I felt so good
I was going to start this off by telling you how often I think about death. I wrote a bunch of sentences and then I felt things starting to get away from me and realized this was maybe not the best way to kick things off here. So, rather than really load all the death talk up front, I’m going to sprinkle it throughout like a seasoning. A really morbid seasoning no one really wants to be added. Bon appetit!
It’s just that I really don’t know how to tell the story of the day I started by walking through a cemetery in Nashville and ended by seeing Mike Campbell play guitar live for the first time since I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play live for the last time ever without talking about death. But there will be life stuff too. Probably more life stuff than death stuff. I’ll try.
It’s been a travel goal of mine to pay my respects at the graves of the legends of country music in Nashville for a while now. But as I’m usually packing a lot of things in when I’m in Music City, “visiting cemeteries” is usually the first thing to get bumped off the travel itinerary. The dead, more than likely, will not be going anywhere, whereas the rest of the Nashville I like seems subject to being crashed into by a pedal tavern and demolished at any given moment. So, priorities must be made.
This time through, though, I had a good week in Nashville, built around my friend headlining the Ryman (“my friend headlining the Ryman” is a real nice thing to type, which is why I just did it twice; I might type it again in a bit) and finally seeing Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs play a three-times-postponed show at the Brooklyn Bowl. And thanks to the kindness of my friends (who were not headlining the Ryman, unlike my friend headlining the Ryman), I not only avoided blowing a few months’ rent on a hotel room but also had someone to drive me to cemeteries. And what are friends for if not to drive you to cemeteries?
The day before was Cemetery Excursion #1, to visit the graves of Johnny and June Carter Cash in Hendersonville, which is also the final resting place of other members of the Carter Family, Merle Kilgore, and, as I discovered just prior to our visit, Joe and Rose Lee Maphis. I’ve told my Rose Lee Maphis story before, but, to briefly recap: She was a greeter at the Country Music Hall of Fame, where I met her and had her sign a record I bought at the Lawrence Record Shop downtown minutes before said meeting. It was one of the happiest experiences of my life. So, I was glad to be able to pay my respects to Sweet Rose Lee in Hendersonville.
But I didn’t come here to talk about that cemetery. I really came to talk to you about the Spring Hill Cemetery, which is the final resting place of Earl and Louise Scruggs, Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright, Roy Acuff, Jimmy Martin (who allegedly paid $15,000 to be as close to Acuff’s grave as possible), Hank Snow, and, my main reason (other than to pay my respects at Martin’s grave, which he posed next to on the cover of a CD he made while he was still alive), John Hartford. (There are also many people buried there whose records I don’t own, and I would like to thank them for letting me walk among them that day.)
Hartford is one of the top three guys whose records I hope to find at a record store (Tom T. Hall and Roger Miller are the others if you’re keeping score…it’s weird that you’re keeping score). I love just about all of the records he made, but I had none of those records the first and only time I saw him live, in July 2000, at The Bottom Line in New York City. I certainly knew of him at the time, but I was at the show mainly to hear the opening act (Rhonda Vincent and the Rage). So my night was good after they wrapped up, and when Hartford, looking a little disheveled, took the stage with his band, I wasn’t sure what awaited me. But as the set went on, I realized I was seeing something beautiful. Hartford, who was taking occasional swigs from a medicine bottle throughout, told the crowd he wouldn’t be able to come out after the show and say hello because he was very sick and couldn’t take the risk. But he wasn’t too sick to do the show and give the best he could. And as he ambled his way through the hypnotic “Watching the River Go By,” it just all somehow felt magical. The troubadour pressing on. The old riverboat captain guiding the ship through rocky waters. I think about that moment a lot, probably more than I think about most concert memories nestled in my brain. I genuinely feel blessed to have seen it. It taught me something, something I can’t put into words. Something about the will to keep going, to keep doing what you love. Something I needed to know.
John Hartford died less than a year later, after a long battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I wish I’d gotten into him earlier and seen him a bunch more times. But I’m grateful for the one time. Because sometimes one time is all you get.
And so all that was most definitely on my mind as I wandered the cemetery looking for his grave. Online help was a little vague, and the guy working at the funeral home had no idea where Hartford was buried and seemed taken aback that I would ask. Well, I’m really hoping he was a guy who worked at the funeral home and not some guy standing by the door mourning the death of a loved one and wondering why the guy in polka-dot sneakers who wanted to use the bathroom was looking for someone’s grave.
So, using the knowledge that the grave was by a gazebo, I strolled around looking for gazebos and finally found John and his wife, Marie, at the back of the cemetery. I sat in the gazebo, put my earphones in my phone, went to my John Hartford playlist, and listened to “Watching the River Go By” and a bunch of my favorite Hartford songs for about a half-hour. A cardinal came by for a bit. It was nice.
After paying my respects to Martin, Acuff, Snow, Wells, Wright, Snow, and the Scruggs family toward the front of the cemetery, I headed onto Gallatin Pike and, after a brief sojourn in the wrong direction, headed toward East Nashville, in the general direction of the evening’s rock show but also in the direction of record stores (and two non-record stores I came across along the way that had things waiting for me, including an old Bob Wills songbook and an LP by actor Greg Morris, one of the stars of Vega$, which I had just finished watching the full run of, because that’s how I roll in 2022). I don’t want to brag, but I scored a signed Elmo and Patsy (of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” fame) record at Grimey’s for a couple of bucks. And it’s a good thing I don’t want to brag, because that would be a terrible thing to brag about. But it’s mine and you can’t have it. Until I die. Then it’s whoever grabs it first.
