Pastiche: Let Us Now Praise Not-So-Famous Men

Born in 1934, Lewis was an avatar of the braver, less self-absorbed strengths of a movement later named (unhelpfully) "New Journalism;" a style he weened and shaped even as the successes that came to peers like Hunter S. Thompson passed him by. A Texan even when he wasn't, Lewis' work for Rolling Stone, New West and later Texas Monthly chart the unheralded rise of a writer with a rare combination of abilities - he is earthy but not crude; educated but not pretentious; regional but not provincial; clean and honest but not cruel (though some would argue that last point, to be sure).

Born in San Antonio, Lewis was orphaned at age eight when his parents were both killed in a shoot out. Fleeing her husband's abuse, Lewis' mother had absconded with Grover, only to have his father hunt them down and murder her. While there are no eyewitnesses, it was reported that Lewis' mother opened fire on his father before expiring, leaving the young Grover to be raised by an uncle, "Spook" Bailey in the Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb of Oak Cliff. When he was of age, Lewis matriculated at North Texas University in Denton. It was here he befriended writer Larry McMurtry, and the two became friends, putting out a literary magazine called The Coexistence Review with a third student. The Eisenhower era was one of restraint and compliance, and Lewis - no beatnik himself - suffered from the era's prototypical disapproval of all things uncommon (read: vaguely "communist"). The red lone star on the cover of The Coexistence Review was enough to warrant some suspicion, and Lewis' chafing against the preeminent values of the time put him in bleak contrast with his fellow students - which was never more manifest as when he enrolled at Texas Tech for his Master's Degree. Lubbock could scarcely have been less welcoming of diversity than it was in 1960, a year where Lewis spent most of his time in and out of classes like "Age of Chaucer" and "Later Victorians," and occasionally arguing publicly in the favor of progressive politics.

A 1962 issue of the school's newspaper The Daily Toreador features Lewis on the cover as part of a feature on a school political debate. Amongst ads for Winston cigarettes and an article entitled "Knitting Provides Coeds Leisure Time Hobby" is a photo of the thickly bespectacled Lewis, who is quoted in an article as a self-described "equalitarian democrat" and who later nastily equates conservatism with "fear, conformity, and the denial of freedom." A ponderous essay from this time period entitled "On Edge: Some Remarks Toward a Social Ethic for the Sixties" posits - the way only a graduate student can - the correct method to conduct a government, all the while thumbing its nose at handy scapegoat (pre-Watergate!) Richard Nixon, whom Lewis charges as having a "papier mache rock of a chin," among other things. While not good reading in itself, Lewis' early work has the fearlessness and depth of spirit that would dominate his journalistic work thereafter.

Grover's life appears difficult at the tail-end of the sixties. In a short list tucked in his personal papers is something entitled "An Inventory of Woes," in which Lewis laments that he is "unhappy in my job," has "a drinking problem," is "getting fatter and blinder," and, most sadly, has "two children whom I haven't seen for almost two years. At the moment, I have no prospect of seeing them for the next two years, or perhaps even longer." Fortunately, his career, at least, was about to take a dramatic upturn with the publication of what is arguably his first masterwork - a piece for The Village Voice in 1968 entitled "Looking for Lightnin'" about the search for blues guitar legend Lightnin' Hopkins in Houston's Third Ward. Lewis' pavement-pounding in search of Hopkins not only throws light on the bluesman's context in the day to day bustle of the city, but also provides a lifelike snapshot of race relations and the community in this area of Houston at that time. It is a type of journalism that is both specific and far-reaching, and the same goes for Lewis' piece about the Altamount Speedway Rolling Stones concert that ended with a stabbing death, which he simply entitled "Stones Concert." Other than the similarly public death of President Kennedy, perhaps no event rivaled that Altamount disaster as the beginning of the end for the sixties' fever dreams of equality, peace and love.

The piece on Altamount resulted in a longer tenure at Rolling Stone, for whom Lewis would act as associate editor as well as contributor. Though his relationship with the fledgling magazine and its publisher Jann Wenner would eventually become contentious and even litigious, it was here where Lewis flourished, particularly in regard to his writing. Just two examples of his finest work are the pieces "Soldier of the Heart," and "Hitting the Note with the Allman Brothers Band." The former concerns the struggles of folk singer Judee Sill, and was published in 1972 (in 1979 she died of a heroin overdose). Almost an extended interview, the piece omits the questions and lets Sill speak the answers (the format of Letters to a Young Poet, say), thereby allowing us to fully wrap ourselves in Sill's memoir of a hardscrabble childhood, life of substance abuse and prostitution, and, finally, her rebirth as a musician. The clear and convincing portrait Lewis makes of Sill reveals so much more about both the art and personage behind her songs than a hippie-ish music magazine - frequently referred to by readers and detractors as "Rolling Stoned" - should ever have been expected to.

