Hold On For Me

"Well I hope that you can hold on. I hope that you can hold on for me."  Marc Cohn, 2016

"Cohn has been treated and released from Denver Health Medical Center." August 8. 2005

"There was exactly enough room in the soft tissue between the outside of my face and the beginning of my skull; there was just enough room to hold that bullet."   Marc Cohn

I have been a Cohnhead since the release of his first album entitled Marc Cohn and  the release of the award winning single "Walking in Memphis."  I didn't know for several years about his shooting that according to all reason and the nature of bullets and brains should have ended his life that night in Denver,  Colorado. During an attempted carjacking, the assailant shot Cohn in the head at point-blank rang. As it turned out, his road manager sustained more injuries than he from flying glass to his face and eyes.

In her song "The Song Remembers When", Tricia Yearwood artfully relates how a song can take us back to a particular time and place.  Those-who-know-these-things tell us that the brain records every detail of that time and place and attaches it to that music.  Then over the years when you hear that song, the brain floods your system with the entire experience--where you were, who you were with, what you were doing and even how you were feeling at that particular moment in time.

Such is the case with "Walking in Memphis."  I was sitting in  my idling '89 Honda Accord hatchback in the summer of 1991 waiting for my wife to come out of the Walmart in Ft. Oglethorpe,  Georgia. Neither of us had a clue what all awaited us in 1991 and 1992, but the song already knew.

If Marc Cohn had died that night in Denver, all of his new music I've listened to since then would have died with him.  But somehow he didn't die and I'm listening now to his new album published earlier this year.  On the 25th anniversary of his first album Cohn released "Careful What You Dream: Lost Songs and Rarities."  Although this music sounds new and fresh, he actually composed these songs before his first album was published. As much as I still enjoy listening to that first album, the music of his latest album has replaced those songs as my favorite of his ballads.

In a strange and wonderful phenomenon of Einsteinian  proportions,  Cohn's song "Hold On For Me' written before 1991 and published this year, tells my story from 1991 and 1992. "Hold On For Me" is a powerful metaphor of the people and events that saved my life. Though not as dramatic as a bullet lodged in my skull, the salvation was just as real. In August of 1991 Cohn said, "I touched myself and there was blood all over my hands and my clothes.  And I realized that I was the one who had been hit." I didn't realize until June of 1992 that I had been struck in the head many years before. Though "treated and released" in July of 1992,  "Hold On For Me" is the story of my continued life.

Sometime in 1986 at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee,  the gospel singer Muriel Wilkins asked Marc Cohn, a Jew, "Are you a Christian child?" And he responded, "Ma'am I am tonight."  The rest, as they say,  is history.