By Stuart Mitchner

Go, seize the day
Wake up and say
This is an extraordinary life ….

Less than a week before Father’s Day, my son and I are talking about the time he fell off the sofa dancing around to Asia’s “Heat of the Moment.” It was mid-May 1983; he was 7. “But it wasn’t the sofa,” he tells me; he’s 48 now. “It was a bunch of cushions I’d piled onto a chair. I didn’t cry, I yelled, I kept jumping around. John Wetton was singing.”

Wetton’s Power

I italicized “John Wetton” to show the 7-year-old’s excitement still alive in the 48-year-old’s voice. In fact, when Wetton sings, the whole world is italicized, there’s no such thing as was; his is the power of is, is, forever is, and the first time I heard him singing Asia’s anthemic “An Extraordinary Life” on the 2008 “come back” album Phoenix, I had to know more about the musician my son had been mourning for the better part of five years. When Wetton sang “Go seize the day, wake up and say this is an extraordinary life,” he had less than a decade to live, after surviving 20 years of heavy drinking and smoking, plus triple-bypass surgery. He died of cancer on January 31, 2017, at 67, same age as my heavy drinking and smoking mother, who also died of cancer and was very much on my mind as Wetton sang of “the smiles and frowns, the ups and downs, of fortune turning … the twists and turns, the lessons learned.”

Asia’s first single, “Heat of the Moment” was a huge hit, spending 26 weeks on the charts while the group’s debut LP was the No. 1 album in the U.S. for 1982, according to Billboard and Cashbox. As Wetton puts it in a 2014 HuffPost interview, “We got let out of the elevator at the penthouse instead of the ground floor.” In a 2011 interview about “Heat of the Moment,” he says that he and keyboardist Geoff Downes wrote the song in an afternoon: “The lyrics are an abject apology for my dreadful behavior towards a particular woman (the woman I would eventually marry, but divorce 10 years later), the chorus began its life as a 6/8 country song, but when Geoff and I started writing together, we moved the time signatures around, and ‘Heat of the Moment’ emerged.”

YouTube

It’s all about life and death on YouTube, where most of the mourning is being done by children remembering how much their parents or friends or siblings loved a particular song or singer. Were I ever to post something for my church organist/English professor father, it would probably be the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. For my mother the possibilities are endless, with “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” at the top of the list, given the way my dad played it on the living room piano whenever he wanted to lift her from a sulk to a swoon. As I listen to Wetton belting out “Only Time Will Tell,” with lyrics like “You’re leaving now, it’s in your eyes, there’s no disguising it,” I was remembering the day she left him after 25 years.

Father-Son Drives

The one time my characteristically reserved father and I had real conversations was when he drove me 250 miles west to St. Louis to see the Cardinals play and a year later on a trip based on my passion for cities, which took us to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and Buffalo. While my son and I listened mostly to his favorite music on our yearly drives to Montreal between 1997 and 2012, with occasional interludes of classics and jazz, my father had to put up with broadcasts of Cardinal games narrated by Harry (“Holy Cow, there she goes”) Caray.

Still, my father had it easy. I was a “normal” kid who rarely rocked the family boat, something my temperamental son has been doing, one way or another, most of his life. The Sunday before Father’s Day was fairly typical. After several blow-ups, he cooked us a delicious dinner (enough to feed the proverbial army) and at two in the morning he played me John Wetton’s self-composed eulogy “Bury Me in Willow” on Asia’s CD XXX (2012), then took up his guitar to demonstrate Wetton’s charging bassline.

A Bad Fall

Still thinking ahead to Father’s Day when we’ll probably make a sentimental journey to the “old neighborhood” as we did when we swung on the swings at Harrison Street park last year, I’m thinking of “the heat of the moment” trauma of a fall my son suffered, at 3, face down on the pavement in our second Princeton neighborhood, a direct hit, and he’s screaming bloody murder as I pick him up to carry him home four houses down the street, blood streaming from the gash, all over my shirt. Fumbling with gauze and tape and disinfectant, I’m shocked to see myself in the bathroom mirror, shirt open, chest bathed in blood, the red badge of fatherhood that no matter how much I scrubbed seemed to remain there, burning like a rash, for days.

