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.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (see link) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre” which are still up at PBS.org. Watch trailer for my acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: both as @gregmitch. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE.

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. The only music from it I can find is a distant audience video that captures audio pretty well of her singing “Diamonds and Rust.”

Photos from the event:

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.

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 by Don Wallen, back then:

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).

Cartoons Monday