The call came on a lazy Sunday afternoon in August, 1978. Your pregnant wife was taking a nap and you were reading the Sunday Journal. It was your friend, Bill on the phone and he sounded worried. Mostly he wanted to know if you’d heard from your mutual friend, Lorin.

*         *         *

You met Lorin in a high school study hall years earlier and, although he was a class ahead of you, the connection was immediate. You saw him as a mentor of sorts right from the start, but he saw you simply as his friend. He was smart, REALLY smart, and he knew so much about music, philosophy and art. You had never even heard of some of the artists or albums he was always sharing with you, but each and every one blew your mind. But then he graduated, went off to college and the two of you lost touch.

Then you graduated from high school. And after two mostly squandered years in the U.W. system, and two more working off your draft obligation, you decided to enroll at MATC and study commercial art. That’s when Lorin re-entered your life. He was now a teaching assistant, and you were a student in his department. It was as if no time had passed at all. He pulled some strings to get you a student job to help defray expenses, and you continued where you’d left off in that West Allis Hale study hall. It wasn’t long before he had become your best friend. You and your wife, and he and his girlfriend, Eileen, were constant companions. You went to the movies together. You partied together. You vacationed together.

Just like when you were in high school, the discussions centered around art, philosophy and music. Lorin introduced you to Marcel Duchamp, and other artistic iconoclasts. He talked about Camus and Sartre and about ideas like absurdism and existentialism. He tried to play chess with you but, because he was an actual rated master, those games never lasted very long. And he opened you up to the legends of Blues Music. He was passionate about the Blues, and his record collection was a treasure trove of scratchy, ancient songs by people like: Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blake, Bumble Bee Slim, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Boy Fuller, Lead Belly, Piano Red, and others. He knew everything about the blues and was able to connect all the dots from the ancients to the more familiar modern acts like The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Kinks and The Who.

The most anticipated annual event in your relationship with Lorin was the Milwaukee miracle known as Summerfest. It began when you were still in high school, and took a number of years for it to hit its stride, but by the mid-70s the festival was more than living up to its self-appointed label as “The World’s Greatest Music Festival.” It was as if Monterey Pop and Woodstock resurrected themselves and descended upon the Milwaukee lakefront every year to set the city ablaze in music, comedy and more. Summerfest offered entertainment for every taste and generation, and each year the roster of performers read like a Who’s Who of the recording industry. There were years when you went every single night.

But for you and Lorin, Summerfest usually meant spending pretty much the entire night at one of the Blues Stages, eating barbecued ribs, drinking enough beer to float the Milwaukee Clipper, and listening to the Blues. Lakefront Blues, under starry night skies. Man…you will hold the perfection of those nights in your heart for the rest of your days. It was truly the best of times.

*         *         *

Bill had called that Sunday to ask about Lorin because while he was out puttering in his workshop he thought he heard Lorin’s name mentioned on a radio that was playing in another room. He dropped what he was doing, entered the other room and turned up the radio only to hear the announcer say: “…and these two recent deaths bring the number of traffic-related fatalities this year up to…” At this point, all Bill—and now you—knew was that two people had recently died in a Wisconsin car accident, and that one of the two might have been Lorin. Although you were pretty much an agnostic by that time, your immediate inclination was to pray, but for what? You certainly didn’t want it to be Lorin (who almost certainly would have been driving with Eileen). But was it really fair to pray that it be somebody else? All you could really do was wait. And when the waiting was over you learned that you had lost them both. It was Lorin. And it was Eileen.

*         *         *

Summerfest will continue to thrill Milwaukee music lovers well into the future. The grounds will be landscaped beautifully and new permanent facilities and stages will be built to accommodate more people and more stars. But you will start going less and less. And going every single night will no longer be an option. After you become a father and take on more adult responsibilities Summerfest will become less of a priority but, of course, you’ll still go from time to time.

By the time the festival reaches its 50^th anniversary in the year 2017, you’ll be an old man and you’ll no longer even live in the Milwaukee area. You’ll still try to get there once a year, but after a while it will start to feel more like a chore than a delight, and you’ll feel like maybe it’s time you stepped aside to let newer generations have their chance at making memories. And your memory of Summerfest 1978—the last you ever attended with Lorin—will always be with you. You will never forget the music, the food, the beer, the hangover, and the miracle of being young in the summertime.

When the festival reaches the milestone of its 25^th anniversary in 1992, you’ll be asked to design the commemorative poster, and that will be an honor. You won’t be able to do it without thinking of your friends and your youth, but rather than dwell on the sadness you’ll want to somehow capture the excitement, the joy, and sheer wonder of what it was like to attend “The World’s Greatest Music Festival.” And know that your friends would have been proud of you.

Lakefront Juke     1992      John T. McCarthy, Jr.     8-color silkscreen

© 1992 Terrapin, Ltd.