The Tune with the Unknown Songwriter
Her neck felt as smooth as I’d always remembered as I ran my hand down towards her body. She still felt as precious as when I first touched her. Just holding her brought back an insane nostalgia that instantly both excited and upset me – inducing a sadness reminiscent of an old friend. I hadn’t touched her in so many years.
My aging, aching fingers were instinctively drawn to a particular position. They made a shape on the fretboard that felt incredibly natural and comfortable; a C. My fingers caressed the strings. They were old and had deteriorated since she’d last been played, just like I had, yet the rest of her wooden frame remained in immaculate condition. I couldn’t bring myself to strum her. She would be so out of tune that the abrasive sound would not do her any justice at all. At this moment I was just happy with simply holding her.
It made me think of my children. Teaching my sons to play the guitar. Playing for them. Playing for my daughter. Playing the song I wrote for my daughter. Playing for my wife. Playing for all my wives. Playing for all the women I’ve ever known. This was the reason why we started playing in the first place, to meet woman, me and Bobby.
Music has always been the magical force that kept my life together and gave it a purpose – a meaning. Without it I would merely be a mixture of molecules and atoms floating around this dense Earth with no grip on or connection to anything. I would purely just fade away into the atmosphere like a cloud of vapour.
Music is the language of the universe. It is the worm and the hook. It is stardust and sunlight. It is everything, the be all and end all, made up of so much nothingness mixed in amongst pure, aural beauty.
The language of love,
The language of the soul.
The essence of our human spirit.
Music makes us whole.
Holding my guitar that day made me think of my childhood. It made me think of all the people I’d played for, but more so it made me think of the people I’d played with. My friends. My family. Bobby.
More than anyone, I thought of him.
Standing up on the stage my heart was bouncing around inside my ribcage. I looked over at Bobby. He looked fairly relaxed, but I knew he was just playing it cool as usual. I walked over to him.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked, shitting myself.
“I dunno. But I’m fuckin’ shittin’ myself! I can’t remember how the fucking verse begins!”” said Bob. He strummed a couple of chords on his guitar to check he was still in tune.
The crowd was gathered in front of us and our drummer was nowhere to be seen.
“If he’s not here soon we’re just gonna have to start playing,” said Bobby, trying to act like a professional. Every fibre of my being was telling me to get the fuck off that stage, but there was something else, something much more powerful than myself keeping me there, telling me that I needed to stay. I needed to perform.
“Without a drummer?” I asked Bob, half hoping him to back down and confirm our failure.
“Yeah. Fuck it. If he comes he comes. I think if we don’t start soon I’m gonna lose the plot and jump right off the stage and run away crying like a baby. I’m so bloody nervous! You cool?” he asked, knowing the true answer.
“Yeah, mate. Fine,” I said, lying.
We needed to do this. We both knew it. If it wasn’t for him, though, there’s no way I could’ve.
The audience started to become restless. A few unintelligible shouts came from the back of the room. It was now or never.
I looked over at Bob. He looked like he was about to cry. I felt like I was about to cry.
“Fuck Charlie,” I heard him say.
And we began to play.
My fingers stepped softly across the strings.
My lips formed sounds and my throat created notes.
My anxiety slipped away as the music poured out of us.
The crowd disappeared.
It was only me and Bobby.
“You play that thing?” this kid asked me as I sat with my guitar between my legs outside the school. It was a rainy day so I’d taken shelter underneath the rotunda where all the buses arrived. I wasn’t in any rush to get to school. I was pissed off, actually, in a shitty mood because of one of the arseholes on my bus.
Every day on the way to school, Ralph would yell at girls out the bus window. He’d choose a different one to yell at each time, because he only had the one joke: “Hey beautiful” - the targeted girl would turn around, often confused yet intrigued as to who was calling out these random compliments at her from a passing bus – “nah, not you!”
The bus would explode in the raucous laughter that only a large contingent of teenage boys can produce. And then they’d all say in unison, “There’s one for, Ralph!”, revelling in his adolescent antics and attention seeking behaviour like he was their gladiatorial champion and the bus was their coliseum. Most mornings I’d laugh too. Not because it was funny, but because it was just so silly and immature that you kind of had to. I mean, he said the same damn joke every morning. He must’ve been aware of the ridiculous idiocy involved. Or maybe he just revelled in the other boys chanting his name ritualistically.
