The Eulogy

Part 1

Exactly 5 years ago I gave a eulogy for my dad.

I wouldn’t say the eulogy was easy to write, but I wrote it quickly because I knew what I wanted to say. As my dad’s Alzheimer’s progressed, I wrote a lot about how we were slowly losing him, and what I missed and loved about him, so I channeled all of that into the eulogy. And because his Alzheimer’s was so advanced at the end, it was a relief when he was gone. We knew he didn’t want to live that way.

Andy’s death couldn’t be more different.

Andy was diagnosed with squamous cell throat cancer in June; he had six weeks of radiation and was declared cancer-free on September 12. But about a month later he started having back and shoulder pain, which he discussed with his doctor, who sent him for x-rays on Oct 30. The pain got much worse over the next 3 days and early the morning of Sunday, November 3, I took him to the ER. A few hours later he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer of the ribs, lungs, sacrum and liver, and he died 17 days later.

I still haven’t grasped it.

It seems impossible that he is gone. He had so many things he wanted to do: he was so excited about the records he was producing for Grey De Lisle; about doing more shows with the Hi-Seas; about a Damselles project he was working on with original songs that recall 60s girl groups; co-writing a song with Lenny Kaye; and hoping to spend some time with Brian Wilson on his next trip to Los Angeles. But more than anything, I know he wanted more time with Jackson and Charlie – and with me too, even though we were separated. We still talked and saw each other almost daily. And after I took him to the ER on November 3, I was with him every night and most daylight hours until the end.

He wanted to live and he had so much more to give to the world.

We all wanted more time with him, not just Jackson and me, not just his family, but his larger family of friends. The outpouring of love has been incredible.

Andy was born on November 1, 1951 to Hank and Cabot Paley, in Washington DC, across the street from a church called St. Andrew’s. I only know that because that’s where his parents got the name.

Andy has two older sisters – Brewster and Debby – Brewster named for Cabot’s family – they were descendants of William Brewster, leader of the pilgrims who came on the Mayflower.

Jonathan and Sarah arrived after Andy, and the family settled in Half Moon, NY. Andy had fond memories of his childhood, and we drove by his old house and neighborhood on our move from Los Angeles to New York, and we went there again a couple times over the years, even seeing an old friend he’d grown up with.

His parents were friends with lots of artists and creative people – including Tom Glazer of “On Top of Spaghetti” fame. In fact, Tom Glazer sang and recorded “The Porcupine Song,” written by Andy when he was 7 years old. It was on a 78 record. I’m actually going to try to sing it.

(The song below is not me singing it - this is the original Tom Glazer version.)

That recording is in our house on a 78 written by 7 year old Andy Paley

Music dominated Andy’s life. His band the Satellites won a battle of the bands hosted by DJ Frank “Boom Boom” Branigan in Latham, NY when Andy was 11 years old; he won a hundred dollars and a recording session which resulted in a 45 “She’s the Little Girl” and “Crash Landing.” I don’t know which was the A side and which was the B side.

In his teens, Andy’s parents the family moved to Brooklyn. Andy dropped out of school when he was 15 years old, and he’s told the boys not to do the same. He spent his time playing harmonica, guitar and drums around Greenwich Village, and working in record stores where he got paid not with money but with records.

He also went to Woodstock with Jonathan. Before they left, their dad told Andy “If anything happens to Jonathan, I will kill you.” They were separated within a few minutes of arrival yet somehow managed to find each other at the end of the festival. At the time, they were unaware that their two older sisters also were at Woodstock.

He started splitting time between Boston and New York, where he met Jonathan Richman, who was busking in Harvard Square; and Lenny Kaye, who was working in record stores in NY and later produced the album for Andy’s band the Sidewinder’s.

Andy he lived an incredible life. He worked with his idols: Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Darlene Love, Phil Spector, Brenda Lee – and of course, Brian Wilson. He put together a resume a few years ago listing people he’d worked with. I’m just going to read a few of these because it’s crazy.

Mandy Barnett

Gene Pitney

Darlene Love

Brenda Lee

Ben E King

KD Lang

Erasure

Debbie Harry

Jerry Lee Lewis

Jimmy Dale Gilmore

Peter Wolf

The CHarmettes

Madonna

Lyla McCann

The Real Kids

The Nervous Eaters

Apollonia – he played on her album

Little Richard

Little Jimmy Scott

Hank Ballard and the Midnighters

Dale Watson

Laverne Baker

The Waltons

Tommy Page

NRBQ

Plastique Bertrand – I can’t pronounce it correctly – Andy knew French because he produced a bunch of records in Belgium

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Richard X Heyman

Denis Leary - some unreleased songs

Julia Sweeney – got a Grammy nomination here

Mighty Lemon Drops

Patti Smith – he also toured with her

Roy Buchanan – who he toured with

Mork Kopfler – I didn’t know this one

Brian Ferry – I didn’t know this one either

Brian May

Jules Holland

The Ramones

SpongeBob SquarePants

Solomon Burke

Basically Andy knew everybody.

