Part Two:
The Gig Of A Lifetime

I'm pretty sure it was a first.

Mike Keneally had a gig coming up in Southern California, and a fairly important one at that. Scott Chatfield had been working his contacts at San Diego's street-hip Belly Up Tavern for years, and it had finally paid off in a booking for the Mike Keneally Band. But I wasn't going to do it, and it was my decision.

Mike's choice to fill the slot was Wes Wehmiller, my longtime friend and fellow traveler in musical circles dating back to Berklee College Of Music in the early ‘90s. It wasn't the first time one of us had covered the other's gig due to some special circumstance. But just doing this gig was a special circumstance; the material doesn't allow for the normal kind of "subbing" or "sitting in." It was an investment, and Wes knew it, and he was nervous about it. I offered to help in any way I could, with notes on difficult licks, or approaches to sections, or anything. At the same time, I knew in the back of my head that, given his abilities, he didn't need as much help as he was asking for. And he wasn't asking for much.

He'd call with very specific questions about the hardest of sections, the strangest of runs, exactly what I imagined he'd want to know. Invariably, before I had the chance to tell him, he'd apologize for taking up my time. My reply of "it's OK, really" never seemed to convince him, and he'd bring the conversation to a quick close. Or was it me doing that?

I couldn't tell anymore. December of 2004 was a strange, dark time, and November hadn't been better. My once ideal day gig at SWR had somehow morphed into a full-blown high-level corporate stress-bucket, with fires burning daily that only I could put out while I scanned the room for exit doors. The person closest to me, Webmistress Katy, was recovering from a vicious burglary in which she essentially lost everything she owned, and we were going through the legal machinations and financial ramifications together every step of the way. An album's worth of bass tracks I'd just recorded had to be trashed and redone due to technical difficulties, generating some not-so-happy feelings all around. There was more. Consider yourself spared.

Just working and gigging alone was usually enough to render me mostly inaccessible to my friends. They knew I barely had time to tie my own shoes, let alone hang out for a night. In that way, Wes was just following my lead of unavailability. I never thought it would get so bad that I'd have to turn down an important, local Keneally gig, but it did, and I did.

Never missing an opportunity to make things about myself, it never occurred to me what the impact of doing the gig might be for Wes.

* * * * *

I'd been waiting for a morning like the morning of Sunday, January 30, 2005, for a long time. I had plans, well-thought plans and ideas about what the week held in store.

Then the phone rang. It was Colin Keenan, a highly intelligent, well-read, equally sarcastic and hilarious friend of mine since the Berklee days. We'd met in a Political Science class, not exactly the first-choice elective for aspiring musicians. It defined us, in a way.

Usually his voice was a dismissive baritone chortle, always on the edge of cracking up. This time it was different, even deeper. He was calling to tell me that Wes had passed away the night before, in his sleep.

Oh my God.

When the immediate shock wore off, I remembered that Colin lived across the hall from him, and had a terrible realization. Most likely, he was the one that found him.

A short, traumatized conversation ensued. The information was only about an hour old. I offered to come down to West L.A. immediately. No, he said, wait a couple of hours. I did, making a couple of calls to close friends in the meantime. Then, in mid-afternoon, he called back, and I left the sun-drenched mountains of the Santa Clarita Valley for the misty sky of Brentwood.

There weren't many people there when I arrived, but slowly throughout the day, friends in the loose and disparate circle of Wes' life began drifting in. It started to dawn on everyone that there were several distinct—you might say compartmentalized—worlds he traveled in. There were his musician friends, some dating back to Berklee. There were friends he played ice hockey with. There were others he knew from the cycling he'd been doing. Yet others were friends going back years who weren't musicians. In and out of Colin's apartment they came, stunned and unprepared, like someone had suddenly dropped them in a foreign country.

A list began forming on a white piece of paper. It contained names, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers of those who wanted to be kept informed of the family's plans for a memorial service. I offered to maintain and safeguard it. Lists were something I understood.

Meanwhile, Colin was already out of his element in hosting a gathering in his apartment; his anti-social tendencies were well-known. I knew he was in direct contact with Wes' parents, and how he was dealing with that I had no idea. Sooner or later the Wehmillers would be arriving from Delaware to deal with the terrible practicalities that accompany the loss of a child. It suddenly occurred to me that I'd only met Wes' father once, and knew very little about him other than he was a professor of geology at the University of Delaware. And I hadn't ever met Wes' mother. A quick check of those in attendance registered similar results. No one had ever met her, not in fifteen years of knowing him. Not even Colin.

