The Most Famous Poet No One Remembers

Hi,

so I'm here today with slate writer Dan Koise, and Dan's turning the lights down.

Dan, why are you turning the lights down?

I'm setting the mood, Willa.

We have a fireplace in the studio now?

Make yourself comfortable, Merlot.

Thank you.

I like that wine.

Let me play a record for you on the hi-fi.

For love is only moments here and there.

It comes and goes quietly, I think.

You hear it like silver bells tied about the throats of cats.

Tied about the throats of cats.

Dan, would you please tell us what that is?

That, Willa, is the most popular poet in American publishing history, Rod McEwen.

I know the hills and gullies of your body.

The curves, the turns.

I have total recall of you in Stanion Street

because I know it will be important later.

Rod McEwen sold multiple millions of poetry books in the 60s and 70s.

He was a celebrity.

He released dozens of albums, was a regular on late night.

He was even nominated for an Oscar.

But I think it's safe to say he is no longer a household name.

He fell out of fame hard.

I only know him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McEwen's name over and over.

His chiseled face stared out at me from hardcovers, paperbacks, dusty record albums adorned with titles and the most 70s fonts you ever saw.

He wore a turtleneck and luxurious blonde hair on the cover of Come to Me in Silence.

He reclined on a sandy beach on the front of Seasons in the Sun.

On one paperback, he stared out to sea and the title of the book told me just how he felt.

Alone.

Dot, dot, dot.

Inside each book and on every record were these inexplicable poems and songs.

Rock gently, go slow.

Take it easy, don't you know?

So, what happened to Ron McEwen?

That's what we're going to find out.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Will of Haskin.

And I'm Dan Koyce.

For today's episode, I went searching for Rod McEwen, a famous poet who sure isn't famous anymore.

I learned that it takes a lot of dedication and hard work to get famous, but it takes something more than that to avoid obscurity.

And along the way, I met a guy who, like me, was bewildered by this bearded, forgotten star until he became an accidental fan, and then, even more accidentally, became the only person keeping Rod McEwen's flame alive.

So, light a candle, have another glass of wine, and follow me on my Dakota Ring journey.

How on earth did Rod McEwen become the most popular poet in American history?

And why was he totally forgotten?

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Rod McEwen was a born liar.

Let's say a storyteller.

This was a real challenge for his biographer.

He was a fabulator.

He made up lots of stuff about himself.

That's Barry Alfonso.

He's a music historian and he's the author of the only serious biography of Rod McEwen called A Voice of the Warm.

Well, of course, he claimed that he had been a cowboy essentially as a preteen, that he was a lumberjack as a teenager.

He would say that he made records that he didn't do, that he made movies in Japan that he apparently never made.

And the ultimate was that he claimed that he had two children.

So like what drove that, do you think?

Having a terrible childhood and a sense of inferiority.

Rod's mother was unmarried when she gave birth to him in a charity hospital in Oakland in 1933.

Rod would never know who his father was.

When Rod was little, his mom left him with her sister for months while she worked as a taxi dancer in San Francisco.

When she returned, she took him to Nevada, where she'd married a violent, hard-drinking man who abused Rod physically and sexually.

The family bounced from town to town.

Rod became a chronic runaway and a street hustler.

He was eventually sent to a brutal reform school.

By the time he was in high school, he was desperate to get famous.

If he couldn't get love, respect, and validation from his family, he was going to get it from everybody else.

Rod got his first shot before he even turned 20, when the charismatic, handsome teenager got a job as a DJ on Oakland's KROW radio station doing a show called Rendezvous with Rod.

It took him a while to figure out the formula.

He started out doing zany comedy sketches.

Then he tried spinning popular records.

But one day, KROW listeners tuned in and heard this.

Evening is a lonely time.

Especially when a man has nothing to do and no one to speak to.

Tonight I won't really be alone.

Because you'll be here.

I'm glad you're here.

I like being with a woman like you.

Though Rod would try on a lot of other personalities over the years, this was the first sign of the Rod who would eventually become famous.

Lonesome, aching,

romantic,

a poet of sorts.

Last night I felt a sharp pain of loneliness.

Tonight with you here,

the loneliness is gone.

This persona turned rendezvous with with Rod into a hit.

But while he was pitching woo to teenage girls over the airwaves, he was also embracing a different identity in his private life.

In the spring of 1953, the San Francisco branch of an early gay rights organization had its first meetings.

