WHEN I WAS A WEE SPROUT in Fresno, dirt and fog capital of the world, we walked the new-tilled soil in Walkman headphones, kicking furrows barefoot, tamping down dirtclods, and chanting along to Freedy Johnston’s first cassette. How we heard this back then, I scarcely can figure; apparently few in New York yet knew Freedy (who had only just arrived from the Midwest) but somehow all in Fresno did (were we some test audience, the other Kansas in Freedy’s marketing heart?).
We particularly adored the song “Fun Ride,” his loose, bouncy tribute to both a delirious carnival and a complicated relationship, a recklessly whooshing song yet handily controlled. It formed the everything of our love for him. “Pull the plug on that thing,” Freedy says, commanding his girl to turn off the television for how it can’t compare to the upcoming “Fun Ride”: “It won’t lift you fifty feet.” This particular observation, this liberating contempt, became our anthem, the voice of our gang of Fresno toughs.
A short time later, Freedy passed through on tour. By then his second cassette had dropped on us out of the drought-dead skies, a far, far greater wonder than his first, falling on our ears generous and splendid like some Marshall Plan or a Gods Must Be Crazy Coke. Elsewhere Freedy was still nobody, but in Fresno he sold out the college football stadium. My friend Melvin Toff and I made over $1,327.18 on bootleg tee shirts we silk-screened in the campus parking lot and sold to the ticket-less thousands who were turned away. “Place your faith in Freedy,” our shirts read. “He will lift you fifty feet.”
And we built something for the state fair called “Fun Ride.” We worked, in constructing our “Fun Ride,” to render his carefully careless song inhabitable. Every egress would, as per the song, demonstrate what it celebrated. Every I-beam would contain the locked-in dynamism audible in the tumbling chorus, every structural cable would reference Freedy’s ingenious arrangement.
Our “Fun Ride” was a huge hit. People enjoyed going on it, and they learned a lot. We garnered the red ribbon at state level but were edged out in the nationals by “Keep Punching Joe,” a vintage 17th century pugilist masque produced—no!—by our long-standing rivals, the Daniel Johnstons.
People lately have asked why a man of my advanced years, frequently faint and sallow, stooped in gait and almost hard of hearing, and now—at long last—too old to vote, called for the killing of Freedy. Yet I ask those early Freedy fans who endured the muzak puke that comprised his last release, can you blame me? Why, that other Johnston—Daniel Johnston—he was never this bad, would never sing something that didn’t hang in his lungs for a time, would never thrive on sweets. The conclusion was inescapable: we had backed the wrong Johnston. The feigned David Gates-isms of this new Freedy! That unrocking rock! The public and press all appeared to appreciate it, but this was wrong.
And so in slippers I slowly set out from my Stuyvesant Town nursing home in brisk November, 1995, trailing an IV and carrying a pail of wheatpaste, to remind the world that Freedy used to be better. Strangers spat invectives at the sickly old man and telephoned at all hours, yet still I persevered! I glued up street manifestos—I did this! Yes!—which tried in their tiny way to ask what happened to the long ago Fresno Freedy we wore on our chests, who sang with such subtle verve and appeared incapable of letting us down.
The staff here have since corrected my meds. The voices are gone and my vision less blurry. My family, when they visit, speak to me as if I have years left, though this too is some sick joke. Recently my dew-lipped niece Deborah brought me the next Freedy CD, Never Home. As it played on the hospital’s bedside boombox, she perched lightly upon the arm of the divan just as you’d expect, watching the inconstant beeps and blinks on the panels of my electronic monitors as if to read some response, desperate to be able to convey my sincere apologies to the world. And . . .
The CD wasn’t so bad, really. It still sounded like the type of stuff listened to by candlelit women in slinky bed apparel as they sip chilled wine from tall stemware, shaking their heads over those louses they always seem to date. Okay, so no one was lifted fifty feet or encouraged to miss work. But time and again Freedy casually picked a graceful detail—“leaving just enough for the weekly rent, plus a little change”—and abruptly carried it into the spirit of a character—“taking the long way to anyplace, in the frozen rain.” Or he’d tell several stories at once, as when a klepto’s case study in “On the Way Out” also supplies guilty dialogue with a girlfriend.
And there are still displays of singing brilliance, in the way he treasures a throwaway line like “now it’s been two months,” starting enraged and closing in pieces, and the stirring manner in which he slows his syllables singing, “I loved you or . . . something like that, anyway.”
At last, making sounds which best belong under the rolling credits of a film of heartland romance, Never Home concluded. I waved a hand with difficulty. “Well,” I croaked. “Let him live.”
“Oh!” dewy-eyed Deborah bounded about, clapping her dewclaws delightedly and moving as if to kiss me. “You won’t be sorry, Uncle. I promise! You won’t!”
He is trying, after all. I think maybe you can almost possibly hear it in “Seventies Girl,” when the band timidly leans into the picture of the song, Freedy’s entire presence aglow with delicate ache, and you hear it in the ambitious writing of songs like “Gone to See the Fire” (in which a couple split over arson)—you hear him working to reconnect with the Freedy who broke my friends free from those unshod yesterdays of Central California, when all we possessed was fallow soil and truly our future was fog.