* * * * *

The next day, Monday, was an outreach day. I went back down to Colin's place and several of us went over the lists of friends to call. There were people in Boston, Austin, Nashville, Canada, and throughout southern California, not to mention the Philadelphia-Delaware area of his upbringing. Everyone was on their cell phones, speaking in hushed, reverent, sad voices.

I ended up being the one to call most of the old crew from Berklee College Of Music who hadn't been reached yet. It surprised me how many of them lived in Los Angeles and I hadn't seen in years. Essentially it was a reconnection exercise. We'd talk, deal with initial shock and the onset of grief, and then I'd ask if they wanted to provide me with current contact information so I could keep them abreast of memorial service details, which I didn't have yet. I was cross-checking my contacts against other Berklee alums in the room. A significant outreach was occurring in Nashville, as the crew Wes ran with at Berklee had essentially split into those who went to L.A. and those who went to Nashville. I had something to do. It helped a lot.

Early that evening, Wes' parents arrived. I recognized his father, John, from the one time I met him. In many ways he looked like Wes with a full beard and mustache, and was dressed like the college professor he was, tweed jacket and all. Then a light-skinned African-American woman in a long, multi-colored dress strode into the room. Her face was round, with familiar eyes. Somehow she had an air of regality to her, betraying a sense of center while those around her struggled to stay upright. It took a second, but everyone realized pretty quickly that this was Wes' mother.

Amidst the hugs and tears and introductions, I felt a collective sense of stunned fascination in the room. How come he never said anything about that?

There was so much he never said anything about.

* * * * *

It was later that Monday night, still down in West L.A., when Colin, who'd never asked me for a thing in his life, asked me to do something on behalf of the family. There was going to be a celebration of Wes' life in Pasadena. It would be on Friday, February 4. Wes' parents wanted there to be a musical component to it, totaling forty-five minutes. Could I help organize it?

That was my role at Berklee. There were plenty of shows. Some people organized and led shows, others played in a variety of other people's shows. I was a well-known show organizer, and Wes was a widely respected show player. That was the way it had always been. I knew what Colin meant when he asked me. They wanted me to do that thing I did back then…for this. Of course, I said yes.

My mind began racing. Forty-five minutes of music. That worked out to seven performance slots. Probably seven different bands. Everything needed to be cleared by John and Paula Wehmiller. Also, I would be co-organizing with a fellow named Tom Langford, a singer/songwriter who Wes was working with that I'd never met. His mother was the headmistress of a private school where the celebration was to occur. Somehow their families knew each other. It became clear to me that Tom was close to the center of his universe in ways I wasn't, and that I needed to get to know him quickly. After all, his music was going to be played, and Wes had played on the recordings, and I was going to be playing bass in the performance.

Meanwhile, the practical implications of memorializing Wes were occurring faster than anyone could track. Katy Towell and I, in addition to immediately registering www.weswehmiller.net, had already changed the front page of bryanbellerdotcom to a single shot of Wes from the View sessions. Others in our circle of friends posted similar memorial pages. Word got out online through the Duran Duran website, as Nick Rhodes posted a personal message of condolence. People on what I now called the "Wes list" were e-mailing me and calling Colin, wondering about the time and place of the celebration. Word began to spread in our circle about the musical part of it all, and folks were making themselves available for whatever came to pass. I figured I'd be spending Tuesday at home, anchored to the desk chair, knowing I needed to be in front of a computer to organize and respond to all of this before I presented it to John and Paula for approval.

But first I needed to do something I hadn't done in at least five years, and maybe ever. On Tuesday morning, I called my boss at Fender/SWR and told him what had happened, and that I would be completely and totally unavailable for the remainder of the week, no matter what.

* * * * *

Tuesday was the main desk day, as I'd suspected. From early morning to late at night, I sat at the computer, with a cell phone headset in my ear, and watched as what I'd sent the night before to only Rick Musallam, Griff Peters, Mike Keneally, Joe Travers, and Colin…

…morphed into a thread that included fourteen people from all over the country. As the day went on, the set list and performance crew somehow solidified.

