Stolen Figgs

Pleasant Grove, a community in the southeast outskirts of Dallas, Texas, was not a nice neighborhood when keyboardist Elliot Figg was growing up in the eighties and nineties. He and his big family lived there for much of his childhood, neighbors with a diverse, blue-collar bunch. Petty crime was a normalcy and thefts were common in Pleasant Grove, according to Figg. He now performs, conducts and writes music in New York.

This isn’t to say Figg’s youth was totally saturated with the crimes of Pleasant Grove. There were tranquil refuges in nature and in music. Woods behind his home were often explored, fond details of them remembered decades later. At a cafe on the Upper West Side in New York city he and I go back and forth sharing cherished memories of our respective childhood forest romps—forts, good climbing trees, enchanting hollowed stumps.

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FAA Report Patsy Cline plane crash last phone call

Patsy Cline’s Last Phone Call

A tribute to a legend and a visit to an artifact of the last hours of her existence, published at the exact minute of her passing + 55 years.

Patsy's Cline last phone call

Ms. Cline, backstage with butterflies and sweaty palms, Memorial Hall, Kansas City, 3 March 1963; her final show. Mildred Pierce photo

I’ve always had a queer fascination with youth and death.

Is it the great senselessness of this? That by rule, we’re all supposed to grow old and reminisce about our youth and what we should’ve done differently? Once you roll the celebrity aspect into it, you’ve got youth and death involving someone that in theory has more monumental life experiences in six months than the rest of us do in a lifetime. And perhaps that’s where obsession begins.

I find it quite strange that it took me as long as it did to find out how Patsy Cline died. And when.

Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ sort of spoon-fed the story of Buddy Holly and The Day The Music Died to anyone whose parents had that radio in the basement, with the missing tuning knob, permanently set to the oldies station. My curiosity for that one took me first to the nightmarish autopsy reports of those three singers sudden, violent ends, and then to a much more healthy end, a 2009 pilgrimage to the exact spot of the wreck in a field in northwest Iowa.

I knew Patsy’s hits. They’d cycle through that same oldies station here and there. But I think they (perhaps purposefully) branded her as a minor ‘crossover’ star in the early rock era, not as one of the biggest stars in the history of an entire genre of music.

As you start to dig in a bit, one finds out things that teenage boys just melt for in the concept woman; a public classiness cloaked in just enough mystery to allow for a secret, just between the two of yas, offset by an offstage reputation of being able to keep up with the boys in the three categories we’re taught to hallow the most: cussin’, fightin’, ‘n drinkin’.

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