Momma Said There'd Be Nights Like This. No, She Didn't.

So JJ-aka-PP brought up the story about the nudist yesterday. Plottie had forgotten about that one, but not JJ, because she was there too.

The problem is, Plot is forgetting a lot of the dates, and the details, except for the part about the nudist, so Plot is relying on JJ to correct anything he misremembers here. She must have been still in High School, and Plot invited her and her friend Dave Rollins to drive in from Long Island to see him play, with his band, which was probably already called J.S. Blue at that point, which is better than 'Strawflowers,' which is what Plot called it in Nashville. J.S. Blue was second on the bill at the Village Gate, a fancy New York jazz spot. Or was it the Village Vanguard? The Gate, we think. The other acts that night were Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, and someone named Sweet Pie.

The Gate was having trouble, as they always were, attracting enough people into the club to hear jazz, which was really the music of a previous generation of hipsters. It was 1971 already, for Chrissake. So, they decided to, uh, 'expand' the qualifications necessary to play there, which meant you didn't have to be completely jazzy anymore, like Alice Coltrane, but more of a rock and roll blend, like J.S. Blue, or, as it turns out, be willing to play naked.

That's Cranky on the right, and Diane in the middle. The curly headed guy on the stoop was still trying to grow his hair so long that the Army wouldn't take him. HA! But true.

Plot's not sure how it looked from the audience, but he does remember that J.S. Blue went on third. Alice Coltrane opened and played a nicely incomprehensible Hindu-laced psychedelic piano set, and then Sweet Pie took the stage, wearing a red robe. Plot was busy talking through their upcoming set with the band, so he didn't see Sweet Pie, but he did hear a gasp from the audience before the piano started playing.

So he peeked through the curtain and saw Pie -- a short, skinny, long bearded and extremely hairy guy, sitting at the piano, completely naked. He immediately scanned the crowd for JJ, and saw her and Dave, both laughing as hard as they could with their hands over their mouths and no sound coming out.

Plot knows no sound was coming out, because the entire audience was dead quiet. Sweet Pie would play, and then take the mike and walk to the front of the stage and -- what, tell jokes? Plot doesn't remember. Then he'd play some more. The audience was dead, dead, dead for most of the whole show and when Pie put his robe back on and walked off stage, and came through the curtain, smelling really rank by the way, he walked past Plotnik with a big grin on his face.

"And now, J.S. Blue!" shouted a voice. Plot, Di and Cranky walked onto the stage and the audience exploded into applause. The band launched right into "Lobo," which was a song about a Puerto Rican auto thief, which the audience seemed to love, but they would have loved anything played by people wearing clothes. From that moment on, Plot always figured it was good placement to be the band that gets to follow the naked, ugly guy.

But the awful part was that Pie sweated like a pig, and the guy's butt was rolling around Plotnik's piano bench. Plot had to sit right down and wallow in that...yuck. The piano keys were drenched too.

Ah, Ducknik reminds Plotnik about the best part: Pie wasn't completely naked. He wore a feather, attached we don't know how, over a portion of his genitals. "It wouldn't have been so bad," Ducknik says, "if there had only been something worth looking at."

JJ, you're the costumer. How did he attach that feather?