The Ghosts of Christmases past Dec. 9, 2023
Fiftieth anniversaries are supposed to be significant,
marking a half century for many events. Woodstock, Altamont and others closing
out the 1960s, although for the Garley Gang, many of these more personal events
began in the 1970s, such as gathering on Halloween at Charlie’s house in West
Paterson in 1970, and the Christmas Eve gathering in Parsippany in 1971 (to
record a tape to send to me in Portland), gatherings in which nearly all the
members of the Garley Gang assembled, and became markers in time that we would
look back upon a half century later after it became impossible for the members
to gather again.
One of these gatherings took place on Christmas Eve in 1973,
when Pauly and Jane still lived on Pine Street in Montclair (I lived in the
rooming house a few blocks away at the time) and we gathered in their kitchen
to get stoned or drunk (depending on your preference) in the kitchen of their
apartment, Pauly taking the lead on guitar as he always did, often inventing
his own lyrics to songs then popular on the radio, such as he did with Neil
Young’s Southern Man in on Christmas Eve 1971 substituting Santa Claus for
Southern Man – “I hear bullwhips cracking etc.)
One song he did this with in 1973 was John Lennon’s “Give me
some Truth,” partly because of the constant news about Richard Nixon and Watergate
(largely a Democratic coup that would get repeated a half century later with Donald
Trump – Democrats always relying on the same pack of lies and the same media
manipulation to keep or gain power).
Pauly tended to be more conservative back then, later coming
to admire Bill Clinton as President and as library director towards the end of his
life, he became mostly liberal. But he didn’t mix politics with his music back
then or later, unlike many silly musicians and others, who felt the need to be
part of the crowd. He tended to sing songs as a kind of personal satire.
Christmas Eve gatherings became a tradition in the 1970s and
largely lasted until Hank’s death in the mid-1990s, moments when we came
together as a kind of progress report, how we all had fared as John Lennon once
said prior to his own death just before Christmas in 1980 and an admission of
change as George Harrison might have pointed out with “All Things Must Pass (as
he certainly did just prior to Christmas in 2001).
In 1973, we were still all pretty much intact, and all retained
our hope for the future, with the assumption that we would all achieve some
measure of success or in Pauly’s case, greatness. We were destined to become
someone someday even if we couldn’t yet figure out who, what or when precisely.
That’s the Christmas I gave Hank a tape recorder as a
present, with which he began to document many of the later events, though sometimes
he had me recording Pauly’s conversations from the back seat of his car, something
of a joke we were supposed to spring on him as a present the next Christmas,
and something I got angry about when Hank wanted to keep these recordings
secret for a much longer time, at which point I destroyed many of them, seeing
them as an invasion of Pauly’s privacy. I did not feel like being Big Brother.
I regret this now all these years later, although some of these tapes still
survived, partly because Hank made me make him copies.
Our gathering, of course, did not take the place of family
obligations. We met and then we parted, going on to other places to see other
places, sometimes later on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day itself. This was
easier back then since we all still lived within each reach in Northern New
Jersey. But the chore of meeting became more difficult as we and our families scattered,
and we sometimes only met for a short time in some location before scrambling
to reach families in more remote locations. Later, these meetings began to miss
important members and eventually because impossible not merely because some
members of the gang had become too remote, but some were too far gone to call
back, without the help of a pack of angels. Eventually, for me, even my family
members faded, and now, I look back at these times with nostalgia.
When I listen to the 1973 Christmas tape Hank made (making
use of his recorder the very night he received it) I still see the faces of
those as they were then, the young and hopeful, the people still with big
dreams, and this sense that the world was (as others have said) still our
oyster.
And maybe it was, maybe it could have been, maybe over time
when someone else looks back they will see how we managed to succeed in ways we
did not expect and if not quite in the way we hoped.
In my mind, this Christmas Eve, I will once again gather with
them as I do every Christmas Eve, celebrating the ghosts of Christmases past.
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