My old friend Handsome Johnny and I would meet up at his house in Willoughby Beach. Some days, I was already there, spooning with his little sister. God bless her beautiful smile. Not sure when exactly Donna came into the picture, but pleasantly she did. Well, I noticed her right away, from the minute I walked into her kitchen and she with her hair all up in curlers and everything askew. Let’s just say she made an impression on me. Maybe more on that later…
So Johnny and I took off in Bess, the old Ford station wagon. She was trusty and true through the night…and we traversed all the backroads of the tri-county area. Normally, there was a mission, some errand of mercy or need, such as a ride to 7 Eleven for a pack of smokes. On weekends, we would ride like kings of the road, cruising slowly because we were already there.
On these magical rides, where adventures stood tall and the road was the code, the harmonicas would come out. They might be bent to hell, full of dirt and dust, but still able to bend a note or two. The harps came out only after errands were done and well into the evening. These sessions were powerful each and every time. We were hellbent to figure things out and played and sang our songs up and down the road. We were undeterred.
Of course, there were many digressions. Sometimes, we would simply cruise around close to home. Other times we found ourselves on some dirt road staring at a field of corn stalks standing tall in the night. A Rolling Rock or two will run right through you, so we’d pull over and walk right up to one of the corn stalks, perform our duty, and proceed to question this corn stalk on why it had an attitude. We’d argue with the corn till it got out of control and we’d have to put it down. By then, we felt better, climbed back into Bess and went on down the road. For any crop damage, we do apologize to the farmers.
Back then, enforcement of the rules by the local constabulary was primarily gentle with a stern nudge toward home. Sure, field parties and groups of misfits were summarily broken up, but two guys crooning with a couple of harps was relatively harmless. Like I say, we were kings of the road. To all the other patrons of the road, respect was always given and as many rules as could be followed were.
Suffice to say, we rolled through the county like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in their heyday, back when they got along. Fact is, that album by Dylan came out around the time we were doing this riding around. The songs would generally start out like the instrumental track, Billy 4, from that particular record. We were vinyl then. Making music would give us a path, a sign, a release. We would bend and replace the lyrics to suit whatever mood we were in, whatever subject we wanted to address. While Dylan’s song laments the tracking of Billy by his old sidekick Garrett, we used the lyrics as a jumping off point to sing about our own world, our own troubles.
As we sang, we went on about current events, rolled on about some disagreement we had with somebody, and almost always threw in improvised lyrics for the girls we knew. We let it all out. Sometimes, there were even testimonials of the soul, but that was late at night when the blues rode the streets. We would end up at some degree of contentment helping to end the night and steady us for the new day. Tomorrow was a long time and we always seemed to have one more song in us.
Handsome Johnny left us some time back. Gypsy queens played his grand finale and he was laid to rest by those who loved him. Ole Bess crawled to the junk yard many years back. Then there’s Donna. Yep, we were an item for a short time back then, but we married different folks and that’s about all I’ll say about that. Time won’t stop and life will throw you curves. Only thing is, it all happened in a relatively short, compressed chapter of time. All the while it feels like a novel or two came out of it.
Some would argue that embellishment occurs most every time you repeat a story. Maybe so, but at that special time on the spectrum, the truth was in the front seat with your running buddy right beside you. May not get the girl and figure out all the world’s problems in one night, but we sure tried.
The road trips helped us to understand life. Maybe, we were only fooling ourselves that we had answers and that we could coax them out with music. Then again, maybe it was, like the old folks said, just a phase.
All of those and more…and the road goes on.
