The View From My Window: Thoughts on August 16th

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And, it's the day the music died.

I've never been a big Elvis fan. I appreciate much of the early music. I understand his importance to the history of American music. I'm fascinated by the story of the greatest American fame-tragedy; the rise from rags to riches, and subsequent failing and falling.

We traveled to Memphis this summer as part of a road trip retracing the steps of American music. I stood on the black x where Elvis stood while recording many of his hits at Sun Records. Its a humble spot, on a linoleum-tiled floor. Bono stood there while recording parts of Rattle and Hum. Part of me was more in awe of the perceived presence of Bono than I was of the ghost of Elvis there. But even this self-proclaimed Elvis moderate found the experience moving.

But I'm not one of those who mark August 16th because of his death.

The 16th is also the day Robert Johnson died.

As part of the same trip where we stood in the studio at Sun, we detoured farther south, into the Mississippi Delta region, and found ourselves standing at the grave of the father of the Delta Blues and eating barbecue at the crossroads where Johnson legendarily sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar playing ability.

It's not hard to understand where the Blues come from, if you ever visit the delta region. The Blues literally seep into your pours as you travel there. It is a land time forgot, in some respects. It is beautiful in a heartbreaking way.

The grave marker of Blues legend, Robert Johnson image:32799:0::0

The graveyard where Johnson is buried is on the grounds of a little church out in the country. It is quiet there. I stood there wishing I could play the Blues a little better (and that I had brought a guitar with me). I would have played a hymn full of minor chords and string-bends in his honor.

It's the third August 16th death that most effects me every year.

Unlike Elvis, or even Johnson, Mark Heard is not a household name. When Mark died fifteen years to the day after Elvis (and fifty-four years after Johnson) there was no real public notice. Sure, there was a small group of musicians and fans who were devastated to lose their troubadour at such a young age (he was 41). And there was a beloved wife and daughter who felt the immediacy of the loss. But Mark's death didn't lead the nightly news.

I was five years old when Elvis died. I was in the living room of the house my mother rented on Franklin Street, in Hamilton, Ohio when her friend and our neighbor, Monica, came over and told my mother the news. She turned on the TV and there were images of people crying. Even at that young age, I knew it was something unusual.

But you don't run into many people who can say they remember where they were when they heard that Mark Heard had died. You don't even run in to that many people who know who Mark Heard was.

It was 1992 and I was at the off-campus house of a group of friends. College had just started back. Several of us were Heard fans, and we were talking about the heart attack he had suffered while on stage over the 4th of July holiday. Most of the news indicated he was getting better. Not long after, another friend arrived with the a shocking update. He had received an email that Mark had experienced another heart attack, had fallen into a coma, and had died.

Of course we didn't want to believe it, even when further investigation revealed that it was indeed true. I kept waiting to hear that the email had been wrong. That the announcement had been premature and Mark had remarkably recovered.

It was not to be. Mark was buried in the Georgia-red clay of his native Macon. There would be no more music.

The mouths of the best poets, speak but a few words,
Then they lay down, stone-cold,
In forgotten fields.

Mark started by playing mostly religious-themed music. He was part of the Jesus Music phenomenon, though his lyrics seemed to stand out among the din of sameness that much of that music possessed. By 1991, his music had changed.

It wasn't that he had lost faith, rather that he had gained perspective. Starting with the release of Dry Bones Dance in 1990 and culminating with 1992's masterpiece, Satellite Sky, Mark produced a collection of songs written about the human condition in a way that reached to the very core of the dedicated listener. This was not Jesus Music. This was some of the best songwriting ever heard.

Why do I lie awake at night, and think back just as far as I can,
to the sound of my father's laugh outdoors
and thoughts of Sputnik in free flight?
Before I mis-fashioned my poverty and before I mistrusted the night,
I must have known something,
I must have known something,
and those are the times I live for tonight.
Why can't I sleep in peace tonight, underneath a satellite sky?

He was struggling with things I could identify with, even before they were actual struggles for me: being a husband, a father, a believer and a skeptic, a "broken man", an "outcast on the outskirts of the promised land". He saw the mundane things of life that can desensitize and drown us, and he called out for relief from the rat race. The lyrics of those three albums are haunting now; almost as if Mark knew his time was short. He wrote frantically and sang with a passion for every word.

Thirteen years after his death, Mark's songwriting was honored when his song, Worry Too Much, won the Americana Music Association award for song of the year. Buddy Miller had recorded Mark's song, opening the door for Mark's music even after his passing:

Its these sand-paper eyes and the way they rub the luster from what is seen
Its the way we tell ourselves all these things are normal 'til we can't remember what we mean
It's the flicker of our flame, and the friction born of living
It's the way we beat a hot retreat and heave our smoking guns into the river.

It's the quick-step march of history and the vanity of nations.
It's the way there'll be no muffled drums to mark the passage of my generation.
It's the children of my children, It's the lambs born in innocence.
It's wondering if the good I know
Will last to be seen by the eyes of the little ones

Sometimes it feels like a bar of steel I cannot bend with my hands
Oh, I worry too much
Somebody told me that I worry too much...

Mark still had faith, and it showed through as a spark of hope that was underlying each song, but he was also honest about the failures and shortcomings of life. There is a lot of injustice all around us. Some of it is injustice we create. He couldn't look upon it and not write about it. There were no rose-colored glasses in Mark's desk drawer:

I will rise from my bed, with the question again,
As I work to inherit the restless wind.
The view from my window is cold and obscene, and I want to touch what my eyes have not seen...

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnant 'til our pockets are clean...

We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we're out on the street with just this lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod,
And we will always be remembered as the orphans of God.
They will dig up these ruins, make flutes of our bones,
and blow a hymn to the memory of the Orphans of God.

Mark's songs only gain relevance as I grow older. More than fifteen years after I heard the opening song of Dry Bones Dance while driving between Dayton and Cincinnati, the music and lyrics are still fresh and new and thought provoking. They grow and mature as I do, and I'd be lost without them.

It is easy to look back at someone who died so young and wonder what else they might have done. How many more songs could Mark have added to my "desert island discs" selections had he lived to be 60, or 50, or even just 45? But it is a reminder that at some point, we'll all die "too young". We'll leave behind some sort of legacy, for good or for ill. Hopefully, the world will be a little better for us having been here. In the mean time, there are important things to do, starting right in our own homes, in our own day-to-day life:

All the unsaid words that I might be thinking and all the little signs that I might give you
They would not be enough. No they would not be enough.

If I weren't so alone and afraid, they might pay me what I am worth
But it would not be enough
You deserve better

The dam of time cannot hold back the dust that will surely come of these bones.
And I'm sure I will not have loved enough.
Will not have loved enough

If we could see with wiser eyes, what is good and what is sad and what is true
Still it would not be enough.
Could never be enough

So we nod over coffee and say goodbye
Bolt the door it's time to go
Into the car with the radio on
Roll down the window and blow the horn

Ain't that the curse of the second hand
Ain't that the way of the hour and the day