Early this past spring, I find myself back on Grosse Ile with some time to kill before I go to my bandmate Dave Leslie’s house for a writing session. Dave lives on the south end of the island where the Detroit River’s Trenton Channel pours into Lake Erie. He lives a few thousand feet from where my friend Brad Morris is buried. A few thousand feet from a small cemetery that houses a few hundred souls who died mostly as unremarkably as they lived. 

In my way I’m trying to talk about my tenure as the music editor of The Museum of Americana: a Literary Review. I’ve gotten some good stuff done. I did an interview with Birds of Chicago before Allison Russell became a GRAMMY-winning solo star. I featured songs by the great Cornelius Eady Trio and compositions by Charlie Rauh and so many other brilliant artists from the Midwest and beyond. I’m grateful to my friend Justin Hamm for the opportunity, but I can’t really explain why I served as music editor all these years without going back to that affluent island suburb in the Detroit River and my first real friend in the art of songwriting. 

There’s no place quite like the Airport Inn on Grosse Ile. It sits across from a former naval reserve base turned municipal airport. It’s a tiny bar/restaurant with a red stained-glass chandelier above the pool table and photos of the riparian and the airfields and Lake Erie from the vantage of a single-engine plane. 

When I walk in that spring day, Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” is playing on the jukebox and I immediately think of Brad.

Brad Morris died of a heroin overdose in 2014. He played bass in my first band and cowrote the first few songs I ever dreamed up. We’d show up at open mics and coffee shops Downriver and play our songs along with the occasional Nirvana and Neil Young cover thrown into the mix. And I’m not saying we blew anyone away, but we had fun and the spirit of what we were doing was pure. I memorized every word to Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue”; I strummed the chords and Brad arpeggiated that movement from the A to G. We were 14 years old.

We started a little three-piece band called Kilgore Trout named after the protagonist in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. We weren’t the right band for Downriver in the 1990s, we didn’t rock hard enough. All our reference tracks were by Sebadoh and Nirvana and The Velvet Underground. “On Fire,” “Willing to Wait,” “Too Pure.” We wrote songs in that vein. We discovered Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground after stumbling on a Nirvana deep cut of “Here She Comes Now.” 

Once we were old enough to drive, we headed out to the west suburbs to play the Mosquito Club and Pharaoh’s Golden Cup and some of our friends tagged along and cheered us on. I’m sure it was painful to for them to listen to.

The thing I always liked best about Brad was that he read any book I tossed his way. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Carlos Castenada, Ken Kesey, all the counterculture stuff teenage boys with artistic aspirations are apt to read. 

To this day, the best concert I’ve ever seen is Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Pine Knob in 1996. Brad’s dad, Jimmy Morris, got us tickets and drove us there, and I’ll always be thankful to him for that, among many other kindnesses. They led out with a raucous version of “Hey Hey My My” then segued wordlessly into “Pocahontas.” I remember liking that Neil Young didn’t have to talk to the audience between songs. He just tapped into that synergy and magic among he and his bandmates and let the overdriven guitars and the lyrics of the songs do the communicating. I always found talking to the audience daunting and would get pretty bored when people took the time to explain a song that didn’t need much explanation. After playing a couple songs from the then newly-released and still underrated Broken Arrow record, Neil busted out his Martin acoustic guitar as the band left the stage. 

As much as we loved the gritty sound he got with Crazy Horse, the acoustic stuff was what we came for. If the song had anything to it, it could survive in this bare form. “I hope he plays ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’,” I said to Brad. I’d been working out that arpeggiated pattern on my crappy Fender acoustic guitar. When he started in with that very song, a spattering of applause broke out before receding into a reverent hush as Neil began the heartbreaking story of his friend and bandmate’s demise at the hands of addiction. It’s such a short song, mimetic of the foreshortened life it describes. Its brevity is what makes it perfect. After finishing that one, Neil addressed the crowd for the first time by telling a brief anecdote about the next number, “Sugar Mountain.” I don’t remember the story well, but the gist of it is that he completed the lyrics to “Sugar Mountain” as a very young homesick man sitting on a bench at a bus station in Detroit. 

The night that Brad was found dead, his brother posted a picture of him with his guitar to Facebook. The next day there were torrential rains throughout Southeastern Michigan. Peoples’ basements got flooded. Roads were closed. I got stuck north of the city after teaching and wound up on my buddy Ryan Dillaha’s screened-in front porch sipping beers and passing the guitar.  Ryan’s big shit around here, pretty widely regarded as one of the best songwriters in town.

Fifth on the Floor, a band from Kentucky, was staying at Ryan’s house that night. Justin from Fifth on the Floor sang a couple songs. Really great Waylon Jennings sort of voice. Deep, booming, little rasps of anger around the edges. We passed a joint and argued about the merits of Guy Clark. Someone brought up Robin Williams’ suicide, the news of it having broken earlier that day. All the while Brad’s death was in the back of my mind, how none of these guys know Brad. How nobody will really remember him for his talent and his good heart. How what you love will start to kill you if you like it too much.       

Around four in the morning I decided the roads must be clear. I made the slow drive back to Dearborn through swamped-out streets praying that my little Honda Civic wouldn’t stall out.  The puddles in the clear night glinted like polished bowling balls. Eventually the pump houses would send them into various tributaries and creeks and the shitty water would wind up in the Detroit River where it brushes past Grosse Ile on its way to Lake Erie. When I got home I had a message from Brad’s brother to call their dad. He had to ask me something. I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy Morris in at least 15 years.

