Wall of Paul

This a photo of me and my buddies taking in a Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden, back in 2003, or thereabouts. The guy on the left is Doug “King of the Bootlegs” Ornstein, and the one with his arm around my shoulder is Mike DeCasper. Chris Swartout, a longtime friend of ours, is behind the camera.

I’ve seen Springsteen perform so many different times over the years, I couldn’t begin to relate the details of this particular show. Rest assured, though, that all four of us screamed ourselves hoarse, and felt like wrung-out mops by the time it was over.

Doug, Mike, Chris, and I share a genuine bond that’s been deepened by the spirit of Springsteen’s best music, and by the mysterious release of great rock & roll in general. As you get older, you lean more and more toward the Stones’ eventual position that it’s “only rock & roll,” and you’re just supposed to “like it,” rather than live for it. After all, there are bills to be paid and mouths to feed. But when I consider my personal march into middle age, I realize yet again that this music has connected me deeply to people I love.

Your strength comes and goes throughout your life, like a ceaseless tide, and sometimes it feels like it’ll never return. But in this particular photo, all of us are as strong as we can possibly be. The music is blaring, and we care about each other. We have each other’s backs.

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Mike passed away on Tuesday morning, July 22nd, after a brutal fight with cancer. He was surrounded during the ordeal, as he was throughout his life, by people who loved him dearly.

I knew Mike for 23 of my 45 years; he was a groomsman in my wedding, and I gave a semi-drunken, memorably surreal toast at his reception. The natural flow of life drew us apart more than I would have liked in recent years, but we were always in each other’s hearts, and he’ll remain in my heart until I draw my last breath. And I won’t be quite as afraid of that eventuality, because it might reunite me with one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. I cherished my friendship with Mike. I cherished him.

A couple weeks back, while I was re-reading some of the pieces I’ve written for Wall of Paul, it occurred to me that Mike, as much anybody I know, has been my target audience, even when I wasn’t thinking about him. Our attitudes about pop culture certainly met in more places than Springsteen albums.

Mike loved the great Hollywood films of the 1970s - “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The French Connection,” “Chinatown,” “All the President’s Men,” “Badlands,” etc. - just as much as I do, and would discuss them with me at the drop of a hat, for hours on end. And I was always delighted when he complimented something I wrote about them.

I know it’s a cliché to say you’ve seen “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” a million times over, and know virtually every line of Puzo-Coppola dialogue. But Mike saw them a million and one times over, and really did know all the dialogue. He could practically recite it like a rosary. And I’m certain he would have agreed with me that it’s a more productive use of your time than reeling off the Holy Mysteries.

“Leave the gun. Take the connoli.”

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Our pivotal connection to each other, though, had to be through rock & roll. Along with the afore-mentioned Springsteen passion, we both obsessed over the Beatles and Dylan, and Mike liberally seasoned his thoughts with Joe Strummer (he would have been pleased that I was wearing a Clash t-shirt Tuesday morning, when I received word of his passing.)

The Beatles thing was particularly intense. I’m pretty sure that I’ve read every single worthwhile book about the Fab Four, and Mike wasn’t far behind me. We could debate forever whether Lennon or McCartney was the better songwriter, but it wasn’t much of an argument, because we both knelt deeply before Lennon while recognizing that McCartney got the critical shaft far too often. And, of all my friends, Mike was most likely to sit with me and listen to a Wings tune simply because of the unbelievably nimble-fingered bass line.

About six weeks ago, I shared one of my final afternoons with Mike. He'd lost a lot of weight already, and was falling in and out of considerable pain. But he lit up when I played him a bootleg I recently downloaded of some Rolling Stones “Exile on Main Street” outtakes.

Mike liked “Some Girls” a lot, because he seemed to have a bit of a sweet tooth for pop albums by hard rockers. But, like many other people, we both recognized the weary, wasted magnitude of “Exile.” There’s an old radio ad on the bootleg, in which Jagger raps out a string of non-sequiturs that reference various “Exile” lyrics, while somebody plays sloppy, barrelhouse piano behind him.

The unfathomable coolness of this is only compounded by a down-with-it-baritone announcer citing the release of the latest Rolling Stones album. As I sat there listening to it with him, I wondered if Mike and I were nearing the end of our journey together. But I wasn’t really sad about it, not then. For those few moments, we were transported, and Mike was released from the terrible chains that had so inexplicably, and inexorably, come to bind him.

For those few moments, we had each other’s backs.

Friday night, Manny Ramirez, one of the most feared home run hitters in the history of the game, proved for what may well be the three-hundredth fucking time that you don’t really have to be able to play baseball in order to be a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.

All you have to master is swinging a large piece of lumber really fast, thus driving an itty-bitty baseball as far as it can be driven. Catching a baseball, running the bases in a logical manner, throwing to the correct base, remembering how many outs have been made in an inning, and, for all we know, properly donning a jock strap seem well beyond Ramirez’s reach. The next time he’s on ESPN, check to see if there’s a protective cup bulge somewhere on his ass.

Chuck Berry, believe it or not, has a lot in common with Ingmar Bergman. Millions of people have at least a passing knowledge of Berry’s most popular tunes, if not through his own records, then via cover versions by zeitgeist-slingers like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But there’s a good chance you’ve never studied him closely enough to properly grasp his brilliance.

To most rock fans, Chuck Berry just is, like the law of gravity, and there’s no point in pondering him any further than that. If you take that approach, though, you’re cheating yourself out of a stunningly detailed, often hysterical joy ride through the central building blocks of the American psyche.

Set aside his wildly inventive guitar playing for now, although that’s akin to ignoring commas, quotation marks, and explanation points when it comes to the type of music he plays. As a lyricist, Berry ranks among the four or five greatest talents in the history of rock & roll. Before Dylan and the Beatles even knew how to tune a Stratocaster, he drew a sweeping, multi-volume comic book detailing the teenage American experience, and it retains every inch of its seductive power fifty years later.

In the same sense that many modern-day Mafioso often insist they’ve taken their behavioral cues from “The Godfather,” rather than the other way around, it’s completely possible that Berry dictated a chunk of our fascination with cars, soda pop, and the open highway. Those things existed before he hit the scene in the mid-1950s, to be sure. But he buffed, polished, and mythologized them until we couldn’t help kicking the bumpers and taking his fantasies out for a never-ending ride. He may not have dropped acid, grown his hair out, or made the President tremble. But this guy could sling the zeitgeist like it was bacon and eggs.

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