It was a damp evening in San Diego in that fateful month of December 1980. The murder of John Lennon only eight days earlier still left me stunned and morose. But this night we were going to try to see another guitar player. Roy Buchanan, who was virtually unknown to me, but was a guitar hero of my boyfriend at the time. The only hitch was that Roy was performing at a 21 and over club and I had only celebrated my 18th birthday six months earlier. We made the ol’ college try only to be turned away at the door. So, we decided to just hang around the parking lot area and try to see what we could see. In our exploration of the premises, we found our way to the alley behind the club. Down the alley I could see a small travel trailer. I could tell by the loud conversations that it was packed full of people. A few people were milling about outside the trailer in the alley. As I begin to nonchalantly walk up the alley towards the trailer my boyfriend was whispering emphatically for me to not go any closer. But it had become apparent to me that the guitar player that he is so infatuated with was sitting right there in the trailer at the little table, the kind of trailer table that drops down into a bed. There are mostly guys in the trailer, and maybe two or three women. I recognize Roy sitting at one side of the table. By now my boyfriend is practically trying to physically pull me away from the trailer entrance but I’ve already smiled and flirted my way up to the door way and stepped up and I say, “Roy, Your biggest fan wants to meet you.” And I pull my boyfriend into the trailer.
Roy smiled and immediately made us feel welcome. Like not only did we belong there but he was expecting to see us, that kind of welcome. He asked us if we had tickets for the show and that’s when we told him of my age problem. He started asking about us, how we met, where we were from and telling us about his personal life, his wife and family. He showed us pictures in his wallet. We discovered that he and I both hailed from the great state of Virginia. He then devised a plan to tell the management of the club that I was his long lost cousin from back home and that he wanted me to be allowed in in spite of the age problem. But the club would not relent. He did, however, manage to get us a seat in the artist’s dressing area where if the door were cracked open we could see the stage from the wing. So, he did this for me after having just met us. After the show he invited us back to the trailer. And this is when I truly got to know Roy Buchanan.
He said he wanted some weed. We said we had some weed but we only had a little water bong, travel sized you might say, to smoke it in. Roy claimed he’d never smoked weed out of a bong before. So I may have that distinct honor but who can say…? Just some of the many things we talked about that night from two in the morning until four a.m. He said his favourite Jimi Hendrix song was Spanish Castle Magic. He told us many tales of the rock and roll world he traveled in. How the Rolling Stones had asked him to play in the band after Brian Jones died. How he had asked John Lennon to play in his band after The Beatles broke up, but of course John, wanted to do his own thing with Yoko. And then the damn burst and Roy sobbed over the loss of our mutual hero John Lennon. He was holding my hands in his hands across the table and we were commiserating on the dire state of the world where someone would take the life of such a peaceful soul. He said his strongest memory of meeting Lennon was how red his hair was and how short he was. We were all crying now. He asked us what other musicians we liked. Of course, I told him I loved Jeff Beck and the Grateful Dead. That’s when Roy told us that Jeff Beck and Jerry Garcia were angels sent to earth to protect him. This he told us in the most clear-eyed manner you could imagine. He made us believe it by the strength of his belief.
By now most of the band has left the club and the little trailer party and headed back to the hotel. When one of the band tries to get Roy to go with them Roy tells them that he is going to stay with his new friends (meaning us) and we agreed to get him to the proper hotel by daybreak. And we continued to drink (non-alcoholic, of course, wink, wink) and smoke (medicinal only, ahem…) into the wee hours of the morning. It was then that Roy told us the strangest tale about how he’d gotten the inspiration for his latest album My Babe, how he’d lost all his money and caught pneumonia after being put in jail and subsequently beat up by the cops and how the cops had tried but failed to stage a suicide attempt to cover up his death from their beating.
Cue the eerie silence….
Yes. That is exactly how Roy met his ultimate demise some eight years later, in a jail in his home state of Virginia. The cops claimed it was suicide. When my boyfriend, who had become my husband by that time, and I heard the news of his death and those details, we just looked at each other in stunned disbelief. How could he have predicted his death with such vivid accuracy? I still don’t know what to think but I do have the journal entry of that night, and these are not just aged memories
That night after we had dropped Roy off at his hotel as promised, we discovered he’d left behind a guitar strap in our car. We considered keeping it as a souvenir of our night but as Roy had trusted us with his personal post office box address in Virginia, we decided it would be better karma to return it to him. Every time we saw him after that night he always remembered us.
The epilougue to this story occurred in 1995, when I got the chance to meet my hero, Jeff Beck backstage at the Concord Pavillion. After waiting patiently for hours, I finally got to speak to Jeff and I got to tell him my story about Roy and how Roy thought of Jeff and Jerry Garcia as angels. Ironically, this was just a few weeks after Jerry’s sad passing. So it caught Jeff’s attention and he seemed happy to hear that Roy thought of him in that way.
And that is why I still call him my friend. I don’t think I will ever accept the facts surrounding his death, I do know that tragically a great musician, a husband and a father is no longer with us. Fortunately, we have some great recordings and video to stir our memories of a kind and special friend he was to us that night and how we grieved together and spoke of many wonderful and mysterious things. A night I won’t ever forget.
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