The next day I tell Sarah about Brad’s death. I explain how close we used to be. I tell her I feel like a fraud being so sad about it. I hadn’t exactly been there for the guy in the last decade or so.       

I dread calling Brad’s dad for a number of reasons, first and foremost this feeling that I am the impostor, that I have stolen somebody else’s grief. Also floating through my mind is the thought that nothing is sadder than a parent outliving a child. And finally, Sarah has predicted that his father will ask me to bring my guitar and sing a song at the funeral home.  

I step out on the back porch. I call Jimmy Morris and offer my condolences and, sure enough, he wants me to play at the visitation. “You know, something by Neil Young or Nirvana. Stuff you and Brad used to listen to together.” I tell him I’d be honored to, which is true, but I don’t admit that in addition to being honored I am scared shitless: of dying, of singing before his mourning family.  

He tells me that Brad’s been struggling with drugs for years now and that one good thing he can take from this is that when he looks into the sky, he knows Brad’s up there.  

As I pull up to the funeral home the next day, I see that the lot is packed. I always have felt weird showing up to places with the guitar, even when I have been asked to bring it. There are some people I don’t know smoking near the door, face tats, lip and eyebrow rings, sallow-green complexions, shaky-looking, down-gazing people who seem about as comfortable here as I feel. I nod at them as I walk in. These people can likely say they were his friends with far more certainty than me; they can at least honestly lay claim to this grief. I decide to leave the ax in the car. I’ll only bring it in to play if his dad insists.       

In the lobby, I see Brad’s dad. Brad’s stepmom is imploring him to eat. “Jimmy, you’re shaking,” she says. He spots me and waves me over. I give him a hug and tell him how sorry I am. He immediately asks if I have the guitar. He says he wants me to play some Neil Young or Nirvana. “It’s what Brad would have wanted.”

This is always the question. What do the dead desire? How would they want to be honored? Phil Kaufman was damn sure, sure enough to commit what most would consider a sordid brand of larceny, that Gram Parsons wanted his body to be burned at Joshua Tree. In his memoir, The Undertaking, Thomas Lynch, the funeral director/writer from Milford, MI, counters that, “The Dead don’t care. Only the living care.” He repeats this point like a mantra or a refrain. Lynch also describes mourning as a “romance in reverse,” which sounds right to me as I sign the book and mentally prepare to haul my guitar out of the car and play a couple tunes. Jimmy’s right too: Brad would have wanted music at his funeral.

Before I go to the car, I step inside the funeral parlor and look around. I spot a few guys I know from back in the day standing near the slideshow. I’ll ask Jesse and Eric to join me, maybe sing a song or two themselves. I approach Eric and Jesse and hug them. We watch ourselves pop up intermittently on the screen, ostensibly happy times that I can’t remember in any real detail. We say it’s great to see each other but that we wish it was under better circumstances. I ask them if they’ll join me to sing. They reluctantly agree. “I guess he’d do it for us,” says Eric.

We go to my car in the parking lot, playing little samples of songs that might be appropriate or meaningful. We catch up a bit as we strum. “Guess we should head in and do this,” Eric says.

Inside, I stand before the gathered mourners. It is quiet. I can hear the air conditioner hum in the ducts. I can hear the corpse trying to breathe. I introduce the three of us as friends of Brad and play “Jesus Don’t Want me for a Sunbeam.” Jesse plays “Wild World” by Cat Stevens. Eric sings an original, a sort of quiet dirge that goes, “Did I say that I love you goodbye, yes I love you goodbye, yes I love you goodbye.”  

So today when I’m back on the island thinking about Brad while sipping on a beer and listening to “Like a Hurricane,” it seems impossible that his brother Mikal should be calling me. Mikal rarely calls me. I’m rarely on the island. If every song is a ghost story and a ghost is directing traffic, where does that leave me among the living? Mikal wants to know, of all things, if I want to join he and my dear friend, Benny Morris, Brad’s and Mikal’s first cousin, at the Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert on May 22nd. I tell Mikal where I am and what I’m listening to, that it seems like the universe is telling me I should go to the show. May 22nd it is. The date sounds familiar, but I won’t piece it together until the day of the show when we crack a beer in the Pine Knob parking lot and Mikal raises his NA beer to the sky and says, “Happy birthday, big bro.” 

Aristotle says something about probable impossibilities being preferable to improbable possibilities, and I wonder which one this is, just as you’re likely wondering why I’d chose such elegiac stuff to mark the end of my time as music editor of The Museum of Americana: a Literary Review. Every great song has a timeless quality, and even a short song can convince us that our time is stretching out, that we’re gonna live forever as Robert Earle Keen would have it. Each time we sing it’s an encrypted attempt to rob death of its dominion. I’ve said things before like, Each song is a vague guess at its own meaning and It’s not really wisdom if it fits inside a sad three-minute song. I leave the Airport Inn and circle around West River Drive to get a look at the bridge before I head to Dave’s, remembering Brad Morris and a poem I wrote some time ago: Black trusses of the drawbridge / gleam in river mist, that span // of iron work between Trenton and Grosse Ile. / My friend Brad Morris // drives his VW Rabbit forever / from the mainland to nowhere // listening to mix tapes and considering / the wild anachronies of heaven.

I’ll miss this outlet, but I hope people will continue to visit the site and listen to the songbook and spare a thought or two for my old friend and your old friends who may be gone but still visit us in these songs.

***Part of the latter middle section of this piece was reprised from an essay called “Three Islands” that was originally published years ago in Memory House Magazine.