Keith Briggs, Part Three

Our last vacation together, I'm glad to say, was all about him. He was prodigiously well informed about the American Civil War, and one of his lifelong wishes had been to do what he called "a tour of the battlefields." Now, I don't care much one way or the other about the Civil War, but to Bro it was an intensely felt and long-researched interest. So I gave up my own vacation plans that last September (2004), and went east to do some historical traveling with him. He flew from the UK to Washington, DC, I took the train there from L.A., and we stayed for a couple of nights in Silver Spring, MD with our friend Kip Lornell and his family before renting a car and hitting the road.

  
Left: the view from Little Round Top, with a statue of Brig. General Gouverneur K. Warren; September, 2004. Right, reading the historical marker at Little Round Top.


At Little Round Top, with Devil's Den (that pile of rocks down there) in the background.  See the next photo(s).


  
Left: standing inside Devil's Den; we had our one and only snake encounter here! This site was the subject of a famous Matthew Brady Civil War photo (at right), so Keith was especially intent on seeing it. September, 2004.

We must have driven over a thousand miles; he wanted to see everything. He held the maps, planned the routes and called the changes, and I drove, as usual. We stopped for gas a couple of times at a chain called Sheetz, where we were introduced to the (new to me) concept of a gas station that had a sit-down restaurant inside; fried chicken, fried potatoes, fried hush puppies, fried hamburgers, fried....oh, you know, road food. Gettysburg, Front Royal, Harper's Ferry, Stone House at Manassas, the stone wall at Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Antietam, Charlottesville, Little Round Top and Devil's Den (which was the place that Keith spent the most time of anywhere we went on this journey, and also was the only place he said he "felt" the spirits of the soldiers. Now, Keith was extremely pragmatic and not at all a "nut job," so if he said he felt something, then there was definitely something there to be felt! Me, I felt nothing, but kept glancing nervously around for snakes. We only saw one snake, in Devil's Den, but one was plenty. He kept telling me the snake was "harmless" - easy for him to say, he was wearing boots!), Chancellorsville, Richmond; every place that had anything to do with the Civil War, he wanted to visit. We bought self-guided tour CDs from each visitors' center, put the CD in the car stereo, and drove along from point to point through each battlefield, Bro talking back to the narrator as we went along, expanding on what was being said from his own encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. [I was lucky enough to be able to "buy back" the tour CD from the Manassas Battlefield during the auction of CDs from his estate; it's now in my own collection, although I don't think I'll ever be able to listen to it again; see below]. He knew every battle, every general, and would point to a row of trees and say, "see, it was from THERE that they charged." And I nodded, and smiled, and took pictures of the damn trees (which I have to tell you looked exactly like the trees we had seen the day before, *and* the day before that), and thought to myself that if I didn't die of boredom before the trip was over it would be a miracle. But he was my friend and I loved him, and this was something he had wanted to do his whole life, so I kept my mouth shut, and I don't think he ever knew how much one cannon looked like another to me. And every battle site had a visitors' center and a museum, and every museum had a book store, and he was good for at least two hours in every book store, as I shifted my weight from one aching foot to the other and gave him a smiling thumbs-up whenever he glanced over to be sure I was okay. We stayed in a series of cheap motels, bought each other fridge magnets in every town we hit, checked the local phone directories for second hand book stores (which he raided; by the time the trip was over he had bought over 100 pounds of books to mail back home to England, and the postage was almost as much as the books themselves had cost!), and shared all the expenses, as we always did when we traveled together; he was in heaven, in his properly reserved British way.

                                    
  
Left: The audio self-guided tour CD from our visit to Manassas, September, 2004. Right: A  few of the fridge magnets we purchased on our Civil War trip. Over the years he bought me so many that now there's barely any empty space on my fridge door at all.

