Every time I see a rough-sounding Pontiac go by
I look to see if it’s you
When you were young and lousy with urges
That had no chords yet to lie upon
Driving through towns looking
For your next song
Or a warm place to sleep
I missed you by two nights
Back in rusty sunlit San Francisco
Your show at the Great American Music Hall
Good enough to have the doorman still talking about it
As he let me in to see Jerry Jeff
I’ve read most of the stories
How you slept in laundromats and backseats
Before you found out who you were
Before America found out who you were
Read about how you burned that highway down in ‘59
A boy still, from freaky Houston, finding his way
When the car wouldn’t go any fartherYou fell in love with trains
Hopping them, you and your guitar, town to town
Until you went to jump off for a gig
Just outside Beaumont, Texas
Made one piss-poor landing and broke
Your back in three places
Somehow after that
Shrinking the pain one night at a time
Over the next string of years you managed
To record three albums in a garage
Named Cinderella
Albums like nobody had done before
Looks Like Rain
Frisco Mabel Joy
Heaven Help The Child
They just didn’t fit anywhere
The tracks bleeding together
Sounds of rain falling, thunder shaking the sky
Wind singing up high in the attic
And long lonesome trains blowing
Blues harp in the night
You said you put those sounds in there
To hide the tape hiss
From that lowly wooden four-track
That birthed your early masterpieces
But it made those records like an intimate call
To an old lover at two in the morning
From some door-broken-off phone booth
And you sounded calm in the eye of that storm
Saying things that took us all out on the road
Made us shiver, light a candle
For luck, and for love
Those records made it hard for deejays
To know where to lay the needle down
So they didn’t play them on the radio
At least until all the listeners had gone to bed
They weren’t the flavour of the day anyhow
But the ballads of a man
Who’d already died and come back
Wiser
When you arrived on Music Row
They didn’t quite know where to put you
Acuff-Rose showed some common sense
You made friends with Willie and Tom T
Lived an outlaw’s tale before anybody called it that
Maverick heart in a city of shills
One of the first to ever make theme albums
Held together by courage
It wasn’t long before you had number ones
In four different categories the same year
Hmph, nobody done that before
Or again
And I think you got a better car then
Helped out a young Texan songwriter named Townes
Got him his first record deal you did
Later were offered a lot of money for that contract
But wouldn’t sell, then ripped it up, set Townes free
You took a janitor’s tape to Roger Miller
From a kid named Kris
The song was good, Roger recorded it
And in Texas a girl named Janis heard it
Recorded it, too
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
Kris was on his way
And a friend for life
You had a lot of friends, Mick
And as good a songwriter as you were
Seems you were an even better friend
Kris would say so
Townes, Willie, Waylon and all would say so
And front porches are falling down under the weight
Of others who’d say so, too
You made it through
Ten records in twelve years
Most of them damned good
But the business of it drove you nuts
The lack of integrity and trust, the weasels
And you stopped making records for seven years
Stopped seeking the spotlight at all
The papers printed rumours
That you’d become a no-name drunk somewhere
That you were driving a truck
Delivering bread to folks who lived too far from stores
Somebody even said maybe you’d died
Talking about you on some radio show
In the past tense
Well, the past was tense all right
But didn’t kill you
Just drove you up north and west a ways
To a place outside of Springfield, Oregon
A farm near the Willamette River
A woman named Susan, your wife
Your children and foster children
And a sunshine made more precious
By the frequency of rain
That’s when your spirit’s whistling melancholy
Was redeemed, I figure
And I know there’s work keeping a farm going
Being a father, a husband, provider
That maybe you had enough coming in
From royalties and residuals
From big ol’ El doing the Trilogy
And Ray Charles, Don Gibson, Solomon Burke,
Waylon, Willie, Kenny Rogers
Covering those songs you’d written
And maybe it finally bought you some time
To take stock and see
How being true is the best crop to plant
In this or any year
But still, we wondered, where’s Mick gone?
And then the website pops up
A new front porch is built
Where friends and others drawn to the music
Could sit and chat for hours
And you started making music again
On your own label at last
Some of those later albums
Rank up there with the first ones
Maybe they’re even better for their mileage
The older the car the better the ride
For how it knows the road
The flint-silver of your words taking on some pewter
Expanding as they cooled
Your rusted at the heart tenor aching so warmly
I couldn’t always give it up to listen
And had to come back later
When my joints were better oiled
Then I heard that you were sick
The news breaking a rearview mirror
I couldn’t see anything in it anymore
But knew that something was closer than it appeared
One night I heard the wind chimes
From a tree in my backyard
A light rain began to tapdance in the eaves
It was the end of September last year
Your Pontiac wouldn’t start
And all the jumper cables of love in the world
Couldn’t reset the beat of your heart
I had the feeling, Mick
That across the broken promise land of America
Those who loved you
Sat down all at once and felt something
Like you feel when a bird flies by
Real close to you
A shiver, then
Hey, Mickey?
You still out there?
When it rains I know you are
When at night I hear the trains
I know you are
* * *
Doug Lang
8 May 2003
Vancouver
Remembering Mickey Newbury, 1940-2002