Phony Beatlemania Hasn’t Bitten the Dust

I remember that line from The Clash’s “London Calling.” At that time, Beatlemania, the stage show, was in full swing. Brother J saw it while at Penn State – and loved it. Many Beatles fan, even of age, never got to see The Beatles. They stopped touring in 1966 and broke up (officially) in 1970. And something tells me seeing them in America any time from 1964-66 wasn’t that great a musical experience. Sure, you had that sense of something enormous happening, but it was tens of thousands of hysterical girls, too, at these things, screaming for the entire 35-minute concert.

Beatlemania was a tribute show, generally stocked by guys who were good musicians (Marshall Crenshaw being one of them), who performed a detailed sampling of The Beatles recording career, at a time when fans had been constantly craving a reunion that was never going to happen. It seems pretty harmless now, but at the time, anyone who perceived himself as hip – or punk – laughed at Beatlemania. Until then, it had been mainly Elvis imitators. Imitating The Beatles kicked open the door to a different generation of tribute, and there have been scores of rock-based tribute bands since, most of whom do pretty well for themselves on the road.

I’ve been thinking about and listening to The Beatles a lot lately due to the announcement of their catalog finally getting the “remaster” overhaul and reissue this fall, no doubt at top dollar. The Beatles are infamous for doing this … well, because they can. People will pay too much for their repackaged product because it’s The Beatles. Holds just as true today as it did in the 70s, when I witnessed those hits collections come out and sell pretty well, presumably to a newer generation, but I wasn’t buying that shit (save for the Blue and Red albums) – I suspect it was the same old fans wanting to be completists, as these new CDs will be in September.

But it got me listening to The Beatles again, and all I can say is, everyone else, man, just go home. These guys were it. Obviously, I don’t mean go home – I’ll get over this Beatles jag. But they’ve clearly been the best band of my lifetime. Forget about genres, whether they were pop or rock, or what have you. The Stones were surely a better rock band. But until they stumbled onto that evil formula with “Jumping Jack Flash” and worked it through Exile on Main Street, they were chasing The Bealtes in vain. Everyone was. About the only album I can think of that gives me anywhere near the same sense of wonder is Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, which is a great album in its own more mature way, but has that same sense of musical reach.

One of the things The Beatles aren’t noted for as much was the habit of wiping the slate clean for each album, from about Rubber Soul on, and giving each album a set, identifiable personality. They all sound different – radically so when you go from Sgt. Pepper to Let It Be. And within each album, you have the band exploring different styles. That sort of musical talent and sense of adventure was something I came to expect from 70s bands – and the great ones pulled it off.

What separated The Beatles most at the time was their sound – I’d imagine because they had an experienced producer like George Martin running the show, he knew how to make their records sound good. I recall when getting the Blue and Red albums (must have been 1974-75 or so) how much more I was drawn to their latter-day material (still am) because it sounded as advanced as 70s pop rock in terms of production values. (The earlier stuff was too boy/girl poppy for me, but I came around on that stuff, too.) My appreciation for the Stones, Kinks and Who lagged behind simply because the production values on many of their classic 60s recordings was way behind George Martin and The Beatles. This is probably because the bands were run by hustlers (Andrew Loog Oldham, Kit Lambert, Shel Talmy) masquerading as producers, whereas Martin really was one. The Stones snapped out of that production lethargy the quickest, but it took other bands awhile to catch up.

Put that all in the context of a 70s kid listening to shit like “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and “The Night Chicago Died.” “Crocodile Rock” was my favorite song for a few years, probably from about the age of eight to 11 or so. I really don’t regret being a huge Elton John fan as a kid. He “got it” the same way The Bealtes did in terms of making each album a new and individual musical statement. And "Crocodile Rock" was probably knocked from its perch by "Bohemain Rhapsody," which kicked my ass the first time I heard it on the radio in my Mom's station wagon while she hit the bank in Gordon.

