Dear readers,
I don’t have it in me to write a Johnny and Sharyn story tonight. “Soon come,” as Johnny used to say.
In 2013 Johnny and I are discussing moving in together, but I have still not stayed a night at his house. My mother starts to complain again about Johnny’s visits to her house, although we follow the rules about no consecutive overnights. She says she wants to spend her old age in peace.
Meanwhile, both Johnny and I have financial challenges: the guitar student trade has dips and ebbs and my busking income is tiny. I am advertising regularly for writing practice students on Craigslist, which usually brings in complaints that I don’t teach for free or people wanting to rent me writing space. Counting my pennies and trying to save for a retreat with my teacher Natalie Goldberg in France, I decide I will do an extra busking shift five days a week: after I play two hours in the Berkeley BART station in the morning I will return to either Downtown Berkeley or Ashby in the afternoon and play another hour. To make the afternoon shift more palatable I decide that I will only play the songs I most want to play during my second shift. Things are slow enough for Johnny that he muses about busking himself and goes so far as to make a busking set list. He says that if he busks he will make a large sign informing people that he teaches guitar.
On February 22nd, 2013 Johnny’s brother David has multiple cardiac arrests and lands in the hospital in Boston. His doctors sedate him, put him on a ventilator and chill him down to protect his organs. Members of his church come to sit with him and pray over him while Johnny and I sit in California.
Johnny and I both have late February birthdays. I ask Johnny if he wants to forgo celebrating because of his brother’s condition and he tells me no, that we are alive and need to celebrate. Earlier in the month we have gone to hear both Alan Toussaint and Dr. John at Yoshi’s as they pass through town on tour. Toussaint is particularly engaging, interpolating Mozart’s death march into “St. James Infirmary” and leading the audience in a sing-along of “City of New Orleans,” assuring us that “All white people know this song,” and turning his mic toward us as we sing.
I buy Johnny a card for his 67th birthday and bake him a pear tarte tatin. His birthday falls on Super Bowl Sunday, so I come out to San Leandro for awhile to see him and to avoid the Super Bowl at my house. Three days after that, on February 27th, Johnny’s brother David dies and, the next day, Johnny treats me to dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant in Berkeley.
I wake up sick the following day, no doubt stressed by David’s illness and death. I stay home from work for a few days, trying to get well before a road trip to Seattle for David’s funeral. Johnny and I will be traveling by car with his niece Lucy and her husband Adam. I sort out black clothes, shoes and raincoat for the service. I cannot find a black beret, so I decide to pack tights and a hat in Lenten purple. Since Johnny’s entire wardrobe is black, he will have no trouble dressing for the funeral where he will sing a few folk hymns.
Lucy and Adam propose camping in Ashland for the first night of the trip, but I look at a forecast showing 90% chance of rain and Johnny books us motel rooms for the night. By then we know that David’s estate will cover our expenses for the funeral trip: meals, lodging, etc., including a couple of nights in Seattle.
Johnny’s family gather at David’s Seattle house for a few hours. Someone brings in some beer for that occasion, but there is no food, no ceremony. We sit in the living room of a house that has been closed-up for months, talking of Johnny’s parents who used to live there. We gather again at a cemetery in the rain for prayers and songs. Those who wish to can use a spade to throw dirt on David’s coffin. We gather that night for a salmon dinner at Ivar’s, a restaurant that has been in Seattle since 1938 and then we go our separate ways.
Johnny is drinking heavily. He gets sick in the car and again in Ashland when we go out to have dinner. At least once during the trip I wake up to see him swigging whiskey from a pint bottle first thing in the morning.
“Whiskey before breakfast?” I ask.
“A good old Irish tradition,” he answers.
I do not say anything else about Johnny’s drinking right then because his beloved brother has just died: he is grieving and does not need extra pressure from me. And I am still trying to figure out whether Johnny is merely someone who drinks heavily on occasion or whether he has a true addiction to alcohol.
"Paris" CD baking breakfast dishes busking butternut squash Christmas cookies cookbooks cookies Daring Bakers desserts eggs feta cheese food paintings food photos frugal eating gluten-free recipes home cooking Johnny Harper Natalie Goldberg pasta peaches pears pen and ink sketches philosophy pie crust polenta recipes relationships salads seasonal cooking seasonal eating seasonal recipes Sharyn Dimmick Sharyn Dimmick — art substitutions The Kale Chronicles tomatoes travel travel stories vegetable gardening watercolor paintings Work With What You Got writing groups writing practice yeast breads
"Paris" CD baking breakfast dishes busking butternut squash Christmas cookies cookbooks cookies Daring Bakers desserts eggs feta cheese food paintings food photos frugal eating gluten-free recipes home cooking Johnny Harper Natalie Goldberg pasta peaches pears pen and ink sketches philosophy pie crust polenta recipes relationships salads seasonal cooking seasonal eating seasonal recipes Sharyn Dimmick Sharyn Dimmick — art substitutions The Kale Chronicles tomatoes travel travel stories vegetable gardening watercolor paintings Work With What You Got writing groups writing practice yeast breads
From the time Johnny and I got together in 2012 we spent our dutifully-spaced nights together at my mother’s house where I lived, with occasional overnights at friends’ houses when we played an out-of-town gig or went to a party far from home.