In the minutes of the Madachine Society's April meeting, most of the participants are anonymous, but one name appears over and over.

Rod McEwen.

He was only 19, at a time when to be gay was to be considered a sex offender, a communist, or both.

But there he was, urging members to lobby candidates, but also suggesting the society rent a theater and throw a big party.

Everyone agrees Mattachine meetings are wonderful places for cruising, he said.

Better than bars.

Barry Alfonso, who found those Mattasheen records buried in an archive.

He was at those early meetings in San Francisco.

Beyond that,

it's very sketchy.

He never spoke about the Mattachine Society on the record to anybody.

Rod was drafted into the Korean War in 1953.

He spent two years in Korea, working on radio propaganda.

He later claimed that he coined the phrase, make love, not war, as a way of persuading North Korean soldiers to return to their girlfriends at home.

There's no evidence that this is true, says Barry Alfonso.

When he got back to California, he continued writing poetry.

He was a lonely, lovelorn guy, and his poems explored these feelings.

But even as he was digging deep, he was also pulling out all the stops.

He was going to become famous, and he didn't particularly care how it happened.

He sang and read his poetry at the famous Purple Onion in San Francisco, where he shared the stage with Maya Angelou, who in those days was singing and dancing calypso.

For a while, he moved to LA to try to be a movie star.

He even had supporting roles in forgettable teen movies, playing characters with names like Ox Bentley.

But Universal never gave him a big part, even though he wrote fake fan letters from teenagers and mailed them to the studio every day.

And he started making records.

Folk records, romantic records, instrumental records, anything that he thought might be a hit.

In 1959, he cracked the top 40 with a beatnik-themed novelty song.

The B-side was more jokes about beatniks, a track called The Beat Generation.

I really dig it up.

Well, man, well, I belong to the B generation.

I don't let anything trouble my mind.

I belong to the B generation, and everything's going just fine.

yeah.

For a solid decade, Rod kept trying to crack Showbiz.

He had a very minor hit with Oliver Twist, a riff on Chubby Checker's Twist.

He sang at bowling alleys and bars, then graduated to cabaret shows and nightclubs.

He sold books of poetry out of the trunk of his car.

He was working, but he wasn't exactly famous.

Then in 1967, he released an album called The Sea.

The Sea didn't even feature Rod's voice, and it didn't sound like a novelty song or him trying to ride the twist bandwagon.

It sounded a lot like rendezvous with Rod, and it brought his poetry into living rooms across the country.

Perhaps the time will come when I no longer smile the way I did this morning, or last week.

When you no longer turn just so in bed,

on the street.

Rod wrote the poems, and a successful composer and arranger named Anita Carr wrote the music.

It was credited to a group they invented called the San Sebastian Strings.

For contractual reasons, Rod couldn't appear on the record, so that's the actor Jesse Pearson, best known from Bye-Bye Birdie, reading McEwen's gentle come-ons.

I do love you.

Believe that.

If you're between 45 and 55, there's a pretty good chance you were conceived to this album.

Andy Zachs, a music historian, an archival producer.

It was a makeout record, for lack of a better term.

I'm not sure that really does it justice, but that does explain some of its popularity, which was immense.

It sold and sold and sold consistently for years, until Fleetwood Max Rumors came out.

It was the best-selling catalog album in the history of Warner Bros.

Records.

The same year the the C was released, Rod also signed a deal to do the thing that really made him, made him not just famous, but beloved, poetry.

Legendary editor Nan Tales at Random House, then at the very beginning of her career, paid Rod $750 to publish a book of poems called Listen to the Warm.

The book contained an instantly iconic poem called A Cat Named Sleepy.

But once upon a time,

in New York's jungle in a tree,

Before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love,

nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.

Looking back,

perhaps she's been the only human thing

that ever gave back love to me.

That was Rod performing live at a sold-out Carnegie Hall.

He could do this because, driven by Sloopy's popularity, the collection sold like crazy.

This is not the way poetry sells now, and it wasn't the way poetry sold then.

Poetry held a slightly more exalted place in the culture in the 1960s, but it was never a huge moneymaker.

Sometimes, poets for children got big, but serious poets printed by adult publishers, even cultural heroes, they didn't sell like Rod.

Take Alan Ginsburg's Howl, the most famous of the beat poems.

That book took about 50 years to finally sell a million copies.

