 10/14/03
Greetings from Twylo! This is one of my
favorite pieces from my years at the Cape Codder -or, actually, eight
of them, edited together and augmented by some stuff that wasn't
fit for a family paper -about one of my all-time favorite
character/musicians, Dick Wetmore. It's long, so get comfy.
GREETINGS FROM TWYLO! (as delivered by Dick Wetmore, bop violinist.)
1. A few years ago, Cape Cod lost one of its greatest hits when the legendary Dick Wetmore re-located to Naples, Florida, with his new bride, Marge. “Why all the hubbub?” you might be saying to yourself, or, “yeah...and-?” I ask you to consider the following: Dick at one time or another shared stages with: 1. Woody Herman 2. Billie Holiday 3. Charlie Parker 4. Erroll Garner 5. Oscar Pettiford 6.Vassar Clemens 7.Link Montana and the Roamin’ Catholics 8. the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra 9. the Nauset High Band 10. Monk, Lord Buckley, and Sun Ra Ok? So shut up. In his 1957 book “The Book of Jazz”, no less an authority on the subject than Leonard Feather mentioned a “Dick Wetmore, who may in due course gain acceptance as the first bop violinist.” He once won the Downbeat poll (for “miscellaneous instrument” -violin), and the same source noted in 1967 that “the first really modern jazz violinist probably was Dick Wetmore”. All this is well borne out by a listen to Dick’s only solo release, a 10” album on the famous Bethlehem label from the late 50’s that is remarkably articulate, understated, inventive, and modern, now as well as then. (Of course, noone’s ever heard it; it’s been out of print for many years.) During the same period -a period Dick spent in New York city toward the end of the fifties -he recorded an album with Vinnie Burke’s String Jazz Quartet that one can only assume expanded on some of the ideas from the Bethlehem album (the group eventually included guitarist Kenny Burrell). Of course, I’m just guessing on this one -even the redoubtable Jack Bradley, the noted Harwich record collecter, concert promoter, and jazz enthusiast who put me on to Dick’s Bethlehem release, has no idea how to get ahold of it. The story goes that then Dick went on a binge that landed him on the street in Manhatten and nearby New Jersey and homeless from time to time over the next sixteen or seventeen years, through which he supposedly gave up music entirely -though the same Jack Bradley claims to have seen him in the middle of the period in question (1961-1978) playing in a duo with a pianist named Bud Blacklock at the Land Ho in Orleans doing some sort of modern abstract post bebop (!!!). Dick remembers very little of this period, so it’ll be hard to check... Around 1978, Dick returned to the cape, rehabilitated, and proceeded to play with almost every musician in the area, short of the hard core punk crowd (see the list for the tribute concert on Sunday). In retrospect, it almost seems that to compliment the truly imposing list of legends he had performed with up to then, he purposefully set out to collect a complementary list of completely obscure musicians from Cape Cod. Last summer he completed his local collection in one fell swoop by playing with the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra, thus removing any possible impediment to moving to Florida (aside fron legions of heartsick fans). As if all this weren’t enough, he
is also the inventor of mirn (not to be confused, he tells me, with Among his other accomplishments are that (according, again, to Jack Bradley) he actually got fired from a gig at the Chatham Squire with Link Montana for being too loud (not the band -just Dick with his violin); that he can do a wonderful elephant imitation (Jack said that “Dick can look and sound just like an elephant”); and that, according to local saxophonist Bruce Abbott, he knows more than most people about life on the planet Twylo...