Falling at 48

Last week the 48-year-old took another tumble on his way down the stairs to his room, where he resides with five guitars, a keyboard, three amps, every surface covered with record albums, shelves fully stocked with CDs. He picked himself up and has nothing but a bruised leg to show for it, but he’s still shaken, haunted by thoughts of fallen heroes, either by suicide, like Keith Emerson and the founding members of Badfinger, or by “natural causes,” with John Wetton, George Harrison, and David Bowie at the top of a long list. The first such death still figures in dreams inspired by the murder of John Lennon, wherein the killer is brought down before he can fire the fatal shots.

Because I’m featuring Wetton this week, I’ve been alerted to numerous intimations of mortality in other Wetton songs like “Never Again” (“This is the day, the day of my ascendance”); “Heroine” (I hold the razor blade up to my face and feel the pulse beneath my skin”); and “Nothing’s Forever” (“Nothing from nothing is nothing, amen, so I say”).

In the 2014 HuffPost interview, Wetton talks about how he decided to name Asia’s last album after the song, “Gravitas”: “The underlying theme of the whole album is redemption, really, and treating each other with a little bit of respect. It’s the non-violent solution. It’s trying to find another way where people retain their dignity. The meaning that I take out of Gravitas is dignity. We didn’t want to make a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll album. Most of this band are in their sixties.” For me and my son and no doubt everyone who knows what happened on January 31, 2017, mortality has become the subtext of the album released less than three years before Wetton’s death, which my son learned about on a YouTube blog.

The Book

In his introduction to Nick Shilton’s John Wetton: An Extraordinary Life (Rocket 88), Geoff Downes describes Wetton as “a star in every sense of the word” and a man “who had it all”: “He had a love for fast cars, fine food, coffee, the Rams (that’s Derby County [England] for non-[English] football followers), films, books, crosswords, current affairs, sport, languages, classical music — anything that would stimulate his mind that he could use to great effect in his music and lyrics.”

Downes ends his tribute with lines from Wetton’s lyric “Bury Me in Willow.” Although the words suggest that Wetton sensed what was coming in 2017, the song is far from a lament, charging out of the box at a gallop driven by Wetton’s bass and Carl Palmer’s drums: “I’ll go whichever way the winds blow, it’s hard to swim against the tide; when I’m gone do this thing for me … bury me in willow, not in oak.” His voice soaring, full of life, Wetton sings of “a life of conflict … collision, damage, disarray … blind, intolerant, unbending,” asking “just let me die a different way, free me, and give me the peace to surrender at last.” Riding the beat to the last line, he sings, “Free me and give me the beautiful silence at last.”

Asia in Tokyo

The best thing I’ve seen on YouTube recently is the video of Asia performing “Heat of the Moment” in Tokyo in 2007. It’s the original lineup, Steve Howe on lead guitar, Geoff Downes on keyboards, Carl Palmer on drums, and Wetton singing lead and playing bass as if he were 36 instead of pushing 60 less than a year after open-heart surgery. The number is a joy to behold, with Howe, a grey-maned, bespectacled, gap-toothed virtuoso backed up in turn against both Wetton and Downes, who is jamming on his hand-held keyboard as if it were a Flying V. Meanwhile, Palmer is driving everyone toward the ecstatic finale, in which Wetton, clearly in his element, happily calls for the audience to sing along with him as he conducts the chorus of “Heat of the Moment.”

Asia in New Jersey

Organized in John Wetton’s honor, Asia’s Heat of the Moment Tour will be playing in Englewood July 9, Red Bank July 10, and Atlantic City July 12, along with other dates, from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada (July 4) to Huntsville, Alabama (July 28). Each performance will be MC’d by legendary artist Roger Dean, whose Asia album covers make him virtually a member of the band. Says Geoff Downes, the only original member in the tour, “I am convinced that John’s spirit is with us as we set out on this new adventure.  After all, it is the Year of the Dragon — just as it was in 1982, when we released our first Asia album.”