Afraid of the Dark

Rest in Peace, My Beautiful Melanie

By 1970, we were living in Belmont, California. My mother, Stan, and I. It was horrible. I’ll tell you about it another time. This post is about the beautiful singer and impassioned songwriter, Melanie.

I discovered Melanie one summer night in 1970. It was on Johnny Cash Presents the Everly Brothers, which was the summer replacement series for The Johnny Cash Show. Back then, if you wanted to know who the guest stars would be on any weekly variety show you had to look at the current issue of TV Guide, and I saw that Ike and Tina Turner, Bobby Sherman, and Melanie would be joining the Everly Brothers that week. I didn’t know who Melanie was at this point. I knew who Ike and Tina were, although it was still a little before their iconic cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary. But I tuned in that night because I was in love with Bobby Sherman, the gloriously good-looking heartthrob on Here Come the Brides. When I saw Melanie for the first time, alone with her guitar, singing her self-penned song called Tuning My Guitar with a combination of beauty and vulnerability, it was love at first sight. If you watch the video to the end, you’ll see Melanie singing with Tina, the Everlys and Bobby. It’s not a combination of performers that I would think to put together, but in a 1970’s sort of way, it’s brilliant.

The next day, I went to the mall to look for Melanie in the record store. I found her album Candles in the Rain, and even though I hadn’t heard any of its songs, I bought it anyway. The picture of her on the cover was beautiful and peaceful, leaving me with a feeling of serenity that was impossible to find in the madness of home.

For me, Melanie was alternative music. I had never heard anything like her before. Every song was a mystical experience, transporting me to another world. The album opened with an acoustical introduction to the title track, immediately followed by a burst of soul as Lay Down(Candles in the Rain), with its electrifying message of peace, hope, and love caused me to spontaneously jump out of my desk chair and dance all around my room. Backed by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Melanie told us to “raise the candles high, cause if we do, we could stay dry against the rain.” Looking at the album’s liner notes, I saw that Melanie thanked the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and because of them, she knew she would never have to sing alone.

So now I had a new mission in life; one that would help me cope with the unbearableness of living with Stan and my mother in an awful duplex by the freeway that was not much better than a tarpaper shack, next door to the bully that hated me. I set out to learn everything I could about Melanie and to collect as much of her music as I could. I found out that Melanie and her guitar were a sensation at Woodstock, becoming an overnight success. Unknown when she took the stage late at night, it started to rain, and in response, people lit candles as she performed her set. It was the inspiration for her words “some came to sing, some came to pray, some came to keep the dark away.” Having heard Candles in the Rain hundreds, if not thousands of times since then, I still feel that same sense of awe, peace, love, and hope every time I listen.

Melanie was on television a lot in those days, and I faithfully checked the TV Guide listings every week so I wouldn’t miss her. One week she was on some music show that I can’t remember the name of, but it wasn’t a live performance. It was a video of her singing (Lay Down)Candles in the Rain - before there was anything remotely like an MTV. It had to be one of the earliest music videos ever produced. It was psychedelic, with a circle of Melanies swirling around as she sang, smiling like an angel. Although the video is grainy and low quality, Melanie’s essence of love shines through. Watch it and see if you can feel it too.

Lay Down(Candles in the Rain) was not the only song on the album that transformed me and transported me to higher ground. It was the whole album. Every song had something to say to me, and the album in its entirety was somehow symbolic of my life at home and everything that I was feeling and going through. The second track was Melanie’s cover of James Taylor’s Carolina in My Mind. When she sang “in my mind I’m gone to Carolina,” she made me believe in a way that James Taylor never could that there was a better place we could get to when the present was so intolerable. And “ain’t it just like a friend of mind who comes and hits me from behind” pierced me to the core as I remembered all of my mother’s broken promises.

On side two, there was a song that Melanie wrote called “Lovin’ Baby Girl” that almost made me stop breathing. I can’t say that it was a catchy, radio-friendly tune, but it sure spoke to me. It was about a lonely girl who promised if you would be her mommy/daddy then she would be your loving one. The line that particularly got me was “if I had some pennies, I could have a world of fun - give me all your pennies and I will be your loving one.” How could Melanie have known what a lonely and lost boy I was, waiting for Mommy to pay attention to me and achingly missing having no daddy? But more to the point, how did she know that I had a bowl filled with hundreds of pennies and that when I was alone I would spread all on the kitchen table and spend hours painstakingly making “penny art?” I designed all sorts of things to pass the time: houses, animals, and even a movie theater with rows of seating. And when it was late and Mommy still hadn’t come home, I would sweep my pennies off of the table back into the bowl and put myself to bed. Melanie ended the song with a series of tortured yelps and cries that seemed to come from the bottom of her soul, and I sang each tortured yelp and cry right along with her, as loudly as I could. Not her best-known song, nor one that made you want to sing along to and tap your feet, but it was performance art at its best.

The crown jewel of the album was Melanie’s cover of The Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday. This is the definitive version of the song. Nobody - not Mick Jagger, nor anybody else, was able to capture Melanie’s haunting interpretation of the girl who wouldn’t be chained to a life where nothing’s gained and nothing’s lost. When she sang “lose your dreams and you might lose your mind” I knew Melanie knew the deeper meaning of the lyrics that she did not write. At fourteen, I had no dreams and was indeed losing my mind. And to me, Melanie was Ruby Tuesday. She may not have written it, but Ruby Tuesday is Melanie’s song.

It wasn’t long before I had the three albums Melanie recorded before Candles in the Rain, and as the years went on, I bought every album of hers the day it came out. I became an expert in her music, and more importantly, in her writing. Everything she wrote had deep meaning for me as if she was speaking directly to and for me. I imagined being with her in the late of night, watching her put the finishing touches on another masterpiece as the sun rose above the pines that she wrote about.

Melanie’s 1975 release was an album called Sunset and Other Beginnings. By this time, she was a mother of two, and her writing reflected her experience with motherhood. There is a beautifully touching song on the album called Loving My Children, in which she “wanders and stumbles some, riding the back roads of youth I can’t run away from,” and “loving my children ‘till love in the world is born.” A sweet and simple song that I played for my mother, hoping she would like it. But I didn’t play the song for my mother that she should have heard, which was called Afraid of the Dark. It’s a short piece, less than two minutes long, accompanied by only a piano, sung by Melanie in a deep register that revealed a new huskiness in her voice. I’ve searched for a live version of this song, but I don’t think she ever sang it in concert, so all I can give is the recording. Please listen. In a few short and simple lines, it explains so much about my mother and me.

I couldn’t believe the power of that simple song. How it broke my heart and helped me understand things in a way that I couldn’t before. All the memories of all the nights that I waited for my mother to come home, and how I’d sadly go to bed and wait for her as she stayed out all night, roaming the corners of the night. And just as Melanie sang, my mother kept the lie of her life in safe keeping, and couldn’t see me, the light, sleeping. But it never occurred to me that my mother was simply afraid of the dark and that’s why she couldn’t stay at home and take good care of me. I didn’t understand, but Melanie knew that “people who are afraid of the dark send their children to bed and stay out all night.” My mother didn’t mean to be neglectful. She was just afraid of the dark and did the best she could do.

Melanie died last week at the age of 76. Her children Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau Jarred announced her passing on her Facebook page. My condolences to them. I love their mother very much.

I want to finish this tribute by mentioning one more song of Melanie’s that means so much to me and that I believe expresses her beautiful philosophy about life and death in a way that I’ve never heard from anybody else. The song is called Bon Appetit, and in it, she sings “when I meet my death I’m sure I’ll ask for just a little more of life’s time - but if I don’t get it, I don’t mind.” In her recorded version, which appears on her album Phonogenic: Not Just Another Pretty Face, she adds “it’s what I wanted all the time.”

I am posting a live performance of this astounding song, but she omits “it’s what I wanted all the time.” This line is key. In fact, this line is everything. Through the years, as I have moved more toward a faith-based life, I have come to see some things that I hope to talk about more in future posts, but for now, let’s just say I understand that life is a continual process of letting go. We let go of friends, parents, lovers, careers, homes, places, old ideas. And so much more. We really do have to let go of everything, and eventually, we let go of our physical life in this material world as well. We let go because we are moving toward something. We often resist, some of us right up to the last breathe of life in this material world. As we let go, we move toward union with our Creator. That’s it. That’s what we’re here for. To be reunited with God, our Creator. And whether we know it or not, whether we agree with it or not, and whether we understand it or not, all we ever really wanted was to be united with God. Nothing more, nothing less.

So I get it when Melanie said she would ask for more of life at death, but if she didn’t get it she wouldn’t mind. It’s what she wanted all the time. Melanie knew. It’s all about returning in unity to God’s loving arms.

Rest in peace, my beautiful Melanie.