When a stick to the eye seems merciful

The SUN IS DOWN. THE DINNER DISHES ARE SOAKING BY a picnic bench, and in the fire ring, half a dozen thick logs are fully engaged. The children are arranging their beach pebbles, wrestling in the dry sycamore leaves that cover the floor of the canyon, poking each other with hot sticks.

We big people are scattered around the fire, sipping and sagging. It’s time to either bring out the guitars or start arguing politics and religion.

Guitars. Thank you, Lord.

“There’s something about sitting on a giant log that makes people want to sing,” my friend R.J. Robinson likes to say. “It’s as necessary as s’mores.”

It’s a comfort, knowing that while electronic amusements control the indoor world, unplugged fun still stands a chance out in the land beyond electrical outlets. For those of us who lug our instruments along with that in mind, making fireside noise is an outdoor ritual that ranks with staring at stars. We, the campfire performers of America, treasure these moments.

Unfortunately, we, the campfire performers of America, frequently stink. And we often persist into the wee hours, risking the scorn of our neighbors and the wrath of rangers. And no matter when we quit or how we sound, we dive without hesitation into songs that we’d never touch in the cold, sober light of indoors. Songs we would not tolerate on the radio. Beach reading with chords.

“Puff the Magic Dragon” on the sands of Bolsa Chica. “American Pie” under the moon at Joshua Tree. “Man of Constant Sorrow” at a San Diego bonfire. The first song I learned, a three-chord John Prine coal-mining waltz called “Paradise,” I perfected with my long-suffering friend Rick on a five-week ramble through Washington, British Columbia and Idaho. That was 1986. Do I own a recording of “Paradise?” Nah. But around a fire, under tall trees, it still seems right.

As does “Hey Jude” in Big Sur or “De Colores” on a Mexican beach. (I draw the line at “Horse With No Name.” Anywhere.)

Churchy songs, camp songs, songs of implausible innocence, startling patriotism, superseding silliness -- an army of semiskilled adult strummers, hunched in flame-lighted bunches across the land, amid hovering insects and marshmallows on coat hangers, keeps them alive.

To explain this phenomenon, I yield the floor to professor Robinson. R.J., a 32-year-old writer and musician who lives in Hollywood, grew up near Muncie, Ind., one of five musical children in a family that owned a campground and presided nightly for three summers over its own fire ring. Since then, he’s played fire rings in Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, California, Arizona, Utah and throughout Europe while vagabonding with his wife, Anna.

The key, he says, is that a campfire music session isn’t really a matter of one or two people performing for the rest, even if it looks that way.

“Everybody wants to be involved, and everybody has their campfire songs, a lot of them from childhood,” he says. “What’s that one about seven brides? And something about seven kids? I don’t know. But if you want to get everyone involved, cheesy songs are the ones people know.”

And you can’t be certain who’s going to know what. A few years ago, in the Sumava Forest of the Czech Republic, R.J. started playing “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” -- to the shock of his Czech friends. How, they demanded, had an American learned such a beloved old Czech melody? Then they traded verses, alternating Czech and English.

“She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” of course, is so old and weathered that it no longer creaks. But it’s the endurance of the other, lesser stuff that’s worthy of a graduate thesis at some college with low standards. In a single summer night around our nation’s campfires, I am sure, more creaky, unfashionable and just plain rotten songs get plucked and hollered than are aired in a year of living-room music making.

Sure, I’m ready to argue about what makes a song rotten or creaky. “Horse With No Name” is rotten. “The Sound of Silence” is creaky. “Dust in the Wind” is rotten. “Lucky Man” is creaky. R.J. proposes legislation to ban all campfire attempts at “Kumbaya” or “American Pie.” But he’s wrong about “American Pie.” It may be creaky, but it’s irresistible.

Now come back with me to the canyon full of sycamores. The surf booms in the distance. Our buddy Bob pulls out his steel-stringed Takamine. And when he eases into an old Dylan tune called “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” we seem to be starting on a respectable note. But who knows all those lyrics? Not Bob. Not us.

Mary Frances and I counter with a few light-hearted tunes about migrant laborers, dead prostitutes and unhappy housewives in fly-ridden kitchens. But now what? What lyrics do we know? Can we hit the notes? Might this distract the children from those pointy sticks?

The truth is that campfire songs are like prime-time television and presidential campaigns: Once the lowest common denominator is found, the game is over. The consolation is that in the fresh air, with bellies full and flames dancing, the pandering goes down easier.

And so we wind up as we are on this night, in the canyon full of sycamores. With the moon hanging high over a jagged ridge, we stumble upon a surprise compromise in the songbook, lean together over chords and lyrics, and belt out those timeless righteous words that some people may recall as the anthem of that timeless, righteous film, “Billy Jack.”

Go ahead and hate your neighbor / Go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of Heaven, / You can justify it in the end.

There won’t be any trumpets blowing, / Come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after [ooh] / One tin soldier rides away

Now, pray the children don’t come at us with those hot sticks.

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To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.