Of course, when the sun went down on the battlefields there was nothing much to do, so once we'd had dinner we usually just stayed in the hotel room; Bro would spend the evenings with his nose in a recently-purchased book, or looking over maps of the next day's travel, while I, the news junkie, tried (often in vain) to find CNN,  or at least a national news broadcast on one of the networks, to keep up with what was happening in the world. He hated American television ("a hundred bloody channels and not a damn thing worth bothering about.") He hated the commercials, the "overdone" prime time drama series, and most of all he hated what the news world calls "teasers." So generally I'd watch tv with the volume low, and he'd read books. But one night I found his Achilles heel, totally by accident. We were in Front Royal, VA, and I was flipping through the channels in the hotel room trying to find a news broadcast, when I came across one of those "America's Funniest Home Videos" shows. It happened to be an episode devoted to videos the public had sent in of their pets doing various silly things, and I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. He lay back on his bed gasping for breath, going off in gales of laughter at every new video they showed. Who would've thought? But it sure felt good to hear him laugh.

                
Left, Harper's Ferry, WV. Right, the Sunken Lane, Antietam Battlefield; Bro took this one with my camera. Both September, 2004.

My favorite stop on this trip was at Harper's Ferry, WV, a beautiful little jewel of a town with what looked like only two streets, surrounded by trees and where two rivers meet (the Cumberland and the Delaware, or is it the Cumberland and the Potomac? Bro would know, and he'd be exasperated that I forgot almost immediately!). He bought me a t-shirt and I bought him one, we ate barbecue for lunch, and we both bought postcards to send home. And there was a bluegrass band, accidentally discovered playing in a small music store in Gettysburg as we left a pizza place, which drew us in, and we bought CDs from the local musicians and listened to a pretty fair Hank Williams, Sr. imitator for half an hour. Frankly, if I never see another cannon or statue or monument or picturesque split-rail fence it's okay with me, but I am greatly comforted now by the knowledge that my friend had the trip of his dreams before he died. For reasons I'll never understand I had switched the Civil War trip, originally planned for fall 2005, to fall 2004, and I am so glad now that I did. I promise you, he saw it all; if Robert E. Lee's horse took a leak under a tree, we saw that tree, AND Keith took its picture! I must have taken over a hundred photos of him just on that trip, alternating between his (really good) camera and my (really cheap) one. And somewhere among his long-dispersed possessions is the amazing picture he took near the end of our journey, as we drove north along the Blue Ridge Highway in Virginia and two bears crossed the road right in front of our car. Real bears, right there on the road! He talked about it all the way back to Washington.

                            
Left, Bro at the Washington Monument. Right, Gettysburg, PA, in the Econo-Lodge Motel parking lot. We stayed at this motel for two nights, as the Gettysburg battlefield was so big and there was so much he wanted to see and do there. Personally I think it was the free donuts-and-coffee breakfasts that were the real attraction.

Considering the distances we travelled together over the years, it's kind of surprising that the only time we ever got lost was on this final trip, on our way back to Washington. Somehow we took the wrong exit off the Beltway and ended up in Falls Church, VA; wouldn't you know he'd spot a book shop and insist on stopping! Back on the right road at last, we had a few more days in Silver Spring with Kip and Kim and their daughters, during which we wandered around DC, playing tourist. I took Bro's picture in front of the Washington Monument, and we also managed visits to the Air and Space Museum, where he was captivated by a display of WWI airplanes; the Library of Congress, where we spent lots of money at their museum shop and had lunch at a diner on Capitol Hill with my friend Jennifer Cutting; and Smithsonian Folkways Records, where Keith and archivist Jeff Place got into long and interesting discussions about reissues as Jeff showed us through their collection. And I was glad to be able, after many years, to reconnect with my close friend and long-ago radio partner Linda Mack and meet her two small daughters, who of course fell in love with Keith and in five minutes flat were climbing up him like a tree, laughing and clapping their hands as he turned enormous cartwheels in the restaurant parking lot after dinner (the showoff!). Then we turned in the rental car and took a train together from DC down to New Orleans; it was his first-ever overnight train journey in America on what he called "the chuffer," which he handled fairly well despite his initial shock at realizing that we were sharing a compartment the size of a very small closet, and sleeping in bunk beds in such close quarters that he couldn't get to the bathroom without climbing over me! We had our usual great meals, visits with Stevenson, Scott and Ursula, Maggie, Scott Barretta, and other friends, and as we wandered the streets of the Quarter he bought - surprise! - more books. (If you'd like to see my Goofy Guide to The French Quarter, which contains mentions and descriptions of many of the places Keith and I visited together in New Orleans over the years, just go back to the home page and click on NOLA.) And then, on October 4th, we said goodbye for what I didn't know would be the last time, and I took the train back to L.A. and he flew home to England.

                                    
Left: At the train station in Meridian, MS on our way from DC to New Orleans, September 2004. We got off the train at a few different stops just to walk along the platform and stretch our legs. The shirt is one of several that we bought together at various times over the years in New Orleans and had monogrammed with his nickname, "Bro."  Center: because everyone keeps writing to ask why there are no pictures of me on this web site, well, here you are: photo by Briggsy, at the same train station in Meridian. Okay? Everybody happy now? Right, another Christmas card, but I didn't save the envelope so I don't know the year.                      

The only part of his life in America that I didn't share was the series of river-rafting trips he used to take down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. I'm too old, I'd say. It's too strenuous, I'd say. Oh, and I can't swim, and I hate water. You go, and bring me lots of pictures. So he would book his round trip flight from Heathrow to L.A., stay here for a week or so, and then go "down the Canyon," as he called it, for an expedition of anywhere from one to three weeks. He'd come back brown as a nut, proudly show off his bruises and scrapes (I still have half a bottle of the liniment he left here for post-trip "repairs"); we'd have another week or two together here, and then he'd fly home. I guess it was a "guy thing;" I often asked him why he did those trips year after year, and he said he wanted to do them while he still could. Plenty of time later (or so he thought) to sit in a chair by the fire and read, when the legs give out and the back hurts and the arthritis takes the hands. He wanted to LIVE while he was alive; I think he was fiercely happy when he was fighting nature at her roughest and coming out on top. He had already booked another trip for the July after his death; he'd bought tickets to come for a week in L.A., then go to Idaho for a two-week white water rafting trip on the Snake River (where he had been once before with his good friend Helen). He suggested in his last emails to me, three days before he died, that I should take some time off work, hop on a train to Boise, meet him there when his rafting trip was done, rent a car, and drive with him to the Black Hills. I checked into it, but it turned out that Amtrak doesn't go from L.A. to Boise, so once again I said, you go, and bring me lots of pictures. And then he was coming back here at the end of that trip for another week, and then would fly home, with a tentative plan taking shape beyond that for us to meet in New Orleans for Christmas. 

            
Left: Where he especially loved to be: striding through the Colorado River, with the Grand Canyon rising around him. Right, that's Bro at the front of the raft; I have lots of images like this, all blurs and water. He sent or brought me back these photos at various times. I don't always know the exact years, nor who took them,  but will identify them where I can.


My old friend the wild river rider, hiking the Deer Creek Trail, in 2002. Note the tiny expedition rafts, each of which holds eight people, drawn up on the banks far below him, to show how high he'd climbed that day. And doesn't he look happy!


            
Left: On the Colorado River with Mike Patton and guide Jen (Bro's sitting at the far right) in 2003.
Right, a closeup photo by Neil Slaven, date unknown.


   
And IN the Colorado River, having just jumped off a 30-foot cliff into the water! With Mike Patton and Steve; I now know that these two photos, sent to me by Bro, were taken by Jeannie Patton, who also helped ID them. Thanks, Jeannie!


Showing off just a LITTLE bit. Pete Chipperfield is at left center, wearing the brown hat.

And then came that terrible early-morning phone call from Eddie Smith's then-wife Cindy, telling me that he was gone; poor Cindy had to listen to me screaming "No!" into the phone so many times, until at last she was able to convince me that it was real. And then to the computer, and opening my email to find many carefully-worded messages from his friends at Blues & Rhythm in the U.K., who knew no other way to reach me and were trying so hard to say it gently, but of course there is no gentle way to write those words. They say that you can judge the measure of a man by the empty space he leaves behind; there's a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in my world without him. Rest well, dear Bro, old friend. It was a blessing to me to be allowed to share a small corner of your enormously rich and varied life for twenty years.

