Hailing the Chief: A brush with the Nixon motorcade

It was all over in 30 seconds.

That’s the length of time it took to record an impulsive act in public; a totally unpremeditated instinctive gesture that could have fostered dire consequences were it conducted in today’s NSA-regulated world; a moment of irresistible improvisation that could have easily landed me in the immediate company of men in dark suits and darker sunglasses, to be interrogated endlessly regarding any connections to subversive terrorist activity, never to be heard from again.

But in 1969, the world, though only six years removed from the haunting Kennedy assassination, was still leading with a cautious innocence, conducting the regular day-to-day without the burdensome over-the-shoulder fear that all decent neurotic people everywhere carry today.

I READ IT IN THE NEWS

It was an early spring weekday morning with the usual madness centered around the daily prep-for-work ritual: Rise, shower, scarf down a bite, squeeze by my wife in the cramped hallway of our Lexington Avenue apartment in New York City, as each fought to get out the door first.

The New York Times, a recent and reluctant substitute for our beloved Herald Tribune that had shut down three years previously, awaited our attention at the threshold outside the door. No time to read, but…what was this? A headline announced that the president was coming to town. That night, in fact. Riding the elevator together, I scanned the story.

“Listen to this,” I said, reading one bulletin out loud. “Nixon’s motorcade is going to run right through here!”

The article detailed a travel route through the city for the Nixon entourage following their touch down at LaGuardia Airport later that day. To our surprise and ultimately great convenience it mentioned that the president’s cavalcade—destined for a distinguished hotel on Fifth Avenue—would take the 79th St. crosstown thoroughfare.

“Man, he’s coming within a block of us!”

Indeed, the planned route called for the caravan to cruise by just one block north of our East Side two-room 78th Street abode. The president’s schedule called for an early evening arrival, which meant we would be home from work in time to witness it if we chose.

We agreed to check it out.

NIGHT RIDER

It must be remembered that to many of us in that pre-Watergate era Nixon was a villain, a snarky pol with an evil eye who personified a growing distrust with government. To those still lost in the Kennedy euphoria, Camelot had been replaced by Mordor.

That night, shortly after shuffling the lone block up to the travel route, news circulated among fellow onlookers that apparently a delay had slowed the official procession en route from LaGuardia. We lucked out, securing a prized gawking post right off the street on the north-side curb of 79th, a site that would yield the closest proximity to the delegation when it passed by. The unexpected lag had nurtured idle, time-killing comments from the sidewalk assembly. Sporadic laughter lit up the twilight, mostly jokes aimed at the president.

The festive atmosphere had the ring of an impromptu street party replete with anonymous jesters holding the attention of the crowd-in-waiting. But the timbre of that hubbub abruptly and universally morphed into one expectant onrush of excitement, as someone yelled:

“It’s coming!”

GOING MY WAY?

It was dark now. Every neck in the vicinity craned forward, peering left, eastward. Police had cleared the bustling street a half hour earlier of traffic, rerouting it elsewhere into the numbing city maze in anticipation of the motorcade’s impending arrival. Suddenly, a chain of headlights appeared coming up from Third Avenue, funeral-style but at a quicker pace. The inevitable police escort preceded the convoy. A full 20 feet separated the last NYPD motorcycle from the first official car. That would later prove an invaluable window of opportunity.

My pulse quickened as the train of black government vehicles amid swirling blue lights approached. It seemed like something was needed for the moment, something that would make this a postcard memory. But likely it would pass uneventfully, nothing more than a quick glimpse at a passing series of dark tinted windows at night. But maybe, just maybe the president would actually be looking at the people he was passing by. What if?

The first car was now no more than 100 feet away, when without warning something wildly impulsive came over me, the telltale surge of adrenaline an indicative clue.

I was about to do something!

Immediately after the final cop bike passed within six feet of us—in that thinnest of windows, in that instant between twilight and darkness, before instinct, reason, or calculation could step in the way—I dropped my right leg down off the curb as the first car approached, not 10 feet away. Then, with a look that bordered on the whimsically earnest, I dropped my right thumb down into the classic hitchhiker stance.

