The Guitarist in the Best Band in Winona
by Kevin Fenton
When I met my friend Gary Mahaffey, he was an optimistic face in an entropic place—a kid with a smile smart enough to become a smirk, up for sledding or football or whatever else was going on.
I was ten. After my dad’s health failed, my family moved from our farm one town west to a house that had seen better centuries, with a vestigial barn and disused latrine, set above a backwater of the Mississippi River about 120 miles south of Minneapolis.
Our previous neighbors were farmers. Our new neighbors, if they claimed any shared identity, were river people. One smoked carp and red horse. Another trapped muskrat. Though the new place was only a few miles from our old one, it felt like more. In my melodramatic ten-year-old way, I felt like my life had ended and I was starting over again.
Still, there were bright spots— most importantly, the neighborhood kids. The rest of Denzer Road was filled with recently built, modest homes, and many of them were filled with young families.
My new buddies were among the last of the free-range children. Six boys within two years of each other, all piloting our bikes from one end of the road to the other. Gary was one of the boys. We were all one of the boys—relentlessly organizing ourselves into packs, clubs, and teams. We didn’t value personality but our personalities still emerged. I was an organizer. Jeff was stolid; Greg, quiet; Tom, angry; and Bill, wild. As for Gary, he was jaunty, occasionally ironic— as much as an eleven-year-old is capable of irony— bemused with baseball’s incessant waiting, not ambitious in Boy Scouts nor charmed by the local woods. He thrived in the tussling of basketball and football and played the latter into early high school.
Even our fears were boyish. If I was down at Gary’s or Jeff’s on a summer evening, and stayed too late, I pedaled like Ichabod Crane on a sting ray, through a houseless stretch where the wooded hill pressed against the road and the darkness incubated dangers. I never feared abuse from adults, though I learned that some friends did, and even though my family had lost our farm, I never worried about shelter, clothing, food, or school supplies. I think Gary felt much the same.
Being kids like us in the 60s was paradisical. We experienced the joy of the thrown or batted ball, of running just for the hell of it, of rushing down hills on sleds, of propelling across ice on skates, of collecting and board games and secret clubs, of watching sitcoms on TV and listening to Minnesota Twins games on a transistor radio. We enjoyed summers spent pedaling bikes through the warm air, playing backyard baseball with no adult supervision, hiking the nearby hills, or exploring along the river.
Our families were on the working-class edge of the middle class and the rural edge of the suburban. But we shared the time’s optimism. We were American boys in 1969. We’d just landed on the goddamn moon. We didn’t think about the future, but we did intuit it: living lives similar to those our parents lived or possibly slightly better ones.
*
In junior high, the guys stopped hanging out as a pack. I stayed on good terms with everyone but I only stayed friends with Gary. Friendship became less about play and more about the first awkward steps toward our adult selves—the self defined by what you do and who you love. Gary introduced me to Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath and talked about how he wanted to play in a band someday. When I was too afraid of my stutter to call a crush, he called her on my behalf. My dad’s health continued to deteriorate and, when I was in eighth grade, he died. When I processed down the church aisle, after his funeral, Gary stood at attention with the rest of my troop, a ritual formality which gave me permission to sag and sob.
*
That next New Year’s Eve, Gary and I stayed up late with my Mom. We played board games and cards, watched the television shows ringing in 1973, and devoured chips and pop at our dining room table. The windows reflected our bright blurry ghosts back at us and multiplied the light from a Sears-Roebuck chandelier. It was a dorky evening but I remember it joyfully. These were the last days of boyhood for us, in that we both wanted to be here, drinking ginger ale and eating Funyuns, playing 500 rummy or Aggravation with my Mom.
*
With my siblings launched and my dad gone, Mom and I moved into the nearby town of Winona at the end of 9th grade. Mom worked night shifts, so I came home to an empty house. Wanting to connect me back to my boyhood life, and fill a few of the empty hours I was facing, she hired Gary to vacuum our house once a week after school. He took the job seriously and did it cheerfully.
*
True to his ambition, Gary formed a band with our friend Bill Jonsgaard, who’d been drumming since grade school. They played “Walk Away” by the James Gang, “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman Turner Overdrive, and, of course, “Smoke on the Water.” They even played a few songs I’d written lyrics for— perhaps the only lyrics ever influenced by Bachman Turner Overdrive. One spring night, they played in Bill’s garage and maybe forty people coalesced there, including some Winona State baseball players still in uniform. The band would go on to play local school dances and YMCA fun nights but I think that spontaneous, serendipitous summer evening was the highlight of their teenage careers.
