Grunt Speak

Once upon a time, I was fascinated by quotations and one-liners.  I would guess this came from seeing so many great comedians on HBO specials as a kid in the 70s.  That was also the decade where the message t-shirt was born.  Rolling Stone always had a page in the back with a company that had a plethora of ironic/funny t-shirt sayings.  “Free Mustache Rides” was my favorite, with the side-view of a naked woman riding a walrus mustache.

Well, I never grew a walrus mustache or bought that t-shirt.  I would think growing a mustache would be a prerequisite to wearing that t-shirt with any authority.  We had a cotton mill in our county that had a sideshop specializing in nothing but message t-shirts.  I used to love going there and having t-shirts made to order.  They always had the usual selection of popular rock acts you could get ironed onto your shirt, but they also specialized in block-letter personal messages.  I’d guess the bulk of their business was catering to local sports teams, but you could also walk in there and get any kind of message printed on a t-shirt.

They made them in the store, too.  Take your selection, lay it out, put it under the hot press and give you your shirt within the hour.  These were iron-on decals as opposed to silk screens, so you knew the shirt wasn’t going to last forever.  I guess this was the 70s working-class version of getting a tattoo, save it only cost $5.00 as opposed to hundreds, and all these years later, I don’t have a blurry blob of ink on my bicep to show for it.  We were smarter in the 70s, which scares the shit out of me now.

For years afterwards, I had a fascination with one-liners and quotes, to the point of buying various quotation books.  Words to live by, yadda yadda yadda.  I’m not sure what that phase meant, but it lasted well into my 20s.  If life were only that easy, so that you could utter some magic words of wisdom, and you’d suddenly see the light and transform into something greater.  It doesn’t work that way, although I guess some type of “wisdom osmosis” could transpire over the course of years.  But there’s a more direct form of wisdom osmosis called “getting your ass kicked by life.”

This concept of gearing your life towards inspirational quotations … I just read a Vanity Fair article about President Obama’s lovelife in his early 20s while attending Columbia University, and the kind of airy/farty world view I associate with that way of life runs like a river through that article.  Not so much him (although he had it, too), but these Vassar-style women he was hanging around, the terminology they use, the dimestore psychology they apply to every thought and emotion.  It just reeks of the worst sort of mediocrity I ran into constantly at college.  The pompous grad student who, I knew, had no talent for writing, but spent a lifetime reading and analyzing and dissecting and practicing the academic banter for the fucking awful dissertation no one would ever read again because it was so pedantic and boring.  So they could get that assistant professor job at some nondescript university in the middle of nowhere and wow them at the wine-and-cheese socials with their views on Chaucer and Hawthorne and get that whole ass-kissing academia thing down so when they applied for tenure, all would go smoothly and the cobwebs and coffin lids and coffee breath in the faculty lounge could descend on them like bored vultures.

On the flip side, at work I’m constantly aware of work-place clichés and repeated aphorisms that underline the futility of a 9-to-5 existence.  Things people mutter under their breath when they’ve been given a thorny assignment and not enough time to do it.  Grunt Speak.  Doesn’t have to be an office.  In fact, you’re more likely to hear these clichés in factories, and garages, and junkyards.  Maybe even more so since it seems like so many people who do physical labor for a living are conditioned to think they’re the bottom line in terms of employment, and they see all from the bottom up.

They’re probably right.  But I can’t help but pause when I hear these oft-muttered phrases, because there’s often more meaning to them, or at least a meaning I sense that they’re not intending when they put forth with some generally downbeat view of the world.  I’m now going to list some of these phrases I often hear, and what goes through my head when I hear them.  I guess I’m thinking outside the box.  (I wouldn’t do this if I was at a biker rally in Sturgis, surrounded by balding, 58-year-old old mechanics, their remaining hair tied back in pony tails, walking around in their assless leather pants, wearing t-shirts that just might bear some of these sayings.  Something tells me they’d force me back inside the box … the pine box.)

Shit rolls downhill.  I’ve been hearing this one a lot lately, to demonstrate situations in which a problem is passed on from an authority figure to an underling to deal with.  There’s a real problem here.  I agree, gravity is such that things on earth that can roll, they roll downhill.  Shit, as a rule, doesn’t roll.  It plops out of an anus and just sits there.  Whatever part of the hill you see yourself on.  That’s the beautiful thing about shit.  Just as likely to be stepped on by a $300 pair of Italian loafers as a pair of work boots.  Shit doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.  In theory, shit could roll downhill.  I’ve seen really dried out pieces of dogshit that are hard enough that if they were on a hill, and a rush of water or high wind blasted it, it could roll downhill.  But I’ve never seen this.  Have you?

And the question begs to be asked: does shit roll uphill in Australia?

Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one.  Tell that to someone with a colostomy bag.  But in general, this is very much true.  I have an asshole.  A show of hands out there for anyone in the same boat?  Good.  Most of us have assholes.  The problem is, I have a lot of opinions.  We all do.  If my body were to match this quote, I’d be some bizarre, alien type of creature that has nothing but hundreds of assholes all over his body.  The analogy is also off in that I gather the ultimate goal of the person muttering this is to equate a person’s opinion with a piece of fecal matter – not the anus.  I can see using this statement effectively in a given situation, with one opinion applied to one particular situation.  But it’s short-sighted.  Let me cut to the chase: I don’t care what you think.  That’s what you’re trying to say.  If you think stating it as “Opinions are like assholes …” is an improvement, all I can say is, nice mullet.

When the shit hits the fan.  I’ve noticed that there’s a preoccupation with feces and anuses when it comes to describing situations at work.  As if they were bad things.  True, we have so many negative associations with feces.  But given how our bodies are designed, we do have these built-in waste systems that require daily disposal, and you should be very happy to defecate on a routine, healthy basis.  Believe me, life is no fun when you can’t!

That said, I’m always perplexed by shit hitting the fan.  Where on earth did this originate?  I can visualize it: a glob of feces striking a moving fan, and pieces of it being flung all over a room.  Not good, man, not good at all.  I get it.  Boy, do I get it.  But … have you ever seen shit hitting a fan?  I know.  This is the internet.  There must be people out there taking their shit and throwing it into a moving fan, just to see what happens.  That’s how the world is these days.  But in general, there’s no logic to this statement.  If the shit hits the fan, it’s because you’re picking it up and throwing it at a fan … which means you have larger problems than shit hitting a fan, in and of itself.  There’s really something wrong with you!

He’s blowing smoke up your ass.  I don’t know what this means.  Should I take it literally?  Someone is crouched down behind a person, smoking, and literally exhaling cigarette smoke up a person’s ass?  Have you ever done this?  Know anyone who has?  Is it a bad thing?  Does it feel bad?  This is generally uttered when someone is trying to mislead or offer false praise to another person.  I can see “smoke screen” – providing a sense of illusion.  But not this.  It’s just freaky.  Please, no smoking near my ass.

Your mouth is writing checks your ass can’t cash.  In this analogy, what’s the bank?  I get it, my mouth is writing checks.  I’m saying crazy things.  My ass can’t cash them.  I can’t back up these crazy things I’m saying.  But where would I be cashing these checks?  What if my mouth was writing checks my ass could cash?  Does that ever happen?  Is the bank some unspoken cloud of truth that determines what my ass is trying to do with those checks?  In theory, I would have a bank account in that cloud of truth, hopefully with over-draft protection, or at least enough money to cash any checks my frivolous mouth is writing and responsible ass is cashing.  And how do credit and debit cards now play into this?  If my mouth is writing checks my ass can’t cash … would you accept Visa or Mastercard?

Life’s a bitch, and then you marry one.  I know the person muttering this means to demonstrate he has an understanding of how foul the world and life itself is.  It’s nothing but a problem.  All the time.  It’s a bitch.  Even as a kid and teenager.  A bitch, man.  And the irony of it all … man, then you go out and marry one!

But isn’t it really a positive saying?  All right, so you’re going around with a world view that life is nothing but a series of endless problems.  I can’t argue with this – to some extent, it’s true.  You sense this, even as a kid and teenager.  Even then, you’re hardened.  Life’s a bitch.

You don’t have to get married.  Especially to someone you perceive is or may be a bitch, somewhere down the road.  Why would you want to do that?  If life has been a bitch, wouldn’t it make sense to try to find someone who, I don’t know, makes your life a little less bitchier?  If you think life's a bitch, maybe the problem isn't life itself, but you and how you see it?  But let’s say you can’t wrap your mind around that.  You’re locked in on that permanent downward spiral in life, it’s a bitch, it’s never going to get easier, or better, this is your fate, not just to live this bitchy life, but to KNOW life’s a bitch and carry around that understanding of the world.

