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LAST NITE A RECORD SAVED MY LIFE |
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Friday, 10 February 2006 04:17 |
Last Nite a Record Saved My Life
By John Sinclair
Truth be told, I can t really think of a night when a record didn t save my life, because recordings have been saving my life and what I have of my sanity since I was a little kid of about 10 or 11 years old in a little bitty farm town in Michigan and heard the sounds of One Mint Julep by The Clovers oozing out of the radio in my bedroom.
Tonight it's Charlie Parker with Strings doing the trick, and thinking back on the nearly 20,000 nights I ve survived since my youthful days (including more than 1,000 nights in prison), ever buoyed by the great recordings beyond number that have brought endless joy to my life, it's still possible to single out one particular night and one certain record that helped save me from missing out on the past 15 years of marital bliss I ve enjoyed with the love of my life, my wife Penny.
It was in the summer of 1988 and I was living alone in the compact apartment I had built into the back of the 3rd-floor loft in downtown Detroit where I shared an office with Frank & Peggy Bach and Gary Grimshaw. Penny and I had separated the previous summer during a painful period when I was suffering a particularly debilitating round of existential depression, but I couldn t get her off my mind no matter how hard I tried.
We had been struggling since 1979 to maintain a loving relationship and had already split up and reconciled four times before we called it quits in 1987. I spent many nights alone in my room during that year of separation obsessed with my thoughts of her and what had gone so wrong with us.
I ve been in love with the woman ever since the first time I laid eyes on her, but my idiotic unfaithfulness and insensitivity had systematically undermined her trust in my intentions, and I just couldn t figure out if there was enough love left between the two of us to try to put our lives back together again to stay.
Records were still LPs then, and I was playing an album by Allen Toussaint titled Southern Nights while I attempted to sort through the emotionally conflicted confusion of my thoughts. Then one of Allen's most lovely compositions came through the speakers, a beautifully soulful ballad called What Do You Want the Girl to Do, and as I listened I realized that he was trying to tell me something very important: All the woman wanted to do was love me, it was as simple as that, but it was up to me to make it possible for that love to survive.
I played the song over and over again that night while it successively moved me to make up my mind about our potential future together and finally accept responsibility for my own central role in the creation and insane nurturing of our difficulties. By the time I turned in early the next morning, I had made the difficult decision to pursue every possible course of reconciliation and, if successful, to irreversibly alter the form and practice of my devotion to the woman I knew I loved for life.
So I pressed my courtship over the next several weeks, professing my love and need for her and even proposing marriage in a poem called i surrender, dear which magically helped produce the desired effect. We were back together by the fall, and we married one another for good on the bright first day of 1989, celebrating our vows of fidelity and connubial bliss to the sounds of Al Green singing Let's Stay Together on the sound system and the incomparable Kenny Pancho Hagood offering a live performance of the ballad he had first sung in 1947 as the theme song of the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra: I Waited for You.
Detroit
November 17, 2003
(c) 2003, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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