That morning, Ralph had chosen his intended victim at a bus stop a few miles before our school. In the mere seconds between when the girl turned around and he delivered his punchline with the enthusiasm he usually employed, I recognised the girl sitting there, innocently unaware of the bus-load of reprobates about to laugh at her and subsequently praise her oppressor. It was a girl I’d recently met and had grown fond of. This was a woman who would grow up to become the mother of my first born child, my son. She was beautiful, and it was her beauty which drew me to her, yet also eventually led me away from her in the end. Our love was short-lived, but it was at this time that it was only beginning to blossom.
Most girls would disregard Ralph’s drive-by ridiculing, taking it as a personal affront to how they looked. Not this girl. She knew she was gorgeous. So when she heard this idiot mocking her beauty from a bus window, she simply laughed.
This is what had pissed me off. How the fuck could she find Ralph funny?! She was the only reason why I’d brought my guitar to school that day. I wanted her to see me with it. And bloody Ralph had just ruined that for me. The fucking prick!
To be completely honest, I didn’t even have the guitar in the case. It was a bit heavy for me to carry around all day. I didn’t really know how to play it yet anyway.
“Yeah, course I do! Why would I have it with me if I didn’t play the bloody thing?” I replied to Bobby, not even looking at him.
“Geez, righto mate. Just askin’” he said and walked off.
That was our first encounter. I was a dick to him. I was a dick all because I was annoyed that the girl I liked found the joke of a dickhead slightly funny. I was too naïve to realise that her laughter was just confirmation of her self-confidence - a trait in which I used to find endless amounts of attraction.
Our school was a large tent in a field that was rarely, if ever, mowed. Our playground was the bushland behind the field. The nuns ran the place with a stern authority, and the brothers kept everyone in line with their crooked canes and their wicked hands. There weren’t many rooms – only four or five, I think. They would split us up based on our age and try to deliver their version of the catholic education, enforcing strict vehemence and cruel, commandeering discipline. I hated it there. I hated the priests and nuns, and still do in fact. My desk sat under a hole in the tent where a leak would drip onto my head or back when it was wet. If I complained I received a thrashing. This wasn’t the end of the world. We were so used to copping the cane that we’d have competitions about who would get the most in one day. The most vicious teachers would be able to swiftly flick the stick back upwards quick enough to strike the backs of your knuckles as well. This was dreadfully painful, but there was no way in hell that any of us would give the sadistic bastards the satisfaction of seeing us squirm or shout in pain. A good trick was to laugh it off, but that would often result in you receiving five or ten more, at the very least.
I was eventually kicked out at the end of year ten for throwing a priest down a flight of stairs. I had my reasons. He had grabbed me on the arse. I was youthfully ignorant of his further intentions, but I didn’t let myself find them out. So I pushed him down the stairs. Of course, nobody believed my story and they asked me to leave right away. I couldn’t have left that place in a more relieved hurry.
The next time I saw Bob he had his guitar. He was sitting alone, playing it at lunch time. I didn’t know anyone our age could be that good. It was as if he had five extra fingers on his hands. I was extremely impressed yet ridiculously jealous at the same time. I was glad I didn’t have my guitar with me that day. I would’ve been too embarrassed to even hold her now that I’d seen him play his. He noticed me watching and stopped what he was playing. He began to play a classical tune. It was really technical and I could tell he was having some difficulty. He mucked it up a couple of times. And he kept looking at me.
I realise now that he was trying to impress me. Maybe he assumed I was really good too.
“How long have you been playin’ for?” I asked him.
“Couple of years now, I reckon,” he said. “How ‘bout you? Wan’a go?”
“Nah. I’m ‘right. Haven’t really been playin’ that long.” I resisted the urge to lie to him about my ability. It was very tempting, but I thankfully had the sense to know it wouldn’t do me any favours if I told him I knew what I was doing, which I barely did at all. “I’m obsessed but. I can’t put her down when I get home. That’s why I bring her to school sometimes. What sorta guitar you got?”
“I don’t even know,” he said with a smirk and a chuckle. “I’m obsessed too though. Probably the best thing I’ve ever owned, I reckon. I call her her too! How funny’s that?”
We both laughed and I sat down next to him. He started playing an old blues tune that I only barely recognised from one of dad’s records. It transported me away from school and out of town to another place. I place that I wanted to visit as much as humanly possible.
