GONE BEFORE

I played rock n’ roll as a teenager growing up in Iowa, but when I entered college, I gave it up for the theatre.  I missed the music, though, and dreamed, literally and repeatedly, about getting the band back together.  (Another recurring dream had me returning with joy to that Green Island farmhouse where I had lived as a youngster, just a few miles up the river from that Almont shed on the HOME PAGE.)  Every once in a while I'd pick up a guitar --- the drums were the only thing I'd ever been any good at --- play for a month or two, then put it down again.  But when the younger of my two younger brothers died many years ago, the urge to play came back stronger than ever, and this time I stuck with it.  It was the best way I could find to stay in touch with him, to mourn him.  I started to write songs, and the first one was about him.  Once I had the gist, I began to write about others departed, including my father, grandparents, then my other brother, then my mother.  Plenty to mourn, plenty to write about.  All but one of these songs made it on to a CD entitled Gone Before.  My mother lived long enough to listen to the CD with me, which meant her song didn’t make it on to the recording.  Why do we wait?!

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Not all the tunes on the CD are elegies, though.  There's a paean to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, another paean to the Mississippi River, a jeremiad directed at the big city (guess which one), and a couple of pokes at masculine pride.  So, not all elegies, but all preoccupied with mortality, for sure, and all huddled like so many drenched fairies under a toadstool named Gone Before.

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On March 28, 2017, I issued this CD liner note --- "Thanks, yes, many, many thanks to Steve, my friend since school days, and BJ, and Dick.  To Steve's wife Carol, and their daughter, Esme.  And to David, who really, really, knows what he's doing.​"  Steve took his own life a year-and-a-half later.  Carol is gone now, too, and so is Dick.  Esme has a CD out now entitled Take Me Out.  She has an extraordinary voice and is a fine song writer, so you better check her out.

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​I'll close here with something a friend of mine wrote after listening to Gone Before, because I treasure it.

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"I wasn't quite sure what to expect but was a bit surprised to hear songs rooted in Iowa.  I probably shouldn't have been.  I recall Michael's jeans from almost 50 years ago.  They were full of patches sewn on with the tiniest, finest hand stitches I've ever seen.  Grandma's work--loving work, slow work practiced in the comfort of home.  Since time plays hell with fabric, the patches needed to be well matched to the old jeans.  New cloth might be so stiff that it would threaten the old denim. So no--I really shouldn't have been surprised to hear an older Michael working from where he came, carefully stitching against the wear and tear of time."

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Bruce Wheaton

Iowa City, IA

November 29, 2017