Eulogy for Mister Reid

I feel grateful that I don’t remember exactly how I first heard of Terry Reid. When most first hear of him it is as a symbol of denial — his pass to Jimmy Page’s urging for him to front a certain rock project he was forming, followed by his pass to Ritchie Blackmore’s urging for him to front Deep Purple, have become synonymous with his name. History is a strange thing, how it places its participants on a many-armed scale, judging the worth of lives to be dissected by books, bio-films, murals on the sides of buildings in urban centers, inspired works of fiction, and even academic journals. Gravity is tricky within its grasp, as those with the greatest meat to their stories are equally as likely to rise to the highest of household-name heavens as they are to sink to the quote-on-quote forgotten bargain bins of pop-cultural dietrus, only to gain the respect they deserve — and collector’s price tags on early copies of supposedly-unearthed, supposedly-now classics — years after their falls from the public eye or this general mortal plain. In the eighteen-hundreds now-lauded composers spent their days savoring bread crumbs, toiling away at conducting the works of now-lauded, dead composers to scrape by. Now, with classic rock replacing classical, the story repeats itself.

Reid’s life, however, was not so bleak, as no one’s ever is; he was admired, oft-covered, and supported by family and friends, by anyone who was anyone. It would be a waste of words to devote time to useless listing, for, all and all, Reid was a man of names. His name other than his own was “Superlungs”, after a cover of Donovan, that Pied Piper of compulsively-straightened-hair blondes who trudge through the summer in jewel-colored velvets, which would become one of his signatures. (His stretched-out version of “Season of the Witch” is also notable.) The name of his debut album, my favorite name for any album, is “Bang Bang You’re Terry Reid” — what do you mean, I’m Terry Reid? I’m not that cute, I think as I stare into his big, beautiful eyes and at his moody mod hairdo, peering out from the dark studio abyss. The title stems from his notably unique version of “Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down” that opens the record with an intensity and force that, almost perfectly, laid the groundwork for everything Led Zeppelin would later become unstoppable for, remains undeniable. Later on Rogue Waves, Phil Spector and “Walk Away Renee”, too, received worthy treatments from Terry. Within his own parameters of sound, he transformed these standards into fragments of personality, these sort of personal extensions of the inner worlds we for ourselves make of these radio staples portrayed prismatically through his musical palate and ability.

I do remember the first time, though, and it is fitting, that I heard Reid’s original composition “Tinker Tailor” — my life was turbulent, still is, both physically and emotionally. It was a song I felt I was entering as the guitar unfolded like a stop-motion origami chimera, an emotional and ramshackle odyssey in ten-frame per second, barely recognizable as anything normal. This was no alien sound — not spaced out, but rather clawing through layers of fresh, fertile soil, pale specks against chocolate cake, utterly organic and tangled in powerful roots. Or, rather, the footage was being played in reverse, and the beast was instead burrowing, finding warmth and comfort in the black-as-night instability. “Why is it that we are looking for someone, trying to see the light?” Strong and undefeatable, or ready to collapse in on itself? Both — utterly indefinable. It was as much a hardened-rubber-like, tangible mass as it was an intangible state of consciousness, of existence.

What I heard was the sound of youth — the uncertainty of youth, the strange and hard to pinpoint passion of youth. And, in a decade defined by youth, Terry was a baby, penning “Without Expression” — a similarly singular song, hanging mid-air in an uncanny and oddly personal balance — at age fourteen and seemingly never looking back. (The Hollies, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and R.E.O Speedwagon have all done it justice.) It was as if Terry had his finger on the wider pulse by following his own heart’s beat. He was never in regret or striving for any mythos of himself, as much as those corners of culture that are in acknowledgement of him seem to want to construct one.

In the mere days before Terry’s passing I was saddened to see that a fundraiser was launched to help him fight the cancer he would so soon succumb to. The visible outpour of support from all corners of the world got me thinking of all the personal, small, invisible loves Terry received in his lifetime, about how this is how we as people are supposed to show our love these days — publicly; the values of “love” and “gold” have become melded into the same, militant thing. If the love we have given is not known to the world — expressed through chart-topping successes in absurd volumes — does it even exist? Are we not allowed to show our love in little, even private ways? Must every song in the whirlwind musicals of our lives be the chest-bursting show-stopper? No — everyone deserves a break, the ability to function as an individual self without the eyes of the world coaxing us to dance for pennies. One of the great lessons I have learned is that music and art are some of the best ways to connect with this individual self. Terry approached his craft in this way by not letting himself be defined by any name more known or larger than his own; he remained true and, in that truth, always interesting.

Despite his passing, which at that point in the progression of his cancer was essentially inevitable, donations to Terry’s fund are still rolling in. Love has rolled in from friends such as Graham Nash and Robert Plant, permitting Terry a spotlight that did not shackle him to his achievements or would-be achievements but his role as a “brother in arms” — equally as talented, perseverant, humble. Music does not pass away, but neither do such qualities. That is the true impact worth remembering — that there are people who embody those qualities of being a good human being, make riding horses through a rainstorm worth doing.