It’s the plaintive opening that really
gets me,
the
wailing harmonica that indeed says love me do,
hopeful
but not altogether confident,
like
things could go either way.
It
might as well say please me—please.
I
might be cooking red beans
or
driving to the drug store to pick up statins,
but
the voices come through the speakers
that
I can no longer locate in new cars.
Somehow
I get there faster.
Maybe
it has something to do with the theory of relativity,
but
I suspect the answer is far simpler:
I’m
a twelve-bar junkie, a hopeless day tripper,
a
dreamer without the tie dye,
and
no matter where I’m going,
any
road will take me there.
It’s
hard to decide which year to focus on
in
the ten-year marathon from leather boots
to
a lonely hearts club and beyond,
a
backbeat that came full circle
to
hard core rock and roll,
rolling
over Beethoven
while
everything still managed
to
come together in unexpected ways.
Oh
darlin’, I wish we had lasted longer
so
that we could have relived it all together.
Remember
when I told you
about
the harmonica break,
the
one you had never noticed?
We
could have read the anthology together,
and
I could have played through the catalog
on
the Martin you saw in Cleveland.
Blackbird
could have finished taking flight.
Really,
I should have known better.
I
still listen,
and
the remasters sharpen the ear.
The
drums are heavier,
the
backing vocals more harmonic,
the
acoustic wires cleaner than before—
it’s
called bending the strings—
and
they did it so well.
It’s
1964, and I’m in love with it
all
over again.
It
helps me get through the day,
through
just about anything.
You
said you understood that too.
The
old bag of bones,
Grendel
dressed in drag,
now
long gone and doing God-knows-what,
told
me I was a nowhere man.
Isn’t
it ironic that years later
I
became a paperback writer?
~William Hammett
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