It's Always Interesting, When Something Good Happens

                        
SUMMARY: Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? That's the way Mike Dewey approached a certain spring that held only the remotest possibilities of happiness. I wasn’t the first person -- and God knows I wouldn’t be the last -- to fall in love during the course of an amazing rock n roll concert, but I might have been the only one to have it all on tape. No, nothing like that … get your minds out of the gutter. You won’t find salacious stuff on You Tube … not that anything untoward happened, except for a lot of innocent and happy soul kisses. Ah, yes, those stay with a guy. Nothing like being free and young and open to anything, especially when you had no idea that anything like that was about to happen. This was the spring of 1976. I was 21 and a gentleman, mostly, and the height of technological achievement was a cassette recorder that I’d used on many occasions prior to sneaking it into Millett Hall on the campus of Miami University. By then, I taped Springsteen, the Dead, the Stones, Patti Smith twice and, if memory serves, a “British Reinvasion” feel-good evening, featuring Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Searchers, Chad and Jeremy and, topping the bill, Herman’s Hermits. I make no apologies for enjoying that show very much, especially since I was a junior in high school and had pretty much grown up on those acts. Their heyday was nearly a decade past, but Peter Noone and the boys took heart – I think – in seeing so many folks who still had fond memories of “Henry the Eighth” and “No Milk Today” and “Leaning on a Lamppost” and, my favorite, “Listen People.” Now, I should devote a few dozen words to the machine that I used. It was made by a company called Scanfax, was about the size of a TV dinner and featured something called, quite impressively for the time, a condenser microphone. Let that simmer for a moment … That meant that there was no obvious cord-like appendage that had to be plugged in and positioned nothing obvious, nothing to tip off security. I could surreptitiously place the recorder nearly anywhere – the arm of my seat, in the aisle or I could just hold it aloft, though that got quite tiresome. As you must have surmised by now, the sound quality was for crap. Rock concerts were loud affairs and this bombardment of decibels tended to overwhelm the condenser microphone, which was far better suited to lectures and the like. Though even that, sometimes, failed, owing to what can only be called operator error. I REMEMBER BUILDING my whole month around attending a reading/talk/screed by Hunter S. Thompson, my literary hero. He was actually going to be on campus and I thought that it was about the best that had happened at Notre Dame since we’d beaten Southern Cal on our way to the national championship my freshman year. By March 14, 1975, however, I was too jaded to get all agog over sporting events. I was wiser and more cynical and thought I could handle anything, hence the pre-game activities my friend and I indulged in prior to walking across the South Quad to Washington Hall where the Good Doctor was to appear. It’s an indication of my wisdom that I’d equipped my Scanfax recorder with new batteries and never-before-used tapes. It’s an indictment of my warped condition that, once I’d found my seat in the auditorium and set up my recorder, that I failed to turn up the volume button, meaning that all 90 minutes of Thompson’s talk were lost. “Sounds like Nixon’s Watergate tapes,” my friend said. “Nice hiss, though.” All I could do was laugh. “Perfect,” I said, knowing that of all the mistakes I’d be doomed to commit in my lifetime, this one would always be in the running for stupidest. “Just perfect.” Because it made sense – on an admittedly inane level – that I would screw up a simple 1-2-3 process that would have preserved HST’s words of wisdom forever because I’d followed his road map for knowledge and had crashed, metaphorically, into a brick wall of inexperience and idiocy. So the months flowed by and I studied a little and learned a lot and wrote all the time … and then I fell in love and then I got my heart stomped on and then it was spring of 1976 and I felt the need drive a great distance, which is how I ended up in Oxford. Seeing my sister was great and all that, but the real reason I’d headed out from South Bend was to see Jackson Browne again. This will come as no surprise to faithful readers but, by that time, Jackson had pretty much disappeared from my turntable, owing to the fact that he and his music were tragically interwoven with the failed romance in whose ruins and ashes I’d been groveling about for months. Again, I wasn’t the first guy to ban certain records from his play list, but when it came to Jackson, I had to admit that the time had come to crawl from the pit of self pity and rejoin the human race. And what better way would there be than to experience the music live and in person, much as I’d done with the one who’d done me so wrong. So hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime, as it were, I steered my 1969 Impala into the parking lot of my sister’s dormitory and got ready to write a new and exciting chapter in my life. WELL, THAT’S OVERSTATING IT a bit, isn’t it? No one knows when the karma wheel’s about to take a spin, right? All a person can do is prepare the best he can and then hold on. As I recall, it was a perfect spring day and the campus was blooming with kids, tired of another Ohio winter, blowing off classes and heading to places where fun was the currency of the realm. I felt like an outsider for, well, maybe 10 seconds, until I fell into the rhythm of it all, the kegs and the bongs and the rock cranked up so loud that I felt, if not healed, then well on my way. Of course, I’d brought along my Scanfax recorder with its condenser microphone and, by the time, we’d found our seats in the auditorium, I was ready to purge my soul of everything negative that had blocked my enjoyment of Jackson Browne’s music for far too long. And that’s where the English girl comes into the story. She was sitting right next to me. She had long blond hair, stood about shoulder-height to me, making her about 5-10, and her accent was pure bliss. Her name, as recorded for posterity on that cassette tape, was Lynn and she and I spent the next three hours singing and laughing and holding hands and kissing and, well … you get the idea. This was Jackson’s Running on Empty tour and, having seen him a half-dozen times or so, it was his best. Lynn knew most of the songs and those she didn’t, I was more than happy to fill in the blanks. Now, would I want anyone else to hear those tapes? Sure, why not? The band is in top form, Jackson’s voice is comforting and sardonic, the acoustics are terrific and you can hear what goes on between Lynn and me. As I’ve said, I’m a gentleman but, well, maybe I don’t have the best singing voice. Forget the “maybe.” Those tapes have preserved what might be called “passable” vocals, but I have to admit, I kind of wish I’d hadn’t tried to hit all the notes in “Fountain of Sorrow.” When I listen to those tapes now, I can’t help but cringe for a moment or two and then I remember that though Lynn and I never saw each other again, she helped me more than she ever knew. Mike Dewey can be reached CarolinamikeD@aol.com or 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. You might like his Facebook page, to which you’re all invited.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load