The singer took the stage and she told us that the first time she “met Bruce was on the first date with her now husband” … here! At the Barley Neck! And she sang this next song … wait, what?
Here? Here?!! At the Barley Neck in Orleans, on Cape Cod?
Now, I understand the allure of the Cape to artists of all stripe: Eugene O’Neill, John Dos Passos, Elia Kazan, Tennessee Williams, Edith Lake Wilkinson, Norman Mailer, John Waters. I get it.
But Springsteen?!
He has the entire Jersey Shore at his disposal - what’s he doing on my island (or my peninsula)?!
And then our singer broke into a very breathy, very guttural (in the best Janis - not Kristofferson - way … that is to say, in the most admirably emotional and poetic) rendition of Bobby McGee. One of the most satisfying I’ve heard live.
Of course, Melissa Ayala had not been talking about Bruce Springsteen but another Bruce, this one ours (more aptly, theirs): the known, celebrated, the most lovingly and respectfully remembered local hero, Bruce Maclean.
People showing up on stage with Bruce was a real common occurrence, at least with the people who talked to me about it. Josh told me with real affection about the times that he’d be at the Barley Neck bar and feel some presence in the room with him, at the bar with him, just behind him at the stool … when a guitar would materialize from overhead (complete with strap, natch) and be placed in his lap.
“It’s in G,” Bruce told him and would walk away to hide behind some post so Josh was willingly trapped on stage, crooning and growling while Bruce was hidden away, giggling - pleased his protege provided.
Back to this first date, Melissa had come to the Barley Neck that night with her now husband, local performer, singer/songwriter, and generationally deep Brewster native, Josh Ayala. Josh had been under ol Bruce’s wing & tutelage for years by that point (16 years is a long time). He’d been brought along to carry Bruce’s singer/songwriter-Dylan-head torch, so, naturally, when Josh brought Melissa to the Barley Neck that night for after-dinner+ drinks on their first date, Josh wasn’t showing out when he offered to put her up on stage to let it off the leash … a delighted Bruce welcomed it and an utterly talented and, at that moment purely inspired, Melissa did rip McGee & the entire Inn down to the weathered, wooden studs.
So that’s the Bobby McGee of which she spoke: a passionate rallying cry with endless opportunities for long, stretching vocal vamps. That was how Josh introduced his wife-to-be to the man who advised and believed in him, the man who would sit and talk pedal-nerd talk with him, who’d swap gear and work out arrangements with him.
And that’s how Melissa met Bruce, whom she’d know for years, who would back her for years, for whom she’d sing and blew out birthday candles. Scroll to the top and listen to Josh tell it in his own words.
Jordan Renzi was there the night Melissa told her Bruce origin story at the Barley Neck as well. She was not only badly disappointed that I didn’t know Bruce by name but that I would assume he was solely a Barley Neck phenomenon - that I would NOT know about the Cyclones and their run at the Beachcomber going back to the 80s, and that I would ADMIT it ... throwing so much mud on his pearly white name. To intimate such Orleans-centric fuckery ruffled her - she admired him, she was impacted by his passing on, and she was in no mood to make that anything but crystal clear. She was a ball of live emotions in the shape of someone who meant a good deal to her and she was, on the contrary, very much in the mood to parade that esteem out and have everyone out on the sidewalks hang their heads and flags at half-mast in a unison of memoriam for the legend.
Jordan mentioned to me that Josh was going to help the Barley Neck out in the immediate with some talent booking, and that said as much to me as the stories I’d heard up until that point or in the coming fewdays.
The Left and the Right sides of the brain not only complement each other, they are very typically running in the opposite direction from the other’s strengths, and with grateful abandon. Accepting this, and knowing the little I do about Josh Ayala, to hear that he, with his powerful baritone voice, thick like tar pouring out of the Right side of his brain and over the vocals stones and into the deep caverns of a song of which you thought you knew the absolute arrangement ... that this Josh Ayala was going to take on the undeniably Left brained responsibility of booking bands for the Barley Neck to pick up Bruce’s mantle in this immediate aftermath … well shit, I was truly impressed. Bruce & Josh's relationship was one that sentimentality could only aspire to.
More, I was moved to put together a modest nod to Bruce here to recognize these folks who I consider admirable acquaintances. So for a handful of talented folks I know, I offer this plea to the gods that they let the man Bruce Maclean pass into whatever restricted rooms he finds. I hope for him a skeleton key through the closed doors which will rescue his midnight stumbles. And that he should know that his friends showed up and played and picked and sang themselves for him here tonight, practically his living room.
Wherever they lay him down amongst the lilies and the roses, I wish for him the best and a perched view to enjoy this serenade which the people whom he impacted so much rolled out for him. Or least, it was the first such serenade; the summer is long and it’s barely spring.
I’ll join them in a final send off and fire my own flaming arrow at his sailing pyre. Cheers, Bruce.
