Two Step

LeRoi Moore played the saxophone line in the back half of “Two Step.” He died in 2008, from complications following an ATV accident. The song he helped build says one thing, over and over, for six minutes and twenty-seven seconds: life is short but sweet for certain.

Hold both of those facts at once. That is what the song asks you to do.

“Two Step” opened side two of Crash in April 1996, when the band was climbing from the Charlottesville bar scene to amphitheaters that held forty thousand people. Carter Beauford on drums. Stefan Lessard on bass. LeRoi Moore and Boyd Tinsley putting saxophone and violin into the spaces where a normal rock band would put a second guitar. Dave was twenty-eight. They had been playing together for four years, mostly in front of live audiences, and Crash was an attempt to get what happened in those rooms onto tape.

You can hear the four years. The song builds the way a band builds when it has played a thing a thousand times in front of people — they know where the ceiling is, and they know how long to wait before they go through it. Steve Lillywhite produced the record, but the architecture of “Two Step” is not a producer’s blueprint. It is six people who had spent enough time in rooms and vans and stages together that they breathed at the same time without deciding to.

About four minutes in, everything drops out except Tim Reynolds’s acoustic guitar and Dave’s voice. The song goes quiet in the middle of its own storm and stays there just long enough for you to hear what it has been saying the whole time.

“Celebrate we will, because life is short but sweet for certain.”

The line is simple. It is also exact. It does not ask you to pretend the shortness isn’t real. It asks you to hold the shortness in one hand and the sweetness in the other and celebrate anyway — not in spite of the weight, but carrying it. The title is doing the same work. Two things, moving together, neither one canceling the other out.

The jam-band label has done one consistent disservice to this song: it makes people hear the length as indulgence. Six and a half minutes. Extended passages where Carter Beauford does things on a hi-hat that a lesser drummer would not have found. It looks like showing off.

It isn’t. The length is load-bearing. The argument the song makes requires time, because you cannot arrive at celebrate we will without having been somewhere first. The storm has to happen before the quiet means anything. The long outro — Beauford and Lessard holding down something that sounds both frantic and inevitable, LeRoi stretching out the corners, Boyd at the very top of his range — is not the band noodling. It is the band finishing the sentence. This is the life. The noise and the chaos and the strange sad beauty of it. Celebrate this, right now, while you have it.

They played the song live more times than anyone has counted, and it was never the same twice. The version on Live at Red Rocks 8.15.95 and the festival recordings from that era have a looseness the studio take doesn’t quite reach. The studio take has something else: permanence. It is the version that outlasts the tour dates. A photograph of a river is not the river, but it is the thing you can hold.

Lillywhite mixed the record with enough room that every instrument stands as its own voice, and that matters here more than on most records, because the thing this band had was never Dave’s voice or Dave’s guitar, good as both are. It was ensemble. Five people becoming one thing. And LeRoi Moore’s saxophone in the back half of “Two Step” is stitched so deep into the song that I have tried to imagine the song without it and I can’t. Some absences make themselves known. His does, every time the song plays.

He recorded that line years before he died. He wasn’t playing it about himself. The song made it about him anyway, the way this song eventually makes its argument about everyone who hears it long enough — life is short, and the people inside the music are not exempt from what the music says.

So the song asks you to celebrate. To step into the one thing you love, pull your companion close, and move. Not because everything is fine. Because it isn’t, and you’re here anyway, and the band is playing, and time is going.

The saxophone is still there, in the back half, every time. He played the sweetness. The shortness came on its own.