After the Rain, a Night for Love Songs

It was one of those nights after the rain, when the evening slumbered in a stillness that casts spells. There wasn’t even a breeze.

You know the kind of night I’m talking about. There’s a softness to it that lingers on the memory like perfume in a woman’s hair, taking you back to other places and other times. It’s the perfect night for a love song.

I realize this kind of dreamy attitude toward music probably dates me, because there’s no cacophony to the tunes I’m talking about, no hip-hop monotony, no heavy percussion going on. But if it dates me, it also dates the singer I’m talking about.

His name is Mark Humphreys. He’s a big, shaggy guy of 41 who gave up boozing to write songs and play a guitar at coffeehouses and small nightclubs from here to Tallahassee.

I saw him in the center of a stillness called Ventura Boulevard where Studio City and Sherman Oaks overlap. He was playing at Lulu’s Beehive, a place about the size of Aaron Spelling’s kitchen, with a counter, some wooden tables and a postage-stamp stage.

Lulu’s reminded me of the kinds of coffeehouses that used to abound in the ‘50s, where guys like Humphreys got up and played or read their own poetry and then disappeared into the night, like the lights of a passing car.

*

Humphreys was born in Los Angeles and is one of its quintessential sons. He wanted to be an actor first and then got hooked on music, formed his own band, drank too much, gave up the band, sobered up, wandered, fell in and out of love, got a job and here he is.

He had his last drink in ’89 and supports himself at home and on the road as a paralegal, hauling his guitar and a laptop computer to cities like Baton Rouge and Mobile and Shreveport and Colchester. Right now he’s probably at a Motel 6 in Marietta, Ga., playing at a place like Lulu’s where you can get a ham sandwich and a cappuccino for under $10.

Humphreys has been after me like forever to hear his songs or listen to his story, which has more twists and turns than a mountain road. He became a musician, for instance, when a friend showed him how to pick out a single chord on a guitar. It resonated in his soul. Still does.

“It was an epiphany,” he told me that night at Lulu’s. “I rented a piano, bought a book about chords and taught myself how to write songs.”

He’s been playing clubs and coffeehouses ever since and later formed his own record company, Trough. He produces CDs in the garage of his rented Sierra Madre home, mostly of him singing and playing his own tunes.

“Every dime I get goes toward what I’m doing,” he said, talking about his national tours. The one he’s on now will last four months. “I have no money and no savings. I must be nuts.”

*

There’s a kind of folk singer’s sweetness to his voice that works with the love songs he was singing that soft and stilly night. He took to the stage in jeans and a plaid shirt and sang like a guy with tears in his eyes about the last time he kissed a woman named Jane.

When our days were speed and light/We never had the chance to see/All the ways a face can hide/Such lonely company.

As with all good folk singers, Humphreys’ music tells stories, and when he sang about Jane, it was a tale told about love that came to an end, about laughter that became tears, about the night they said goodbye.

There were maybe a dozen or so people in Lulu’s. A couple of men played chess, others ate, a few listened. The applause was sporadic, like the uneven tapping of rain. I clapped like hell to fill in the silence. There are no standing ovations in a coffeehouse.

A lot of the songs were about the women he knew and the rainbows that emerged when the storms had passed. They were about love’s softness and its sadness. They were about beginnings and endings.

Humphreys is a born romantic, and I guess I am too. I’ve been married to the same woman for almost half a century and am still dazzled by the fluorescence of her; there’s still magic by moonlight.

So here’s to a love song at a place called Lulu’s when the stars were dark and the night as still as a sigh and L.A., for just a moment, was a city without noise at a time for lovers.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.