This pose I maintained for the full duration of the motorcade, not knowing of course which of the black sedans the president inhabited. Perhaps the secret service nursed the barest trace of humor back then, because today, should any fool willfully step off a curb in front of the president’s car, that person should expect to be immediately apprehended as a diabolical threat—yes, never to be heard from again!

The crowd of heads now swiveled to the right, watching the line of bobbing red taillights trail off toward Park Avenue. The whole thing had taken no more than half a minute.

We laughed the short walk home. Then I never gave it another thought for 45 years. But I now wonder. Did Nixon see my gesture? If so, was I written off as just another irksome dissenter, smirked at in disgust after what he might have perceived as disrespect?

I like to think that the man who worked tirelessly to earn the ignominious moniker of Tricky Dick could somewhere in his own twisted mind see the humor, or rather, the lightness in it all; a nervy attempt by an unknown member of the proletariat at lightening up a moment top heavy with over-ceremonious pomp and reserve. Yes, I’d like to think Dick Nixon was smiling at the odd pantomime taking place outside his magic carpet. Who knows what positive changes might have come for the man, and for the entire world for that matter, from the residue of that one moment of unbridled impulse?

A far scarier thought: What if they’d picked up that hitchhiker from another galaxy?

One didn’t have to reach far for moments of light-hearted irony in New York City in the Sixties.

Studio Stowaway: An Unexpected Visit from Rock Royalty

It started out as a typical rehearsal. Typical, that is, when you live in a major urban center like Manhattan: Packing your car full of guitars, amplifiers and assorted gear, driving through the craziness of New York City, then placing yourself at the mercy of the parking gods, hopefully to find a spot within walking distance of MRC’s recording studios on West 57th Street, before lugging your stuff up to Studio B on the third floor.

When you reside in Manhattan, you live in an apartment, not a freestanding dwelling like a normal house. If you’re a practicing musician, you’ve already got a big problem on your hands. With adjoining walls everywhere, there simply is no acceptable protocol for rehearsing—be it singing or playing an instrument—without turning your neighbors into hostile enemies.

As one of Philips Records’ new young acts in 1968, our five-man band, Ross Legacy, was allowed a massive perk by the label — free use of its studios (they were a subsidiary of Mercury Records) for rehearsals when the facility was “dark,” or not in use. Before that tidy arrangement was extended, Pam—my singing partner and first wife—and I would jump in our green Volkswagen bug and head from our midtown apartment for a house our band knew of in Manhattan Beach, a distant suburb of Brooklyn that lay a daunting hour-and-a-half drive away. And believe me, a 90-minute drive through New York City streets bears no similarity to motoring through countryside.

This particular evening in late 1968, as mentioned earlier, began the same as the others: Hooking up at the building’s entrance with lead guitarist Frank Fuchs, bassist Mike “Eggie” Ekster, and drummer Steve Turok, before freighting our gear up to the studio. The band always had more music to rehearse than the time we were allotted by our generous benefactors, so little time was wasted on idle chatting and catching up.

We had been at it for almost an hour, easing through our limited-but-growing original folk-pop repertoire and settling into a comfortable practice rhythm, as it turned out, just seconds before the most amazing shock of our collective young lives.

Much to our surprise, we had a stowaway in the studio—a world-famous one at that.

As the band was moving through a number, the door to the control room inside the studio suddenly opened. The engineer’s suite had been “dark” as well, the black opaque-like glass all the while concealing the presence of one exhausted producer of the Hamilton Face Band, another of Mercury’s artists, who were recording just down the hall from us in the larger Studio A. Now, a massive Afro emerged from behind the door, followed in quick order by the rest of the man’s instantly recognizable face.

It was Jimi Hendrix.

Five faces went slack in disbelief at the tall, slender, friendly faced celebrity standing somewhat sheepishly before us.

“Hey, y’all,” a smiling Hendrix said. “Sounds good what you got goin’ on here!”

Five faces remained slack in disbelief. Well, it was an odd situation, after all. I mean, just what was the most famous rock star on the planet doing in our rehearsal room, and why did we not know that for an hour?

Then, as if reading our combined minds, he filled in the Why. “We took a break across the hall. This studio was dark; it looked like the perfect place to hide away for a little nap.”

Five faces stared blankly back at the superstar. With a wave and a big smile, he was gone as fast as he had appeared.

It’s funny how you review a major accidental event after the fact. How did we sound? we wondered. Was anything said that we’d be embarrassed by before we knew he was in the studio? Were we in tune? Nothing negative jumped out at us in our excited appraisal of the kingly visit from rock royalty. All to a man, though, wished we had known that he was in the room, so we would’ve been at our best. Needless to say, the remainder of the rehearsal was our finest ever. Within two and a half years, Hendrix would be dead from an overdose and ascend to legend.

Thirty-four years later, I tracked down Fuchs, our guitarist, now in L.A. He had produced some albums and made music himself in the long expanse since our last contact in ’69, the year Pam and I moved to Nashville. He was originally suggested by the wife of the late Woody Guthrie, whom I’d once met in her fight against Huntington’s disease, the disabling robber that quieted the great Woody. Frankie had taken clarinet at 9 then picked up piano and guitar on his own. Later, he spent his college summers as Arlo Guthrie’s accompanist. I used to marvel at that small-world aspect that involved us both knowing Marge. The first thing he brought up conversationally that day, though, was the brief but stunning instance with Hendrix so long ago. Frank still recalled it all with great enthusiasm.

“Man, he said the music was good!”

I’ve thought about that. Sometimes only slight degrees separate true inspiration from total deflation. What if this rock god had said instead, “You suck. Can’t a guy get any sleep here!”

Tim Ross, Everyone!

After 46 years of playing and singing professionally, it was with some trepidation last Saturday in the waning twilight that I ventured into a songwriter’s night at one of the clubs in Printer’s Alley, Nashville’s old-tenured and renowned nightlife hub, a sort of New Orleans-style pared down Vegas strip.

Visits to the Alley had been few and far between. Maybe 40 years. It was different then, the Alley. The Captain’s Table, The Embers, Brass Rail and other historical entertainment venues drew some extraordinary nightclub talent back in the day. Mostly people you never heard of, though, or who might have been well known but more on the local level. There was the colorful guitar-playing Ronnie Prophet, a Canadian cross between Vegas Wayne Newton and Vegas Elvis. As part of a visible Nashville music duet in the late 1960s and ’70s, I was awed at some of the superior talent that played down there. Not just the familiar stuff of legends already made―Boots Randolph, Floyd Cramer, et al; most folks knew about that. It was Bobbi Jo Walls and Judy West gracing their enchanting piano-cocktail bar settings that drew throngs of steady regulars, many of them businessmen from the then-thriving downtown area. These and other antediluvian thoughts of the Alley swirl in my head walking to the gig.

Once inside, my wife Caroline and I are told that the club’s event coordinator and host (two different people) will be there shortly to answer important questions, like, When do I go on? This particular writer’s night stipulates that the talent arrive at the venue by 6:30 p.m. to be assigned a time to play between 7 and 9. With the universally accepted knowledge that nothing of any significant consequence will possibly come from the evening career-wise, a short three-song stint is the given format. I hope to get on and get off stage early. To be assigned a later time slot, thereby dragging out the evening sitting amongst the club’s patrons comprised almost entirely of other participating songwriters, would turn what we surmised was a tolerable jaunt into an anguish-laden evening of unending eternity. Are we on yet?

To our great relief, I snag the opening slot. The host is preoccupied setting up video streaming but casually asks my name. Deafening metal music flattens the room from the sound check in progress at the other end of the club.

“Doesn’t that bleed over into this room when both stages are playing?” I ask the bartender. “Nah, the sound drops off about halfway,” is her reply. Riiiiight. If soundproof doors could seal off the open space between the two facing stages, it would only slightly cut the decibel level!

I’m plugged in and ready to play as the clock hits seven. The evening’s host steps to the mike and says, “Please welcome… Tim Ross!” But as I step toward the mike, he tarries for some introductory conversation.

“Tim, tell us a little about yourself.”

“Let’s go with Alan Ross for starters, and we’ll call ourselves square,” I tell him, making a humorous attempt to correct the misnomer without flogging him for it. No reaction on his part, so I briefly tell those assembled at the club about the early Dot Records years with the folk trio Children of Rain, later followed by the Philips label release as Ross Legacy back in New York in the mid-to late-Sixties; how I came to Nashville as a result of the promotion trip on the Philips’ recording, in June of 1969, and decided to move to Music City with my then-duet singing wife, Pam; how I’d segued into the music of my father’s heritage, Scottish folk and Celtic, about 20 years ago, and that I would now do one of those pieces from my Scottish CD.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

The name gaffe is not unprecedented but still amusingly rare. Usually, it’s a just a simple misspelling of my name, complicated by the fact that I’ve added the contraction “wm” for William―my first name―in front of my middle name (which I have gone by for 67 years) as a defense against being swallowed up by the vast anonymity of the Internet and its appallingly infinite number of Alan Rosses. In the music business, “What’s in a name?” is all about the never-ending toil spent cultivating that name and the eventual branding that takes place over time. Will that name be remembered by the masses? Indeed, will it even be pronounced correctly? After 46 years of playing the name game, my industry recognition factor nearly nonexistent, I could do worse than to be called Tim Ross.

If you think about it, a botched name really only registers if you’ve heard of the person; if they actually have a name of some renown. I went around Atlanta one November day in 2007 with Pro Bowl running back Warrick Dunn, a 12-year NFL player for Tampa Bay and the Falcons, when he appeared at four brand new Habitat for Humanity homes, giving away down payments like Santa Claus and stocking first-time owners’ new homes with furniture, computers, food, appliances and the like. It was a well-coordinated event, with partnered support from area sponsors, Dunn’s Foundation, and Atlanta Habitat for Humanity. But I vividly recall the Atlanta Habitat executive director being called up to the microphone to impart a few words to the media that had tagged along for the philanthropic occasion. Insufficiently prepped for her speech, the woman embarrassingly referred to Dunn as “Warwick” three times during her comments. The media appeared to graciously overlook her faux pas.

Back at the gig, the room is filled with two separate publishing groups of 20- and 30-something songwriters and their friends. I am the lone outsider―no publishing affiliation and no recent chart-busting hit. But my opening Scottish jig turns heads, Caroline tells me afterward. “You captured the room.”

And lost it just as quick. Changing the next play at the line of scrimmage, I audible to a classical-sounding folk ballad I penned in 1968. Three female songwriters sitting at the first table in front of the stage, boringly enduring it all―(Sigh) Are we on yet?―pull out cell phones and start texting not five feet from my face, insensitively oblivious to my presence.

An upbeat boogie-rock piece brings back some of the crowd on my final number. In the back of the room, nearly lost in the shadows, a treasure catches my eye: my oldest son has received my short-notice text that I was to go on imminently, beaming himself to the club in time to catch the last two tunes. It’s a warmer feeling than even the nice reception the songwriters-in-waiting give up, as the host again steps to the microphone with noticeably keener enthusiasm than initially displayed in his opening introduction. As I exit the stage, behind me, in a voice of practiced urging, the emcee implores the patrons one last glorious time:

“Tim Ross, everyone!”

Burying Clete

The gold cuff links slipped through the always troublesome slits of the white shirt's French cuffs. I paused to admire the unique wonder of them, each a little gold calendar of the month of June. To either side of the month were the numbers 19 and 32. On the 30th day of that month, a Thursday, sits a small ruby. June 30, 1932, the day my parents were married.

The cuff links came via the usual lineage chain: inheritance. I received a number of my father’s personal effects. Split them with my brother, in fact, at the time my mother said to us both, “he would’ve wanted you to have these.”

But the reason for dressing up wasn’t for anything enjoyable or delightful or happy or fun. I was going to bury my friend Clete today. And that called for me to squeeze into a pair of dress pants and haul out the aging white shirt that my wife said had ring around the collar. Before that it had been a wrestling match between should I wear the cheap suit or abandon ritual and sport a double-breasted blazer with a pink tie. I’ve learned how to dress for a funeral. Actually I’ve learned how to dress someone who was already dead for their big send-off. My father. He was an artist and a colorful dresser, always. His appearance sparkled with dashing style, which was instinctive to him. It didn’t take my mother, two sisters, and me very long to dress this man for burial in splendiferous attire. A striking figure in life, he went out in a burst of color. We saw to it. The lingering effects of that passage 19 years ago have influenced the way I dress for another’s entombment.

So, when I was asked to be a pallbearer at Clete’s funeral service, I knew he would have approved of my preferred farewell celebration attire. Blazer and pink tie it is. I had noticed at the previous night’s visitation that Clete had been interred in a very stylish black country-western dress suit. It looked great on him. We had known each other in various incarnations since first meeting in the fall of 1969. Both of us were fledgling songwriters at Nashville’s famed Tree Publishing Company. Photos of us from that time show hopelessly bowled early-1970s hair, mustaches, and mutton chops, or some combination thereof. During the mid-1980s, Clete sported the traditional de rigeur Music Row haberdashery, the straw curled-brim cowboy hat. The Clete of late, from 2002 on, wore a gracious face and, thankfully, was hatless again. He was lean with a smart braided ’tail, a sweet and dear man.

Our friendship, though, got off to a rocky start. Unbeknownst to me, until he told me just two weeks before he was murdered, Clete early on eyed me as a rival. He had come to Tree as a tunesmith, but in the guise of a duet. Clete and his first wife, Kathy, wrote and demoed songs together and were enjoying their situation at the giant country music publisher. He told me, “And then you and Pam came to town and stole our thunder!” Clete, in a huff, let it be known in the hallways of Tree that “he might just be looking at going over to Cedarwood,” a rival song publisher. In retelling the event 40 years later, Clete, a master at self-deprecating humor, put that Am-I-The-World’s-Biggest-Dumbass-Or-What look on his face, and said, “My God! I left the No. 1 country music publishing company in the world ’cause I was bent out of shape over you guys coming to Tree!”

He was a man of a thousand stories. After Clete found himself backed into a corner by his own half-hearted threat, he did indeed leave Tree and our paths wouldn’t cross again until 1985. He was forming an acoustic country trio then and had already lined up the name for the group. White Crow. Would I be interested in joining him and multi-talented singer/musician Scott Jarrett? Most certainly! The trio cut several songs, among them an uncelebrated tune, “An Angel You Love,” that deals with a couple in love who cannot connect in this lifetime because of prior attachments mate-wise but who look forward to another time—in heaven—when they will finally get to share their love together. The song was eerily prophetic. Clete had found his true love—in this lifetime; a woman named Marj whom he had been married to for the last 15 years.

Marj had accumulated some wealth through two previous marriages to men who had predeceased her. She and Clete had built a $1.5 million-dollar home on middle Tennessee’s Tims Ford Lake and were just putting the finishing touches on the landscaping, when Marj passed from a quick-acting cancer. In a surreal turn of fate, Clete lost the love of his life just one month before meeting his own violent death. Now, implausibly, “An Angel You Love” would begin Clete’s funeral service, and like the song, reconnect him with the angel he loved.

Living with senselessness

My wife Caroline and I had discussed how odd it is that people suffering the loss of a loved one are supportively bolstered at the time of death by friends and family, who then appear to abandon the bereaved in post-burial haste, everyone going back to their usual lives almost as if nothing had happened. The survivor, though, embarks on the opening leg of a journey of aloneness. With that in mind, we invited Clete to dinner one week after Marj’s funeral. Three weeks later to the day, he too was gone.

The murder part of it is too horrible to think about for long. Maybe that’s why people unconsciously tend to soften an event like that in their minds when pondering it; we linger on all that was good about a person, not the circumstances under which they exited. But I found that when a dear friend was shot multiple times in his own home in what more and more appears to be step-family involvement over estate and money, I frantically looked for anything solid to hang on to, for anything that could make the off-the-charts shock and pain just the least bit bearable. Once more, a formidable foe direct from the calendar had intruded again.

Me and the 23rd, we have this thing. It takes from me people I love. Three times I have lost a friend on December 23rd or have buried them on that date. A drunk driver took the first one, a massive heart attack felled another friend like an axe; now a murder. On top of that, I was jailed overnight 27 years ago on Dec. 23rd for partaking a tad too strenuously in pre-holiday merriment. The 23rd day of the twelfth month is a date I’d like to ban from future calendars.

