This morning I woke up at 430. It’s as if Doug was waking me up to write something. Death is a weird thing. It’s something you push to the back of your mind – because the reality of it is overwhelming. I think about Doug a lot, replaying his solos and the things he said to me in our short time together in my mind. Over and over. And his death, bringing his body to a hearse in front of Montmartre Club in Denmark and having it drive off. An unbelievable aching sorrow that doesn’t go away unless I just put it out of my mind. It just doesn’t get easier, that’s the simple truth.
To be honest, the Raneys are a tragic case. The people in our family just slipped away silently without any of us being present in the same geography when it happened. My father was the first to go, he passed in Louisville while I was in NY and Doug in Denmark. My mother slipped away in the middle of the night and I was in a neighborhood but about a mile or so away and my brother still in Denmark. My brother passed in Denmark in a shelter while I was in NY. I think we are fundamentally flawed in this way – we let things go until it’s too late to fix things. In a word we’re fucking lazy with reaching out to each other.
It pains me to say it but my brother and I were not close in many ways. Although we wrote and talked some on the phone, we didn’t see each other between 1979 and 1993. This is an unbelievable thought. We reunited in 1993 when Doug made his return. I went to Denmark in 1994 and then Doug returned to NY in 1996 where we played together again. Between 1993 and 1996 was our closest we would be emotionally, musically and in kinship. He would return again in 1998 but things were not the same. He had moved on to a divorced life and I couldn’t offer him much by way of gigs as I was already working a day job, teaching at night and raising my daughter. And that was the last I saw him. Again a shocking and painful truth I didn’t see him from 1998 to 2016.
Things really started to unravel for him in the early to mid 2000’s and his bouts with homelessness and alcoholism were in full swing by 2005. I did my best to reach out to him. I remember being on the phone with him live as he was struggling to score a couch in Christiania – Denmark’s Historic hippie town – and appease some people that really may have been out to hurt him.
I really thought he could turn the corner and he eventually and he did to large degree between 2011 and 2013. When the photos of his now ailing body after years of abuse began surfacing online it was shocking. All he had left was his music. But by 2014 things began to unravel again and he was homeless. Without the help of our friend and guitarist Morten Højring finding a shelter for him, he surely would’ve perished sooner. We spoke in around Feb-March of 2016 and I told him that I was going to come see him at the end of the year. I just knew the end was near. Even then he was still playing big brother with me – when he was initially excited about my coming over he suddenly hedged that I should maybe wait until – he got this that and the other together. And in May he was gone. Fuck. This is really the way things happen, I’m afraid to say. I struggle with the guilt of not having helped him as much as I could of, no should’ve.
I have no silver lining here folks. My heart still feels broken but I keep Doug’s music with me close. With that I share Doug’s gorgeous version of Good Morning Heartache that we did together in Birdland 1996. My contributions were minimal here- this was his tour de force. I was dying to hear his voice and when I finally heard it at the end of the tune he also announced the next tune – another apropos title, The End of a Love Affair with his trademark snicker so I just left it on. You sticklers may notice something mid tune but I leave it to you to tell me (hint, it was fixed by the start of the piano solo). Regardless Doug was still a monster of the guitar. A tragic, lovable, subtle, enduring, perplexing but always engaging monster of a brother.
Doug I miss you and love you always. You are in my heart and my soul
Jon
