I have a strange memory. I can remember things from when I was on the far side of toddler age, and yet, during the height of my depression there were times when I’d disassociate so badly that I’d lose whole days like sand through a sieve. I remember things I wish I could forget and have forgotten things I’d give anything to remember. Just as things were just starting to get black around the edges (I would have been only just sixteen) I remember lounging in my friend Carol’s bedroom, one lazy summer day in 1994. I was visiting for a long weekend at her home in Newburgh, New York and glad to be away from my own one horse town. As most kids my age did then, before the ubiquitous Internet hookup and despite her having cable and my own home not, I was reading her recent copy of Seventeen. Flip, flip, flip… pages of useless trash depicting ads of women who were thinner than I’d ever been and clothes I couldn’t have afforded in my wildest dream. The only thing that was even remotely interesting was the section on upcoming books, movies and music. I scanned, barely even paying attention.
You’ve read those reviews yourself, just because it was a teen magazine doesn’t mean that it was any less a.) gushing, or b.) deliberately snooty as a rule than any other collection of reviewers. I really can’t tell you why this particular review caught my eye more than any other, it was only a short collection of sentences and a tiny thumbnail picture, just like all the rest. The picture showed a man who looked like every other grunge rocker of the time, perhaps slightly better dressed, but just as scruffy. He clutched an old fashioned microphone in his hand and his face was bowed away from the camera. It wasn’t his picture that caught me so much as the way the reviewer described the album. I can’t tell you now, thirteen years later, what they said, only that there was a naked passion to the way his music had obviously touched the writer. Why I, a cash-strapped teen, should feel suddenly compelled to fork what little I had over on a complete no-name crooner is beyond me, but that I did when we took a trip to the mall the next day.
I practically wore that cassette tape out. I played it over and over again, struck dumb at first at the raw emotion recorded on that thin brown ribbon of tape. Play, rewind, play, rewind. One song in particular was in danger of wearing through. I didn’t know that it was a cover, I only found that out years later, from my father of all people (who has very limited American cultural references before a certain age), not that I cared then or care now. I used to carry around my Walkman every where I went and I’d sit in the darkroom at school and surround myself by that red glow and his angelic voice. It was seven minutes of escape, seven minutes when I was utterly transported and all that mattered was a darkness I’d chosen, and the sound of his voice. I’d try and match him note for note but there was no way I could hold a note as long as that man could. He could draw it out to it’s shivering end, long after I’d run out of breath. I’d force other kids, people who were barely friendly to me, to listen to his song. I’m surprised I wasn’t teased about it, they were probably freaked out. While the tape is long gone, I’d (illegally) downloaded the song a few years ago and then lost it again.
Two days ago I had one of my mental zig-zag moments that ended with the intense desire to download the entire album off of iTunes, instant gratification at it’s finest. God… pressing play was like pressing hard on an old wound, one that never quite stopped aching somewhere deep inside. Every time I hear that song I’m taken back in time, to that darkroom, to complete and utter silence where only his voice filled the darkness behind my eyes. Listening to him sing is like taking out a photograph of a dead lover, long gone but still possessing the power to move you to tears though you’ve very much moved on. It has that bittersweet ache and I’m sixteen all over again. I listen and close my eyes, I listen and I raise my voice in time with his. I watched the video and I’m reminded how sweetly he gave his heart to me, to everyone.
Summer of 2007 marked the ten year anniversary of his death and I’m not surprised I’ve been thinking about his music more and more subconsciously. I’ve always said that drowning’s not a bad way to go, having been mostly there myself once. He died the day after my 19th birthday. I wish this video, the only good version I can find that's embeddable, hadn't cut out the beginning of the song. That soft breath that is part of what makes this song what it is to me. That breath takes me back, every time. I miss you
Jeff.
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content
tired
accomplished
exhausted
creative
hopeful
amused
pleased
nostalgic