Rod sold a million in 1967 alone.

Thus began the incredible peak of Rod McEwen's fame.

He became unavoidable.

Right away, Random House bought the rights to reprint the book he'd been selling out of his trunk called Stanion Street and Other Sorrows.

With it, Rod did numbers no living poet has come close to since.

He sold 3 million books for Random House in just a few years, at one point accounting for 4% of the total sales of the entire company.

He was profiled in life.

He got an Oscar nomination for a song from the Maggie Smith movie, The Prime of Best Jean Brody.

If you turned on a TV, there he was, game show contestant, panel personality, talk show guest par excellence.

Here's Rod being introduced by Johnny Cash.

I'd like you to welcome with me now, poet, composer, actor, lumberjack, cowboy, but most of all, a most sensitive and unique human being, Rod McEwen.

He even convinced none other than Frank Sinatra, who was desperate to connect to a new generation of fans, to record a whole album of McEwen tunes.

I have been a rover.

I have walked alone.

Meanwhile, Rod was also diversifying, starting a hugely successful catalog business called Stanion Records.

He used that label to release all his own albums, many of which were just him reading his poems, but some of which were a little surprising.

Take this 1974 electronic album, Music to Freak Your Friends and Break Your Lease.

And he also got labels to grant him the rights to a bunch of old music that wasn't cool anymore, the music of his youth and lots of other people's youth, and he released it on Stanion.

Stuff he really liked tended to be

female vocalists from what at the time were 20 or 30 years before, people who'd come up in the sort of post-big band era.

Everybody from Judy Garland to Sylvia Sims, Alice Faye, Vera Lynn.

But now that your lips are burning mine, I'm beginning to see the light.

This ended up being really shrewd counter-programming.

And if you went to see Rod McEwen live in concert anytime in the early 70s, there was a postcard sitting on your chair.

Get on the Stanion Records mailing list.

And Stanion sent out catalogs every couple of months, and they developed into really gigantic things.

He also used Stanion to sell a bunch of Rod McEwen merch.

He was way ahead of the curve when it came to what we would now think of as lifestyle branding.

The greatest object from that period is something called the Rod McEwen muckabout jacket, which is a, it's a sort of a puffy yellow windbreaker, kind of a canary yellow thing with an odd racing stripe or two running across it.

And it is,

to contemporary eyes, one of the ugliest objects of all time.

There were plenty of other tie-ins, too.

Calendars, notepads, little books of aphorisms.

He made a deal for Rod McEwen-branded tulips you could send to your loved one.

And he issued little 45s you could mail to friends with messages that I'm sure seemed very sensitive at the time.

I get off on you.

Really.

For a while, I thought

I was never going to find anybody who was tuned in on the same wavelength as me.

Or maybe somebody I could tune in with.

Who was all this stuff for?

Who were the people who loved Rod McEwen?

You make me laugh.

Now that's something that it's not very easy to do.

No kidding.

Ask anybody I know.

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Rod McEwen's whole deal does not exactly fit into my sense of the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s.

And yet, Rod McEwen was there, as big a star in his own world as Dylan was in his.

And, in his way, as much a sign of the times, a sign that even the buttoned-up kids were searching for something new.

There was this great longing for closeness and

connection that people of all different backgrounds felt at that time.

Barry Alfonso, Brod's biographer.

They didn't want to go out and smoke pot and get naked at the Love Inn, but they wanted to feel like they could get beyond the sort of stultified way of men and women and people in general relating to one another.

I wonder where we go from here.

Straight ahead, I guess.

Straight ahead.

Nora Efron profiled Rod and Esquire in 1971.

Here's how she described the crowd at a McEwen show.

You won't see any of your freaks here.

No, sir, any of your tie-dye people.

This is Middle America.

In 1969, there were about 40 million Americans between 15 and 30.

Yeah, 400,000 of them went to Woodstock.

but what about all the rest?

I discovered Rod McEwen in 1966

working at a radio station in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

WBBZ, 1230 on your dial, the voice and choice of North Central Oklahoma.

Bill McLeod lives in Tulsa now.

He's an adjunct professor and retired public school teacher.

As a teenage boy, I felt sad about

lots of things.

Life seemed to be sad.

And by George, Rod McEwen was sad too.

And

we could be sad together.

Bill did read some other poets, but Rod was the one he loved the most, in large part because Rod's work was so approachable.

His poems are

conversational.

He doesn't start each line with a capital letter.

His poems is like he's talking to you.

And not only that he's talking to you, but he's talking only to you.

That's one connection between the reader and Rod.

But Rod's poems helped make connections between readers, too.

Several people I talked to mentioned that lots of their old Rod McEwen paperbacks have handwritten inscriptions in the front.

They were often given as gifts.

And his acts.

They said things that people weren't sure that they could say, or that maybe they didn't feel courageous enough to say, or maybe they didn't feel like, well, I'm not a poet, so I can't really say this, but I get what this guy McEwen is saying, and I want somebody else to understand this about me or about us.

Inside my copy of Stani on Street and Other Sorrows, purchased from a used bookstore in Reno, Nevada, there's this inscription in neat cursive.

Lane.

Here's a beautiful book for a beautiful person.

McEwen's a cool guy who knows how to really express himself and I think you're one person who can understand what he's trying to say.

Stay cool, kiddo.

Love Nance.

Rod helped people connect, sometimes to him, sometimes to lovers, sometimes to young friends, sometimes even to their own family.

I spoke with a woman named Mary LaFour from Madison, Wisconsin.

She fell in love with a cat named Sloopy when she first heard it, and she became a lifelong Rod McEwen fan.

And it just touches your soul,

whether it's stream of consciousness or poetry or even his singing.

I mean he just pulls out of you the unsaid things,

the thoughts, the feelings, and then he puts them there and you're like, yes, that's how I feel.

Years later, she took her daughter to a Rod McEwen concert and then Mary wrote a poem about it titled, I thought she wasn't listening.

She read some of it to me.

My daughter, who until then had worn a look of impatience, suddenly stepped in front of me and softly spoke to this man who had been a part of my deepest reflections for what seemed like forever.

And she said, I grew up listening to your poetry.

You always talked about love,

and I've never forgotten that.

And here stood this man who had given so much love, asking nothing in return with tears in his eyes.

Mine too.

This child, who has always been a mystery to me

made what I wanted to say seem so simple.

And I know now that she'll be okay.

She remembers one simple thing.

The thing that matters the most.

Time spent with love is time well spent.

I'm so sorry.

Okay.

And for all those years, I thought she wasn't listening.

So Here's Rod,

this man whose poetry and music moved so many people, who dreamed of being famous, and then sold so many books, he could buy a 30-room mansion in Beverly Hills.

But that's not the whole story.

Because even as he was succeeding beyond measure, he was also a joke.

Dick Cavett called him the most understood poet in America.

In 1968, the editor of Poetry magazine, Carl Shapiro, a former poet laureate of the U.S., wrote, It is irrelevant to speak of McEwen as a poet.

His poetry is not even trash.

A 1969 LA Times review said, one can find better verse on the walls of restrooms.

Rod brushed the critics off.

I never really call it poetry myself, he said in 1968.

But as the reviews got harsher and as he got richer, he started to bristle.

There are a lot of people who take pot shots at me because they feel I'm not writing like Keats or Elliott, he said in 1971.

And yet, I've been compared to both of them.

So, figure that out.

Now Rod at least was a famous rich guy in a position to defend himself, but critics also came for his fans, the ones who like Rod's work because it's so plain-spoken and accessible.

Lewis Cox wrote in The New Republic in 1970, people who ordinarily read scarcely at all can fall in and out of his poetry, even if you do move your lips rapidly as you read.

The disdain directed at McEwen and his fans makes me want to defend him from a bunch of gatekeeping snobs.

And there are ways to do that.

McEwen, writing in the 1960s, has poetry that's overwhelmingly feeling-oriented.

He is not afraid to name and write about sorrow or grief or love or excitement or loss or fear.

Mike Chaucer is a professor of English at Willamette University, where he studies the intersection of poetry and pop culture.

He offered a different model of masculinity to people about how they can feel the world and name the world

in ways that weren't necessarily publicly available.

Mike also connects McEwen to the Beats, who so prized authenticity, to the confessional poets of the 60s, including Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, and especially to Walt Whitman.

Whitman, too, had sequences of love poems that by today's ears sometimes sounds schmaltzy too.

But Whitman never shied away from being a poet of feeling either.

I can see all of this.

I find them actively embarrassing.

Now I have the time for football all full long

and to apologize for little lies and big lies

Told when there was no time to explain the truth.

There is something about bad poetry that's maybe more painful than any other bad art.