In December 2012 we made our one and only appearance as a couple at Camp Harmony, a multi-day New Year’s camp-out put on by the San Francisco Folk Music Club. I had been a club member for decades and often spent five days at camp in late December and early January.
One of the features of Camp Harmony was a swing dance or rock and roll dance that took place in a rotation of contra dances, French dances and other dances during the week. In 2012 somehow I got wind of the fact that some of the people who had traditionally led, managed and played for the Swing Dance would not be attending camp. This gave Johnny an opportunity to put himself forward as the bandleader/organizer for a Rock and Roll Dance (I wanted Johnny to go to camp with me and I knew it would sweeten the pot if he got to bring his Telecaster and amp and lead the band, a volunteer group of musicians — you never knew who would show up to play keyboards or bass, to sing back-up, to lead a song).
Johnny corresponded with the powers that be, collectively known as Ralph, and convinced them to give him a try. He hired his friend Sunnia Eastwood to bring us and our gear to camp. I gave him a rundown on how camp usually functioned. We bunked in a cabin with friends from the Ballad group and Joe Offer from the Mudcat Cafe, who had been a kitchen crew buddy of mine in years past.
Johnny threw himself into the job of managing the rock and roll band, as he always did, recruiting players he knew that were on site. I don’t remember too much about the actual dance except that Bob Reid and Art Peterson sang back-up parts on “The Weight” and Johnny and I reprised our duet on Springsteen’s “Fire.” People danced and sang and played and Johnny helped people have a good time and kept things moving.
Sunnia came to pick us up from camp after our two nights there. She was to take us to another party for the night, but just as we left camp we got into a car accident. Air bags deployed, gear moved about, and all three of us got thrown around and battered. Johnny’s friend Dale came to get us, to take us to his house for his party and to bring us back to camp the next day. At that point, my long-time friend Deborah, who was leaving camp to attend a choir rehearsal, offered to drive Johnny and me back to Kensington. I called ahead to tell Mom we had been in an accident and were shaken up and she kindly allowed us to stay the night on New Year’s Eve, the night before her birthday.
We did not stay up until midnight to ring in the New Year: I retreated to the bathtub to soak my bruises and scrapes from the accident after setting Johnny up at my computer to check his email. We did, however, begin to talk about the coming year, during which we planned to move in together. I thought I would move during the summer after I got back from a meditation retreat in France, while Johnny advocated for my moving in in February, our mutual birth month. I pointed out that, although I had been to his house, usually for rehearsals, that I had never seen the bedroom or stayed overnight there: whenever I had been to Marcella St. the door to the bedroom was closed and I had taken to referring to it as “The Forbidden Zone.” He assured me, as he often did, “Soon come,” saying he thought the bedroom would be ready for me to visit in February 2013. I didn’t think I would be able to begin visiting and move in the same month — we had Valentine’s Day and two birthdays to celebrate, there was a President’s Day holiday as well, and it was the shortest month of the year besides. It turned out that neither of our predictions were correct: it would be January 2014 before I moved to Johnny’s house.
Recently I started singing transatlantic duets with my friend David, who lives in Yorkshire. He mentioned “Scarlet Town” by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and I was keen to try it. David sent me some lyrics which didn’t jibe with how I heard the song, so I listened to the recorded track from “The Harrow and the Harvest,” running it back a few times to check particular words or phrases.
When I had done the best I could, I emailed a new version of the lyrics to David. Then I hunted up live performances by Welch and Rawlings on YouTube and watched Welch’s mouth, trying to lip-read as well as listen: was she singing “Cairo on a bet?” or “Cairo on a bend?” And was it “holly on the mountainside?” or “Polly on the mountainside?” Although I could hear no clear “n” or “t,” I put my trust in “on a bend.” Just to be sure, I listened to several other performers sing the song and found support for “on a bend” and “Polly.” Along the way I heard several clear enunciations of another phrase “a lean old time,” which I had heard as “leavin’ town” and David had heard as “a little town.” Welch and Rawlings do not include their lyrics in their liner notes or on their website so listening and comparing is the only way to approximate their songs.
In the folk world, misheard words are called “mondegreens” because someone once heard “They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen” for “They have slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green.” Johnny, whose hearing for both words and chords was better than mine, laughed at some of my “mondegreens” in songs by The Eagles. I had interpreted “Life in the Fast Lane” as “I do the best thing” (I only ever heard it on the radio on a poor stereo system) and thought the phrase “a heartache tonight” was “a party tonight” under the same conditions.
When Johnny was alive, no matter what was going on between us I could ask him, “Hey, Johnny, what do you think Gillian Welch is singing here?” I could also ask him “What is that chord progression? I can’t figure out the third chord.” I could ask him, “What is Tracy Chapman playing in the intro to ‘All That You Have Is Your Soul?’” I could ask him to listen to any song and come up with a credible version that I could play, tailored to my skill-level as a guitarist. I marveled that he could listen to a recording and determine whether the guitar-player was using a capo or playing in an alternative tuning and also identify each version of each chord used. He had honed his skills by listening to music and teaching himself to play anything he wanted to play, playing along with recordings until his ears told him he matched a part note for note.
