon song, in the most literal sense

of the word. It's all about trying to get over love by drinking. And, you know, you wonder when he has these sort of grandiose illusions like, you know, we can Paris about, you know, getting off to Paris to forget one's troubles. And you wonder if the way Strayhorn is writing it, if he really means that this is, you know, a rich person that he's describing that really is capable of doing this. Or you wonder if this person is just drunk out of their minds and just fantasizing about such things, from an alcoholic haze or whether, you know, exactly what level it works. Or if this is somebody pretending to be foes sophisticated. And only last year everything seemed so sure. And one of the ironies, it seems to me about Lush Life is, it's Billy Strayhorn's most famous song and Strayhorn is best known for his long association with Duke Ellington. I mean, they were very close friends and collaborators for 30

years. He was on the Duke Ellington payroll, you know, that was the whole way his rent got paid, was by working for Duke Ellington. And yet the Ellington orchestras never performed Lush Life. Never performed it to speak of, it was sort of something that when the two men met, when Strayhorn went backstage at the theater in Pittsburgh and met Duke Ellington. And that was one of the songs he sort of auditioned with. And when Ellington heard it, he knew he had to hire this guy, you know, to work for him in some capacity and they didn't quite know what that would be at that point. But that was really one of the songs that impressed Ellington so much. But they both had this sort of, I don't know if it was a spoken or unspoken agreement, that that song was really not right for the orchestra or for any orchestra for that matter. I don't think that Strayhorn felt that the song was not appropriate for that sort of presentation. I mean, it was supposed to be a very intimate song, just voice and piano, preferably the same person, you know, playing the piano and singing. And there I'll be where I'll rot with the rest of those whose

lives are lonely to be. The tenor jazz sax player, John Coltrane, did a couple of versions of Lush Life. And I get the impression that you really liked the one he did with Johnny Hartman. Well, both the Coltrane versions are quite wonderful. Billy Strayhorn didn't like either of them because Coltrane would change the chords. Well, actually not change the chords. There's one example he's changed a harmony from one to another and he doesn't. He just keeps repeating the same harmony. And Billy Strayhorn didn't like the fact that he was messing with it. But both the Coltrane recordings, the instrumental recording and the vocal one with Johnny Hartman are quite beautiful. And that's what really put the song over for the next generation. Once Coltrane did it, a lot of the modern and post -modern jazz musicians wanted to do it. And they all were very much taking

it from Coltrane. I mean, he really was the one who symbolized to them that the song was okay to do it. And in fact, ironically, at a period when jazz musicians are starting to not do the great American song book that much when they're starting to find other things to do, that song gains in popularity. And there's more and more versions of it from the 60s and 70s and beyond by modern and post -modern musicians than had ever been before. And then there's a more recent instrumental version by Joe Henderson. Yeah, on the Billy Strayhorn salute record, it's quite nice too. Joe Henderson was a very introspective tenor player. So the song suited him very well. I mean, it wouldn't work as well with, you know, such a big, you know, like a big open -brevura style. You know, it's a song that works better when it's more intimate the way Joe Henderson plays it. Yeah, this is the song Lush Life was composed back in the 30s and it evoked a certain era. Do you think it still works today? Oh, definitely. Like I say, it has this nice

ambiguous thing going for it where you don't know exactly what the person's mindset is or where he's coming from. And you can project all these different things onto it. It's very much open to fresh interpretations. And that's really what keeps the song alive. It's the fact that you can do it in lots of different ways and make it relevant to lots of different settings and lots of different time periods, lots of different approaches. Wheel Freedwald is the author of a book called Star Dust Melodies. He spoke with Steve Paulson. For a list of the recordings we used, check our website, www .ttbook .org. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. To buy this program on cassette, just call the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -4444. Ask for program number 1228 -A. Drinkers and Drunks. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Steve Paulson, Veronica

Rickard, Charles Monroe Cain, Anne Strange Champs, Doug Gordon and Mary Lou Finnegan. With engineering help from Marv None. P -R -I Public Radio International. It's one of the great stories in the history of books, James Murray, a poor kid from Scotland who dropped out of school at the age of 14. Somehow found himself creating the world's greatest dictionary. Next week on to the best of our knowledge, Simon Winchester tells the remarkable story of James Murray on the Oxford English Dictionary. It's to the best of our knowledge from P -R -I Public Radio International.