At first I tried to avoid hanging out with Bobby because I wanted to practice the guitar until I felt like I could at least hold a rhythm to his tune. I saw him around town and I couldn’t really avoid hi at school, but I tried not to speak to him or act like I was impressed by his skills and his attitude. After a couple of months of non-stop, everyday practice, I had a handle on a few chord progressions and felt a bit more confident. I started to bring my guitar to school again, but this time I would actually put her in the case and sometimes even pull her out and play her. I never sung, though. I’d never sung for anyone. I had safely assumed that I couldn’t sing and my voice sounded shithouse. I sung sometimes at home, to myself, when nobody was around.
It was inevitable that me and Bob gravitated towards each other, being the only two musicians in our tiny school. We started hanging out a fair bit, jamming and just mucking around. He taught me more chords and how to use my fingers to play instead of just a plectrum. I taught him how to shoot and where to find plenty of ducks and rabbits. He taught me how to break into someone’s house. I taught him how to speak to girls. He taught me how to roll and smoke a joint. I taught him which pubs would let in underage kids like us.
We both learned a lot when we first met, but what we really learnt from each other was the true meaning of friendship. I’d never really had a best mate until then, and I’ve never really had any other best mates since.
A couple of years later, about a year or so before I got kicked out of school, me and Bob where playing our guitars on top of the pipe where people used to smoke between classes. It was also the place where my claustrophobia was born.
Years earlier I had crawled in after this kid, unbeknownst to the horde of boys climbing in right behind me. By the time I’d found him we couldn’t get out because all the kids behind us were stuck behind other kids. A group had gathered at the entrance and nobody would move back. Everyone kept cramming in and I was so overwhelmed with the feeling of being trapped and unable to escape I think I had a panic attack. It was a terrifying twenty or so minutes that has forever left me too frightened to enter dark, enclosed spaces.
As I started to sing the second verse of The Beatles’, Things We Said Today, we heard someone clapping and both immediately stopped. I’d never sung in front of anyone, apart from Bobby. The thought easily scared me more than crawling back into that pipe again.
“That were brilliant!” said the fat kid, in his weird accent that sounded kind of similar to my Irish parents’. “You boys play 'ere much? I never seen yous ‘ere before.”
“Who the fuck are you and where the fuck did you come from?” asked Bob, never one to beat around the bush.
“Charlie,” he said, doing some weird sort of bow thing. “Charlie Pitts. From Scotland.”
“Not where are you from. Where’d you come from? Did you sneak up on us or somethin’?” asked Bob, slightly more pissed off than before.
“Oh. Naw. I only just got ’ere. But I could heare ya singin’ from over by that bush. Were just takin’ a wee shite.” Charlie pointed to the general area that most of the boys at school used as a toilet, but was directing his comments at me. I started to feel real hot in my face and probably went all red.
Bobby spoke up, excitedly: “How’d we sound? Good? Can Tez sing or what? I keep tellin’ him he can bloody sing but he won’t sing for anyone else, so nobody can tell him how good he is.”
“Let me tell yous somethin’. Honest to god, like, t’ought I were hearin’ a record bein’ played out the bush,” he opened his arms wide in exaggeration, obviously aware that we wouldn’t believe him. “I’m dead serious, boys. Yous’ve got some talent, eh. Will yous play us another tune?”
“Fuck off, mate,” I said. And he did. He promptly fucked right off.
I went home that afternoon with a satisfied smile. I had finally had a slight bit of confirmation that my singing voice sounded okay. Even if it was just this weird Scottish kid, it still made me feel so fucking happy it made me want to dance and scream. It also scared me a little bit. It scared me in the way that a skydiver gets scared before jumping out of the plane. They know they’re going to jump. They know they want to. They know they will enjoy the freefall. They know that it’s probably one of the best feelings out there – but they’re still scared.
I was scared because I knew now it was only inevitable before me and Bobby jumped up on stage to perform in front of people.