2. In 1978, when Dick came to live on the lower cape for the second time, the word was that he had been a great musician who threw it all away for a serious decade-and-a-half-long bender, during which he never picked up an instrument; ...or maybe he did, he just doesn’t remember anything from those years, he had been completely out of it. That was the rap when I finally caught up with him. He was playing somewhere in Brewster -maybe Longfellow’s? -with Tom Tracy, then and now a smooth-voiced, highly polished acoustic performer of high local regard with a repertoire of largely singer-songwriter-ly covers. According to Tom, he and his partner at the time, Peter Buscemi, had been playing a gig at the Woodshed in Brewster when they’d been approached by an older gentleman of diminutive stature and inclination (and crew-cut!), who probably said something along the lines of “I’m thinking of picking up music again a little, and you guys sound so wonderful; I wonder if you’d be interested in playing together a little bit sometime?” (Nothing at this point about the planet Twylo.) It’s likely that Tom’s expectations were running much more toward “harmless crackpot” than “genius swinging jazz musician” by the time Dick showed up at his apartment the next afternoon, fiddle in hand. Tom remembers thinking “yeah, sure, pal...”, and then being completely blown away; Dick remembers thinking that Tom and Peter sounded wonderful, and talking to counselors about that it might be time for him to start playing music again, that he thought he could handle the bar scene then, that he wanted to play anything other than jazz, which had always been his passion. He remembers not wanting to put himself under too much creative pressure, and the duo’s music and approach somehow opening him up to the point of being able to at last truly appreciate something as simple as a walk on the beach. A friendship was born, and Tom and Dick performed together, off and on, for the next eighteen years, sometimes under the mysterious moniker “Where’s Harry?” (as in Tom, Dick, and...); Tom marveled at Dick’s “appreciation and love of life”, and was also pleased to note that he was a good driver. When I first heard Dick play, I was most impressed by the fact that he was both very self-assured and very childlike; each song was fraught with both silly mistakes and wonderful discoveries. He played without ego and without pretension, but with evident and contagious joy and bemusement. In the least pushy way possible, he made it fun. I was fascinated and introduced myself, and soon heard the story of his long fall from grace confirmed, which seemed to make sense of the feeling of a talent slowly but jubilantly reblooming. Also, he was nuts. He had that quality I’ve come to associate with fine musicians who firmly resist taking themselves and the world seriously: a sort of irresistible, playful, Peter Pan thing that only great artists can pull off without needing to be punched. Somehow, after however many years down and out on the street, he’d held on to that thing, hidden yet undiminished. And then, you’d end up hearing about all the people he’d played with...
3. Let’s see...where were we? Ah yes, Dick Wetmore, master musician and noted former citizen of the planet Twylo; the man who said to me, “Yeah, I once wrote an opera, but I lost it while I was drunk.” How can one help being curious about such a person? How is it that he would turn out this way? Was it a series of factors dictated by environment, experience, and upbringing, or was he just weird to begin with? Dick was born on January 13, 1928 in Glens Falls, a lumber and paper mill town in upstate New York just north of Saratoga. His dad was an architect, soon out of work because of the depression, causing the family (including Dick’s siblings -an older sister and an older brother) to move in with their grandmother. He remembers his dad as being shy and retiring, and his mom as being “not too well-wired”; but they were a somewhat musical family: Mom played piano, and Dad played harmonica and sang. Still, when he was first randomly assigned the violin for his school band, his parents sent it back, worried in part that it might be too expensive. His principal, though, had heard him sing, and believed he might have some natural ability for music; so he talked them back into it. He was never treated as a prodigy, though he took some pride in being one of the only kids in school who could really play. Unfortunately, it was a double-edged sword: for a small, glasses-wearing kid, the stigma of playing violin was all he needed to be firmly classified as a sissy amongst some of his class-mates; he remembers being regularly accosted and “thrown into the pricker bushes” in school. Even much later, as an adult in the jazz community of New York in the 1950’s and early sixties, this combination of physical attributes combined with choice of ax made it somewhat hard to be accepted -violin players were regarded as being effeminate and/or snooty. He remembers at one time being “accepted” by Miles Davis because he was a friend of Gerry Mulligan’s, but he says he was never exactly “liked”. (Miles was not much of an enthusiast where white people were