Roger Clyne's music saved my life. It’s that simple.
Backstory: I grew up sequestered on a New Mexico mountain. My preacher parents were beautiful, loving, passionate people, and I will always be grateful to them for raising me in world of pure love. To accomplish this, they cut me off from the rest of the world. No television. No “secular” radio. And only one other family on the mountain. My brother and I entertained ourselves by stealing books from the abandoned hippie commune library a few miles from our house. (I learned to read on Shakespeare and The King James Bible, so don’t blame me when my language gets flowery.) We had miles of desert as our playground and ran back to the house only when we heard Daddy whistling for us at the end of the day. Luckily, my daddy thought his Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan records were pure enough for my ears, so I grew up listening to these masters. Sometimes, though, I listened to other music too, sat in my bedroom with my ear pressed up against the speaker, falling in love with forbidden fruit.
Fastforward. At the age of eighteen, I met a twenty-five year old cop. I had almost no real life experience in anything, and seven months later, I married him, thinking he was my knight in shining armor. He wasn’t. I won’t detail our marriage here, but suffice it to say that it was highly abusive. Two weeks before my beloved daddy’s death, he begged me leave my horrific marriage and come home, and I intended to, but a heart attack took him before I could follow through. I was devastated. I felt utterly alone in a world that had become cruel and dark. My religion, which was everything to me at the time, forbade divorce, so it would take an act of Herculean strength to free myself. Strength was something I didn’t think I had.
I suppose it was during this time that I became suicidal. I would imagine cutting my wrists, writing the ugly words my husband called me in my flesh with a razor blade. I desperately wanted to get back to the place where my daddy was, to be with the person who had loved me purely. The thing that kept me from doing it was my two children, the great loves of my life. But it was hard to hold on. The call of suicide was strong. I wanted to die.
One night, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my father’s voice. I heard him as clearly as if he had been standing by my bed in the flesh. He said, “Do you really want to be here?” Then, I heard footsteps leading down the stairs and to the door of my house. I heard the door open, and then, my father whistled for me, the way he had when he wanted me to come home when I was a little girl. After that, the door slammed. That experience shook me to my core. I told people from my church about it, and they told me it was “demonic.” But I didn’t believe them. I thought it was my daddy, come back from the grave to save me. And knowing he was with me gave me the courage to leave. I packed up everything I had, not knowing where I’d go, only knowing I couldn’t stay there anymore. Of course, the universe provided. But still, the next two years were living hell.
Then, along came a miracle. Since I was doing all the things I thought I’d never do, I quit my job as a kindergarten teacher and went back to school to follow through on my dream of becoming a writer. I entered one of my stories in a writing contest that was judged by Bantam and was shocked to find out that I’d won third place. At the conference where I was to receive my award, I met my second husband, a pilot. This pilot took me to his home in Phoenix on New Year’s Eve 2000, where the Gin Blossoms were playing at a street fair. We wandered up to the back of the crowd just as the opening band was taking the stage.
A mad, drunk, and restless troubadour stumbled onto that stage and lit it up like the fourth of July. I literally felt like I was being struck by lightning as I watched him play. I can’t describe what it was that made me feel like that, but I knew I’d never seen anything like it before, that I was experiencing something otherworldly. I knew instinctively I was in the presence of greatness. It wasn’t like I heard some lyric that touched me. I couldn’t even understand the lyrics. But the performance itself had an energy that did something beautiful to my heart. It woke up a part of me I didn’t even know existed. A beautiful part. A red, passionate, wild part. But. I didn’t even know what his name was. So I walked away thinking I’d never see him again.
The universe had different plans. Nine months later, I’d married the pilot. I was suddenly richer than I'd ever been. My kids were taken care of. I'd adopted a beautiful teenage girl. I was traveling the world, swimming in oceans I never thought I’d see, looking at constellations from angles I didn’t knew existed. We went to visit my mother-in-law, and she had left a newspaper open on my bed. As I sat down next to it, I looked down and saw that guy from the concert staring up at me. And the article said his name: Roger Clyne. I raced to the computer and ran a Google search, which I had only learned to do that week. (I was technologically illiterate.) Roger Clyne was playing the next night in my home town, Albuquerque, on my birthday. Happy birthday to me. I went to see him, and the rest, as they say, is history. The marriage to the pilot (though he is a wonderful man and still a dear friend) didn’t survive the test of time, but my relationship with the Peacemakers did.