He met all 4 Beatles, and Frank Sinatra. He was friends with Bill Paxton and Andy Warhol. He worked with Madonna and Brenda Lee. I’m certain he is the only person who has played with both the Ramones and the Beach Boys.

In fact, a few years ago, the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson did a show together at the Hollywood Bowl and Andy and I went. And later we were in an after party area and I saw a guy walking around wearing a t-shirt and it looked like the Ramones t-shirt – the Ramones logo with the names around it – but instead of the Ramones, it had the names of Murry, the Wilsons’ dad, and Carl, Dennis and Brian. And I walked up to the guy and I said, “where did you get that shirt?”

And he said, “Oh, a friend made it. There’s only like 5 in existence.”

And I said, “Where can I get that shirt? I have to have that shirt for my husband. He’s the only person whose played with both the Beach Boys and the Ramones.”

And the guy said, “You’re married to Andy Paley?”

One day after we’d been married a few years I got home from work and he told me he’d talked to John Waters earlier in the day. I had no idea he knew John Waters.

Another time we were at the Burbank airport and I saw a guy who looked really familiar, and just as I realized it was the actor Paul Reiser, he walked towards us and said, “Hey Andy! How are you doing?”

One day he called me at work to tell me he couldn’t pick up the boys from preschool because he was going to Warren Beatty’s house with his friend Seymour Stein to see a screening of a new movie of Warren’s – he wanted Andy and Seymour’s opinion on a song in a pivotal scene.

And then there was the day our neighbor Peter introduced Andy to a friend of his, and mentioned she had been a Bond girl. Then he told his friend, “Andy was in the Partridge Family!” And I was surprised that Andy hadn’t told me he was in the Partridge Family, but it seemed plausible, until I realized he was not Danny Bonaduce or David Cassidy and I was pretty sure he wasn’t the other kid either. I asked Andy to be on the safe side. I think Peter got the Partridge Family and the Paley Brothers confused.

It's a testament to how much Andy valued friendship that he not only had so many good friends, but close friends he’d known since he was a teenager. He kept in touch with people he’d known for decades, and continued making new friends along the way. Here in Vermont he befriended Norbert from his favorite record store, Speaking Volumes; and Catilin who managed the UPS store, and where we have a mailbox.

For years, when Andy visited New York, he would stay at his friend Kelly Simpson’s apartment on Beekman Place. Kelly was a professor of Egyptology at Yale. I stayed there with Andy a couple of times, and each time the doormen would greet Andy as if he were an old friend, even though he only stayed there maybe once or twice a year.

Andy knew so many people from so many parts of his life: guys he met when he drove a cab in Boston in his 20s; people who knew from working in record stores; artists; writers; comedians; childhood friends; and of course people in the music business.

Andy loved finding the perfect gifts for people, like the guitar strap he carefully selected for Nora Kenny when she started playing guitar, and the scarf he chose for Karen, my sister-in-law, and this necklace he gave to me.

And he was generous with his talent. He frequently wrote, recorded or produced (or sometimes all three) songs or score for live performances or animated shows or podcasts or charity organizations, sometimes only accepting payment for the costs for Jake, his engineer, and any hired singers or musicians, but never for his own time, or rarely.

He worked regularly on comedy and variety shows put on by his friends.

I met him because he was writing and playing music for the Thrilling Adventure Show – or as it was known back then, the Thrilling Adventure and Supernatural Suspense Hour. It was a stage show performed as an old time radio show. Billy West, another old friend of Andy’s, was performing in the show that night. I was with my cousin Arianne and after the show, Billy made a beeline for her. Arriane looks like a Texas beauty queen – as she says, 6’ feet tall with hair and heels. While Billy chatted up Arriane, Andy and I started talking and he asked for my number at the end of the night.

He did not call me for months. And I went to the Adventure Show the next month. I was pretty bummed out because he seemed like a really nice guy. And I got there and he wasn’t there. It turns out it was the only show he ever missed. He was on a SpongeBob cruise.

I went the next couple of months and he was there and I avoided him because it was clear he wasn’t interested and I didn’t want to deal with it. And then in December of that year, I was driving to Las Vegas with my friend Monica to see my cousin Lance in a rodeo doing bullfighting. And we were halfway there and the phone rang and it was Andy. And he asked if I remembered and I said, of course I did, and he asked me out, and Monica wrote his number on a piece of paper and put a heart next it. I was going to bring with me to show you because I still have it but I forgot it at home. And then we promptly lost the number. Monica dug through the car and I did too, but I think she did most of the work. She dug through a fast food bags from the food we had on the way. And we never found it.

