Free I Was There the Night He Died by Ray Robertson Page A

interesting.”
    â€œNo doubt. But who is it anyway?”
    â€œSomeone who’s been dead for a long time.” Only about fifteen years, actually, but to an eighteen-year-old, that is a long time.
    â€œJim Morrison,” she says.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œJimi Hendrix,” she says.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œJohn Lennon.”
    â€œNo,” I say, both to shut her up and to prove that I’m not the classic-rock zombie she obviously thinks I am. “And not Keith Moon or John Bonham or Brian Jones either.”
    â€œSo who then?”
    Christ, it’s no wonder her old man is a drunk. “Ronnie Lane,” I say.
    â€œIs he the one from the Rolling Stones?”
    I pause, and not just to take another toke, either.
    â€œNo. That’s Ronnie Wood.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference?”
    â€œDon’t you have any homework or a science project or some extracurricular activity to attend to?”
    â€œNope. And all my chores are done for the day, too, pa. Please tell me all about the life and times of Ronnie Lane.”
    If I wasn’t starting to feel the effect of the weed and the house wasn’t so empty and everything wasn’t so not enough or too much, I’d just stand up and go. I stay where I am.
    â€œRonnie Lane … ” I begin. “Ronnie Lane, he … ” I continue.
    When you can hear yourself talking, you’re not really communicating. Pot may be the ideal fuel for contentedly puttering around in your own consciousness, but booze, it seems, is still the drug of choice when tongues need to be loosened and the race for the right word is preferable to slouching on the sidelines. I extinguish the joint and twist the cap off the wine bottle and take a long pull.
    â€œI guess you’re not shooting for the bestseller list with this one, are you?” the girl says.
    â€œGive me a minute.” That minute plus one more and two more slugs of wine later, I’m ready.
    â€œRonnie Lane was in a British band in the 1960s called the Small Faces and in another band in the ’70s called the Faces. They both played rock and roll and they both played it the way it’s supposed to be played: loud, rude, and horny. Around the time of the Faces’ second album, though, Ronnie woke up to wooden music—US dusty high-­lonesome twang goosed just right with blood-pudding British dancehall stomp—and even though the Faces’ audience was getting bigger and everyone’s bank account was getting fatter, Ronnie took his bass and went home, used the money he’d saved up not buying Cadillacs and rhinestone jumpsuits and vacation homes in Bermuda to purchase a farm on the English/Welsh border to raise his family on and to make his new music at, and a mobile recording studio to rent out to other bands to help pay the bills. Because the guy was no dim dreamer—it was 1973, he knew what he heard in his head wasn’t what the kids watching Top of the Pops wanted to hear. He knew what he was up against. For Christsake, he called his band Slim Chance.”
    Offering a writer an audience is like inviting a drunk to an open bar; they simply can’t help themselves. All I lack is a big blast of dexy and this freezing winter night amended to summery mild. I settle for a big swallow of red wine instead.
    â€œBut the deck wasn’t stacked against him quite enough, not yet. To promote his first album with Slim Chance, he decided he wasn’t going to gig the usual big city concert halls, but to bring something he called The Passing Show to every provincial outpost in England that would have failed a cost/benefit touring analysis, a rock and roll circus with clowns and jugglers and fire-eaters and, most of all, the rocket fuel mandolin music he wanted to tell everyone about. And naturally it was the wettest British summer in thirty years and the antique gypsy coaches he’d bought to haul around the musicians and their families