Fw: Playing With Tom Robbins, Who Passed Away Yesterday

Mon Feb 10 15:50:25 UTC 2025

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 10:47 AM Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> *From:* Greg Mitchell has new 'Between Rock and a Hard Place' <
> gregmitchell at substack.com>
> *To:* "markekohut at yahoo.com" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Monday, February 10, 2025, 10:16:35 AM EST
> *Subject:* Playing With Tom Robbins, Who Passed Away Yesterday
>
> Nearly 50 years ago, I did the first major interview with the author of
> "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Plus: Emmylou's version of "Cowgirls" song
> and a Joan Baez tribute.
> ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏
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> ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     ͏     
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> Playing With Tom Robbins, Who Passed Away Yesterday
> <https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=258400&post_id=156811426&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=lqwh&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDE0NjQxLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNTY4MTE0MjYsImlhdCI6MTczOTIwMDU4MywiZXhwIjoxNzQxNzkyNTgzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjU4NDAwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.uybKqyafXe999_8NQflgEjQ2m6Qjz-S1wD63y-teFAI>Nearly
> 50 years ago, I did the first major interview with the author of "Even
> Cowgirls Get the Blues." Plus: Emmylou's version of "Cowgirls" song and a
> Joan Baez tribute.
>
> Greg Mitchell <https://substack.com/@gregmitchell>
> Feb 10
> <https://substack.com/@gregmitchell>
>
>
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>
> *Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books
> <https://substack.com/redirect/e5245c2b-202a-496f-9511-f6b8a5010d64?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
> (see link) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via
> PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b55c916b-aae3-4d6c-a3ae-5eb8d26c62e3?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>”
> and “Memorial Day Massacre
> <https://substack.com/redirect/8a8be122-4517-4225-8baf-b1509f344e3d?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>”
> which are still up at PBS.org. Watch trailer for my acclaimed 2025 film
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5342bebf-8b30-46f0-ae24-7af05822e5a0?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
> “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the
> legendary **Crawdaddy**. At Blue Sky and Twitter: both as @gregmitch. You
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>
> The usual mix of things today, with political potshot cartoons down below.
>
> First, there was a major benefit concert/tribute for Joan Baez in San
> Francisco on Saturday, featuring among others Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda
> Williams, Jackson Browne and on and on. Here is a piece about it.
> <https://substack.com/redirect/7ba50ae2-8999-4d0d-b43e-b848531ed6a2?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
> The only music from it I can find is a distant audience video that captures
> audio pretty well of her singing “Diamonds and Rust.”
>
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5029d3cc-e2a7-4926-9633-48501db17803?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
>
> Next, just one of several horrific Trump statements during an impromptu
> presser on Air Force One on the way to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers
> $4 to $10 million (Elon, please probe this unnecessary spending).
>
> *Reporter*: You are going to meet with first responders today, but you
> pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted first responders [on January 6].
>
> *Trump*: No, I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves… by our
> government. I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted.
> What I did was a great thing for humanity.
>
> [image: Powerful friends]
> <https://substack.com/redirect/8b8fd21a-1b02-4d2c-9247-717f6f127f0c?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
>
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> *Did Tom Robbins Ever Get the Blues?*
>
> Next, the once very popular playful novelist, mainly with younger people
> of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Tom Robbins passed away yesterday at the age of 92.
> Of course, this made me recall my efforts at* Crawdaddy* in 1976 to
> interview him, after my rather celebrated profiles of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
> and Joseph Heller. Robbins was a cult star for his fun if dopey (in both
> senses of the word) novels “Another Roadside Attraction” and “Even Cowgirls
> Get the Blues.” He had been doing the Pynchon thing for awhile, cultivating
> an air of mystery, no one knew where he lived, and he had never done a
> major interview.
