The Day the Music Would Die …

Backstory:  It’s the winter of 1977, just between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m home from my first semester at college. There’s a benefit concert over in the chapel at Vassar College which is less than five miles from my home. Ah, Vassar College. Recently (in ’77), made coeducational, most of the women dreamed of being the next Gloria Steinman or Betty Friedan. The guys who chose to attend Vassar in those early years were way too artsy and sexually ambiguous for college girls, even Vassar girls, so picking them up was as easy as shooting ducks in a barrel. All you had to do was mention Joan Baez or Judy Collins, be pro-ERA and abortion and you were in. We loved going to Vassar.
           
There’s a benefit for some cause and Don McLean and Harry Chapin were playing; each a solo, acoustic act; each with a few hits already. Chapin wrote and sang the soulful ballad of a father looking back on not being there for his son in “Cats in the Cradle,” and “Taxi.” But, it was Don McLean we were going to see. He had a beautiful ballad about Vincent Van Gough that I found myself humming as I ran on those fall college days:

                        “Starry Starry night

                        picture palate blues and greys
                        look out on a summer’s day
                        with eyes to dark to see …”

It was McLean’s other song, his ten to fifteen minute FM dirge about the death of Buddy Holly that we all wanted to hear and sing along to. We were all young and brash, too brash really. We were middle class kids whose fathers all worked for IBM. We were all in college and had the world waiting on us. We knew nothing of war, disease, or distress. We had all the answers. Problem was, we knew none of the questions. There we were listening to a guy not much older than us tell us about dreams dying:

“A long, long time ago

                         I can still remember how that music used to
                         make me smile.
                        And I knew if I had the chance
                        That I could make those people dance
                        And maybe they’d be happy for awhile
                       
                        But February made me shiver
                       With every paper I delivered
                       Bad news on the doorstep
                       I couldn’t take one more step
           
                       I can’t remember if I cried
                      When I read about his widowed bride
                      But something touched me deep inside
                     The day the music would die …”

And we sang “American Pie” and we thought we knew everything he was talking about. And you know what? We didn’t have a clue …

Fast forward to the present.  It’s Thanksgiving, my sixth one behind bars. I listen to a lot of old music. No offense to “artists” today, but music is all over-commercialized, over-dubbed, and recorded. You want music that matters; you turn to Dylan, the Dead, the Allman Brothers, and Bob Marley. Hell, I sit around now wearing out a Jimmy Buffet compilation and the guys look at me like I’m listening to big band swing music (check that, they don’t know what the big band era was and “swing” music gets a glazed over stare). Still, they gather around me for lyrical pearls of wisdom.

I keep a three ring binder full of song lyrics, close to one hundred and fifty songs. I use lyrics daily; like trying to explain poetry to guys in the creative writing class, I pull out the Beatles’ “Let it Be” –
           
           “When I find myself in times of trouble
            Mother Mary comes to me
            Speaking words of wisdom
            Let it be.

And in my hour of darkness

            She is standing right in front of me
            Speaking words of wisdom
            Let it be.”

I don’t know what Lennon and McCartney had in mind when they wrote that, I just know as I read the words guys who never heard that haunting piano accompany Paul nodded and said, “he’s talking about peace, and patience, and mercy.”

The music. There are a thousand lines that remind me of her, of us. “Time in a Bottle,” sung at our wedding; dancing on our deck as I whispered “Tupelo Honey,” in her ear. There’s holding both our sons mere seconds after they entered the world and quietly singing “Forever Young” as if with those words I was armoring them for adulthood. Funny, but I can’t watch “Parenthood” on TV because they use “Forever Young” as their opening music.

It was the music, the lyrics that kept me going so many times in here. I don’t know how many nights I wondered, “can I get through this?” and a song would come to me. I couldn’t shake Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe” when I doubted my God, my hope, and my faith:

“Lord won’t you tell us tell us what does it mean

            So at the end of every hard earned day people
            Find some reason to believe …”

When I’d try and find it again it was Seger and “Running Against the Wind,” and Marley’s “Redemption Song” and “No Woman No Cry” that helped me click the laps off and find my balance.

Music. I talk music daily with Saleem and DC (old Motown stuff like Wilson Pickett and James Brown; the Supremes, Marvin Gaye), and Craig and Omar (the 70’s and 80’s before disco and rap and techno and syrupy pop sung by Barbie wanna-bes). It was during one of those conversations when a buddy said he couldn’t make it and reach his dreams outside. I looked at him and just hit him with Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” –

            “Well everything dies baby that’s a fact
            But everything that dies some day comes back …”

He looked at me for the longest time and then said, “you’re saying I died in here, but I can get it all back?” “Something like that,” I replied and I watched him roll those words around in his head and find that glimmer of self-confidence and hope he needed to try and get clear of this place.

Sounds stupid, right? Until you remember how Scottish soldiers carried their dead king off the battlefield singing the Psalter “God Our Help in Ages Past,” or churches for centuries beginning Advent Season with “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, Come to Set Thy People Free …”

Freedom. I tried to count all the references in the Bible to God freeing “the prisoners.” The captive, you see, are in God’s loving arms. The music frees the captive’s soul.

            And I keep thinking about Don McLean. He thought the music died:
            “And the three men I admired most
            The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
            They caught the last train for the coast
            The day the music would die.”

The music didn’t die. It was always there, always with words giving meaning to the confusion that too often is our life. So the guys come around all the time and ask questions – I get bombarded with questions – and I try and give straight answers. Somehow, to make my point, to close the case, I hit them with a lyric. And a light goes off, and they get it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about music during this Thanksgiving season. I’ve learned a lot in here, and there are blessings even in difficulties. The music keeps playing and I keep going.

            “Well it’s all right, even if they say you’re wrong

            Well it’s all right, sometimes you gotta be strong
            Well it’s all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay
            Well it’s all right, every day is Judgment day”
            “Well it’s all right, even when push comes to shove
            Well it’s all right, if you got someone to love
            Well it’s all right, everything will work out fine
            Well it’s all right, we’re going to the end of the line”
            “Well it’s all right, even if you’re old and grey
            Well it’s all right, you still got something to say
            Well it’s all right, remember to live and let live
            Well it’s all right, the best you can do is forgive.”

I think the Traveling Wilburys had it right. 1977, Vassar College, and I heard that the music died. Thirty-six years later with failures and disappointments a mile high and I feel more hopeful. And, the music still lives; the words still give meaning even in here.

            “Yes my guard stood hard when abstract threats

            To noble to neglect
            Deceived me into thinking
            I had something to protect
            Good and bad, I define these terms
            Quite clear, no doubt somehow
            Ahh, but I was so much older then
            I’m younger than that now.”

                                                        Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages”