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"Wild tales of a long, strange trip come true."

In June 2006, Greensboro singer-songwriter Andy Oglesby took a break from his hard-fought battle against lung cancer to record his final song.

His once-smooth voice cracked as he sang, and he barely had the energy to play his guitar, but he pushed himself to finish.

Three weeks later, at age 51, he passed away.

"The song was literally his last breaths," says Katy Adams, Oglesby's friend and bandmate.

What Oglesby left behind from that recording session was his masterpiece, "(Take Me Back to) Dillard Street," an eight-minute epic any folk singer would be proud to have written. Every line represents a compressed nugget from Oglesby's personal history.

During the song, he reminisces about local hangouts such as Beef Burger and playing music all night with his friends. Part musical autobiography, part ode to the friends and places in Greensboro that he loved so well, "Dillard Street" appears on "Words to Burn," the newest album by the Near Myths, one of the bands Oglesby created with five friends. The CD was independently released early this year.

Oglesby was never a full-time musician. His early years in the Greensboro music scene didn't lead to a recording contract or lots of fans. But music was always important to him, and at the dusk of his life, he put everything he had into the creation of a touching musical farewell.

"Pocket full of nothing but guitar picks."

For the members of Oglesby's family, his career as a musician began with an act of rebellion.

A self-taught guitar player and pianist, Oglesby was a broke history major at UNCG. In 1976, he moved into a low-rent apartment at Dillard and Lee streets, grew his hair long and soon dropped out of college so he could continue playing music with his friends at night.

"Mom and Dad wouldn't tolerate that kind of stuff and pretty much said, 'Straighten up, or we don't want to see you,'" says Leslie Pipan, Oglesby's sister. "And there was a good number of years where he wasn't in our life as a family."

The only member of Oglesby's family who would associate with him during his bohemian heyday was Spotter, a small black and white dog that Oglesby took everywhere, including the shows he performed with local musician Bruce Piephoff.

"I remember one time when Spotter went and took a leak on stage," Piephoff says. "He (Spotter) would always upstage us because he would sit there and do whatever he wanted to do."

Oglesby would frequently host get-togethers for his tight circle of friends at his apartment on Dillard Street. Several people from the group formed his first band, Rough Mix, which  included Adams, as well as fellow guitar player and poet Jim Clark.

"I did well in graduate school, made good grades, but I didn't let that stop me from having a blast," Clark says. "There was great music everywhere on Tate Street and any number of great fun things to do."

"No hard feelings, just say, 'Thanks.'"

Rough Mix would not last forever. Most of its members, including Clark, graduated and moved to different cities.

Maybe it was because he realized that he was getting older, but Oglesby moved on, too. He traded the guitar-slinging days of his youth for a full-time job selling pipes for WaterPro.

"Andy always loved music, but I don't think he had any intention of doing it full time," Piephoff says.

Having decided finally to "straighten up" his life, Oglesby also repaired the rift between himself and his family.

"Everybody was thrilled when he came back. We were just thrilled," Pipan says. "It was almost like the prodigal son."

Oglesby married his wife, Julie, whom he had met while attending Grimsley High School, and helped raise her two sons from a previous marriage. He also got a mortgage and became involved in his stepson's Boy Scout troop.

"He pretty much transitioned out of that bohemian lifestyle to a more suburban kind of life," Piephoff says. "For about 20 years, he wasn't really playing."

"New Myths revealed."

Oglesby stayed in contact with the former members of Rough Mix. When his stepsons were old enough to move out of the house, he helped his band reunite with several of Clark's friends under the name the Near Myths.

The reunion would not be conventional.

For starters, some of its members didn't live in the same state or country, let alone the same city. Besides Oglesby, Adams was the only other original member who lived in Greensboro. Clark, an English professor at Barton College, now lives in Wilson, Terry "Teep" Williams lives in Knoxville, Tenn., and Ben and Bernadette Greene live in Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

"We had to take days off from work and drive for hours just to play for 40 minutes," Adams says.

Despite the distance between their homes, they seemed more ambitious this go-around. Together, they released "Wilson," a loose collection of songs they recorded in the studio at Barton College.

"Left behind some words to burn."

When Oglesby complained of a sore throat in the spring of 2005, the people who knew him thought he merely suffered from a virus that was going around at the time. Oglesby knew it was something different.

"It was first diagnosed as throat cancer, but very quickly, they found spots on his lungs, so it was really lung cancer," Clark says.

The diagnosis was painfully ironic because Oglesby had stopped smoking long ago.

"He thought he had caught it early," Adams says. "He kept after it and kept after it because he thought there was always an amount of hope that it was not going to be fatal until the last five or six weeks."

During his year-long fight with cancer, Oglesby also dove into his music. He pushed his band to buy a P.A. system so they could go on tour and began working on a new song titled "(Take Me Back to) Dillard Street."

At first, Oglesby's bandmates were slightly bewildered by the song's eight-minute running length.

"I guess one of the things that really hit us the first time was, 'Wow, this is a long song, this is a really, really long song,' " Clark says. "But there's precedent for that, and even Neil Young had an autobiographical song on his 'On the Beach' album called 'Ambulance Blues' that's like about nine minutes long."

With "Dillard Street," Oglesby accomplished more than just a musical autobiography. He also captured the spirit of Greensboro. As with most college towns, Greensboro is like a revolving door. People and local businesses come and go.

The theme of impermanence especially rings true now that Oglesby, one of the few members from his circle of friends who stayed in Greensboro, ultimately had to leave it, too.

"He included all of us and all our times together that we shared, so really we thought the song was us." Adams says. "I was just amazed that he could put that together. It seemed very simple, but the more I listened to it, the more complex I realized the song was."

The week before Oglesby would record "(Take Me Back to) Dillard Street," he played his final live show outside of the former Coffee and Cream House on Alamance Church Road in Greensboro.

He had bought himself a new guitar, a real pretty Martin acoustic guitar, and he was so glad to be able to play that," Clark says. "We had to shorten the first set by several songs, and we obviously couldn't do a second set."

In a way, the show brought the members of Oglesby's family, as well the many friends he had made while living on Dillard Street, together for the first time.

For Oglesby's sister, the concert was a revelation.

"The event was so powerful to begin with,because it made us realize that Andy had a really good life and an exciting life," Pipan says. "It was a good life for him that we didn't know a lot about, but he had so many friends that loved him for a long time, and that was good to know."

"Take these things away ..."

Multiple chemotherapy and radiation treatments left Oglesby gaunt and unable to walk without a cane. But he joined his band in Wilson to record the vocal and guitar parts for "(Take Me Back to) Dillard Street."

"It was kind of a long, hard recording session," Clark says. "Not awful, but he had to stop and start over a lot and just had trouble keeping everything going on a song that long."

Oglesby would never live to hear the completed version of his song.

The Near Myths had to finish recording and mixing it without him.

"When we got to the studio three weeks later and played the tape of Andy and his guitar, it was really kind of hard to deal with," Clark says. "But we knew that up until the very end, that until he couldn't concentrate on anything else, he was looking forward to having the song finished, and we knew that that's what he would want."

"I became fond of the expression, 'What would Andy think?'" Adams says. "This was his song, so we tried hard to think about how he would want it to sound."

And in the end, the collaboration of the Near Myths and Oglesby's spirit paid off. "(Take Me Back to) Dillard Street" is the most polished song on the album "Words to Burn."

"It's a great song," Clark says,  "and Andy just put in everything he had left."

"It's just such a great song," Pipan says. "I think it's so poignant when you hear it, whether you know him or not."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com

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