Within the first six months we were together, Johnny showed me how he drew a box chart for an arrangement of a song: each 4-beat measure got a box with a chord written in it. If the chord changed on the third beat, he drew a diagonal line from the upper right corner to the lower left corner and put one chord in each half of the box. Sometimes Johnny would draw groups of musical notes, quarter notes and dotted eighths, for example, and write the letters of the notes above them: he wrote out the introduction for Richard Thompson’s “Just the Motion” for me in this way and used blank spaces on the page to draw chord symbols for “Fsus2” and “Gsus4” before I learned how to count up the scale and create my own suspended chords. I responded to the chart with enthusiasm, writing him to say that having the chart made practicing fun rather than frustrating because it mapped how to get where I wanted.
Before I met Johnny, I devised most of my accompaniments impressionistically: for simple songs I could hear the chords, or hear chords that would do — chords that would go with the melody. I didn’t try to copy the arrangement on a record: what I did was learn the song by singing along with the record repeatedly, then singing the song as I walked around and went about my day and then finally picking up my guitar and fitting chords to the song I had now learned. For some things — like Joni Mitchell songs — I consulted songbooks, which featured tortured chord changes in standard tuning. None of this is necessary now: you can often find specific lessons for playing particular songs on YouTube where the guitarist breaks the whole arrangement down for you, and you can find a list of songs in each of Joni’s custom tunings on her website, but when Johnny and I started to play in the ‘50s and ‘60s the internet did not exist. I approached songs as a singer rather than as a guitarist (Feel free to insert derogatory music jokes here).
If I had met Johnny in my youth, I might be a better guitar-player today. By the time I met him I had my own ways of doing things; specific cheats for getting around barre chords, for example, and idiosyncratic chord changes to a few well-known songs. I had just a few formal lessons in some basic arpeggios, a few tips from other players. Although I started out playing exclusively in standard tuning without a capo, I soon employed a capo to move any song into a singable key with easy chords. My hands were never strong enough to master a full barre chord, except for a blurred-sounding F# minor. A fall I took in my fifties broke my left hand in two places below the index and ring fingers, temporarily destroying what hand strength I had and forever impairing my reach. I went to hand therapy, did every exercise I was given, wore strange contraptions of wire and rubber bands designed to stretch my bent ring finger, brought my guitar in to show the hand therapist what I would need to do in order to play. When I started busking shortly after Johnny and I got together, my left hand would sometimes cramp while I was playing, leaving me unsure whether I could make the next chord change.
I tried guitar lessons with Johnny a few times, but they frustrated both of us: with forty-some years of playing behind me I was not a beginner, but I was not a conventional player either. Eventually, we figured out that it worked better for me to consult him when I wanted to learn a specific lick or skill or “the right chords” to something. Johnny always obliged these requests from me no matter what the state of our relationship was and I always honored his skill and generosity in doing so. I miss his ears today as I forage forward on my own.
Johnny loved time travel stories: he would read any book or watch any movie that involved time travel. He loved watching “Outlander,” every Sunday night, seeing Claire and Brianna go through the stones to Scotland and America.
I have been to the house he lived in for many years: I know that his things are no longer there and I know where some of them have gone. And yet, persistently, for the last couple of days my mind has constructed a different world.
In the world that I see, Johnny inhabits the Marcella Street house. He sits in his folding chair in his living room, plugs his red Telecaster into his Marshall amp and plays and sings. He does not sing to us anymore. He does not go to Zoom music sessions. Students do not come to his house. You cannot call him up “any time,” as he always encouraged people to do. You cannot reach him by email and if you go by the house he will not answer the door.
I cannot explain this, but I see Johnny playing guitar, watching T.V., listening to music. He is not unhappy or lonely and he still has his stereo, his records and books. For me it is like watching someone in a life-sized doll house: I can see into the interior. I do not think he sees me.
In this self-contained world he orders food-to-go: beef stew from the Hof Brau, barbecue from E.&J, crawfish etouffee from Angeline’s. He may make ghostly visits to the Bay Fair Farmers’ Market where he bought corn and strawberries and pumpkin pie. He can bring home the strawberries, but he cannot have conversations with the vendors. He moves through a world where he cannot talk to anyone, but he can get what he needs.
There is no alcohol in this world — no whiskey, no vodka, no beer. He does not need it anymore. He is not partying or drinking to overcome some pain or shame. He plays his music and listens to music and is contented.
It is almost like Johnny lives in the world of an ofrenda for the Day of the Dead, surrounded by the things he loved most: music, books and food. Johnny liked to go to the Oakland Museum to see the exhibited altars every November.
I do not see him walking around in New Orleans or having conversations with other dead musicians. I do not see him reunited with his brother David or departed friends. I do not see him playing gigs. I do not see him in his office using his computer. I only see him in his living room where he taught and played and rehearsed and Zoomed. I see him in the house we sometimes lived in together, but I do not see myself there — we do not pass in the night like ghosts as I water the garden or cook in the kitchen. I am not there at all.
