Kevin and I went to see Steve Forbert last night at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to celebrate Kevin’s birthday. The first time Kevin gave me a Steve Forbert song on a mixed tape–Fayetteville, Arkanasas, circa 1994, “Romeo’s Tune”–I was in my early twenties, fresh out of Alabama by way of Knoxville, and I couldn’t quite figure out this guy from San Francisco with such great taste in music. When I moved to New York City with Kevin a couple of years later, he took me to a Steve Forbert show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and over the next couple of years we saw two more shows in the city, one at the Mercury Lounge. Not long after we moved to San Francisco, we went to see Forbert at a little church in Noe Valley. I was still in my twenties then, and I embarrassed myself pretty well at request time by shouting out, “Mission of the Crossroad Palms!”

Turns out that’s a whole album. The song I was hoping to hear was “Oh, To Be Back With You,” which is so beautiful and sad I can hardly stand it. Well, last night I got the title right, and Forbert did indeed sing “Oh To Be Back with You,” and it was the highlight of an all-around wonderful show. Kevin and I were in the front row over to the side, which gave us a nice view of Forbert’s harmonica table, which he kept returning to between songs. His energy was great, his voice was just like I remembered it, and yes, I fell in love with Steve Forbert all over again.

Forbert is from Meridian, Mississippi, and it just so happens that I was driving through Mississippi a few days ago, en route from Memphis to a little town called Brookhaven, where my parents grew up and where most of my extended family still lives. My dad, his wife, my sister and I were going down there for my granddaddy’s funeral. On the way we stopped at a 76 station in the middle of nowhere, and outside I got to talking to a gas station clerk in his early twenties about the heat, and the stillness of the air, and the sounds of the south (all those insects chirping and humming away in the middle of the day, so loud it feels as though you’ve landed on another planet), and I said to him, “Where are we, exactly?”

The kid dropped his cigarette and pointed down the empty highway and said, “Laurel’s down that way. I can’t wait to get out of here.” Just then I thought of Steve Forbert, and a line from one of his songs: “Goin’ down to Laurel, it’s a dirty, stinking town…”

Last night Forbert sang another one of my favorites, which was on that first mixed tape Kevin made for me when I was so young–“Song for Katrina”–You sure look good down in ol’ Canton/ With your new blue dress and your lipstick on. And he played “Middle Age,” which is funny and a little sad, given that Kevin and I are rapidly getting there. When he mentioned that he’d be going down to San Luis Obispo to play a show with Al Stewart, a lady got so excited she stopped the show and went up to the stage to talk to him. To his credit, Forbert was very gracious in the face of an amusingly awkward moment. Sometime between the peanuts and the pretzels and the Callistoga (no drinks at Freight and Salvage, which may have accounted for the somewhat subdued crowd), I picked up a copy of Steve Forbert: Best of the Downloads, which you can purchase here.

It turned out to be the night of two Steves…as we left the show, Steve Wozniak (a.k.a. Woz) was standing right outside the door. My friend Ben Fong-Torres recently said that he wished he’d taken photographs with all the fascinating people he’s interviewed over the years. Since the Woz was right there, and I already had my camera in hand, well…

Anyway, all of this leads me by a winding route to Outer Banks, a collection of three of Russel Banks’s early novels. In the preface, Banks writes,

It was so long ago, and I was such a different person then, that they seem to have been written by someone else. It’s as if the books were written, not merely by a younger version of my present self, but by a different writer altogether. He’s a man in his mid-thirties, which makes him thirty to thirty-five years younger than I am now. He’s not I, but he’s someone I happen to know rather well, almost intimately, the way one knows a much younger first cousin or favorite godson.

I was thirty years old when I published my first book, and looking back, just seven and a half years later, I too feel as if those stories were written by a different person. Forbert released Alive on Arrival in 1978, Jackrabbit Slim in 1979. When he catches a glimpse of those albums out in the world, it must feel a bit like meeting a stranger, but the kind of stranger who is achingly, eerily familiar.