concerned anyway.) It’s a little hard to tell why Dick stuck with the violin, as even today he says he doesn’t really care for the instrument much: “I’m not sure I’ve ever liked the violin -I really go for fatter sounds.” His instrument of choice is actually the baritone horn, though he hasn’t owned one for years now. His old horn got so beat up that even he couldn’t play it anymore (though he once won a cutting contest with the afore-mentioned Mulligan at George Wein’s short-lived Storyville club in Harwich that involved that horn. It was leaky and dented and what you blew into it tended to come out a second or more later; as a result, noone else could play it. Eventually, the horn had to be fixed, and it never sounded as good after. Harry “Sweets” Edison once asked him “Do you think you could play a horn that worked?” (The two were having a couple of drinks on the way to a golf course outside of Boston; Dick describes himself at the time -the mid-fifties -as being “a mouthy drunk, but boring!“) Speaking of Gerry Mulligan, in
1995 Pacific Jazz re-released an album called “The Gerry Mulligan
Songbook”, all of which is fun; but by far the best cuts are the four
previously unreleased tracks
4. Dick once told me that one of the best things he ever heard was this: “The only tangible evidence that we’ve ever existed is of a spiritual nature.” He attributed it to Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous; I paused long enough in my inquisition to make sure that this was truly over my head and also to let Dick know that I had really given it a try, but what he said only a little later made a lot more sense to me. He said that he had learned that it’s important to “be what you’re supposed to be -which is an instrument”. I thought this was a lovely, sensitive thing for a musician to say, let alone a former air force tailgunner. His brush with the wild blue yonder took place in Texas in 1945 or so -it didn’t last because the air force eventually discovered that Dick could barely see, and excommunicated him to the army, where he put in a few months in the swamps of Mississippi before getting a gig with Bob Crosby’s band that got him into the canteens and hospitals as a musician and out of harm’s way (kudos here to whatever genius finally confiscated Dick’s machine gun). When he came back to Newton, MA., where his family had moved for his last year of high school just prior to his experience with the military, he ended up back in school at the New England Conservatory of Music, where (through another friend, a fourteen-year-old piano prodigy named Dick Twardzick) he met Bob Zeiff, whose writing, an amalgam of cool jazz and modern compositional techniques that was clearly way ahead of its time, was such a large part of the considerable magic of Dick’s only solo album, released on the legendary Bethlehem label in 1952. Bob was something of an iconoclast; Dick remembers a record company begging him to change the title of a cool little tune he wrote called “Steaming Turd”, but to no avail -the song went unissued. The early fifties in Boston were a heady time for Dick, who was living in Beacon Hill with his future wife Mary, who was a teacher at Radcliffe. He was spending time in the coffeehouses on Charles St. with artists and intellectuals, doing some conversational bluffing and “picking up clues for later”. He was also playing constantly. Bop was just coming in, and there was music everywhere, “lots of really different kinds of music -swing, cool jazz, bebop, Dixieland -incredible stuff with no particular style established”. He remembers nights in Manhattan when it seemed like every legendary musician who ever played could be found within a few blocks of 52nd St. He recalls Fats Navarro as the king of all the trumpet players, and seeing the Woody Herman band with the legendary “4 Brothers” saxophone section (Al Cohn, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Serge Chaloff), so junked out they’d just sit on the bandstand right through the breaks. Dope was all around -there was a guy named Sonny Truitt who carried an attaché case full of different kinds of illegal delicacies, whose query to musicians was always a simple “where do you want to go?” Another friend up in Boston named Carl London was known for his generous after hours parties, which featured gallon jugs of different kinds of pot with names like “Chicago Light Green” and “Mexican Salt and Pepper”. Carl also had tame mice, most of whom he’d named after famous jazz musicians. Everybody was doing something, either pot or booze or speed or heroin; Lester Young distinguished himself by stick- ing with opium. After hours parties were the norm in Boston in the fifties. Dick would do his regular gig (at Handy’s for instance, which was an all-black bar with constant fights and occasional corpses in the alley, where Dick sometimes sought the protection -due to his pigmentation and sissy choice of instrument -of a bouncer named Buffalo, who carried a “sap” -a sock full of buckshot), get out at one or two in the morning and head out to Christie’s in Framingham, where there was a regular private jam and open bar until dawn -and then they served breakfast. Everyone showed up