Long Time Gone

If I might make a suggestion to the reader this piece will make more sense if you either listen to this YouTube audio clip or have it playing in the background while you read the post. 

Memory is a tricky thing.  Reminiscence tends to remove all the warts and rough bits of years gone by.  The dark stuff in the past is why rich people/urban people have psychotherapists I guess. Lying down on a couch with a disinterested third party helps them to cut through the layers of gauzy and obscuring thoughts that cover over what happened so long ago.

Sometimes human memory is really just not effective. We forget some key person or event because some brain cells have died and the pathway to an experience is gone. Trauma, beer and age these all work against keeping the threads of the past close. I hope I can hold on to some things from my youth as my remaining few years fly by. This desire to remember is why I write this stuff down.

Music is intricately related to my memories.  Some songs put me in a place or with a person so clearly that it is almost like I am there. Sometimes it is the tune and sometimes it is the words that open the door that makes the connection to a past long distant and gone.  Sometimes it is something that lies above or beyond both of these that make a song a key to a specific time and place.

The commerce of ideas amongst my current friends these days often takes the form of trading music. Whether it is the gift of a play list from ITunes or a disk shipped off in the mail, music has been a very important coin of the realm of my generation. In engaging in this trade amongst my cronies I often find myself listening to a song I have heard quite literally 200 or 300 times before as I sit and assemble a playlist to burn and ship off. Some of those songs are just so much pleasant aural wallpaper.

Other times, each time I hear the opening chord I know exactly what the song means in the context of my life. In listening to a song sometimes I don't hear what the singer is singing. Instead I am transported to the time at which that song became part of my life. 

Gregg Allman's Multicolored Lady is one such song for me. The song is pretty and the song is melancholy but what the song's lyrics say means nothing to me. The meaning comes from my memory of where I heard it first and who I heard it from. Every single time I hear it I am awash in the smells, sounds and feeling of one very short period of time in Pedricktown.

When I listen to this song it does not remind me of a past love. Seems odd doesn't it that what is clearly a love ballad doesn't mean a damn thing to me about love. What I hear inside my head when the song plays is the voice of one of the lost people from my youth.

When the music starts time is stripped away. Before the lyrics even begin it is the winter of 1974-1975 again and I am home from university on Christmas holiday. In a dull gray winter light a tall and lanky figure leans over the juke box in a small café and he is punching up that song. That solitary figure is a ghost.  He is of the past and of places long gone.

Once upon a time and hundreds of miles from where I live now my Uncle Walt opened a little restaurant. Walt's little lunch counter sat pretty much square in the center of my little hometown in part of an old warehouse.  The few tables and lunch counter there were for a short time a crossroads of the town. Walt (or Timer as he was known) cooked and served the kind of things you'd find in any South Jersey lunch counter; coffee, greasy eggs and sandwiches. The restaurant was small and funky but the times I was in there place seemed to do a good business. Walt is dead and the restaurant is long gone. The song does not bring Walt to mind; his is not his voice I hear.

Walt as a personal aside was damaged goods, to be sure, but he was an adequate and serviceable cook. The years he had lived away had taught him the basics of feeding a large group, effectively, quickly and with sufficient presentation so as to not piss off a hungry clientele. His restaurant was nothing more than about a quarter of an old warehouse with tacked up walls to separate the dining area from the large empty storage space. Surely in the winter it was cold, in the summer it was hot, but for a little while it existed there in my hometown.

Walt’s place had a Formica counter and counter stools. It had maybe one pool table, two pinball machines and no liquor license. On one New Year’s Eve that lack of a license did not matter.  To this day I can remember a hopped up Walt up on the counter all 300 pounds of him. He was up there with a lei around his neck doing some kind of drunken dance as the ball was preparing to drop 90 miles away in NYC. Clearly he was several sheets to the wind as he was shimmying and shaking in his kitchen cook’s white. But I digress.

The most important thing to me in Walt’s place was the juke box. For the time and the place, a small town in the marshes of South Jersey in an old warehouse turned greasy spoon, it had a phenomenal jukebox. God in the 1970s you savored those places. Some of the songs I remember on the thing were Mott the Hoople's All the Young Dudes, Elvis Presley's singing Chuck Berry's Promised Land and Gregg Allman's Multicolored Lady.

It seems to me that the first time and every time I heard that Allman tune start to play I would look over to the wall where the juke box sat and there would be a mass of shaggy blond hair hanging over the Rockola. That hair was a veritable lion's mane pushing up out of a faded and frayed army surplus jacket. Smoking what were most likely Marlboros or Kools (I don’t remember which but did teenager boys smoke anything else back then) the button pusher will always be leaning balanced with one hand resting on the glass of that phenomenal juke box.

Smiling in what can be best described as a "What the fuck?" grin he scanned the song list. Finally, he sees what might be D 11, I just don't remember the actual number, and then he punched it in. Using one extended finger, a lit cigarette cradled between the punching finger and his middle finger and smoke curling out of his nostrils, he picked Multicolored Lady. Alan (Deacon) Jones loved that song. Deacon repeatedly pumped quarters into that machine and he did it while sipping a coke and smoking a cigarette.  All the while his mind was whirling.