>
> Somehow I managed to contact him through his agent or editor and got back
> a friendly letter offering to send me a “self-interview” which I could
> print if I did not edit it at all and did not reveal where he lived. He
> sent it to his agent or editor first, and they scotched the idea. But with
> “Even Cowgirls” heading for a new paperback edition and a movie directed by
> Robert Altman in the works, they convinced him to do at least one lengthy
> in-person interview.
>
> So in April 1977, I flew to San Francisco to interview Robbins, mainly in
> Japantown. Robbins had warned in a second letter to me, “My publishers
> haven't gotten used to my craziness yet, and I think they may be a little
> nervous about what I might say.” Robbins again made me promise to keep
> hidden exactly where he lived—somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—claiming
> fans were starting to camp out on his front lawn. Kurt Vonnegut had told me
> he went through the same thing when he lived in Barnstable on Cape Cod.
>
> Photo of Tom back then:
>
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5dfe0c88-cd24-434f-98f6-4d4c43753bb1?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
>
> As I expected, Tom acted predictably offbeat as we walked around
> Chinatown, with his young girlfriend Margie, ducking in and out of Asian
> toy shops he loved. He was into the new transformers toys way ahead of the
> rest of us. His mantra seemed to be “play” which he said he took
> “seriously.” At a vegetable stand he picked up a stalk of asparagus and
> placed it on top of his head, as if to launch it into space via his own
> thought-beams. “It's never too late to have a happy childhood,” he said.
> His next book, he revealed, would be titled, “Woodpecker Rising*”* (it
> was later changed to “Still-Life With Woodpecker”).
>
> With a thick head of hair and ‘stache, Tom was youthful in both appearance
> and manner. Perhaps all those magic mushrooms he’d ingested back in the day
> had something to do with that. From some of his colleagues at a newspaper
> back in Virginia where he got his start, however, I’d discovered that he’d
> long lied about his age, and then to me during our interview (cutting about
> five years off the current forty-five). Robbins was uptight where Vonnegut
> had been relaxed about his status as a rapidly aging hero of younger
> readers.
>
> Still, he seemed like a good guy, and he invited me to a party that night
> for him, naturally on a local houseboat, a former bait and tackle
> shop--another seaside attraction.
>
> It was quite a bash, featuring an all-cowgirl bluegrass band (unlike
> Robbins’ famous heroine Sissy Hankshaw they were not all-thumbs). I met
> Tom’s friend, a Seattle artist named Lead Pencil, and one of his many
> female admirers, actress Joanna Cassidy. It reminded me of a party for
> Leonard Cohen in New York when he was surrounded by five or six lovely
> women everywhere he walked. Robbins said that 80% of his fan mail came from
> women, even though a lot of “dumb” feminists were “confusing sexuality with
> sexism.” Apparently some of them thought the cowgirls in his novel should
> have come out as lesbians, or so he claimed.
>
> At some point I found myself sitting next to young songwriter Rodney
> Crowell, who had just penned a tune for Emmylou Harris, based on “Cowgirls,
> *”* at the bar. Crowell, who was still touring as part of Emmylou’s
> backup band, was chatting with someone behind me but I could hear every
> word. Rodney said something like, “Emmylou is still so damn upset about
> that damn *Crawdaddy* article on Gram Parsons, after she read it on the
> tour bus. I told her, if I ever find the guy who wrote it, I’d beat the
> shit out of him.” So I casually got up and found another seat, out on the
> deck. I had co-authored that article.
>
> If Rodney had managed to ID me, maybe I’d just blame it all on my
> co-author.
>
> Here is that song, with Emmylou and Rodney (and yes that’s young Rosanne
> Cash).
>
> <https://substack.com/redirect/0b7c9c8e-9be1-44ba-a172-494e36a45bb2?j=eyJ1IjoibHF3aCJ9.ql_c5RLnVxO2kZEjDOaLuEtOMnQ8mznPqxTm3B0PLn4>
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> *Cartoons Monday*
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> [image: No photo description available.]
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