Long Gone （Slight Return） #2
Entry $6
Community World Theatre, S 56 th this tape is marked (K), July 2, 1999.
MYERS: So, I wonder if you could talk me through what it was like with Mutt in the early days. Before the record deal, or the European tour.
MARK BECK: Uh-huh. Did Ray and Paulie tell you about Birmingham? And Mike Haynes?
MYERS: Only that he’d been talking with Joe, somehow convinced him he could make spirit recordings. They met the day he disappeared…
BECK: Mmm-hmm. I mean, they’re not wrong, but I’m assuming they told you he was a kook?
That he was some kind of crank, stringing Joe along?
Well, no. That wasn’t what it was like at all.
So Joe—he’d had all kinds of problems in the past. That’s common knowledge.
Even before rehab, his head was messed up in all sorts of ways.
It’s why he drank so much, spent so much time stoned out of his mind.
His dad was kind of crappy and his mom was an alcoholic—but more than that, he never quite fit, not really.
There’s only so much time you can spend as an outsider.
After rehab…well, I don’t know what they did to him in there—believe me, I’ve tried to find out—but he came out dry as a bone and more messed up than ever.
[There’s a voice in the static here that may or may not be the same person who can be heard on the other recordings. It sounds like they say, “eyes were opened,” but the quality is too poor to be certain without further context.]
MYERS: They told me. He, what, didn’t think the world was real anymore? That he’d changed dimensions?
BECK: Yuh, that’s it. But man, that messed him up so bad.
It wasn’t just us he didn’t recognize—he wasn’t even at home in his own body.
In some ways, being on the road in Europe helped him.
Being around familiar places back in the Northwest, but only half recognizing them—that was driving him crazy, fast. At least in Europe it was all new, for all of us.
We had to hide the mirrors wherever we stayed, but he was kinda coping.
I thought so, anyway. He seemed less strung out, more like his old self. Then came Birmingham.
Item #51. Lyrics to “Scot-Free,” written in black pen on lined paper. Possibly torn from Joe Morris’s notebooks. Edits marked by struck-through text.
The streets are a battleground
The home is a ring
Your heart is a doesn’t make a sound
My misery sings
Scot-free / Shot me
Living inside my head
My The world is a dream
Thinking I’m better dead
My misery screams
Scot-free / Shot me
Item #12. Recorded interview between journalist Peter Myers and Ray Doyle. Audio cassette. The label is written in brown pen; this tape is marked (F), June 18, 1999.
MYERS: How did Morris’s state of mind affect the rest of you?
DOYLE: It freaked the hell outta me. He started talking about how there were ways to record voices from this other world?—
MYERS: This was the guy in Birmingham? The studio?
DOYLE: Yeah. No. I’m not sure. You know, Joe would say things to us, out of the blue.
Like, “Hey, guys, you think we can record it like this? Because then we’ll be able to hear the voices from that other place, the one I left.
” And we’d look at him like he was crazy, but he’d stare us down.
Paulie, he thought Joe was putting it on, like he was planning some epic prank and one day he’d burst out laughing and tell us he’d had us.
But it never felt like that to me. Joe…he looked kinda broken from the day he came back.
And all this crap he was talking, it was a part of that. The dude in Birmingham?—
MYERS: Mike Haynes.
DOYLE: —yeah, he just fed the crazy. Joe told us he’d set up a whole studio, and the pair of them were finally going to do it.
They were going to prove what he’d been saying—all of it.
Like he’d been living in a different version of reality, and something they’d done in rehab had pushed him out of alignment.
He said to me one day that he was gonna get back there, that he had another life and he was going to find it again through the tapes he was making with this Haynes guy.
He believed that, I think. That this shitty studio in Birmingham, England, was going to open a portal to another world.
MYERS: So what do you think happened to him? He didn’t show up for the show at Edward’s No. 8, did he?
DOYLE: Look, we all know the story. He didn’t appear, then or later.
We thought he’d fallen off the wagon, but then the days passed and…
the official inquest, it decided he’d slipped into one of the canals.
Haynes said he saw him leave, alive and well.
And there were witnesses, I think, who saw him near the water?
You know more than me. I’ve tried to stay away from the articles, the speculation.
Do I think he’s dead? Yeah, I don’t doubt it.
We were his world, man. There’s no way he’s still out there somewhere and hasn’t been in touch.
MYERS: Have you heard the tapes? The ones he recorded with Mike?—
DOYLE: Listen, I’m not sitting here discussing that weird conspiracy bull. Joe was troubled, okay? He had his problems, and they came to a tragic end. Why do you people have to rake over it all? [Muffled.] I lost my friend, for Christ’s sake…
[A crackle then a sharp pop, like Doyle has removed a microphone. A brief rustling. Silence.]
Item #16. Audio cassette. Recorded interview between journalist Peter Myers and Paulie Schultz. The label is written in black biro; this tape is marked (H), June 25, 1999.
SCHULTZ: That tour wasn’t easy. I’ve toured a lot since, and I think part of me thought it was normal.
Joe was really troubled by that point in his life, and we were all too young—and too excited by the media attention—to notice how bad it had got.
If I have any regret, it’s that we should’ve noticed, as green as we were. Jesus, there were enough warning signs.
MYERS: [Interrupting.] Like what?
SCHULTZ: I remember…I walked in on him, once.
I think it was in Belgium, not long after we landed in Europe.
Small club, the kind of crappy facilities we’d come to expect.
A back room the size of a closet, smelling of stale sweat and spilled beer.