I do not know why I have this particular vision unless it is that the house is where Johnny died and his spirit is hanging around until such time as it is ready to move on, sitting quietly in a spirit version of his most-used room with his beloved music for company. I feel strongly that he is there. And I accept that I cannot call him up or visit him — I do not feel that as a pang. Instead I feel glad to know that he is safe: the sensation I have is that I am in this world over here and he is in that world over there.
Do any of you see Johnny anywhere these days? Do any of you understand what I am describing? Do any of you have a felt sense of where he is?
One of the things I brought back from Johnny’s house on Marcella Street was a binder of charts and set notes, most from two gigs we played in Kensington in 2012-2013. Johnny always typed up large-print set lists with the name of each song and the key he would play it in.
Johnny certainly knew how to put together sets: he had been a bandleader for decades and a D.J. at Berkeley’s KPFA radio. But when I look at the set lists for our first two duet gigs they look crazy to me: the song choices don’t hang together, the order of the songs doesn’t make sense. Each set looks like a tug-of-war between two sensibilities.
I had gotten us our first gig for December 21, 2012 at the Arlington Cafe in Kensington where I lived. We would play for tips and food and would have to bring our own P.A. if we wanted one. Johnny had spent six weeks in October and November producing records for Edie O’Hara and John McCord. Before I confirmed the booking I asked Johnny if he was sure he wanted to play it. He said, “I don’t have anything else going and it’s better to play than not to play.”
I remember our first rehearsal: Johnny came over to my house with a small Marshall amp, his Telecaster, a clipboard with pen, pencil and paper. We sat in the living room and started to talk about what to play.
“Honey, the gig is only four days before Christmas,” I said. “I think we should play some Christmas songs.”
“Sure. We can do that,” Johnny agreed.
I envisioned some kind of Christmas set, traditional carols interspersed with a few popular songs. I had grown up singing in a church choir and loved sacred Christmas music. In my burgeoning busking career I sang “River” by Joni Mitchell, “Hot Buttered Rum” by Tommy Thompson and “Blue Christmas.” I knew many Christmas carols and asked if we could do “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” — I knew that Johnny could come up with gorgeous chord voicing to my favorite carol, which ends with the poignant plea
“True man, yet very God,
From sin and death now save us
And share our every load.”
While I no longer believed the doctrine behind this, the wish to be relieved of suffering resonated with me: how wonderful it would be to be rescued from our errors and have our burdens shared.
Johnny wrote “Lo, How a Rose” into our first of two sets, but he did not group it with our other Christmas offerings. Instead he gave it the penultimate position in the set, followed by his original funk number “Work With What You Got,” which had the effect of erasing the touching carol, radically altering the tone of the end of the set.
Similarly, Johnny began the set with Robbie Robertson’s “Christmas Must Be Tonight,” which he sang lead on, and followed it with a solo blues number, “Kind-Hearted Woman.” The set ricocheted between Christmas numbers and songs that Johnny might have played in a solo show and my acoustic original songs and low-key covers.
I remember that Johnny suggested that I play Hazel Dickens’ “Working Girl Blues” and that he encouraged me to sing it in a lower key than I preferred. I acquiesced to that: it was only a matter of moving my capo down a few frets and losing a couple of high notes. He originally thought he wanted to do Bob Coltman’s “Before They Close the Minstrel Show” together, but I balked when he wanted to cut out choruses and elide middle verses.
“I don’t want to sing it that way, Johnny. The chorus is the heart of the song.”
When Johnny left the Coltman song was in the set list that I sent him via email, but his penciled note on a sheet of paper in the charts binder says “Think We Sh’d Drop.”
We dropped it. Johnny phoned to say he wasn’t feeling it: if he couldn’t arrange the song the way he liked, he didn’t want to play it at all and he didn’t want me to play it either.
Not wanting to fight, I said, “That’s okay. I can always sing it on the day job.”
We never sang it again.
More penciled notes indicate songs Johnny had considered adding to our set: “Frankie and Albert,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Visions of Johanna,” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” all of which would have fit in with my folkie repertoire, but, in the end, Johnny chose to pack the last set with a parade of Johnny Harper hits: “Suzy Q,” “If the Good Lord’s Willin’,” and “This Land Is Your Land.” It’s almost like he had gotten tired of pretending it was a duet gig and wanted to turn the evening into a Johnny Harper show. I had parts to sing, scripted on “If the Good Lord’s Willin’” and my own part on “This Land Is Your Land.”
When we played The Arlington again in the spring of 2013 the sets didn’t hang together any better. Johnny reprised “Kind-Hearted Woman,” “Work With What You Got” and “If the Good Lord’s Willin’” in the first set, along with “Belle Starr” and “My One Desire.” I added “Finger Ring,” and “Buckets of Rain” plus Mary O’Brien’s “We Can’t Pay That” at Johnny’s request. But the beginning of the second set whipsawed between Johnny’s opener of “King Harvest” by The Band and “Ingenue,” a tender love song I had written for him.
We followed that with a run of love songs that concluded with me singing an a cappella folk song in Scots called “The Lea Boy’s Lassie.”