*
Our friendship looked like a lot of teenage male friendships in the 70s— we loved being young men with poorly developed executive functions. When cops spotted us walking with twelve packs, we raced through yards, seeding the lawns with Miller High Lites, and vaulted a high wooden fence. The least athletic, I pulled myself over with sheer adrenalin, knowing, even as it happened, that we would talk about it for years. Man, I didn’t think Kevin was going to make it. Driving around one night, Bill Jonsgaard peered down the railroad tracks, saw no train, and accelerated along the tracks to the next street, juddering over ties, making the world our amusement park ride.
We partied— we drank and we smoked the weak weedy dope of the time, often in boathouses, sometimes at keggers. An anthropologist visiting those parties would be surprised at how bovine we were: adolescent creatures standing anxiously in fields. We drank beer and talked, usually with each other, less frequently than we hoped for with girls.
I am convinced that all drinking has a spiritual aspect, though sometimes you have to search pretty hard to find it. Drinking induces—and excuses—a connection which our sober selves fear. Partying was how people who don’t do transcendence do transcendence.
We bullshitted meaning we talked about God and his apparent truancy, about girls and their actual elusiveness and about music.
Music was accessible and we were passionate about it. Normally laid back, fifteen-year-old Gary complained of the misheard lyrics of “Smoke on the Water.” Kids walk around school, singing ‘we all came out to Montreal.’ It’s not Montreal. It’s Montreux. Whenever anyone talked about music, he listened, with an intensity that made him correct misheard lyrics. Years later, Gary introduced me to his girlfriend, saying, “This is a guy who was into Springsteen in 1975, back when nobody else in Winona had even heard of him.” He meant this as a high character reference.
We looked ridiculous but our souls felt serious, as souls always do. We called our comic groping toward transcendence “partying.” We called our confused groping toward philosophy “bullshitting.” We called each other “dude.” It meant friend.
*
One summer night, while Mom was on a rare vacation, I planned a party with my friend Neal Nixon. We brought in Gary as a third partner. The idea was to play our twenty-five favorite albums, a narrow slice of music history that, with the exception of a few nods to the blues, ran from the Beatles to Steely Dan.
It did not go as planned. The party started in late afternoon and, by eight, I blacked out. When I woke up the next morning, I was as hungover as I’ve ever been, pasted to the couch for hours. The place had been trashed, largely by guys we didn’t know well: eggs splattered across the kitchen floor, Elton John records shot with a BB gun, smoke bombs set off in my bedroom. One of us, frustrated at not getting laid, had punched out a pane in the window on our kitchen door.
Gary, Neal, and a few others got to work, leaving me to recover on the couch. They cleaned the kitchen with a shovel. They picked up. They vacuumed. They mopped. They went to the hardware store and replaced and recaulked the shattered windowpane. They made lunch. Their efforts weren’t entirely successful. The window caulk was the wrong color. When my mom returned that night, she knew there had been a party. But she never suspected the extent of the damage, because my friends had stepped up.
*
One Saturday night home from college, I’d attended a considerably more sedate party but returned home before eleven because Gary was stopping by after work. The party I’d attended had been at a high school friend’s, our class valedictorian, the daughter of a lawyer and granddaughter of a judge, home from Williams College. I’d talked to other friends, home from Carleton and Harvard.
As we opened beers at my mom’s kitchen table, Gary broached a subject that we’d never discussed. He said, matter of factly, “We belong to two different classes. You’re a part of the manager class. I’m a part of the working class.” He wasn’t diminishing or dismissing our friendship. He was just being incisive about its setting.
After becoming certified as a machinist, Gary found a job at a company called Watlow which, according to its website, provides “best in class engineering expertise and leading thermal products” . " Its products include heaters, sensors, and controllers. Creating molds for these semi-customized industrial heaters does not strike me as easy or boring or trivial work. What he did for a living mattered at least as much as what I did for a living— I studied law but then worked in advertising. A 2009 notice in the Winona Daily News honoring long-term employees reported that he had worked there for twenty nine years.
*
After college I entered law school. After living with a woman for some months, Gary got married. I was a groomsman in their wedding. A few months later, when I returned to Winona, he was divorced. It ended— in his telling— when his wife, a quiet woman he’d lived with for months, realized this is it, this is how I am spending my life—on this couch, with this man, and I don’t want that.
*
Sometime after his divorce, he met someone—a fearless, fun, and decent woman who Neal and I thought was great for him. They married and had a daughter.
*
Then one day, Gary—uncharacteristically close to tears—called and asked if he could drive up to the Cities. He arrived angry and baffled. He was, once again, losing his wife and, this time, his daughter. There must have been a reason why this marriage was ending, but he either couldn’t see it or didn’t want to talk about it.
He insisted we find something livelier than the dowdy, divey bars I was hiding in at the time. He had always been a man that women liked; he inspired electric, playful flirtations that I envied. Sensing what he needed, we walked up to the Union Bar, a good blues place. We didn’t find what we were looking for there, either. The affirmation he sought required a certain lightness of the soul.