Ah, death! Yes, I’d almost forgotten. Let’s get back to it, shall we?
It still seems not quite right that Tom Petty is dead, and not quite right that one night I was seeing him at the Hollywood Bowl and then a week later he was gone. Like that. The guy whose tapes I wore out, the guy who seemed to be Cool walking the earth, the guy who’d always been there. Gone. Crazy.
But I wasn’t his bandmate, his friend, the guy who stood next to him on stages around the world. That is a deep, deep loss. So, not long after Petty died and I read a quote from Mike Campbell saying something along the lines of he’d never play those Petty songs again, I understood the grief he was going through and why he would say something like that at that time. I didn’t want to believe it was true, and suspected it wouldn’t be the case, but the thought of Campbell never playing those songs again rattled around in my brain for a while, and it made me so sad—sad that he would feel it, and sadder still that he might mean it.
So, when Campbell announced that he would be devoting more time to an occasional side project he did during the Heartbreakers years called the Dirty Knobs, I was glad to hear he was not giving up on music entirely. And I was in for whatever he was in for, so I jumped on tickets when he announced a show at the then-unopened Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville. Sure, he’d probably be playing closer to home, but Nashville was the date announced first and I wanted to see what he was up to as soon as I could. And, hey, maybe he’d be up to throwing in a Petty song or two. March 15, 2020, here I come!
Then, this thing happened and the world shut down. And it stayed shut down for a while. And then the show was rescheduled. And then things started going south again. And then the show was rescheduled again. And then Campbell and the Knobs decided to record a new album and postpone the tour until that was ready.
And then, finally, it was showtime, exactly two years later, though not before the opening shows of the tour in Florida were cancelled because of a COVID case in the touring party, making Nashville the new opening night of the tour. Hopefully? So I crossed my fingers (even when seeing my friend headlining the Ryman) and that finger crossing worked and we were at the door of the Brooklyn Bowl showing vaccine cards and getting ready to see Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs, and Campbell had said in interviews that he would indeed be adding some Petty songs in their set. So let’s go!
I should note that during the pandemic there was a Petty 70th birthday virtual celebration that ended with Campbell and Benmont Tench doing “American Girl” and “Something Good’s Coming.” I am afraid to watch it again because I don’t know that I can handle it. You give it a shot if you want. Maybe you’re stronger than I am, but watching the two of them play a beautiful, slowed-down version of “American Girl,” the last song they played that night at the Hollywood Bowl, made me cry more than any song I’ve ever heard in my life. Tears kept flowing during “Something Good’s Coming” too. I was a mess.
All that is to say that I could not be certain that I would not immediately begin dissolving into a ball of emotion in a pseudo bowling alley the second the Knobs started into a Petty song. I had made it through another pandemic livestream the Knobs did from the Troubadour in LA where they did a few Petty songs (welled up, no sobbing), but I was still not confident that it had prepared me.
So, nine songs in, as Campbell started talking about his friend and then went into “Southern Accents,” I felt the tears starting to come. But I held it (mostly) together, partly because I’m completely in control of my emotions at all times and absolutely not apt to fall apart at any given second, but mostly because the eight Knobs songs before that were such a release, such a giant exhale for a band that had been waiting to tour for two years and a crowd that had been waiting to hear them that long too. I’ve seen a good number of shows since things started opening up (and shutting down and opening up again) and was waiting for that one people talked about when things first shut down, the one where people said it was going to be this amazing feeling when we’re all back together and having fun. I’ve had fun at a lot of the shows, and they felt great. But they weren’t amazing. This was the amazing one.
So, sure I teared up a bit when Campbell sang:
For just a minute there I was dreaming
For just a minute it was all so real
For just a minute she was standing there, with me
Because I’m human. But it wasn’t a night to be sad. It was a night to be glad to be alive. To be glad to listen to the guitarist you love playing for an audience again, playing his new band’s new songs and his old band’s old songs and looking happy doing it. To be glad to be in a room with love darting all around, from the stage, to the stage, everywhere. To be glad that though Tom Petty doesn’t walk among us anymore, his songs do, and his friend does, and death is not the end.
What I’m saying is it was an amazing show, and it culminated with Mike Campbell, Cool walking the earth, stepping to the front of the stage and ripping through the end solo of “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” a solo I probably listened to hundreds of times on a worn-out cassette and a half-dozen or so times live and didn’t give much thought to, but that night sounded like “Ode to Joy” by 300 orchestras all at once, right there in Nashville, two years in the making and finally out in the world to make everything all right for a little while.
And sometimes a little while is enough.
It was enough that night, enough to make me want to chase that feeling again the next week when the Knobs played in Brooklyn, enough to send me off like a rocket that night as I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and headed home.
Enough to not make me think about death so much, to make me glad to be alive.
Like anything was possible.
