About [17] Roll Away

Words and Music by Monty Dicksion

Newly Re-recorded February – March 2022



  Both the audio and the video recordings of this song took a lot of work, but this song also has a long history and a lot of background behind it.

  I first made up the rhythm guitar part in 1974, and I still play it exactly the same today as I did from the beginning.

  I always knew that this song needed some lyrics, but I hadn’t thought of any nor what the song was to be about for nearly 20 years later.  But I had the title right from the start because the words “roll away” just seemed to be a natural fit.

  It was right about the time that I made up this song that I started having these recurring dreams.  The dreams didn’t happen all that often, but often enough so that I’d wake up and think, “How strange that I had another one of those dreams!”

  The dreams varied, and yet they were similar.  I found myself somewhere, on my way going somewhere.  Sometimes I was walking, but usually I was driving.  At the beginning of the dreams, I always knew exactly where it was that I came from, and I was trying to get back.  But with every turn I’d take, I just got more and more lost.

  The dreams weren’t scary, it was just strange that I had such similar dreams so often, and I continued having these kinds of dreams for almost 20 years.

  That brings me to 1991-1992.  I made a recording of Roll Away using my 4-channel Tascam reel-to-reel tape recorder.  But the recording wasn’t very good (my fault, not the machine's).  Nor was I happy with the lyrics, so I never did anything with that recording.  But the lead guitar part that I made up was about 90% the very same lead that I played in my new recording.

  It was at that time (1991-1992) that I saw the movie version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, by Ernest Hemmingway.  At the core of the story is a riddle, which Hemingway put right at the beginning of the story –

“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngaje Ngbi’, the House of God. Close to its summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”

 

  The main character, at the very beginning of the story, is in Africa, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  He is dying, from an incurable disease, if I recall correctly, and he begins to reflect on his life.  He had been a colorful, adventurous person, and now he was thinking about it all.

  And as he lay there thinking about his life, he looked up at Mt. Kilimanjaro, and suddenly he knew the answer to the riddle:  The reason the leopard was way up there was because he had gotten lost; he had strayed; he had lost his way.

  When I saw that, I thought to myself, “That’s it!”  That’s what those dreams were about.  And that was what my song Roll Away needed to be about.  So I tried putting together some lyrics to say that, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I came up with.

  It was then some 30 years later, in preparation for doing this song for my As Live As I Can Make It project, that I began to work in earnest on the lyrics for this song.  It took me about 2 months – from December 2021 to January 2022 – to come up with lyrics that I was happy with.

  Although I hadn’t planned it this way when I started this project, Roll Away could very well be the theme song for this project.  The lyrics of this song are about single-mindedness and perseverance.