Childhood was all about those profound introductions to music. I recall once going to a neighbor’s house and him playing his older brother’s records, one of which was the “Hey Jude/Revolution” 45. “Hey Jude” was just one of those songs that made immediate sense, the kind of thing where you’d sit and watch the Apple spin on the vinyl because you didn’t know what else to do while the song played. Just floored by it. With “Revolution” I distinctly recall at a pool party about that time, kids taking turns getting a running start on a deck and jumping into the water, making sure to time their scream with John Lennon’s at the start of “Revolution” … while a designated kid had to pick up the portable record player’s tone arm and drop the needle at the start of the 45. I’m sure we took turns and had a blast. That scream had to be one of the coolest musical memories from my childhood. (Another great one was a bunch of kids in pajamas dancing at night in front of a blanket hung on a clothes line to Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “The Loco-Motion” while other kids shook flashlights at them, causing a strobe effect.)

So, a bunch of decidedly non-hippie kids in rural Pennsylvania were using “Revolution” as back-drop for pool parties … what happened between 1968 and 1973? It’s always strange for me to recall that I came of musical age shortly after the Beatles demise – literally only two or three years after. But I can assure you, I “missed” The Beatles, as people 10 years older who were there often tell me, and I know that being of age and hearing that stuff for the first time as it came out had to be a glorious musical experience. Shit, it was glorious for me a few years after the fact. And in retrospect, taking full boyhood joy in Lennon’s scream seems a lot more innocent and useful than fucking Nike using it to sell sneakers about 10 years later.

So much time has passed between now and the 60s, yet it’s crucial to note that 70s kids missed out in some sense on that music, even if we discovered it less than a handful of years later, the same way I’ll discover a band now who had a good album out in 2003 or 2004 that I missed. But that same sort of impassable musical wall doesn’t seem to exist now. No one’s going to lecture me for not picking up on a band a few years too late – there’s been no recent cultural/musical revolution that I missed out on. That sense of cultural ownership seems non-existent now, only with hipsters, and the sort of bands they lord that sense of belonging over, man, most people have no idea who those bands are. (And that’s what being a hipsters is all about: exclusivity.)

Take that sort of artistic exclusivity that seems so esoteric now and apply it to an entire generation, with the realization that these people weren’t full of shit, the music really was that good, and that sense of cultural hipness was common currency as opposed to a secret handshake. I will always defer to Beatles fans who were teenagers in the mid-60s, because they “got” that music like no one else has since and understand it in that “musical DNA” manner so much of the 70s means to me.

Remember that none of The Beatles stopped making music in the 70s, so they were always hovering around in some sense. Ringo Starr may have been a bit of a put-on, but “Photograph” is probably the best solo Beatles single, and a song that makes me feel like it’s summer time, 1974. George Harrison got a rousing start with All Things Must Pass, and I recall his single “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” in tandem with “Photograph” as a perfect summer song. But after that, phew, he put out some bland albums after the first two, and I wasn’t buying. Lennon, of course, started out like a genius, lost his mind for a short while, then got it back after a long break, albeit never quite on that same level. “Mind Games” is that one single I recall spinning over and over, but that whole album leaves a lot to be desired. Hell, even his cover of “Stand by Me” feels as real and classic as anything else he was doing around that time. I can’t tell you how I excited I was the first time I heard “Starting Over” on the radio in the fall of 1980. Just took my breath away to hear him get “it” again, I knew from the first few strummed chords that he meant business again, and what a horrible shock when he was snuffed out by a maniac months later.

Paul McCartney ruled the 70s in terms of post-Beatles solo output. Even his supposedly shitty stuff (McCartney, Ram, Wild Life, Red Rose Speedway) sounds pretty good to me now, if a little raw. Band on the Run sounds like the pop gem it was and is – I was just playing “Mrs. Vanderbilt” on my iPod yesterday and couldn’t believe that loping bass line he came up with for that song. The whole album is filled with those sort of nice touches – album tracks like “Mamunia” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” sound even better to me now. Sure, he got too big with Wings at the Speed of Sound. But I like that he got that big again – one of those guys had to, and he was the obvious candidate. (Besides which, another great childhood memory was trying in vain to win that fucking album at the spinning wheel stand on the Point Pleasant boardwalk one night while visiting our cousins down there. I must have spent $15 trying to win an album I could have bought for $7.) You want a cool “70s” experience, pick up the live album, Wings Over America, go home, crack open a beer or two, turn off the lights and play the first track, “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” at top volume. It still fuckin’ rules! (And I realize what an assclown the previous sentence makes me come off as ... such is life.)

