June 2, 2002
Even in restored
dreams, the previous disagreements continue.
We drove to Lake
Hopatcong yesterday morning to deliver the CDs containing photographs and music
from last week's fundraising concert for the town's recreation department.
During the week, I
had informed Jimmy about my recording of the event and told him I had taken
numerous pictures. He was surprised on a number of levels. We had grown distant
for lack of visiting him over the last year, and with Jimmy, lack of contact
has always equated to an evaporating of trust.
He seemed overly
grateful for my efforts, forgetting how dedicated I'd been to preserving the
history of our passing through this life -- collecting the pictures and the
sounds of our mutual movement, and highlighting the significant moments. From
the days when Frank positioned me in the back seat of his car to acquire secret
tapes of Jimmy's conversations, I had become a chronicler of the Garley Gang.
Although other
people had taken pictures of the event with more sophisticated equipment, the
low light and the lack of a rock & roll imagination had left few of them
satisfactory. I saw two of the prints at the library, and they were not as bad
as Jimmy had implied over the telephone -- needing some studio work to enhance
them. As for the music, no one had thought to duplicate that, and Jimmy listened
to the recording with great interest, making note of the mistakes and the
points of pride.
He was annoyed and
pleased with the photos. They had captured the tone too well, showing the aging
people standing unromantically on a grammar school stage, yet with a sense of
history that showed in their expressions.
Jimmy told us of
his plans for the band, giving us a geographic outline of where he was willing
to play, as well as limiting the venues to places that did not sell alcohol.
"I don't want
to start playing bars again," he said. "Then no matter how good we sound;
we'd be judged on how much people drank."
In a conversation
later, Garrick told me he disagreed with this, saying that the band could not
hope to get enough gigs if they listened to Jimmy, and suggested that the band
play some middleclass supper clubs.
This was an age-old
argument, not so much in the details, but in the dissatisfaction: Jimmy and
Garrick maintaining an acute disagreement over the practicality of various
situations. Whereas Jimmy criticized some of Garrick's bass-playing, Garrick
blamed part of the performance's flaw on Jimmy's insisting they play up on the
stage.
"It would
have been better if we were down on the floor," he said. "It would
have been more intimate, and the sound would have been better."
Down deep, both
men felt the same passion for the music and the rock and roll life as they did
when younger, and these disputes were a matter of how to express that love, for
the music and for each other, the crusty conflicts of people so close in their
roots that they cannot help but clash.
fire house video
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