Where's LaBeef?

Every once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places, if you look at it right.

Sleepy LaBeef , Times Square, 1987. All photos ©Chris X Carroll.

Sitting around the SPIN offices one Spring afternoon, editor Bart Bull pulled me aside and said two words: Sleepy LaBeef. Yep, Bart was doing a story on Mr. LaBeef and he thought I should shoot it. Bart was a little older than me, way hipper, and when he turned me on to something, I paid attention. One day Bart called me into his darkened office, placed a mouse in my hand, and said, “Here, play with this,” as I got to experience my first time using a Mac. We set the drawing program to spray paint a brick pattern and I never looked back. Although it would be a decade or two more before I actually used my Mac for creating photographs, I nonetheless had learned that Bart was often in tune with the cutting edge. So when he told me to, as the SPIN photo editor at the time, assign myself to photograph Sleepy LaBeef, I most surely did. Paging Charles Dickens, Mr. Dickens to the white courtesy phone, please. Turns out ol’ Sleepy was named in childhood for a lazy eye, and LaBeef is a slightly different spelling of his real name LaBeff. 

I have come across several super-sized individuals in my time, most notably Julia Child. She was so large in person it put one in mind of a muppet. Not fat, nor tall, just at a larger scale than normal people.  Sleepy LaBeef definitely qualified; my main memory of him is of encountering a giant of a man. You can see it in the pictures, the ones where he’s holding a Guild dreadnought-sized guitar that, with him, looks like a toy. Shaking his hand was like shaking hands with a roast. But for all his super size, maybe because of it, he couldn’t have been sweeter. Big smile, friendly with everyone around him. Giant guy in an electric blue suit and ebullient smile, what’s not to like?

That is a dreadnaught sized axe there, though it looks like a toy.

That guitar in the picture looks an awful lot like one of mine, that I had bought from Megan McLaughlin of the Musers when she upgraded to a Martin. But it seems unlikely I would have brought it along as a prop. Maybe he was in town sans axe, and wanted one for the shoot, so I brought mine? I don’t have a “story”–so I’m not sticking to it–but damn, that Guild acoustic looks tiny in his hands. 

We were having a grand old time. I normally abhorred working on a crowded street like that, but I’m so glad we did. The studio may have been safe, but it was also hyper-controlled and boring. I don’t know if I would have wanted to take Run/DMC, Paula Abdul, or Peter Gabriel out into Times Square, but Mr. LaBeef acted like he was the mayor. This is New York City, baby, you take your giant-assed self out in your best shiny electric blue suit and you own the joint, even if it’s the capital of the world. 

I’m walking here!

We were, of course, having the best time ever, just clicking away, yet sadly it came time to close. Sleepy leaned in (and down, he was huge, remember?) and handed me the biggest guitar pick I’d ever seen. Not as big as your palm, but twice as big as your average guitar pick.

I got this one from Sleepy LaBeef, you can buy yours from Amazon.

“Son, If you want to play guitar you’ve got to be able to keep ahold of your pick…”, he murmured conspiratorially as he shook my hand with that huge meaty paw and left a strange triangular pick there, as if he’d just tipped a maitre d’. 99 problems with my guitar playing, but a loose flying pick ain’t one. I’d like to tell you I treasured that pick, revered it, and could still tell you its exact location. But as I am an honest Puck, I’ll instead tell you that those picks that Sleepy turned me onto are a mass-market item made by the good people of the Fender Corporation. So Sleepy turned me on to the idea of the huge-ass pick, no idea where that ur-pick got off to. And I have relished them ever since.

I recently saw David Byrne on the internet, opining upon his favorite pick: the Fender Pizza pick, so named because of its resemblance to a slice of that American creation on which we feed. Byrne likes it because he rocks so hard that he routinely breaks off the tip of his pick. Instead of discarding it, (like a traditional one which contains only one point) he just flips it around to reveal another point, so the Psycho Killing can continue unabated. 

I’ve used these giant Fender tortoise shell picks ever since that spectacular afternoon working in Times Square with a big, big man. “Keep a grip on your pick.” I will now, Sleepy, thanks to you and your big picks and bigger heart.