In his music, Pearl’s life shines

Published: Wednesday, October 3, 2007 8:02 PM CDT
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Slain journalist’s friend plays his songs tonight,

8 p.m., Tommy’s

By Reilly Capps

On Lift 8 one morning, riding into the Telluride sky, Daniel Pearl started writing a song called “The Missing Part.”

“Never know what you miss / with the early whistle blowing / when it has gone away / never mind where they’re going.”

This was in 1994, while Pearl was stationed at the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. That day, staying at the house of his frat brother and songwriting partner Michael Tobin, the two wrote the rest of the song.

They weren’t sure what it meant. Something about being young and carefree, maybe.

They wrote songs about love, and about a demanding British girl named Lucinda who begged to have a song about her, and they sang them at the Steaming Bean during an open mic night, Tobin on his guitar and Pearl on his mandolin.

Pearl is gone now. In 2002, while tracking down a story in Pakistan, he was kidnapped and murdered by Muslim extremists.

But Tobin will play some of the songs they wrote together tonight at Tommy’s. Oct. 1 -15 are Daniel Pearl World Music Days, and Tobin’s will be one of hundreds of voices in 26 countries remembering the daring journalist who traveled to some of the world’s darkest places to show how the world lived, thought, and died. (Tobin likes the picture Pearl’s captors sent out where the handcuffed man seems to flip them the bird.)

“It was so hateful, so heinous,” Tobin says, standing on the deck of his Telluride house. “It touched people in a special place. You don’t even know him and you’re upset about it.”

But Daniel Pearl has come to stand for hope, clarity and tolerance, not death.

“He wasn’t this superstar he’s made out to be now,” Tobin says. “[But] they took a really good man … He was genuinely concerned about the state of the world.”

Tobin met Pearl at Stanford in 1982. Tobin was a human spark plug, with a bullhorn mouth that home teams love and umpires loathe. And Pearl was an adventurous but quiet person, a smart, skinny kid with a reporter’s slot at the local radio station KZSU, where Tobin was the sports reporter. What brought them together was their love of music.

They traveled to a music in Iceland. There, Tobin says, the forgetful Pearl mislaid his mandolin and violin. When it turned up later, Pearl got down on his knees and hugged his instruments like a long-lost child.

The somewhat clumsy Pearl wrote a funny song about knocking over the guitar of a girl he had hoped to score with.

“I met a pretty guitarist of the opposite gender / strumming my guitar and trying to send her / well she looked at me like I put her cat in the blender / well I’m really very sorry that I dented your Fender.”

Pearl could write about anything, from pharmaceutical fraud in India to currency speculation in Afghanistan to money laundering in Tanzania. But music was often how Pearl worked his way in to foreign cultures.

“Whenever he got somewhere new, he always sought out the music scene,” Tobin said. “He believed in music bridging the gap.”

Pearl wrote beautifully about Iran’s rock and roll revival, songs in Qatar that supposedly make you go blind, and Elvis’s head (all of which are collected in “At Home in the World,” published by Simon and Shuster.)

Tobin’s house — a canned-soup, keyboard-on-the-kitchen-table bachelor pad— is littered with memorabilia and letters from Pearl.

Here’s a worn postcard Pearl he scribbled while on an Ethiopian Airlines flight, addressed to “Michael Tobin, Colorado Street, Next to the empty lot, Telluride, USA.”

Here’re clips Pearl sent Tobin from the Indianapolis Star, one of his first jobs.

Here’s a picture of Pearl on main street with Asra Nomani, the women whose house he stayed at in Pakistan in 2002.

Here’s a picture of him getting up from a fall on the ski area.

Here’s a picture of him lounging, shirtless, at Gorrono's with a beer.

Here’s a headscarf Pearl brought him from Palestine. Tobin is still amazed that Pearl, who was Jewish, traveled to so many countries so full of anti-Semitism: Iran, the West Bank, Pakistan. (The final words his captors made him speak were, “My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish.”)

Tobin made it to Pearl’s wedding to his wife Mariane, and handled the ring during the ceremony. And when Pearl went to Pakistan to follow the story of shoe bomber Richard Reid, the story he wouldn’t live long enough to write, Pearl e-mailed to offer Tobin his Paris apartment. It was the last time Tobin heard from him.

“Don’t think I won’t be crying [tonight],” Tobin says. He fingers a photograph of his friend and songwriting partner. “It’s been tough. It’s taken me five years to let some of this out … I miss the guy terribly.”

And he misses Pearl’s mandolin. When Tobin sings the lines of “Missing Part,” the lines that seem to mean something different to him now, without a mandolin player and without Pearl’s voice, a very big part will be missing.

“Never seen a light so bright / Coming out of the blue / Was it a pact they made? / And were they foolish enough to follow through?”