As me and Bobby became better friends, we also became more accustomed to having Charlie hang around us. He was like our biggest fan. Our only fan, really. He never really ingratiated himself into being another one of our mates, but he hung around us enough for both me and Bobby to accept him and his opinion. He had a great taste in music. Much better than all the other catholic boys we knew, and we could tell that he really knew a lot about music in general, he just couldn’t play to save himself. We quickly gave up trying to teach him guitar. He was so useless he’d have to use his right hand to move the fingers on his left hand into position to make a chord, and he could never remember any of them. He was also fairly tone deaf, and couldn’t tell when he was out of tune, which was odd seeing as he had such a highly developed ear for great songs. The only thing he had going for him was he could keep a basic beat, so it was only natural for him to pick up the drums and begin to join our jamming sessions. Not all of them, though. He was still an outsider, even though I soon became comfortable singing in front of him, which made a total of two people in the world I would sing for.
Charlie never practiced. He used to tell us he practiced all the time at home, but we knew he was too lazy. We both thought it had something to do with his parents. He never spoke about them, ever, so we assumed they were just typical catholic arseholes who neglected to do right by their kid. We knew nothing about them. We knew nothing about him either. We only knew that he didn’t own a drum kit and he never did any practice.
He began to show up at Bob’s unannounced, halfway through our jam sessions. It was as if he could sense us playing from wherever he was and materialise in Bobby’s shed, shouting: “What’s ‘appenin’, fellas? We keen for a dance or what?”
One Saturday afternoon, mid-jam, Charlie rocked up true to form with a few beers we assumed he’d stolen off his folks and a flyer for a local school fete. He was so overly excited about the three of us performing as a band. He wouldn’t shut up. He was already a bit drunk.
We soon talked him out of the idea, and he soon became too drunk to play the drums. He lay down and listened to us, and eventually passed out. We drank the rest of his beer.
I could tell that Bobby wanted to play at the fete. I did too. But it scared me. It brought over me that same type of fear I felt that day when we first met Charlie; when he told me that I could sing. We grabbed the flyer off Charlie as he lay snoring and tucked it away underneath a couch cushion and neither of us mentioned it to each other for days.
Of course, Charlie was the one to bring it up again. It was less than a week later, at school. Charlie had another flyer. We couldn’t tell if he’d forgotten about telling us that afternoon in Bobby’s shed, but we just ran with it. We pretended to consider it, but when he left us alone we both said, unequivocally, fuck that! I think deep down we both knew that if either of us had said the opposite that it would have been a sure thing. Why else does one learn to sing and play the guitar? It’s not like all we ever wanted to do was entertain ourselves. It was just that neither of us had the balls or the ambition to really go for it and put ourselves out there. Not without Charlie we didn’t.
It took him about two weeks. The kid was so goddamn convincing. I can’t speak for Bobby on this, but I kind of started to like Charlie. He had a dry, cool wit that stood out amongst most of the boring bastards in town, and his accent made everything sound hilarious. The thing about Charlie Pitts was, in spite of all his surface charisma and bullshit bravado, he was actually really shy and timid. He seemed to carry an air of sadness around him that gave his approachable exterior a sheen of intrigue and depth. I don’t recall ever seeing him talk to anyone but me and Bob, and certainly not any chicks. Come to think of it, I don’t even remember hearing anyone else ever mention the bloke. He rarely used to ever come to school, and even when he did, we’d hardly ever see him. It was only really when we played our guitars he’d show up, sit and listen, sometimes providing us with some sort of a rhythm.
We practiced every day – me and Bob, that is. Charlie would come every so often, sometimes drunk and unable to really hold much of a tune. He had started to get a bit better at keeping a good beat and throwing in the odd bit of flair to fill in a gap, but when he was drunk he seemed to slip a lot more and give up easily. He definitely wasn’t as excited about the gig as me and Bobby anymore. He also wasn’t as completely petrified about the gig as me and Bobby were.
The fete was on a Saturday night. At school on Friday afternoon we’d organised to practice Saturday morning – probably our first ever organised rehearsal. Charlie didn’t show up to school that day, but he did appear at Bobby’s that night while we were having a jam. We were trying not to practice our set. We thought that we should just keep it light-hearted and muck around, having some fun doing what we loved. We played some Beatles and some Beach Boys, and when Charlie showed up with booze we both got drunk with him and eventually put the instruments down.
“Yous really are gonna kill it tomorrow night, yous know that, right?” he said in his slurred, drunken Scottish twang. “I cannae fookin’ wait, eh!”
“You’ll be ‘right too mate,” I said. “Just stay sober so you can keep a bloody tune. You’ve gotten heaps better at hitting those skins lately. You might even be the best drummer at our school by now, I reckon.”