here -Bobby Hackett, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles, whoever was in town. He says a lot of these jams were recorded and released later as bootlegs. Dick also met Erroll Garner at Christie’s, who later hired him to replace his regular string bass player for a week. This wasn’t Dick’s main ax, but he says he wasn’t intimidated: “It was easy. When you play with someone great, they make you sound great”. In the mid-fifties, Dick moved to New York for a few years, where he participated in the birth of the legendary Five Spot, originally a little dump in the bowery that moved to the Village once it established a reputation. Cecil Taylor was the main mover and shaker at the beginning, aided and abetted by Buell Neidlinger, David Amram, and “Dennis somebody”. Dick sat in constantly, not only at the Five Spot, but at the Royal Roost and Birdland as well, playing with everyone from Monk to a pre-Saturn Sun Ra to Lord Buckley. They were great years, but by the end of the fifties, Dick’s drinking was out of control, and he returned to Boston. Throughout the fifties he had played frequently in Cape Cod during the summer, most prominently at the Southward Inn (which used to be in Orleans where the Bank of Boston is now) with Leroy Parkins and the Excalibur Jazz Band. There was nothing high-brow or cutting edge about the Excaliburs -they played loud, jumpy Dixieland jazz the tourists could get hopped-up to -but they were all excellent musicians, and it was an integrated band, which was unusual for the time. Other members included drummer
Tommy Benford, a veteran who had once played with Jelly Roll 5. For Dick, the fifties- which coincided with his twenties -encompassed most of what he even now considers his prime years. Certainly his single, brilliant album as a leader on Bethlehem (supposedly, Chet Baker later re-recorded the entire album, though his version was apparently never released) and the list of folks he played with throughout the bear this out. If he wasn’t backing up the legends as part of the house band at Storyville in Kenmore Sq. (where he’d ended up backing up Garner on string bass, substituting for Gene Ramey, Erroll’s regular bassist, who’d been busted for picking pockets), he was jamming with them at the all-night parties thrown by a former state policeman named Eddie Curran at Christie’s. At the same time, Dick was discovering Cape Cod. He first came out in 1946 when he was only eighteen to visit a friend in Provincetown; he remembers Eastham being all farms and Rte. 6 turning into a dirt road around Truro. He went on to appear with Leroy Parkins and the Excalibur Jazz Band from 1952 to 1959. They were a noisy, out-going band of excellent musicians, usually doubling on a variety of instruments and concentrating largely on Dixieland; they packed a bar in Orleans called the Southward Inn for many years, especially on their regular Sundays (shades of the Casuals!). They jammed on the cape with Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan, Mose Allison, Dave Lambert, Jimmy Raney, or whoever else was out there at the Southward or the Chatham Bars Inn or the Atlantic House in P’town, but their crowning achievement was the Sunday shows. They played from 1 pm to 1 am, with Dick and pianist Bob Pilsbury pretty much whacked out of their heads at all times on whatever booze and dope was handy. They once ( in an all-out promotional assault on behalf of the Southward) played out of an airplane flying over the beaches. Their shows grew to include a little melodrama wherein the owner of the Southward would pretend to shoot (the leader of the band) Leroy, at which point two of the bartenders would bring in a wicker casket on a wheel barrow, put Leroy in, and wheel him out. Gradually, the rest of the band would depart from the bandstand, leaving only the drummer, Tommy Benford, who would go in to a one hour version of “Caravan”. When Tommy showed signs of tiring, the band (after throwing rolls of toilet paper down at the audience through the vents -shades of the Blue Man Group!) would start to come back in through the windows playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Right about then, Leroy would be lowered from the hay loft in his casket, and burst therefrom, risen from the dead, clarinet a’blazin’! Dick recalls conga lines through the kitchen, followed by furious chefs. It must’ve been quite a show -it’s not hard to see why the Excaliburs packed ‘em in. At the same time Dick had been
pals with the great character actor Richard Libertini, who helped pull
some most effective pranks on the unsuspecting Southward management.
Summers must’ve been a bit of a relief, for Dick was at the time
feeling some pressure to become a leader (since his solo album),
something he had little appetite for. In 1957 Dick was in New York with
Vinnie He also didn’t care about going on the road, as he’d been out there some at that point. He had disliked the loss of privacy and had never cared about being “one of the boys”, especially when he considered “the boys”’ attitude at least mildly racist in the first place. In retrospect though, you’d almost have to say that these events left him a bit too much drinking time...
