To listen to Howard perform No New Songs, click on the player below:
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No New Songs?
***
Sitting on a bench in a brown grass park, a guitarist played a light tune.
His music filled the air, but there was no one around to hear.
Then a couple walked by and sat on a bench beside the spring from which the town had sprung. The old gent nodded politely to the musician and the pair began taking the afternoon sun.
Down the path, the guitarist saw teens gathering around a tall, smartly-dressed, adult. Within minutes, they came away. Arms alive, mouths full of sound, pockets bulging. Spreading like a viral cloud.
Three of them came up, stopped to listen, and the heavily-tattooed one said,” How come all you play is that old shit? Can’t you play nothing new?”
The musician kept playing softly. His guitar case had pennies, a few dimes and a quarter in it. Maybe enough for water.
He sang an old song. “Got the keys to the highway, I’m billed out and bound to go.
I’m leaving here running, `cause walking is mos’ too slow.”
His gnarly fingers moved like satin on the strings, but they looked like dirty cotton when you watched them close, until you saw the bandages.
If you closed your eyes, you’d hear a train rumbling through this part of town.
You’d hear crows on the wire rappin’ to kin as the folks on the phone talked to the neighbors.
Standing close, you’d smell old tobacco, unwashed socks, sickness in the lungs.
You’d hear an uncatchable wet rattle down deep and the sigh when his breath
lingered on a long syllable when he thought of his wife and kids happy in a new life.
Him looking down at the ground. Playing a jump with no name.
“Don’t you know no new songs, Man?”
He shook his head to himself. Not looking up, he kept playing.
His hands didn’t tremble. His voice would’ve if he tried to sing.
“How about some Rap, Man?”
“… Know some Rap, old man?”
“Or some Heavy Metal, bro?”
“Heavy Metal! Yeah… Heavy Metal!!!”
***
He played heavy bronze strings. Old with finger-grime, soft like a well-tuned lute.
Heavy he played. Like his long time marriage.
Heavy, like a spike striking steel. A squealing brake…
Heavy like the plywood case protecting the last thing of value,
the only thing left in life, his guitar.
He softened his sound, playing a ragtime piece.
Two of the kids nodded sleepily, heads bobbing, eyes half-lidded.
Distantly, the musician heard the raspy call of an approaching freight.
He knew it’d get louder, closer, soon.
***
“No New Songs?” “What good are you, anyhow?”
One of the teens reached into his back pocket and something heavy filled the boy’s hand.
A train whistle keened out…
On two strings, a fret apart, the musician slid his fingers up a fret.
And the far-away whine of a train came out.
He heard the train coming closer.
… He got to walkin’ now …
The notes traveling as if they were going somewhere…
And when the chord changed… There was somewhere else to go.
He was building rhythm into thunder like a train on a track…
He saw heads bob, and smiles break out…
Tthis was an old song they knew in their bones.
One heard all their lives…
The sound of heavy stuff passing. Moving tons of metal.
Bound for nowhere known. See it once and then it’s gone.
“Hey it sounds like a train!”
“You know it does!”
Then the roar of the passing freight train began to roll down from the track-bed.
***
Like the train then, the teens moved along.
Off to their business. Smiling girls and Benjamins a-waiting.
And as the train retreated, the musician remembered waving at the brakemen in the caboose when he was just a boy. If one of them saw you, he’d wave back.
Now there was just a single red eye blinking.
A mechanical robot.
It receded and winked out, and his fingers played another song…
—
Note: “Keys To The Highway,” by Brownie McGhee, McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 1963.
***
About the Author
Howard Harrelson was born in the heart of California’s Central Valley, and began his writing career in the sixties, writing protest songs, poetry, and helping translate “Corridas del Delano” for the UFW newspaper, El Malcreado, under Cesar Chavez. A registered conscientious objector during the Viet Nam war, he later moved to Canada to raise his four children and built a television production studio in Vancouver. Returning to California, Howard was on staff at various newspapers, where he wrote hundreds of articles. He also experienced a brief period of homelessness which adds perspective to his work. Today, Howard is a Creative Writing student at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He writes for the television show, “Santa Monica Update,” works in the Antioch Bookstore, and serves as a caregiver for a developmentally disabled adult. He lives in Santa Monica and Encino, depending on which day you ask, and his favorite pastimes are making music, tinkering endlessly with computers, taking serious naps, and questing for the perfect donut.
