For Absent Friends - Where can Quixote go now?

Remembering my dear friend Sean "Wesley" Heaney....

“to Sean,

 the Sancho Panza to my Quixotic quest on all matters Dylan, from the Rolling Thunder Revue to “It was January the 30^th, and everybody was feelin’ fine.” Thanks!”

The above inscription was the dedication of my third excursion into the world of Bob Dylan for my friends at McFarland - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography 1961-2022” (still available on Amazon).

It came from my heart to a friend who held me in his heart for years and years. Sadly, he passed away a few days ago, alone in what I can only imagine was a deeply cluttered room somewhere in Newport, Vermont, Bob Dylan CD’s and my book somewhere within easy reach.

Together, Sean and I saw Rolling Thunder Revue Show #3

Sean “Wesley” Heaney - not his real middle name but since it shared the same cadence as Bob Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” - he let it slide, and I had been friends since the early 1970’s when I met him, then a tall, scrawny teenaged younger brother of the girl I was dating, a tall, lovely, whipsmart girl named Julie, who, as fate would have it, was born the very day after me - August 24, 1953.

We met at Rivier College, dated for a while and on several of our visits, they included get-togethers at the Heaney farm in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire and since that often included playing Bob Dylan music, Sean was always on the periphery, evidently excited that I was there, a baseball player at the time.

Once, for some reason, I had my uniform with me when I visited Julie and Sean was so enamored of a genuine baseball uniform, insisted on putting the uniform shirt on, I didn’t have a game for a week so I let him borrow it. I heard that he wore it for neighborhood games that week. Not sure if it helped him hit at all.

When tragically, Julie died of lupus at 19, for reasons I still am not sure I understand, I found myself going back up to the Heaney farm to chat with Sean, his older sister, Janet (as passionate an Elton John devotee as was admissible under U.S. law at the time) and I think now, to help us all heal. I wasn’t smart enough to realize that then, something just made me go there.

Sean “Wesley” Heaney

And Sean and I hit it off. I mean, almost brother to brother. He loved Dylan, so did I. He liked the bust Janet’s balls about Elton John, so did I. And we both missed his beautiful sister, who still had the giant stuffed turtle I bought her in her old bedroom.

But diving into Bob Dylan was the way to go and we did. And a few years later, I was able to wangle him a ticket with me to go and see the third show of the Rolling Thunder Revue at Southeastern Mass. University. It was an absolutely incredible show, Bob was in rare form, we had great seats and for years and years, the memory of that night, the songs we heard, the ride to and the ride back - we saw a CAMEL on the roadway, it was like something out of The Basement Tapes.

And speaking of The Basement Tapes, Dylan has a song called “Clothes Line Saga” a takeoff on Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe" a huge hit at the time. And in the song - which is Bob at his most droll - he says “It was January the 30th and everybody was feeling fine.”

So for years and years and years, Sean and I would call each other on January the 30th and utter that line, before lots and lots of laughs, Dylan anecdotes, lyric discussions, talks about the goddamn Red Sox, life, hurts and occasionally, Julie.

We went on a few record-hunting expeditions, continued to talk and write to one another all these many years. Nobody was more excited than he when I told him that I was doing “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography” Edition One way back when and I read - or emailed him - every single word, then did the same for Volume Two and Three.

He made sure, DAMN SURE, as he would put it, that I gave a “damn good write up for “Street Legal’ a Dylan album that he felt was sorely underrated. I agreed, thought one reason for that was it was under-recorded so when a remastered, reissued version came out, he bought it for me (and trust me, the kid was a pauper!) and made sure I heard it. It was better than the bathtub gin mix we got the first time and I made sure to note in Edition Three. May have even mentioned him in the text.

Then there was a silence. He moved or didn’t have a phone or something. He never had a computer so if he was going to read or send an email, he had to go to Galeria or something near him. I’d send him banks of Dylan-related stuff, when I’d had something published on the Bob Dylan Bible called “Expecting Rain” or something like that.

Just a little while back, he GOT a cellphone, got me the number and we resumed our Dylan-related chats, broadening the discussion to include my son’s baseball career, the continuing struggles of the goddamn Red Sox, music in general and his tenuous status as one of his siblings that was still around. With his occasionally black sense of humor, he said he “was one of the Fab Four” referring to himself, sisters Joellen, Jocelyn and brother Jeb, the four Heaney children who were still alive. Older sister Janet and older brother Joe died of cancer. They had lost Julie first.

I could never laugh when he said that, of course. But since he said it often, it seemed to help him cope.

I was on my way to the gym on a Tuesday, I think it was and my phone tells me we spoke for an hour and six minutes. It was a wonderful chat. I’d read him my latest Bob Dylan Substack piece, we discussed it, then launched into a long talk about his older brother Joe, who worked with me at the Nashua Telegraph and covered Milford High football at the high point of the school’s football run. And I was telling Sean that Joe wrote about the Milford High football team as if they were the Knights of the Round Table and Coach Paul Lavigne was King Arthur reincarnated which was causing me flack with the teams I was covering because I didn’t cheer for them in print, if they fumbled or threw an interception, I wrote it. Joe discreetly opted not to, even though I urged him to. “They’re just kids,” he’d say.

We rarely ever let our conversations wander that way, but we did that day for some reason. And Sean seemed to be happy talking about it, as if he was re-settling it in his mind. We had a few laughs about Dylan stuff, some of my spirited arguments with Janet over “hairy Elton John” and in general, it was almost like a greatest hits conversation. He was laughing throughout and in spite of what evidently were very serious health issues we’d been discussing over the months we spoke; he sounded like he was bouncing back.

But then came the sad news from his younger sister Jocelyn on Linked In. From the sound of things, I might have been the very last person, the final human voice, or laugh or smart-ass remark he ever heard. And we had a sampling of all three, for sure over that 66 minutes.

We parted as we always did, “God bless you, Johnny” and “God bless you, Sean.” I didn’t get to say, ‘love you, brother” but hell, he knew that. Even if it wasn’t exactly January the 30th.