They sang the wrong songs for Dale Earnhardt.
They brought in the right guy to sing Thursday, Earnhardt’s old buddy Randy Owen of the group Alabama, the one who wrote the right song–the one Earnhardt used to sing to himself, about himself. But they didn’t sing it.
Dale Earnhardt was about as bad a singer as you ever could hear. But when he would sing it to himself–I’m in a hurry and I don’t know why–maybe sitting in his office signing pictures of himself, his right hand flying, a blur with a pen in it, turning out keepsakes for faraway fans at the rate of one a second, while his Learjet waited for another takeoff to someplace else he didn’t want to go . . .
Oh, how it fit . . .
In a hurry to get things done
I rush and rush till life’s no fun.
“I don’t have time for family life, man!” Earnhardt once said, looking up from amid a stack of boxes on boxes of those pictures, in a lamenting tone that was almost crying, the cobalt eyes desperate, the plane’s destination that day unknown to him until he would take out, at the last minute, that little leather schedule book.
He couldn’t even enjoy the Lears, not even the black one, custom-built.
“Just another tool,” he called it.
All I’ve really got to do
Is live and die
But I’m in a hurry
And don’t know why.
At Thursday’s nationally televised memorial service, Randy Owen sang two of his funereally country songs, generic salve for the family of any dead man of the working class.
But he didn’t sing for Earnhardt. Not the way he could have.
I hear a voice
It says I’m runnin’ behind
I better pick up my pace.
“Look at this one,” Earnhardt said, selecting a letter from one of dozens of thick files, as a legion of his secretaries teemed around him at Dale Earnhardt Inc. “This is the kind of letters I get from people. Read this. Woman wanted me to drive her husband’s hearse to his grave. Said it was his dying wish.”
I knew how Earnhardt was about funerals–he simply would not go to them, period. A clergyman we both knew once told me, “I’m in the dying business. I’ve seen it all. But Earnhardt has more hangups about dying than any other person I’ve ever known.”
Knowing how Earnhardt was–and those were in the days when we still could kid–I shrugged and asked:
“Well, did you do it? Did you drive the hearse?”
After he made a one-syllable expletive last five syllables, he finished, “No!”
And then he muttered: “I’ll be in one of them things soon enough.”
Don’t know why I have to drive so fast
My car has nothin’ to prove.
The nearest thing to a eulogy Thursday came from a fresh-faced young evangelical preacher named Dale Beaver–odd, as Earnhardt was a Lutheran who did not wear religion on his sleeve–and Calvary Church is an enormous edifice to evangelism, seating 5,800.
Dale Beaver clearly had met Dale Earnhardt only briefly, and quite late in Earnhardt’s career. Odd . . .
But oddest of all in a memorial that somehow left a nation hanging in its goodbye, a memorial wrapped up in 22 minutes flat while you waited for some sort of main event that never came, was that they didn’t even let Randy sing it right.
Earnhardt was always “antsy,” as one of his old-time handlers used to put it. Couldn’t sit still. Always walking. Moving. Sitting down. Getting up. Walking around. Getting in a truck. Going somewhere. Stopping briefly. Getting in a car. Going again.
He was in a hurry, and he never knew why.
It’s a race
And there ain’t no room
For second place.
He was born for the pace, not only the 210 m.p.h. (back before they mandated the restrictor plates he so despised), but also the helter-skelter travel of a rising folk hero to meet all his obligations, the public appearances, the endorsement appearances, the autograph appearances, the charity appearances, the speaking appearances.
But at the pinnacle it got to be too much even for him, and there were times when he would just go and hide. That reclusive state, in the gloaming of Earnhardt’s life, was how Rev. Beaver seemed to have found him for the first time.
From that, the preacher struggled to tell us something about the man he knew so sparingly himself.
Earnhardt transcended NASCAR by a light-year or so. He came to realize that too late–“Un-believable,” he called it–to stop the fast train hurtling along with him aboard. When you would mention that to him he would growl, “Yeah, but I’m drivin’ the train.”
But you wondered. Especially when he would take out that little leather schedule book to see where the Lear would take him next. And in public–hell, Elvis himself could have walked as easily into a restaurant or through an airport without being mobbed.
Shakin’ hands with the clock
I can’t stop
I’m on a roll
And I’m ready to rock.
Thursday, word was coming in to Associated Press writers at the memorial service that newspapers as far away as Japan, Korea and Taiwan carried Asian-language obituaries of Earnhardt. On Native American reservations in North Dakota, black “3” flags flew at half-staff outside the humble homes.
And so as the strangely hollow memorial service flashed by, you wondered how much fulfillment it offered a continent, even other parts of a planet, longing for a substantive goodbye.
Randy Owens sang:
Goodbye, goodbye
That one word
Hurts so bad
When you’ve lost
A friend you’ve had.
And that was nice, generic, but it didn’t apply. For NASCAR–try as it might to continue with the “life must go on” mind-set that chairman Bill France espoused this week and Earnhardt himself embodied for all of his career–won’t be able to say goodbye to Earnhardt nearly as easily as a 22-minute memorial.
White-haired Junior Johnson, the legendary moonshine runner-turned-driver who was the nearest thing to Earnhardt before Earnhardt came along, stood outside the church in the freezing bleakness when it was over, and he said of NASCAR and its culture:
“They will not shake this one off like they have some of the rest of ’em, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin. . . . This’ll be around a long, long time.”
Network newscasters were comparing this to the deaths of Elvis and Princess Diana, two other icons of the masses whose lives were consumed by the horrific burdens of adoration.
Standing there with Junior in the awful midday Carolina winter gloom, the truth was palpable, even unsung:
All I’ve really got to do
Is live and die
But I’m in a hurry
And don’t know why.
