Paris on the Trinity
Ministers from many worlds drop in at the Dog.
By MICHAEL PELLECCHIA
Sit at a sidewalk café in Paris, beholding the steady Seine, and if you linger long enough, the whole world will pass by. They say it about Paris, but who says it about Fort Worth?
Put me down for one. For about seven years, I’ve been hanging out on an almost weekly basis at the Black Dog Tavern, run by a guy who used to work for the same publisher as me. A lot of characters show up for our jam sessions, but last week was special. I met a stranger from New York on one night and another from Terlingua the next.
The Sunday stranger came from that place of legend and lore they call the New York Stock Exchange, that noble guardian of corporate riches and calculated spreader of risk, the Humvee of the free market system. Now here at the Black Dog was its press guy, a stand-up fellow with the rare talent of being able to give the background while staying in the background.
After the stock market crash of 1987, the stock exchange entered the modern world of public relations and hired someone to tell its story to the public using plain English. Sixteen years later, Ray Pellecchia is still that guy. Last week he was in Fort Worth for a business writers’ convention at the Renaissance Worthington.
As Ray stood looking out over Main Street from his hotel, he remarked that it looked like a movie set with no people on it. A fellow conventioneer, Dave Giddens of Arlington, who writes a column in the Dallas Business Journal, told him that it helps if you know where to go. Sly Dave — an old buddy of mine — sent Ray to the nether regions down by the convention center, to the Black Dog jam session, where he knew that, on a Sunday night, Ray stood a good chance of running into another Pellecchia.
As soon as we were introduced, I realized this was the same Ray Pellecchia who was on my list of people to look up, for genealogical reasons, next time I was in New York City. “Pellecchia” isn’t unusual in Italy, but in the U.S. I usually have to spell it for people. Instead of me going to find him, however, he ended up finding me.
“Last year was the worst year of my life,” he told me over a beer. He was the one who had to yank the press credentials from the Arab tv network Al-Jazeera. He’s had to answer questions about the former chairman’s pay package and stem the tide of outrage resulting from big changes at the exchange. “This year,” he said, “we’ve seen things begin to turn around, with getting new leadership, launching new initiatives.”
“Ray,” I told him, “I used to be in PR myself.” My weary look told him he could skip the spin. Yeah, I used to get paid to tell people how clean coal emissions could be. How the government could get them a great apartment. Yeah, PR. He relaxed just a little, enough to make me realize I hadn’t carried burdens like his in quite a few years. And was thankful for it.
Monday night’s visitor to the Black Dog was from a part of the U.S. that is, mentally, about as far away from the NYSE as you can get.
For a good portion of the last half of the 20th century, there was something in the popular culture now fondly called “the folk scare.” At various times in the 1950s and 1960s, “folk music” took the nation by storm. Billy Faier, envoy from that world, walked into the Dog as a guest of Jennifer Bryan, who stages unusually eclectic concerts from time to time. Faier had brought his banjo. He got up to the microphone and played everything from Shakespearean ditties (“It Was a Lover and His Lass”) to Beatles tunes (“You Won’t See Me”).
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry. Guys like him don’t make a point of spreading their legends around. But legend he is. Played at the first Newport Folk Festival. Hosted Bob Dylan on his 1962 radio show from WBAI-FM New York — it’s the only known recording of Dylan playing “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor.” Faier was a prominent member of the Washington Square folkies in New York in the late 1940s, edited the folk music magazine Caravan. A true gray eminence, 74 years old, he plays the longneck tubaphone like nobody’s business.
I was discussing with Billy the ballads of Woody Guthrie, particularly the New Deal ones such as “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Roll On, Columbia.” In 1953, it so happens he was driving from the East Coast to the West with Guthrie and under-appreciated jazz saxophonist Brew Moore. Woody was into one of his typical disquisitions on unions. After waiting politely for him to finish, Moore said, “Woody, I know what you think about unions, and how you’re so in favor of them, but I’ve been in the New Orleans musicians’ union for many years and all they ever do is mess me around.”
According to Billy, Woody’s reply was, “Well, Brew, nothing is sacred to me, not even unions. If that one needs fixing, you ought to help fix it. But nothing is sacred to me.”
Nothing is sacred to me. Like a one-line poem. You couldn’t write a script for those two nights, the picker and the PR man, one from the wild wide-open and the other from the highest of high-dollar dramas. They each had a drink, and everything that was sacred dropped by the wayside for a while. It could have happened anywhere. Tad, I told the Black Dog owner, some interesting people wander in here. Everybody says so, he replied.
Michael Pellecchia is a longtime local jazz musician and writer.
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