I could tell so many stories of miracles that have occurred as I’ve followed Roger, because since I started doing this, inexplicable occurrences and serendipities accompany every trip I take. In fact, the universe has done back-bends again and again to make my life the malleable thing that allows me to raise children, engage with my art, and follow a rock band. Even though I’m no longer rich, the universe makes sure I somehow have the money to see Roger play. I’ve stopped being surprised when someone offers to pay for me to go to Mexico or pushes hundreds of dollars into my hand the day before I leave to see Roger or hands me a ticket to a show no one is supposed to be able to get in to or offers me a place to sleep not knowing I don’t have one. But the two songs that I credit with saving my life are “Better Beautiful than Perfect” and “Persephone.”
Suicidal tendencies don’t disappear overnight. As I began to follow Roger, I was still incredibly tortured by my past. But every time I stood in front of that stage, something beautiful and cleansing and healing happened to me. I know I made an ass of myself when I stood there crying or dancing or whatevering, but the craziness happening on the outside was a symptom of a miracle happening inside me. Those songs melted into the core of my being and healed the broken places. I wept for everything. For my father’s death, my pulverized dreams, the little girl inside me that had been broken so badly she wanted to die. And I did other things too. I danced. I laughed. I held a glass in the air and toasted this thing I had once hated. “Here’s to life,” I’d scream at the sky, and I’d mean it, because somehow, my life was feeling like an amazing, breathtaking adventure. Like a gift instead of a curse.
And on the trips from city to city, as I raced along that highway in whatever rental car I happened to be driving, listening to the song “Better Beautiful than Perfect,” watching the ocean kiss the sky outside my window, I fell in love with everything. With grass and sand and sky. Sometimes, I slept in my car, and that sensation of lying there under the stars alone, watching lightning scorch the night or stars dance, was the most holy, exquisite sensation I had ever known. I was at peace. I was safe. I was alive. I started writing as I did these things. I’d sit in coffee shops and parks and subways and write. Sheaves and sheaves of writing. I wrote from that place inside me that Roger had woken up. And the writing started to sell. I got a Master’s Degree. I wrote a novel. About rock-n-roll. And now, that novel is poised to sell. (I think, I pray.)
Which brings me to “Persephone.” Actually, it doesn’t. But we’re going there anyway. Several years ago, I was driving from Dallas to Austin, having just bought Turbo Ocho. As I listened to “Persephone,” I thought about my life, about the ugly thing that it had been and the beautiful thing it had become. I thought about the scared, tortured little girl I’d been and the powerful, luminous being I was now. And I knew into my toes if there had never been a man named Roger Clyne, I would be nothing more than a bag of bones in a box. And as I listened to the words to that song, “I will stand and I will fight with all my light here on the line between the darkness and the light, until at last I have thee in my custody,” I realized that something bigger than me, something beautiful, had seen me as its Persephone and stood and fought for me on some invisible line, brought me to Roger’s music, saved me from my hell.
I cannot explain what happened to me in that moment, except that I understood on a profound level that I was the object of an intense and indescribable love. I looked up, and I saw a billboard that said one thing: “Look.” And I felt like the universe was telling me to look around, so I did. I saw everything: the sky and the grass and the flowers and the clouds. I saw the other stuff too. The stuff we would think of as ugly: torn tires and cars and rusty cans and candy bar wrappers. And as I looked at the world around me, in a state of pure love, I can only describe myself as falling into that place great masters describe as enlightenment. The world around me, in all of its imperfection, became utterly beautiful, became heaven. I felt my connection to everything. I felt myself as being a part of God. I felt utterly and completely safe. I felt wholly loved.
That little girl that wanted to slit her wrists was healed forever that day. Because of that experience, I got the word “beloved” tattooed over the vein that I used to want to cut, that I used to imagine carving with the ugly words my first husband had called me. That day, I knew he was wrong about me. I was not a slut or a bitch or a whore. I was someone’s Persephone. I was the thing that had been worth fighting for. I was, I am, Tawni, beloved of the divine. I would never have known that had not Roger Clyne come into my world and showed me that life is grand, love is real, and beauty is everywhere. (I have that tattooed between my shoulder blades, just over my heart chakra, but that's another story for another time.)
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