"Hollyhocks and Roses" (DEMO)

My yard ain’t exactly Monet’s garden at Giverny, but by the time summer’s in swing, when our postage stamp-sized lot is in full bloom, a glass or two of Cabernet and suddenly, the damn thing is Louis XIV’s Versailles.

We bought the house we’ve haunted for the past 38 years for its proximity to a library and a highway. We were hypnotically drawn to its house-wide porch, a feature we’d rhapsodized over in magazines, but never experienced firsthand.

But that first summer, we immediately freaked out when people strolling by on the sidewalk began speaking to us out there. Some actually walked up to the porch to introduce themselves and SAY things. It was horrifying.

In fact, it was enough for us to beat a hasty retreat indoors, where we remained every summer for a number of years until children and life ran us ragged to the point we didn’t care who said what to whom anymore — at least as it related to hanging on the porch.

Nearly 20 years later, we had refinished the porch ceiling with high-gloss polyurethane, rolled out an Oriental carpet, constructed a porch swing from scratch and suspended a bamboo curtain and enormous Boston ferns from the cross-beams. Out came the candles, and we started living out there every summer night.

One evening, the candle array cast particularly intriguing, magic lantern-like silhouettes of Sue. All of a sudden, I had all of “Hollyhocks and Roses” in my head. I furtively blabbered the tune into my Nokia voice memo app as soon as I could scam a few alone moments, and demo’d up the song the next day:

It’s an unusual tune for me — kinda slow-ish, kinda romantic-ish — not the usual screaming distorted guitar-driven thumper I was more generally prone to writing. Digging up the written lyrics, I found a note I’d scrawled reminding myself I was looking for an R.E.M. “Flowers of Guatemala” vibe.

The 1986 R.E.M. LP, “Life’s Rich Pageant,” is a go-to disc for me, and really, the only R.E.M. I’d consider a “desert island” record in their catalog. I was OK with some of their other stuff, but like U2, after commercial success, the singer developed an annoying messianic complex, and I got off the bus. “Flowers of Guatemala” is a gorgeous, lilting track on “Life’s Rich Pageant.” It always gets me, like Warren Zevon’s “Reconsider Me” on his “Sentimental Hygiene” LP, or “Landslide,” a guilty Fleetwood Mac pleasure. Drop a needle on any of them, and I’ll discreetly make a beeline for a Kleenex (or its cheaper Costco equivalent, given these inflationary times).

“Hollyhocks and Roses” was slotted for what Bob and I agreed would be a final Boho Zen EP (which I suggested we call “All’s Well That Zens Well”). The universe had other plans. We never got back in the studio. “All’s Well That Zens Well” exists only as a couple of demo CD-Rs. The track here is the demo as I got it back from Bob with his percussion and vocal additions.

Even though I’d do some other things with the tune in a studio today (tightening up the front end of it, for one), I wanted to share it because of the amazing backing vocal treatment Bob gave the song’s bridge at about 2:57 into the track:

Roses fill your arms

And then I

Hold you in the sun;

Daisies know

What love is

Pick the petals one by one

For my money, Bob elevates the track with that incandescent bridge vocal. It nails the “Flowers of Guatemala” vibe I had in my head.

But the strangest, most psychic bit about that is, I am quite certain that I never once mentioned the R.E.M. thing I was hearing when I handed Bob my rough tracks for his input.

Zen?