I can still see him, sitting on his parents’ couch in the lamplight, singing as fast as he could-“he-grew-a-beard-as-soon-as-he-could-to-cover-the-scars-on-his-face…” It was like Chadwick was trying to keep up with his own song. (At the end, there was a verse in which the general walked onto the battlefield alone and gets gunned down by the enemy his men, still lingering in the area, recover his body and bury it-a verse that didn’t make it into the final song. Then he sang: “There was a decorated general with a heart of gold…” The lyrics were a little different then, still inchoate, but the story was fully formed: an Army general who sees in a dream that the war he’s fighting is pointless, and instructs his men to leave the battlefield, go home, and live their lives. (I used to scratch at the body with a pick, around the sound hole, trying to make it look old and worn from years of playing, like Chadwick’s. He and Pete and Brad had been trying to teach me to play on the new Yamaha I’d recently bought at Sam Ash for $149. His fingers moved fast, and I smiled right away because it still looked like magic to me, all those notes tumbling out so quickly. His bandmates-Pete Francis and Brad Corrigan, all of us friends-and I sat and waited. He flipped a page of his spiral notebook, looking for the beginning of the notes he’d been working on that day. He stuck a pick in his teeth while he tuned. He picked up his sister’s Phantom acoustic guitar, the one with the wood worn away around the sound hole from years of hard strumming. The fire was dying, and there were just a couple of lamps on in the room.

I always loved this, existing as I did on the outskirts of his prodigious talent, looking in. Mike Smith Chadwick’s Parents’ Living Room, West of Boston, 1996

Dispatch band