6. One thing that has been established about Dick Wetmore over the years is this: he is not a reluctant conversationalist. He’s not hyper or obnoxious about it; generally, he’s just engagingly chatty. The shortest answer I ever got from him was to the question, “When you started living in New York City in the fifties, was that when your drinking got really bad?” His answer was “Yes”. I think it was the first -and possibly last -pause in a conversation we ever experienced together. Basically, Dick ended up spending well over a decade as a total, out-of-it drunk, and when he talks about that experience today, it’s like he still can’t believe it ever happened, and he’s awed and intimidated by the fact that he ever could have gotten that out of control. Even before he moved to New York, though, he was already firmly in the jazz melieu, a culture where most people were more or less defined by their particular addictions. Alcoholics were a relatively conservative group compared to some of the exotic junkie legends like Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker who he sometimes backed-up, certainly admired, but felt lived in a different world. Even on his only solo album back in 1952, the personnel of his band changed markedly just prior to the sessions -guys were already getting busted and/or crazy. When Dick turned up in New York around 1957 with his first wife Mary, he got involved in all kinds of things -the original Five Spot, the 52nd St. scene, even occasional gigs in Las Vegas with Woody Herman, who he loved, and whose band at the time also included Major Holley and Vince Guaraldi. He’d go out for months at a time, playing the lounges of the New Frontier or the Sands back when there were only six or seven hotels on the strip, and Wayne Newton was a twelve year old whose dad owned a bar. The bars had music 24 hours a day, and the musicians worked six hour shifts, Woody’s band alternating with people like Kay Starr and Charlie Ventura. He liked Woody, both musically and socially; the beat went on. By 1958, the Wetmores were back in Boston and their marriage was on the rocks (they divorced a few years later). Dick went back to playing the old Storyville club in Kenmore Sq., which by then was called Jazz Village; he remembers banks of phones upstairs -a necessity for an operation he suspected was heavy into running numbers and call girls. He continued at the club (run by George Wein, who later produced the Newport Jazz Festival) when it re-located near Copley Sq. under its original name -this was where he backed up Billie and Bird. He was mostly playing baritone horn at this point, and every Sunday he played jams, backing up poetry, experimental ballet, and the like -not to mention “a guy who played different varieties of train whistles”. In the late fifties he was also playing a lot at the Vendome, a high class hotel in the Copley Sq. area. He says he was doing sort of a George Shearing thing with a guy named Ray Herrara that occasionally involved Dick playing cocktail drums (!). Boston felt like a step back after New York, though, and Dick started really screwing up on the Vendome gig, mouthing off and eventually getting fired. He was living in a subterranean apartment on St. Botolph St., and he was increasingly “stupid and unemployable”. By the early sixties, he was up to about two quarts of gin a day. Today, he says “I don’t remember the sixties at all. I know I made at least two mental institutions...” He turned up playing at the Land Ho in Orleans in the summer of 1963, washing dishes on the breaks to get enough money to stay drunk. Otherwise he was basically homeless, living in cars or on the street. He was found incoherent in a hotel lobby, “talking to porpoises”, and sent to his first mental institution, in Urbana, Illinois. The cure failed to take. In the summer of ‘67 he was back on Cape, playing abstract, post bebop at the Land Ho (Norman Mailer was a regular) and painting houses; sometimes still living in his car, sometimes staying with friends nearby, who threw him out once he started burning up their furniture to keep warm. From there he drove his old heap back to Manhattan, where it finally broke down for good. Dick stayed for a time in a friend’s bathroom, until he was thrown out again. Then he lived on the street, sleeping in doorways and garbage cans. He re-surfaced briefly in Pompano, Florida in 1968, playing for a time until he was again fired for getting smashed and berating the audience over the mike. Around this time, amazingly, he re-married, to a woman named Barbara (Dick called her by her middle name, “Toby”), whom he considered a drinking buddy, though she wasn’t an alcoholic. The marriage was rocky and short-lived, though they didn’t get around to a formal divorce until 1990. In 1971 Toby couldn’t take it anymore, and he found himself all alone in the woods of Vermont, talking to the animals, ranting; he stayed for weeks, alone, until he ran out of gin. For a time he lived in New Jersey and worked at the mail room of the Foster Wheeler engineering company days and as a security guard at a “Two Guys” department store by night, still getting smashed constantly, hiding booze in the scales and Windex bottles. Eventually he passed out in a men’s room and went into a coma for three or four days that briefly left his right side paralyzed. He recalls being in the Lyons Hospital in Lyons, New Jersey, in the early seventies (where he’d gone at the instigation of one of his old, then-sober drinking buddies). It was here, in the quiet room of the ARU (alcoholics recovery unit), that he finally figured out that he was a stone alcoholic. “I found out I didn’t exist. I got really scared -I finally figured out I was really sick, and I panicked”. Finally, he had touched bottom, and it had begun to kick in. It was still years before he could even contemplate playing music again...