If that’s the case, wouldn’t marrying a bitch really add no more or less bitchiness to your life?  Life’s already a bitch.  Then you marry one.  It seems more like fate … and in line with you how you see the world … and ultimately what you were destined to do … and if you’d care to admit, happy to do.  You married a bitch.  It’s OK.  You expect no more or less from the world.  You may marry a bitch or two.  Or three.  You can handle it.  Frankly, if that’s how you see the world, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

And what does the bitch think about all this?

Same shit, different day.  A beautiful saying that demonstrates the repetition of most of our work days.  You’re dealing with the same shit EVERY day.  Man, it never ends.  But look on the bright side.  It could be different shit, same day.  Implying that you’re dealing with all kinds of shit in one work day, and that’s got to be more stressful and depressing than same shit, different day.  Same shit, same day?  Eh.  Different shit, different day?  I guess that should be what I tell potential employers when they ask what my goals are.  I want to deal with different shit on different days.  Man, just not the same shit on different days, lord, I can’t take it. 

There’s no free lunch.  Ass, grass or gas: no one rides for free.  Forgive me for that 70s flashback, but it’s pretty much synonymous with this phrase.  (Although if you hitch a ride with me, I will not demand ass, grass or gas in return.  If you want to help with gas money, I’m OK with that.  I don’t smoke marijuana, especially while driving, but I appreciate the offer.  Ass?  I don’t expect sexual favors for taking you from Point A to Point B in a motor vehicle.  Are we cool now?  Can I go back listening to my Foghat eight track?  No, I’m not gay.  I just don’t demand ass for giving you a free ride, mama.  No.  Not even a free mustache ride.)

I’ve had a few free lunches in my time.  The one place I worked, an investment bank, we had free lunch every day.  I’m assuming the bank used the money to pay for it as a tax write-off of sorts.  Their attitude was the money they spent (and partially recouped at tax time) giving free lunch to employees encouraged people to work at their desks and not go out for lunch.  (Of course, most people ate at their desks … then took an hour lunch anyway!)  But it did work for some people, and it was a nice little perk.  In NYC, if you don’t brownbag it, you’re generally spending anywhere from $5.00 to $15.00 per day on lunch, depending on how extravagant you want to get.

We’re the people our parents warned us about.  No, you’re not.  My parents didn’t warn me about people who wear lampshades on their heads at parties.  Or drop movie/TV quotes in vain attempts at humor.  Or spout meaningless clichés at work all day long, as if that self-mythologizing nonsense gives meaning to their lives.  Or are just not funny, original or genuinely wild in any sense.  My parents warned me about perverts and criminals.  Unless we’re sitting in a holding cell in Rikers, I tend to view this statement with mild contempt.  I wish my parents had warned me about mediocre people with no wit, intelligence or imagination.  But they probably figured life would drop them on me like rain soon enough.  It did.

That which cannot kill me will make me stronger/I’ll never live to see 30/live like you were dying.  All thanks to Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”  I’m not even sure if that’s the exact phrasing, but you get the picture.  It’s a young man’s thing.  You have to be young to say shit like that.  I’m not sure how old Nietzsche was when he came up with that one, but he was wrong.  That which does not kill us does not make us stronger.  It kills us, slowly, almost imperceptibly, in small doses, over time.  You keep doing crazy things that threaten your health and well being, you’ll see by your 40s, it’s killing you.  Chances are, you’ll look like you’re in your 60s in your 40s if that’s your life philosophy.  And you’ll be dead in your 50s.

But you’ll never live to see 30?  All right.  I don’t think too many people are upset by that.  You aren’t either?  Tough guy, eh?  You’re really burning the candle at both ends.  You’re just too wild for this world, man, there’s no other like you, this wild burning flame, you’re out of control, man. 

You know what I’ve learned?  A vast majority of people who utter that see 30.  They see 40.  They see 50.  They might even see 60, but rarely 70.  And that time span between 40 and 60, they’re generally so beat to shit physically and mentally, that they might be regretting not checking out before 30.  But life doesn’t work that way.  You tend to hang on to it as long as you can, as long as it will let you.  It’s life.  It’s all we know.  So it makes sense not to make dire predictions about your check-out time.  And why is “30” such a bad age to live to?  You don’t hear 35-year-olds in bars crowing, “Man, I’ll never live to see 40!”  Generally when I refer to someone not living to see 50, I’m acknowledging that the person is in ill health, generally due to years of drug or alcohol abuse.  Not designating this person as a wild child who’s burning brighter than the sun.  It’s not cool, the grand illusion being it’s just as uncool when you’re 25, but you’re not smart enough to see it.

No matter, you’re going to live like you were dying.  Very bad country and rock songs have been written about this topic.  By people who have no clue what dying implies.  Watch someone die sometime.  You will, sooner or later.  Someone you love.  Over the course of time.  Years, months, weeks, or days.  They’re not jumping out of airplanes or burning with the light of a thousand stars.  They’re suffering.  They’re in agonizing pain.  They’re high on morphine and floating in and out of consciousness.  I don’t ever want to live like I was dying, although from what I’m seeing, I’ll be an anomaly if I don’t.  Most people go through that horrible phase at the very end. 

I also hope I get old before I die.  Like Pete Townshend.  I think 60s rock music did more to misconstrue and taint the reality of aging than any other cultural force, before or since.  We’re still suffering from it and will be for generations.

It is what it is.  This is the granddaddy of them all.  Muttered all day long, every day, simply to signify that, yes, this situation sucks, and we all know it.  Well, I don’t know it, and I often say as much.  Once, this guy Bob at work, said that in a meeting, and in my best “let’s think outside the box” voice, I replied, “Bob, allow me to interject here, but I have to disagree.  In this particular situation, it is what it isn’t.”

Some people just stared at me.  Others got it and laughed.  Bob laughed, because he knew I was poking fun at him.  It is what it is.  Man, come on.  That’s not saying anything.  If you feel the words “it is what it is” bubbling up in a conversation, do yourself a favor: say nothing.  You’ll be saying the same thing as nothing.  Then again, in a world where “like,” “you know,” “totally” and “awesome” are used dozens of times by people every day in conversations, “it is what it is” must sound like a line Jesus used in His Sermon on the Mount.

Back in the 80s, The Godfathers, a British band, put out a song called “Birth! School! Work! Death!” that did a great job of encapsulating this sort of “life is hard and never gets any easier” philosophy I see people employ every day.  I thought this song was going to become one of those foundations of rock, like “Stairway to Heaven” or “Freebird” but it just didn’t happen, probably because it was the 80s, and hard-rock songs like this (that weren’t hair metal) were out of place.  But it took that philosophy and boiled it down to a four-word chorus, with exclamation points, that pretty much says it all.  If only this clichéd take on the world was done as originally more often.

The New Blogger!

With Google’s recent update of all its programs a few weeks ago, I was shoe-horned into their new “Blogger” set-up when signing in and adding posts/editing this blog.  I’m not sure why Google, and so many other web-based enterprises, feel a need to be forever “updating their look” when there was nothing wrong with the previous “look.”

Aside from adding a function that directly allows links to open up in another tab, I can’t stand it.  For one reason only.  When I log in, every time, I’m faced with a chart that shows readership based on the past few weeks of viewing, and then when I get into Edit Posts, I’m also given a breakdown, post by post, of how many times individual readers have read that post.  In short, where statistics used to be a sidebar choice that I never chose, it’s now shoved into my face every time I get on the thing.

There doesn’t seem to be any way of editing that statistical view off the home page.  So I’ve undertaken the highly scientific method of placing my hand over the screen where I know that chart will appear, and then when I get to the Edit Posts page, shifting my hand so it hides the column of statistics showing readers per post.

Why?  Because I’m not writing for statistics, or in hopes of hyping myself to the extent that tens of thousands of people are checking in here weekly to see what I’m doing.  From what I saw, looks more like dozens, which makes more sense as I shoot for posts every other week, as opposed to every other hour.  I know if I was getting those big numbers, my Comments section would be deluged by that predictable brand of internet twerp who feels a need to dump on every site he reads … I get a few here sometimes, but not enough to bother me.  (And if they did, I’d simply shut off comments.)  I’m not worried about comments, one way or the other.  You’ll never hear me pining for people to comment.

