LAZARUS MAN by TERRY CALLIER. Story by Eric Roe.

County Road M between Middleton & Madison, Wisconsin, USA. 1998

The song came on just as I left the last of town’s artificial light and moved into darkness. It was a gentle, ruminative guitar, and then a sound like seashells rattling, washing up, tumbling down. The music became tidal in its repetition, compelling and deliberate. I was drawn into it, my world drawn down to the fragment of road illuminated by my headlights, the bare trees and old snow at the edges, and this hypnotic refrain.

I was following County Road M, which weaves along the northwest shore of Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. It’s the back road from Middleton, the suburb where I lived then, to Madison, where I worked the night shift at a meat packing plant. I was part of the sanitation crew: We cleaned the production lines after they were done running for the day. I’d started fresh out of high school, skipping college because it wasn’t for me—all I wanted to do was write. By the time I graduated high school, I’d already written a novel-length thriller, which was sure to be published to great acclaim. Why would I need college?

But now I was almost nine years at the plant, and that novel was in a box in the closet, kept company by two others I’d gone on to write. The plant had become quicksand. I’d begun to understand how it could be easier to let it pull me under rather than waste energy thrashing about to try and escape. Just the same, I was trying. I’d returned to school, taking classes part-time at a community college, and I was closing in on the end of a new novel, this one drawn from my experiences at the plant. This one, I wanted to believe, would be different. This one would not go into a box in the closet. It would go out into the world.

In my car, the music continued, lead guitar and bass weaving around the mesmeric pattern that had been laid down at the start. It’s almost two minutes into the song before we hear vocals, a baritone voice in singsong: I met a young man on the skeleton coast / He was out on his feet, pale as a ghost / I asked him his name – he said Lazarus, man / I’ve come to this country from a faraway land. And so begins the Ancient Mariner-like tale of his wanderings.

At the heart of the song, Lazarus recounts the confounding miracle that set his life on its new course:

I went off to sleep, and I guess that I died

I was stumbling and rising, so I couldn’t quite tell

One foot in glory and one foot in hell

On one side the garden and on one side the flame

I thought I heard somebody call out my name

Yeah, somebody was saying, Lazarus arise!

So I sat up, opened my eyes

You know, I wanted to dance but I didn’t have room

So I threw off the sheets and walked out of the tomb

The singer imbues the first part of that verse with bewilderment, then moves into stunned amazement, and then, when Lazarus wakes, there’s triumph— he’s walking out of that tomb not weak or hesitant, but with an exultant strut. Driving through the dark, held tight in the song’s spell, the vitality of that line buzzed new life through my body.

The song took me all the way to where County Road M meets the main road to head into the city. The DJ announced that the singer was Terry Callier. I’d never heard of him. It turned out he was coming back to life much the same way as his Lazarus. He’d put out a number of successful albums from the late 1960s through the 1970s, but then he dropped off the radar, retiring from music to become a computer programmer. In the 1990s, his music was rediscovered, and his 1998 album TimePeace, which included Lazarus Man, was his first since 1979.

Lazarus Man spun through my head all night as I worked, energizing me. It stayed with me as I continued to push through school, a rallying cry as I worked toward the end of my packing plant novel. In another month, the novel was finished, and it was good—a huge step in the right direction. It didn’t find a publisher, because my writing just wasn’t there yet, but I was closer. I kept writing. Eventually, individual packing plant stories coming out of my experience would find publication, including a story called “Notes from Lazarus,” which owes its central image directly to Callier’s song.

Almost exactly a year after first hearing Lazarus Man, I quit my job at the plant so I could finish school. I was coming back to life.

Stereo Story #782

Also see Eric’s stories about George Harrison’s When We Was Fab and Randy Adams’ Just One Thing.