7. Things weren’t really going so good. He had hit bottom -but we all know he didn’t throw in the towel, though the thought must’ve occurred to him. Luckily for all concerned, Dick is made of putty. He bounced. Today, he says that he got so scared that he was finally able to listen properly to others who’d been through it, and to understand the truth in the clichés. After 90 days in the hospital (all of which he was grateful for -he feels that they sometimes kick them out too fast nowadays), he joined AA, and twenty-five years later, he still goes to meetings every day. Back then, when he finally started to listen, the first voice he heard was Stan Luddeke, his sponsor (who, ironically, eventually died of lung cancer -though he he’d quit drinking, he’d continued smoking). It’s clear that his admiration for AA and the people who helped him there over the years is considerable, along with his continued commitment to helping others today in the same way. Initially, he had to stop playing for quite awhile; then as now, bars simply weren’t the best places in the world to stay sober. For a couple of years he worked as a parking lot attendant in Morristown, New Jersey. Eventually, he heard about a government program to teach new skills to people whose original occupations were no longer viable. Dick’s choice for a new career today seems the perfect metaphor for his own inner re-grouping: he took up musical instrument repair. This involved taking a bus from Morristown at five in the morning to Union, where he learned instrument repair from a guy named Fred Kirschner. Like I said: putty. When he finally showed up back on the cape around 1977, his new-found sobriety had obviously not rendered him bland. He moved in with Jack Bradley for a time, followed by his wife Tobey, who parked her van in the driveway; their break-up was apparently long and difficult, though eventually amicable. Jack was suitably impressed, but eventually needed to get Dick to move out. Bradley had been an habitué of the New York jazz scene himself and was not particularly naive; still, both he and his wife Nancy remember with quiet awe the experience of having dinner at one point with two of his ex-wives, Dick himself, and at least one girlfriend (they remember the ladies being as cool as could be, and themselves being quite nervous). He has always been a people person. As we all know, Dick eventually thrived on local soil, though he has now forsaken us for the dreaded Florida. (I could go into his recovery in greater detail, but everyone knows that it’s a lot more fun to see someone get into trouble than out.) Meanwhile, here’s some vital items about Dick that somehow managed to slip by so far: In the nineties, he did some wonderful work teaching at the local high school, passing the jazz torch on to the current generation of pups, for whom he has an obvious affinity (and vice versa). Last summer, Dick achieved a lifelong dream by playing with a symphony orchestra (in this case, the Cape Cod Symphony); he believes he may be the first jazz violinist to have done that. Local drum legend Rikki Bates (of Space Pussy) remembers being in the studio with Dick, trying to get a take on a Link Montana song called “Then I Wouldn’t”. Rikki suggested to Dick that he “play one for the little man on your shoulder”, and got just the solo he needed. He also remembers Dick talking with great enthusiasm about an activity called “slithering”,which involves rolling naked on a new-mown lawn shortly before dawn.... He once asked Vassar Clements, a famous bluegrass fiddle player who played for years with Earl Scruggs, how he got in the groove for “Orange Blossom Special” (Dick, a jazz man, had had to work at assimilating bluegrass). Surprisingly, Vassar said that he just tried to think about Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”. Today, Dick says “I’ve never felt like I was a great player; just good. Great is Ellington, or Charlie Parker”. His early recordings, one of which (“Piece Caprice”) was included on a recent Smithsonian collection of the most important jazz recordings of all time, would tend to belie that notion as being perhaps a tad modest, though appealingly respectful. He has been married to his current wife, Marge, for three years now, in a row. He says that she has made him happy beyond his wildest dreams, and at last comfortable in his own skin. They are more than comfortable (though far from well off) in their new home in Naples, Florida. When they first got down there, most of the gigs he thought he had booked for the winter disappeared; but he got a regular Sunday quintet job playing on the beach (“for people in bathing suits” marvels Dick), and even some work as a strolling violinist.Now, a few years down the road, he frequently works seven nights a week; clearly, his enthusiasm for and love of music is as infectious as ever.
8. A former girlfriend
of Dick’s revealed that he was originally from the planet Twylo.
Apparently the main reason Dick left Twylo for this planet was: lack of
water. He hadn’t had parents, but was instead “born from a non-verbal
ostrich with concertina legs” that made it play music when it walked.
He says that he beamed himself to earth “on purpose. I remember, early
on, beaming myself different places and finding nothing.” Putty. Reprinted with permission of the Cape Codder, Orleans, MA.
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