I spoke to Tom Langford for the first time and he told me which two songs he'd be doing. I could tell he was another organizer-type, and he assured me that details about the venue and sound system were firmly under control. I felt great about that, and about him.

Chip Vayenas, a Berklee graduate now living in Austin and playing with Mingo Fishtrap, and the original drummer for Wes' half-joke rock band I, Claudius, was flying in to play on "Bite," which Wes had written for that band, and which I'd recorded with Wes for View.

Ali Handal, another fantastic L.A.-based singer/songwriter Wes recorded with, asked if she could be a part of it. I had her CD with Wes on it, and it was brilliant. That made four tunes so far.

Kira Small—known as Kira McConaghy during her Berklee days—was part of Wes' original crew back in school, was known as an A-level singer all throughout and afterwards, and she'd been leading the outreach to the Nashville Berklee alumni ever since she got the news. When she made mention of wanting to come out for the celebration, I reserved her a slot. By the end of the day, she confirmed. That made five.

Colin mentioned to me that Wes really loved the song "View" from my solo album, and felt we should play it. I gulped and agreed. Now there were six.

Finally, Wes' parents wanted someone to perform The Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun." It was very special to them, though I didn't yet know why. I felt right away that it should be Mike Keneally. He accepted. He probably knew it already anyway, I thought.

Sixty-five e-mails and countless phone calls later, Tuesday ended with a firm set list and fairly solid musician lineup. The one and only rehearsal would be Thursday night. That left Wednesday to clear everything with John and Paula, learn my parts for the tunes, write an obituary for Bass Player magazine to hit their publishing deadline, and write whatever I was going to say at the celebration. I'd worked lists before, but this was something else entirely.

* * * * *

I woke up Wednesday feeling a strong urge to listen to the music I'd be playing at the celebration. It wasn't like me to not know the material two days before the gig.

Wes and I were very different bass players, often remarking to our mutual friends how we wished we could do what the other one did so well. I coveted Wes' technique and fluidity on the instrument. His hands and fingers moved so naturally, effortlessly, gracefully. Then you had me, with my bulging wrist veins and fingers that didn't go this way or that when I wanted them to. I made it look hard, he made it look easy.

In terms of pure musical styling, I'd probably listened to Wes more attentively than any other bass player in my life. Yes, more than John Paul Jones, Jaco, John Patitucci, and on and on. I never thought about it that way, because even if I wanted to cop Wes' style and feel, it would have been really weird because everyone we played with would know I was ripping him off. Did I know what it was that made him who he was as a player? Sure. The way he changed fingering positions, the way his playing fingers struck the strings so evenly and from a certain distance, certain fret-hand finger slides, a silky-smooth trilling method, a quirky and understated sense of melody…I'd heard it too many times not to know it at some level. But I'd never purposefully set out to emulate it, ever.

Tom Langford's music was mature, deeply soulful folk/pop/rock, allowing Wes to explore his rootsier side. A serious student of James Jamerson and old Motown, Wes applied that knowledge to "Rest A While" and "I Was Raised" from Langford's Places You Know album and produced beautiful, melodic, complementary lines. "I Was Raised" in particular had a bridge with a simple progression and room for Wes to fill, which he did in three absolutely signature licks. The first tune I charted the chords and implied his line; the second I wrote out nearly note for note. It demanded that respect, such was its brilliance.

Then I checked out Ali Handal's tune, "I Miss You," and heard the other, funkier side of Wes. Aside from Jamerson, Wes' other main influence was Pino Palladino, a more obscure (at least to the mainstream) player whose dark tone and deep, sparse, swinging, urbane groove had made him one of the first-call session bassists in the world. This was pretty far from my reach; Wes was doing amazing things that I could hear but might have trouble feeling in my soul. It almost sounded like it wanted a fretless. It didn't sound like it wanted me. I e-mailed Ali and asked if I could give this tune to another fellow Berklee alum from the time, a killer, jazz-influenced fretless bassist named Chris Golden. He'd be playing bass on "View" anyway, since I needed to play keys. Everyone agreed. It felt good to let it go, better than I thought it would.

I set off for West L.A. thinking, my God, so wide was this guy's range it's going to take two Berklee graduate bassists just to cop three of his tracks.

* * * * *

That afternoon I brought the laptop with me to Colin's place. It was time to sit down with John and Paula Wehmiller and firm up the celebration's running order and other details.

