Veteran Cosmic Rocker

[ceciliatan]

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

And so it was that Remo got to hear the demo I’d made of “Midnight” before anyone in M3 did.

He picked me up at the airport and didn’t say much as he drove toward his house. I hadn’t told him anything about why I was here, only that I needed to get away for a while. But he knew there was something wrong at home—-on the phone he’d said something like “Just like the old days, eh?” and told me to come out right away.

We picked up some take-out on the way, fried chicken and biscuits, another old standard, and had eaten most of it before we even reached the house. The house itself was on a winding wide street. Like every house on the block it had a wall around the front yard and a gate into the driveway. I was betting other celebrities lived on this street but he didn’t bug me with tour guide patter.

Once there we settled down to shooting the shit on his back porch overlooking the lights of LA and drinking (me root beer, him bourbon, old habits die hard). He told me about two new guitars he’d bought, a new American-made Gibson from the top of the line, and a second-hand steel dobro he picked up in Tijuana last week. I told him about the new material and BNC bullshit politics and how they were stringing me along. He told me about the new stuff Nomad was planning for their next sessions.

And then we ran out of things to say and I stood there on a redwood deck in a city I’d wanted to follow him to years ago, not looking at him.

“Remo,” I started, but couldn’t finish.

Until this moment, I hadn’t been sure what I had come here to do, and now that I knew, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

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