Green Flash of Youth

Jesus H. why do these things happen? Especially begging the question, yes, sir, why do these things happen in places like a card store for the love of Pete? No, no, no it shouldn't be that way. Nope. Not a goddamn mass-produced sentiment like the ones I saw there while browsing and waiting on her. Her. The manifestation, the avatar if I may, of my memory of the past and guarded optimism about the future.

My daughter, the Wee Lass, Her Royal Cuteness was in search of a card for her mom. I was the Captain of the Guard, awaiting her Majesty's attention there in the stacks of the Hallmark store in Kansas City. The store is big, a stone's throw from the corporate HQ, and there were more cards than anyone could possibly use. I was idly scanning the stacks when it hit me.

An inner tsunami of nostalgia and grief for something gone. "Something is missing," I heard myself saying, "something has been lost," and I had trouble swallowing the lump in my throat. My heart flopped over in my chest. The screens behind my eyes rolled old, scratchy films of a childhood missing and youth faded away. Flickers, shadows, the laughter of my brother, the faces of my mom and dad when they were younger, too. My grandmother in the background with hand on hip and cigarette poised for another drag before that large laugh that made me feel like I had roots.

Laughter like that is all the more powerful because of its grounding in the understanding that life can be rough and brutal. The only way to survive is to learn to laugh, to break it down and let the water flow around the stones of our soul.

I blinked to clear my eyes but it did no good. I saw myself in the backyard chasing a Frisbee, flung like a skeet from the backhand of my Big Bro. The afternoon sun was gold tinged with silver splashed across the backdrop of that sweet cerulean sky we seemed to have more often when were young. Dinnertime was not far way. I had hunger in my belly. The kind of hunger that blooms from the blissfully ignorant discharge of energy we always thought was boundless, energy that is the province of children. This is a hunger I rarely feel, anymore. Adult hunger tends toward the satisfaction of the base desire to get calories in the belly and avoid starvation. It is a hunger that too often feeds Pragmatism instead of Delight.

The store lights seemed too bright there. Shaking my head seemed not to work. The imps of the perverse were not yet sated, their claws feather-light and sunk in deep. The sadness of loss threatened to carry me away, and those movies of what I used to have kept running. The images stained, faded and scratched with a soundtrack distorted by the reels slipping off their sprockets. I breathed deep, trying to gain some composure while feeling thoroughly ridiculous in all that air-conditioned comfort.

"Snap out of it, man. Thoughtful cards are no reason to bemoan the loss of the youth, the future you once thought was guaranteed," a scolding voice in my head. I am the man that I am, 'myself plus my circumstances' to borrow a phrase from Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset.

I am myself...plus my circumstances...this is inescapable. I am myself plus my losses plus my future, even though that is something I cannot know until it becomes the Now. To know this is to understand what the sequoias know, should they deign to speak to us (or we deign to listen).

I dropped my head in weariness. My daughter was a few aisles away, gleefully reading the cards and clutching what proved to be her final selection. Finally, my vision was clearing. I rubbed my eyes hurriedly to erase the bittersweet evidence of jadedness before she could see it to ask. She approached me on the bounce with a smile on her face. She held out the card for my inspection.

The sun was setting over the unsettled ocean of my mind. I was on the beach holding my breath, waiting and hoping for that split second flash of recovering my loss. Hope began to fade until my daughter's enthusiasm and glee spilled over into the atmosphere, and there it was: the cloud lifted while my heart opened up to blossom into a darkening sky. I saw the green flash of youth, of promise, brought forth from the depths by the laughter of my legacy.

Bookends: Eighties

Me and Big Bro, circa 1984

I was browsing some '80's and '90's music files tonight and I could not help but think of my brother.  The music led me to some pictures, specifically the one above.  It's a Polaroid, and my parents have the original.  I never used to get sentimental over old pictures, especially ones of myself, but things are different now.  As far as I'm concerned, that picture up there needs to be archived in a museum-quality case, suitable for framing.

I am struck particularly by our expressions.  Mine was showing a lot more self-assurance (youthful arrogance?) than I really possessed, and Big Bro?  Well, he was the shizznit, as that expression says it all.  He certainly could pull off the Look.  It gained in strength when he had a guitar in his hands, something I could not (and still can't) do.

I think that picture was taken at a time when I was beginning to feel I had any confidence at all of dealing with the world, out of high school and on my way to college.  It was a time I felt like I was right, even when I wasn't.  Untested youth has a way of doing that to a person.

