After facing death, Wilmington lawyer turns to song
Make no mistake about it, Jeff Bove may be a musician, but the Wilmington patent attorney is still a lawyer at heart.
When The News Journal arrives for an interview, he frets about trademark infringement if the newspaper takes a photo of a drum set emblazoned with Deep Purple’s logo.
He is meticulously prepared for that chat with pages of handwritten notes scribbled across the big pages of his yellow legal pad like this is the case of his life.
STORY: Facing cloudy future, lawyer digs into past
STORY: At death’s door, he turned away
Which it is. The details of his own story are a tale of survival and sudden musical rediscovery.
In 2010, Bove came close to death as a rare disease slowly transformed his lung tissue from a healthy pink to thick, scarred and leathery.
He had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the same ailment that took the life of his father, former Delaware attorney general Januar Bove, when Bove was 39. More than 20 years later with Bove suffering from the same ailment, there was only one cure as he gasped to breathe while tied tight to his oxygen machine: a lung transplant.
Going down the stairs of his Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, home was a struggle, making him a prisoner while he continued to work daily for the now-dissolved intellectual property and business law firm Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz.
At the same time, he decided to undertake a task had been putting off – creating a four-disc box set of the music that he and his friends created in his Tatnall School days as ’60s Wilmington rock ‘n’ roll band Martha Lidd.
He dove into the project, using every bit of energy he could muster to re-master stacks of decades-old tapes.
“When he told me he was having a double lung transplant, I thought he was a goner. I thought that was a final measure,” says Smyrna-based musician and guitarist Tommy Alderson, a longtime Bove friend and collaborator. “But, Christ, he made it look easy.”
‘Still Resting from High School’
In July 2010, the call came and Bove was shuttled to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for an eight-hour operation. Six days after surgery, he was back home easily walking up and down the same stairs that had been such a challenge only a few nights before.
With another man’s lungs in his chest pushing oxygen into the red cells in his blood, the seven years since have been marked not only by his medical rebirth, but a return to one of his first loves – music.
He has completely recovered, feeling better now than before he became sick. He has suffered no significant side effects and lives life with no limitations or restrictions from his doctor, except for one. Bove has been told to avoid gardening for fear of breathing in large amounts of mold spores.
He has written more than 70 songs since then and has released three albums, including the new 24-track genre-hopping double album “Still Resting From High School” with generations of Delaware musicians pitching in as members of the band and singing leads.
Mastered by New York-based and Grammy Award-nominated mixing engineer Fab Dupont (Toots & the Maytalls, David Crosby, Shakira), “Still Resting” features a hand-picked band featuring everyone from Delaware guitar legend Alderson (ex-Johnny Neel Band) and fiddler David Poland (Betty & the Bullet) to youngsters like Still Moon’s Dan White and Universal Funk Order trumpeter Blayne Salerni. Former longtime Hotel DuPont Green Room harpist Janet Witman also plucks on a handful of songs.
But the most impressive effect of the album may be the one it has on Bove. When this buttoned-down attorney, seated in his studio, presses play on the album’s final song, “We the People,” he transforms.
His face lights up as the music washes over him, just as it did as he was fighting his disease. But now, his body joins the band. His head nods, his feet tap and his arms swing as he hits the air drums when the moment calls for it.
The same thing that nearly took him out of this world has thrown him back into the old one he used to inhabit — the one of a driven musician with nothing to lose.
“The songs just keep coming,” Bove says from behind his glasses, nattily dressed in khakis and a light button-down shirt covered with a dark blue Vineyard Vines sweater. “After going through what I went through, I know we aren’t guaranteed so many more years. These songs are coming out and there must be a reason, so I better get them all down quick.”
‘I’m playing with house money’
Gone is the long brown hair and matching beard from the ’60s that would have made him a perfect fit in The Band. It was his look back when he and his bandmates would practice in the Immanuel Church basement and his mother’s Westover Hills home, rattling her lamps upstairs. He is now clean-shaven with his gray hair corralled by a more conservative cut.
“I’ve had more fun in the last seven years — it’s just been great,” says Bove, who will turn 65 later this month and still practices law. He’s now working full-time for intellectual property firm RatnerPrestia housed in the Nemours Building in downtown Wilmington. “I figure I’m playing with house money.”
Before his illness, Bove was toiling in his office for 60 to 70 hours a week, helping run his law firm and fighting court cases with a lot on the line. He loved it, but there was no balance in his life. Writing and recording music had evaporated over time and totally left his life for nearly two decades.
But after an organ donor rescued him, his days in the studio from working on his legacy-filled Martha Lidd box set didn’t end. He couldn’t let them. The songs kept arriving, shooting like a fountain from his pen. Soon, he was writing more original songs than ever before.
When asked about the song “Refugee” from “Still Resting from High School,” he doesn’t immediately see how a listener could connect it to his health struggles and ultimate comeback. If the song is about his life-and-death battle, it’s news to him. He never really thought about it.
“I have too much to beat/Can’t face all the heat/Soon they’ll be nothing left for me to keep,” Dan White, 28, sings on “Refugee.” “So what’s the point of it all/I’m in a free fall/Into a valley where I feel so small.”
When the lyrics come up during an interview in the living room of his country home, surrounded by acres of preserved farmland, he says, “I don’t know where these songs are coming from. I don’t have anything specific in mind and I don’t write about myself, per se. They’re just comin’.”
If you’ve never seen Bove perform at a local club, the reason is simple — he rarely plays out, except for a random reunion gig like a recent one at The Kennett Flash with veteran Delaware honky-tonkers The Sin City Band.
And these new songs won’t be filling the air at a music venue anytime soon. With two jobs – lawyering and recording his music – there’s no time to rehearse with a band with an eye toward live performance. Instead, he’s working on yet another new album with Alderson, who performs locally with Tommy Alderson’s Group.
Alderson still marvels at how Bove calmly tackled his illness as if it were a legal case and then used the ailment that nearly took his life to push himself back into music.
“It blew my mind how he could stay that composed. I don’t know what to make of him sometimes — I really don’t,” adds Alderson, who has been touring the world for decade as guitar technician for Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse. “It’s a surreal thing to see. It was like I was watching someone getting ready to be buried and he has come back even stronger.
“He’s not supposed to be here, let alone kicking ass.”
Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).