Lloyd Hamer on the Web
Up
at the crack of dawn and down to the office to surf
the
internet for hours without end.
Jesus
may come today, says one
particularly
memorable page.
He
will come back for us
and
take us to his big home page in the sky
The
page offers a bit of insight
into
Jesus' thoughts as he hung between two thieves.
The
dramatic scene is animated right before your eyes
as
the Lord and Savior writhes in pain
and
has his now historic conversation
with
the thief on the right.
"This
day thou shalt be with me in Paradise",
says
Jesus in his best Marlon Brando voice.
It
was the twenty first century,
Beginning
badly as it did
Lloyd
Hamer was born after bitnet became
The
internet in the eighties
technology
was on the throne,
Jesus
worked now only behind the scenes
Lloyd’s
little northern family was just hoping
to
be able to keep up with it all,
no
delusions that it was going to perfect their lives
or
replace their faith in the New Testament.
Lloyd
Hamer was so named
because
his parents had an ironic sense of things
and
they liked the way it rhymed
with
the country pianist’s name, Floyd Cramer.
They
had no way of knowing their son
would
become a famous pianist himself
and
that he would travel the world,
playing
before auditoriums filled with loyal fans,
who
yelled for more when he was done.
His
style a blend of Joplin (Scott),
John
(Elton), and Lewis (Jerry Lee).
Sometimes
the music would get so tasty
he
would begin to sing lyrics made up a few days before,
and
the audience would turn delirious.
The
music was rapturously pastoral and American.
Reminiscent
of riding across the heartland
on
a trainful of boozers and gamblers
who
alternated between celebrating
the
birth of the savior and mourning the death of a president,
That
would be as close as you might come
to
the level of emotion without actually being there.
If
you walked in during the middle of a set,
you
might not understand immediately
the
raucous reaction of the audience,
but
once you had been there a few minutes,
your
synapses, dendrites, axons, and so on
would
begin to groove to the melodies and
there
was no siren on earth that could draw you away.
Lloyd’s
concerts were sent in streaming
Video
to local computers…
Lloyd
was not a tall man, in fact
he
was only 5 feet 8 in his street shoes,
but
he could make a grand piano live up to its name,
with
his own compositions, or sometimes
renditions
of the works of others.
Meanwhile
back home in Duluth, Minnesota,
George
and Ethel Hamer would wait in the snow
for
another recording he had released and
his
visits which came less frequently
as
the years went by.
Emails,
clips and video calls
They
did not know it, but they were destined
to
live well into the twenty first century
and
they were going to see some things
that
the loving parents of a musical genius
should
never be forced to go through.
The
country they loved and the one he traveled
were
worlds apart.
In
the world they had known,
you
should be sincere and not sarcastic,
successful
and not stressed out,
and
if worldly, not folorn.
But
back then they had not had their MTV.
Lloyd's
first video included a couple patterned after them,
almost
to the point of the old lady and man
in
front of the barn with the pitch fork,
but
not quite.
Most
of it was shot in Georgia,
a
state where they had never been,
and
had no desire to be.
The
state where Roosevelt had died
and
a few other things had happened,
like
Jimmy Carter.
They
lived vicariously and electronically through Lloyd,
although
as he began to stay away,
call
less often and write almost never,
they
talked about the weather,
about
the Twins, the Timberwolves and the Vikings.
You
should sit down for a few minutes
with
them sometimes
and
say the name Lloyd
and
watch their faces light up.
“Lloyd
lives in a different world”
They
like to say
