Blues for Stu. |
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By Sab Grey
August 4, 2003
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Stu was
my best friend and now he's gone. And I don't know what to do.
Stu and I met in a London club where I was DJing. I liked him right away. He had a style of dress that was completely original, sometimes bizarre, sometimes goofy, but always right on the money. We talked about music all night and decided to jam. It clicked right away. He told me if we were going to play together I had better get my chops up. So we sat in his cold London basement flat drinking cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes while he taught me everything I know about rhythm guitar. 5 or 6 hours a night after work for weeks on end. And it worked. We got so tight we knew what the other was doing even before they did it. And when we played we rocked. Everyone was amazed when Stu would put the guitar behind his head and walk across tables or down the bar, ripping out hot licks. What they didn't know was we practiced it. Stu would pace back and forth in that apartment with the guitar behind his head until it was right. Cause that was Stu, he didn't half ass anything. Stu was there through my divorce and everything else that was going on wrong in my life. Cause that's the way he was, if you were a friend and you needed help he was there, no questions asked. We moved to the States to play music cause the environment was better for what we wanted to do. And it was. We called ourselves the Royal Americans and became a three and four piece band. Paul Cleary played Doghouse bass and Jimmy Swope played drums. I still have a picture of the four of us sitting at a booth in some bar in Virginia. I can't look at it right now. It holds a moment when my best friend was still alive and we had a gig to do. Which is how we spent most of our time together. Practicing music, waiting to play music, playing music. When he met Johna his life changed I had never seen him so happy. They were perfect together. When they decided to move to San Francisco it meant the end of Stu and me playing music together but not our friendship. He called me when he and Johna married, and he called me when he became an American, and I called him about stuff going on in my life. When I played San Francisco, touring with Iron Cross, Stu and I went to lunch and caught up on everything. He'd found his home and everything was golden. Stu and Jonah came back to the East Coast one Christmas and we got together one night. We went to a bar to see our old friend Jimmy Swope playing. Jimmy invited Stu and me up to play a couple of songs. We clicked right back where we'd left off more than two years earlier. Then we sat around and talked about old times and new times and seeing Stu and Jonah made my Christmas that year. Then Stu got ill and now he's gone. I called him when I could and talked to him and heard him weaken through the phone lines. Until near the end he could barely talk at all, my friend, who never spoke in a sentence if he could say it in a paragraph. I told him to get better dammit cause we had albums to make, but who was I fooling? And I wish, like all those left behind, that I had called more often or that I had done something more or anything. I guess it's part of the ritual of mourning, the flagellation of self, the helplessness and the wondering; "I should have…" But cancer has its own agenda and doesn't listen to the wishes or needs of anything or anyone but the murderous multiplication of itself. Now that my best friend
is gone I try and be thankful that he found his wonderful wife and enjoyed
the life that was given to him with her.
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