In those whirling thoughts he was almost certainly planning the night ahead even as the first strains of the tune started to play.  The plan was simple, repetitive and well appreciated in our small town which was like every other small town in America where stake trucks hauled produce in on hot summer days. The plan would consist of an evening of cruisin’ the back roads seven ounce beers sitting between our legs cranking up the Alice Cooper or Led Zepplin and chain smoking cigarettes. The cycle was predictable; cigarette, beer, change the 8 track tape, another beer.  I won’t lie there were some joints smoked on those back road rides sometimes. The days back then in small town America meant work at whatever meaningless, manual task could be had.  But the night, ah the night, it was a party crammed into a little Chevy Vega crisscrossing the back roads.

Got on a bus in Memphis, destination Rome.

Georgia ain't no paradise but a place I just call home.

I sat next to a broken hearted bride

She was cryin', tryin' so hard to hide her selfish sorrow.

I tried to get her talkin'

She didn't have much to say

She asked me for a map to death row

But I didn't know the way

She had lost a million in the game

One look out the window at the pine trees and the rain

It wasn't her day.

Multicolored ladyyou ain't like no rainbow I've ever seen

Multicolored lady

Angry red, passion blue,

but mostly shades of green

Midnight came and brought more rain,

nothing seemed to ease her pain.

The hours that we talked seemed like minutes

all in vain.

I watched as her tears kept runnin' wide

Bye and bye and bye,

way back after a while

She started smilin'.

Multicolored lady

You ain't like no rainbow I've ever known.

Multicolored lady

Come go with me,

I'll take you to my home

Oh, by the way, I'm bound for Rome.

I had known Deac since we were tiny.  He was a couple of years older than me but we were close enough in age that we were out on the playground together. We scrambled around in the same dusty brown dirt of the school yard that lay behind the blacktop but before the swamp at roughly the same time.

Once he ran over me on his brand new five speed bike as I walked out of the Pedricktown bank.  You might remember the bank had that weird front door that didn’t allow you a good view in either direction.  His bike was new and he was pumping those pedals faster than hell. When he hit me I went flying, he went flying and the thirty bucks my Mom had sent me to get out of the bank went flying.  Deac got up, helped me up and helped me pick up the bills. He really was a decent guy.  No malice, no anger, he was really just a good guy.

In high school we rode the school bus together. Hell we got thrown of the school bus together for throwing shit out the bus windows on the ride home one day. Mr. Dietrich did not appreciate that. Rules were rules. Together we begged a ride to school with somebody else for that next week. 

Still the image of Deac I remember most comes from a time when I was in that grimy little dinner on a day when I was home that winter home on break from university. Sitting at that lunch counter, drinking sodas and me smoking my Newports he was the only person in that place and he was once again playing that song.  We drank our sodas and talked about what college was like and what he was doing.  But the time my cigarette had burnt down to the cork tipped filter that song got stuck in my memory forever.

For me he is eternally staring down at the glass of the jukebox almost wistfully. The song is playing softly. It always seemed odd to me that this sturdy self confident 19-year old would be drawn to such a romantic ballad. Deacon had a girlfriend, was well liked and the lonesome lament in this song seemed to have no place in his world. Mott the Hoople's Sweet Jane (another of his favorites) I could understand, but not this one, at least not for him.

Me, as the years went on, I would come to love the Allman song. But I was always insecure and any song that played on self doubt and sadness was right up my alley. Still he treasured that song and I just couldn't wrap my mind about the why of that fact. At first I though it might have been an accident that he played it. But the over those days and weeks when I was home quarters kept dropping in, and the tune kept playing. For months the song stayed in the juke box.

That song was there spinning on that old Rockola when I left to go back to college after spending some time home. And each time I came back, it might be a little scratchier but it was still playing. In the end it was still there when I came home after the close of my freshman school year to say good-bye to Deac.

In June there I was 600 miles from South Jersey waiting for my parents to come get me in the big old Ford LTD for the ride back from Michigan. About an hour before they were due into East Lansing to pick me up the phone in my dorm room rang. As I picked up the phone my older sister (my only sister) started talking quickly. She wanted to tell me to tell my Dad to come home as fast as he could.

She felt it was important and she put it on me to tell my Dad that Deac was dead. I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anybody from back in the day that Allan's Dad was one of my Dad's best friends. Our family’s presence at the funeral was thus appropriate. I did as instructed. I told my Dad the sad news and we hauled ass back to Jersey in time for the funeral.

As I understand it Deacon had drowned in a farm pond swimming. His death was a tough hit for me and for everyone in town. Deacon was one of the good guys. He was cheerful and affable.  He liked me and at that time having somebody like me was important. Instead of treating me like dirt the way some other people we mutually knew did, he and I hit it off on some minor level. When we talked there was some substance to it. He knew I had a different future from him and some of the others there in South Jersey but he understood.  He knew I wasn’t judging him for whatever he would do with his life. Farm, factory, sales or whatever he was going to do okay. Sad sometimes the twists life takes.

Each time I hear that song, I'm in a dingy little diner, I have a cigarette lit, a Coke is cradled in my hand and it is 1975. And Deac is punching in that song one more time.