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After hours of blabbing on the phone, Edie finally asked me over. Knowing myself pretty well, I'm not all that sure why I hadn't pushed this long before that. It was however, well worth the wait ! One of the primary reasons to actually get together in person was to play with some ideas for actually doing something music related TOGETHER ! Yes that sounds insane, but at the time I was trying to put together some type of club thing, only I may have been born in the wrong decade. It was the late 70's, and I was into music from the 40's. I was without a doubt out of sync with my friends and fellow musicians. I had been in top 40 bands as the keyboard player and vocalist, but I found that really boring. I wanted to do stuff like "As Time Goes By", "Our Love is Here To Stay", and "Embraceable You", etc. Edie on the other hand knew all the music and musicians that I would bring up, and had a great memory for singers and lots of old songs. Ironically in recent years, vocalists such as Rod Stewart have had tremedous success with recording "The American Songbook" with the exact material I wanted to do then. I guess I'm the one that suggested to Edie that we attempt something, but she loved the idea. She felt very comfortable with me. It is a long drive with tons of traffic from North Jersey where I lived, to East Hampton. My friend Bill Schofield, who had originally told me about the Reno Sweeny gig, came with me. Meeting Edie came at a point in my life where I was making the change from being called "Bob", to being called "Robb". Bill always called me Bob, Edie had been calling me Robb, so it led to some fun confusion. Edie ended up calling me both, but my favorite was when she would playfully in her heavy Farmington LI accent, call me "Mista Brauuuun". I brought a tape recorder so Edie and I could play around with ideas, and save what we thought worked. We had no keyboard at Grey Gardens, so Edie would record vocals, and I'd play with keyboard parts when I got home. We would put the recorder on, start singing something, and almost without fail interrupt ourselves by saying something that led to a half hour of talking. Thankfully we always left the recorder on. We did this on several of my visits to Grey Gardens, so at one time, I had hours of unbelieveble material, most of it, just my conversations with Edie.
Unfortunetely, after five moves, storage in damp basments, hot attics, and all kinds of temperatures, several of the cassettes did not survive. I still have hopes one or two more will show up someday. The ones I did find however are wonderful. In addition to singing, there's conversations on almost every topic under the sun. Cats, music, Jackie, The Kennedys, politics, her mother, selling the house, etc. We needed some digital wizardry to help restore them, but thankfully it worked. If I had only known 30 years ago how precious these would become, I would have labeled, dated, and safeguarded ALL of them !
The one question that people asked way back then and especially now is "was Edie nuts ! ". I will admit, that if one watches the Grey Gardens documentary, there are far more questions than answers regarding little Edie's sanity, but I usually answer "not really". First off, I don't think the film would have been anywhere near as interesting, if the Maysles had included more of the "everyday" conversations and events that filled the Beale's lives. The 2nd release, The Beales of Grey Gardens, seems to show not only some more "normal" moments, but also some more bizarre moments, like when little Edie was screaming about the fire in the house ! So, the image that the general public gets about her might be a bit exagerated. After watching the film even a few times, you can start to see through all the drama. If you listen more to what she says rather than how she says it, or how she looks when she's saying it, you get a better idea of what she's all about. I always try to emphasize that the Maysles took about 60 hours worth of film, and we only get to see, at the most, about 3 hours of that. A fraction of the filming, of a fraction of their lives ! How many of us, if we had a selected 60 hours of our lives caught on film, and then that 60 hours carefully edited, might not appear really strange too. Jerry Torre has related to me some very touching stories about both Edies, which I'm sure would help strike a balance if they had been filmed. Jerry and I both share the view that there were certainly more "normal" moments in their day than those "out there" moments. It's so odd that when people quote Edie, that it's basically all taken from these few hours of film. S-T-A-U-N-C-H ! One line from her whole life right ! As much as I love the film, there are topics that Edie talked about often that are never even included in the film.
No, I don't think she was nuts. WAY out there ?? Yes ! Without a doubt, but it was her dramatic way of talking and dressing that made her seem much more out there than she actually was. I found Edie to be passionate about everything. That passion manifested itself through rather extreme facial expressions, and quickly changing volumes in her voice. She was usually a non stop blabber. Perhaps from living in that house with just her mother for so long, she was making up for lost time. As I mention elsewhere, we talked about everything. She was extremely political, a liberal democrat, who somehow kept up on everything that was going on both on a local level and national level. Talking politics fired her up most of the time. She hated republicans. Edie was the most "normal" , when just talking about day to day stuff. She was always very interested in how my life was going.. She wasn't the best listener, but better at giving advise. At the time I first met Edie, I was not only in a band, but working in a Bank in Manhattan, as music rarely pays the bills. She on several occasions got almost scarsastic about that.. She did NOT like that element of society. The stock brokers, bankers, and the lot. One time, when she was raving about how much she loved my long hair, I told her she should tell that to the lady at the bank where I worked, because this woman had just that week said "you and that long hair look like shit ! " Edie' s response. "you're an artistic Latin type and you shouldn't be working in the bank in the FIRST PLACE ! (yelling the latter) ..." This quote could have come right from the documentary, as she said it with the usual GG drama. This is one of my favorite quotes, and I am lucky to have this one on tape. It's VERY funny, very cute, and very touching all at the same time. Edie definetely know how to give a compliment, and to make people feel special. She always made me feel special, especially in regards to my music. Edie was unique, quirky, and dramatic, but "nuts". No I can't say that she was !
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