LUDIC LOG

It's hard to write remembrances of people you admire; the tendency is to become maudlin, or mawkish, or to engage in cheap pop-cultural eulogizing. I didn't know Johnny Cash or Warren Zevon; standing ten feet away from the latter as he played at After The Gold Rush is the closest I got to either of them. Mourning the death of an artist you admire is nothing like mourning the death of a wife, a child, a friend -- the distance mitigates. When someone you know dies, they take away the thing you loved the most about them -- themselves, their presence, their being. But when an artist dies, they tend to leave behind the thing you loved about them -- their art.

I didn't love the Man in Black or Ol' Velvet Nose because they loved me back, or because I stayed up and talked to them all night long, or because they relied on me to shelter them from the world, or for any of the other reasons you might love someone. I loved them because they made music. They didn't make it for me, but there were many times when I felt as if it were written for me, when it was easy to forget that millions of other people had heard the same songs. Did they react the same way that I did? Did it mean as much to them? It hardly seems possible, but reading the testimonials, it must be the case. The essence of what these remarkable men were lives on as long as their songs can be heard, so it doesn't seem appropriate to mourn; only to remember.

***

Eight years old, listening to my father's eight-track tape player -- yes, there really were such things, and we owned one. It was my primary source of music when I was that age. There was never rock 'n' roll in our house; Mom didn't like anything with bass or drums in it, and Dad only listened to old-school country music. I didn't much care for Mom's saccharine-stringed Muzak, so when I'd come home, a latchkey kid on my own and desperate for music to keep me company (even then, I preferred music to television and books to people), it was Dad's collection I'd scrounge through. I loved Flatt & Scruggs the best, all those sharp ringing notes, the blinding speed and glossy energy of the banjo. Patsy Cline had a voice that made me develop a crush on her even though she'd been dead for nearly 20 years and I didn't know what she looked like, and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings are the first people I can remember impressing me with their ability to write good songs. But when Dad would ask me who I liked, I would always shout: "Johnny Cash!" Because of the chicka-boom, the images of trains and rivers, the absurdly catchy horns on "Ring of Fire" -- my favorite song as a kid -- and because of that voice, that amazing voice: "Johnny Cash!"

***

My second year of college. I was a full-blown punk by this time; I listened to the Pixies and Big Black and Husker Du and Leaving Trains and I don't even remember now how -- or, more germanely, why -- I would have developed an interest in a man ten or fifteen years older than most of my musical idols, a man who chronicled the decadent California post-hippie scene I reviled so much, a man who palled around with Stevie Nicks and the Eagles. But it so happened that I had a work-study job, and paid my way through school as a security guard on campus, pulling the graveyard shift. I had to do the rounds, checking every building, completely alone at 3:30AM except for my Walkman. And the cassette that kept me feeling good, night after night, was an early Warren Zevon greatest-hits compilation, A Quiet Normal Life. His exceptional songwriting was good, sure, but it was the lyrics -- bitter but never defeated, amused and bemused, cynical but not cruel, incredibly witty and dry -- that made me know from the first moment I heard him (with that voice, the closest to my own of anyone I've ever known) that he was a kindred spirit. Warren Zevon had already become the kind of man I was on my way to becoming.

***

Mom and I didn't get along, musically speaking. For her, music ended for the most part around 1962, and anything with a remotely contemporary feel was nothing but "electric noise". And yet, and yet: to this day, the only rock 'n' roll song she really likes is Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini" -- despite the fact that it's one of his loudest, heaviest, most pure rock songs, she absolutely adores it. And still, again: a few years ago, I bought her the American Recordings series. She's never liked Dad's old-school country; she never cared for Johnny Cash; and she's never even heard of Will Oldham, and wouldn't like him if she did. But that Christmas, she put Johnny Cash's cover of "I See a Darkness" on the stereo I'd bought her for Christmas years before, and told me she was moved by it. So I am brought closer, in little moments, little ways, to my mother, through the work of two men I'd never have imagined she'd enjoy. Two men who had nothing in common save this, and that they died in the same week.

***

Innumerable other memories, inextricably linking their work and my life. Seeing X, the only band I've seen live more times than Warren Zevon, open for him -- the chroniclers of two very different versions of Los Angeles, where I was living at the time -- and being amazed that so many people left after their set. Listening to Johnny Cash on the stereo in my car, driving through rural Illinois with a good friend, both of us happy to be with each other, happy to have such great music to listen to. Sitting through an interminable, awful opening set by the Guess Who, twenty years past their expiration date, only to hear Zevon (playing with a three-piece band, no drums) rip out one of the most blistering guitar solos I've ever heard in my life. Going to see old episodes of Ranch Party at Chris & Heather's Record Round-Up, and watching Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two pull off a terrific version of "Get Rhythm"; slack-jawed in wonder: could Johnny Cash ever have been so young? Seeing Zevon (solo this time) for the first time in Chicago; for him it was a homecoming, and for me an arrival, commemorated by a staggeringly complex rendition of "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" on synthesizer. Working another graveyard-shift job as a file clerk for an insurance company, and walking to the bus stop as my shift ended at 7AM, hearing Johnny Cash sing "Sunday Morning Coming Down" like some gutter Jesus, who had suffered for my sins to such a degree that I didn't even have to commit them.

***

In the end, that's all you can do: listen, and remember.