I'm glad I didn't know then, what I know now.  I see this picture, and I cannot help but marvel at the power we didn't know we possessed.  Me and my Big Bro against the world, two saplings as yet unbent by the storms of life...the hurricane that took him down struck much too early.  The one that might take me, well, I hope its a long way off.

Until then, I'll think of him, and sink my roots deeper into the soil.

---

The following link (to myspace.com) is to a song by The Jesus and Mary Chain, that came out in 1989, which is kind of the cap on what I think of as my first (hopefully) Golden Age.  I listen, and I wish I could have sung this live with my brother on guitar.  I know he would have liked that.

Blues From A Gun

Hymn: Tupelo Heart

It was a sweaty camping trip
I was there, corduroy shorts
She was there, green eyes

Lots of friends, and noise,
I didn't know her
I knew her friend

I opened my mouth,
small miracles, she opened hers
she didn't walk away

To know her lips
was to know sweetness,
tupelo on the tongue

We said I love you
Not knowing what that meant,
Years apart, I still don't know

Stir the honey in the tea,
she whispers in my ear,
and I remember

Language Barrier

Bard I am not, when the language
is love and the talk is of amour
Words I know, having read the dictionary
but phrases I cannot string together

Homily on love, you ask?
I think not, god, the doubt
The dizzying want, the parted lips,
Wine turning into vinegar

Knowing a little of the language,
Is it worse than none at all?
To speak of passion, hurl an insult,
Yet not truly touch the heart?

I said I am not a poet, nor can I sing,
at least not well, hunched in the dark
hovering over the tattered hymnal, breathing.
Arias the shadows of my inamorata

Ain't Seen Nothin' Like Him

Sometimes I wonder, 

what I'm gonna do, 

cause there ain't no cure 

for the wintertime blues

(awesomepowerchordprogression)

(bestairguitaristever)

(exceptformybrother)

(wait)

(mybrothercouldreallyplayguitar)

(dammit)

So I'm in the car the other night and I'm yawning at the same time my mind is racing a million miles an hour, all I want to do is go home, just go home, so I can eat and rest. It occurs to me I cannot figure out from what I need to rest. I don't mine coal or pick vegetables or work on high steel. My ass sits at a desk most days and I push buttons and move a mouse and draw stuff on tracing paper.

Oh, and I use a lot of Post-its.

Anyway, I'm in the car trying to stay awake and the radio is on

"and the radioman says it's a beautiful night out there

And the radioman says rock and roll lives

And the radioman says its a beautiful night out there in Los Angeles..."

AIIIIGGGH...no, that's "Screenwriter's Blues" by Soul Coughing, which is a good song but it is not even what was playing on the radio. The radio. The radio plays almost all the time while I'm in my car because I like music and songs and lyrics...

...and I am, in all honesty, sometimes afraid of the quiet...

...because that means I'll have to listen to the noise of  my own head. I suppose that is why I have always been easily distracted and irritated by outside noise. I'm sensitized to it, and I struggle to control the internal stuff and outside noise is just more rocks in the pond. I am getting better at disregarding the noise and embracing the silence. I am practicing, I get help. Just not right now...

See? So, like I said I was in the car, sitting at a stop light, listening to the radio and 

"Radio is a sound salvation,

Radio is cleaning up the nation

They say you better listen to the voice of reason..."

DAMMIT! There it goes again! "Radio, Radio" by Elvis Costello. You see what I mean? You see what I am up against? That kind of crap happens all the time. Some days I can't seem to finish a thought because my mind constantly gets sucked in by all these tangents and eddies and sidebars and asides and really, folks, sometimes I wish it would stop, STOP, STOP so I could at least remember what it was I set out to accomplish.

SO, I'm in the car, at the light, blah, blah, blah, and this amazing song comes on. It was amazing not only for the classic rock song that it is, but also because I hadn't heard it in years. YEARS. I was amazed and stunned and yes, even had some little tears in my eyes while I was smiling.

"Pinball Wizard" by The Who. I heard that opening guitar strumming sequence, followed by that power chord...and the lyrics just started spilling out of me and there I was in my brother's room at home listening to the stereo (yes, people, an honest-to-god turntable along with dual cassette decks) or maybe we were in the car with the volume up way too high but it really didn't matter, no it didn't, it didn't, because what really mattered was that Big Bro and I and some friends were strumming that air guitar and windmilling just like Pete Townshend onstage and...