And then what happens? Johnny leads the room in a roaring sing-along of Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-In-Law.” I doubt that these two songs had ever been heard on the same bill before, much less in the same set. After that I sang “Sitting on Top of the World,” Johnny added a medley of “Spoonful” and “Smokestack Lightning” and we closed once again with “This Land Is Your Land.”
If I had it to do over again I would have refused to sing in Scots, which general audiences don’t understand. An American blues ballad such as “Poor Lazarus” or “Little Sadie” would have been a better choice, both livelier and more comprehensible to the listeners. In the early days of our musical collaborations, I deferred to Johnny more than perhaps I ought to have, awed by his musical skills and flattered when he praised or requested songs in my repertoire. While I did not care for a couple of Johnny’s original songs I sang parts on them and would never have suggested removing them from the sets (I, too, was playing some original songs). My model for collaboration was something like sex columnist’s Dan Savage’s dictum: partners should be “good” (skilled), “giving” (generous) and “game” (willing to try things, to take risks). I believed that Johnny would use his skills to create good shows for us, but these set lists belie that.
What was going on, I wonder now. Was Johnny too burned out from his production jobs to focus seriously on our gigs? Did Johnny expect me to defer to him completely, expect to tell me what to sing and how to sing it? Did Johnny, who had been saying he wanted to play duet gigs with me, not have his heart in these gigs, perhaps because he would rather play solo or with his band?
I think Johnny and I could have come up with better sets had we taken a lot of time to discuss the actual sets, rather than to slot in songs piece by piece, had we discussed our individual concepts of the gigs, had we explored the subsections of music that we shared (Bob Dylan songs, Afro-American blues ballads, white mountain gospel music). I would have had to speak up and say, “Honey, I don’t think these sets are working” and risk Johnny’s reaction. Imagining that conversation, I can imagine everything from the snide (“Oh. You are the one with the thirty years of professional experience.”) to the passive-aggressive (“Alright. You plan the sets. I need them in forty-five minutes.”). I can imagine him deciding he didn’t want to play the gig after all, leaving me to either play a solo gig or cede the gig to him.
Perhaps I could have been more honest earlier in our musical relationship, differentiating between things I liked to hear Johnny play or sing with his band that I did not want to sing on, and things I would like to sing with Johnny, or have him sing at my gigs. I could have stuck up more for songs I loved to sing. Johnny loved music so much, had such strong feelings about it, that he could get upset over differences in musical tastes: he identified with the music he played. If I didn’t like a song, singer or arrangement, he would often take this as a personal criticism and jump to the conclusion that I didn’t like him, that I didn’t understand him, whereas I was willing to say, “It’s just a difference in aesthetics. People like what they like.”
It would take Johnny and me another six years to develop shared repertoire. I learned to play “The Weight,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Highway 61 Revisited.” He played “Raised on Robbery” and sang with me on the intro. We worked up Richard Thompson’s “Walkin’ on a Wire” and “Wall of Death” and Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” at my suggestion and crafted a duet of “Pancho and Lefty.” He learned David Rawlings’ “Ruby” for me and Linda Allen’s “Love Song for the Hard Times.” Unfortunately, the Johnny Harper train derailed again in October 2019 before we got to record or perform those songs.
Dear Readers,
I’m interrupting the chronological story of Johnny and Sharyn to write about current events: yesterday I made my last pilgrimage to the house on Marcella Street where Johnny lived the entire time I knew him. I lived there, too, a couple of times, as did my beloved cat, Fiona, or, to give her her complete name, Fiona Felina Houdini Cobweb Purrington (aka “Mrs. Purrington,” aka “Tex”).
I moved out of the Marcella Street house for the last time in late 2019, not long before the pandemic hit, and, because of the pandemic, with public transit declared risky, I did not visit the house often. I saw Johnny once in March 2020 when he asked me to come out and get some things I had left behind and I spent a half-day in his backyard earlier that month, while he was in the hospital, digging up shrubs, trees and tomato plants that I had planted there in order to transplant them to pots in Kensington. I left that day with a fig tree, a raspberry plant that Johnny called “Robert” (for Robert Plant), a blueberry, and a couple of tomato plants.
When I last saw Johnny at Marcella Street in March 2020 he was wearing strange clothes: either someone had given them to him or he had found them at a thrift store. He wore a sweatshirt, blue jeans, some unlaced tennis shoes on his feet. I had never seen Johnny dressed in street clothes other than head-to-toe black: black jeans, black long-sleeved button-down shirt, black socks, black leather dress shoes, black leather jacket. He carried a black leather satchel, and had a black watch cap and a black cotton sweater for inclement weather. I did see him wear a red or purple tie once or twice, but I had not seen him in colored clothes, other than blue and white hospital gowns.
The house was not too bad on that visit. A friend of Johnny’s had gone in and straightened it up and perhaps Johnny, too, had made one of his periodic efforts to clean and order his environment. We met in the living room and he pointed out things he wanted me to take. I used to be able to take anything I didn’t want down to Thrift Town on East 14th Street, a short walk from the house, but Johnny told me it had closed down after I left in late 2019.
