What's Up?
We found each other again because I was trying to write a book.
That sounds more organized than it actually was. I had been looking for a subject for months, and a stack of yellow legal pads was the proof. I had started one novel about a lawyer, another about a family fighting over an estate, and a third about a teacher at a private school. I needed inspiration that came from something other than my own life.
I was teaching then, as I still am, and most days I'm happy with things. I teach literature, grade papers, and talk too much about music for a literature class. Every day, I try to make seventeen-year-olds believe that books were written by actual people instead of marble busts or artificial intelligence. I have a good office, a good marriage, a clean house, and I'm a pretty fine cook. The only thing giving me trouble was my next book.
One afternoon I found an old cassette in a box. It had a faded label with Andrew's writing on it, a date in 1987, and "Jimmy's" written on it. I popped it into my boom box and pushed play. It was us, back in the day. And we sounded... young.
Rick counted off pretty fast, as usual. Andrew told him (on an open mic) to calm down before we were even eight bars in. Dave’s amp was turned up nicely, and Eli popped in with a Casio that sounded like he got straight from a Toys R Us. It sounded really great. Wacky and strange, but great. Then my younger voice came in, higher than I remembered and trying very hard to sound excited.
I sat there and listened to the whole thing, twice. What struck me first was how cheerful we sounded. Even when we were singing about death, we sounded happy. Sure, Rick wanted everything faster and Andrew wanted everything steadier, but what kept coming out of the speakers was pure joy.
Jimmy's was almost empty that night, so we were really loose, like a rehearsal. That meant a lot of false starts, mistakes, interruptions, jokes, and everybody talking over everybody else. But it was fun. About halfway through the first listen, that entire night came flooding back to me. I remembered so much about that night - even the bartenders were into the vibe, dancing and throwing around as they wiped the tables and served the few patrons who stuck around.
That was great to hear, and to remember.
I started writing down the scenes I remembered from those years. I wrote about Kenner Bowl, where Rick first decided drums were the right instrument for a man with his ... um, let's say "gifts." I wrote about Andrew’s family restaurant, where he could carry four plates, settle a bill, and remember every customer’s name before he was old enough to vote. I wrote about Eli sitting on Decatur Street with a tape recorder, two books, and an expression that made tourists wonder whether he had just insulted them.
And I wrote about all of us as a group of friends - that night, driving to Biloxi at two in the morning because somebody said they wanted to see the beach. Rick drove, and of course he never looked at the gas meter so we ran out of gas near Slidell. Dave walked into a gas station with a few dollars, bought a scratch-off ticket, and came back with six hundred dollars. Andrew observed that Dave had amazing luck, and even more so when he really needed it.
Andrew's voice kept ringing in my head. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to hear him, see how he's been doing. It had been, what, over twenty years since I'd seen him at the restaurant? I still had his number in my contact list, and I'd scroll past it sometimes and think that I should call. But I never did.
I had no idea whether the number still worked, so I sent a simple text. “Hey, it’s Thom. Don’t know if this is still your number, Andrew. I just wanted to check in. How are you?”
He wrote back three days later. “Took you long enough.” I knew enough about Andrew to know he wasn't really peeved. He was welcoming me into a conversation. So I called him that night, and within a few minutes we were talking the way we used to talk after rehearsal, when everybody was tired and nobody wanted to go home yet. Andrew told me about his wife, his kids, and the restaurant just off Magazine Street. I told him about teaching, the books, and the cassette I had found.
He remembered the rehearsal as well as I did. He even remembered the song, which didn't really surprise me. Andrew always remembered things and then would offer up observations about them when you weren't expecting it. Wisdom or just a patient memory? Probably a little of both.
Andrew said Dave would probably still have some of our old equipment and possibly the original recording. That turned out to be nearly true. Dave answered the phone when I called him the next week. He was wiring up an amplifier (it wasn't broken, but that never really mattered to Dave). When I mentioned the old songs, he asked whether I still had my Martin and the case with all the stickers and pins - I don't. I asked whether he still had the Gibson - of course he did.
Rick was harder to find because Rick had made a career out of being hard to find. Andrew eventually tracked him down in Alaska. When Rick answered, Andrew told him I was writing about the band. Rick said, “Who died?”
Eli was the hardest to find, but he always was. Dave had an old email address (bounced), I tried a few internet searches, and we came up empty. Rick claimed he could find him through “drummer channels,” which none of us really understood. I even looked through the obits. Eventually, Andrew found somebody who knew somebody in Portland, and then Eli appeared by email as if he had been standing beside us the whole time. I told him we might all get together sometime. He asked, “Do we still get to be weird?”
Through all this, I realized I was no longer just writing a book. I was going back in time. Maybe now we have jobs, families, mortgages, schedules, and reading glasses. But those songs have our youth in them, and now there's something even more that still binds us together. We're a group of old(er) friends who are still funny, still generous, still recognizable (Rick has suspiciously shaven his head - has he lost that incredible hair?), and still interested in the same odd little hobby we had started when we were young(er).
So that's what this is. We hope you feel as good as we do today. We’ve started playing them again. A few of them, anyway. Turns out they still know their way home.