Romney came to California in 1962 at the request of comic Lenny Bruce, who promised to manage his stage career. “Here he is, ladies and gentleman, a legend in his own lifetime,” he said before turning to the performer. Among his best was the introduction he gave for a new act appearing at the Gaslight, the famed brick cellar in Greenwich Village. His voice always sounded like it had been up all night, and he had a gift for comic timing during stage announcements. This goes back to when he was still Hugh Romney, a hippie impresario with a court jester’s face enhanced by a smile missing its front teeth.
So there that he is the one who got the idea to put acid in the Kool-Aid and call it “electric,” giving author Tom Wolfe the title for his account of the psychedelic era in San Francisco. Gravy is not sure whether it was he, Robin Williams or someone else who first said, “Anybody who remembers the ’60s probably wasn’t there.” If it was Gravy it was a lie, because he remembers every detail about the 1960s and he was definitely there. What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000,” listed by Entertainment Weekly as among most memorable entertainment lines of the 20th century. People come to his birthday parties to support the cause and hear the bands, but they also come to hear the Wavy-isms - the most famous being his sunrise greeting at Woodstock, “Good morning. “He realizes it is better to give than to receive.” “He’s the Saint of Circumstance,” Jones adds. “There is no human being quite like Wavy,” says Dorian Jones, who is there wearing a T-shirt with the concert logo “Wavy Gravy 75th Birthday” above a list of bands - Jackson Browne, Crosby & Nash - like any rock festival souvenir. It is the main fundraiser for the Seva Foundation, a Berkeley nonprofit, and on this day it will raise $100,000 to prevent blindness and restore sight in 20 countries worldwide. His annual birthday concert is more important than the pain he is in. Then he pulls himself out of that chair, down the rickety stairs and into a car for an hour-and-10-minute ride to an outdoor venue in Rohnert Park. But if you ask him if he is considering retirement, he quips, “My tires are good.”
“Collapsed weasel,” he calls his condition. Suffering ongoing back agony that six spinal surgeries could not cure, he keeps mainly to an office chair with wheels that he rolls around his bedroom. “I don’t walk so good right now, but I can still talk good,” Gravy says in an earlier interview at his home in Berkeley.
0 kommentar(er)
