What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
June: Grateful Dead — “We Bid You Goodnight”
Early this past June, I fucked up my phone and had to completely reboot it. While it was great or whatever that all my photos were preserved and my contacts were cloud-protected, all my saved voicemails were erased forever. I know what you’re thinking: Who even saves voicemails anymore? I do, I guess. Or I did. I haven’t since then.
Saved on my phone were three messages my father had left me before he died suddenly on July 1, 2011. I don’t mean to say that these were messages he left right before he died. He didn’t know he was going to die. None of us did. So there were no particularly poignant goodbyes; one message, from two weeks before he died, was a quick one asking me if I wanted to have dinner one night with him and his friend Gunnar; another was a reminder that I had promised to go with him to his storage room on the Upper West Side and help him clear it out. I hadn’t managed to make the dinner with Gunnar, but I had met him on time at the storage space, and we moved box after box from the warehouse and into the back of his 20-year-old Mercedes station wagon. But the last message was one he’d left on my birthday, June 21, ten days before he died. It started off like all his messages did, with our own private joke of a greeting: Hello, Kristin. It’s I, Dad. As if I didn’t know who it was. As if I couldn’t recognize his voice as well as my own. He’d called to tell me that he’d gone to see Midnight in Paris that day and he’d liked it very much and he was so happy for me that I’d been able to see it while I’d been in Paris a few weeks before. He told me he couldn’t wait to see me that weekend. He told me he loved me. My father never left a message without telling me he loved me.
On the day in June, four years later, when all those messages were erased forever, it had been a long time since I’d listened to them. In the weeks and months following my father’s death, I played them over and over, anything to hear his voice again. He had a beautiful voice. He used to sing to me all the time. There were nights in high school when I’d come home way later than I was supposed to and I’d find him in my room, the quietest corner of our home, playing his guitar, waiting up for me. He’d play me to sleep, like he had when I was just a child, usually starting with “Wild Horses,” throwing “Scarlet Begonias” in there somewhere, always ending with “We Bid You Goodnight.”
I had long before accepted, or, rather, acknowledged the fact that I would never hear those songs in his voice again, but when those voicemails were deleted, the injustice of how final and complete his absence was in my life was almost unbearable. And so I started searching for him again in the things of his that I had. When my father died, he left me his record collection and everything of his that had to do with music, like the electric guitar which was housed in a case lined in hot pink fur. And as I was looking through everything, I found an envelope full of discs his company had sent me almost four years earlier; they were filled with everything personal that had been on his work computer.
One by one, I looked through the files. A part of me was wary of what I’d find; a part of me worried this was an invasion. Most of me just wanted to see his words, read his thoughts, in some way hear his voice. And suddenly, I did. One CD was full of files of him singing. He’d recorded over 40 songs at a friend’s recording studio in the months before he’d died. I had known about this, but I’d never thought to ask for the files. And then here they were. Here he was singing Dylan and the Stones and the Dead and Dan Hicks and all the music he’d always played for me when I was younger. Here he was flubbing an opening chord and laughing at himself. Here he was singing “I’m Patty Hearst,” a song he’d written himself and played with his own band in the early 70s. Here he was. And so that night I went to sleep for the first time in forever listening to my father singing me to sleep, his voice arcing up till I thought it, or I, would break, and then slowing down into a husky whisper: “I go walking in the valley of the shadow of death, And we bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.”
Goodnight.—Kristin Iversen