So much has changed about why I write over the years.  I’d say in my early 30s, I was wildly ambitious to hype myself, and get my name out there, and have people read me, and write outrageous, crazy shit to draw attention to myself.  And as the decade wore on, I could see, sure, I could make it to some level doing that, but it’s a put-on, I’m not doing anything for the sake of pure writing.  I’m … just … hyping … myself.  Some of the people I was writing with at the time at my NYC weekly paper, I’ve seen, have hyped themselves into varying positions of low-level fame.  God bless them, too, but it just felt off to me after awhile.  There’s writing, and there’s hyping yourself.  They’re not the same thing, although the internet has encouraged writers to do nothing but hype themselves 24/7, to the extent that I know doing so has become equally important as their ability to write with any sort of purpose or passion.

New York City does nothing but encourage that level of hype over talent.  Editors and anyone else who should be on the lookout for talent are not on the lookout for talent.  They’re sitting back and letting it come to them … and what comes to them are people desperate to see their name in lights.  Some of them are good writers, some are so/so, and some are charlatans.  Their ambition is not to write, as it once was, but to receive adulation as a writer, that special sort of respect we give to them.  I recognized that yearning within myself, like I said, up through my 30s, but after awhile realized, I don’t need it.  I somehow reasoned my way into getting through life without the approval or respect of strangers, and in doing so, saw through that crazed determination I once had.

Not that I’m some guru with all the answers now.  I just know one wrong answer.  It’s a miracle in life to know any real answers.

Most annoying to me are the blogs with the guy, always a guy, who has an opinion on everything, usually expressed a few time a day on various worldly topics.  Usually an opinion geared towards liberal or conservative readership.  And the guy never comes up with one original thought.  He’ll be commenting on a link to something he saw or read that day and then flooring us with his wonderfully one-sided analysis of the issue at hand.  You better believe that when Joe Paterno took his tumble from grace, every shithead on the internet who falls into this category had his snap judgment on the situation, brandishing his Superman’s cape and saving us all from this raving, ancient pervert … when all the writer was doing was ruining a good man’s life just before he passed on, with no evidence, with no real knowledge of what he was writing about, just that finger in the wind, sensing which way it was blowing and adding his own hot air to the instant hurricane.

Thanks, guys.  And that’s only one example of the sort of faulty internet logic that these guys employ to, I don’t know, boost readership?  Position themselves as voices of moral reason (when this is about as far from the truth as you can get)?  You tell me.  Because when I land on one of these blogs with our modern-day Socrates putting out bite-size nuggets of faux wisdom, I’ve seen it so many times in the past that I just get the hell out of there. 

What I try to do here is picture the reader as a friend in a bar, talking over drinks, because I’ve realized there’s not much more valuable in life than making simple, human connections with other people.  That may sound goofy and stilted, but look around, on the web in particular, and you can see just how disconnected people have grown from their sense of humanity.  Walk the streets.  You’ll find people so obsessed with their smart phones that they’re completely out of the moment and disconnected from their physical reality.  And you realize, that’s just passing them in a moment, and the larger reality isn’t the person putting the phone back in his pocket after checking a message, but obsessively thumbing the damn thing for the next half hour.  Reality is an unwelcome diversion in the eternal smart phone session.

I read so much horseshit about “this generation” and how our lives will change as a result of their gadget addiction.  No.  Their lives will change.  Their fingers will get bigger.  Their eye-sight and the ability to read small print, worse.  Their lives more engaged with actual reality, simply by default.  And I have to think most people too wrapped up in this nonsense will slowly but surely become relatively normal human beings, as opposed to these meandering, soul-less device bots they are now.

Generally speaking, any prognostication on teenagers or people through their mid-20s never takes into account that these people are going to change radically in the next decade of their lives, be it political views, personal philosophies, lifestyles, etc.  It all changes.  To gauge them in the present tense and take that measurement as a barometer of how the future for all of us will play out is utter bullshit, and the mark of someone with no eye for the big picture.  Essentially, we’re talking about toys, for overgrown children, that have been expertly marketed to them, which is the real story here.  I wouldn’t call it “just a phase,” but I would recognize that the recent college grad who can’t walk in a straight line on the sidewalk due to her Twitter obsession is going to have way too much real-life shit going on a decade down the road to be that same errant twat forever.  (Call me an optimist.)

This whole “statistics in your face” function with Blogger is just an extension of this putrid self-absorption.  I’d wager that most people writing blogs, if they’re hung up on statistics, probably get a cruel wake-up call when they’re faced with daily reminders of who is or isn’t reading their site.  Unless the blog is wildly successful, there’s bound to be a small (but hopefully dedicated) readership.  As for wildly successful blogs, man, look around.  There’s a teenage sort of nastiness to most of the really popular ones.  An obsession with celebrity.  A surface appreciation of pop culture.  Or this pretentious desire to be everything to everyone as noted a few paragraphs earlier, which I’m recognizing is just another row of vanity mirrors in the funhouse.  These people are like the Scarecrow at the end of The Wizard of Oz, rattling off square roots after the wizard gives him his fake diploma.

It struck me as a better idea to provide something no one else can – more drawn-out essays, observations and stories that I can relate to you from my life and experiences.  Which may bore the shit out of some, or at least I hope that’s the case given what most people find intriguing these days, but if I’m doing it right, may also form some sense of connection with people on the same wavelength.  And you don’t measure that with statistics.  Either you get it, or you don’t.  I know how to pump up statistics.  Write one-liners and small paragraph posts, numerous times a day.  Hype myself on Facebook and Twitter.  Badger these larger amalgamator sites to link and hype my site.  Give away free music constantly.  Put pictures of celebrities on the site and write about them.  Hurl insults.  Stir the pot.  It’s not hard to do.

But again, I have to ask myself why I’d want to do that, and that question goes all the way back to why I chose to write in the first place.  It was simply being a reader first, having my mind blown by people like Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs, and foolishly trying to mimic their styles.  And after realizing I couldn’t, still noticing that I enjoyed the act of putting thoughts on paper, and that people recognized that I had some facility for it.  Recognition kept me going for years, the longing for and acquiring of it, but even that conked out on me after Dad passed on.  I lost the urge to impress upon other people how wonderful, witty and knowledgeable I am.  Fuck, I’m not.  Sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m a complete idiot.  I’m like anyone else.  While that realization set me free in a number of ways and got me more in touch with how the world really works (as opposed to how I want it to work), it also showed me that the world will go on spinning just fine without me.  And I think that’s something people who long for fame can’t quite get through their heads, which is a large part of what drives them to succeed in their chosen endeavor.

So why write at all?  Because it’s what I do.  And I’m good at it, or at least I’ve bullshitted myself into thinking I am.  In any case, you’re stuck with me, you dozens of weirdoes who probably still listen to vinyl albums and get along with your parents.  If Blogger was being really honest, instead of statistics coming up on the entry page for their site, they’d have Google create a type of mirror connected to a computer’s web cam, only instead of giving a fairly accurate physical portrayal of the writer’s face, somehow incorporate Photoshop to guarantee the person is rendered far more attractive and appealing, the same way Cinderella’s dog sisters all thought they were beauty queens whenever they gazed upon their reflections.  That’s what most people want.  Hell, that’s what most people see.

Update: Holy shit.  I just logged in to enter this post, and Google got rid of the “in your face” readership chart.  Please disregard the above blathering.  I can go back to feeling like a normal human being.

Every Which Way But Loose

With the high-school reunion approaching, I’m recalling all those weird little quirks so many of us had back in high school, the late 70s turning into the early 80s.  Of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to us at the time, but it was a good time to be a teenager.  We thought we were in hell, and if you took me back in a time machine now and made me spend a week in high school, wandering around like a Dickensian Ghost of Christmas Past, I’d more than likely agree.  But I can see through the scope of passing time, the life of a relatively care-free teenager in a small town circa 1982 wasn’t a bad place to be.

