What if you had lived?
I’m wondering late at night as an autumn rain blows in.
Maybe just a little like a Liverpool rain?
Maybe it was raining when you sat on the bedroom floor of your friend Paul’s house and listened to Buddy Holly, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and Elvis and then made up some songs of your own?
Maybe it was raining in Hamburg, those early days when your band would go for 8-10 hours a set. Every day. It really all started from the fact that you guys practiced. You poured the sweat of the hardest working guy on the Liverpool docks into your job. You put your hours in. My God, you guys were good. You worked at being good. And it showed.
Maybe it was raining outside of the Ed Sullivan Theater that first night you came through the tiny black and white Zenith TV in our families basement, I hushed my sisters to listen, they liked Paul but I thought you were the cool one.
On that night that everything changed.
I remember looking at your scribbled handwriting on the ragged piece of paper in the most stately of glass display cases in the British Museum. That piece of paper where you wrote:
“Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved you more.”
Maybe it was raining that night in front of the Dakota. That night you were shot down dead.
That night everything changed again.
It’s been what. . .that many years?
Jesus.
Sometimes I forget that you are gone.
But then I remember what you left behind.
I listen and I grin.
Trying to be a bit like you.
As if I knew one or two of your secrets.
And of course I don’t.
But I can sure feel you there when you sing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWIMYVKbLE]