Carry The Torch
Sometimes life looks back at you and says… yes
My therapist once told me I reminded him of Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. You know, John Goodman’s gun-toting, rule-loving lunatic who’ll pull a piece on a bowler who dares to toe the line. “Am I the only one who gives a shit around here? Mark it zero,” Walter screams. And my therapist said that with unnerving precision—like he’d been waiting for the day he could finally lay that one on me.
He wasn’t wrong. There are days when I am Walter. When someone’s pushing in line at Gelsons and I have to swallow a monologue about moral collapse. When I’m banging my head against the music world and thinking maybe it’s time to bring out the proverbial Uzi.
But here’s the kicker: I got to thinking about Johnny Goodman. The real one. The guy who became Walter Sobchak. The John who drove me all over creation in his beat-up Ford rentals or borrowed vintage rides from Bruce Willis. Johnny hates flying. Claims he’d “rather ride the open road with AM radio and bugs on the windshield than get into a tin can with wings”. Can’t argue with that.
I dug out an old photo of Johnny and me and sent it to my therapist. That was the trigger. Next thing I knew, the reel-to-reel started spinning in my head, unspooling a full Technicolor flashback. And since my readers love this stuff—the big names, the broken dreams, the music, the cameos from actual gods—well, buckle up.
Let’s talk about Ivan Neville. I met him on a corner in L.A.—Third and Gardner—where fate likes to hang out in jeans and a tee. Within thirty minutes, we’d decided we were going to make a record together. Not “maybe.” Not “let’s jam sometime.” We decided. Like war generals. Or drunk uncles at a wedding.
And instead of going through the major label meat grinder, I rang up Bruce. Yep, that Bruce. “We got money,” he said, like it was no big deal. So we built a studio in one of his places up on Mulholland. I had all my gear shipped out from NY. We called it Uptop, and it felt like a comfy treehouse for musicians with a golf ball driving range that ended in canyon sunsets.
Ivan and I dreamed big. We made a wish list of players—no rules, no shame. Keith, Bonnie, Robbie, Waddy, Kootch. And “The Dads”—a whole saga of father/son reconciliation I’ll let Ivan explain. One day we are picking up Aaron Neville in Willis’ black 1960s Cadillac convertible and cruising Sunset with the top down, Big A in his sleeveless t-shirt in back and Ivan in front grinning like a raccoon in a bakery. We were poor-ass rich. Rich in dreams, poor in label support.
We wrote fifteen songs. The best method? Ivan is gifted in case you didn’t know: If I could build a track, he’d just get in the booth, and mumble like Diz on mushrooms. Just pure feel. From that mumbles track (I literally name it mumbles on the recording console) I catch a melody and a word or phrase in the soup and build a whole song from that. “Lost Ball,” for instance. Ivan mumbling “lost ball doot de doo duh ” It was an old school New Orleans patwois phrase from his father. “You’re gonna end up like a lost ball in the high weeds.” BOOM! Got it. That’s loneliness. And I’ve got a PhD in that.
So back to Goodman. We were working on a new one “Life’s Been Good Too Me.” I roped him and Bruce into singing backups on this song about a cracked-out street philosopher in a thrift-store suit. That guy who tells you he can get you anything and still believes, somehow, in the cosmic church of it all, that life’s been really good to him.
Tour time came. Bruce and I flew private. The band bused. Which, of course, painted a target on my back. Being the “non-famous friend” on the jet next to the movie star? In Hollywood, that’s heresy. But Bruce wouldn’t have made it to the Letterman appearance without me playing den mother. I made damn sure he showed up.
We played New Orleans—House of Blues. Ivan’s home. He is the heir apparent as far as I can tell. Nola is Johnny’s home too. Before soundcheck, Bdub and I swung by the Goodman’s, an old governor’s house with ceilings that belonged in Versailles and a golf course out back.
We went back to the venue for sound check and I’d been ranting, as I often do, about the Crab Po’ Boys at Mother’s. Preaching “Best damn sammich in the Gulf South,” like I knew anything… but I told anyone who would listen, and probably a few who wouldn’t. My plan was simple: skip out between soundcheck and dinner, grab one, bask in its holy grease, and return reborn.
But Bruce—being Bruce—overheard me, and decided to fix it. He had Bon Joshie, one of our roadies and a man with more hustle than instinct, place an order for fifty Crab Po’ Boys. FIFTY. Like he was feeding a vampire army on Fat Tuesday.
Trouble was, the sandwiches got delivered to the bus. Not the venue. Nobody told the band. Nobody told me. We ended up choking down House of Blues catering—some kind of faux-creole sterno lasagna horror—and wondering why dreams die quietly in backstage eating areas.
Fast forward to the next morning. The band boards the bus, bleary-eyed and looking bad, and there they are. Fifty soggy, mushy, cold, gooey, long-dead Crab Po’ Boys stacked like some kind of seafood sarcophagus in the aisle. Not even the tour vultures touched them.
Dawn. All is quiet on Decatur Street. Driver pulls over by a garbage can. Door opens. Box of crab corpses flies out. Door shuts. Bus pulls away.
If you were a pedestrian on that corner, all you saw was a gleaming tour bus ejecting what looked like a box of swamp death. Like a Monty Python skit. Like a seafood exorcism.
Some people say that was a sin. A waste. Maybe even a war crime by New Orleans standards. Me? I just say “its only rock and roll but I like it. Yes I do… Roll on!”
Now here’s where the real heartbreak sneaks in wearing Mardi Gras beads.
A year later, the album didn’t move. At all. We had no machine behind it. No industry cronies calling in favors. Just great songs and ghosts of possibility. It could have been landmark. Its a great record. Its actually one of the records I’m really proud of. Ivan carried on the blueprint on his recent offering—we’d made something lasting, even if the spotlight didn’t linger.
Then, years down the line, I’m standing at the House of Blues in L.A. The Neville Brothers are playing. This isn’t just a show—it’s sacred ceremony. I’d seen them decades earlier at the Ritz and they’d rearranged my molecules. Music as religion.
They came out for the encore. Someone whispered, “They’re gonna do your song.” And then it happened.
“Carry the Torch of Love in Your Heart.”
I wasn’t ready for it. The voices I’d worshipped were singing words I’d pulled out of my head one night, above the smog line in a mountaintop studio. I stood there like a statue. Just a guy in the crowd, tears pouring down, feeling seen by the gods.
Sometimes you don’t need validation. But when it comes like that, uninvited and undeniable, it changes you. In a town that often says no, that night was a yes.
And yeah, maybe I’m a little bit Walter Sobchak. Maybe I live by rules no one else signed up for. But I’ve carried the torch. And if you look hard enough, you’ll see the smoke still rising.
