I had so many of them, and a lot of them came from simply being in the music business. I’ve shared some of them with you before, yet there are still more, and in my precious quiet times, streams of forgotten memories come floating through, from where, god only knows. Those ‘almost’ forgotten memories are a large reason I write in this blog at all. They are fun for me to share, as I get to relish them one more time in their telling.
It could be a picture, the sound of a voice, a song, something spoken in a certain way, an old tv show… and the memory of another time, another incident jumps up into my conscious, almost like a jack in the box when the lid opens. Many of them are easy to remember, and I I think “of course.” Then others are more surprising and bring with them a sense of wonder, as in, “now where the hell did that come from?” Almost always something that happened to me that I’d forgotten for years. I bet that happens to you, too.
These days, I remember, from time to time, happenstance meetings with famous people, usually those that I was introduced to, some that I “bumped into” by accident, and some that plopped me into their presence by design – Hoagy Carmichael, Diahanne Carroll, Jimmy Carter, Henry Mancini, Roy Clark, Michael Douglas, Stephen Cannell, James Guercio, Susan Anton, The Dalai Lama, and that guy with the black patch over his eye that I sat next to on the plane to New York one morning.
Today, however, is Orson Welles Day at the NSB. I saw him in an old film briefly last evening, and this memory came roaring back to me in Technicolor. I was in a recording studio in L.A., recording strings on a few Susan Anton songs. For some reason I was walking back to the studio room to talk to the strings, and the recording engineer was walking in front of me through this narrow little dimly-lit hallway between the studio and the control room.
Halfway down the narrow hall we met this little old man coming toward us. As we met, we squeezed to the right and he squeezed to the left. As he passed, he was slightly bent over, and I wondered for an instant what an old man was doing in a studio. But I caught his glance up at us, and he looked vaguely familiar. As he passed, he said in a low and quiet voice, “Good day, gentlemen.”
It struck me, it was one of those little moments. A moment seemingly to be instantly forgotten by its daily mundanity of moving through life to the places we want to, and maybe need to, be. This one was not mundane, was not forgettable, but rather stunning, in hindsight.
The “Good day, gentleman” and his look, though old and a bit grizzled, started connecting for me, and I stopped the sound man ahead of me. “Hey, wasn’t that…”
He started walking again. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s Orson Welles. He’s in here a lot these days, recording voice overs for ads and documentary films. He still has a good voice for that stuff.”
I can tell you now that I somehow felt greatness in that little man who passed us in that hallway, not in hindsight, but right then, when he passed. There was so much in that moment, in his look, in his voice. There was a gentleness, an understanding of who he was and who we were, an awareness of the moment that I wish to god I had to any degree. I would have given much to meet him in the coffee shop right then and listen to him, listen to his thoughts on life, on love, on art. God what I would give to have gotten that opportunity.
But what I got was, “Good day, gentlemen.” And this memory of him.
This happened in the summer of ’84. He died the following year.
Steve Hulse