"Ever since I was a young boy,

I played that silver ball

From Soho down to Brighton,

I must have played them all

But I ain't seen nothing like him

In any amusement hall..."

...was spilling from our lips like we were born to sing it, rock it, just they did and I realized that I was singing it, loud, just like we used to and that's when I choked up and out of the corner of my eye Big Bro was playing his guitar and grinning like a possum and I realized then and there that yes, I ain't seen nothing like him, ever, and never will again.

But he sure played a mean guitar. And on the stage in my mind, I'm leaning into the mic and he's in front of that huge Marshall stack and he hits that chord again and plays, plays, plays and I sing, sing, sing. I surprised myself because I remembered all the lyrics. After all these years...

"How do you think he does it?

(I don't know)

What makes him so good?

I drove on down the road, a rolling one (or maybe two) man rock and roll band singing badly at the top of my lungs. It was perfect. How could it not be? With backup like his, I always sound good.

Lions Through The Crest

We were lions once, long ago and far away.

That summer the golden-haired boys we were ran along a beach of white sugar tinged with caramel. My Big Brother striding the sand and talking to the girls as if he owned the ocean. My timid self hovered at the edges of the hormone clouds and thought my little island a grand place.

Grand, if it bothered one very little to be alone and feel apart from everyone, all the while wishing that somehow the courage could be found to kick open the candy store door and grab some sweetness.

I was much too polite to make a scene.

Big Bro always found a way to do it. To this day I’m still unsure how, because I never really saw it happen. He just seemed to know people, or know how to start talking to them. On the beach, or at parties he would be chatting people up as if the introductions had been made long before. It was a skill I envied deeply. He made friends; I made time until he could make some friends for me. I resented it, sometimes, but was too grateful for the attention I did receive to bite the hand that fed me.

Can humans do what prophets say?

And if I die before I learn to speak

Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?

That summer I was awkward and chubby. Like an overgrown penguin without the cuteness. I tagged along with Big Bro because I wanted to be a part of things, I wanted to have a life, get a girlfriend. I wanted to drink beer in the sun and pretend I was all that. Bag of chips, optional, because I ate too much as it was anyway.

Big Bro let me go with minimal fuss. I thought maybe he was taking pity on me. Behind the mask lay a sensitive kid who felt bad that his little brother was possessed of weapons grade dorkiness. He never said it and I never asked. The truth probably would have shamed me into hiding in my room twice as much as I did. I was living my life half-asleep, soporific under the effects of shyness I had not the courage to overcome.

It was at the beach that really started feeling the effects of oncoming puberty. All those pretty girls, tanned and curvy gulls flocking around my brother and his friends. Problem was, I failed to understand it. To me, it was like a perpetual state of that near-sick, that awful whirling dizziness when you can’t decide if you are going to puke or just need to lie down. I solved the problem by avoiding the groups, hovering on the edges and hoping for a glance or a word. Of course, I rarely did get one. Not surprising when most times it happened I shied like a nervous foal, floundering in the sand and pretending sudden interest in the beach glass and seashells. I usually ended up in the surf, even though the opaque emerald sea always worried me. Sharks and jellyfish were never far from my mind.

A life is time, they teach you growing up

A million years before the fall

In the water I was generally alone and felt little of the social pressure I did on land. I bobbed around, a human shipping container overboard in heavy seas. I never had a boogie board or a jet ski or even a wetsuit. My version of body surfing resembled a semi-svelte log tumbling over in the waves and smacking into the sand. There was no grace.

Eventually, I created my own peculiar ocean sport, which consisted of standing in near chest-deep water and waiting for a wave to break at just the right time. I crouched and pushed off from the bottom to launch myself through the face of the curl. Timed appropriately, I could ride the face a little and then burst out the other side in an cold jade rainbow of spray. For brief seconds I could be weightless and hovering over the water, no awkwardness, just grace. I was blessed with a slice of time free of the bonds of gravity and teenage angst.

My brother, he body surfed like a pro.

You ride the waves and don't ask where they go

That summer I rode the waves as much as I could. Jumping through breakers burned off some nervous energy. Eventually, I could get back to land with enough courage to work my way into some conversations, usually with my brother’s words “this is my little brother…” at which point the older, pretty girls my brother knew would usually would say “Aww…”. From the outside I suppose I looked like a goofy puppy. The chick magnet guys on the make bring to the park to get the attention of the ladies. Of course, I was so desperate and so much of a goober I never saw the leash. All I knew was the pleasure of being scratched under the chin by curves in bikinis smelling of coconuts and beer. In other words, heaven on earth.