One thing I learned about Paula was that she was an ordained Episcopalian minister, and that this was not her first event of this nature. It lent her an inner strength and sense of appropriateness that proved invaluable as she listened to me rattle off this and that about how the music was going to go. We discussed who would speak and when, and how that would intersperse with the musical performances. Most crucially for this afternoon, we were there to sort through hundreds of pictures from their family archives and from friends to determine which ones would be in the slide show that would play during musical set changes.

There were ten to fifteen of us there that day. People were on their cell phones, calling close friends, having them e-mail me pictures from wherever they were. We were checking e-mail every sixty seconds, looking for pictures, getting confirmations from musicians on various items, checking details on the venue, creating and approving text for the program we'd be publishing for the event, writing the invitation, agonizing over who to send it to, getting deadlines on obituary publishings…it was happening so fast it was impossible to process. We all just kept going forward. No one dared to stop and think about it.

That proved difficult when John handed over a disc of old family pictures. Wes' closest friends gathered around the laptop and watched silently as we scrolled though over a hundred pictures none of us had ever seen before: Playing baseball at age ten, playing piano at age five, as a baby, as a teenager, as a grown man with his father by some train tracks in the desert. John and Paula chose several pictures for a special slide show, one that would only run while Mike Keneally played "Here Comes The Sun," which was to occur after the Wehmillers themselves spoke. I stared straight ahead, scared to meet eyes of Wes' parents while they performed this horrible task.

Four or five hours later, it was all settled. I left that night with discs to give to Tom Langford's mother Fran, who had a team of support staff ready to create the slide show and print the programs and get the technical details at the venue prepared for Friday night. I had hours of deskwork ahead of me, but I couldn't wait to get it done and hand off to them. Carrying this ball was getting heavy.

On the other hand, I couldn't help but think that managing this was easier than some of the challenges I'd been faced with in my last year of working for Fender/SWR. Nothing should be more difficult than this…nothing. Right?

* * * * *

The one and only rehearsal was scheduled for 6:00PM, Thursday night, at the private rehearsal space of Daryl Jamison, the former owner of SWR. Over the years we'd become more than work associates; we truly were close friends. Everything I'd ever done there was done with his blessing and support, including the ability to leave for tours with Mike Keneally when they came around. He was an honest music enthusiast, knew songs and albums I'd never heard of, played mean Hammond organ and aggressive bass, and loved to host his friends for jam sessions. We'd been through a lot during his tenure at the helm of SWR, some of it great, some of it not so great. Ultimately his entrepreneurial skills served him fairly well, and he was in a position to be his ideal self—a patron of the arts.

He called it The Doghouse, and a drum head with artwork that said "Dirty Dogs" and a picture of a bulldog hung high on one of the walls of this old, beat-up building he'd converted into his own private jam room. It was stocked with a fully functioning PA, guitar amps, several bass rigs (all SWR, of course), his Hammond, basses, guitars, keyboards, drums, a full-size refrigerator, couches, and a vibe perfect for what we needed. When I called him to ask if we could use it for this occasion, his response was unsurprisingly generous: Use anything you need for as long as you need it, use the gear for the performance, use it as a place to hang. Anything you want.

It occurred to me that this was going to be more like a Berklee show than anything I'd done since my time there. All these different tunes, with all these different bands, gathering for one rehearsal to play one show only. I'd led these kinds of rehearsals before, and some of the same people who took part in those old shows would be there tonight. Back then I was wound tighter than a piccolo snare drum, and everyone who worked with me knew it, for better or worse. I felt myself getting ready to fight off those urges. The last thing everyone needed was me doing my typical basket-case stress-monster routine in the middle of all this.

We were ready to go at six o'clock, as planned. Tom Langford and his band, Ali Handal, Griff Peters, Rick Musallam, Chris Golden, Joe Travers, Chip Vayenas (who'd arrived from Austin the day before), Kira Small (who'd arrived from Nashville only hours before, with charts in hand), Mike Keneally, Colin Keenan, and a few close friends were there as we managed to run every song to our satisfaction in less than ninety minutes. The professionalism and intensity of each performance, for a rehearsal, was unmatched in all my years of being a musician. Never once did I feel the need to be anything other than a facilitator; my usual stress of showleading was completely absent. It was unnecessary anyway, but the different vibe was coming from a deeper place, deeper inside. All I could say was thanks to everyone for being so utterly cool, and sounding so beautiful.