But he called again on Christmas Eve, and we had our first date on January 7, the day before my 41^st birthday. After I moved in with him a few weeks later, I found the paper with his number under the seat, stuck under the bolt under the seat, which is why I still have it.

Later he told me he hadn’t called me earlier because he couldn’t find my number, but later he admitted he’d put in on his refrigerator and walked past it every day trying to get up the nerve to call me.

So besides the Adventure Show, Andy also wrote music for Clowntown City Limits, a dark comedy written and performed by Jim Turner, Mark Fite, Dave Gruber Allen and Craig Antone; music for Two-Headed Dog featuring many of the same people doing a lot of short comic pieces. Andy favorite one was Craig Antone playing a dj at a college radio station and would list crazy band names and songs. It doesn’t’ sound funny when I say it but it was really hilarious. He also did music for the Rudy Casoni Show, which was a variety show hosted by Toby Huss playing a fictional bastard son of Frank Sinatra.

Andy loved working on comedy shows with his friends. Andy had great comic skills and occasionally gave his comedian friends ideas for bits. He was so thrilled when they would used them his suggestions – I know Andy Kindler used a couple of them.

Andy Kindler also created a bit about Andy and myasthenia gravis – an autoimmunie disease that Andy had. Andy washing the hospital at Cedars in LA and Andy Kindler showed up with a bit about myasthenia gravis and performed it for Andy in the hospital.

Andy also often enlisted the boys to perform comedy skits, and would make elaborate videos of bits and send them to his friends.

Shortly after I met Andy, he introduced me to his friend Seymour. We had dinner at Mandarette, one of Seymour’s go-to restaurants in LA – and after dinner, Andy went to get the car to pick up Seymour and me at the front door. This gave us some time alone.

Seymour leaned over and asked if I’d met Brian Wilson yet – I said no.

Seymour said “Andy and Brian are a lot alike,.” He said they both had a childlike sense of wonder and that was where their talent came from. He also said it would make Andy a wonderful parent. And he was right about that – especially when the boys were little. They both have incredible imaginations and I credit Andy for that, for all the make believe and silly games he played with them when they were little, and the comedy bits he did with them in recent years.

He was also a storyteller. He had so many great stories about working with Brian Wilson or Jerry Lee Lewis or meeting each Beatle on separate occasions, or about the time Steven Tyler and Andy had a gun pulled on them by a club owner after a gig, or about how he got a job as a London tour guide before ever visiting London, or being locked inside Phil Spector’s house, which apparently wasn’t an uncommon thing for people who visited Phil.

I find some solace – and I hope the boys do too – in knowing how many people loved Andy. It was incredible how many phone calls and emails and text messages and visits he had in those last days. HE had friends flying in from Los Angeles and other places at the drop of a hat. Billy West didn’t even call ahead of time. He just walked in the door after flying in from Los Angeles. Jonathan Richman almost never flies but he got on a plane for Andy.

Lenny Kaye was going to drive up on the 22^nd or 23rd of November and I called him on the 19^th and I said, “I think you should come sooner rather than later,” because Andy had moved to hospice on the 18^th and was going downhill pretty quickly. And I said, “Lenny, I think you should come sooner.” And he said “I’ll drive up tomorrow.”

He drove up and got there around 4 or 5 – I can’t remember exactly – and he brought in his guitar and he serenated Andy and one of the songs he sang was “Rendezvous,” which was on the Sidewinders album and it was also on the Paley Brother album, but Lenny produced the Sidewinders one. It was really an incredible moment to see him serenading Andy – practically lifelong friends – and to have so many people with him who loved him. The boys were with us; and my niece Violet (Jonatha’s daughter); Andy’s friends Dave “Gruber” Allen; and Jake Posner, his engineer; and Lenny.

Brian Wilson called that last day too. Brian didn’t make the call but his assistant put him on the phone and he kept saying “Andy! ThIs is Brian! This is Brian Wilson! I love you Andy!”

And the nurse kept telling us that hearing is the last to go, and I know that on his last day he heard Brian telling him he loved him, he hear Lenny serenading him, and at the end, he heard us telling him we loved him and playing his favorite songs. The last song he heard was “Cloud Are Rolling Away,” which Mandy Barnett sang at our wedding, and he heard that recording again as he died.

I lost a dear family friend - Paula Parkinson - years ago to cancer. Before she died, she told me that there was a blessing to knowing she was dying: that so many people told her what she meant to them, and she was grateful she was able to hear that.

I am grateful that Andy was able to hear that too. I know he was overwhelmed by all the people who told him what he meant to them in those last days. Thank you all for that gift – for him, and Jackson, Charlie and me. I think it eases the pain a little just to know how loved he was by so many people.