We weren’t imbued with the useless negativism and self-loathing that came into play with so many kids in the 90s.  We weren’t raised by people from the 60s, i.e., the Baby Boom Generation, thank God.  We were the tail end of it.  Rest assured, the parents before them stuck to a far more traditional background that had been in place for decades.  And as the 70s wore on, kids weren’t as wild.  When I watch the movie Dazed and Confused now, while I can view it with nostalgia, the truth is that movie represents kids from the early 70s, who tended to be far more druggy and lost than we were.  Not like we were rockets aiming towards the future.  But if you described a kid as a burnout, you knew exactly what that meant, and it was a much smaller group of kids from previous years.  Even with that heavy drug influence of the early/mid 70s, I can see a lot of those people, as they aged, maintained more of a stoic/Korean War vet take on life.  Much like their parents.  That’s what you don’t pick up on as a kid.  You somehow morph into your parents over time.  Which might make you shit your pants in terror.  But is comforting as time goes on.  Unless you were raised by assholes.

College wasn’t considered a financially crushing endeavor back then.  If you had halfway decent grades, it was expected that you’d go, mostly because it was reasonably affordable, at least compared to today.  Going to Penn State, I worked two years in the factory, worked part-time when I got up to the main campus, and when the smoke cleared with my B.A. in hand, I was $5,000 in debt, which was comparatively low to most of my friends.  But most of them were looking at no more than $10,000.  These days, I hear of people tens of thousands dollars into their college educations by the time they leave.  And the kids who didn’t go?  The ones I know have fended reasonably well for themselves, falling into long-term working-class jobs that ended up not being such a bad deal 20-30 years down the road.  They might complain about security and lack of pensions, but we’re all in the same boat now, no matter what color our collars are.  (Dad worked three decades in a factory and left Mom with his pension that allows her to live comfortably in her old age.  You think this is going to happen with 401-K’s and Social Security?)

But never mind all that.  Going back to the early 80s.  For some reason, I keep thinking about this guy M, who was known for being a great wrestler.  In one of our English classes our senior year, I distinctly recall one of those round-table discussions where we all talked about what wanted to do with our lives.  I’m sure I said something about writing … not knowing then that hardly anybody has the life of Stephen King, making a fortune, living comfortably in large houses in the New England countryside.  If you had told me I more than likely wasn’t going to make a living at this, unless I took some insane editorial job with lousy hours, low pay and a constantly shifting future, I might have thought twice.  But nobody warned me about that, not even in college.

I remember when it came M’s turn, unironically, he said, “I want to drive a truck around the country with a chimp as my only companion.”

What the fuck.  We all knew what he was talking about.  A few years earlier, Clint Eastwood had a massive hit movie with Every Which Way But Loose with the exact same story line.  He followed it up with Any Which Way You Can.  In those movies, Clint made side money by staging impromptu bare-knuckle brawls in factory and farmyard lots for big money.  I’d imagine M saw himself doing the same, as he was a tough kid.  More importantly, he probably wasn’t referring to these movies, but the hit TV show, BJ and the Bear, with the dashing star Greg Evigan taking over the Eastwood roll, sans brawling, as a care-free trucker traveling the land with Bear, his chimp compadre.

Never mind that we had no idea of how wild and hard-to-tame chimpanzees are.  That thing would be shitting in the cab routinely.  Tearing up the upholstery.  Jerking off constantly.  I suspect chimps on a movie set like that are routinely drugged to keep them under control.  Driving around the country in an enclosed space with one?  Come on.  For every cute scene of the animal charming people in a diner while wearing a captain’s hat and faking human laughter, there’d be a few hours of him kicking out windshields with his powerful legs and rubbing his erection on teenage girls in parking lots.

No one laughed when M said this.  Probably because doing so might entail him tying the offender up like a human pretzel.  He was a nice guy, anyway, when not wrestling.  I’m sure a few of us gave each other a “what the fuck” look, but his declaration was taken as seriously as anyone else’s.  In fact, I remember him getting into a brief discussion with another kid about the logistics of acquiring a chimp and taking it on the road … as if this was as viable an option as attending a local community college for Accounting.

And that’s a berserk form of innocence that no longer exists!  Maybe thanks to reality shows, which are horrible, but at least are a strategically-edited form of reality.  As opposed to the endless stream of cockamamie sit-coms we were raised on in the 70s.

On the other end was my friend L.  I wrote a piece about his passing for Leisuresuit.net back in the 90s called The Blue Shirt.  Which was actually about our entire-class picture in the yearbook, all of us gathered in a field behind the high-school, a cool picture to this day.  My friend J, standing next to me in the picture has a fluorescent blue shirt and no right hand.  In reality, he had both hands and was wearing a white shirt.  The problem being, in each of the five pictures taken that day, he was giving the middle finger with his right hand wrested on his should each time.  The pain of it being, I was doing the same thing, with my arms crossed, save there was a guy standing in front of me just enough to block out my hands from each picture.

But that picture also reminded me of L, who was right next to us, laughing his ass off.  He was gone within a year, suicide, although I suspect to this day loved ones probably consider it accidental.  But I knew the guy, and he was smart enough not to leave a car running in a closed garage, which was how he was found, and also knew he was despondent over a break-up.  It’s a touchy subject I’d rather not get into – the few kids/adults who have committed suicide from our class are always hard to discuss because no one wants to think about a life ending that way, especially for somebody that young.

I remember the lunch-room discussions we used to have.  R was also part of that lunch crowd, I think in our junior year.  (Here’s a goodwrite-up of how R was.)  R could often be found doing weird things to his food, like taking his hot dog out of its bun, cutting it up with his butter knife to make it look like a penis, tearing up and shaping the bun to look like two testicles, and placing his mashed potatoes at the head of the hot dog/penis to make it look like recent ejaculation.

Doing so would make him laugh that horsey laugh of his for minutes on end, past the point of tears, to near heart-attack level.  What can I say, this is how we were as teenage males left to our devices, and I suspect little has changed over the years.

But I remember L and I once getting into a red-faced argument over my opinion that, “Anything was possible.”  L scoffed at me and told me it wasn’t.  I can’t even remember how I framed it or what we were talking about.  But it quickly grew into a deep philosophical difference between us, that I thought anything was possible, and that L knew for fact that some things had to be impossible.  The lynch pin of his point of view was that there was no way scientists could invent something that would allow his arm to snake 15 feet over three tables and steal French fries from a girl’s plate sitting that far away.

And I told him, don’t be silly, I’m not talking about possibilities in terms of crazy shit like that, I mean in terms of your life, what you want to do with it, how you want to live it, anything is possible, positive or negative.

I can’t recall why he got so angry, but you could tell he was genuinely offended that I would hold such a point of view, positioning himself as the voice of reason and experience, while I had to be out of my mind and childish to hold such a point of view.

All these years later, I could see that moment now as an omen of what was to come.  Because you have to believe life is impossible to check yourself out in a closed garage a few years later, car engine running, while you sit there hoping nobody finds you before the deal is done.  I’ve had some dark days in my adult life, but never to the point where I’d ponder checking out like that.  Because I’ve lived long enough to know that all things pass, good and bad, continuously, and it’s a rare life that gets locked into one or the other for long periods of time.

And yet, as I get older, I can see what L meant, that things are a lot less likely to happen for some people than others, particularly when you’re raised working-class like we were.  That was probably the heart of the issue for him, recognizing our place in the world.  Whereas I refused to recognize that, pictured myself going to college, getting an English degree, writing all the time, getting famous, making truckloads of money as a result.

Well, three out of five aint bad.  And that’s the difference.  L would have looked at three out of five as a demonstration of impossibility, a failure of sorts.  I probably would have, too, back then, before the internet rolled around and made writing a damn near impossible stand-alone job.  I’ve learned that the simple ability to write whatever I want is all I really need, since I’ve been supporting myself by other means since the day I left college all those years ago.  It would be lovely to write all the time and get paid a fortune, but I suspect the quality would be no better or worse than what I’m putting out here, and you can take that for whatever it’s worth!

But L did touch on some sense of disappointment, not just within myself, but within everyone I knew from back then.  Even the extremely intelligent kids, I could sense, were not going to change mankind and alter the course of humanity, despite having the potential to do so.  From what I’ve seen, most of them have fallen into lucrative professions and, pretty much, learned how to cover their own asses.  I’m not knocking it.  In this world?  That’s to be expected by any sane person.

It’s enough to make sense of the world and your place in it, to not lose hope or sanity, to keep on keeping on, because as I saw on my father’s death bed, we’re all going to end up in that place, in that room, taking our last breaths one day, and pondering what it was all about, and what, if anything, is going to happen next.  And whether you set the world on fire, only covered your own ass or checked out early because it was all too much, there’s bound to be a sense that life, in and of itself, was enough.