Along with the music, there were so many interesting books about The Beatles that came out in the 70s. I had them all. My favorite, and one I hope to pick up again, was The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello, the “house hippie” at Apple Records describing his days at the record company. Apple to the Core by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Sconfeld was the hardest read as it dealt with the details of the Beatles breaking up in court as opposed to rock mythology, but I suspect I’d find it a lot more interesting now. You have to remember that at the time, there weren’t a lot of books about rock artists, and the ones that were tended to be cheap, picture-laden biographies aimed at fans as opposed to serious readers. To this day, I love a good “rock” read, but it seems like these books don’t get written nearly as much as they did 1980 to 2000 or so. (Believe me, I’m no prime candidate to write one. The amount of research and interviews that would go into a book like this on any band or artist would take years … of financial support. I still don’t understand how many of these books got written in the first place, unless it was by a critic or a professor with a paying day job and lots of down time to pursue this.)

The other day, I made the comment to a friend that listening to The Beatles now was like recalling a special blanket or stuffed toy one used to have as a kid. Those sort of connections are nothing to scoff at or discard. Sure, I think there’d be something sick about indulging in that feeling exclusively, to the exclusion of all others. But I can assure you, the adult Beatles kick is a passing phase, something that I’ll indulge intensely and appreciate while it goes on, but come back in a few weeks, and I’ll be on to something else. That’s how I find my musical tastes go now – these intense fixations that last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, generally followed by another week or two of floating around musically, with another fixation kicking in soon thereafter. Shit, last month I thought Supertramp was godhead. Still do, but I’m not listening to them right now. Something about The Beatles, though, really registers with the elemental strains of however I came to love music in the first place, going all the way back to the start.

I’m not sure how this registers with kids now, nor do I care. I wasn’t too crazy about the movie Superbad, but one cool scene, when the obnoxious chubby kid had to describe how good something was to his friend, he blurted out, “It’s like the first time you heard The Beatles!” So I’m assuming there are plenty of people still “getting” this stuff the same way I did second-hand in the 70s. No shame at all in listening to this stuff over and over again, in weird hard bursts as time goes on. If anything, that sort of recurring passion for great music is something that keeps me looking for more new stuff to keep that feeling somehow alive, as opposed to living inside some sort of cardboard box of memories behind the 7-11. I'm more of a wandering bum of musical memories.

Panda in the Rain

Had a weird the other Saturday while cleaning up the landlord’s sidewalk. It was a crappy day weather-wise: a steady, soaking rain falling through the afternoon. I wasn’t really sweeping, but picking up any stray trash deposited on her sidewalk, which is always a given. As I moved down the sidewalk, I saw that someone had left a large stuffed panda wedged against the front fender of a pick-up truck.

It had a face like the animated pandas from that recent movie. Not quite sure what it was doing there, a stuffed animal left against a car bumper in the rain. This is what you call junk. No one was leaving it there to pick it up later. There’s a night club a block over, and I gather that late in the night, when that place clears out, people who are parked over here come back to their cars and sometimes leave odd shit behind. Predictable stuff usually – used rubbers, empty six packs, cigarette butts and those little clear plastic packets that held ecstasy, crank, speedballs or what have you. Assholes go to nightclubs, at least around here, not good people.

I knew enough not to leave it out there. That’s the kind of thing that some wise-ass group of kids heading to the basketball courts would most likely kick, or beat, knocking the stuffing out of it, making a bigger mess. When I picked it up by the arm, I saw something weird underneath it: a $1.00 bill. This is the first time I’ve ever found money out there, so that made my day. I grabbed the bear by the arm, which made me feel weird, like a kid, and dragged him back to the big hard-rubber garbage bin I keep on the landlord’s back patio. The damn thing was heavy, too, as it was water-soaked.

The bin’s nearly full after a few weeks of putting stuff in the there. Stuffing the panda in there … now I know how Tony Soprano felt when he had to dispose of a body. It wouldn’t fit. Should I cut its arms off? Its head? Legs? I had to dispose of this thing. No way was I keeping it. But stuffing it into a black garbage bag in a bin literally felt like I was trying to ditch a corpse. The quizzical panda face looked back at me as if to say, in Jack Black’s voice, “Hey, buddy, why you doing this to me?”

