I’ve stood in line to shake the hands of only two people in my life, Ray Davies and Muhammad Ali.
Both were at book signings, and I highly recommend both.
I had already purchased and read both books and had to shell out more money, but it was a price well paid for the signatures and handshakes.
Ray was promoting X-Ray, his “unauthorized autobiography” on Height Street of Height/Asbury fame.
When I got up to him in line, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing both the new book I had purchased and the curry-stained edition that I’d already read.
Luckily, he wasn’t upset that his life story had been stained by my daily lunch of curried shrimp minus the vegetables at Henry’s Hunan.
He laughed and agreed.
Later that night, I finally got to see him sing “Waterloo Sunset” for the first time at the Fillmore. I’d seen the Kinks at least six times before that, but they never performed it during that era.
John Wesley Harding actually pronounced his name correctly as the opening act. It’s pronounced “Davis,” not “Davees.”
It was also the last significant time I spent with the girl who broke my heart after falling in love with me talking about my Rock and Roll hero.
I skipped out of work to shake Ali’s hand. Ali and Thomas Hauser were promoting Hauser’s oral biography of Ali. The man in front of me in line was a Black Muslim. He wanted the champ to autograph a famous photograph that he had of Ali and Malcolm X. This presented some problems:
1. Because of his trembling hands, Ali wasn’t signing anything. They were pasting his autograph into the books.
2. It had to bring back sad thoughts about how he and Malcolm ended up. The two eventually made the same journey to true Islam, but Ali was misled about Malcolm and spoke out against him after he had left the Nation. Malcolm’s assassination left this rift unhealed forever.
3. I genuinely believe Ali felt terrible that he had let the kid down. Even though he might not have wanted to sign the picture had he been healthy.
Even at that point in his life, the man had an aura about him. I swear he glowed with radiance.
When Ali shook my hand, he was a bit distracted, but here’s the man’s holiness to me.
When he noticed my disappointment, he immediately turned his attention upon me and made that cool boxing pose that Red Foxx stole from him when he used to get mad at Sanford and Son.
Muhammad Ali probably shook more hands than anyone in the history of the planet all around the globe, and he did his best, even in a state of disrepair, to make every sing one seem like a special experience for his fans.
I was once in the car behind Ali in a McDonald’s Drive-Thru in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was in town for an NAACP event.
I didn’t know who I was behind until the car pulled away and I got up to the window and the people inside were freaking out.
He wasn’t driving.