Although Johnny and I had more than one conversation about my coming back to Marcella Street for a visit, ostensibly so we could rehearse some music we had previously developed arrangements for (We both missed playing music with another person), I never went. I told Johnny I was a little afraid to see what condition the house was in and I didn’t know how it would feel for me to be there — I was afraid that I would feel sad or shaky. What actually kept me from going back, however, was not fear of discomfort, it was Johnny raising the stakes: just when we had worked out how I could visit, he said, “I wouldn’t want you to come unless you were thinking of staying. It would be too painful if you came and then left again.”
Coming and leaving again was precisely what I had in mind. I understood Johnny’s point and told him so, but I was not ready to promise to do anything other than play some music and see how it went. I said, “Johnny, we haven’t been able to see each other at all. We couldn’t meet for coffee, or have a meal, or go to the movies. Now we’re talking about an overnight visit, a couple of days, after which I’ll have to quarantine.”
Johnny never reissued the invitation and I did not go, although I would have loved to resurrect our music.
After Johnny died I made a couple of trips to Marcella Street. The first time, about a month after his death, I sat on the floor of his office and went through files and boxes of paperwork, removing “Sharyn” files and “Ballad Group” files, correspondence, and signed CDs and cassettes I had given him, taking home the paper trail of a shared life. I had dinner that night with Johnny’s niece at the home of our friends Jerry and Sally who lived in town. We ate greens and red beans and rice and homemade peach cobbler and talked about Johnny. We played a little music on two of his guitars. I picked up his Martin and played “Buckets of Rain” softly while Jerry and Lucy talked.
The second time I went back to Marcella Street, I brought pruning shears and cut wayward spurs from the peach tree I had planted. I chopped the errant growth into short lengths for kindling and brought home an armload of budded peach and persimmon branches. I dug up the main root and runner of an olallieberry I had planted, along with a tomato plant and some cut chard. I went with Edie O’Hara, Johnny’s friend, student and protege. We took a few pictures in Johnny’s living room in front of a wall of records, still in their shelves.
Yesterday I went back to pick up a few more things Johnny’s niece and his ex-wife had set aside for me. There was a slim binder of charts for a few songs I had written and a few I had performed at a show with Johnny, including Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” plus a couple of set lists from gigs we had played in my home town, a birthday card I had sent him, a cassette of mine that had strayed into his collection. Once again, I visited “my” trees in the yard and took photos of them. I peeked into the shed where we had stored many belongings that did not fit in the two-bedroom house: the only remnants of my life there were seed packets that some animal had torn into and the square pavers I had laid as a path to the shed. I cut a final bouquet from the rogue chard that insisted on growing between squares of the patio.
I walked through the old bedroom one more time, seeing a wooden block that had once supported my central double bookshelf, still screwed into the wall. I saw a bag of wrapping paper I had bought in a paper bag in Johnny’s office. The kitchen junk drawer still held a curtain I had taken down and a collection of old shoelaces I kept for tying up plants. Few traces, really, of a life together. Outside, chunks of concrete I had broken with a borrowed sledgehammer sat near the back gate — no one had ever hauled them away.
I walked around and snapped pictures, gathered chard, stowed binders in my backpack without much emotion. After I had called for a ride service to pick me up, Johnny’s ex-wife helped me carry a heavy turntable down the front steps. As I went through the front gate she said, “It must be hard leaving somewhere you lived together.”
I teared up then. “I hope there will be some kind of closure, “ I told her.
I balanced the turntable on the rusted trunk of Johnny’s old Toyota Corolla that still sat in the driveway while I waited for my ride.
After I greeted my driver, put my belongings on the backseat of his car and buckled my seat belt, the driver and I exchanged remarks about the hot weather. As he followed directions given by his talking GPS, taking a route to the freeway that Johnny and I would not have taken, my tears spilled over, blotted by the edges of my mask: I had caught the song on “the jukebox,” Johnny’s name for the songs that play in our heads — all the way home from San Leandro to Kensington, I heard a variation on Steve Earle’s “Goodbye”
“Maybe I was off somewhere,
Maybe you were just too high,
But I can’t remember
If we said goodbye.”
Hi Readers,
No story tonight: I’m wiped out from my Covid booster on Friday. I’ll try to get the next installment up within the week, but I can’t promise anything.
The discomforts of rehearsing for Lucy’s wedding did not rise or sink to the level of a fight: they just exposed some differences in the ways Johnny and I approached music, performing, arranging, rehearsing. Our first real conflict materialized on Thanksgiving weekend, the day after our first Thanksgiving meal together.
Thanksgiving is my mother’s favorite holiday and for forty-plus years I had been assisting her in making the food, an extravaganza of free-range turkey, chestnut dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams, tossed green salad, cranberry sauce, yeast-risen rolls and two kinds of pie. We made everything from scratch, our only shortcut was using canned pumpkin in the pumpkin pie. We made the same menu every year, the only variable the second pie we would choose to make. Mom and I had a well-practiced routine. She is a good cook, known for her thin, crisp pie crust.
We invited Johnny for Thanksgiving dinner and sat him at the head of the table next to me. He ate well, although my family of origin did not direct much conversation toward him. I tried to pick up the slack.
