Certain Songs

On friendship, growing older, and the music that stays with us

“My guys aren’t doing too great right now,” my dad says.

We’re on the phone a day after he tripped and fell outside his apartment in Florida. I’m walking to the ferry, on my way to Brooklyn for a concert.

He managed to escape without any broken bones. But because his face was the first part of his anatomy to hit the ground, he looks like he’s just gone 15 rounds with Joe Frazier.

At 83, he still gets around pretty well, but balance has become an issue.

He also tells me that his two closest friends from college — his “guys” — are both battling health problems.

One, he says, recently fell at his home and is recovering from a broken hip. The other, who already survived a kidney transplant, is now suffering from another ailment. I didn’t like hearing this news, but I was also touched that, more than 60 years after they first met, these old pals are still looking out for one another.

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At my 25th college reunion a couple months ago, I was talking with my old roommate John. He mentioned that he was going to be coming up from Atlanta to New York for work in July. He said Patterson Hood and Craig Finn, the lead singers of Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady, respectively, were going to be playing on a bill together in Brooklyn the night he arrived — would I like to go?

“John,” I said. “I have good news for you. I happen to already have tickets to that show. Let’s do it.”

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I first encountered John because of a song.

It was probably the late-summer of 1997, the start of my freshman year of college. I was coming out of the dining hall, on my way back to my room, when the sound of a piano on my right caused me to stop — someone was playing the Bruce Springsteen song “Backstreets.”

“Backstreets” wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t a song you’d hear on classic rock radio in the ’90s, like “Glory Days” or “Dancing in the Dark.” But among Bruce devotees, it’s one of his iconic songs. So when I heard it being played that day, I knew I was in the presence of a true fan.

I looked over and saw that it was a blond-haired kid wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I don’t recall now if I had seen him before or if I recognized him as a fellow member of the class of 2001. But I do remember that I raised my fist and called out to him, “Backstreets!”

He nodded in acknowledgment and kept on playing, and I went back to my room.

We presumably had a more formal introduction shortly thereafter, but I don’t remember it. However it went down was certainly less cinematic — and symbolic — than the “Backstreets” moment.

Despite our geographical differences — he hailed from Georgia, I came from Connecticut — John and I became fast friends. Our relationship even endured through the peak of the heated Mets-Braves rivalry, which happened while we were in school. (It says something that one of us didn’t kill the other during the 1999 National League Championship Series, but I digress.)

But Springsteen was always a foundational part of our story. We obsessed over bootlegs of Bruce shows from the ’70s, discussed his trove of previously unreleased material that came out our sophomore year, and at the start of our junior year, we drove down to Washington, D.C. to see the first of three Springsteen shows together.

Last Sunday night in Brooklyn, John and I were back at a music venue for the first time in years. And even though it didn’t involve Bruce directly, it felt like a full circle moment.

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There couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred people at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, which was fitting — the show felt more like an intimate evening with two artists than a rock concert.

Craig Finn stood on the left side of the stage, Patterson Hood on the right, both with acoustic guitars slung over their shoulders. (A third musician, Ben Hackett, provided additional instrumentation from the back of the stage.)

For about two hours, they alternated playing their own songs, one gently accompanying the other, each artist punctuating the music with personal stories.

Craig recalled that seeing Drive-By Truckers live in 2000 inspired him to form The Hold Steady. Patterson, in turn, revealed that his 2008 lyric “we’re trying to hold steady on the righteous path” was a quiet message to Craig: “Yes, I see you.”

Like Springsteen before them, these men have spent their careers telling stories about ordinary people and the relationships that shape them, each in his own distinct voice.

John and I are fans of both, but he leans toward Drive-By Truckers, while I’m more of a Hold Steady man.

That meant there was something for each of us on Sunday night. And while I loved hearing Craig perform songs I knew well, I was just as entertained watching John react to Patterson’s songs (from several fist pumps to at least two one-man standing ovations).

Watching these two longtime friends while sitting next to one of my own, I found myself thinking of my dad and his. I don’t know what the next 35 years will bring, but I have a template for friendship that I hope to emulate.

Craig finished the show with “Certain Songs,” a Hold Steady number that perfectly expressed what had brought me and John together nearly 30 years ago — and again that night: “Certain songs, they get so scratched into our souls.”