In the back of the room, slightly out of view, Daryl Jamison stood and smiled.

* * * * *

By late Friday morning, the flood of e-mail had stopped. The master list of tasks for the celebration was running thin. Even the cell phone had stopped ringing every three minutes. There wasn't much left to do but get the gear from The Doghouse and head over to Pasadena. After one last check of the contact list to see if we'd forgotten to invite anyone, I packed up my Toyota RAV4 with my own gear and headed out.

Like anything in which the combined energies of the participants comprised an organic whole, the celebration was a living, breathing thing even in its setup phase. A laptop was set on a table, displaying an endlessly repeating video loop of Wes slapping his bass in gauzy lighting. Another table was adorned with his most important personal effects: a hockey stick, a cycling helmet, a framed picture of him cradling a P-bass, stuffed animals, and his main axe, a charcoal Tyler five-string bass. A separate room contained large, framed versions of photographs Wes had taken of his friends, his surroundings, his world. They had hung on the walls of his apartment, covering every square inch of wall space. Now they lay upright on the floor, leaning against the walls of the room we used as the backstage area.

I spoke to a girl who had been assigned to work the slide show, and explained to her when to run the main slide show, and when to run the special "Here Comes The Sun" slide show. She didn't know who Wes was. She would soon.

Like any other gig, the musicians and I set up the stage and P.A. piece by piece, with drums, keyboards, guitar amps and microphone stands arrayed to best suit the changing needs of each tune in the set. All throughout this time, people arrived. Wes' parents walked slowly, their strength present but occasionally ebbing. I met Wes' only brother, Abe, a tall, extremely fit man with light brown skin and that familiar Wehmiller face. I learned that he essentially runs the day-to-day operations of a private school in Seattle. I met Wes' aunt, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. Yes, that Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, the Harvard professor, the member of the Board of Directors of Berklee College Of Music, the celebrated author and charter member of this nation's academic elite. The father was a geology professor, the mother an ordained minister. Something suddenly clicked: Wes' brilliance was rooted in a family steeped in the pursuit of higher knowledge. That, I thought, would at least partially explain why he consistently kicked my ass at chess whenever we played, once so badly that I relieved the board of its pieces in a curse-laden tribute to his skill.

I saw people from Berklee I hadn't seen since the very last show I did there, my senior recital. Joe had played drums. Kira sang in several tunes. Jon Skibic (who was at the ceremony but didn't play; he was also the guitarist for 100 Proof), had played guitar at that recital. And Wes and I played, of all things, a classical duet together, followed by a tune built for each of us to groove on while the other soloed. Many of the people I saw milling around the room were at that show, in the audience. That was November of 1992. Ten months later, Wes and I both moved to Los Angeles, within a month of each other.

Walking around the room, I felt lost. I didn't have anything left to do. I drifted to Katy, who was chatting up Wes' personal computer expert, Chas. Discussions ensued about constructing an interactive tribute website. I observed the conversation as Katy and Chas began speaking in a language I barely understood. After a few minutes, Katy and I knew we had a new project to work on together. We were alike in that way. Work was what we knew and did best, and we could always count on it to save us from thinking about other things not immediately solvable or controllable.

* * * * *

It began on time, with Tom's mother Fran introducing everyone to her school, and providing a general introduction for Colin Keenan, who was the M.C. by default. Not a public speaker but very well-spoken, he set the stage for what turned out to be three hours of tribute, and even that seemed not to be enough. What would be enough?

(I won't go into what each speaker said in detail—for that you can go to the Wes Wehmiller Tribute Website; click on "Memories Of Wes" and you'll see the listing for memorial tributes—but the music and a few details are well worth describing in this space.)

Tom Langford spoke eloquently but in a trembling voice, with little to hide and seemingly little desire to do so. I stood with his band, ready to play the part of Wes Wehmiller, his bassist, once he was done. Wes' family sat directly in front of us. I thought, it is so wrong that they should have to watch me do this.

I set out to make it right. I positioned my EQ different than I usually would, with less treble and more midrange, and set my hand for a more even stroke of the strings. The first tune, the mellow "Rest A While," was simple, and Tom had trouble making it through in spots. But I felt calm, made eye contact with the drummer, and just played the tune. I played a couple of Wes-isms, but nothing too noticeable. It wasn't that kind of song.