You swim like lions through the crest

And bathe yourself in zebra flesh

That summer I had no clue that my Big Brother needed me just as much as I needed him. He needed a shield, a cattle catcher to help ward off collisions between his overloaded mind and the social pressures bearing down on him. He needed that shift in attention sometime, I know, because maintaining the façade of the Cool and Collected is exhausting. Jokes, beer and weird thoughts only get you so far before you have to retreat and let someone else be in the light. He was cool, he was The Shit, but every now and then, he coaxed me onstage so he could take a break from being the construct people expected him to be.

That summer, we swam the crest and the zebra flesh between our teeth was nothing less than life itself, a clandestine gift from one brother to another. I throw back my head to roar, and his voice echoes back to me. He may have been the heart of the pride, now and again, but he wanted me to be a lion, too.

Italicized lyrics are from “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods. My plane took off from Baltimore, but hasn’t landed on Bourbon Street…

Adult Geography

“Hey, eeeeasy, mister!” the shrill voice of the boy child scraped across my eardrums, an icy spike into the throbbing mass of my head. Shirtless and buzzcut, the kid and his buddies half-glared, half-shrank away from the front of my car as I rolled forward an inch. Buzzcut was on a bike, one of those BMX types that look cool but are a total pain in the ass to ride anywhere for long. His peeps, two of them, were slightly ahead of him and walking fast like they actually cared to not be in the path of impatient people driving big hunks of metal.

Don’t wet yerself, Junior, I muttered to myself as I drove past the bike to make my turn, I wasn’t gonna hit you. Like I needed the complication of a tweenager sprawled across my hood. Oh, hell to the nahhh.

All I really wanted to do, I thought, was to give him notice. Notice that it is no proof of manhood to wait until the light is just about to turn and then decide to race across the street before the cars could start moving. Nor does it pay to play daredevil with a cheap bike or a skateboard.

Bike vs. car = epic failure for the bike.

I sighed, feeing grumpy and old beyond my years. Grumpy like the dwarf, but with a boil on his ass. Old like the Sphinx, and just as battered. Turning the corner, with the shouts of the neighborhood Evel Knievel and Co. fading fast, I wondered what had happened to me.

When did I get to be the Geezer?

It wasn’t until much later that I realized I was a teensy bit jealous, and lost. Those kids were me decades ago, doing much the same thing with my friends, bike and skateboards and attitude. They were getting about on a summer evening the only way they could. Which is to say, on foot or leg powered wheels. As such, they had a completely different perspective on where they were in the landscape, and a completely different view of the tyrannical freedom of the car.

A half-mile later I was thinking back to when the best way I had to get around was by bike, or by walking. The place I grew up in was very flat, almost no hills and no real steep grades to speak of. My world was circumscribed by the energy and time I could devote to getting somewhere. Of course, I didn’t have very far to go for most things. Most of my friends were within easy biking distance, and some were certainly close enough for walking visits. True to form, as a kid I had no appreciation of that luxury. Walking was anathema, unless unavoidable, and biking was a necessity in the absence of a car. But, gawdddd, all that pedaling! Mom, Dad, I wantneedgottahavecantlivewithoutmylicensepleaseletmedrivebymeacarpleasepleaseplease…well, you know the drill.

The place I grew up in was no small town, nor was it a big city by most measures. Flat, roads in a grid, convenience store around the corner (where I spent far too much money on pinball) and a park not far away. Getting around these places on a bike or on foot was always an investment of time (of which I now know I had plenty) and energy (also of which I had plenty); it always seemed a bit of an adventure. Will the chain pop off? Is it going to rain? How do I carry a pizza and an illicit six-pack on the handlebars without dropping them? You know all the shortcuts, the curves, the places where its cool to ride hell-for-leather and hope to not get flattened by a car. You get to know whose yards to cut through, and which ones have dogs to avoid (or smack the hell out of with a newspaper). Everything seemed potentially a LONG way away. And it seems a REALLY long way when you decide to leave a friend’s house at two o’clock in the morning after a party, where everyone is either asleep or (ahem) passed out, and walk home. Jay-zus, was that a long night. I discovered the meaning of “miles”. Given the dodgy nature of some of the places I had to traverse, it was the fear n’ beer that got me home. And, yes, Mom, I’ll never do that again…

Traveling this way gives an amazing, intimate knowledge and understanding of the terrain of one’s daily existence. It is a perspective hard to obtain while driving in car. Or maybe it is that the scale of things changes after years behind the wheel, pushing the gas instead of pedaling the wheels.

