"Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" is not my first poem, but it wins that title by default. I wrote it in the spring of 1998, a couple of months before graduating from high school, and it appeared in the campus literary magazine that went home to parents. Before that, I had written a few poems as class assignments and maybe attempted a few others on my own time, but all of those efforts have been lost to time and memory. When I entered college that fall, as far as I was concerned, I brought one poem with me. I read "Elegy" at a handful of campus readings and got it published in the UCI magazine Faultline in the spring of 1999. In my book Tea and Subtitles: Selected Poems 1999-2019, that poem is the sole representative of the first year in the title. In 1999, it was all that I had.
Every artist starts somewhere, and it's usually a more earnest place than where they end up. Woody Allen's first movies were lightweight comedies. Bob Dylan spent his first two albums faking an accent of some kind -- on "Blowin' in the Wind," he seems to be trying to impersonate an Okie twenty years his senior. When I wrote "Elegy," I'm not sure if I was trying to impersonate anyone, but if so, it was probably a songwriter rather than a poet. The engine that drives the poem is its rhythm and rhyme, and if I remember correctly, I was trying to evoke the sound of a rapid guitar that the titular character might strum. The LAST thing you HEAR is a SOFT chord in A, / ringing UNder the BASS at the END of the SONG -- that meter never stops throughout the poem, except for the final line of each stanza, which drops one beat. I wrote it, first and foremost, as a musical piece. Not being a composer, I have no idea what a suitable melody might be. I like "Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" a lot. In the quarter-century since I trepidatiously handed it to the high school magazine editor, I've written many poems that I consider deeper, subtler, or more mature -- but, then, there's a reason we still pull up those early Allen movies or Dylan songs too. They represent part of a journey, a process of discovery, and sometimes those early efforts can hit upon some genuine truths, even if we know the artist eventually moved past them. Would I ever write another poem like "Elegy"? Probably not. But the nice thing is that I don't have to. I wrote it already when I was 18, and I'm content to let it stand. (The poem appears as this week's feature in the Journal of Radical Wonder.) A common question that I get about the poem is whether it's about a real person. The answer is that it's based on one: Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, who was kicked out of the band in 1969 due to his erratic behavior (fueled by drugs) and drowned in his swimming pool soon after. The last Stones track that Jones appears on is "You Got the Silver," on which he strums an autoharp in the background. It would be tidy to say that it marked the farewell of the band's original lineup, but it actually features just four of the five; Mick Jagger sits out the track while Keith Richards takes over on lead vocals. No matter. It's a gorgeous song (some days my favorite Stones piece), and the sense of longing in the tune and lyrics complement the knowledge, in hindsight, that it marks the last diminished contribution of a member who was once the band's guiding force. I first heard the song that senior year of high school, and even then, I had no intention of romanticizing Jones. He was, by all accounts, a reprehensible man in terms of his treatment of women, and his decline should serve as a caution to anyone even considering toying with drugs. But, as the saying goes, merciless is not the same as pitiless. What moved me upon hearing that track was the idea of anyone's final essence being captured on tape and preserved for posterity -- even more poignant if it were a rhythm guitarist (usually not the most prominent member of a band) rather than a singer or soloist. If you listen to the Stones' 1960s albums in order, you will Jones start out boldly, then fade and finally disappear. "You Got the Silver" is the last moment before the disappearance. As a high school senior in 1998, I wasn't going to submit a poem about the Rolling Stones to the campus magazine. "Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" became a fiction piece, with the musicians now a coed garage band and the title character's death, though still drug-related, caused by a car crash rather than drowning. The tape that the guitarist last played on resides in the narrator's apartment, rather than Tower Records. Looking back on that 18-year-old who worked a story poem out of Brian Jones' swan song, I'm proud of his moderation. He was boy enough to spin a tale about playing in a rock and roll band, and man enough to give it a sober ending.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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