*
After that, I saw him less frequently, only stopping in when I was in Winona to see my mom. Despite our seemingly divergent paths, Gary and I had a great deal in common. We’d both been recently rejected. We drank in a dark, propulsive way that no one could euphemize as partying. We had jobs, but little money. We lived in rented places that teetered between mess and squalor.
But we no longer talked easily. The things we shared were too caked in shame. Still, we carried the best versions of each other around with us.
*
In 1995, I learned that Gary and his band, Cold Rolled Steel, were playing in Winona. Neal and I attended with our wives.
We entered in a haze of smoke and found a table while the band combusted a ZZ Top cover. When the song ended, Bill Jonsgaard, now a bearded dynamo in a leather vest, pointed his drumsticks at me and yelled, “Kevin Fenton! Gary, it’s Kevin Fenton.” Gary’s face lit up. I don’t think I’ve ever been so welcomed so enthusiastically anywhere.
People pivoted toward us. Gary, still smiling, yelled, “Kevin, how you doing? And is that that dog Neal Nixon?” My wife was complimented. I was complimented. Gary told the crowd about the hell he used to raise with this thirty-five-year-old man in a Brooks Brothers shirt who’d just ordered a Diet Coke.
Gary was a happy man, the king of Friday night. Neal and I couldn’t get over how much he’d improved as a guitarist. A few more songs confirmed our good opinion. The music was designed to be played in a bar, on a Friday night; it made the weekend a little more like a weekend—faster, louder, funner, sexier, boozier.
Later, as we drove home to Saint Paul, my wife said, “There are worse lives than being the guitarist in the best band in Winona.”
*
Sometime after 2010, I received an invitation to follow Gary’s page on ReVerb Nation, a site where songwriters share their work. There I found five songs and pictures of an aged Gary. His status said, with the humor familiar from the boy I knew on Denzer Road: “I'm number one on the ReverbNation Singer Songwriter charts for Minnesota City, MN.” The population of Minnesota City is 240.
He didn’t need to be self-deprecating—the music was driving, complex blues rock. I never got around to telling him how good it was.
*
In early 2018, I heard My Morning Jacket, a Tennessee-inflected guitar band, and thought: “Gary would like these guys.” I made a mental note to contact him, but never got around to doing that, either.
*
That August, I checked Facebook in the cursory, compulsive way I usually check Facebook. A picture stopped my scrolling: a happy picture of Gary: a full head of hair; a Bob Seger beard; large, tinted glasses; a white shirt and leather vest. He held a red guitar and pointed a finger gun at the photographer. His look was a little seventies, but he rocked it.
It wasn’t a happy caption. R.I.P. Gary Mahaffey, Mr Cold Rolled Steel, Gary MaHockey . . . God Bless You!
Beneath his photo, Facebook reduced grief to emojis. Facebook added up the comments, and that quantification seemed even more vulgar than it usually seems. I can’t remember how many there were.
Many commenters were baffled. No one else was mentioned—no significant other, no partner, no children.
By the time I screen-shotted the page a week later, there were fifty five reactions and forty five comments, few more than a couple of words. But a portrait emerged. You could tell Gary had been in a band in Winona, that the band was good, that many of those who were acknowledging his death hadn’t seen him in a while, and that even those who knew him well were surprised at his death.
That Facebook post was as close to a funeral as Gary would get, at least as far as his friends were concerned. Given everything I knew about his family— kind, dependable people who liked a party— I expected a better send off. Something must have happened to Gary. Something that causes good people to change the designation “private funeral” to “family-only private funeral,” when you ask if you can attend. His obituary said, in its entirety:
Gary V. Mahaffey, age 57, of Winona, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, August 5, 2018, at his home.
When I shared my condolences on his brother Denny’s Facebook page, he didn’t respond. He didn’t respond to any of the condolences posted.
I poked around Facebook. His second ex-wife accepted my friend request. No mention of his death. A young woman who was the right age to be his daughter showed up in her pictures, but Gary did not. I sent friend requests to the person who posted the news of his death and to Bill Jonsgaard. No response. I asked my friend Dave Hultgren who, as a bowling alley manager, knew pretty much everyone, if he had heard anything. He knew only that Gary had been depressed for a couple of years.
*
For a small processing fee, the Minnesota Department of Health would provide me with a non-certified record of death. I planned to get one. It persisted on the bottom of my to do list for weeks until I deleted it. Like everyone else, I didn’t really want to think about Gary’s death.
Acquiring the death certificate stayed on my shadow to-do list, in that place where tasks become regrets. In the fall of 2021, I found the necessary form, completed it, and mailed in my request.
*
On a sunny October afternoon, as I was leaving to pick up a Target order, I checked the mail. In it, there was a thin envelope from the Minnesota Department of Health. Inside the envelope was a non-certified record of death.