The latter piece is the most controversial of Lewis' career, thanks in no small part to the fact that the article was published right after the accidental death of one of its two main subjects, Duane Allman. Whereas "Soldier of the Heart" is primarily made of an afternoon's reminiscences guided by Lewis' occasional narration, "Hitting the Note with the Allman Brothers Band" is a full, days-long immersion into the world of a touring rock band, taking us from the plane to venue to hotel. Lewis interviews everyone around, including the band's tour manager and roadies, and reports it like he sees it. I'd argue against Lewis having any sort of bias regarding the band, but his account is unblinking and the light he sheds is harsh. If Judee Sill is the brilliant but struggling artist with a heavy load to bear, the brothers Allman are prototypical rock stars - rude, crude, and out of control. The boys in the band seem to do nothing but sneer, lie around and snort cocaine, only pausing to play a show or cause consternation for others, namely, in this story, an up and coming Rolling Stone photographer named Annie Leibovitz. Through Grover's lens, the Allman Brothers (and Duane and Gregg in particular) are hoarding and immature, but this piece is no caricature of rock star excess. Contrary to what has been said since, or the poor timing of the article's publication, it's a revealing, unrelenting snapshot into the life of a rock band on the ascendancy in the 1970s. Its restraint and its courage are what make it - and Lewis' writing - such a joy, even in the face of life's sorrows.

Lewis' split from Rolling Stone and Wenner was acrimonious, even as these things tend to go. Lawsuits were filed, and Lewis found solace with his wife Rae by leaving Texas first for Utah, and later for California. It's at this point in his life that Lewis seems the most content, at least from the perspective of his correspondences. Life seems to have taken on a much-needed simplicity during these years, which allowed Lewis the chance to realign his priorities. In January 1975, he wrote to Judee Sill: "So much has happened since we last met that I really don't have the strength to undertake a recounting. The best summary I can offer is that my wife Rae and I live here on a permanent basis, we're involved with a partner/friend in running the only store in town (The Store, it's called), and I don't know whether I'm a writer anymore or not." But in just a few months, he had a thankful change of heart. "From now on out, I've resolved I'm only going to write about national treasures. John Garfield was a national treasure. So was Horace McCoy. So was Hank Williams and that crazed old dago who built the Watts Towers." He freelanced for Playboy and wrote for New West magazine. He witnessed the attempted murder of Larry Flint, which resulted in the piece "The Shooting of Larry Flynt: An Eyewitness Account by Grover Lewis." And much later, in 1992, Texas Monthly published a piece entitled "Farewell to Cracker Eden" about Lewis' subsequent return to and chronicle of the dilapidation of his boyhood home, Oak Cliff.

Lewis' career as a journalist and creative writer is varied and deep, and has thankfully been anthologized in the collection Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader by our own University of Texas Press just four years ago. But in many ways, even this collection and a careful study of his papers reveals all that could have been but wasn't - a memoir, Goodbye If You Call That Gone and a novel, Code of the West, were left unfinished, and the portions anthologized in Splendor in the Short Grass are heartbreaking and expressive, even in piecemeal.

Lewis died of lung cancer in 1995, and it seems that amongst his many powerful pieces, the most important components of his oeuvre remain unwritten - contained somewhere in the fine detail of both his unfinished novel and the clear-eyed recollections of his unfinished memoir. Lewis never completed the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, nor even the Horseman, Pass By it would have taken to propel him into public consciousness.

For now, we have a more scattered portrait of an irascible and firmly responsible writer, as framed (primarily) by the rapidly changing worlds of popular culture in the late sixties and the seventies. While still at Rolling Stone, Lewis wrote to Jann Wenner about the possibility of doing a story on Neal Cassady, the Beat figure made famous by Jack Kerouac's description of him in On the Road. Concerned with grounding Cassady's mythic reputation by placing it in sharp contrast with his widow Carolyn's often unhappy recollections, Lewis wrote: "When you show such a person as he truly was, it seems to me, it serves the cause of the truth we're all trying to serve in our various ways." It's difficult now to tie together the strings of who Grover Lewis truly was, though it seemed a fair tribute to the man to at least try.

Much thanks to the helpful staff at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State and the The Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas. More on "Splendor in the Short Grass" can be found here.