Sunday Morning! “Nina Simone’s Gum” by Warren Ellis

Since I’m in the process of making a long-distance move, I’ve found it’s a pretty simple task: you just dissassemble yourself and jettison most of your existing life. All of the things that are useless or without value can be left behind as unnecessary weight and you keep only what is most essential to making a new path for yourself. At least, that’s the idea. What you find however is that useless and valueless are two very different things. Precious family heirlooms might have no place in your life, while an old ratty tee-shirt is valuable beyond belief.

“They’re just things,” we like to say, when it’s someone else doing the purging, but the emotional valence of our things cannot be calculated in monetary terms or reckoned in any instrumentalist sense. I’ve been finding myself in Canada Post shipping records whose “value” I’ve estimated as less than a dollar (because that’s what I’d get if I tried to sell them), and then trying to explain to the incredulous young clerk why I’ll spend $55 to mail $10 worth of these “valueless” records: because they mean the world to me and I’ll play them until they make their last trip around the turntable. This is the difference between me and a “collector”- if there’s a song I need (say, “Hey Sah-Lo-Ney” by Mickey Lee Lane), I’ll buy the cheapest version I can get and listen to it a thousand times, until it’s “worthless.” So, my record collector friends don’t like how I treat my “things,” but record collectors are weird.

But this is what we do- we make things sacred, we imbue them with preciousness, and it’s very seldom rational. It’s probably why economists often sound like jerks- theirs is a social science that describes how people would behave in theory if they were ever rational, which they seldom are. Imagine a historian deciding to write about the Battle of Leipzig as it should have been fought. Once you notice that disconnect between how rational actors should behave and how human beings do behave, you’ll see if everywhere.

But there’s also something wonderful about our irrationality. One of the things I loved about Warren Ellis’s new book “Nina Simone’s Gum” is that everyone he encountered in his mad quest to save a piece of chewing gum that the legendary singer had left behind on her piano after a 1999 performance, as if it was a holy relic or museum artifact, understood what he was doing; they all got it instinctively- of course, this tiny worthless thing is extremely precious. There’s a touch of the absurd to it, of course, but along the way, you can fully relate to everyone’s behavior. We all would have done the same.

Besides, Ellis is a musician and they think differently from the rest of us. He’s played for years with Nick Cave, the Lord Byron of moody gothic rock, on violin and other instruments in the Bad Seeds and Gridnderman and various other projects, and he’s great. In 1999, Cave directed the annual Meltdown Festival and packed the bill with fellow romantics, oddballs and artists possessed by the spirit: Lee Hazlewood, Harry Dean Stanton, Nina Simone, Diamanda Galás, the Bad Seeds, Jimmy Scott- somehow, incredibly, the earth didn’t crack open at this event. Doctor Simone was, by this point, 66 years old, a bit over it all, and somewhat reclusive. When asked if she had any special requests before the show, she replied:

“since you’re asking, can you get me some champagne, some cocaine, and some sausages.”

And soon after, the stage was set, Cave introduced her “and she moved onto the stage slowly.”

People were clapping, crying, screaming, ecstatic. I had never felt energy like that in a room. It was unfathomable to think we were in her presence. Those moments you don’t believe are real. When you know life will never be the same after.

The first song was choppy and painful, and just a warm up. And then, Simone stood up, walked to the front of the stage, raised her fist with a “yeah!” and returned to the piano… And then, the rapture. If you’ve ever seen a singer tap into the kind of genius Nina Simone had, they become a storyteller, an actor, a poet, a preacher and a shaman all at once- a conduit for the art and the spirit. Watch how she turns this slightly choppy start to a 1976 performance into a collective catharsis by the end with an audience as rapt as if they were hypnotized chickens.

There’s no cell phone footage of her 1999 performance, of course, and very few recordings- but Ellis recalls a “spiritual experience” in which nearly everyone present was in tears by the end of her set. I believe it. Look, I don’t know if it was really different before cell phones, but sometimes I remember shows I saw as a young person in which there was so much anger and energy and finally ecstasy in the crowd I think I must have dreamed it. But, if you were there, you know.

So, Warren Ellis did something a little impulsive after the set: he carefully wrapped Nina Simone’s gum in the small towel she carried with her on stage and saved it in a Tower Records bag, until 2019. Somehow, he kept this thing from getting smooshed, or lost, or disposed of in the time since. Twenty years later, Nick Cave was preparing his “Stranger than Kindness” exhibit for the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen and putting together a “Hall of Gratitude”- the issue of the gum was raised. It was just too good a story and a relic to leave out.

So, Ellis preserved the holy wad of gum and the museum found experts who could design a climate controlled display case, a jeweler who could make molds of the gum and reproduce it in wax and silver, and even someone who could estimate its monetary worth for insurance purposes: they guessed a thousand dollars. Along the way, people found themselves in tears by being in the presence of this little bit of useless refuse. And we get it.

This shaggy gum story could have become tedious, but Ellis’s narrative weaves in littler stories, like the time he saw clowns in his backyard one night as a child, or traipsing around London as a young man with a broken heart and an Arleta cassette (when he met her, the Greek singer gave him a marble, which naturally he kept), and his departed friend Mick Geyer, one of those aficionados with perfect tastes who will share bits of knowledge that rearrange your mental furniture forever. This was especially meaningful to me; I knew a guy just like that who I never see anymore, and I miss him often.

All of these stories evoke the sheer communion of shared music. The way a song can be a kiss between thousands of people. In the end, I took nearly two-thirds of my records and I passed them along to friends for “collector prices”- two dollars a record, or whatever they could afford. Even the ones that were, secretly, “worth” a lot more. It was a way of sharing something that meant the world to me as I pass along to the “great beyond” of New York City. Some of these people I’ll probably never see again, but they’ll stay stuck in my head. New songs will come and go and leave behind psychic traces. A song sung is, after all, just a fleeting work of art in the medium of time, as fragile as a butterfly wing. But, then, so are we all.

And so, what are YOU singing, listening to, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or passing along today?