But the next song, "I Was Raised," was different by design. We kicked it off, and I felt a sudden charge. My left hand was sliding into notes, my right hand fingers were striking the strings in a different way, and patterns I didn't usually use came rushing into my brain. It was a lifetime's worth of soaked knowledge, gathered from watching the bassist I always really wanted to be, and it was pouring out of me, in the first setting I'd ever encountered in which such a deliberate homage would be appropriate. The bridge came, and I locked eyes with his family as I played Wes' fills, note for note, slide for slide, without shame, without sadness, without regret. Then, on the outro vamp, when the bridge progression returned, I broke out every single Wes-ism I knew inside of ninety seconds. It felt unexplainably good, like the first time I'd ever played a Jaco lick correctly. My process was at that level of reverence.

When it ended, the crowd broke out into loud, jarring applause. You could feel a weight lifting in the room. I felt proud and embarrassed at the same time. I mean, it was such a shameless ripoff of him. The guilty pleasure was that I'd always wanted to do it. The higher joy in it was seeing the reaction of his family, something I'll never forget.

We changed sets for Ali Handal's tune while the slide show ran. I heard intermittent laughter, sighing and sobbing, depending on the picture. I wasn't watching. I was setting microphone stands in place.

Her tune began with her soothing voice and Chris Golden's warm, deep fretless bass providing the root. It was just the two of them and a percussionist, and Ali strummed an acoustic guitar while she sang sweetly to Wes, over and over again. I miss you…tonight…

Chris sounded unbelievable, much better than anything I could have done with it. I smiled, briefly satisfied with myself.

Next up was Chip Vayenas, who'd known Wes for longer than just about any other non-family member in the room. He spoke about the things only he could speak about, and then joined Griff, Rick, Colin, Mike, and Ali (who sang Wes' high background vocal) for a rousing version of the silly I, Claudius hard rock tune "Bite." With a refrain of no one hurts me like you do when you/bite down on me, one might consider it a little weird for such an event, and it was. Which made it perfect. Wes would have appreciated the cognitive dissonance of it all. The crowd sure did.

Now it was my turn to speak. I had decided that, for once in my life, I didn't want "me" to be any part of the speech, so instead I leaned on humor and spoke about Wes' love for all things Canadian. (It's on the tribute website, as described above.) I needed every laugh I could get, because the band was waiting for me to play "View."

The original intended meaning of the tune was a sense of permanently leaving a place you once were, and reflecting on what was done while you were there, be it positive, negative, or anything in between. It was my fantasy about leaving Los Angeles for a more remote location, truth be told. But wherever you go, there you are—and everything you are comes with you. That's what the View album cover was supposed to mean, and that's why the city reflects in the suspended window over the road. In any event, its meaning was about to evolve.

I barely remember it, other than I barely got through it. My hands shook while Griff soloed over the outro vamp, and afterwards I had to go to the backstage area, surrounded by Wes' photography, and breathe deeply for a minute in order to recover. But I didn't lose it. There was more to do.

* * * * *

The man we affectionately referred to as Zen Master Griff was speaking. In the past he'd provided me with sage advice for hiking trips, and he spoke from experience—he'd climbed both Half Dome and Mt. Whitney with Wes at his side well before I did so. Now he was giving some advice to those in attendance, and it didn't come off as preachy at all. It was loving, as was everything he did. His message was simple: This feels good, everyone together like this. Can we, like, keep this going? The answer was obvious. For my part, I resolved to drive down to West Hollywood and see him and his talented girlfriend, singer/songwriter Jackie Daum, play a gig they had coming up on February 20^th. Maybe afterwards we could hang out somewhere.

Kira Small had come all the way from Nashville to lend her heart and spirit to this, and it was her time. She'd recruited fellow Berklee alums Tristana Ward and Jude Crossen to sing with her on a version of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," which had been reworked by the Austin, TX-based singer/songwriter duo of Albert & Gage into a sweet, slightly country-flavored ballad. And anyone who knew Kira, Tristana and Jude knew that the three of them singing together on anything was going to sound amazing, as they were all session-cat-level pros. But Tristana and Jude hadn't been at rehearsal, so it was an extra special delight when they came in together in three-part harmony on the first chorus. The power of their collective voices was so strong that the P.A. buckled and clipped a bit, but the beauty of it came through crystal clear. All I could do was stand behind Kira—while she played keyboards and literally sang her heart out—and read her handwritten chart, and smile. If there had been a show at Berklee with this kind of tune in it and Kira singing, Wes would have been the bass player, without a doubt. Truly, we were all back at Berklee now, in the very best sense of it.

