Jo Stafford

Haunted Heart

By Kedrick Rue

Laurel.Canyon.Blvd_.sign_.9900N-600x397I am driving up Laurel Canyon from a day in the city. There is little nature in Los Angeles, but what is there seems to be concentrated in the canyons that separate Los Angeles from the Valley. Between the two locations is a deep, winding rift in the plastic-and-concrete reality of Hollywood. It is as if all of the dreams out of which these fictions originate well up out of this rift.

When I was a child, we lived in these hills. My father worked at Lookout Mountain Studios, and I still own the house, whose location I shall not disclose, and which I call the Rectory. There were folkies, and hippies, and Satanists running through the woods at the time, along with children. Joni Mitchell sang songs from her terrace not that far from my house, in preference to having to make conversation, while David Crosby chased groupies through the caves hollowed out in the bedrock below his bedroom.

One morning I came outside to find a number of tiny people with flowers gathered in the garden. At the time, this didn’t seem strange, as I would regularly come upon one of Frank Zappa’s G.T.O.’s dressed as a butterfly, or a wandering itinerant who appeared to be There Were Folkieshomeless but who nevertheless had numerous expensive silk scarves draped around his neck. But these people were different. They were fairies, or pixies, or whatever you want to call them. They were tiny, and seemingly made of light, and they were all gathered around a tiny puddle where a toad presided, staring solemnly at the two who appeared to be their King and Queen, draped as they were in flower petals and cobwebs.

Then someone in the canyon began to play electric guitar and everything vanished.

Did my parents put something in my breakfast orange juice? Impossible. Did I inhale the leftover pot smoke from a party nearby? Unlikely. Did I dream this fairy wedding? I’m still not sure.

What I am sure of is that in my youth, my parents were friendly with people who worked in and around the film and music industry, and my imagination at this time was fertile. The canyons seemed like an enchanted place, where anything could happen. There was no sense of danger. At least before the Manson murders.

Sometimes my parents would sometimes bring home keepsakes from their parties or their time at the studio. One of these keepsakes which I cannot shake, and which is constantly on my turntable at the Rectory, is a record from Jo Stafford which contains the song “Haunted Heart.”
Jo Stafford
Haunted Heart, my haunted heart.
There’s a ghost of you within my haunted heart.
Ghost of you, my lost romance.
Lips that laugh, eyes that dance.

My father may have played the record that day, or maybe I did. All I know is that it’s inextricably tied to that image of the fairy wedding. The hippies, for the most part, are gone, priced out of the canyon. The folkies are gone. Even the Satanists are gone. My parents are gone, but I am not, and the image is not. And when the magic of the canyons seems to have faded, taken over by the plastic or the concrete or the gentrification or the business end of things, I remember that fairy wedding, and I remember that song. It haunts me in the very best possible way.

Haunted heart won’t let me be.
Dreams repeat a sweet but lonely song to me.
Dreams are dust, it’s you who must belong to me
And thrill my haunted heart.
Be still, my haunted heart.

Haunted Heart on YouTube

Jo Stafford

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s