I like to think that, although he was an agnostic, he's in his own version of heaven now: the largest used book store and reading library in the universe, with section after never-ending section of unread books on all his favorite subjects. And there are plenty of comfortable overstuffed chairs, and good reading lights, and probably a fireplace or two. He no longer needs his reading specs, so he uses the little table next to his chair to hold a cup of good rich mocha coffee, and he sits and reads and reads and reads. And there's a stereo system somewhere in the room playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Jelly Roll Morton, and Muddy Waters, and Cajun music, and Sibelius, and Tex Mex, and all the rest of his favorite sounds. And in the rare intervals when he gets tired of reading, he puts down his current book and stands up and stretches and walks to a window and looks out at the view, which is the Colorado River as it goes racing through the Grand Canyon, and he turns and smiles at the woman he loves.

                      
We were both quite fond of this portrait, which he called his "Bob Lee Jr. look." Wearing one of the Bro shirts I'd had made for him, and doing his best Robert E. Lee imitation. On Antietam Battlefield, September, 2004.

Keith's body was cremated at Lincoln Crematorium on March 18, 2005. Nearly 100 of his friends were present at the non-religious service that he didn't want; he would have hated it, and been embarrassed by "the fuss," and yet I think he would have been secretly pleased to see how many people his life had touched in some way. Several of his friends spoke in tribute to him, and some of his favorite music was played. I figured out the time difference from L.A. to England, set my alarm clock, and when the service began I curled up with a cup of hot chocolate and looked through some of these photos of him, re-read some of his letters, thought about how much our life together had meant to me, and cried a lot. He would have been SO ticked off at me for that. His friend Eddie kindly taped the whole service and sent me an audio cassette so that I could "be there" with them all. I offered to take a portion of his ashes and scatter them in the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but his cousin Eddie Bream, whom Keith had chosen as the executor of his estate, decided that they would all be scattered over Keith's mother's grave at Gorleston Old Cemetery, Magdalen Way, Gorleston, Great Yarmouth, and so that was done a couple of weeks after the service. In Bro's will he directed, as he had so often repeated to me, that his house and car be sold, and that his book and record collection be liquidated, and that all the money raised should be given to cancer research, as both his mother and the woman he loved had died of cancer.

           
Left, the obituary notice in the Skellingthorpe local paper, sent to me by Eddie and Cindy Smith. Right, Keith's ashes were spread over the foot of his mother's grave. The names on this grave are Blanche Johanna Powley, Vera Briggs, and Herbert Powley. The Powleys were Keith's maternal grandparents; Vera Briggs was their daughter and Keith's mother. The flowers were placed there a few months after Keith's death by his good friend Justin Wallace, who also took this photo.

"He was a man, take him for all in all; I shall not look upon his like again."  -- Hamlet, Act I, scene ii


Back to Part One

OTHER FRIENDS REMEMBER KEITH BRIGGS

From Sailor Paul Vernon: The first time I met Keith he was being rained on big time, which he later said was not unusual for him. He’d been buying records from me for a while and had made an arrangement to visit from Lincolnshire, the county not of his birth, but of his choice. He was an Essex man originally, but had escaped that fate. I opened the door and he stood there, rain pouring down his face from the well-spring atop his head. “My name is Briggs, but we all have our cross to bear” he said. He was early and I was having lunch. “I’ll come back later then” “no you bloody won’t, you’ll come in and have some lunch.” We liked each other immediately and he visited whenever he was in London. He managed a leisure centre in Lincoln, and whenever I phoned him his secretary would answer the phone and ask who was calling; “The Reverend J M Gates” I’d reply, or “Leonard Chess.” “Hallo Sailor” he would say, laconically, when I was put through. When it became clear that I could usefully revisit California again, I offered Keith a deal that would turn out to deepen our relationship.


From 1978 to 1986 I traveled regularly from London to various parts of the States buying records for hungry European fans. In 1983, the first trip in 1981 having been so spectacularly successful, I returned to the west coast.  

As two people can split the driving and navigating, the heavy lifting that is always involved, watch each other’s back if things start looking dodgy -which they sometimes can - and, as an old guru of mine once remarked “enjoy the dimension of sharing,” I always took a sidekick with me on these trips, the deal being that I paid air fare, hotels and car rental and we shared eating and drinking expenses. Because my regular partner, Bill Greensmith, wasn’t available, the new Sundance Kidder to my Butch Posturing was Keith.  He agreed because, as he said “I know an Otis Rush Cobra 45 from a hole in the ground, and a hole in the ground from any arsehole who might want to put me in one.”

