Every month or so, I go to the open mike at the Lizard Lounge. There are a ton of reasons I like to go to the Lizard Lounge – cool scene, great talent, and my favorite part: Tom Bianchi is your gracious, outrageous host. Tom is one of my favorite folks on the local music scene, first, because he works so damn hard, and second, because he really, really knows his way around a stage. I know that I can go to the Lizard Lounge and expect a couple moments, at least, of pants-wetting hilarity, thanks to Tom; and I know that when I yank his chain when he’s introducing me, he’ll give as good as he gets. Just a class act, and one hell of a performer.
I somehow ended up at the Lizard Lounge the Monday after the massacre in Newtown, CT. I’m not about to call it a tragedy, or an incident – it was a massacre, plain and simple, and I don’t believe in mincing words about its awfulness. And for the first several performers, including me, not much, if anything, was said about it – until a man I’ve seen a number of times, a man whose name I’m embarrassed not to know, got up and did two Christmas songs, one in German and one in Russian, and dedicated the second to the murdered children and adults of Sandy Hook. It was poignant, and thoughtful, and the audience was very respectful – and then Tom got back up.
And Tom talked about how he’d been hosting an open mike in Allston on 2001, and how on September 11 he went to the open mike because he didn’t know what else to do, and how the day of the Newtown massacre, he had an easy gig at the Lizard doing sound for a holiday party, and spent those five hours obsessively checking the news, and how he called his kids about 20,000 times, even though he knew they were safe in school in Vermont, and how he remembered when John Lennon died, and he was 11, and his mom let him stay home and decorate the Christmas tree, and how this past weekend he’d written a song about John Lennon, and how angry he was, and how a friend kept telling him, focus on his life, not on his death, but he couldn’t, because he needed to be angry, he needed to feel it. And by this point, he was crying.
It takes a lot of guts to cry onstage. I wonder whether I’ll ever end up there. Sometimes I’ll sing a song, and I’ll get a little choked up at the end, and I’ll croak the last line instead of crying, and that’s as far as I’ll go.
Here’s the thing about John Lennon, and that night at the Lizard. After I played my songs, someone walked up to me – I’d call him a kid, but he turned out to be more than 30 – tall, slim, topknot. He told me that he’d seen me at the Passim open mike, more than ten years ago, and remembered a song I did called “The Beatles Are Dying”. And I knew it had to have been a long time, because I never do that song anymore. But here’s the beginning of the bridge:
“And John’s assassin played Father Time
And Linda Eastman earned her angel’s wings…”
The thing about this bridge is that it used to read “And Mark David Chapman played Father Time…”, and my pal Terence Hegarty wrote me and said, “Take it out. The killer doesn’t deserve to be named.” And he was right.
Nothing we can do can undo September 11, or Newtown, or bring back John Lennon. There are bad people in the world, fanatical people, crazy people, and they are armed, and they can kill us. But there’s no reason to name them. Our voices, and our tears, belong to the people they killed.