A while back I wrote a post about one of the slickest Marty Robbins tunes in the vaults. Days ago I was driving up the FDR eventually up to the country to do 18 and "When Rita Leaves" came on the radio. Strange because I rarely listen to music on the radio and stranger still was what popped into my mind.
I thought about the woman in "Devil Woman" and how Rita where probably the same person. It is nothing earth shattering but it gave me a smile to think of this one woman who wanders around the boarders of the southwest enchanting men and destroying their lives in the process. Then I thought about the song "Dry Lightning" that comes from Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad album and again how it was written about Rita and then finally about Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" and once again how it was Rita he was singing about. My thoughts were awash with the similarities and story that could be written tying all these snippets of life together, all by different artists who probably had different women in mind. Hell most everything written, sung and painted has been stolen from someone else.
I had a friend whose mother loved Delbert McClinton and probably because of that never paid him much attention, however every once in a while he'd knock on the door of my ear and pry his way in. This song always finds its way in. The silky gut string's lead that trickles throughout the song placating the dearth of love the voice is singing of with a hint of strings barely audible in the corner combined with matter of fact lyrics in Delbert's honest voice is a wonderful combination.
Years ago in South America I ran into my own Rita in a small bar late in the evening. There had been ones before and after but this Rita burned a scar in my memory that will never heal. She spoke little English but we found ways to communicate, jet black hair with a small mole on her left cheek and complex deep brown eyes that matched the hue of her skin. I woke up the next morning in a small room with commotion outside the windows below the first story of which I was laying, A Saturday market in a part of town I could never place. Seven in the a.m. and it was already over thirty three degrees and close to that in the room, the ceiling fan doing little other than ensuring the heat was properly scattered throughout the room; Rita looking adorable and better than the night before sleeping in bed like an angel in the clouds wrapped in white sheets.
Until it was time to leave and I walked home up the hills of the campamentos with a throbbing headache from five bottles of bad champagne and a pack of Belmonts, though cigs and champagne never throbbed such as this. Maybe it was because of the difference in brands, maybe it was because this was the fourth day in a row of doing the same but more so it was withdraw of Rita and the views I had had of her silhouette against the fire lights of the streets and the strange words that rolled off of her tongue like the gut string in this song.
I keep saying I'm going to go back down there and find her but it is probably better to not take up such a logistically impossible request and just return there in my mind while Delbert's musical silhouette projects itself onto the walls of my living room, with instead of dark hips in my hands merely an old Yamaha that has a dead low E and cracks across the back.
