EDGAR ALLEN POE SINGS THE BLUES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
September 8, 1985
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

A century and a half later, the crowd at the Folk Club is getting restless, waiting for Edgar Allan Poe to make his appearance. Edgar Allan Poe! This fellow is supposed to sing the blues. The emcee nervously watches the entrance. No Poe. Half an hour passes; the emcee paces, steps outside, looks down the sidewalk, sees only a handful of street people, walks back in, paces. No Poe, no Poe. These artists are impossible! Who do they think they . . .

But even now, the star attraction is racing toward Miami Beach from a play rehearsal in West Dade, mentally transforming himself from a small-time actor into a small-time bluesman. He will make puny money tonight. The artist's life has not changed much in 150 years. Poes have always scraped. The first Poe, the real Poe--inventor of the detective story, gothic poet, critic, drunkard, drug addict, a man so unstable and aberrant that at 27 he married his 13-year-old cousin--may have been the consummate struggling artist in American history. Never did he have money. Fame shortchanged his genius. But then this country has never taken care of its creative minds.

And this new Poe--Edgar Allan Poe IV, to be exact--is indeed blood kin to the great poet, not a direct descendant, but a great great great great nephew or something to the most celebrated melancholic in America. And what does he do--he sings the blues.

Poe IV is not exactly shy to trade on the family name. Hype is money! If only he could trade on it more profitably.

What is most peculiar here is that this fellow looks so much like . . . like Edgar Allan Poe: He's got an unnervingly intense appearance, a long, taut body, piercing eyes, high bony forehead, thinning hair, the aggregate effect being that of an amiable lunatic, someone who might at any moment cackle, "True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but why will you say that I am mad?" (The Tell-Tale Heart, first sentence.)

Tonight, Edgar Allan Poe IV is singing for half the gate at the Folk Club, which is not really a club at all, but a health food restaurant called Our Place, secreted on the funky southern end of Miami Beach. Cover charge: two bucks. Maybe 25 people are in the house at any one moment. The patrons radiate a certain '60s-vintage sincerity, they seem excruciatingly polite. They rest their elbows on wax tablecloths, nibbling on carrots, seeds and humus dip. A few psychedelic posters with psychedelic eyeballs stare from the walls. The musicians in the warm-up band have bangs. One gets the feeling that this may be the only place in Miami where no one is packing a gun.

Poe finally arrives, and vanishes again. He's under a tree outside, chomping on take-out chicken with the street people, who turn out to be his back-up band. A few minutes later they hit the stage at last. It looks as though there are about a hundred of them up there, with Poe out front. For the first few dozen beats Poe silently fits thimbles on the ends of his fingers, his brow knotted with concentration, as though he doesn't hear the music. Finally he looks up, his mouth opens and a sound comes out, welling deep from his innards, rising into an epiglottal roar, the voice of an old black man: Ah Gat De Blooooz And Ah Can't Be Sadisfied . . .

Yesss AH GAT THE BLOOOOOOZ AND AH CAN'T BE SADISFIED

WHOOOA, IF AH DON'T LOOZ THESE BLOOZ AHM GONNA CATCH THAT TRAIN AND RI-IDE.

It's amazing. . . . Right here in this boho little club in South Beach a strange, skinny guy climbs up on stage (which is, of course, what you'd expect in a place like this), but when he opens his mouth--he can really sing the blues! He's good! Right here in this place with a $2 cover and people munching carrots and beans!

On stage Poe shakes his head, stamps his feet. His knuckles whiten around the mike stand, a vertical vein pops from the center of his forehead. He goes bug-eyed, he grimaces and sweats. Poe produces an old-fashioned washboard and starts to grate upon it with the thimbles, scratching it, stroking it between his knees. The effect is not particularly musical, but it cranks the excitement and then Poe begins to really whack the thing, pounding on it, slamming it, torturing it so severely that his thimbles come sailing off and Poe drops the washboard and screams, "OOOOH, AH FOUND MAH BABY, PUT HER SIX FEET UNNERGROUN!" That's the end of the song.

He plays for two hours, at one point stripping to his boxers . . . this from a man who claims to be horribly shy . . . and then he takes the night's pay, $35, and goes over to the piano player and the lead guitarist and splits the money three ways.

One can scan his resume and decide that at 27 he is either young or old, good or bad, somebody or nobody. In the world of struggling entertainers there is no reliable calculus of success. This man is not unique -- there are a lot of Edgar Allan Poes out there, aiming high, grasping at the edge of the trench.

Figure that he is a nonunion actor working steadily in relatively small community theaters. Figure that he has done a couple of local commercials (Wolfie's, for example) and been a movie extra. Figure that as a singer he has appeared in public no more than two dozen times. Figure that he has not had to wait on tables for two years and manages to pay his $200-a-month rent. Figure that his colleagues say he is talented. Add that up and it would probably be fair to say that Edgar Allan Poe IV is no longer unknown. He's obscure.

Like his distant uncle, he is afire with aspiration, a believer in his ability, confident that some day he will know glory. "I was the only student cast in every play," he says of his days at the University of Miami. And he says, "I've never had a bad review." Not that he has had many reviews at all. He has saved every clipping, transcripts of radio reviews, articles from the student newspaper. He underlines his name.

The thought that he refuses to contemplate, that any young man of talent shudders at, is this: Even if he gets the chance to hone his skills, achieve artistic freedom, rise to the peak of his talents, gain wide recognition and benefit from lucky breaks at every turn, he nevertheless could discover that he will fall short of his personal goals for the single unchangeable reason that he lacks the indefinable spark of greatness. Lacks that special It.

This gift made the original Edgar Allan Poe an immortal among American writers, his standing made secure by gothic poems and stories of transcendent horror. Women buried alive. Men entombed behind brick walls. A dead man rotting suddenly to a state of "detestable putridity." A drunk cutting the eye from a live cat: "I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity." The morally corrupt are doomed to madness or death. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The man could really sing the blues, in his own twisted way. His namesake has a lot to live up to.

"You gotta believe," the modern Poe says one night over a beer at Tobacco Road, a blues band chugging away in the corner. "If you don't think you've got it, you've got no business doing it. If I didn't think that I had it--that I can act with anybody--then I wouldn't be doing it."

As a general rule, performers let their ego shimmer right at the epidermal surface, not because they have a corrupt psyche, but because that's the business--the self is the product that's being marketed. These guys have to sell their face, their voice, their personality, their being. This isn't accounting or dentistry (though both may figure in the final product), this is show business. The chief asset cannot be put in the bank or invested in capital. What they are perceived to be, they are, for all practical purposes.

Poe, if anything, is not as self-aggrandizing as he should be. He shies away from talking about Success. He admits no inner torments. "I'm all right," he says, blandly.

He says his father wishes he had become a business executive. His father? That would be Edgar Allan Poe III. He's a retired used car salesman, known to his friends as Pudge.

"Hey, Pudge, what's that boy of yours up to?"

"Oh, well, he's an actor. But he's a heterosexual! He doesn't sing or dance. Well, he sings a little. But he's got a deep voice!"

Poe imitates Pudge, the car salesman, then laughs theatrically.

Over another beer at another bar, inside the Hyatt, Poe says he pictures himself in movies. He's got some screenplays he's working on. Seems like every aspiring actor is working on a screenplay. Poe says he has mapped out one screenplay in which a jazz singer gains great fame, but snubs his old friends, and winds up getting shot and killed. Poe would star as the jazz singer. Another idea: Write a musical about the life of the original Edgar Allan Poe, using Edgar Allan Poe's own poems. He's even got an idea who should play the lead.

But can a struggling blues singer and actor gain Fame in Miami, even with a famous name? In the bigger picture, can anyone become anything in Miami? Talk to most struggling actors or actresses and they will tell you that Miami is just a notch better than, say, Dayton. Not enough jobs. Not enough status for entertainers. Not enough art media. And the critics -- yuck. ("Old miss white gloves . . . she didn't smile once during the entire show!") Local actors have to beg for the crummiest role on Miami Vice. They gripe that even the local plays, the ones at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, for example, are cast in New York or L.A. Poe says, "I was an extra in The Dogs of War. And I was standing there talking to Christopher Walken and he said, 'If you really want to make it, you can't stay in Miami. You have to go to New York.' "

New York! In New York the rent is like a thousand bucks a month. Poe frets. Who could afford it? No, he'll stay in town, practicing his craft, singing the blues.

"I've done a lot of research into the blues," he says one day at his inglorious apartment in Coconut Grove. "All the cliches you've heard about the blues were true."

A tour of the artist's pad reveals at least 1,000 records stacked to the ceiling. He's got rare blues, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Blind Willie Johnson, the Rev. Gary Davis; he's got Dixieland jazz, jug bands, string bands, bluegrass, gospel, spirituals; he's got Cajun music, field hollers, western swing and some scratched-up Led Zeppelin.

He's got a record called Old-Time Bones and Hickory Leaf Playing.

"I try to expose myself to everything," he says. "Like Duke Ellington said, there's only two kinds of music: good and bad."

He has even written a lot of original songs. He thinks they are too commercial for the Folk Club. Except for his mother, he says, no one has ever heard them.

I's another Friday night, and backstage Poe is laughing at his own jokes as he waits for the play to begin. The audience is filtering in. Poe doesn't need make-up for the role, so he can shoot the breeze. He hums with nervous energy. After he tells a joke he literally slaps his knees.

"Sure, I've paid my dues. I had to live on the same floor with my brother and sister. I had to share a bathroom with them! I had a black and white TV in my room. I didn't get a car until my 16th birthday. And it wasn't even the one I wanted! I had to swim in my neighbors' pool."

When he gets on a roll he cannot be stopped until the performance is over.