Thinking back to my childhood and adolescence spent hoofing it, or pedaling my chubby buns off in the heat of a sticky Tidewater summer, I realize now that the city of my birth was really a neighborhood. And to my kid-sized mind, the neighborhood was more than a city; it was a big country bounded only by the limits of my muscles and my ambition to explore. It was a kingdom of the strange and of the familiar, places outside my daily existence and the delights of a home to go to, safe and dry. I used to think it was big. Really BIG.

When I go there now, to visit my parents and my brother, I am always stunned by how small my hometown seems, how close everything is now that I drive. It weirds me out, even makes me a little sad, although I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s the passage of time and the nostalgia that goes with it. Maybe it’s the realization that the scale of my existence has changed drastically from that of the kid I once was.

Later on that same night that I played matador with Buzzcut and his buds, I pulled into a drive thru ATM to deposit a check. All thoughts of “Easy, Mister!” flew out the window when I realized that I had no pen or pencil to fill out the deposit envelope. Cursing and muttering, I started the car again and headed across the parking lot to a grocery store, looking to buy some pens so I could get back in the car and finish my errand.

I got out of the car, Grumpy the Dwarf in search of Bic love. As I shut the car door, I happened to look back towards the road. There on the sidewalk, in a group of three, was a mother and who I assume were her daughters. She was pushing a baby stroller, the girls were laughing and skipping as they headed across the road to the neighborhood on the other side. At that moment it became clear to me why I felt jealous of Buzzcut. He was reveling in the oblivious freedom of youth, exploring his country anew, learning the land for the first time.

Me, I was tired, having wasted too many sunny days taking graduate courses in Adult Geography.

And still trying to get that degree.

Good Day In The Field

(HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: PLEASE SEE ANNOUNCEMENTS AT END OF POST. THANKS!)

One advantage to being unemployed is that, while I am stuck at home working up resumes and scouring the Internet, I get to listen to music as much as I want as loud as I want. I am free to play the air guitar and the air drums (even the occasional air bagpipes) and shake my moneymaker all over the damn house without shame, censure or scorn. Well, perhaps a little scorn. I am pretty sure my cats look upon all these antics as a truly vulgarian display of poor taste and worse manners. I care not, for I am an artiste.

Of course, all of this imaginary musicianship does little to further my career as an architect. It pays to be creative in that profession, as a rule, but I have yet to encounter a single prospective employer who wants to know if I can accurately play the chord sequence to “Monkey Wrench” by Foo Fighters while grimacing musically.* This is quite the pity. I have been practicing, I know I can nail it if they just give me the chance!

I have been assisted greatly in my musical excavations by the receipt of an iPod as a gift on my most recent birthday, in conjunction with a wireless rig to some pretty good bookshelf speakers that I purchased with some bonus money.** A consolidated music library with the flexibility of streaming from the iPod or my laptop has allowed me to listen to a deep catalog of stuff I haven’t listened to in years. Thank the lawd for shuffle!

One of the most striking aspects of “Music Appreciation Month” in the Gumbo house is the sheer breadth and depth of memories and emotions I have experienced. At various times I have been nostalgic, deeply pensive and riled up. I have been sad to the point of tears and overjoyed to the point of crazed laughter. Sometimes all within the space of a few minutes. All sorts of memories:

1: Sitting on the benches at a local playground on a summer weekend, my friends and I eating cheap carryout pizza and ill-gotten beer. When we could, we would pitch in and get someone to buy us a case: Three six-packs of Budweiser and one of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Guess who drank the PBR. Heh. “Free Bird” wasn’t far away, either.

2: Carrying around my brand new (drum roll) boom box with an 8-track player in it, wearing out my copy of “Deguello” by ZZ Top. Yeah, it was the definition of unhip, but it was mine and I didn’t care. “…Spied a little thing and I followed her all night, In a funky fine levis and her sweater's kind of tight, She had a west coast strut that was as sweet as molasses, But what really knocked me out was her cheap sunglasses…”

3: I can remember sitting on the edge of my bed, head in hands, wallowing in anguish and self-pity because the first great love of my life didn’t love me back, she just really wanted to be friends. “Thank You” by Led Zeppelin was on the stereo. I hated that song for the longest time after that day, but lately it has worked its way back into my playlist. It is a great tune.

