Nina Simone’s Gum
There’s a scene in the eminently strange film 20,000 Days on Earth where Nick Cave is having a conversation with Warren Ellis, his longtime musical collaborator. Ellis, for those unacquainted, is an enigmatic Gandalf-like figure, a multi-instrumentalist who creates sonic landscapes that defy description. (I dare you to listen to Ellis’ haunting vocals on the song “Bright Horses” without falling apart.)
In the conversation in the film, Cave asks Ellis, “Do you remember the Nina Simone gig?” The gig in question took place during the Meltdown Festival in London in the summer of 1999, an event curated by Cave himself. And of course Ellis remembers it.
He remembers it because he was starstruck. He remembers the limo ride. He remembers how frightened everyone was of her. He remembers what Nina Simone—Dr. Nina Simone, that is—was wearing (the top was white; it brought to mind a duvet cover). He remembers the way she waited in the wings, chewing gum and smoking a cigarette. He remembers the nervous energy in the room.
No one there ever thought they’d have this opportunity.
“That we were about to see her perform in 1999 was a miracle,” Ellis writes. “By the nineties her life seemed shrouded in hardship and turmoil. People knew that things were difficult for her [where she was living] in the South of France. There’d been reports that she’d fired a gun at her neighbours. There was obviously a lot of distress going on in her life. She was a very complex character. She was always explosive and outspoken, but now her career was winding down. She represented so much to so many, but her health was seriously deteriorating, both physically and mentally.”
On this night, following Cave’s introduction of her, Simone got out of her wheelchair and slowly made her way to the center of the stage. Ellis watched as she took the wad of gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano, staring out into the darkness of the crowd. He remembers her apparent rage in that very first song, how she feebly walked to the edge of the stage and raised a fist. And how she then settled in to a set that somehow bordered on the joyous. He remembers hanging on her every word, her every painstaking note.
And Ellis remembers how, immediately after Simone finally stepped back into the shadows, he made his way through the crowd, up onto the stage, and found her gum, on the piano, sitting there wadded up on a discarded towel. He folded the towel and took it with him as a souvenir—a relic. In the years that followed, he rarely looked at it but always kept it close. Until recently, that is, when this piece of gum took on a life of its own.
Not all of this is in the Nick Cave film I mentioned at the outset. But it is in the first 50 pages of Nina Simone’s Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found (Faber & Faber), which I’m reading now. It’s another book I intended to save for vacation. Again, I couldn’t help myself.
Reflecting back on that conversation captured in the film, Ellis writes, “Something shifted when others became aware of the gum’s existence. I thought about how many tiny secrets there must be out there in the universe waiting to be revealed. How many people have secret places with abandoned dreams, full of wonder.”
