Chris Gaffney, 1950-2008

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

Every time I interviewed Chris Gaffney he was in a hotel room in Denver, though it couldn’t have always been the same one, and every time he heard from me—bad, fast questions about Van Halen and the Standells—he had a joke and a story and some quick laugh and an idea about something I’d never thought might fit in my head. And every time the interview would settle somewhere comfortable and turn into a conversation, and I’d end up with hundreds of words on The Rockford Files and Night Gallery that wouldn’t go to print anywhere.

Later, I’d listen to his songs and think about what it was like to pester a guy like Gaffney. He’d say that spending time with Hacienda Brother producer/songwriter Dan Penn made him feel like a kid let loose on his older brother trying to work in the garage, and that was close to my own experience of Gaffney, and better than I could put it myself.

When I heard he was ill, I thought for sure I’d hear from a hotel room in Denver that he had tramped through the disease. And then—well, I didn’t listen to his songs until I sat down to write this, and I didn’t sit down to write this until now because that’s one more goodbye that leaves us sadder now and smaller forever.

Gaffney had rare force from the real source, the original wounded spirit of American music now split by so many generations you’d almost forget how far back a certain kind of song could stretch. He’d own his songbook selections—like “Cowboys to Girls,” a song he told me he’d probably play forever—because of the careful way he chose to walk inside them: “You can enter the song with a certain reverence, and hold it true to form. On all those songs, I think, ‘I’m not Otis Redding, so I just have to be me.’”

So first I thought to find a song to reflect on Gaffney, to recall that lost glow of his. Maybe Wynn Stewart, who Gaffney saw weekend after weekend as a kid because his dad liked to get on stage to do “My Funny Valentine.” Or Johnny Darrell, who I found through the Hacienda Brothers’ “Mental Revenge.” Or Percy Sledge or Otis Redding. Someone to help make sense of the space left in place of the man with a line or two that would stay true forever.

But instead I’ve been returning to Gaffney’s own “Turn to Grey,” not for insight or epitaph, but just to let it play. Jim Washburn (who wrote about Gaffney with the precision and heart he deserved) said there was something in the Hacienda Brothers’ music as lonesome and beautiful as a Piper Cub in the night sky, and that’s where it was for me: in a Gaffney original that flew past so fast I’d always play it twice, with a lot of lines to laugh with out loud but a heartbreaker anyway that put two full-life stories in one simple verse (“I saw your brother yesterday, he’s a loser/He’s livin’ in Fontana with a kitchen for his farm/He said I looked a lot like someone he knew back in prison/Who never meant to do no one no harm . . .”) and still left room for the guitar to finish the signature.

What do you do with a song like that? I don’t know if it made me feel more like I knew him or he knew me. It had every necessary thing inside it, ready to make you feel better when you felt good already, or make you feel less lonesome when you felt wrecked already, and to make you laugh a little always and remind you about a line or two if a train honked hard out in the night somewhere. It’s strange and hard to think about songs like that without him now—I would think it always might be. I would think maybe it always should be, too

Tags: chris gaffney, the hacienda brothers, turn to grey