4: Freshman year in college, the blond streak in my hair, skinny ties in the closet and I had Oingo Boingo’s “Cry Of The Vatos” on the turntable in my dorm room. Not so much a song as a collection of funny noises set to a melody, it always put me in a silly mood. My next door neighbor, a true son of New Jersey and a die-hard Bruce Springsteen fan(atic), knocked on my door and said “What the fuck is the matter with you?”. I laughed and said nothing. Later that year, he got me drunk the night my nephew was born and I was trying to study for a calc test. My nephew turned out fine, but the calc test was a train wreck. Ouch.

5: My fourth year in college and I had moved in with two of my friends, into an off-campus apartment. One of my roommates was the Audio Equipment guy, had a great rig with huge speakers and a CD player. Because of that, I bought my first ever CD: “Electric” by The Cult. The song that did it: “Wild Flower". It still gets me, right there.

6: Senior in college, and I am heading back to my apartment after a late night in the architecture studio. It was some distance off campus, and I was (in my mind) lucky to have a creaky old 1977 Chevy Nova as a form of transportation. Sort of a pre-hoopty, but it ran and it has a radio. Zipping down the road, and “Copperhead Road” was blaring out of the speakers. At the time, listening to Steve Earle snarl out those lyrics, I thought he was the bad-assest of the badasses. Great song, just don’t drink whiskey while listening to it!

I graduated from college just before the 90’s, entering the ‘real world’ and leaving behind the easy access I had to the same range of music I was lucky with in my studio and dorm. I was relying primarily on one local radio station, did a lot of listening in the car during my commutes. It’s weird, I have a bit of a musical memory drought from those years. Mostly what I remember is either goofy (Presidents of the United States of America), grungy/poetic (Soundgarden, U2) or angry and dark (Tool). What I can recall is mostly singing along with one or another of those groups (Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Alice In Chains should be in there, too), and being vaguely dissatisfied with life. It didn’t start out that way, it was a gradual thing, but looking back I realized a bit of a cloud had settled in on me by the end of the decade. I know it sounds really weird, but “Aenima” by Tool actually helped me through a rough patch.

2000 and beyond has been a bit of backwards and forward for me. I started getting into all the music I had left behind from my teen and young adult years at the same time I was expanding my horizons into “the softer side of Irish Gumbo”. I was getting much more interested in folk, country, funk and rap. I picked up a taste for some “alt country” and old blues. I ended up listening to a much broader range of styles, with an exponential increase in singer/songwriters in my music library. I can now count among my collection various works by Ellis Paul, Jeffrey Foucault, Eddie From Ohio, Johnny Cash, Son Volt, Parliament/Funkadelic and Jeff Lang***. It was also about this time that I started attending the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, New York almost every year.

It was at the 2001 FRFF that Jeff Lang provided me with one of my all time favorite music memories. Jeff is a blues/folk oriented singer/songwriter from Australia, and happens to be a monster guitar player, to boot. I was fortunate to catch Jeff on the Workshop stage, a smaller one than the main stage, in a group workshop with about 8 other performers. We were sitting on a blanket in the grass, and the weather was sunny and excellent.

The performers were taking turns playing songs based on a set theme for the workshop, I don’t recall the theme, but I’ll never forget the song. Jeff stood up to play “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (a Bob Dylan original) but discovered a problem with his guitar. He asked to borrow one from Mary Gauthier, who was sitting next to him. She gracefully obliged, and Jeff proceeded to play.

I wasn’t a big Bob Dylan fan at the time, so I didn’t know anything about the original. Jeff launched into the song, setting a fast pace for it, and tore into the lyrics. About a minute into the song I realized that I was hearing something special. Talk about passion for the music! Oh, lawd, he lit that thing up! He was really bringing the story to life, and his guitar playing was inspired. Possessed, almost. He did a bit of a solo, kinda fast and bluesy. My jaw was dropping, and when I looked around, mine wasn’t the only one. We were gobsmacked, flat out. When he finished playing, there was about two seconds of silence, and then everybody starting clapping and shouting and hollering. We were on our feet, standing ovation. The other musicians on the stage were just staring at him in awe, and clapping. Jeff turned to Mary to hand her the guitar, and she is looking at him like he’s a lunatic. She looks at the guitar, then looks up at him with a smile, and says “What in the hell did you do?”

What the hell did he do? Why, he amazed us by creating magic, that good day in the field.