Before he met me, Johnny had sometimes attended a Thanksgiving dinner for local “orphans,” people who did not have immediate family in the area. In 2012 that dinner fell on the day after Thanksgiving and I agreed to go with Johnny. I made an extra pie to take to the gathering and, because I was transporting food on the bus, I chose to leave my guitar at home.
Johnny arrived by cab and, as it happened, the party took place in the same Berkeley home as the ballad group where Johnny and I had met, so we took our customary places at the end of the dining table where we ate our second Thanksgiving dinner with six other people.
We sat at the table for several hours, eating, waiting for food, talking. I think Johnny had brought some beer and I know that the hostess, Marlene, brought out a bottle of bourbon.
As is often the case, I wasn’t drinking at all. My tastes run to champagne and single malt whiskey and I am careful to limit quantities of alcohol due to my family history and my own low tolerance for alcoholic beverages.
Johnny drank, of course, and I noticed that he drank more than anyone else at the party. That should not have been a surprise to me — I had seen him drink on previous occasions: he was a big guy and liked to drink. This time, though, I saw signs of slippage: he referred to a politician as a “fuckhead” and when I said lightly “Bad boy!” he responded by saying “You know you love it” and grabbing me.
I was shocked. It’s not that he couldn’t grab me physically in private, but I did not know some of the other guests and am fairly circumspect about public displays of affection. I attributed Johnny’s coarser language and behavior to his drinking.
When we had eaten dessert we moved to the adjoining living room to play music and sing. I took up residence on the couch, where I eventually stretched out flat: the long hours of sitting at the table and the long hours on my feet preparing Thanksgiving dinner the previous day had taken their toll.
I am the kind of limited player that needs to play my own instrument: I have hand damage from earlier fractures that affects my ability to play and, as I said, I had left my guitar at home so that I could carry food to the feast.
Once or twice Johnny suggested I play something and someone would hand me an unfamiliar acoustic guitar (Johnny was playing his Telecaster). One guitar I could not play at all; I eked out something on the other. Johnny, meanwhile, led songs, accompanied people on songs of their choice and played duets with his friend Beth. He stayed in the center of the action, played tirelessly and kept drinking while I grew tireder and tireder.
I don’t remember what time we left the party or how we got home that night, but I do remember a bus ride where Johnny said, “I’m going out with a crazy person.”
He said that because I mentioned his drinking and behavior at the party. He chose to interpret my comment as a complaint about how he behaved in the session. He accused me of telling him he was hogging the session or grandstanding, but what I wanted to address was how his demeanor toward me had changed.
“You weren’t acting like yourself,” he said. “You were being passive, not participating.”
“Johnny, I was tired. It was a long day and I didn’t have my guitar because I had to bring a pie.”
He told me I had to stop behaving like I had toward my father and my alcoholic brothers.
“They weren’t there,” I said.
“Oh, they were there,” he insisted.
Johnny thought that everything would be fine if I just accepted his drinking and trusted him to handle it, but I didn’t trust anyone who drank until they proved to me several times that they remained pleasant, trustworthy and, above all, fully present.
When Johnny referred to me as “crazy,” I cautioned him not to say things he might regret. I knew that I could react to certain words or behaviors, but I also knew I was not crazy, that I was reacting to things that Johnny had done and said.
It took hours of accusatory emails and conversations to sort it all out and come to peace. The underlying issues remained, however, and would rise again.
Right after the Labor Day debacle when Johnny got restricted from visiting me, Johnny invited me to sing several things with him for a gig at his niece Lucy’s wedding in Santa Cruz. He first asked me to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a song dear to the bride-to-be, which I had recorded on my CD “Paris,” and to sing “Ingenue,” which I had just written about falling in love with Johnny himself. He mentioned including Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire” and Alan Toussaint’s “New Love Thing,” which we had been singing together.
But on Friday September 7th, eight days before Lucy’s wedding, he sent me a long list of songs to sing back-up on, some of which I did not know, some of which I had never heard. I immediately requested lyrics and details via email. He said breezily, “You’ll do fine.”
Fast forward to the rehearsal on Tuesday. Johnny had asked me to rehearse at his house, to go over all of the parts before his band came to rehearse with us. He booked two and a half to three hours for us to go over all of the parts.
Now, I have a reasonably good ear and I have sung most of my life, starting with singing along with records as a small child. I have two primary harmony-singing traditions: I have done a lot of choral singing where you sing fixed parts from written music and you have weekly rehearsals to go over your parts. I also sing with groups of folk musicians where we all improvise harmonies when we are not leading a song and singing the melody.
Rehearsing parts with Johnny was something else again. He either sang a harmony line for me, played it on his guitar, or used some combination of singing and playing to produce the line. He expected me to learn a harmony line, reproduce it in perfect rhythm, memorize it and then go on to learning the next line in that song, or the first harmony line in a different song. The only thing I had to rely on was my musical memory. Also, I was working in genres that I didn’t sing in — R&B, for example.
Johnny spoon-fed me lines for a few hours. Many different lines. I struggled to jam them all into my head. And then he started to complain about my vocal tone, that it didn’t match his. “You don’t sound like a soul singer,” he said.