I searched the form to find the cause of death: Multiple Drug Toxicity (Fentanyl, Methadone, Methamphetamine, Mirtazapine, and Carboxy-THC). It was designated “accidental.” I didn’t recognize “mirtazapine.” When I got home, I learned it was an anti-depressant, although not one of the more common ones. It’s possible that other anti-depressants had failed. He died on August 5, 2018, at 10 in the evening.
When I emerged from our building, the afternoon sunlight shone brilliantly, the sky was perfect blue, and I disturbed brown and gold leaves as I walked. In my car, the reality of his death hit me again, and harder. The movement of my Subaru Forester down St. Paul streets was elegiac. I mouthed, Dude, you deserved better.
Waiting for my groceries at Target, I looked at the document again. His sister Marie had reported his death to the authorities. He had died at his “residence” which the document listed in Winona, less than a mile from my teenage home. His listed occupation was “laborer,” and I thought, no that’s wrong, he was a trained and skilled machinist.
I pieced this picture together: He died alone, on a Sunday, at the age of fifty seven. “Accident”, the form reported. I don’t think the form was wrong but the category may have been inadequate. He took fentanyl and methamphetamine, which are the drugs of someone locked into addiction. But he also took the anti-depressant mirtazapine and the heroin replacement methadone. These are the drugs of someone trying to get better.
At the time of Gary’s death, I hadn’t had a drink for almost three decades. The recovering alcoholic knows two things, above and beyond the contingency of his own recovery:
1) He cannot save anyone who does not want to recover
2) He has a responsibility to let those who still suffer know that he has recovered, that it is possible, and that he will accompany them if they wish to make that journey.
I mentioned briefly that I was sober, in a call before we attended his show in 1995, but that was it. By not establishing any connection other than a single Facebook message for twenty three years, I failed my friend.
*
My reluctance to act— to wait years to even ask for the death certificate— helped me understand his family’s reluctance to respond. In trying to write about Gary, I felt something I’ve never felt before when writing— a sadness that verged on nausea. I recognize this feeling, though. Maybe this bad feeling came from realizing that having no real conversations for years isn't friendship at all. I didn’t kill my friend. But I was a part of the reason he died alone.
Gary was my brother. When I needed family, he and Neal stepped up. We talked about who we wanted to be and who we wanted to love. We drank and smoked dope because, besides making us stupid, it freed our stifled, hurting spirits. When I was too sick to move, and the house was filled with broken eggs and shattered glass, they cleaned up.
Gary was an artist. His ReVerb account made it clear that he’d studied the blues. But I think he had an even deeper affinity with the urban bluesmen of the 50s, especially Howling Wolf and his great bands with Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin. In Howling Wolf’s world, if you were lucky enough to have a dangerous job at a steel mill or a tedious one at a factory, it exhausted you. Your life was a relentless series of humiliations and aggressions, both micro and otherwise. Money was tight. Police were everywhere. By Friday night, you wanted to drink and dance and listen to hard driving electric music. You wanted music that acknowledged your pain but transformed it into a rough joy. Listen to a song like “Mr Highwayman,” where the singer fears the patrol car parked on the side of the road but also exalts in the pleasures of driving fast— an exaltation underlined by fierce harmonica, amped-up piano, and slashing guitar fills.
Gary played for luckier people than Howling Wolf did but he knew that smoke-filled bars with small dance floors were an oasis in a world with less meaning and less hope than the world they knew as children. And the music he created could dissolve a week of frustration and exhaustion and boredom. If that’s not art, I don't know what the hell it is.
I won’t presume to write Gary’s official eulogy. There are too many years when I wasn’t there, and parts of his life I have no business writing about. But I can write this:
Gary V. Mahaffey, age 57, of Winona, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, August 5, 2018, at his home. He grew up outside of Minnesota City, near the Mississippi River. There, as one of the Denzer Road boys, he enjoyed a happy boyhood. He was a Cub Scout and Boy Scout and played Little League baseball. He attended Saint Stanislaus grade school where he played basketball and Cotter High School where he played football. In high school, he discovered his true calling, which was playing guitar in rock and roll bands.
As an adult, he worked as a machinist, crafting precision parts for the Watlow Company, and continued to improve his musical craft. As a member of Cold Rolled Steel, and with his friend Bill Jonsgaard, he created hard-driving rock and roll for many of his fellow Winonans. Friday and Saturday night were a little more fun because of him.
He was a good friend to men, a charming companion to women, and a cherished brother, uncle, and son.
He died a death of despair. But he did not live a life of despair.
Runner-up of the 2026 Online Nonfiction Contest
Judged by Joel Whitney
"The Guitarist in the Best Band in Winona" is a heartfelt and powerful tribute essay turned obituary-of-extraordinary-length. Without flinching, the essay's bittersweet note comes through its tribute to childhood friendships across class boundaries and the American maladies of depression, hyper-individualism, addiction and shrinking opportunities.