I stepped on his head a few times, and that made enough room. But it got me thinking about the stuffed panda’s backstory. What happened to deposit that panda on the front fender of a pick-up truck? These things are meant as presents for kids. Was someone trying to hurt a kid by stealing the panda and dumping it on an anonymous sidewalk in Queens? What I’m trying to say is what kind of person would dump a stuffed animal on the street in the rain? I’m taking it they’re not giving out stuffed animals as prizes for Biggest Guido over at the nightclub. I often ask questions like this in Queens, as there’s a surly attitude way too many natives seem to carry around with them like a cap gun, under the mistaken impression that they’re armed with a .44.

That panda had bad vibes about it. I expected it to animate itself early Sunday morning, crawl out of the garbage bag, bust into my apartment, and kill me with a carving knife. But I wasn’t the one who left him, so I slept easier on that knowledge.

*

Another Queens note. A few weeks ago, I made the leap and got “Go Green” bags from my local supermarket. Actually, they were giving them out as a special promotion, one per customer, so I tried it. And I came to a stark realization. Grocery bagging really is a huge waste of cheap plastic. When I come out of that supermarket with plastic bags, each bag a double-bag because these things are so cheap, I’m carrying at least 12-14 of these things. Just totally useless. And it occurred to me that using one of the more sturdy green bags was just easier. I didn’t have a few dozen pieces of rumpled plastic digging into the creases on the insides of my fingers. I walk about 300 yards back to my place, up a hill, so it’s a bit of a trek.

The next week, I bought one for a buck or so. I have two arms. I only need two bags. I’m not really focused on the environment. This is just easier. And the cashiers, instead of bagging with me, let me bag myself since they can’t reach over into my cart, thus I get a good, balanced weight in each hand. So, I look like a pussy toting these bags up the hill to my place, but what the hell, they work better, so I’ll keep on using them.

I also think one of the managers there is trying to hit on me. Female, thankfully. Not a bad looking girl either, curly blonde hair, pretty, svelte. Every time I go there, it seems like she finds some reason to talk to me or make some kind of contact. This last time, she hustled over and tried to bag for me (clearly wasn’t bagging for anyone else), but I told her, no, I got my own bags, but thanks anyway, blah blah blah. The one drawback. I’m older now, and one of the things I’m really aware of with women is how other women view them. When this woman casually makes contact with me, figuring out an excuse to talk to me or what have you, I notice the looks on some of the cashiers' faces, and I’m getting the vibe they don’t like her (which could just be a boss/employee issue). Some of the cashiers, as nice as they are, and actually pretty good at their jobs, are pretty homely. Good people, for sure, but not erection inspiring. Still, when I spot the eye roll, or one of them makes eye contact with me as if to say, “I know you’re not falling for this” … it makes me wonder. Ugly women tend to have pretty solid bullshit detectors.

*

The other day, a new girl at work asked if we had a company softball team. Of course, the place I work is so cheap they wouldn’t even put out for a checkers team, much less the few hundred dollars it would cost to register a team with a league, buy a few bats and balls, and budget a post-game beer kitty. But it got me thinking about my adult softball days, playing with the team from my smallish (about 60 people) ad agency, which for me lasted from roughly the ages of 25-28.

All these leagues in Manhattan are in constant struggle to find playing fields, as there’s just so much free parks space. You’d think Central Park would be the gold standard, and surely is in terms of location and that New York vibe, but the cold reality was playing there sucked. The fields were often uneven, pock-marked with holes in the outfield, and the infields nothing to write home about. They were also crowded as hell, with overlap. I recall once nearly getting into a scuffle with a teener league team from Spanish Harlem holding a practice who wouldn’t give up a field, although they had to. Kids acting like surly creeps, at the behest of their idiot coach. All their empty saber-rattling lasted about 15 minutes before a parks commissioner one of us ran to get came by and threatened them with a permanent ban, and the coach with arrest. I recall a lot of “we’re going to get you” mumbling and such, but the general vibe was adios, douchebags, this aint your block.

We played on artificial turf a few times, at a public park on the upper east side, called Asphalt Green, I think, an odd name for sure. As with most Manhattan fields, two games over-lapped each other on each end of the park, thus if you hit one to the outfield, chances were pretty good you’d have at least a triple as the outfielders would have to contend with balls and players coming from the other direction. The strangest game we played was at a small park by the United Nations, in which there was an encampment of homeless people in right field. Made things a bit awkward. They weren’t moving for anything. Any time a ball came into their encampment, they’d simply throw it out to the nearest person – they knew the drill. But imagine being homeless and having softballs line-shot at you every other day in the summer! Obviously, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but such is life in Manhattan that people often work around odd scenarios like this.

