I was in Los Angeles earlier this week at a sales convention for my day job when I got the news about Randy Ryan.
Randy was a guy I worked with at my first job out of high school at a record store in West Seattle called Penny Lane (not to be confused with the L.A. based record store pictured here).
Randy and I had an odd relationship, mostly because Randy was a really odd sort of guy, but I always basically liked him.
He basically had really bad hygiene habits, kept a horribly messy apartment (despite having meticulously clean habits when it came to our record store), and really enjoyed doing all he could to get me in trouble with our boss (Willie), because we were both gunning for the managers job at the record store back then. He also could be very cold, arrogant, and anti-social towards certain people.
Despite all of this, I still always really liked Randy.
It was particularly fun getting together with him a few years back, after we had not seen each other in something like twenty years. After hearing the news this week, I'm particularly glad I was able to do that now.
In between sales meetings in L.A., I got the news that Randy died earlier this week. According to an e-mail from another friend, David Rynning, that I don't see nearly as often as I should, Randy had a sudden heart attack in downtown Seattle. Oddly enough, he was on his way to the doctor when it happened according to the e-mail.
So like I said, Randy was an odd guy, and on the surface we didn't have a whole lot in common. He was gay, I'm straight. He could be withdrawn, where I've always been kind of an open book. And of course there was that god-awful apartment of his where you could write your name on his toilet seat, and you sometimes had to make your way around all of the McNaughton's bottles and cigarette ashes strewn about the place.
But we had some good times in that apartment back in the seventies. We sometimes had to endure his depressing poetry, listen to his dull music (his taste sometimes ran towards boring singer-songwriters like Stephen Bishop) and watch his weird impressionistic dances to get there. There was also the matter of his mood shifts, which sometimes came in waves over the course of a night of pretty hard drinking...but we had some good times there.
We stayed up all night many times drinking, listening to prog-rock groups like Genesis and the Strawbs (we even called these get-togethers our "Strawb-outs"), and getting into deep conversations about things like religion and spirituality. I guess you could call this time my sort of "philosophical seeker" period.
The past few years I've had a pretty steady series of encounters with old friends and aquaintances from my distant past.
Some of these have been quite rewarding, such as when I was able to renew my friendship with old DJ pal Nasty Nes about a year ago. Others have proved ultimately frustrating, such as when my old drummer Huey and I started jamming together again last year for a few months, only to have him mysteriously drop the whole thing and disapear again just as my own creative fires were just starting to get sparked again.
I've also got a few more of these impending reunions that are sure to crop up in the next few months. Kim Murrell, my old high school buddy who now lives in Chicago called me again just a few nights ago when Obama got elected. And I should be seeing Pat Levy, a buddy from junior high in Hawaii who I haven't seen in more than thirty years, early next year when he comes to Seattle to be the donor for his brother's cancer.
Just tonight, I went up to the West Seattle junction to grab a quick beer and I bumped into another guy I haven't seen in years who proceeded to tell me the true story of how another mutual friend of ours, Leon, had died. Most of my friends believe Leon died as a semi-destitute heroin addict. But tonight "Greg" insisted that he had just come into a big financial inheritance a few days before they found him dead, and even suggested foul play may have been involved.
The thing is, the way Greg told the story I think I may even believe him.
Anyway, many of these reunions have been great experiences, but many others either didn't quite fulfill their initial promise, or just turned out to be bad ideas.
But the common link with all of them has been their bittersweet quality. Whatever the case, they seem to be occuring with increased frequency these days, and I'm sure there will be many more to come. The bottom line is I guess this is what happens when you get old.
I'm sorry I never got to say goodbye to Randy one last time.
But at least I was able to see him that one last time a few years back, and whatever weirdness ever existed between us was finally sorted out that night. Now I can go on with just the good memories of our days at the record store and our nights sorting out the meaning of life over too many beers and bongloads largely intact.
Rest in peace Randy. Tonight, I'll be listening to the Strawbs Hero And Heroine album in your memory.
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