It's so open, so deeply sincere, and yet so empty.

It reveals the yawning banality at the center of all our souls.

I read Rod McEwen's poems and I think, ugh, that's a B-minus Hallmark card.

And in fact, in the mid-1970s, Rod actually signed a deal with Hallmark.

It was for a series of greeting cards that included semi-personalized recordings for the 150 most common first names at the time.

Hi, Stacey.

Thank you, Stacy.

Thank you for being you.

Hi, Tammy.

Hi, Tina.

Hi, Paul.

Hi, Richard.

Thank you, Jerry.

Thank you, Virginia.

Thank you, Grandma.

Thank you for being you.

Thank you for being you.

Thank you for being you.

Perhaps it seems cruel to dig up this forgotten poet who is only remembered by people who love him.

It's not like I even think he was full of shit.

I think at the beginning he really was sincere.

It's not an accident that this was the stuff that made him famous, not novelty songs or movie acting.

He meant it, and people could feel that.

Here's Barry Alfonso.

I think he was tapping into a real longing and a real loneliness that he had

and finding a way to market it.

The trouble for McEwen, or maybe the trouble with McEwen, came as he kept having to perform longing and loneliness to perform heartfelt sincerity over and over.

How often can you market your sincerity before it isn't sincere anymore?

Through the 1970s, as Rod was walking this fine line of being beloved, productive, and yet also totally disparaged, he was walking another fine line.

His poems and songs alluded to cruising, to trysts with countless lovers, male, female, carefully gender, nonspecific.

He wrote about his days as a teenage hustler, but he never ever said he was gay.

Stephanie Burt is a poet and critic who teaches at Harvard.

Of course he wasn't out.

In that era, let's say 1963 to 75, you had a couple of choices.

You could be studiously asexual and try to be famous for something else so that people just wouldn't think about who you slept with.

You could be

really

just flamingly out there

and obviously super gay.

You could be liberace.

The third way, which is the way that McEwen as a manager of his own public image seems to have chosen, was to be

soft focus,

small r romantic,

and carefully nonspecific.

You say, I don't like to put labels on things.

Barry Alfonso describes Rod's public treatment of his sexuality as personally discreet, but strategically provocative.

If you knew what you were looking for, if you were a specific segment of Rod's audience, it was there.

All those Judy Garland reissues on Stanion Records, the disco album Rod released, featuring a Crisco-slathered fist on the cover.

In 1977, Rod campaigned against anti-gay laws in Florida.

It was the only real political stand he ever took.

When a spokesman for Save Our Children lumped Rod in with all the other quote-unquote perverts, Rod said he'd give him 100 grand if he could prove he was a homosexual.

Rod said, I've been attracted to men and I've been attracted to women.

I have a 16-year-old son.

You put a label on me.

This is a bold response, for sure.

I kind of love it.

I would also note that in classic Rod McEwen fashion, there was no son.

As far as Barry Alfonso could find, all Rod's close relationships with women were platonic.

He claimed for decades he had illegitimate children in France, but nope, he never did.

He did have a life partner, though, a man he loved and lived with for decades.

The man's name was Edward Habib, who he met in San Francisco, and they were together with some breaks from the late 50s, early 60s through Rod's death.

Rod, at various points in his career, asserted that Ed was his photographer, his manager,

his biographer.

At some point, to justify Ed's constant presence, Rod made up another story.

Rod claimed that his mother adopted Ed.

So

they were brothers.

Maybe it was just to end the conversation.

Well, Ed's my brother.

The end of story.

Rod McEwen told the world it didn't matter who you loved.

He told the world you should be open, earnest with your feelings, put it all out there.

He fostered connection, a way for people to tell others what they couldn't say themselves.

But he lived in a world where he couldn't put it all out there.

He couldn't say everything.

This brings me back to some of what he did say, all of his fibs.

Barry Alfonso told me that despite everything, he ended up feeling forgiving toward Rod.

Pretty much all of his lies were,

if there is such a thing, white lies, harmless lies.

And I have to admit that to some degree I give him a pass for that, even though it made my job very, very hard, because it seemed like he didn't harm anyone by doing this.

Maybe it's harmless, even kind of charmingly brazen, to say you invented the phrase, make love, not war, or Midnight Cowboy, another one he claimed was his, or to write your own fan letters.

