Reggie Nightingale

I have lived long enough to learn that chemistry cannot be scheduled, confidence cannot be borrowed, and any evening improved by good music can usually be improved a little further by dimmer lighting.

Some nights you want candlelight, satin sheets, and a record spinning low. Other nights you want clean pajamas and eight uninterrupted hours. Maturity is knowing both can be seductive.

At my age, you stop chasing every beautiful thing that walks into the room. Mostly because the knees have filed paperwork. You learn to let the beautiful things come to you.

A gentleman never kisses and tells. He may, however, write a tasteful bridge about it twenty years later.

A good bass line should do what a good lover does: arrive on time, know when to hold back, and never make you ask where the groove went.

I was once banned from a hotel in Cincinnati. The official explanation involved a chandelier. I maintain that the chandelier was poorly installed. I also maintain that a gentleman should be allowed one appeal.

I have discovered streaming statistics. This was a mistake. Somewhere in Belgium, one person has listened to “Silk After Midnight” 312 times this year. Whoever you are: drink some water.

Young musicians today have in-ear monitors, digital boards, wireless guitars. We had one microphone, three extension cords, and a promoter named Kenny who disappeared halfway through the evening. Somehow the show still started. Kenny did not.

There is an art to entering a room late. Too early and nobody notices. Too late and they have already ordered appetizers. The same principle applies to romance, though the consequences are more expensive.

There is a rumor that I once wrote an entire song about a woman whose name I never learned. This is false. I learned it eventually.

There are songs you write because you are heartbroken. There are songs you write because you are in love. And then there are songs you write because somebody walked through the studio wearing red boots. Art comes from many places.

People keep asking what happened to the chest hair. Nothing happened to it. It simply negotiated better working conditions.

Just listened to A Gentleman’s Guide to Misbehaving all the way through for the first time in years. I owe several women an apology. I also owe whoever played bass on track six a drink. Apparently that was me.

I have been informed that calling a record Whole Lotta Reggie displays an astonishing level of self-confidence. If the shoe fits, polish it.

The hair is silver. The knees file formal complaints. The top three buttons remain unemployed. We carry on.

Somebody asked whether Sweat, Smoke & Satin was really recorded live. Baby, you can hear a glass break during the second verse. By the third verse, somebody had lost a shoe. We certainly did not add either one in post.

My doctor says I should exercise more. I reminded him that I spent most of 1978 dancing in platform shoes. He says that does not carry over. Medicine has become unnecessarily rigid.

A young man at the grocery store told me his grandmother used to play my records. I thanked him. Then I went home, poured something expensive, and spent forty-five minutes reconsidering the passage of time.

They told me the new photographs needed to look “age appropriate.” Baby, I am the age. The shirt, however, remains negotiable.

Gentlemen, if your shirt has eight buttons, God did not intend for you to use all eight. A little mystery is good for the circulation.