Yet, no matter the subject, Harper remains the same stoically calm individual he has been throughout his career, a man at peace with whatever his past might be, heading toward what promises to be a radiant future.
Thirty minutes before show time, he drains his pint, waits for The Raconteurs to finish their set on Austin City, then signals to his band, who are piled in a corner booth. Harper draws them into a tight huddle and offers a quarterback’s words of encouragement for the upcoming show. Among these veteran players, there is a palpable excitement about performing with a legend in the making. But it’s that word, legend, that Harper balks at. “Legends, gods, it’s the stuff of fairy tales,” he assures me with his gregarious smile. “I’m just a flesh-and-bone man playing songs about the world I live in.” He pauses on his way out of the pub, unable to resist: “If others want to listen in, I’m all for it.”
***
ROCK STAR PLUMMETS TO DEATH,
CAUSE UNKNOWN
Associated Press
PARIS—The body of rock singer Savy Marquez was found in the middle of Rue Mouffetard early Friday morning, having reportedly fallen from the roof of her six-story apartment building.
Marquez, 27, the lead singer of the popular rock band Farewell Ghost, was in Paris convalescing from a throat infection that forced the band to reschedule the latter half of its European tour. Her apartment, not far from the Mouffetard Market, was the sight of an impromptu gathering of stunned fans seeking answers this morning. “It’s a terribly sad day,” said Camille Binoche, 18, close to where Marquez’s body was found. “She was in the prime of her life, a hero to every girl with a guitar. Now she’s gone, long before her time.”
The singer joins Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Rocco Boyle, and scores of others on a list of rock icons who have died before reaching thirty. “We believe Ms. Marquez fell from her rooftop between three and five a.m. this morning,” said Jean Girard, an investigator for the Paris Police. The cause of her fall is under investigation.
Farewell Ghost’s first album, Voices in the Dark, made them an overnight success and garnered a pair of Grammies, among numerous other accolades. Marquez and Farewell Ghost had released four subsequent albums, becoming a mainstay on Billboard charts and performing exhausting tours around the world. However, their latest effort, Let Me Out, Let Me In, evoked a critical and popular backlash that was known to trouble Marquez.
Ghost’s surviving members dismissed the idea of suicide. “Savy loved what she did for a living,” said Janet O’Connor, a spokesperson for the band’s management company. “I’ve personally chatted with Joe and Gregory and they agree she was in excellent spirits and couldn’t wait to get on the road again.”
Investigators confirmed finding medication prescribed for her throat infection in her residence. Whether the medication contributed in any way to Marquez’s fall, or if the singer was alone at the time of the incident, is not currently known.
Marquez is survived by her two brothers, Guillermo, 30, a drug treatment counselor in Van Nuys, California, and Mickey, 19, a student at Stanford University. “My sister was not the preeminent woman in rock and roll,” Mickey Marquez read in a family statement this morning. “She was a preeminent rock star, period, with a passion that could win an audience in a single verse, and no one took the art of playing guitar more seriously.”
While not on tour, Marquez split her time between Paris and Los Angeles. Though she was engaged on two occasions, Marquez never married and lived alone in her Paris flat. Funeral services have not yet been arranged.
The ceremony was private, and the press and paparazzi and fans and worshippers, were kept at bay outside the cemetery gates. But if you had a reason for being on the grounds, and if you arrived hours before the gates were closed to all traffic save limos and headlighted cars, and if you kept a low-enough profile and expressed your grief genuinely, you were overlooked.
Clay started his morning sitting in the grass at the grave of Payton Alexander. He had been here a few times through the years, often mired in guilt. He still enjoyed talking to Alexander—Payton, call me Payton, Clay—even if his therapist didn’t talk back.
An hour before the ceremony, Clay moved closer to where the large canvas canopy had been arranged and knelt by the grave of someone named Francis Scapelletti, 1922-1993.
The services were just as Savy would have wanted them, undramatic, nondenominational, full of people and music. Her abuela had passed a few years earlier—if she hadn’t, the news of Savy’s death would have surely stopped her heart—but Clay spotted Mickey, very much grown up now, standing hand in hand with his gorgeous girlfriend, and Mo, who was healthy and muscular as he delivered his sister’s eulogy with the vigor and heartfelt emotion of a seasoned orator.
After him, a Hollywood actor that Savy had once been engaged to spoke earnestly about his time with her. Then it was Fiasco and Spider who stepped forward with an acoustic guitar and djembe drum to play “Away for Safekeeping,” one of Farewell Ghost’s better-known ballads, performing it slowly, solemnly, and without vocals to symbolize the missing voice among them.
Finally, the five members of Cloak and Dagger, a band that had toured with Ghost, and who were considered to be rock music’s “next big thing,” played an upbeat song about “the music living on and on, even after all of us are gone.” To Clay, they looked like they were still in high school, with their spiked hair and trendy all-black suits, but he supposed that was only the mark of time passing—his generation growing older, taking on additional responsibilities, starting families, buying fewer records,