*For the record, I cannot play the chords. I can grimace musically, in a variety of styles. Including klezmer and Tuvan throat singing.
**The last bonus before the Crash of ’08. I don’t regret the purchase one bit. I likes my tunes.
***Geek that I am, I actually have three signed CD’s from him, plus I introduced myself to him at a show he played at the Kennedy Center in D.C. Nice guy, and tolerant of doofuses like me.

PSA #1: Tomorrow, Saturday February 7th is another Pic and Prose collaboration with Michelle at Confessions of a Desperate Housewife. Please stop by both of our blogs and drop some comment luv, it’s a feast for the eyes and the mind!

PSA #2: The simply smashing Petra at The Wise (*Young*) Mommy has invited me to participate in a contest to win her affections, for the weekly “HeBlogs/SheBlogs” post that she runs on her blog. Ordinarily, Heinous at Irregularly Periodic Ruminations is the lucky fellow to keep Petra company, but Jim will be on hiatus while he takes care of some personal matters, and we wish him all the best and have him in our thoughts. Please visit with Petra for the rules and stuff. Myself and seven other strapping young lads are competing for the honor, and you lucky readers will get to vote on us! Contest entries will be posted beginning Monday, February 9th on The Wise (*Young*) Mommy, two per day for the week. My entry will posted Monday, so please visit and vote!

Portrait Of Irish Gumbo As A Punk Rocker

You ever have one of those moments where you feel like you open a door into a room you weren't expecting, or you blinked and when you opened your eyes you were somewhere you hadn't been in a long, LONG time? That happened to me yesterday, sitting in front of my computer at work and wishing I could figure out how to make the work not suck so much. I have a borrowed pair of earbuds taped to my desktop (yeah, I know, ad hoc to the point of dweebiness) until I get a decent pair of speakers. I turn the volume up really loud, which amounts to the music sounding like an old AM radio playing across the room and under a blanket. Still, it is better than nothing. I stream my favorite local toons purveyor (all props to http://www.wtmd.org/ for the neato media player) to my computer. I love the variety and it gives me a soundtrack for the happenings outside my window. Yes, I do work, but we can all multi-task, yeah?

So I am scarfing down calories in a feeble attempt to eat "lunch" on my "lunch hour", listening to the midday show on 'TMD, and I was starting to zone out a bit. That is, until a bolt of lightning, a blast from the past, came blaring out of the speakers. I actually laughed out loud and started headbangin' in my chair (discreetly, of course). What should I hear but "Problems" by the Sex Pistols. HA! Awesome! That made my friggin' day! If anything was going to snap me out of my funk, it would have to be some old school punk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lQfyEeIIXU). Worked like a charm.

To give it some context, consider this: I first heard the Sex Pistols in the early '80's, back when I was starting to branch out from my classic-metal-southern-fried-rock roots. I was used to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd; all the usual suspects from a typical southeast Virginia rock-n-roll adolescence. I never could live that life truly hardcore, so when punk and New Wave finally made it to my home city of Portsmouth, I was all over it. I made the switch pretty quickly from denim jacket/long hair/bandanna to skinny tie/hair gel/zippered pants. And for whatever reason, I felt right at home.

The Sex Pistols and 'Never Mind The Bollocks' was revelatory for a reformed cracker such as myself. It fueled in part the need I felt to cast off the same narrow, unimaginative thinking of almost everyone around me (ah, the hubris of youth!) and fed my adolescent male urges to be loud, fast and disruptive. Especially if it gave me a chance to thumb my nose at the redneck lifestyle I felt was suffocating me. I listened to my cassette of NMTB so much, the tape began to flake and drop out. And me and some of my friends would drive around in whoever's car, blasting the godawful music and shouting the lyrics at the top of our lungs. Sometimes encouraged by a few illicit beers, I could work up a pretty good rendition of 'God Save The Queen' or 'Holidays In the Sun', all the while thinking I was quite the know-it-all punk. What a blast!

I gradually moved away from that genre when I graduated from high school, went to college, and broadened my horizons even further. The cassette I lost somewhere, but I don't recall being too upset about it. I was moving on to different things. I was beginning to "grow up", as the saying goes. I forgot about the Sex Pistols and my tiger striped sweatshirt and the black jeans (purchased in England in 1982, don't you know!) randomly sewn with zippers all over. Johnny Rotten stopped shouting in my head. Years later, the spark came briefly back to life in a moment of nostalgia, and I started trying to find 'Never Mind The Bollocks' on CD. I tracked it down in a small music store in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. My wife and I were staying in nearby South Egremont so we could attend the Falcon Ridge Folk (yes, 'folk' music) Festival (http://www.falconridgefolk.com/), and had strayed into town for a bit of food and shopping. Lo and behold, this little music store had a collection of oddball CDs which included one copy of NMTB. The latent punker in me snapped it up. I listened to it a few times, had a few laughs, and it quietly assumed a position on my CD shelf, untouched.

