Lighting a Dark Memory

Song 327: This week on the playlist you can hear The Lights of Downtown by The Long Ryders, written by Stephen McCarthy. It seemed appropriate to follow up last week’s track by The Byrds with one by The Long Ryders, who not only drew obvious inspiration from The Byrds, but who also had the honor of working with original Byrds member Gene Clark while recording their first full-length album Native Sons. One of my CA musician friends introduced me to the music of The Long Ryders by giving me a cassette of his favorite LR cuts, and not long into my first time through with that collection, listening to the car tape player while cruising the East Bay in my ’67 Plymouth Fury, I had become a fan. This number from their 1985 LP The State of Our Union sounded to me like a kind of musical cowboy movie, and it quickly got my attention as being one of the best of the bunch. As a kid, I had enjoyed plenty of cowboy movies and TV shows that revolved around an almost-cartoonish level of violence, but I had also understood the clear distinction between such entertainment and the real-life experience of brutality, which I sought to avoid in my own life, as much as possible. The words of this song echo the thoughts I had growing up about the deep regret that I knew I’d feel if I ever took someone else’s life, or caused someone serious lasting physical harm. One lesson that I absorbed from the fiction I watched and read as a child was the resolve to walk away, and stay away, from any situation that could potentially lead to the kind of tragic consequences that would leave me shaking my head and having to say I can’t run away, I can’t hide — it’s a slow death for me inside.