I remember the moon landing so vividly, mainly because of the company I was keeping. I was eight years old and visiting my mother’s family in Nashville, like I did every summer. At the time my Aunt Frances had a salon going pretty much 24/7 and all these characters would come and hang out by the pool. One of them was Tupper Saussy, who was a genius advertising guy and a pretty good painter and a great composer who had a bunch of Top 40 hits, including "Heidy Ho Princess" and "Morning Girl," which is still one of the great songs, with a band called the Neon Philharmonic.

Anyway, when it was time for the landing everyone gathered around the TV in the playroom – all the adults in  bathing suits and cover-ups with Bloody Marys in hand, and my cousins and me on the floor, and  Tupper took a seat at the piano and scored the whole thing on the spot. There was a little Beethoven (as there always is in any Tupper song), but it was mostly pure Tupper – over-the-top, dramatic, virtuosic and absolutely perfect for the moment.

Tupper always was a renegade. He and his then-wife Lola had marijuana growing in the window boxes of their house on the very august Belle Meade Boulevard, and later on he became a fairly famous income-tax dodger. After years on the lam somewhere in the islands, he served a little time, and when he got out he moved back to Nashville and started his music career up again. He was so talented, you can’t believe it (you can still find the Neon Philharmonic on Amazon, along with his crazy books on the evils of government), so it made me really sad when he had a heart attack – while writing lyrics on his computer – and died instantly a couple of years ago in his apartment back on Belle Meade. Neil Armstrong and Tupper are forever linked in my mind, which would probably come as a big shock to Armstrong.