“Excuse me?,” said the voice in my head. “I never said I was a soul singer. Hello! I’m a white girl, soprano in the upstairs choir, folk musician.”
I had been working hard to please Johnny, but I was working in unfamiliar territory. I tried again. Once we had gone through all of my parts we started singing the songs.
After awhile, Johnny said, “I’m not feeling it. You can stay for rehearsal if you want, or you can go home. Your choice.”
I felt abruptly dismissed. My thoughts raced. “Is he really cutting me from the gig? Am I not going to sing at all at the wedding? What about ‘Fire?’ What about ‘our song?’”
Drawing a deep breath and pushing aside my emotions, I said, “I have a question.”
He looked at me.
“Do you want me to sing on anything?”
“That’s a good question. You can sing on ‘Fire’ and on ‘Center of the World.’ You’ll have to stay for rehearsal.”
Just like that my participation went from a dozen or more complicated parts to the ones I knew in the first place.
The conflict did not end there. We began to rehearse “Fire,” which we had sung together informally a couple of times. I was singing on the tag line and then full out on the third verse, “Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah…” I sang the part the way I always had, with a rising inflection on the second syllable of “Delilah,” the same way you say the name: De-LI-lah.
Johnny keyed in on that word. He asked me to stay on one note for all three syllables.
I tried it. I didn’t like it. I argued for my position. “I’m singing it the way you say it. De-LI-lah.”
“The note’s not in the chord.”
Oh, give me a break! Technically, I was singing a suspension. I didn’t think to say that. Suspensions are common one-note variations from chords that add drama or tension (and resolution when you move off of them). I am an intuitive singer and was singing what felt right to me in the harmony line. Johnny had never objected to my singing the word that way before. When not bound by written music I was used to choosing the notes I wanted to sing.
Johnny didn’t like my line. I didn’t like his. I gave in and sang it his way because I like the song and I liked singing it with Johnny.
Next, we worked out a cue for me to come in on the third verse, which came after an extended guitar solo and some schtick Johnny did vamping over it. We agreed on the cue.
Meanwhile, the band came in, all smiles, greeted each other, set up and began to play. Johnny came alive and on fire during rehearsal. The musicians laughed, joked with each other, called out low-key compliments. I sat listening with one hand over my left ear because the drums were too loud for me to bear, feeling increasingly alienated: the band sounded good, was having a good time, grooved together — I was the odd one out.
When it came time to sing “Fire,” Johnny forgot to cue me and I missed my entrance to verse three. I pointed out that he had forgotten to cue me and he cued me the next time. We sang the song and moved on. No one said a word to me. Not “nice voice.” Not, “Nice to hear the harmony.”
The rehearsal went on into the night. At one point, Johnny called a short break and maneuvered me into the hallway. “What do you think?,” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking how different we are,” I said.
This was already an old conversation between us, only usually he said “We’re so different” and I’d laugh and say “I was just thinking how much alike we are.”
I might have added, “I don’t belong here.” I was certainly feeling that.
Johnny looked puzzled, then hurt. He shone with excitement. “Did you notice the guitar solos? I played every one differently for you. Did you hear me put your name in “Cripple Creek?”
I hadn’t been following the guitar solos. I rarely did: music, for me, is about lyrics and melody and harmony. And I hadn’t heard my name in “Cripple Creek,” maybe because I didn’t know the song and maybe because I had my hand over my ear to ameliorate the sound of the over-loud drums.
Johnny said, “I’ll talk to you later” and went back to rehearsing. When the evening broke up I got a ride home from Patrick the bass player. I told him how frustrated I was: “I can’t learn several parts in a few hours.”
“Of course not,” he said.
Later Johnny and I rehashed the whole rehearsal from my feeling that I might as well not exist in that context to his feeling that I wasn’t happy for him. I was happy for him: it’s just hard to sit through a multi-hour rehearsal when you don’t feel included or appreciated. I saw Johnny in his element no question and I couldn’t see where or how I fit in. We didn’t go over my musical numbers with the band, other than “Fire”: “Hallelujah” and “Ingenue” would be solo performances for me while the band was on break. In fact, while I was onstage singing a love song for Johnny at the wedding, Johnny was having a conversation with the wedding officiant. I told him that I had looked out in the crowd for him while I was singing, “Here I am falling, falling for you,” only to see him talking to someone rather than listening to me.
Johnny told me he had picked out a spot from which to listen to me sing and the wedding guy had found him and button-holed him with questions about the schedule. I don’t know why he couldn’t have said “Shh. That’s my girlfriend onstage. I’ll be with you in five.”
A month after the wedding I got me and Johnny a gig to play at The Arlington cafe in Kensington on December 21st. I wrote in a Facebook publicity announcement “Johnny Harper, the great and powerful, and Sharyn Dimmick, the small and meek (well, small anyway) will be playing at The Arlington. You heard Johnny at Cur-Ville, now come hear him sing with his new love thing in bucolic Kensington, California.” I had hopes for us as a duet act as well as for us as a couple, despite the emergence of early differences.
thekalechronicles 