Gourds on Film

Since the turn of the century, I’ve been saying The Gourds are my favorite American band.  I’m not sure what that means.  Most of what comes out of the UK these days is the same old stuff, which is not an insult, but not since Pulp has a band from over there blown my doors off.  Favorite American band?  I think what I’m trying to say is they’re the my favorite band still playing.  Period.

And now some folks are trying to raise money to do a documentary on them. After I post this story, I’m going to get over to Kickstarter and make my donation.  Why not?  Even if I buy the DVD when it comes out, I’d still be dropping $20 or so after shipping, so it makes sense to kick in on the funding and make the thing happen.  Every few days I check in, and I suspect they’ll make that $45,000 goal by June 11.  Most likely from word of mouth at gigs and among fans on the web.  And things like this – if you’re reading this, a fan, and didn’t know about it, please, drop a few dollars, you know these guys are worth it.

I can’t even recall how I got into The Gourds.  I had the first album: 1996, Dem’s Good Beeble.  I can’t recall if I first heard them on Vin Scelsa’s radio show on WNEW, or if longstanding pal, P.J. turned me on to them.  P.J. actually knew the band at their inception, having lived in Austin in the early 90s, literally across the street from Jimmy Smith, and was privy to the early days of the band before the first album, which must have been a blast.  P.J. had followed his college flame to Austin, eventually married her, moved back up here to live on a farm her family owned in Otisville, NJ, eventually divorced her after the birth of their child, and I guess the one thing he can thank her for, aside from a good daughter, was her turning him onto The Gourds.  (It’s always a good idea to take the good with the bad when you look back on major disasters in your life, because there’s always some kind of good mixed in.)

That first album didn’t floor me at the time.  I remember thinking, “These guys sound like an updated version of The Band, with Kevin Russell nailing that rural Levon Helm vibe, and Jimmy Smith providing the looser Rick Danko element.”  I also recall the band denying they ever heard of The Band at the time, which was utter BS, even I knew that.  They knew their country and rock history.  I’d eventually come across Kevin’s earlier work in the Picket Line Coyotes, and that was one dude who must have worn out his copies of Murmur and Reckoning … so fucking glad he morphed into something else with his next band!

The next album, Stadium Blizter in 1998, that was where I got into them and started sending that “favorite band” vibe.  That was also the year of “Gin and Juice” … which probably would have been a lower Top 40 hit had they released it as a single.  But the band didn’t want to be considered as a novelty/cover act at the time, and the song floated all over the web in the nascent days of Napster, getting mis-labeled thousands of times over as being performed by Phish by stoner jam rock guys who must have had their heads completely up their asses.  It may not seem like much now, but that was a crucial point in the band history, one that could have broken them onto an entirely different level.  But, by choice, and by that weird misidentification, the big Wilco-style tour bus drove right by them, leaving them with the rental van and the 2-3 week touring schedule.

Son of a bitch, that and the next album, Ghosts of Hallelujah, blew my doors off.  Gangsta Lean.  Magnolia.  I Ate the Haggis.  There was such a looseness about their sound, the kind of looseness you had when you were seventeen, and the kind of looseness you never lost, providing you didn’t turn into a shithead when you grew up, as so many adults do.  This was the kind of country music I liked, and still like now.  Made by smart, loose guys from a rock background, who grew into country as they got older, but never forgot that sense of fun rock and roll has in its heart.  This was the sound of America, that melding of so many southern influences into one coherent whole, the same way people like Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Beach Boys and CCR did, once upon a time.  Not so much a conscious effort, just people joining their musical backgrounds and fitting it into a format that may be as old as the hills, but can easily sound new when someone brings his own take into it.  As opposed to the current state of pop country, which is a pathwork of bad cliches, 80s stadium rock with the occasional fiddle and/or steel guitar solo.

People are carrying about their latest album, Old Mad Joy, as if it will be their “breakthrough” … but let’s cut the bullshit.  These guys are never going to “breakthrough” in that blockbuster commercial way I’ve seen so many people imply in reviews.  Either these people aren’t listening correctly, or they’re just full of shit … knowing music critics, you know which option I angle towards.  It’s a good album.  All their albums are good.  The hype leading into it was this “real” producer Larry Campbell was going to take the band, in Levon Helm’s studio near Woodstock, no less, and forge a new sound of sorts that highlighted all their strengths.  I think we all pictured the guys in the cellar of Big Pink creating their version of The Basement Tapes.

Fucked if I can tell, but it sounds like any other good Gourds album I’ve bought in the past 15 years.  Not a breakthrough.  Not a higher level.  They always work on a high level.  It sounds like Campbell might have encouraged them to tighten up their sound, but that doesn’t necessarily make them a better band.  It sounds like doing so had the best effect on Jimmy Smith, or at least “Drop What I’m Doing” is the best song he’s done in years, one of the best Stones-style riffs you’ll ever hear.  I’ve always been more of a Kevin Russell fan (Gourds fans always seem to lean one way or the other), but the sum is always much greater than the parts with these guys, and Jimmy’s songs have that necessary rough-and-tumble quality that the band could not function without.  (Jimmy's song "The Blue Bottled One" from one of his solo albums is surely in my Top 3 by the band.)  Their greatness is that sense of union and tension between Kevin and Jimmy.

And it seems like they’re good enough guys, like each other enough, that whatever differences they have, they can keep it together and go on as a band.  That’s rare with musicians, and the whole band seems like they’re friends.  Compare and contrast with, say, The Ramones, driving around in vans for decades, and no one talking to each other at all, mile after mile, week after week, year after year. 

That’s got to be hell.  I sometimes fret when bands I love don’t make it on that larger level, but I’ve learned, by the same token, not making on that level generally allows you much more control of the product, and if you have enough of a fan base, freedom to tour at will and still make some kind of money.  Most people I know have no idea who The Gourds are, and I’m completely comfortable with that.  For the songs I’m compiling for a class reunion in July, I’m including “Gin and Juice” but doubt I’ll get a chance to slip it on between the Toby Keith and Rihanna and Beyonce and Loverboy and Seger and Madonna and Kid Rock and Lady Gaga and whatever else people in their 40s want to hear that still makes them feel cool.  Shit, I’d have about two dozen Gourds song in that mix if I were going to do it by my personal taste, but I’m not.  Class reunion is not hipster funhouse time, and like it or not, at least in the northeast, you’ve got to be a bit of a hipster, a 90s-style hipster of sorts, to be into The Gourds.  Or into alt country in general.  It might be different down south, and surely is in Texas, but up here, you say you’re a Gourds fan, the general response is, “Why not squash?”

I’ve met the guys a few times through P.J., and it always felt weird, as we’re talking pre-show in NYC.  Once, we even went backstage when they played the Bowery Ballroom.  I just felt like a dick.  The band is always a little nervous and in their own space before a show – any band is like that.  Well-wishers came by, guys who were clearly hipper than P.J. and I were, and we all felt like dicks … because The Gourds aren’t a black-turtleneck hipster sort of band.  I struck up a conversation with Kevin about college football which eventually turned into periodic email exchanges, but we lost that thread a long time ago, long before the demise of Paterno which I’ve written about extensively here, but Kevin struck me as a very smart, funny, warm guy … just like his songs.  Jimmy’s just like his songs, too, you half expect the guy to wear a bell around his neck so he doesn’t get lost in the streets before the show.  I remember one show, pre-show, seeing him on the street, and looking away, because I figured he wouldn’t remember me, but damn, when I looked back, I caught him looking away with a “shit, I know that guy, but this is New York and we have to play it cool” look on his face.  Shit.  I’ve always felt like an asshole over that moment.

But, I’m rattling on here.  Go find the band if you already haven’t.  I’m now going to head over to Kickstarter and drop down a healthy donation, so I can get my DVD when the time comes.  There are two bands I grew up with: The Replacements and The Gourds.  While Paul Westerberg seems to have dropped out for the time being, and that’s somebody I’ll hang in there with, no matter how much he pisses me off, The Gourds have never let me down as musicians.  I was well into my 20s when I heard them, as were they, and they've felt like that one band I could pace my life with and still feel some ongoing connection in the music they make and how I live.  They’re never going to get what they deserve, but that seems to be a running theme in most of my favorite musicians’ lives, not to mention my own!

We Are Young

The desk-top AM radios at work keep playing this song “We Are Young” by the band fun in a way that I know implies #1 single.  More than a few women at work still listen to the local AM Top 40 stations as they work.  As a result, I’m exposed to some of the most heinous shit imaginable, but it at least tips me off on what kids find popular these days.  With a class reunion coming up, it also tips me off on which current tracks to include in the mix, that some drunk person in his 40s might request, although the thought of some guy my age baying out this song is something I hope doesn’t transpire that night.

And it’s not that we aren’t young.  In the grand scheme of things, we’re just over halfway there.  That’s what you grasp about life in your 40s.  You might die any time in the next 20 years over some unforeseen health issue: a massive heart attack or early cancer of some sort.  But you might also live another 40+ years.  It’s hard to grasp how life moves and works without living through it, because I’d have no concept that there was still such a long way to go at this point in my life.  When you’re in your 20s, especially towards the 30 end, you start to grasp that this “instant youth” shit you’re being over-fed culturally on a daily basis is revolting and tiresome.  People feel “old” at 26 because they’re inundated with these images of how they’re supposed to feel at this age (young! vibrant! wacky! alive!), when their reality is slow entry in adulthood, and the realization that life is what it is, and some days that’s going to suck, or just be another day, as opposed to this fireworks display of euphoria they’re being misled to believe in. 

This song itself isn’t bad.  I’m glad Fueled by Ramen is getting some sort of cash windfall, as much as this song troubles me, as I bought more than a few indie songs from the label in the 90s.  It’s catchy, even with the annoying, slick production values that date it immediately.  Of course, that ersatz euphoria noted above is the troubling issue.  Sample lyrics: 

My friends are in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State
My lover she’s waiting for me just across the bar
My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking bout a scar, and
I know I gave it to you months ago
I know you’re trying to forget
But between the drinks and subtle things
The holes in my apologies, you know
I’m trying hard to take it back
So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down, I’ll carry you home

Tonight, we are young
So let’s set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun

The verses are nothing to write home about, but the chorus bursts forth in a triumphant wave, that sort of “singalong in the arena” vibe they were going for, and hats off for achieving it.

I can’t figure out whether the singer knows he’s full of shit, or whether he takes himself very seriously.  I’m willing to wager he started out knowing he was full of shit, but now that there are people falling all over him and treating him like a mini-god, he’s taking himself (and this silly song) very seriously.  It has that one-hit wonder vibe to it, the kind of thing that will be played at high-school reunions 10 years from now, and a bunch of rapidly aging 28-year-olds will go “fuck yeah” and pound one down.  I understand this song first became a hit when the cast of the TV show Glee immortalized it in song.  And that’s one teenage phenomenon that is way out of my jurisdiction, as the one time I tried to watch the show, I projectile vomited for the entire five minutes it was on the TV.

What really troubled me was finding there’s an entire Wikipedia entry edicated to this song alone (which probably makes sense, as opposed to the band and/or album, because this one song is going to be it for them).  And this passage in particular: “‘We Are Young’ received immense praise and positive commentary from major music critics and is considered a breakthrough for the indie music genre. Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone called the song ‘rollickingly catchy,’ writing that ‘Ruess' knack for the anthemic is matched by Gen-Y humor – emo self-deprecation that leavens the bombast.’ … Spin reviewed the track positively based on its inclusion in the album, singling it out for ‘marrying fist-pump stadium rock to the prim indie-pop of Grizzly Bear's ‘Two Weeks,’ keeping the deliberate beats and soaring melodies but replacing choirboy primness with a percussive whomp.’”

If you want to know why I got out of writing about music professionally, there it is.  Because a song like this … my god, you’d have thrown it on my desk, I’d have shit myself laughing over the concept of having to hype it for a living.  And that’s exactly what those critics are doing.  I hesitate to call them whores – that’s too kind a word.  They’re simply liars.  Because I know they have the cultural knowledge and experience to see this song for what it is, and they should have the courage to stand their ground and write off a piece of fluff like this for what it is: cynical, mediocre product aimed at manipulating that dislocated, unreal sense of grandeur kids mistakenly attach to their youth.  But these people don’t want to lose their jobs, so they keep log rolling with everyone else.  Don’t cry for me, Argentina: if I had to do that for a living, I would be suicidal.

I’ve been thinking about this more lately due to a few things.  For one, I went to the NYC Public Library and took out the first season for The Monkees tv show (with the second on hold).  I love The Monkees – always have.  Their music was a core part of my early childhood in the late 60s and throughout the 70s via reruns and such.  The shows were fun, but they’re hard to watch now, as it’s basically Gilligan’s Island type humor with the requisite two-per-show musical romps based on the same frolics The Beatles did in A Hard Day’s Night and Help!.

But even with how much I love the band, I can see why they caught so much shit in their time, the desperate level of cynicism, no different than what I see going on now with “We Are Young,” that’s employed to sell product to kids.  The Monkees had it written into their theme song: “We’re the young generation/And we got something to say.”  The closing theme from their second season reinforced the point: “In this generation/In this loving time/In this generation/We will make the world a-shine.”

The concept of “youth culture” weighed more heavily in the 60s than at any other time in our history, before or since.  People genuinely thought a revolution was occurring, a before and after moment that would divide an older/out-of-touch generation with the newer one who understood life on some pure, basic level.  That wasn’t true.  At all.  True, a lot of good came from the 60s, but a lot of bad, too, and in the end, more than anything, I’ll take the music over anything else from that time.  The Monkees were two actors and two musicians carefully picked to helm a network TV show aimed squarely at kids and the market The Beatles had created for this kind of music.  It was done brilliantly.  The music was and is excellent.  And The Monkees themselves proved themselves up to the task, especially Mike Nesmith, who went on to have a respectable solo career in a more country vein.

But just watching these episodes now, phew, it’s harder than I had anticipated!  The Monkees caught shit because they made light of “the revolution” and because it was obvious that “the establishment” had everything to do with their existence.  Of course, it may not have been so obvious that the establishment was just as responsible for allowing any legendary rock act, be it Jimi Hendrix or The Doors, to exist.  But it was painfully obvious with The Monkees, and all of them eventually paid the price for tying themselves down to the teen market, as any act does that directly attaches their success to a certain time or age.  The same will happen to fun as they go along.  But as The Beach Boys never became The Beach Men, nor The Beastie Boys Beastie Men, fun will never become no fun.  They’ll be fun to their fans always, and serve as a nice roadside marker in the lives of the fans as they speed away into the distance of live moving on.

In tandem with all this, I recently picked up a cheap copy of Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze movie based on the 1963 book by Maurice Sendak, that I, and every kid I knew growing up in the 60s and 70s, had read repeatedly.  I loved that book – how the monsters in the forest were portrayed, the perfect invitation to kids to let their imaginations run wild as they paged through the book.  I had seen trailers for the movie when it came out, and was a little alarmed that they were using an Arcade Fire song to hype it, but I thought when I saw the puppets they had playing the monsters, man, that looks pretty cool, if I ever see a cheap copy, I’ll pick one up.

And so I did.  I have to say, Jonze did an excellent job of bringing the monsters to life.  The eyes of the puppets are amazing, heavy with human emotions.  There’s a lot right about this movie … but the fucking soundtrack.  Forever frozen in time – the early 2000s – by a shitty soundtrack.  All these chirpy, cute, hand-clappy/foot-stomping indie rock songs that are just putrid.  It deeply mars the movie for me.  For me, this is an early childhood memory, mark it down to 1970 or 1971.  Most kids of my generation read that book only a few years after it was written – I’m sure it also reached into the next generation of kids as I was always seeing those Sendak monsters in cultural references over the course of my life.  It’s not tied down to any type of music.  Had they made a movie about the book in 1970 – and used the fucking Monkees, or the Archies, or Bobbie Sherman, to do the soundtrack, it would have marred the experience in the same way.  Never mind that I can’t stand that twee sort of indie pop espoused in the movie.  Even if I liked it, I would still sense that it was out of touch with the timeless theme of the subject matter.

And the central character, the little boy, Max, was portrayed as too much of a prick for me in the movie.  I don’t recall having that feeling when I read the book as a child.  Max wasn’t a prick.  In the movie, he surely is!  He’s portrayed as fatherless, lonely and angry all the time … thus his need to strike out for a fantasy world of monsters and empires to be conquered.  Fuck.  I was a happy kid.  It was enough just to escape into a book, whatever my emotional state.  It feels like this movie was created to tap into some type of faux anger kids are supposed to relate to, I guess because so many are raised in split families these days, and somehow justify Max’s need to escape into a fantasy world.  We don’t need that justification … ever.  For any reason.  It’s OK if you want to read comics, or Sci Fi, or just get lost in a book or movie or song.  It bothered me that a character I knew to be pure and uncomplicated in my childhood was made to be, essentially, an emotionally-damaged little prick, in the movie adaptation.

So, what I’ve written about here seems to come down to reality and fantasy, and the need we have for each.  Reality of the adult world vs. the fantasies of childhood which, these days, extend well into our 20s and include mistaking getting drunk with your friends in a bar as “setting the world on fire.”  I’ve been drunk with friends in bars in my 20s.  I didn’t set the world on fire.  I was lucky not piss my pants most nights.  The best I could hope for was a short, clean break from the realities of my day-to-day life and a nice sense of human connection that doesn’t always present itself when everyone is sober.  Now, how in the hell are you going to write a hit song about that?  You don’t.  You write this.

August 29, 1983: Serious Moonlight

Knowing I’m an alumni and a fan, people at work have been ragging me on the topic of Penn State football since this Sandusky scandal broke last fall. Not nearly as much lately, but one of the guys got into the topic of that perfect season from the early part of Joe Paterno’s career for which they didn’t receive the national championship. I had thought that President Nixon somehow decided who would be national champ that year.

A little research showed that the season was 1969, Nixon had only suggested in a newspaper article that the winners of another bowl showdown should determine the champion, and he was probably right as Penn State didn’t play a single ranked team leading up to their bowl-game win.

In doing that research, I stumbled onto a yearly listing of their records, and one date really stood out for me: August 29, 1983. The night Penn State played in the annual “kickoff classic” at Giants Stadium, as reigning national champions after defeating Georgia 27-23 in the Sugar Bowl on New Years Day. That game was probably the apex of my Penn State fandom and best memory, as they played a great game and shut down Hershel Walker who had been tearing up every team Georgia played up to that point.

But I remember August 29th of that year like it was yesterday. I had just wrapped up my first summer in the factory, had one year of college under my belt and was days away from starting my next. I remember feeling fantastic, had a lot of money for myself at the time, was tanned, in great shape from running all the time, really getting a sense of moving forward in life.

The day doesn’t stand out because of Penn State, but because of a quandary I had to face. Obviously, I was pumped to watch that game on TV, but in the mean time, my group of friends had learned that David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour was coming to Hershey, PA that same night, and it seemed like a real opportunity to see him perform, still in his prime. His Let’s Dance album was ruling the charts that summer, thanks to MTV. I wasn’t that crazy about the title track (my opinion has changed over the years), but the lead-off single, “Modern Love,” was one of those typical Bowie hits, a sonic punch that was just a brilliant little pop gem.

I was a huge Bowie fan, starting with the ChangesOneBowie greatest hits eight track brother M bought and wore out in a matter of months. I started buying his other albums, beginning with Ziggy Stardust (this was probably 1976 or so, a few years after the fact), and that was one of those albums I played all the way through a few times in one sitting, for weeks on end. It’s hard to communicate the seismic shift that took place in a kid’s head in the 1970’s when he discovered a recording artist like David Bowie, but there was a before and after, no doubt.

Bowie is one of the most misinterpreted artists of the rock era, often mistaken as a trailblazer and innovator. He innovated nothing. His brilliance was in taking nascent trends (like glitter and synths) that a relatively small audience of hip people knew about, grasping that style of music in an extremely short amount of time, then putting out his own take on the trend … long before the average rock fan had any idea the trend existed. Thus mistaking Bowie as the first glam rock star, or the guy who made synthesizers cool with his Low album. (Marc Bolan was way out in front of Bowie on the glam front, and it’s painfully obvious that Bowie loved German bands like Neu, Can and Kraftwerk, thus his Low album. Which bombed at the time. And which, frankly, is more about recording effects applied to guitars, drums and keyboards than anything else. Listen to “Sound and Vision” from that album; it’s a guitar-based song with one of the nuttiest drum sounds I’ve ever heard.)

For me, it was the actual songs themselves, the guy has always had great pop sense, and his lyrics. Which tend to be nonsensical, but in ways that suggest a certain mood that suits the music. I catch the paper boy, but things don’t really change, I’m standing in the rain, but I never wave bye-bye, but I try. Huh? Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors, blushing at all the afro-sheeners?

There’s always been a surface slickness to his work, but with more than enough talent underneath to suggest this was an artist you should pay attention to, always. That’s the perfect definition of rock star. Most of them don’t go too deep in terms of real emotion or communication, but they get across these larger, sweeping concepts in highly entertaining ways that many of us recognize as someone tapped into a deep reserve of talent. (Of course, that’s all faded now … that kind of rock star … and the massive, unified fan base to suggest some type of large gathering of like-minds. We’re left with fragmented flashes of brilliance and a lot of shit rising to the top.)

And that time in the summer of 1983, Bowie was as popular as he would ever get. MTV had a lot to do with that, taking an artists who always understood the concept of image, and allowing him to create this slick, cultured, suit-wearing guy, with an unloosened tie, tan and dyed-blonde hair, like a male model trying to appear more business-like, or a business man with a highly-evolved sense of style. It suited the music he was making at the time, a much more polished take on the riskier 70s image, more user friendly, meant to register with 80s kids, which it surely did.

We had to go see him. Penn State be damned. Major artists like that would occasionally play the stadium next to Hershey Park, but not always. More often than not, when we went to see concerts, it was in the much smaller Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, where I saw my first concert, J. Geils Band, a few years earlier. Seeing Bowie in Hershey would be my first stadium concert, and we were all excited as hell to see this guy we knew only through eight tracks, album covers and the radio.

So, the day came, late August, we all piled into the old man’s used station wagon and made the hour or so journey south to Hershey, blasting Bowie tapes (at this point, surely cassette tapes) the whole way, getting in the mood. There must have been five of us, recalling brother J and neighbor B, but I seem to recall two or three other people along for the ride. As always, we felt like rubes when we got down there. Even presented with kids who were raised in the slightly more urbanized southern part of the state, we assumed they were in on something we weren’t. I’ve since realized people from around Harrisburg or Bethlehem/Allentown and surrounding cities can still be rubes in the grand scheme of things, despite seeing themselves otherwise. We were always raised thinking Reading was a big, rough-and-tumble/to-be-avoided city, but it’s just a faded small city with a shitload of big city problems.

We got our seats, around the far end of the 20 yard line, with the stage in the other end zone. It was a long ways off! To make matters worse, a lighting crane whirred into action just as we sat down and thus blocked our view of the stage. Luckily for us, they repositioned by a few feet, but that only cause another section of seats to start hooting and hollering.

It felt … impersonal. I’ve always felt that way sitting in a stadium, be it for a sports or music event. I don’t like going to stadiums, period. You can give me the best seat in the house, and I won’t care. Just too many people! Way too much hassle getting in and out. The amount of shit you have to put up with just to see a show is unbelievable. And, especially with rock and roll, you’re constantly made to feel like dogshit on the shoes of the staff and everyone else working in an official capacity. This is pretty much why I don’t go out much anymore to see bands, even in clubs, which can be just as problematic and uncomfortable.

We were crowded in with a fairly typical bunch of 70s rock fans who didn’t give a damn about the 80s or time moving forward. That’s another thing about rock and roll, you get to see where people, the fans of a given artist, stamp their foot down and say, this is where it ends for me. “It” being the desire to hear new music and open yourself to other things … the way we all once did with the given artist in question. They found a home … in most cases, it looked like Diamond Dogs circa 1975, that weird, patchy haircut, the crystal meth and pot, jeans and t-shirt, none of this faggoty disco/punk shit, no sir! And I can’t blame them. Diamond Dogs was a pretty good place to stop. But all I could think was, Diamond Dogs seemed like a pretty good place to start …

So, we’re sitting there, getting high on the pot cloud that hovered over any large-scale rock show in the 70s or 80s, and the opening act comes on: Tenpole Tudor. Had never heard of him at that point. He looked like a tall, skinny guy trying to be one of The Stray Cats, who were enormously popular at the time. I thought he wasn’t bad, a vaguely rockabilly thing going on, very stripped down, rocking out, small drum kit, bassist and guitarist doing their thing in front of a huge, closed curtain on a massive stage.

Of course, they were out of place. And as with nearly every opening act I’ve seen in a large venue, completely ignored by the crowd, who would get in the habit of baying out “Bowie” after about 20 minutes of the act. The worst case of this ever for me was seeing The Replacements open up for Elvis Costello at Madison Square Garden. For me, that was a dream show, my favorite band from the 80s matched with a guy who could do no wrong in my book as a recording artist. And the Costello fans treated The Replacements like non-entities. I couldn’t believe it. Even that small gap between Costello breaking big (late 70s) and The Replacements making a name for themselves (mid-80s) was just enough to create a void with the Costello fans, that thousands upon thousands of them didn’t know or care who The Replacements were. Paul and the gang knocked out a perfunctory set and left … Costello came out, bearded and the size of a house at that point in his career, and played just fine, but I left that night feeling a bit cheated, and extremely let down by a bunch of people who should have been more savvy.

Tenpole Tudor went on around 7:00 at night, so he was clearly going to play about 45 minutes, let the sun go down around 8:00, so Bowie could play in the dark. In that down time before darkness, I snuck away to buy a t-shirt, my mythical Bowie Let’s Dance gray muscle t that cost more than the ticket for the show! As an adult, and for years now, I’ve not been in the habit of wearing t-shirts that advertise anything: bands, magazines, products, free mustache rides. I only wear blank shirts: black, blue or white. But for a long time, I was king of the message t-shirt, and it seemed crucial to buy a shirt at a concert. Of course, it’s always a rip-off, but I also know now, this is where a huge portion of the concert revenue for an artist is generated, fans buying these hideously over-priced shirts as mementos of any given night. I recall the stand beneath the bleachers, the half dozen or so choices, the rays of the sun cutting through the bleachers, me, thinking, shit, man, I’m buying a Bowie concert t-shirt, this is great!

Well, that thing got lost over the course of decades. I suspect Mom, in one of her cleaning fits after I moved out in the late 80s, probably put it in a black trash bag and gave it to the local Goodwill store. About a decade ago, I saw that same shirt being sold on E Bay for $75.00! I think we all had a few concert shirts like that, the kind people would one day pay top dollar for and wear for “retro” cool effect. Frankly, I looked like a dick in that shirt, which is probably why I didn’t wear it that much.

But about quarter after 8:00, lights went down, everyone started carrying on, lo and behold, Bowie and band exploded on the stage in a blaze of light, and I can’t even recall what song he opened with. He had his canary yellow suit on, and the band looked like a bunch of jackasses, the horn section wearing pith helmets and explorer khaki outfits, guitarist Carlos Alomar wearing a fezz and some kind of black, Indian-looking dress, lead guitarist Earl Slick in an 80s headband and the sort of Chess King-looking pants and peasant shirt, the two male background singers decked out in seersucker suits and fedoras that made them looked like southern attorneys at a garden party in Savannah.

It was a mind-fuck of a show. Naturally, we were all impressed with the lighting, the first time we had seen such effects, the laser shows, the multi-colored spots, the fog banks, etc. He put on a rock show, no doubt about it. And we could barely see it. It was like watching a touchdown from the other 20 yard line! This was before video screens, so all we saw was this little flame-hared guy in a yellow suit, about 100 yard away, and his weirdly-attired band. The sound was pretty bad: it was a stadium. Music wasn’t meant to be played like this outdoors. In a natural amphitheater, sure, but not a flattened out field surrounded by a metal casing. The echo was terrible. Nothing wrong with the sound system, but there’s just so much you can do in a place like this.

About the only stand-out for me was his different take on “Heroes.” He started the song slow, mumbling these incoherent lyrics, that, knowing Bowie, really meant something, he was imparting something profound, and those mumblings ended with, “I will be king/And … you … will … be … queen.” And the band exploded into that huge guitar riff on the last word, a great moment. I later found out that Bowie was singing, “Lavender blue, duh-luh-di-doo, Lavender green, duh-luh-di-doo, I will be king, etc.” He was probably giving instructions to the lighting crew on what shade spot light to use! I was let down to learn that he wasn’t adding some profound message to the already-profound message of “Heroes.” The dude wanted to swim like dolphins, man!

I was able to track down that version of the song years later, as part of a bootleg of pre-tour rehearsals that he played in a small Dallas club with originally-planned lead guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. Enjoy! I recall that it was a money issue with Stevie Ray, as I’m sure he wanted more than sideman pay, and everything worked out fine, as he then went on to push his solo career over the top at that time. Earl Slick could probably play Bowie’s songs blind-folded as he seemed to ride shotgun on so many of his tours and albums.

Aside from that? Honestly, the show got boring, fast. And I have to be honest, that feeling has overcome me at some point in nearly every live show I’ve ever attended. Sometimes the whole show will be like that. Other times, just a few minutes. But at some point, I look around and think, this is bullshit. It’s too much. I’m uncomfortable as hell. We’re packed in like sardines here. There are a lot of people acting like small children, taking this thing as an opportunity to “cut loose” and essentially be pricks. Same vibe as sporting events. People getting too drunk and high. Taking piss breaks constantly. Baying like idiots in ways that don’t suggest irony but brain damage. I sort of look at myself in an imaginary mirror when I see shit like this going on and think, “Am I part of this?” And the answer is no, but I have to accept the fact that this special thing to me, the profound relationship I feel towards this artist’s music, is shared by people who appear to be complete jackasses!

I ask myself, what’s going on here? What is this thing? We pay a truckload of money to attend this thing, get treated like shit every step of way, are forced into bleachers or crappy plastic seats, then spend the rest of our time dealing with people in the immediate vicinity getting into mild forms of weirdness, be it piss breaks or fist fights or talking/yelling constantly through a set, all the while, trying to take in a show that sounds choppy because it’s been booked into a venue that was never meant to host musical events. At some point, I don’t understand the process. In younger days, I’d just bite my tongue and keep buying the tickets. Now, I just say fuck it! I can see going to small club shows where there is some type of musicianship going on – think celtic music being played live by accomplished musicians, or blues, or jazz, or even some quieter kind of folk or country. But this blowzy, balls-out, rock-and-roll, party-time event … what an over-rated ritual I’ve found these things to be over the years. Music makes sense to me personally in my every-day life, but loses its meaning for me in these staged events.

But, this realization was years down the road that night! We all told ourselves this was fucking wild, man, this was incredible … but it was just a well-staged rock show put on by a consummate professional who looked like a dot on the faraway stage and sounded muddy by the time the music reached us in our bleacher seats.

I’ve since realized that I could very easily bump into Bowie on the streets of New York, as he lives here, walks around with no fanfare, keeps a low profile. It just seems odd to try to make that connection between this ordinary guy on the street, and this shiny star at the center of these traveling events, that went on for years, that influenced millions of kids, that made perfect, beautiful sense to me the first time I slapped Ziggy Stardust on that cheap bedroom stereo. I think that’s where they myth begins. Falling in love with that sound, the word play, the sense of style, knowing this is someone who has something to tell me, even if it makes no sense, it sounds like it makes perfect sense. But then to realize I’m not the only one getting it, that millions of other people do, too. But one day, I could turn a corner on Broadway, and there Bowie will be, looking through the window of a bookstore, in an overcoat, just an average guy I could walk up to, say hello, thank him for making those albums, and he’d probably nod and be gracious, so long as I was cool and brief about it.

It’s obvious why a moment like that would mean more to me than any massive concert. Because that’s how I understand music, on this small, one-to-one level. That’s how you’re reading me now, on your computer, in your room, or wherever. You read along, if you really like what I’m writing, you keep on reading. I understand life at this level. When you times it by a million and attach all these other values to that human connection, that’s when things get weird for me, and I enter this vaguely troubling misunderstanding with how this all works. But that’s rock and roll, and I wouldn’t be “getting it” on any level if it hadn’t been marketed on that large a level, so I guess I have to take the good with the bad.

I’m glad we saw Bowie that night. Not so much for the act of seeing Bowie (which was the only time I saw him). But because when we got out in the parking lot and turned on the radio, we came up on the football game in the last minutes of the fourth quarter, with Nebraska beating Penn State 44-6. They got their asses kicked! I’ve sat through more than a few Penn State games like that in my lifetime, but that one, coming on the heels of a national championship, was surely a bad, bad feeling. Had we stayed home to watch that? We would have sat there grumbling and moaning the whole time, getting deeply upset in the way sports make us feel when our team gets shellacked in an important game. Had we skipped seeing Bowie to sit there at home and watch that happen? Even worse.

So we drove home that night, howling up Route 81 around midnight, still buzzing from the big concert, “TVC15” blasting from the tape deck, but coming back to reality where our football team now officially sucked.