The summer before 8^th grade, my good friend Dan Jones accompanied me and my parents to the town I would one day call my home – Nashville, Tennessee. However, Music City and I got off to a rather inauspicious start. That makes it sound worse than it was. Let’s just say I wouldn’t have imagined I’d one day be a neighbor of Longneck Larry and his brother, Driftin’ Dick.

After a week spent chaperoning a pair of pubescent snots around Opryland, The Parthenon, and Andrew Jackson’s house, my parents valiantly towed us along to a free concert suited more to their tastes than ours – Kenny Rogers. Now, it would be a colossal understatement to say that I wasn’t into the Silver Fox at the time. I knew nothing of the man’s musical oeuvre. Nada. I did not know how to hold ‘em, fold ‘em, or when to walk away. The only taste I’d had of Kenny Rogers were the fried chicken and macaroni & cheese at his short-lived rotisserie joint. And speaking of cheap chain restaurants, you should know that this particular performance took place in a Shoney’s parking lot. A truly memorable venue, I must say. I fondly recall the way the buzzing neon lights enveloped the crowd in a bright red haze, not unlike the glow from Kenny Roger’s Roasters that kept Kramer up for a week on that one episode of Seinfeld.

Typical of surreal childhood memories (and believe me, if this memory was a painting it would be called Island in the Dreams by Salvador Dolly), there could’ve been 50 or 300 people there. I have no idea. There are scenes in my head which feature a throng of sweaty, sunburned backs, and still others where I recall Kenny Rogers privately serenading all 19 of us in attendance. Whatever the exact numbers, suffice to say Kenny wasn’t packin’ em’ in like he used to. I say that not to mock the Country Music Hall of Famer, but to impress upon you that the small size of the crowd begat the startling forthrightness of Longneck Larry’s interaction with Kenny Rogers’ between-song banter.

So who is Longneck Larry? That’s merely an alliterative nickname I’ve bestowed upon a man – nay, a legend – who once stalked the Music Row Shoney’s parking lot on a hot summer’s eve in search of his long lost brother Richard. Whether Larry’s Christian name was in fact Billy Ray, Cletus, or Darryll, we’ll never know, but you can rule out the actual name Christian. But Longneck fits the man, even if it fit few of his shirts. Actually, what connected Larry’s head to his torso was not so much a neck as it was a leathery periscope, which made it all the more surprising when he failed to find his Dick (I mean this both in the sense that Richard never returned, and also because he eventually pissed himself).

Then again, Larry did not cast a wide net. He patrolled an 8 foot radius in a repetitive pace that was faintly reminiscent of the velociraptors sneaking around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, albeit with the lumbering agility of the grazing brontosauri. Here’s the best mental image I can suggest to help envision this man: Picture a face like a catcher’s mitt resting slightly askew atop an upright cobra, rotating like an oscillating fan. Or a tanned ostrich, but instead of a protruding rotunda of feathers, the abdominal girth is here expressed by the beer gut common to this breed of species native to the Southeastern United States. For the sake of the metaphor, call it his plumage of pilsner.

Later you’ll learn that Larry was perhaps second only to Kenny Roger’s mother in his deep, abiding love for the crooner, but you’d have guessed this anyway from the wardrobe he picked out especially for the occasion; there was his shirt, which didn’t exist. I’m not sure if he lost it in a bar fight somewhere between his 3rd and 18th Budweiser, or if he just didn’t bother to throw one on when he left the house that morning. It’s always possible that the reason for its absence is that there does not exist a garment on God’s green Earth that could’ve gone well with his cutoff jean shorts. Atop the rutabaga he called his head was a Miller Lite trucker hat, but you probably already knew that. Every once in awhile he’d remove it to block the setting sun, and disheveled wisps of what remained of his golden hair would reveal themselves matted to his forehead.

You might wonder how I can remember so many vivid details about a random stranger milling about at a concert more than 20 years ago. This is partly attributable to the fact that Larry’s visage is so intensely burned into my brain that you could call it a ‘Hillbilly Effigy,’  but also because Dan and I eventually turned our backs on Kenny Rogers altogether, and stood with our mouths agape like kindergartners at the edge of a lion exhibit facing this spectacular creature in his natural habitat. And so it is that I can still hear his voice two decades later, echoing across that parking lot with literally more volume than the main attraction: “Richaaaaaard?! Richard?! Where’d you done run off to, boy?!” If I heard that once, I heard it 12 times before the encore. From that you may gather that Larry was looking for his son. But from the grunts that occurred intermittently like verses to his chorus of “Richaaaard,” I gleaned this piece of genealogical information: “It’s my brother, he gone, gerta fernd him.”

Every once in awhile, my mother would stifle her laughter long enough to punch my arm in admonishment of my rubbernecking (to borrow a phrase), but she gave up that fight after my dad assured her that, from Larry’s view of the world, there were three of me & Dan, and we were approximately two feet to the left and right of where we actually stood.

