Sing me back home

By Eric Marks

"We played king of the mountain
out on the end
The world came charging up the hill,
and we were women and men
We stood side by side,
each one fighting for the other
We swore until we died
we'd always be blood brothers"
- Bruce Springsteen, "Blood Brothers"

It's late on Friday night, and if you walked past my apartment, you'd think there was a freight train barrelling through it. My $30 stereo's turned up loud enough that the speakers are popping. The sounds of sparking, crashing wheels are beaten strings, and the long, soulful wail rising from the background is a harmonica. In the middle of it all, Bruce Springsteen is belting out the chorus of Atlantic City: Everything dies, baby, that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back - I'm singing along, or trying to. My voice is too thick, and I keep choking up. This is the closest I've come to getting hammered since I quit drinking nine years ago, and I haven't touched a drop. I'm high on music and memories, riding a crashing, jangling locomotive into the past. I'm waking a dead friend the only way I know how - playing the songs we used to listen to, singing us both back home.

"Sing me back home with a song I used to hear, make my old memories come alive." It's a Merle Haggard song, but the version I heard first and like best was by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Like most of the music I've been introduced to since my teens, I heard it while sitting around drinking coffee in my cousin Bruce's livingroom. Bruce and his wife, Tammy, welcomed most anyone who came to call, and on winter weekends there was often lots of company. The usual crowd was small, though - just Bruce, Tammy and little Billy Joe, Bruce's best friend, Gerald, and me. Warm, cavernous and dark, that old country parlour was our salon, our tavern, our coffeehouse, our Open University. Like all good gathering places, it had its moment, but the moment lasted five years or so, long enough for each of us to introduce the others to favourite music and books and movies and make new discoveries. This being a truly small town - a village, in fact - we'd all grown up together, gone to school for seven grades, drifted apart and then together again in our late teens, discovering we shared a curiosity about the world that set us apart from many of our neighbours. We liked new experiences and we educated ourselves by reading and listening to whatever we could find. We each had our preferences. Bruce liked the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Johnny Cash, The Who, Black Flag. Tammy favoured The Band and Tom Waits. Gerald liked The Police, Dire Straits, Stewart Copeland, Andy Summers, Mark Knopfler. I brought Laurie Anderson, Hüsker Dü, Pete Townshend, Scott Merritt. We mixed them together and wound up with Miles Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Ginger Baker, Victoria Williams, Chet Baker, John Cage, Captain Beefheart, Kate Bush, Dizzie Gillespie, Giant Sand, Jean Sibelius, Fred Eaglesmith, John Zorn, Edgard Varese. Looking back, none of us had much, and much of what we did have was free or almost free - spectacular lightning storms and second-hand records, shooting stars and panfried scallops fresh from the dock, strong coffee and 3 a.m. drives, easy conversations and the soothing rhythm of the waves. We listened to thousands of songs and watched dozens of concerts and movies, spent hundreds of nights talking and listening. We became landmarks in each other's geography. Bruce and Gerald and I even took a road trip once - a musical pilgrimage - pooling our money and tuning up the $1,000 car and driving almost to the New York border to hear The Rollins Band playing with Jane's Addiction. It was one of the first dates of the tour that turned into Lollapalooza, the Woodstock-wannabe event of our musical generation. On the way down, we stopped in Lowell, Mass. to visit the grave of Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, paying tribute to the original road bum and Lonesome Traveller. Gerald, a man of a few words but always choice ones, brushed the dirt off the sunken headstone and delivered the eulogy: "Jack Kerouac - he sure loved music. He wrote great books." After the concert, we drove all the way back in one night with just one speeding ticket, a caffeine and adrenaline induced feat Kerouac would have appreciated.

The great blessing of living in a village is that you grow up knowing everyone, and the great curse is that you grow up losing everyone. The road home becomes a ghost road, a path strewn with landmines that explode in the past.
I could drive it with my eyes closed. Someday, I will.
A friend of mine, who takes beautiful photographs, asks me why I never take pictures of my home town. I want to tell her it's because I can't see it, the way fish can't see the water in which they swim. It's not so much a place as it is an environment. I don't visit home; it surrounds me, and I breathe it in. My cousin Bruce's old house is on the ghost road. He's in B.C. now. His son, Billy Joe, is almost as old as we were then. He's as gentle and intelligent as each of his parents, and just as enthusiastic about music as he was as child. His horizons have been shaped by all of us. Gerald's house is there, too, but I can't look at it just yet. He died in a fishing accident last Friday, near the beach at Giffin Pond where we all used to hike for picnics in the summer. It's a beautiful place, wild and rugged. It makes no difference at all. I put on a CD before I called Bruce to tell him: Warren Zevon, one of our favourites. For old times' sake, I played "Play It All Night Long." Then, for Gerald, Zevon's swan song, "Keep Me In Your Heart For A While."
In the days to come, I know Bruce will do the same thing: pull a recording out, or a stack of them, as I've done tonight, listening for the chords that connect us to one another and the past.

The harmonica is wailing on my stereo again. Springsteen's still singing, the CD almost finished now, and for the first time in 40 minutes I find myself listening to the music instead of just soaking it in. And suddenly I'm overwhelmed, hearing the words as though for the first time, the sadness swelling in my throat, the anger screwing my eyelids shut against the tears and clenching my fists until my knuckles go white.
<> And just as suddenly, it's over. The CD hisses to a stop. The phantom train has left the station, leaving me in the present, still sad but growing more at ease with moving on.
I'm home. Really home.
I hope Gerald is, too.

"On through the houses of the dead,
past those fallen in their tracks
Always moving ahead and never looking back
Now I don't know how I feel -
I don't know how I feel tonight,
if I've fallen 'neath the wheel,
if I've lost or I've gained sight
I don't even know why -
I don't know why I made this call
or if any of this matters anymore, after all
But the stars are burning bright
like some mystery uncovered
I'll keep moving through the dark
with you in my heart,
my blood brother."

Eric Marks is a newspaper editor. He lives in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, on the shores of the Gulf of Maine.