Chapter One --
The crowd clapped and whistled. The waiting guitar noodled. Over the humdrum a voice is heard.
“Hey, mister light man! You’ve got to turn those lights way down! I’m not kidding – you’ve got to turn those lights way down! ... C’mon!”
The man with the mic waited for the lights to go down. They didn’t. The crowd cheered. A tambourine beat, waiting, waiting.
Seconds passed and the great man said, “Ah, wadda we care.”
And he began to sing.
Chapter Two –
The second part of the story is told by rock journalist Dave Philips. He looks majestic in a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts, like Kaputnik from MAD magazine; horn-rimmed glasses, a corn-cob pipe gripped in his teeth. He clears his throat and lists names into the recorder.
“Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Bon Scott, Ian Curtis, John Bonham, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Phil Lynott, Peter Tosh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin, Johnny Thunders, Freddy Mercury, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell, Jeff Buckley, Screaming Lord Such, Ian Dury, Kirsty MacColl, Joey Ramone, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Dimebag Darrell, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, Les Paul, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie James Dio, Paul Gray, Peter Quaife, and counting ...
“Dramatic, gripping, ripping, bloated, tragic, glorious, death has always ridden the coattails of rock music.
“Plane crashes, drug overdoses, murders, heart attacks, electrocution (by guitar), cancer, drowning, skiing accidents, being mown in half by a speeding powerboat.
“Some are more mysterious. Skatalite and trombone legend Don Drummond allegedly committed suicide while institutionalized in Belle Vue Asylum, Kingston in 1969. Jim Morrison’s fatal heart failure in 1971 is disputed to this day –“
I cut him off there by pressing the STOP button.
Chapter Three --
Thieves first robbed the grave in 1973. In 1981, to mark the tenth anniversary of his death, a bust was erected on the site. This was subject to all kinds of atrocities before being stolen seven years later. Finally, his father placed a flat stone on the grave
that reads ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ - "according to his own daemon".
It has yet to be stolen and it is stuck tight.
Though the hallowed site knows many stories, my favourite is the one when Patty Smith visited in the autumn of 1973. She wrote it so beautifully: Rimbaud on her heart and hyacinths in her hand, following the strings of French graffiti like Theseus to an unmarked grave, reading C’est la fin, mon merveilleux ami in the rain.
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