What a Fine Thing to Make Love and Survive

Willie Nile — "Vagabond Moon" (1980)

I spent a significant portion of the summer of 1980 holed up in a bedroom of my dad and then-stepmother’s loft apartment at 18th Street and Park Avenue South. I didn’t have any friends in New York City, and at age 14 I was way too young (or so I thought) to wander across the street and check out the punk-rock action at Max’s Kansas City, or any other local nightlife. And yet, I didn’t feel the least bit lonely.

Sure, I missed my pals back in Chicago, to whom I occasionally sent postcards with witty descriptions of my daytime adventures in the Big Apple; but between my Strat-o-Matic Baseball set (with the complete 1979 season cards!), a stack of George Orwell novels pulled from my dad’s shelves, and a bunch of New York radio stations to spin the dial between, I was as happy and content as the proverbial bivalve whenever evening fell…

---

---

With the exception of Saturday morning cartoons and a few other TV shows like The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, I’d generally shied away from anything explicitly aimed at kids; to me, the adult world was always far more interesting — and at this moment, nothing was more interesting to me than adult life in New York City. After everyone else in the apartment had gone to bed, I would sit up in the huge industrial windows of my dad’s living room, watching in rapt fascination as Max’s denizens strutted or stumbled up and down the streets below, while the twin towers of the World Trade Center glowed knowingly off in the distance.

I desperately wanted to be a part of it, this city so densely packed with buildings and history and attitude. I had only barely even kissed a couple of girls at this point, and yet I somehow already knew in my soul that the most romantic thing in the world would be to be simultaneously in love and in New York City. What was that line from the song that I heard at The New York Experience, the multi-media show at the McGraw-Hill Building that our dad had taken my sister and I to?

Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourke

Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York

Yeah, that was it. More than anything, I wanted a Mamie O’Rourke of my own to do Manhattan with — East Side, West Side, all around the town.

Further amping up the NYC-romance connection for me was some guy named Willie Nile. I knew nothing about him, other than that FM rock station WPLJ was going all-in on him and playing “Vagabond Moon” several times a day. They even aired a live simulcast of his July concert in Central Park, which I happily devoured in its entirety. I had no idea that Nile’s band featured such NYC scene luminaries as Jay Dee Daugherty from the Patti Smith Group and Fred Smith of Television fame (hell, I didn’t even know who or what Television even was at that point), but his songs like “I’m Not Waiting,” “Dear Lord” and “Old Men Sleeping in the Bowery” seemed thoroughly steeped in everything I’d already seen and experienced — either in person or vicariously — in Manhattan during that hot and sticky and incredible summer.

But the one that really got me was “Vagabond Moon,” a poetic song of romantic yearning and rapture that — while never explicitly name-checking any local landmarks or intersections — felt like it could have only come from the New York City streets. The song’s taut Stratocaster chords clattered and rang like someone raking a crowbar along the iron fence enclosing the Trinity Church burial ground, and Nile’s lusty-yet-courtly lyrics could have easily been sung from a tenement apartment window a hundred years earlier, when life in NYC was shorter and even more brutal than it was in the “Fun City” of the 1970s.

Ride to my window baby, come in the morning

Under the covers maybe we can play

That nasty old reaper don’t give you no warning

Ride to my window baby, come by today

Ride to my window baby, come in the evening

The afternoon sun is going down soon

Why be waiting there, hiding and grieving

When we could be rolling ‘neath the vagabond moon

I had thus far experienced almost nothing of what Nile was singing about, and yet I totally got it — especially the part about seizing the day (and night), and reveling in its myriad joys and possibilities with someone you really dug. Preferably in New York City, of course.

“Vagabond Moon” was an absolutely perfect song; and, given how hard WPLJ was pushing it, I figured it was about to break big, just like Steve Forbert’s not-dissimilar “Romeo’s Tune” had done the previous fall. But once I got back home to Chicago in late August, I heard it no more. For whatever reason, I would find out decades later, Arista Records only ever released the song as a single in France and the UK; and though Willie Nile continues to make wonderful music to this day, he was sadly never able to transcend cult status on these shores.

His song has always stayed with me, though. I found a copy of Nile’s self-titled LP shortly after graduating college, and proceeded to put “Vagabond Moon” on mixtape after mixtape for friends and romantic prospects and myself. This was around the same time that my dear friend Jim Saft turned me on to the works of legendary New York writers Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, for which the album seemed to serve as a perfect soundtrack.

The first Willie Nile album also seeped into a vivid dream I had the other night, one which somehow involved a sumptuous Italian feast, a Civil War battle reenactment, and a really happening art gallery party where Willie and his band were rocking out in the corner. I could see the Chicago River and its bridges from the windows of the gallery, but — maybe thanks to Willie’s music — that old familiar whiff of idyllic New York City romance hung heavily in the air. I was there at the party with a girl I was really crushing on, quite literally the Mamie O’Rourke of my dreams; and as “Vagabond Moon” started to play, she informed me with a soft, sweet smooch that the feeling was mutual.

And then, just as things were starting to get really good, my cat Angus woke me up by rummaging noisily around my desk. Willie and Mamie and the mountains of spaghetti and the Civil War re-enactors (the real deal, not tantrum-throwing MAGA gasbags) all vanished into thin air, leaving me feeling about as alone and bereft as I’ve felt in the past year… which, given the events of the last 12 months, is definitely saying something. Ultimately, the only way I found to console myself was by playing “Vagabond Moon” about 20 times in a row.

Ride to my window baby, come after midnight

No one on my street is awake or alive

We can pass time here, kiss in the moonlight

What a fine thing, to make love… and survive

What a fine thing, indeed. Here’s to all you lovers and survivors out there; and here’s to me someday being among your number once again.

---