Painting
First appeared in Portland Magazine, Winter 2011
I never never never in all my living days have understood how he got that sound from a crummy old tinny old Stratocaster, tones in anyone else’s hands would be wheedle-thin, but that was Stevie Ray Vaughan. His signature was clear within a couple bars of one of his tunes spilling out the radio, the density of those notes pure unequivocal evidence that sometimes a conversation about bigger things occurs between musician and instrument. I had a music gig at the Laurelhurst Pub the night Stevie died. It was a duo with my husband, and I remember we were both too upset at the news of the helicopter crash that killed Stevie Ray to play our own tunes, so we just filled the place with Stevie songs, many of which I only knew the lyrics part-way through, but just let words find me and made up strings of things to sing about while Dave played the songs on his Gibson guitar, and so was born some weird hybrid hodgepodge of the memory of Stevie through his music and two young indie rockers at a bar in Portland, Oregon.
We did not sound like the stuff of legend, but if someone had told me that far into the future, some 21 years later, that night would be one stuck in my mind, resonating as some sort of validation for why we do the things we do…It was a random night, the bar fairly empty, a gig amidst many gigs Dave and I played throughout the 90s. I probably wore jeans and a t-shirt and my black boots. I had probably scrawled out the set list on the back of one of our posters while sitting in the passenger seat on the drive over. I can still see Dave plugging in the guitar, I my mic, us about to begin, looking at each other and saying, “This isn’t going to work tonight.”
Who knows what would have happened if the club had been jumping with fans or if it had been a Saturday night instead of a Monday? But with the gratitude that only hindsight delivers, I believe all the circumstances aligned to promote an evening that started out as any other and ended as a map pin in the geography of memory. We didn’t break into one of our edgy folk tunes. Dave’s fingers decided on a blues progression and for the rest of the night we riffed and wove our way through one Stevie tune after another, improvising off choruses, Dave’s solos and my singing blurring recall with in-the-moment chord and word choices.
Like Stevie Ray, Dave was largely self-taught and never learned to read music. He had struggled with severe dyslexia his whole life, and credited this brain glitch with forcing him to find his own sound in his own way. And he did. The tunes we wrote together won national songwriting awards, charted across the country, and spilled out over five records, tours, and countless shows. And both Dave and Stevie died young. That’s where the comparisons rest. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s memorial statue is in Austin. There is no statue of Dave following his sudden death at age 44, but two decades following that night at the Laurelhurst, on the morning of the lowest tide of the year, our two kids dig a hole near Proposal Rock at Neskowin beach on the Oregon Coast and overturn the box we were given after Dave’s cremation. Before covering the hole with sand they each scoop up a handful, their hands covered in ash like gloves, walk to the shoreline, bend down, and reach for the waves. After, we walk back to the rented beach house, all the cousins and aunts and uncles, Dave’s brother and mom. We make waffles, the kids run around the yard. I sit on the deck and listen. There is a particular resonance to children’s voices, their under-developed pitch. Gulls above squawk a peculiar fugue. The ocean fills every left-over soundspace. Sitting there, I remember Dave and I had to shout our vows on our wedding day to be heard over the waves as we stood on that very beach at Neskowin, giggling, “What?” Joking and cupping a hand to ear, “Eh? Can you say that again?”
But even the repetition of promises could not bind the threads of years like an unwinding spool uncoiling time spent like stitches and after twelve years together, the rings came off. I didn’t sing for seven years after the divorce–not my songs, not improvised lyrics over the melodies of other songs. I could hardly even listen to the radio. And ten years later, on the night Dave died, my children’s questions run through me not as words, not semantics, but as sounds, blurs of tones with a singular cadence, the language of hospital sounds, beeping machines and crying. The sound of Dave’s mom sucking in her breath as she gasps over and over in a pattern, a rhythm, sitting in a chair in ER next to her son. I remember the music from Shrek 4 but not what happened in the movie. When we returned home from the hospital we crawled into my bed with my laptop, my kids wanting to watch Shrek. They had planned to watch it with their papa. So all night long we curled around each other in my bed and watched that movie. I gave them bowls of cereal. I propped myself up in the middle, a child on either side.
I remember many dusks back in our music days, tired after a day of work, loading up the car with amps and cords, heading to another nosedive bar with no guarantee of even fifty bucks, wondering why we kept lugging ourselves and our gear out to play our songs over the din of clinking beer bottles and loud conversation. It took many years of accumulated age and life to realize we make experiences to make memories to call upon when needed. I couldn’t have known then that sometimes, eventually, as elusive, unpredictable and abstract as memory can be, that sometimes these glimpses backward to the past are all that remain.
Sound rings off forever. There is no reconciliation point, even when it moves past our ability to hear. It’s out there somewhere still, echoing. It’s something to believe in, to know, even though it can’t be touched or seen. Like faith. Music plays itself in how it’s felt, in how the notes reverberate through the tiny bones in our ears, yes, but also throughout all the rest of us, a secular love rooted in the infinity of belief.
I confess to moments of quiet now. My son plays his father’s guitar, dexterity in fingers that used to reach for me to pick him up. My daughter has a voice that is an anthology of divinity. I listen to them doodle around with notes while I’m making dinner or upstairs working. Without realizing, they’re borrowing memory, too…mine, and transposing a kind of music that spills like light across a table. Sometimes I hear happiness. Sometimes I move through the song of our days like we moved through that night at the Laurelhurst, improvising, listening, being, remembering.