Graffiti scrawled up the walls. We didn’t have a bathroom at this place, just a second room even smaller than the first. Sink.
Cracked mirror. It stank of piss, like the other bands had ignored the lack of a toilet and just used the sink—that’s what we did.
It had a door, but it was only attached by the top hinge and didn’t shut properly.
So, I walked in while Joe was using it. That wasn’t unusual—we were living in each other’s pockets.
I saw more of those three guys on the tour bus than I ever wanted to.
But Joe liked his space before a show, so we left him to it.
This time he wasn’t right, though. His face was up close to the mirror, like he thought he was gonna push right through it, and with the fingers of his right hand he was clawing at his cheek.
I said what the hell , naturally, and pulled his hand away.
There were red tracks across his face, a couple of them beading with blood where he’d broken the skin.
I asked him what he was doing, and he looked at me like I was a stranger.
“I’m not him,” he said, looking back at the mirror.
“That’s not me.” We hid the mirrors in our dressing rooms after that.
I’d still catch him staring at the rearview on the bus sometimes, though.
MYERS: And this got worse when you arrived in England?
SCHULTZ: [Grunt.] You could say that. That Haynes guy?
He stoked it all up. Joe had only the thinnest grip on reality by that point, but Haynes tipped him over.
He got fixated on the idea that he could record voices from some other reality.
It would have been hilarious if Joe hadn’t bought into it so completely.
I don’t think we even had any idea of how much he believed it.
Not really. If that was what he needed to get himself back on track, then so be it.
Musicians have done crazier things over the years.
He meant it, though. Joe…his head was all over the place, and I don’t think he saw it the way we did. Not at all. He thought…
[Schultz trails off here and there’s silence for a few seconds. Then suddenly there’s a loud shout, like someone yelling angrily in a nearby room, and the words “I’m watching you, Paulie” can be clearly heard over the microphone in a voice that is unrecognizable as either Myers or Schultz.]
MYERS: [Coughs.] Ray told me Morris had this idea—that something had happened to him in rehab, and he was in the wrong world?
SCHULTZ: Sounds about right.
MYERS: Did he actually believe the British engineer, Mike Haynes, would be able to fix it?
[The same voice shouts, “Yeah,” off-mic. It’s the clearest of the interruptions.]
SCHULTZ: I don’t think so. He just…I’m going to sound as crazy as him, but he thought that if Haynes could record voices from other dimensions, then maybe there would be another version of Joe somewhere, pulled out of his rightful world and going just as crazy as he was in ours.
That maybe they’d been swapped somehow. I dunno.
We didn’t talk about it much; he made all his plans without us.
I think, though, that that’s what he wanted—to somehow contact the other side, maybe work out how it happened. How he could get back.
MYERS: And what do you think happened?
Item #33. Audio cassette. Recording of a telephone call. The audio is poor; Peter Myers most likely recorded it by holding a Dictaphone up to the earpiece. Both voices are faint but audible.
[Ring tone.]
MIKE HAYNES: Hello?
MYERS: Is that Mr. Haynes speaking? Mike Haynes?
HAYNES: It is, yes. Who is this? Do we know each other?
MYERS: My name is Peter Myers, I’m a?—
HAYNES: I know who you are. I’m not speaking to journalists. I’m sorry.
MYERS: Maybe we could just?—
[Click.]
Item #29. Audio cassette. Recorded interview between journalist Peter Myers and Mark Beck. The label is written in black biro; this tape is marked (K), July 2, 1999.
BECK: You know Haynes never charged him for his time, right?
Not a dime—or a penny, I guess. Thing is, it wasn’t bullshit.
None of it. He actually could record these…
voices. Whether they’re ghosts or another dimension or aliens or whatever, I don’t know—but they’re real.
I managed to get my hands on one of his tapes, and there’s something there, speaking in the background.
You can’t hear it all. Just words, sounds sometimes.
I mean…! Joe was actually onto something, and we all thought he was going crazy.
But here’s the mad thing: what if he wasn’t?
What if everything he said was true? What if different dimensions exist, and our Joe—the old Joe—ended up somewhere else?
What if the guy who came back to us wasn’t Joe at all, not as we knew him?
And what if—I know what you want to say, but stay with me—what if that day in Birmingham, Mike Haynes somehow managed to reconnect him with his own dimension, maybe even send him back there?
MYERS: I’m not sure I…
BECK: They never found his body, did they?
In the center of a big European city, Joe Morris, a recognizable rock star on a major tour, just vanished.
Tell me, what’s crazy? Assuming he did what he said he was going to do, and found a way back to another dimension?
Or assuming he simply evaporated into thin air?
MYERS: Let me get this straight, you’re saying that?—
BECK: You’re interviewing us all separately, right?
Me, Ray and Paulie? No one else sitting in on the interviews?
Good. Take a listen, why don’t you. Listen back to your tapes, with the volume turned up high, and tell me you don’t hear anything.
Because I do. All the time. It’s why I retired from drumming, hung up my sticks…
Joe didn’t die that day, man. I don’t know what happened to him, but he didn’t fall into a fucking canal.
He came back broken, and Haynes fixed him. He’s in the tapes.
Item #78. Lyrics to unrecorded song written in pencil on the back of a concert flyer. Morris’s edits marked by struck-through text.
Long gone (slight return)
walking away / leaving today / no time to say
gone gone
dying inside / eating my pride / found some place where to hide
gone gone
hate my own face (gone)
find a new place (gone)
among the dead and erased (gone)
i’m gone
gone
gone
gone