When Wil and I started the This Wreckage ‘zine over 30 years ago now, the idea is that we would have people submit material that we would throw in each issue as is and put it out to the world. What we didn’t realize going in is that most people do not want to actually share things like that. We struggled in finding material to achieve our albeit ambitious goal of a monthly issue.
However, in a small way, I’d like to float out a similar request we used to do every issue, but with more of a singular focus. I am hoping that anyone who reads this would be willing to send some kind of story of a certain song that means something to them. This could mean a short story, an essay, a drawing, a photograph, a poem, a few words, I don’t know. One of my favorite things is to tie music to pretty much every waking minute of my life. It’s a problem really. There are hundreds of songs that evoke a lot of emotions for me for a variety of reasons based on their being nearby at the time. I absolutely love hearing and reading other people’s stories along these lines. I don’t care the genre or the artist, or my personal history, if any, with the song, I find these stories endlessly fascinating.
I’m hoping to encourage any and every one who might be willing to send some of their stories to me via messenger, or via email: tangledrec@hotmail.com. I would like to share them here, on this site, if given the permission.
Please ask any questions you may have.
Andy has been kind enough to tell a story. Here it is:
Later
in life I was made fun of for liking them, and I was too quick to let judgement
of peers, those self-proclaimed culture vanguards who read lots of Rolling Stone magazine and hung out in
record shops and went to punk shows, skew my own thoughts, my own loves. I’ll
never forget the feeling of being at The
Gorge Amphitheater and see them live before the sunset. They were our
generations Grateful Dead, and Dave Mathews had some tortured aspect
of his voice that touched a nerve for me. Many songs echoed in my mind, but one
in particular about Little Mikey Carson and the gravediggers that wait for us
all - that one lingered and surfaced again and again. It mixed the pain and
separateness of teenage angst, twisted up in a deep yearning for meaning, with
a glimpse of acceptance, of peace, of human fate. And as he asked the
Gravedigger, “won’t you make it shallow, so that I can feel the rain?” So, I
find myself thinking of Keats, and
his mighty grasp of the language and culture of a time bygone, who wanted
nothing more than to proclaim, “here lies one whose grave is writ in water.”
The feeling never faded; the feeling never died.
This is one of my favorite songs. I also struggle with DMB fan shame, but there is more to this band than the “jam band” trope, and this song in particular moves me every time. I’ve even toyed with having “So I Can Feel the Rain” on my own grave. I loved your article!
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