But when you're telling people you have illegitimate children and meanwhile the man you love is standing next to you pretending to be your brother, you don't seem so unharmed yourself.

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In the 1970s, Rod McEwen did more work than many people do in a lifetime.

His will to succeed, his drive to fame, seemed insatiable.

But as the 70s came to an end, Rod McEwen would start to disappear.

In the new decade, Rod became seriously depressed.

AIDS was devastating a generation of gay men.

His longtime friend Rock Hudson died of the disease in 1985.

The total romantic and erotic freedom that Rod had written about in the 60s and 70s was over, abruptly, terrifyingly.

I never left the yard for two years, Rod said.

I didn't answer the phone.

Outside the yard, the culture was changing.

This kind of soft, sensual horniness was no longer in vogue.

For many people, Rod McEwen became someone you were embarrassed you ever loved when you were young.

And all those books with the dedications in them from the girl who eventually dumped you because you never quite figured out how to get in touch with your emotions, they go straight to goodwill.

Meanwhile, the Rod McEwen new product pipeline slowed to a trickle.

Andy's axe.

I suspect that he must have thought at that point, okay, I've made more money than I'm ever going to need, far more, and this is just going to keep rolling in, and so I really don't have to worry about this.

He let a lot of opportunities slide.

As he said, he didn't answer the phone.

Licensing deals expired.

Books went out of print and no one worked to bring them back.

He lost track of all the royalties he was due from other artists covering his songs or of the payments coming in from Europe, Asia, everywhere in the world.

By the 1990s, Rod mostly puttered around his mansion, looking at his awards and memorabilia, spending his money.

He became very well known among the employees of his local Tower Records because nearly every night he'd show up, buy a bunch of CDs, and then file them away, still in their original packaging, in the Mammoth Music Library in his basement.

There were moments in those decades when you could have imagined Rod McEwen making a comeback, when other artists paid tribute to his influence.

As early as 1977, for example, Richard Hell released a seminal track of New York punk called The Blank Generation.

Wait a minute.

generation.

McEwen probably could have had a giant chunk of the publishing on Blank Generation had he cared to pursue the matter.

He did not care to pursue the matter.

Two decades later, Nirvana recorded a demo covering Rod's song Seasons in the Sun, which another artist, Terry Jacks, had taken to number one in the 70s.

Goodbye, Papa.

Please play for me.

I lost the black sheep of the family.

Nothing ever came of it, although you'll be totally unsurprised to hear that Rod later claimed he and Kurt Cobain had planned to write a song together before Cobain died.

Between Richard Hell, Kurt Cobain, even an album of covers from one of the guys in Ween, it's not like it's impossible to imagine people rediscovering Rod McEwen, but the Rod McEwen machine had shut down.

That's part of the problem with being a one-man show like this is that

without the real infrastructure to kind of keep it all together is that you're constantly being asked for 50 things at once.

And so unlike, you know, his contemporaries from that period, say somebody like Burt Bacharach, who, you know, who had that infrastructure that McEwen didn't have, there was always somebody for Burt Bachrach who was, who was, you know, Bacharak Inc.

or whatever it was, was always marching forward.

But Rod was never marching forward.

No one was marching forward.

No one was even opening the mail.

And so he faded from the cultural landscape.

He did keep playing shows from time to time, though.

In 2001, Andy's axe went to one.

Like me, Andy had gotten interested in McEwen after seeing his books and records all over thrift stores.

It went along with our, you know, with our Brady Bunch fetishism and our Partridge family fetishism.

That was the ironic universe in which I dwelled for much of the 90s.

When he heard about a show at the Performing Arts Center in Thousand Oaks, California, he wanted to go as a joke, basically.

I mean, how could I not go to this?

I figured, okay, it's going to be kitsch.

It'll be hilarious.

So anyway, we sat down and the lights went down and McEwen came out.

And it was just him backed by a small jazz combo.

And he played for about,

I think it was about three hours with an intermission.

And it was one of the greatest live performances I've ever seen.

And I say that with no irony at all.

I say that completely, genuinely.

he tore people's hearts out and i walked out of this thing thinking like okay okay,

I've been wrong about this guy.

I mean, whatever I thought I knew about this guy, whatever I thought I understood,

I was wrong.

Andy had been transformed from someone who ironically appreciated Rod McEwen to someone who genuinely loved Rod McEwen.

I've experienced that kind of transformation myself, not with Rod McEwen, but with many, many other artists.

