The Benefits Of Benefits
By Tommy Womack
Peter Case is a buddy. We’ve worked together in Nashville, Memphis, Lexington, KY, Decatur, GA, and – I kid you not – Sesto Callende, Italy. He’s a true hardcore troubadour who has lived it to his toenails out of a suitcase for decades, playing his guitar and weaving stories with his words, wearing a rumpled suit, with an old hat, looking like a man who took a train into town.
Peter had open heart surgery earlier this year. A benefit gig was at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in California back in May. Dave Alvin played, T-Bone Burnett, others.They did it because yet another exorbitant medical fix-it bill affected yet another life that has value.
There were benefits for Duane Jarvis and Tim Krekel too, before the hammers fell. Perry Baggs of the Scorchers was a beneficiary of a big two-night one here in town two years ago. A few years back, Government Cheese reunited to help an old friend deal with her bills.
There was even a posthumous benefit once when Jack Emerson passed away suddenly, leaving a mountain of bills. So it goes.
When my manager then, Kim Webber, was diagnosed with MS in 2000, I and John Bruton organized Kimfest: 4 nights at 12th & Porter. We had an unbelievable line-up. As (a drunk) master of ceremonies, the people I introduced included: Peter Case (coincidentally), Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Tift Merritt, Buddy & Julie Miller with Emmylou Harris, Ryan Adams with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Robbie Fulks, Mike Ireland & Holler, (a very young) Justin Townes Earle, Jason Ringenberg, Webb Wilder, Scott Miller, and many others. One of the nights, who showed up but Donnie “Ralph Malph” Most??!!! We met and talked and he was nice as nice can be. I was walking on air the rest of the night – I’d met Ralph Malph! We raised eight grand.
The cynics and the uninformed scoff at benefit gigs. What’s $8000 in the face of a six-figure bill? What good does it do? Well here it is.
Benefit posters only say "To help pay the medical bills of so-and-so" because "To help keep the lights turned on and the water running and the rent paid while our friend is too sick to figure out yet what his or her next move is going to be, assuming he or she even has one!" takes too long to write out. We accomplished that exactly with Kimfest, keeping her house rented and bills paid for three months while she got herself together enough to get her Social Security benefits set up. (Thank God she’d worked a straight job for twenty years and had paid in.) I’ve played a lot of benefits in my time, and I’m afraid I’m going to play plenty more. But not in England.
I wouldn’t say I took a survey of the English population but I did converse with many about the health care debate in America. Everyone had one thing in common. No one had any complaints about their own system. They seemed pretty happy with it. Peter the pub owner in Burton-On-Trent, told me – and I quote - the English health care system is “excellent.” His word, not mine. “Excellent.” And he’s an old guy too, saying that.
I pray people don’t give in to fear in these crucial times when we have a chance to try and fix a system that saves your life and ruins it at the same time. I’m sick of playing benefits. We shouldn’t have to.
God bless,
- Tommy -