Steve Perry Pinch-Hits for Steve Perry
Steve Perry Pinch-Hits for Steve Perry
By Aarik Danielsen
In the even-numbered years of our Lord, the Giants stretched the sky from San Francisco in all cardinal directions, to my Midwest and beyond. Every win rippled the canopy, transmitting bay air and birdsong on a line to my satisfied senses.
Permit me and I’ll supply a primer on the players, plot the twists of each World Series club. But my favorite mid-inning stretch outlives all the dynasty thrills; I reconstruct it from memory and TV static at least once a week.
Journey’s “Lights” plays over the PA, as always. But one night, the golden tablets of ballpark tradition fracture and a TV camera pans up to Steve Perry, former rock deity. Dressed in black with hair of the selfsame color draping his shoulders, he might be the Steve Perry of 1979 or 1984. Only older folds of skin give him away—only this, and his posture.
Singing along, aloud with the words he etched into musical lore, he appears guileless in public for perhaps the first time. His body knows how to accentuate each note like a frontman does, giving the melody true voice. Yet he seems to relax into the confines of Section 219, cooler than any spotlight.
At first I embraced the easy read: bemused has-been caught up in playing to whoever or whatever’s left. But stop and take this brief test, one I’ve given myself.
Bow your head and close your eyes—like a prayer, go on. Now lift, now open. Can you picture Foreigner’s Lou Gramm crooning “Double Vision” after a Mets 6-4-3? Or Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon unable to “fight this feeling anymore” from the club seats at Wrigley Field? Not without prejudice.
Steve Perry sings, and he looks every bit the natural. A man born to do something the way Lincecum was born to rock the rubber back and forth. The way Sergio Romo was made by God to stare, then throw sliders. Everything Steve Perry sings is a little too much and just the right amount. Forever caring more than you or me, but forever teaching us to care.
What notes stick in a great singer’s head? Maybe divorced from his former mates, Steve Perry feels free to raise his voice in the absence of glances heavy with the freight of decades.
Maybe that mournful catch just around the bridge is gospel: it really is sad—oh!—those mornings out on the road without San Francisco, without its every charm. Here, swept into its center, he knows what everything’s worth. The city rising up around him is the thing. The Giants are the thing. This moment, weightless together, is the thing.
Just minutes before the next first batter, maybe Steve Perry counts up all the Mondays and Thursdays gone forever, all those highway runs. Doing the math of poets and icons, he knows singing one song on one night covers the sin of a few days away.
Who am I to judge the shape redemption takes? Maybe ribs swell, pressing hard and beautiful against your skin, whenever 41,000 people sing your song without turning the microphone their way to beam “Sing, San Francisco!”
My God, stay pure, Steve Perry. Triumph comes so soon for your Giants. And transfiguration comes whenever a man is most himself between the very lights he created.
This poem was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes a regular column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, HAD, Rain Taxi, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and more. Find more of his work at https://aarikdanielsen.com/
Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.
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