But even Dixieland drunkards lose their appeal after awhile, so we belatedly became more interested in what was happening on the stage rather than 50 yards in front of it. This being one of my first concerts of any caliber or kind, I was introduced that night to a professional ploy I’ve since seen executed a half dozen times. I call it the ‘Aw Shucks we Might Suck’ bit wherein a tremendously accomplished artist feigns ignorance and mediocrity with a brand new song that they and the band  “have never played in public before.” Kenny’s intro was a variation on an old cliché: “Hey folks, I sure do appreciate ya’ll coming out tonight to hear us play all your favorite songs. And I do wanna let you know that we’re gonna get back to some of ‘em here in a bit, but right now I was hoping you’d let us try out a new song on ya. That’s right, it’s never been played for an audience before, and I know that’s exciting, but there is some bad news. The bad news is that we might screw up a little bit, so I’d like to apologize ahead of time. So whaddya say, will you give us a pass and let us play you a new song?”

It was at this moment that Larry broke through the third wall and became part of the act. Responding to what was quite obviously a rhetorical question, Larry craned his Longneck to the sky, and following a thunderous belch, barked, “Hey! It’s a hit to me, Kenny! It’s a hit to me! Whatever you play, it’s a hit to me, brother!” Keep in mind, Larry was not only within earshot of Kenny (who had by this point already walked away from the mic and over to his bass player to count off the intro), but was also directly in front of him as well.  Larry’s vote of confidence actually delayed the performance, as the band peered nervously into the crowd to find the source of such vocal fanaticism.  “Remember the Alamo” is a rallying cry for Texans. The British have “Long Live the Queen!” To the bewilderment of others, “It’s a hit to me, Kenny!” became the unique salutation with which Dan and I would greet each other in the hallways for the remainder of our six years in middle & high school.

We thought we had just seen Peak Larry. Little did we know he would soon outdo himself on the catchphrase front, assuring that he would eternally reside in the pantheon of legends next to the two men whose careers he would suddenly and inexplicably wed. It came less than five minutes later, when Kenny & Co. held the final note on what was probably the lead single of a very forgettable album.  There’s a kind of polite applause in these situations that has the unmistakable if unheard quality of sounding both appreciative and also pleading for more familiar material. With mere clapping, a crowd can convey the following:  “Yes, very nice, ok we indulged you; now play ‘Lucille’.” Amidst this smattering of cheers, Dan and I turned around to observe what kind of response this had elicited in Larry. Did he still feel, as he had predicted, that whatever Kenny plays is a hit?

At first assuming that Larry was a terribly arrhythmic dancer (and let’s face it, not a bad guess), I would later (in college, by first-hand experience) come to realize that the invisible surfboard on which he was struggling to maintain balance is in fact a common accessory to binge drinking. You know the move; feet shoulder-width apart, pigeon-toed, arms outward, and knees buckling and swaying back and forth as if made of Jell-O. It was from this unstable posture that the declaration was loudly proclaimed, accompanied by a stomp of the left foot and a defiant pump of the right fist that ironically evoked a Black Power salute. His words still ring through the ages: “Michael Jordan!” The key here is to pronounce this with a strong emphasis on the first syllable, and fade off after that with the slightest hiccup in the middle. It was something like “MIKE!al JOrduh . . .”

The nonsensical nature of the announcement was matched only by the clarity with which it reverberated in the Nashville night. There was no mistaking it. Piercing through the cacophony of junebugs, nearby traffic, food vendors, and guitar feedback was the 6’6 shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls.  Here are a few other hypothetical scenarios I’ve come up with that could compare to the head-scratching juxtaposition of the greatest living basketball player with the preeminent purveyor of the Countrypolitan sound. Imagine being at a Neil de Grasse Tyson lecture, and immediately after he concludes a fascinating exploration of the cosmos, someone in the 5^th row stands and screams, “Tom Brady!” Or picture yourself courtside at a Warriors pregame shootaround, and following a flurry of swished three-pointers by Steph Curry, you yell “Elton John!”

“Michael Jordan!!”

Weird, right? It was. Nobody knew what to say, including Kenny himself, who acknowledged the comment with a broken grin that seemed to say, “I can’t believe this is what it’s come to.” Soon thereafter, Larry dissolved into the ether, but not without casting a huge shadow on the lives of all those present. On the drive back to the hotel, I distinctly remember two off-hand comments that are comical in retrospect, though I did not understand them at the time. The first was in hearing my father describe Larry as “something out of Deliverance,” a reference I did not get. “It’s a really good movie about a group of friends who go fishing in the wilderness and they end up getting captured by scary inbred rednecks,” my dad explained. “We’ll have to watch it sometime.”
“Well, maybe in a few years,” my mother chimed in.
Upon brief reflection, my dad replied, “Oh. Right. Yeah, there’s a few scenes — well, one, really — that you can’t see yet.”

The other comment came courtesy of Dan, who remarked that he had once seen a couple of individuals who reminded him of Longneck Larry. When we inquired as to where and when, he said, “At a gas station in West Virginia when we were visiting my grandparents.” Not yet knowing the reputation of The Mountain State, Dan and I exchanged shrugs when this observation provoked a spontaneous burst of laughter from both of my parents.

As memorable as that evening was, one question has always remained: Why did Larry associate the velvety baritone of Kenny Rogers with the graceful athleticism of Air Jordan? Was that his way of telling us that Kenny Rogers was the Michael Jordan of country music? Did he get lost in that magnificent mane of salt & pepper hair and think to himself, “What would be the opposite of that?” and blurt out his answer? With this video, I now have my answer — Larry was reminiscing about the greatest game ever played.