“Probably the only drummer at our bloody school,” said Bob. “But yeah, you’re right. You’re ten times as good as you were a few weeks ago. I might even sell ya that drum kit if tomorrow goes well.” Me and Bobby laughed and had another big, long sip of our beers. Charlie just lay on the beanbag, staring at the ceiling.
He didn’t talk for ages. Me and Bob chatted away about which girls might be there and how impressed they’d be. The drinks had made us forget the anxiety and fear we’d been feeling about performing in front of people. We started to talk like we were seasoned rockstars, but Charlie just sat there listening, often smiling at us but uncharacteristically keeping his mouth shut. After a couple of hours and a few more beers, he got up to leave. “I’ll be seein’ ye’ in the mornin’ boys. Yous are fookin’ made for this, yous really are. Donnae get too pissed tonight, yeah? Even rockstars cannae play with mingin’ hangovers, y’know? Peace, boys.”
The next time I picked up my guitar I could feel them both there with me.
I restrung her, tuned her up and sat with her in my lap.
My thumb gripped her neck, fingers poised above the fretboard.
I pulled the plectrum out from between my lips as my mind rushed through a lifetime’s worth of forgotten music, desperately trying to recall chord progressions and lyrics. Many flooded back to me, but most remained hidden in the deep recesses of my memory.
Most of the songs I could remember didn’t seem right.
Then one song came back to me, the only song that seemed suitable to play.
My fingers stepped softly across the strings.
My lips formed sounds and my throat created notes.
My thoughts slipped away as the music poured out of me.
Everything disappeared.
It was only me...
One last song.
Too bad about the fingers.
The chords change slowly these days.
But after all I tell myself,
You never could play the thing anyway.
The Czar of the eight bar repertoire
Forgets how the verse begins.
At the tomb of the unknown songwriter
The dealer never wins.
And the strings are getting rusty now.
And the voice is getting thin.
But I’ll step up to the line, one last time,
To play one last song for a friend of mine.
We were dayglow Desperadoes.
We were soldiers of the light.
We went down to El Dorado
And hung around all night.
Blame it all on Charlie,
You know he was the one
Who said the tomb of the unknown songwriter
Was shining in the sun.
We were high-heeled boys making too much noise.
We were Bandits after dark.
We were kings in another country,
Shooting pigeons in the park.
Wearing rings and things and waterwings,
Waiting for the call
At the tomb of the unknown songwriter,
Rain began to fall.
He’s the leader of the band.
Fifteen fingers on each hand.
Look, Ma, he’s in stereo.
He’s a guitar hereo.
Sitting in Fanny’s parlour
Writing Jimmy’s epitaph.
Singing, ‘Hey Mad Tom, what’s going on?
Do you wanna be a photograph?
We heard a sound and turned around,
But we never did find
The tomb of the unknown songwriter
In the land of Nevermind.
Slowly round and round we go.
C, A minor, F and G.
Just another revolution
For Bobby and me.
It would take too long to wind this song
Back to where it begins.
At the tomb of the unknown songwriter
The roof has fallen in.
And the strings are getting rusty now.
And the voice is getting thin.
But I’ll step to the line, one last time,
To play one last song for a friend of mine.
Charlie left us that night as two little boys, half-drunk and dreaming of what may be. He left us with a gift that neither of us could ever repay even if we knew how. He left us with passion and he left us with confidence. He left us with ambition and pride. He left us with everything.
Music is what brought us together, but Charlie Pitt’s existence became the cement that formed the foundation of our friendship and a lifetime of playing music together.
He left us as boys,
The next day we were men.
But as for Charlie,
We’d never see that kid again.
​
I don’t get to see Bobby too much these days. And soon enough I won’t get to see him at all. We’ve gone down a different path in life, yet always we remained connected through the unbreakable link of music and the friendship it helped us build back when we were kids. Just two boys and our guitars.
I used to pick her up quite a bit and every time I played her I always remembered that night, me and Bobby up on stage. Charlie wasn’t there, he never showed up. We couldn’t see him, but we both felt his presence. It seemed like he was there in spirit, then, and every other time I played her.
The last time I saw Bob I asked him what he thought Charlie was up to now.
“I hope he’s fucken dead,” replied Bob with a smile and a glint in his eye.
20TH AUGUST, 2017