 

My plan was to retrace the steps I had taken before.  Chris Strachwitz still had stuff, and there were a few others in the Bay Area to check out as well; then it would be Los Angeles again, the Stolpers and others who knew I was coming. Keith turned out to be an excellent choice, he was a big lad and very fit; on our first morning he turned up for breakfast in belt AND braces, making a very English statement that no bugger in the Bay Area understood. We went and saw Chris at Arhoolie, then peddled off with a trunk full of goodies to see Henry Mariano, king of the bootleg 45's.

 

Henry had an inner sanctum in his house, a specially constructed windowless room dead centre of the building, in which he kept his stock of 45's. He’d been in the business for years, selling both originals and repros, I bought a lot from Henry, who laid records in front of me grouped by price, the large $5 pile first, followed by a slightly smaller $10 group, chased by a yet smaller clutch of $15 items, hounded by a handful of $25 goodies then finally just a very few at $50. I bought most of them; later Keith said, “You know, SOMEWHERE in that room there was a box with one record in it at $200."  We also went over to Oakland to connect with a hapless twit whose name I no longer recall but who had somehow got his hands on a huge pile of R&B 78's that he was having difficulty shifting. I bought him out as a Butterbeans and Suzie couple in the next apartment went at it hammer and tongs with each other while Keith just stood there appreciating the sheer bizarreness of the situation. We went to see the cutely named Rip Lay, who was getting out of the record business and into the baseball card game; I guess there weren’t enough nutters for him among the record collectors. Satisfied with the Bay Area haul, we hit the road. We would do Highway One properly. For two lads who grew up in England, Highway One was overwhelming. One of Keith’s other interests- and they were legion – was nature; he was a walker who took on Iceland, for God’s sake. We marveled at the views, tempering it all with a non stop string of rotten jokes, another practice we both enjoyed.

 

In Los Angeles we availed ourselves of a very kind offer from a customer of mine who said “if you’re staying in LA you’re staying with me.” He lived in a very plush neighborhood and his home was impossible to find without help, so he met us downtown and we followed him out. The house was a splendid affair, large and airy, with a Jacuzzi in the backyard and a conversation pit filled with “interesting people,” who we immediately joined. The Daiquiris and the Margaritas flowed like Sanatogen{look it up}. So did the marijuana and the cocaine. People came and went constantly, our host vanishing for a few moments at a time to see and deal with them. Keith and I looked at each other and exchanged coded eyebrow messages in Cockney Rhyming Slang. This bloke, clearly, was a dealer. Later that night he owned up to it, apologized and said that if we were uncomfortable he would get us a hotel. Taking a line directly from Marlon Brando in The Godfather, and molding it to the moment, Keith spoke for both of us by saying “It makes no difference to us how a man makes a living.” We agreed to stay. In the days that followed we sampled Los Angeles very deeply; I bought many more records, we made quick and often very firm friends with many, we saw a giant figure of a golfer, advertising the course he stood atop the entrance of, burning down in the night and agreed that this, as much as anything else, was why we had come to LA. We were told by a very mellow fellow in a restaurant that “the only crime in California {toke}...is being uncool.” Keith gave me one of his looks. Later that week, walking a block somewhere in the city, we passed a vacant lot being shielded by chain link that advertised itself as “Long Fence." When it ended Keith simply said, without cracking a smile “I’ve seen longer.”

 

As a result of that 16 days spent together we became much deeper friends. Later my life took me away from England, but we emailed each other and occasionally picked up a phone – hang the expense – and talked from Prague, or Toulouse or Washington, wherever I happened to be at the time. His closing remark for each conversation, chanted mantra like with a grin I could see, was simply “Keep your arse out of the fire.”  

 

Then two years ago Mary Katherine emailed me with a message that announced itself as “Very Bad News.” It certainly was. I remember my wife Judy picking me up from an antique auction house I was working at and asking how my day had been. “I’m in shock” I replied. “Keith Briggs is dead.” Judy, who had never met Keith but had heard much, simply said “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. He was one of your best friends.” Yes, he most certainly was.