MATT BARRETT’S TALES FROM THE ROCK N ROLL CRYPT: Episode 12
Lennon
Lee called me the day John Lennon died. A couple hours later Rick called me to say our band, the Dads, were playing at a tribute concert at the Pier in Raleigh with Arrogance, Nantucket and a bunch of other popular North Carolina bands. On the way to the show Rick was trying to teach us a song he had just written, while he drove us in
his van. He wanted us to sing it either a cappella or just with a guitar. The lyrics were “Every day in every way things are getting better. Everything is looking so much better.” The tune and the harmonies were very Beatlesque but the lyrics seemed inappropriate considering the circumstances and nobody wanted to do it.
When we got to the Pier there were some muttering about the order the groups were playing in, mainly about us, the Dads, because we were a new group and were playing right before the headliners, Arrogance and Nantucket, while more established bands would be doing their set while the audience was just getting off work and finding out about the show. It was a valid point. I said maybe it was because we were the only band that played Beatles songs and even our originals sounded like the Beatles. But it seemed to me like someone got us that spot and in the end it worked out pretty well for us.
I had written a sort of eulogy like something you would read at a friend’s funeral. I planned to read it at the beginning of our set but by the time we got on stage I was so stoned I couldn’t do it so Zoe read it with all the passion of someone reading names out of a phone book. We played a short, high energy show that included the Beatles songs Wait, Every Little Thing, and Twist & Shout, to by far the largest crowd we’d ever played for. After that people really started coming to our shows and I always felt that the John Lennon Memorial Concert was kind of our big break.
Zoe left my eulogy on the stage so I never saw it again, and Rick either forgot all about us playing his new song that night or was happy nobody else mentioned it. But years later I found the lyrics in a book of positive affirmations and I sang it before I went to bed to the tune he had written for it for about a week, until my life became perfect again.