Rickey Wright

This story is intended to bear witness to my beloved and sweet friend, and the friend of so many others, Rickey Wright, who died yesterday.

I met Rickey in the late ‘90s. It was his first day on this job at Amazon. He was brought in from Virginia to join our little tribe of music editors who would launch the music store. There was quite a bit of buzz around him. How knowledgeable he was about music and what a good writer he was. He lived with Susan and Eric Benson for a while until he was set up in his own apartment, where he would live for the rest of his life. He always talked about how great Eric and Susan were for taking him in. Rickey was always talking about how great other people were and never forgot or took for granted any kindness or generosity that was bestowed upon him.

I remember the very first moment I saw Rickey. He had a different look about him. We sat on a door desk in the hallway outside the elevators that opened to our floor. We had our first talk about music and I think we sat there for an hour. Rickey would often refer back to that day saying that I made him feel welcomed when he was so nervous and unsure. I would also refer back to that day, telling him how compelled I felt to jump right into him and get to know him.

In those early days, Rickey used to swear a lot. Fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. One time I just burst out, “For chrissakes Rickey, pull back a little will ya??” He did.

I remember noticing very early on that Rickey could really put the Guinness away and would never turn down an invitation to a visit to the FAO Schwarz bulk candy aisle.

Rickey used to literally rock and roll. He never stopped moving. Either his leg was always tapping or he’d rock back and forth in his chair like a baby trying to comfort himself. He had a repertoire of postures. Always leaning forward with his hand on his thigh, fingers pointed in and elbow pointed out. He used his hands when he talked, flipping his palms upward in a gesture of offering.

Rickey always looked cool. He was a rock critic and looked the part. He always had a good haircut. He always wore the cool black ankle boots with the pointed toes. He knew how to wear a suit. He walked on his toes a bit which sort of accentuated his little belly. He always had just the right rock ‘n’ roll button on his bag or his jacket.

Rickey loved his cats, Chet and Kettle. When Chet was sick, he went through tremendous lengths and expense to try to keep him alive. When Kettle ran away, he consulted a pet psychic to find her, and found her. He used to talk about what a good soul Chet had and how you could see it in the little cat’s big eyes.

Rickey was funny and he had a distinctive voice. His vowels were long and rounded, came from the back of his throat, and were softened by his Virginia upbringing. He consistently pronounced our friend and coworker, Marc Greilsamer’s last name wrong…”Greeelshammer”. It made me grin.

One time Rickey was going through a radio junket being interviewed for the Grammys. I borrowed the tape so that I could use it to help me prepare when I’d have to do the same thing. I still have the tape. I never wanted to give it back to be filed in some dusty archive.

If you needed to know something about popular music, you could consult a book or go online, or you could talk to Rickey. A book or a website can provide you whatever infinite data you need: the cross references; the sidebars; the trivia, the discographies, track listings, and reviews. What a website or a book couldn’t give you was all that plus the passion, the conversation, the excitement, the joy, the love. That’s what Rickey gave in addition to his exceptional knowledge.

Rickey won the Rhino Records Geekus Maximus contest pitting music geek against music geek in a showdown of music minutiae. It was a nice little PR coup for Amazon and we were proud of him.

When we worked at Amazon in the early days, sometimes Rickey would come into work around 11:00 a.m. and leave at 4:00. He’d drink three or four diet cokes and would try to eat odd things for lunch. Sometimes he’d bring in a green or red pepper and try to eat them like you would an apple. Sometimes Rickey missed deadlines and sometimes the tools we used never quite worked for him. Sometimes Rickey would come into my office and he would stay too long. He often commented on how many long hours I put in and I wondered, with some resentment, why he wasn’t doing the same. Sometimes Rickey’s vices interfered with his work.

Amazon could be a brutal and unforgivable place and some of us had our identity wrapped up in it too much. Some of us took it too seriously. I was one of those people. I had so much to prove and to learn and I could only do it through my job, or so I thought. My relationship with Rickey at work was completely separated from our friendship outside. I was concerned for him and I went to our managers to express my concerns. As a result, Rickey was put on a performance plan and when it was time to lay people off, one day, Rickey found himself one of those people. On the day Rickey was fired, I told him I would meet him after work at a bar nearby. When I did, he was already, understandably, pretty well into the sauce. I was very honest with him about why I thought this happened. He rejected my theories. I’ll never forget the conversation but that is between Rickey and me.

I never confessed to Rickey that I was the little insipid mastermind behind his performance review. He would lay out his assumptions as to why it happened, who he thought had it out for him. Throughout our friendship he always used to thank me for my honesty. I would feel bad that he never knew, and wonder if he did actually know, and was just giving me an opportunity to come clean. He never would have confronted me directly because he was too kind for that. I always told him I strongly disagreed with his assumptions but I never told him why. I truly thought that it just wasn’t the right environment for Rickey.

And indeed it wasn’t. But now that I am older, and now that I am a bigger person, my attitude is different. Rickey was extraordinary. And extraordinary people need to be protected. They need to be preserved. They need license. Why couldn’t we have seen that? Why couldn’t we have *created* the environment for someone like Rickey? Why couldn’t we have nurtured, helped, compromised? Where was the effort in finding out how to do that but not cross the line into enabling? Why can’t we do that for all people? Maybe we did to some extent just by forcing the circumstance upon him. Maybe Rickey should always have been a freelancer. There were other permanent gigs he was passed over for after Amazon. But knowing Rickey made me come to this conclusion that all gifts of all people we know need to be celebrated and accommodated, not shoved aside to fit into the lane we’ve been assigned to on the track of our little daily rat races.

Rickey and I didn’t just talk about music. We talked a lot about love and relationships. Rickey loved his women. Kate and Jill and Becca and Carol and Julie and Bobbi and the other Bobbie and his mother and his friend in Florida and so many others whom I will think of later or never knew or met. He loved his niece and I heard stories about her since she was 13. How cool she was and, of course, what music she was interested in. We all felt tremendous affection for him too. I never had a conversation with Rickey that didn’t last for hours. I never had a conversation *about* Rickey that didn’t last for hours. Everyone else will say the same. Rickey always made you feel special and loved.

“Beth, you’re so great. I really love you.”

“I really love you too Rickey.”

If you had an opinion or passion about music, Rickey wanted to hear about it and was vested in it. His brain was so huge, it was like he had this never-ending capacity for listening, absorbing, processing, recording, and delivering a response that was totally in tune with whatever it was the other person wanted to say. The last conversation we had about music, we were discussing the self-titled debut by Robyn. He thought it was a great album. I thought it was too derivative and was carried too heavily by the single.

So, back to love (it is hard to talk about conversations with Rickey without digressing into conversations about music). Rickey really wanted to be in a relationship. We talked about it a lot. For all of his achievements and his friends and the love that surrounded him, I think that this is the one thing he really wanted that remained elusive throughout his life. We would talk about it for hours and hours, always on the phone. There were things I always wanted to say to him regarding this topic. Things that would be rather direct and hard to hear. My honesty with Rickey was always pure, but couched, cushioned. He was so incredibly gentle and sweet, how could anyone ever not be that way with him in return?

You know, over the last week, since we all got the news that Rickey had the stroke, music has seemed clearer. Sad songs feel sadder and happy songs feel happier. Air seems richer and hugging my husband or a friend feels more sensual. Rickey’s intense, single-minded, pure and bottomless love for music, and love for love, is what I will keep with me always every time I play a song. He gave that out into the world and what he gave will remain with us always, but it ends today, and I feel an enormous vacuum now in that regard. I write this and I can’t believe I will never again in my life have one of my marathon conversations with Rickey. I write this now and I worry it is too soon or too much or not enough, but I don’t know what else to do with these feelings that I have and I won’t know what to do with them when I finish writing this. I always felt very deeply that Rickey would not live a long life. But I realize today no matter how long he lived, it never would have been long enough for what he put out there….it’s enormous and irreplaceable.

Rickey and I only ever talked about two things: music and love. Our last conversation was about the latter. It occurred around the beginning of January. We hadn’t talked for a while and he found me on online and we had an online chat. Sometimes Rickey would feel anxious or depressed. I think this is well known to everyone who knew him. He was anxious about being in his mid-40s and not being in a relationship. I have always expressed myself better in writing than in speaking (I know you feel sorry for me now that you know this). As gently and as lovingly as I possibly could, I said to Rickey the things I had been wanting to say to him for so very many years, pulling no punches and being as direct as possible.

I’m not sure how much of that I want to reveal here because it was so private and it was about Rickey’s most private feelings. But I will say that the last conversation I had with Rickey was the most honest, and therefore the most loving, I had ever had with him.

I checked in on him a while later. This is the last correspondence we ever had:

Rickyfb

Life here, Rickey, is heavy without you, darling. I love you and I miss you so much. I know where ever you are now, it is all up and will never be down again.