Mister Sweet Whisper

Back to that Chattanooga Dunkin’, where Coley thumbs a ride with a truck driver heading south. Over the slow simmer of “Hitchhikin,” the pair crosses into Alabama in the dark. “We passed a small frame house, completely aflame/Transparent with fire,” Coley rasps, dealing his words out slowly as the music becomes stranger: a clash of upright bass and one comically unhinged horn we come to understand as the sound of frightened geese scattering into the dawn. Is this a distant recollection? A metaphor? A dream? “I don’t have a great memory,” said Coley in a recent interview. “I never did, but now that I’m 74, it’s a memory that doesn’t want to hold anything captive. It wants everything to go free.”

These are awfully lonely songs—decadent and wild, but long ago and far away. A cobblestone street lined with nightclubs materializes on “Club Roma,” with music drifting outside where the beautiful people smoke under the neon: “All you can see is the lips/You can see the eye.” Coley keeps walking past the clubs and cafes, down quiet streets so dark it’s hard to see. The lights are low again on “Dancin’ Like an Assassin.” (“So I needed some money, so this friend of mine told me he could get me a job working as a stripper,” he recounts wryly. “I said that’s OK/I said I can do that.”) In the strip club shadows, everybody looks good naked, and Coley gets lost in the lounge lizard music as it plays faster and faster: “I’m like a potted plant that moves around, man/I’m on the tables, and petals fall off on the tables, man/My petals falling off, man/My flowers.”

For a moment, he almost remembers where he is. “So I was kinda turning over on the bed, and it was like rolling across hillsides,” the homebound poet murmurs on “Flesh Vehicle,” until the mystic-sounding organ drone transports him to a reverie where he is simply walking: up hills and down valleys, over rivers, into towns. We are in the unknown country of the imagination, where neither the limits of the body, nor the strictures that define America as much as any bright vision of freedom, are a match for the forces of the sublime, the ribald, and the reckless. But there is sad, sardonic wisdom in a song like “That Knock at the Door” which might apply to any number of current tragicomic spectacles. “You see the god of fire seeking fire/That’s a bad sign,” Coley growls over soft strokes of vibraphone, the faintest brush of cymbals. “And yet there’s hardly a household in this realm that hasn’t heard that knock on the door.” From a distance he watches this fallen god in simple clothes—just another person now, not unlike himself—and bows his head in sympathy, or shame.