When you lose a dog

"Dry your eyes for Madame Joy."

(or Finding Astral Weeks on the Way to the Rainbow Bridge)

I sometimes worry that, at my age, music no longer imprints on me.

At least not the way it did back when, when albums could creep up and attach themselves forever to my emotional core, sometimes multiple times a year.

The obscene portability and ubiquitousness of streaming-on-demand has made life-soundtracking just another ritual of the mundane. But that's a rant that I won't get into.

Not right now.

But something did finally imprint recently. A long, strange journey, now that I think about it.

Earlier this year, I dropped off some Brazil records to our friend Jon at Take Care Records and picked up a book called Detroit Rock City. It was an soup to nuts account of the southeast Michigan scene, all the way from MC5 to The Stooges to the Detroit Cobras to the White Stripes.

As one can imagine, Lester Bangs took up more than a few pages.

The Detroit scene's legendary oracle and kingmaker was a name I'd known since Almost Famous. Not deeply familiar, just that his name was always in the air always when a conversation turned to rock's golden age. Music journalism's Bukowski, or some such.

Anyway, I liked the way he wrote and the book sent me on a bit of a Bangs binge.

I bought old issues of Creem, NME, and Rolling Stone on eBay. I bought all manner of collected Bangs works, like Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, Let it Blurt, and Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

And it was because the last one that Astral Weeks found its way into my life.

Bangs deemed it "the rock record with the most significance in my life so far" in a 1979 think piece, after enduring what he made to sound like was a long dark night of his cocaine-fueled soul, and I had to check it out.

Scene change - come venture in my slipstream.

This weekend, Frankie, our beloved corgi, passed away from acute kidney failure.

It was a loss that seemed to gather up the flotsam and jetsam of other lesser losses into an emotional snowball that finally broke the levee until everything came out all at once.

This was all during my Bangs deep dive, during which I figured I'd give the album a chance. Because, like him, I was there now - curtains drawn, records on repeat, staring at the wall. In mourning.

Everything but the cocaine.

Bangs was right. The last time something hit me like this was Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go by Jason Molina, which was the soundtrack to another massive heartbreak that I won't get into.

Not right now.

In the aftermath of our in-home euthanasia, I listened to "Madame George" (Joy) obsessively:

say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

dry your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye

your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye

your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye

your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye

say goodbye to Madame George

A song that will always belong to Frankie. A melancholic, sentimental meditation on passing (people, places, things) if there ever was one. A song I will play twenty years from now, remembering her tiny legs, her floofy butt, and the way she'd lay on the floor in front of the tv like a sentient potato.

"Beside You" entered my emotional landscape during Frankie's darkest day, when her body very visibly started working against her, and I could tell how much pain she was in and we sat on the back porch next to each other, both quiet, my arm around her for the last time.

Both of us knowing.

It was probably the first time I wept for her, never fully realizing until then how much one could love a dog.

"Astral Weeks" (the song) is a stream of consciousness prayer for the gnostic and the dying. A tone poem that goes nowhere, yet everywhere. Pausing, repeating and settling into a hopeful sadness, like whispering we'll see each other again into a furry ear, without using those words. An attempt to say all the things you'd wanted to say to a dying loved one in their living years, but never did.

in another time

in another place

in another time

in another place

way up in the heaven

way up in the heaven

way are goin' up to heaven

We are goin' to heaven

in another time

in another place

in another time

in another place

in another face 

There are other great songs on the album, but those are the three that managed to brand my soul like a Hereford steer.

So maybe I’m not too old to imprint.

What is more likely is that it just takes more to do it. A drilling down through accumulated silt of cynicism and adult jadeness.

School's summer break and blustery fall romances don't do it anymore. It takes something like the passing of a beloved to really make it stick.

Frankie's mama would say "Fleet Foxes" (s/t) is her definitive Frankie album, but Astral Weeks is mine.

I know that from here on out, every time I listen, I'll be right back on the back porch, comforting our poor baby, thinking about her little legs and the way she'd cry when it stormed, crying uncontrollably myself.

Like I am right now.

Which reminds me, I need to see if Jon has it on vinyl.l Weeks

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What I’m reading: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Lester Bangs)

What I'm listening to: Astral Weeks (Van Morrison)

Read the Brazil tour blog at the Substack: