Men with Guitars (and a Piano)

Ever since I discovered You.Tube.com I've been a bit of a YouTube junkie. I find myself thinking about a piece of music that was meaningful to me at some point in my life and then I go to YouTube and, amazingly, I seem to find it. Music is evocative for me anyway and a piece of music has often been the beginning of some of my favorite, if not my best, writing. My short story "Danse Avec Moi" came from watching a couple dancing in a Cajun club in Lafayette, Louisiana one night. So here are a few memories and links to videos of the musicians who created them.

I knew this guy who wanted to be a musician more than anything in the world. He saved his money and bought a Yamaha steel guitar because all the really great steel guitar men use them. But it just didn't "work" --- he never learned to play it and he complained to me saying, I thought these things were supposed to be so damn special. Sigh. There is an important lesson in that. Here is Carlos Santana playing my very favorite of his songs on a Yamaha: Samba Pa Ti. Is this perfect or what?

It was a couple years ago this week. I was in love with a guy who turned out to be no good. But I didn't know that then. I was way deep in love. One beautiful November night we had dinner at The King's Rook in Marblehead, one of those sweet, intimate little places just made for lovers. Then we walked up the street, kicking through the leaves, to the me and thee coffeehouse. We had tickets to see Garnet Rogers there. I have seen Garnet Rogers many times and have always thought of his voice as Baptiste's voice in The Old Mermaid's Tale. We were early and thought we would just walk around but there, sitting on the tailgate of his station wagon tuning his guitar, was Garnet Rogers himself. We walked over and said hello. He was so, so nice. It was a wonderful time talking to him and, even though I somewhat regret that affair, I still love the memory of that night. Later, when my brother died I went to see Rogers again and I got to talk to him again. I said, I needed to hear you because my brother died, too. He hugged me. This is the song he wrote about his brother, Stan: Night Drive

I've been thinking about Gordon Lightfoot a lot lately because of the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald wreck. He was probably the first singer-songwriter, as they are now called, that I fell in love with. I only saw him once many years ago but it was a good evening in a small auditorium somewhere around Buffalo. I can't even remember where now. But he was such a beautiful man and he wrote such evocative words. He was very ill a few years back and is closing in on seventy now. Hard to believe. But he still is one of the most beautiful of the beautiful men with guitars that I love. And this is the song he wrote that he played the night I saw him and still love all these years later: If You Could Read My Mind

It was sometime in the late seventies that I was in Chicago for a wedding. It was an awful, stormy night and there was a guy playing in a club near where we were staying so we went to see him. The place was only half full but he played the piano and sang and, damn. His voice was like an ashcan full of cigarette butts and broken beer bottles but his singing was magnificent. My friends wanted to leave --- I wanted to stay for the rest of my life. I saw him a few years later in a nightclub called Rockefellers in Houston and he was even better than he had been in Chicago that night. A voice of pure grit but a soul that is bottomless. This is Tom Waits singing Tom Traubert's Blues

Hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading --- and watching.