Untouched, that is, until yesterday morning, when WTMD surprised the hell out of me by playing 'Problems' on the midday show. It came on, my jaw dropped and I sat upright in my chair, shocked and delighted by this delightful breach of cubicle decorum. I even conjured up my old punk rock sneer during one passage:

"Eat your heart out on plastic tray

you don't do what you want

then you'll fade away

You won't find me working nine to five

it's too much fun a-being alive!"

Classic poetry, it ain't. But it certainly jolted me out of my funk, made me more awake than I had been in many moons. I shook hands with the energetic, angry (but in a good way) young man who flared back to life. We smiled at one another, pumped our fists in the air and reveled in just how good it felt to be alive, even if for just four or so minutes of radio ecstasy.

This morning on my way to work, I think my fellow commuters could hear me bellowing all the way to Baltimore, as the Sex Pistols melted my CD player.

"Problems! Problems!

WHAT YOU GONNA DO WITH YOUR PROBLEM?"

(Special props to WTMD for reviving my inner punk rocker. I consider them a valuable community service! Do us a favor and give 'em a listen!)

Revisiting The Vinyl Frontier

Not too long ago, my daughter was cavorting around the living room, tossing stuff around, and she threw a toy (a little bear, I think) behind the TV set. I heard her rummaging around back there, and then she said, "Daddy, what's this?" I turned around to see her holding my vinyl copy of "A Different Kind Of Tension" by the Buzzcocks. She was holding it up and waving it around like a Frisbee. I stifled a yelp and made a slow-motion grab for it before it broke. Safely in my hands I put it back in the milk crate that was holding it.

Wait. Did you catch that? No, no, not 'Buzzcocks' (heh, heh..shut up Beavis!), I said 'vinyl'. That's right: VINYL. I still have a small crate full of full size albums, cardboard sleeves and all. Okay they aren't all mine, some of them belong to my spousal companion. I won't embarrass anyone with THOSE albums. Instead, I'll embarrass myself with my albums.

Once the wee lass was safely out of range, I rifled through the remaining albums in the milk crate. I was pleased to see my copy of 'Dark Side of The Moon' still there, and I felt a little weirded out to find a Black Flag Album and ‘The Record’ by Fear. Leftover relics of my punk influenced dissolute youth. Oh, and I think I threw away my Flock of Seagulls album. Whew!

While I am not too sentimental for the sheer bulk that vinyl took up, I do miss the album covers, and the great art and the liner notes that read like a book (instead of like something inside a matchbook cover). Funny, having a turntable and having to buy needles (phonograph needles, you stoners) didn’t seem that cool when that’s about all we had. 8-tracks were a complete pain in the ass, and cassettes weren’t that much better (how many times did I accidently unspool the tape? Too many!) But I realized a few years ago that there really was something special about the needle hitting the groove. You got that little bit of scratchy sound, a few hisses and pops, and then BAM: a good fat sound. It was a Robert Johnson collection on CD that gave me that epiphany. I think it was ‘Stones in My Passway’ that I listened to first. What a weird experience to listen to vinyl recordings that had been mastered to CDs! The scratchiness of vinyl with the clarity of digital audio. Weird and how postmodern can you get?

Most of my collection is on CD now, and while it is convenient, it does lack some of the cachet of vinyl. My brother still has a lot of vinyl, with album covers hung up on the walls of his computer loft at home. Pretty cool to see that stuff hanging up. That is one thing you definitely don’t get with digital music; who cares if you are carrying an iPod or an mp3 player? You can’t really tell anything about the person, and while the gadget is cool, it seems more like a fashion accessory than anything else.

True vinyl story: One of my uncles, a Vietnam vet and a low-key hippie, had a pretty cool record collection. He gave me and my brother a copy of The Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, a second edition (I think) when we were just old enough to start appreciating the music. I had it for a while, but between college and moving around and just generally trying to stay employed and be an adult, I LOST IT. To this day, I still don’t know where it went. My uncle is gone now, passed away about twenty years ago. I never told him about the album; I didn't get the chance.

Uncle Harry, I’m sorry, bro. We were young and stupid…

(Note: This is a longer version of a very short essay I posted to a local newspaper blog back in May 2008)