At the funeral, the first-ever occasion I’d been asked to tend to the dearly departed as a pallbearer, I laid a firm hand on the casket containing my friend, helping guide it into the hearse then again from the hearse to the burial site. I was the last to throw a spade full of dirt onto his casket before the undertaking crew, like ants descending on a meal, completed the sizeable job in mere minutes. Something about being involved with Clete’s burial comforted me. It felt like we bore him home.

When I think about those times when someone close to me has passed, I notice that I tend to look for a positive spin: They were ill and death was a blessing, they were old and feeble and were mercifully taken. If a sudden accident or a wartime death, the hastily held belief became Hopefully it was quick. Death’s inevitability humbles all. We don’t want to think that it’s worse than it already appears. See you in heaven. We’ll be together again one day. All fit comfortably in the uneasy contemplation of death. But none of those stop-gap self-consoling phrases work when the disquieting shadow of murder hangs over the deceased.

Also weaving its way through this emotional morass is a most incongruous intruder—Christmas, of all things. Yet, while undergoing this current blue Christmas I somehow feel connected to the pervasive holiday spirit in a different, subtler way. Somewhere in all the madness, in all the shock, in the loss, the senselessness, the pain, and even with my issues with the 23rd, those eternal words of that tiniest of embattled characters from Dickens’ Christmas classic come pounding through with more pertinence than ever through its imperative plea for hope in a desperate time:

“God bless us, everyone.”

Life in a Limo

I would have liked to describe it as Nigel Mansell driving a limo.

At least that was the thought in my head when I took a job driving a limousine on September 16, 1993, looking, as always—the perennial freelancer—to fill in some of those vital holes in my financial plan. Facing almost constant near extinction in freelancing, the editing work not being what it was, I found myself applying for a job with Ken Fortin’s Capital Limousine Service. After a two-hour interview, I was hired on the spot, with no driving experience, which speaks mostly well for the education my parents provided me.

The first few days I was trained by Stanley, an excellent guide, who showed me the workings of an inside of a limo and told of how people will come up and breathe and lay their hands and fingers and mouths on the limousine, and how you’ve got to wipe it off every time—all part of the protocol and tight detail work required in prepping the big ride for public service.

My first day was spent inauspiciously in the brake shop. But soon Stanley took me out in the stretch limo and put me behind the wheel, a surprise treat, having been told I would probably start with a sedan, a less risky proposition from a driving standpoint.

The best way to equate driving a limousine is to say that you are a captain of a ship. You’re looking at something about 26 feet long. You’re talking about a yacht, a land yacht, as limos are often called. And with good reason: Piloting them is no different (having captained my own 26-foot mahogany Chris Craft cabin-cruiser for 10 years). It has been a good and accurate analogy, one that came in especially handy when parallel parking for the first time.

I’ve not hit anything yet.

After my first week at the limousine service, I’ve still got a clean slate: no nicks, no scratches. It’s a record I’m proud of and will work hard to maintain, not wanting to incur the wrath of Kenneth Fortin, a down-to-business kind of owner but a very fair man, and a nice man too, I might add. Ken is also letting me violate some of his personal rules of etiquette for limo drivers. I am, from what I understand, the first limousine driver—ever—to be allowed to keep his ponytail. Many enter the training period with ’tails, but, as soon as they are judged worthy of working out, are asked to head for the barbers and submit to the clip. Ken views everyone closely, and somehow has seen the glimpse of a far-off rebel with a cause in me, approaching me with respect, if not a little forbearance. He is a man task and duty oriented. And with good reason.

Away from the Ball pre-release party

The party for Alan Ross’ Away from the Ball book release was celebrated at La Paz Green Hills, Nashville, Tenn., on Sunday Sept. 7, 2008. Away from the Ball looks at the benevolence of NFL football heroes off the field. In the wake of the negative headline-grabbing actions of Michael Vick, PacMan Jones, and others, Away from the Ball takes an in-depth look at three superb humanitarians—a recently retired head coach, a current star running back, and a legendary NFL alumnus, plus a brief look at 20 other true league heroes—the selfless players who place helping others above playing football.


The author

















with John Mitchell, friend and editor of Away from the Ball












Celebratory cake, held by son-in-law Owen Walker and kibitzed by grandson Xander Ross