(click on wee image to see beeger image)
Beckett Park. 2:00 p.m. 51 degrees. Sunny, cloudless blue sky.
Walking with Eddie
Listening to Blue Monk mp3
8 golf balls in muddy
wash Bud bottle at base of steep hill below
driving range of Beckett Ridge Country Club
Thinking of Thelonious Monk
hiding from the hippies behind curtain
backstage at the Carousal Ballroom, San Francisco, May 3,
1968.*
* “May 3, 1968:
Thelonious Monk and Dr. John The Night Tripper at the Carousal Ballroom.” Entry
from The Virtual Museum of San Francisco. “Chronology of San Francisco Rock:
1965-1969.” www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/rock.html. Accessed February 3, 2012.
Anecdote about Thelonious Monk from article about blues guitarist Joe
Louis Walker “Aggressively Spanning the Blues.” Jim Fusilli. Wall Street
Journal. Wednesday, February 1, 2012. D5. The paragraph referenced here reads "He [Walker] failed to connect with the eccentric jazz master Thelonious Monk. 'Monk was nice, but he would hide behind the curtain. He hadn't played for many hippie audiences.'" Robin D. G. Kelley addresses the common notion that Monk was "eccentric" in his 2010 biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. I don't have the book in front of me, but Kelley makes a convincing case that Monk was no mere eccentric. A complicated and compelling man, but the "eccentric" label tends to lessen his accomplishments, which were great, and the product of no mere eccentric.
Walker could be referring to the May 3, 1968 performance
at the Carousal Ballroom. I could be wrong. The Carousal was taken over and renamed
the Fillmore West by Bill Graham in July 1968.
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