'My Mentor, My Teacher'

I, on the other hand, was in no mood for thanksgiving yet. In fact, I entered into a deeper period of freefall with the publication of "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" in 1984—a critical success and resounding popular failure—followed by "Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South" in 1991. Drugs were only part of my near-lethal lifestyle: I married and divorced three (or was it four?) times—the last, to a woman who tried to kill me. The marriage ended when I set her car on fire.

I was too ashamed to ever tell Jerry of her existence, even though we spoke on the phone at least every couple of weeks. He always had jokes to relay. I cannot remember a single one that is printable in this publication. What I can remember, are the conversations we began to have about new American films noirs. I hadn't had a TV in years, but bought one—and a VCR—when Jerry began to send me tapes of movies, including: Carl Franklin's "One False Move" and Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." Such gestures may seem small, but they're exactly the kind of thing I mean, when I say Jerry saved my life again and again.

In 1993, I began to climb out of this depressed and beastly—I use the word literally—mode of existence when, I joined the Roman Catholic Church. Jerry, who had split from Shirley and then wed a Greek woman—a relationship that also ended in divorce—was on his own path toward a happier and more stable existence. He married the novelist Jean Arnold. He continued doing a little producing: the B-52s, for example, of my home state of Georgia, to which I had relocated. My favorite phone call to Jerry was an annual one, made at an ungodly hour on Easter morning after my return from Mass: "Christ is risen!" I would shout gleefully into the phone. His favorite, and considering the circumstances, kindly rejoinder, was to turn on at full blast, Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man," which he of course had produced and always seemed to have ready for my call.

The last time I spoke with Jerry, he seemed in bitingly good-humored remission from his final illness. I was in bed, nursing bruises from a recent tumble I'd taken—the indignities of aging!—and he asked me how I was. "Fine," I answered quickly, knowing the mortal seriousness of his own condition. "'Fine,'" he said, after discovering why I sounded a little the worse for wear. "You goyim are all alike."

Certain obituaries about Jerry have already made much, perhaps too much, of his failures as a family man during his most active years in the music industry, something over which he suffered extensive guilt. Jerry's daughter Anita, for example, had gone on the road with Doctor John, become addicted to heroin, and died of AIDS. What none of these written memorials has underscored, so to speak, is his profound generosity toward those he came to love.  Like so many of us who have felt sharply our shortcomings as fathers and sons, he set about to create a family of friends, which he did primarily by telephone, as he advanced in years, and travel became difficult for him.

It was second … no, first … nature for him to love the people I loved. Indeed, Jerry was instrumental—again, so to speak—in the courtship of my ultimate wife, the poet Diann Blakely. Almost immediately upon hearing that we were corresponding—if only as fellow writers—with increasing intensity, he began to shower her with gifts. These included: immaculately typed weekly postcards featuring heroes like Furry Lewis; packets of articles written by, or about, him; adoringly autographed photographs of himself, alone or with friends; a lavishly inscribed copy of his life story; and boxed sets of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and other members of his pantheon. On learning that Diann was from Alabama, he confided to her that he considered his induction into her native state's Music Hall of Fame, one of the great honors of his life; and immediately sent her a videotape of the ceremonies. After months of such attentions, she was, predictably, smitten—with him, and, eventually, much to my great good fortune, with me.

"More Bass," said Jerry, when asked what he wanted written on his tombstone. No sound more closely approximates the rhythm of the human heart, especially in the Southern style he loved, with its one-TWO-three-FOUR backbeat.

Stanley Booth is the author of "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" and "Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South"

© 2008