"Michael Jackson and I are contemporaries. We're exactly the same age. I remember listening to him on the radio when he was a member of the Jackson Five. I remember singing (he sings) I'll Be Theeeeere, IIIIII'll Be Theeeeere, and I was thinking that should be me up there. And now I see him hanging around with all these Hollywood types (he frowns as if he disapproves), with Brooke Shields, girls trying to rip his clothes off on the street and everything, and I think (dramatic pause) that should be me up there."

He slaps his knee hard.

Church, the director, says, "Allan's got an incredible amount of potential. He's very exciting. His big problem is that, like many young actors, he's got too great an imagination. So many young actors don't know how to reign in their imagination, they don't know how to discipline it."

A few minutes later the play begins. Poe delivers his most lengthy soliloquy in near darkness; evidently the theater is missing some lights. The Herald theater critic will subsequently declare that The Formula has potential, but in this current incarnation it "fizzles." Poe's role is relatively minor -- a playwright, sitting around at home in T-shirt and Army pants, trying to write a musical without resorting to the same old formulas, but also wanting it to be a commercial hit.

His first line: "This artistic soul could use a little financial success."

Poe goes to an audition. Judgment is passed in a tiny room on the fourth floor of the Hyatt. The hopefuls sit outside, practicing their lines, exercising their lungs, lying on the floor in meditation. One by one they enter. "Rosa," Poe says in an old Dixie twang, stalking the hallway in an ugly yellow plaid jacket and dirty jeans. "Rosa. Rosa." He waits for an hour.

"Edgar Allan Poe," a voice finally announces. Poe goes in and finds himself face to face with a serious-looking woman who had turned him down for a previous role. Two other men, unsmiling and silent, sit next to her.

"Hi Edgar, how are you? You remember us all? Did you get an opportunity to read the play?" The woman sounds nice, but . . . she's been doing these auditions all day and by this time there's a patronizing note to her voice. Like he's a kid. Like he's slow.

She describes the play, The Miss Firecracker Contest by Beth Henley, and then he apologizes for not preparing a "light" audition. He was supposed to do something "light." But he says the only "light" monologue he knows was the one that didn't work that last time he auditioned in front of her. No one is smiling.

Poe makes a joke about his ugly jacket and then begins, his voice as deep and Southern as the blues, and dramatic, very dramatic, so uncomfortably dramatic that the walls close in:

"Dance, Rosa," he says. It's Tennessee Williams. "Rosa. Rosa Gonzales. Did anybodah evah slide down heah as fast as I did this summah? Like a greased pig. All summah long even I put on a clean white suit. Half a dozen, six in the closet and, uh, six in the wash. Ain't a sign of depravity in mah face!"

He's putting spins on the words, he's showing all the things he can do with his voice, his eyes, his shoulders, which is considerable. His hands shake a little as he sips from a cup of water, part of the act. Never has Poe looked so crazy.

"And yet all summah long I have sat around like this, remembrin' last night, anticipatin' the next" -- suddenly he mashes the cup and hurls it to the floor, splashing water around the room and nearly getting the judges wet -- "the trouble with me is I shoulda been castrated!"

No one is smiling. The room is so small. So hot.

"Rosa. Yur not dancin'. Dance! DANCE!"

He yells this so loud that it literally hurts the ears, and he's got those bug eyes again. But what is really incredible . . . what is really a specific violation of the unwritten code of auditions . . . is that Poe is looking right into the eyes of the serious woman, staring right at her like a crazy man as he screams DANCE! and maybe it's just the light but there seems to be some trace of fear in her eyes.

"Head's on fire. I'll go in a minute, but first I was hopin' you wud put you hands on mah face . . . "

When it's all over Poe is wound up, trembling slightly. Nervous laughter. They thank him. But just as he starts to leave the room he whips around and starts saying things . . . saying things to the woman, and though he is smiling it becomes clear that he is complaining about his previous audition, complaining that he didn't get the role . . . it's unbelievable . . . he actually says to her, "I must admit, I thought you'd at least call me back," and she says, "I tried to be very specific in what I was looking for," which is a polite answer, but he keeps talking about it, he won't let it drop, he's vibrating.

He finally gets the hell out of there, races into the elevator and says, "I don't know what got into me. I don't know. I guess I was still in character. I was on a roll."

He laughs at himself. Walking toward the parking garage he says: "I think I totally blew it."

One hundred and forty years ago, a great writer went to another audition of sorts. He had written a new poem of special beauty, a sorrowful and eerie lyric of lost love and endless grief. He wanted to sell it to a magazine, and so had come to read it to the editors. He spoke with great flourishes, caressing each syllable with his theatrical voice:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -- While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door -- Only this and nothing more."

When Edgar Allan Poe looked up from his work the editors' faces were blank, impassive. They turned him down. They had no interest in this new poem that Poe had titled The Raven. But because he was so obviously destitute, so wretched a character, they passed a hat and raised $15 to give to the poor man.

Four years after The Raven was rejected by Graham's Magazine, Poe died in an alcoholic haze, raving to the very end, penniless, without even a child to keep his name alive.

Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald