Octavio Cavalli and Robert Rosen at Cafe Reggio, NYC, 2014.
“Do you know Mary Lyn Maiscott?” Octavio Cavalli asked my husband, Robert Rosen, tonight during an interview on his Buenos Aires podcast,Lennoncast. It was a joke, of course, and then Octavio surprised me by playing my version of “You Can’t Do That,” from my Blue Lights CD. He’d been talking to Bob via Skype for nearly an hour about Bob’s book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, conducting the interview in English but with immediate Spanish translations for his Latin American audience. Octavio, who has also written a bio of John, Bendito Lennon, punctuated their conversation with a few Lennon songs—as Octavio explained something in Spanish, I suddenly heard the definitely English words “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.”
It was an honor to have my Beatles cover end their segment, especially appropriate since I sang the song at the publication party for Bob’s book in 2000. Latin America loves John Lennon and also Bob and his book—we’ve been there a few times and have always gotten a gracious and enthusiastic reception. Luckily for me, as people there embraced Bob, they did the same to me, with Guillermo Henry in Mexico City playing Blue Lights in its entirety for his Radio Etiopía show in 2007. So gracias to Octavio and everyone who listened or will listen to the interview and the song (Episode 3, which will be up within a few days)!