I worked with Coyote at a Nashville radio station calling in every morning to give a weather forecast. Bob August (middle) called in to do the traffic. On Thursday we’d do a bit on science, he’d introduce me by saying “and here is Jeff Ray the science guy, wearing nothing but a lab coat”. He lived on a houseboat only about 5 minutes from my house. On his fly bridge we would sit and talk philosophy and cultural history for hours on end. Portions of this were used in the his front page obit that ran in the Tennessean.
Coyote McCloud was the most famous of all my friends, an outlier in the bell curve of anything toward a common life. His was not country, not urban, and certainly not suburban. He was a riparian in complete violation to Corp of Engineer law, he took refuge from normalcy on a houseboat for the last six years of his life. He spent his life as an entertainer, a radio personality whose banter exuded freely and effortlessly as the propagation of a modulated radio wave. His telling of the various degrees of separation from famous musicians could fill an afternoon. Think of the covers of Rolling Stone magazine across the 70‘s through the 90’s and he had conversed with a majority of them at one point or another. One summer afternoon I picked him up at his boat dock to take him to a my father’s annual Fourth of July picnic (he was a regular). I had my well-read 18-year-old nephew riding along. He had never heard of Coyote and asked him what he did. “I played rock n’ roll music” he replied. My nephew preceded to name every famous musician he could think of since the inception of Rock and Roll. The ride took twenty minutes, the names never stopped. Coyote had meet every one of them, adding where he meet them and the circumstance and something they said or did. Coyote’s brain was like a recording device; even inside your own conversation with him he’d ask you about something you mentioned 30 minutes before. We was always doing an interview, somehow in that brain of his always taking notes.
It was a life well lived, one reasoned and suburban men day dream about. Parties, award shows, MC events, run-ins with management and lovers. There were the radio hysterics- the Y107 melt over a German Shepard and a girl. The Where’s the Beef” record, the only song ever released in every Wendy’s restaurant in America. He could talk all day about his studio work and the people he co-wrote with. The stories never ended, anything you talked about he could link to somehow. He was an encyclopedia of musical knowledge, the hits just kept coming. The course of his life was a raging river with sharp bends and benders. He reminisced every outcrop he hit along the way, under his fame was an iceberg size history of firings, displacements and immediate family left unattended. What we remember is that which rose well above sea level. For long stretches he got hang time...air time. We would call that moments of fame, Coyote would simply call it fun. A average man might get that 15-minute flight once in a life time. For Coyote it arrived in 4 or 5 year bursts. Like all the very talented people he made it seem effortless. It was a life lived absolutely absent of fear of failure, a life of legendary reverie for living and full of deep friendships and a thousand acquaintances. He built a library of a thousand well told stories. What a life. What a ride.
Coyote died from cirrhosis of the liver, on his boat April 6h, 2011. By his side was his ex-wife Susan Brown (of the Tennessean), one of his most successful radio show partners Cathy Martindale, and his good friend Bobby Miller, the captain of his houseboat that rarely sailed. Coyote had refused a hospital or hospice, he just wanted to drift away while still tethered to his closest friends and family. Coyote was a radio star. Despite the advent of MTV, video didn’t kill him, it couldn’t touch him.
If would be wildly inappropriate to offer a toast in honor of my friend given the nature of his demise. So instead just make a promise. Learn from him to live fearless. The next time an idea hangs back in your throat, suppressed because you fear sounding the fool, I know how to be brave. I learned this from a my good friend Coyote McCloud. Just tip up your chin and let loose a howl. Then turn to the mic and say something.
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