When the singer is gone, let the song live on.
Searching through a box of old things to find something to donate to an auction for Don's Walden Woods, I found an old leather bound book with faded pages and faint scribbles, written by someone I barely know anymore. Myself from 1981...
Journal Entry: Monday Night, The Forum [1981]
If only for a moment, I shall tell you what it was to be a part of the Heartbreakers tonight, to be so proud that your heart breaks, to hold onto Adria Petty and to watch her dance, and to tell her that it is imperative that she tell her father how good he was and that she danced on the stage for her first time, I knew that Bruce Springsteen would have been proud of her. She has the moves down.
Needles and Pins was good. I feel that Tom and I are better than that, but then we are just beginning. And we will just get better. Gordon said it was Don and Phil. Dear Gordon was our love for the Everly Brothers, it could have been faster, and we will certainly get stronger, but if it was nothing else, it was Tom and I, and Tom and I have the potential to be a stroke of genius, inside us, within us, we certainly can sing. Together, we can sing anything. We can sing whatever it is that is important to us.
Singing with Tom and being a guest of the Heartbreakers has only made me see clearly that I want my own band. I do not want a band of musicians who play for the money. I want a band of angels who play for the love. I am not selfish. I do not want the glory of being a queen. I want a band with Lori and Sharon and Waddy and Russell and Bob and Benmont and Roy and Bobby and Davey and anyone else that wants to be in it, and really just whoever wants to be a part of this. I am willing to share it, and I ask very little of anyone. I only ask that you be the best band that you can be. It was only luck.
And as she sits at her typewriter like Lillian Hellman and she cries, 'Julia, my friend, my guide and my counselor,' and as Julia becomes part of the ocean and her friendship's only part of the memory and she fights and hangs onto a thread of life that has become daily more important to her because it is, to her, her lifeline. And as Adria Petty looks up at me with love and trust and expectations of me, I make my choice. I make my decision. When the singer is gone, let the song live on.
Journal Entry: Monday Night, The Forum [1981]
If only for a moment, I shall tell you what it was to be a part of the Heartbreakers tonight, to be so proud that your heart breaks, to hold onto Adria Petty and to watch her dance, and to tell her that it is imperative that she tell her father how good he was and that she danced on the stage for her first time, I knew that Bruce Springsteen would have been proud of her. She has the moves down.
Needles and Pins was good. I feel that Tom and I are better than that, but then we are just beginning. And we will just get better. Gordon said it was Don and Phil. Dear Gordon was our love for the Everly Brothers, it could have been faster, and we will certainly get stronger, but if it was nothing else, it was Tom and I, and Tom and I have the potential to be a stroke of genius, inside us, within us, we certainly can sing. Together, we can sing anything. We can sing whatever it is that is important to us.
Singing with Tom and being a guest of the Heartbreakers has only made me see clearly that I want my own band. I do not want a band of musicians who play for the money. I want a band of angels who play for the love. I am not selfish. I do not want the glory of being a queen. I want a band with Lori and Sharon and Waddy and Russell and Bob and Benmont and Roy and Bobby and Davey and anyone else that wants to be in it, and really just whoever wants to be a part of this. I am willing to share it, and I ask very little of anyone. I only ask that you be the best band that you can be. It was only luck.
And as she sits at her typewriter like Lillian Hellman and she cries, 'Julia, my friend, my guide and my counselor,' and as Julia becomes part of the ocean and her friendship's only part of the memory and she fights and hangs onto a thread of life that has become daily more important to her because it is, to her, her lifeline. And as Adria Petty looks up at me with love and trust and expectations of me, I make my choice. I make my decision. When the singer is gone, let the song live on.