It's totally magical.

Suddenly, something hits you, a song or a painting or a poem, and it's like a new room opens up in your heart.

Rod might have let most everything fade away, but he could still do that.

Rod McEwen died in 2015.

The LA Times obituary noted that he was survived by his half-brother, Edward McEwen Habib.

After Rod died, Edward was left with a real mess, a mansion full of stuff that no one had dealt with for decades.

He threw up his hands, trashed a lot of it, gave a lot of stuff away, including handing over all of Rod McEwen's master tapes to a friend.

And that's who they were with when Andy Zachs, who for his day job is a producer specializing in historical audio and archival releases, wondered what was happening with them.

I knew that nothing was going on, and I thought, well,

maybe this is something I should get involved with.

Let's see what's up.

Andy tried to negotiate with the guy for months, but the deal fell apart.

But then, in 2018, Edward died.

And a little while after that, the guy called Andy back.

Saying, you know, those tapes that I own, I can't afford to store them anymore.

And so I'm going to have them destroyed.

And, you know, to me, there are a few worse sentences in the English language that you could say to me than I'm going to destroy the master tapes.

So Andy made a deal so the tapes wouldn't be destroyed so they could stay in their climate-controlled storage facility.

And that's how Andy Zach's accidental Rod McEwen fan ended up paying an enormous amount of money every year to store the complete recorded output of Rod McEwen.

There's a catch though.

He can't do anything with it because the people who own the rights to use this material are Edward's heirs, who don't seem to see what could be so important about all this and have been unable to agree on any kind of deal.

So I am in the odd, somewhat peculiar situation of being the guardian of Rod McEwen's master tapes, which I have no right to release or monetize or do anything with really other than I can listen to them privately.

He's been trying to get the Library of Congress or some university archive to take them.

No one wants the tapes because Rod McEwen has no cultural profile, but he'll never recover that profile unless someone uses the tapes.

The most saleable poet in American history, and now he can't get anyone to give a shit.

Talking to Andy, I found this incredibly frustrating.

Essentially, a bunch of random decisions by people who aren't even Rod McEwen have led to a situation in which there isn't even a way for this material to come back into the conversation.

When you lock away material, and when things are consigned to various memory holes and media storage facilities,

they can slip away.

One of the weird contradictions of living in the future is that every artist is at the tip of your fingers, but you can only find who your fingers know to search for.

In the not-so-distant past, artists could avoid slipping away just thanks to the physical evidence, a record in a thrift store, a used book with a man in a white turtleneck on its cover, murmuring to the bewildered shopper, who am I?

Who did I matter to?

Who did I stop mattering to?

I tried to explain what was driving me crazy to Andy.

I just keep thinking about the difference between the Spotify algorithm, which directs you towards things that other people like right now,

and a thrift store, which directs you towards things that people liked 20 years ago and then sold.

Thrift stores and the like were really foundational for me.

You never knew what you would find.

And when you did find something, it would often be confusing.

I would say

that's sometimes the best stuff of all,

is the stuff that doesn't make sense, the stuff that may seem irritating, the stuff that at first you just, you can't really even figure out a response to

other than to ironically laugh at it because you don't have an emotional vocabulary that'll properly describe what you're experiencing.

I definitely don't have the emotional vocabulary to properly describe the Rod McEwen experience.

Maybe someday I'll have the epiphany Andy had, or maybe I won't.

But maybe some of you will.

And that kind of epiphany, it's so rare and so wonderful, it really puts my reflexive judgments in their place.

In the face of that, who cares what I think of Rod McEwen?

For a solid decade, Rod McEwen was the most sincere man in America.

His art came directly from his soul.

I remain bewildered by that art, by his fame, by his 80 years of love and lies.

But I'm also amazed and heartened that someone this weird, this pure, this totally unique, got to be mega famous in a bygone America.

I may never be on the same wavelength as Rod, but you know what?

I still get off on him.

Hi, Dan.

Hi, Rod.

Thank you, Dan.

Thank you, Rod.

Thank you for being you.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Dan Coise.

You can find me on Twitter at Dan Coise,

And I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This podcast was written by Dan Coise.

It was edited by Willip Haskin, who also produces Decodering with Katie Shepard.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

Special thanks to Barry Alfonso, Andy Zach, Eric Noftal, and Jordana Williams.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate Decodering and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I would love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

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We'll see you next week.

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