ALVIN LEE ~
George Kalamaras
The Bluest Blues
—for Alvin Lee, 1944 –
2013
It happens that quickly.
The bluest blues.
Sometimes it’s a knife-cut, something horribly wrong growing
inside the one we love.
It’s rarely as dramatic as a house burning. Or mistakenly drinking a glass of bedside lye.
You’re gone, Alvin. A
decade older than my fifty-six years.
Let me be clear: I could never have survived age thirteen without
you.
Nor sixteen. Eighteen. Even twenty-five. Let me count the scars.
My thirteen years then were simple. The Temptations and the Supremes.
Are You Experienced? Rubber Soul.
Disraeli Gears.
Then you sang, “I Can’t Keep from Crying, Sometimes,” and
suddenly neither could I.
Why is it we are born in certain centuries into one
another’s lives?
We never met, but like the night possum, we track one
another’s marsupial past.
We never met, but paramecia on the wrist remind us of ways
we knew before we poured
into the body’s pouch.
We never met, but I see your barn studio collapse that day from
the gutters, from the rain.
Never met. A sign,
that even while recording On the Road to
Freedom, liberation was
never easy.
Your dear friend, George Harrison, was fortunate, having not
yet arrived from next door.
Stevie Winwood and Mylon LeFevre were outside, discussing a take, smoking a joint.
What if you’d been inside, recording a track? What if George had lent his fame to the lp,
rather than the
credit, Hari Georgeson?
What if I’d never heard Cricklewood
Green? Spent night after night head-phoned
to
“50,000 Miles
Beneath My Brain”?
We wake some mornings with blistering snow in the gut, saying
yes and no at once.
We go in for a routine procedure, telling the one we love
what we want later for dinner.
Small things.
Large. We assume there is time to
love the mice. Brush the dog.
Walk the daughter’s hair.
That we might finally get it right.
Spend our lives with a Gibson hollow-body 335, peace sign
decal pasted onto the axe.
Keeping ourselves that
open is what allows us to receive.
Roaring riffs from the gods.
The bluest blues. Your
scorching fingers, at Woodstock, I wished the world had never seen.
Clouded—crowds gathered, thereafter, in stadiums for only the
lightning part of you.
Now you have drifted sadly back to ash.
It happens that quickly.
Something horribly blue gone suddenly wrong.
I was thirteen, Alvin.
Now I’m fifty-six.
A life together we never met.
The stutter-shove of a guitar god is true.
The blue blue bluest of the blues.
( 19 December 1944 ~ 6 March 2013 )
George Harrison & Alvin Lee
our thanks to: "Linda Cain, Managing Editor, Chicago Blues Guide"