Mike Keneally rose to speak, and as usual, he improvised beautifully. It turned out that my assumption that he already knew how to play "Here Comes The Sun" couldn't have been more wrong. It's actually pretty tricky to sing and play at the same time, he said, and required a capo to boot, and he was going to have to sit down and figure it out. Then, the punch line. He went over to his manager Scott Chatfield's house to check out a new article on him in the U.K. magazine Guitarist. When he picked it up, he couldn't believe his eyes. The cover screamed in all caps: "LEARN TO PLAY THE BEATLES' CLASSIC ‘HERE COMES THE SUN'!" A full transcription was included. Really.

When he was done speaking, I performed the last two tasks of my leadership role by simply setting Keneally's microphone in place, and letting the girl running the projector know that it was time to play the special slide show Wes' parents had requested. She nodded, and then a tear rolled down her face.

I took my seat for the first time that evening, next to Katy, and we watched Mike play the tune unaccompanied. With nothing left to distract me, my eyes were drawn to the projector screen, and as the pictures of a much younger Wes flashed by, my resolve finally, at long last, gave way, and I buried my head in my arms on the table in front of me, sobbing loudly and uncontrollably while Mike sang.

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun

It's alright

* * * * *

After a brief, deeply personal speech from Colin, who seemed drained from having his apartment be the center of operations all week long, Wes' parents took turns speaking.

John Wehmiller named his firstborn son, John Wesley Wehmiller, Jr., after Major John Wesley Powell, the famous 19th-century explorer. He was the first man to survey the Grand Canyon, he spoke several Indian tribal languages that very few white men of the time spoke, and went on to become the director of the U.S. Geological Survey in its near-infancy. Like Wes, John said, he was a genius.

We learned of their special attachment to the song "Here Comes The Sun." It played on the car radio on September 10, 1971, while John and Paula were speeding down the highway in a pouring rainstorm on the way to a hospital, where Paula would give birth to Wes the very next day. From then on, they played it every year on his birthday.

Wes' mother Paula didn't begin by speaking. She began by singing an old spiritual often sung during the civil rights marches (I didn't know this; she explained it to me later). Once done, she did what no one else in the room could do. She stood tall and spoke clearly, as if to say, thank you all so much for getting us here—now I'll take us the rest of the way. She thanked us in a way only a mother could thank us. As it turned out, though we didn't know her until now, she knew who we all were by name because, unbeknownst to us, Wes had been filling her in on everyone in his life, constantly and consistently. So she had one, simple request, and that was for all of us to keep her and John abreast of what we were doing in our lives, musical and otherwise, as Wes did. In that way, his spirit would live on with them, through us, forever.

* * * * *

I hadn't eaten much all week, and now I was hungry. All of the musicians were. We attacked the food table like we were never going to eat egg rolls and taquitos again in our lives. We were also thirsty, and not for fruit punch. We put the word out: There's a hang back at the Doghouse, starting ASAP. Bring your own party favors. For our part, Kira and I hit the liquor store together and left with enough whisky and vodka to inebriate a large band.

As the mellow, instrumental strains of Viktor Krauss' Far From Enough played over the Doghouse P.A., the musicians sat in a circle, and released and bonded. It had gone as well as any of us could have expected, and we were intensely proud to have done what we did for Wes' family, and in his memory. Soon we'd be back to our lives in progress, some of us with a renewed sense of purpose, some of us radically altered, others essentially unchanged but for an unwanted emptiness. But that could wait. Tonight, this night, was for celebrating our friend, and our renewed bonds of friendship and musicianship, and for resolving to do more of what it was that we really wanted to do in our lives while we still could.

* * * * *

The next day, I found myself looking through the mountain of e-mail I'd sent and received the past week, trying to make sense of it all. I stumbled on one I got from Mike Keneally back on Tuesday, which included text from an e-mail Wes himself had sent Mike shortly after the gig they'd played together in December.

I sat back in my chair, stunned. It turned out that Wes Wehmiller, the supposed king of brevity and understatement, had plenty to say about the gig they just did, and especially about the one-on-one rehearsal they had beforehand: