Sunday Pages: "Jessica"

A song by the Allman Brothers Band

Dear Reader,

Over spring break my freshman year in college, I flew out to Palo Alto to visit my girlfriend. We’d been together since high school, and we were serious in that stubbornly naïve way of 19-year-olds in love. (In matters of the heart, as Shakespeare well knew, nothing is as durable as teenage certitude, which is why these relationships tend to end, metaphorically speaking, with fresh young corpses lying dead in a tomb.)

Long distance relationships are challenging under the best of circumstances, but ours had significant obstacles. First, her family moved away after high school, to a small college town in upstate New York that takes forever to get to even now, when I live in a small college town in upstate New York. Second, our breaks never lined up, because Stanford was on the trimester system—which, I was convinced at the time, was created for the sole purpose of tormenting me. Also, like, we were kids.

The point here is that, once we left for college in the fall of 1991—right after the first Gulf War and right before the collapse of the Soviet Union: two hugely important historical events I was only dimly aware of—we could only see each other if one of us made the schlep. In the spring of 1992, I was the one doing the schlepping. I flew, by myself, from Newark to San Francisco. I took a bus to Palo Alto. I got off on the sprawling campus of what was, I was immediately certain, the best university in the country. All the buildings looked like the clock tower in Vertigo. All the students walked around like they had their shit together. Stanford was intimidatingly impressive, and it was impossible for me not to regard it as Enemy Territory.

She gave me a hug. She gave me a tour. She introduced me to some friends. We went to a party at one of the dorms. That probably wasn’t the first time I’d heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but it was certainly the first time I danced—or, more accurately, moshed—to it. I bought a t-shirt at the party: Madera Gras, it said (which is how I came to piece together, testing my ailing memory, that it must have been during spring break that this took place).

The next day, we left the campus and stayed the night in the basement apartment of her grandparents’ house, a hop skip and jump away. It was one of the rare—and one of the last, although I didn’t know it at the time—opportunities we’d have to be alone together.

We sat in the small living room listening to the radio. The Bay Area had a fantastic station that played classic rock mixed with cool alternative stuff. That night, as luck would have it, they were in the middle of one of those long commercial-free weekends. I was introduced to Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” (with its prophetic line: Don’t you look at my girlfriend! She’s the only one I got!) and “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)” by the Moody Blues—songs I never heard on the shitty, corporate New York classic rock stations.

And it was that night, in that room, with that woman I loved so much, when I first heard “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers. The song is 1) an instrumental, and 2) twice as long as a standard track, so it was an unlikely FM radio staple. I believe it’s the only instrumental on those 100 Greatest Classic Rock Song lists. And they played it that night, as if just for us.

I have long maintained that it is much harder to write a happy song than a sad one. “Jessica” is seven and a half minutes of pure joy. It begins with a bouncy, up-tempo acoustic guitar. Then the piano, bass, and drums kick in, punctuating the ebullience. When the electric guitar finally enters with the melody, as if from on high, it’s like one of those dreams where you’re flying. Listening to the song for the first time, I felt like I was levitating.

I didn’t know anything about the Allman Brothers. I thought they were basically equivalent to Lynyrd Skynyrd. I didn’t know that one of the two brothers died before I was born, or that the band occupies a space somewhere between Skynyrd and the Grateful Dead, or that the musical genius who wrote “Jessica” and played the guitar was not an Allman at all, but the wonderfully-named Dickey Betts.

A few years later, by then quite single, I went with my friend Michael to see the Allmans at the Garden State Art Center in New Jersey. It’s a big outdoor space, and we sat on one of the hills ringing the stage. Most of the crowd were people like us—preppy kids from North Jersey—but in the parking lot, we glimpsed a few biker guys with long hair, long beards, gleaming belt buckles, and obvious contempt for the poseur fans. It was a terrific show, but I remember us thinking that the members of the band were so old.

They were exactly as old as we are right now.

Betts died this week. He was 80. I knew very little about him—I spelled his last name wrong on Twitter!—or about “Jessica.” Who was the eponymous woman? A friend? A lover? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Jessica is his daughter. When he was writing the song, she was a toddler. She heard it and started bouncing around to the beat. Betts abandoned his original exercise—to produce a song the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt could have played—and instead tried to musically channel little Jessica’s unbridled happiness. Did he ever! Because that’s the thing about “Jessica”: there is a childlike innocence to the joy—which also happened to mirror the innocent joy I was feeling when I first heard it.

On the way home from work the day Betts died, I played “Jessica” in the car. I turned up my phone as loud as it would go, and turned up the speakers as loud as they would go. It wasn’t loud enough. (In the post-iPod era, the music is never loud enough.) I wanted everyone to hear it, everyone on the street, everyone in the town, everyone on the planet. And I was surprised, as I listened to Betts’s masterpiece for the umpteenth time—but the first since he was reunited with Duane and Gregg in the great jam band in the sky—to find tears streaming down my cheeks.

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ICYMI

The Five 8 was served neat this week. In the third segment, LB breaks down the Trump family’s mob ties:

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Photo credit: Chris Tank. Dickie Betts in 2009.