He was the king of the back seat
Of drunk reverie
Saw him escorted out of a mets game

On network t.v.
Kept his head in the clouds
With any cheap high he could cull

In his cancered impala
And his hog shirts
And his head tapes played dull

He lived in a company house
In the pardeesville woods
With a stir crazy dog

And a graveyard of old "jimmy" hoods
Sundays we'd run for his stash
At the new york state line

That summer when moments of
Circumstance altered like wine
CHORUS

This is for the man
This is for the days that we killed
Was it my wind of change

Or just a breeze at the top of the hill
He didn't talk the gold ring
He just schemed for a skeleton key

But when you think you met thunder
You only see what your head wants to see
He threw back-mountain parties

Five deep at the "well"
With his girlfriend, louise, who'd get lit
And tell us all "go to hell"

Then he'd get liquored up
And throw me his keys and yell "drive"
With him and louise in the back

Doin' "american pie"
He'd talk of out west over beer
And the garbage that we ate

'bout the punk band he'd managed
In phoenix in '78
I was this kid of sixteen the enamored

Impressionable kind
In the poetic pull of the passion
Of life with the lines

CHORUS
He just disappeared that mid-august
Not even a shout

Then i read in the news that september
That his time had run out
How he tried to outrun a state trooper

Down 93 south
A charge of possession is why he fled
Said word of mouth

The paper said nothin' was left
But the seats and the frame
And i read in the write-up

For the first time his real name;
Birthplace unknown, not from nowhere
No close family

Just a wild running river
That cut it too fast to the sea
I still raise a glass once a year

On the night that he died
Though hindsight says
He only let me believe that we'd ride

Lord, he still taps a vein in my mind
Like a summer rain cools
Long after that river ran dry

And reality ruled
CHORUS 2X