But most of our games took place on Ward’s Island, the ass end of Randall’s Island. (I understand both islands are joined by a landfill, and aside from softball fields, you’ll find an insane asylum, a fireman’s training school and a few stadiums/small venues for musical festivals. I saw the Fleadh there a few years back, and had a blast.) If you played on Ward’s a lot, you got the vibe your softball league wasn’t premier. Which was fine by me. The team I was on sucked for the most part (although they’d catch fire a few years later, with the help of ringers, and go up against the much larger ad agencies, with their crews of ringers, and win).

There was a softball bus, a yellow school bus, that would pick us up at some appointed place along Madison Avenue, and drive us out to Ward’s, all the teams inter-mingled on the bus. Co-ed, so there were plenty of hot advertising chicks along for the ride. It was such a relaxing thing to do after work. The concept of getting on school bus and going to an island to play games … it was like being back in grade school. My main memory of those games would be, in more quiet moments, turning towards the East River and seeing Manhattan laid out like a jewel in the summer evening, a light breeze blowing off the river, and thinking, this is paradise.

The games themselves were a lark for the most part. Even when we were serious, we were joking. I’m a bit leery of grown men who play team sports in a deadly serious fashion in their leisure time. It’s fucking tiresome to be around guys like that – let up already, dudes, you missed the boat in high school, get over it, the rah-rah attitude should have ended with intramural sports at college. I attended nearly every game, simply because I knew how much fun it was. One game, I distinctly recall, we were getting our asses handed to us, and I was playing third. A guy named Tom on the business side was in leftfield – Tom rarely came due to being stuck late at work. A hard grounder was hit my way and got through – unless I had dived, which I could have, I wouldn’t have stopped it. Tom sees my lack of effort and flips out, yelling incensed, dive, Repsher, dive, at the ball! All I could think was, eat me, douchebag! Tom was generally a nice guy, but he had a prick sheen about him, too, that would come out sometimes on the job.

Understand, we weren’t total losers. Our record would usually be about 4-6. And some of those losses, as noted, were sure-fire shellackings going up against agencies with literally 10 times the number of employees and that much larger a talent pool to draw from. Sure, we had the mailroom guys. You had guys like me who were coordinated and could still play, but were no great shakes. You had one or two guys who played softball in more competitive leagues and were really good. And one or two girls who were pretty good, the rest just showing up for the hell of it, which no one minded at all. The overall gist was to go out after work and have a blast …

… which would happen AFTER the game. That same yellow school bus would come rolling down the dusty roads around the baseball diamonds just before sundown, and we’d all pile on, this time with one destination for everyone, some sports bar whose name I can’t recall on the Upper East Side. And, believe me, that’s where we won. The beer allowance was generally about 3-4 pitchers, and we would get shit-faced with the other teams, often making nice connections with people who were pretty much in the same boat mentally and work-wise. I can still recall K.D., our jock team captain, having two girls from the recording company next door to us (who played on our team quite a bit) “dance” with him one night, which meant grabbing his cock through his shorts and whispering “we know you have a hard on” in his ear. I got touchy-feely with another girl from over there who loved Led Zeppelin and stole my Reading Phillies hat – a mutual attraction going on – save she was on the verge of getting engaged to her lawyer boyfriend, and things never quite got off the ground, despite getting very friendly.

Getting laid was not the norm, but we got plastered in lieu of this, and in general, got to know our coworkers as genuine people. You get that with sports and drinking, seeing people on a whole different level … which is why I like sports and drinking! There’s a woman in my boxing class I saw on the street the other day, and didn’t recognize until she tugged my arm. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,” I said … meaning work clothes as opposed to the skin-tight hot pants with the word “Angel” written across her wonderful ass cheeks, and a sports bra top, which is how I normally saw her in class. She laughed, because she knew just what I meant. It was the same with softball – I got to know people in a way that was much more different than work. Part of that was being in my 20s and seeking out those kind of connections (which I don’t do nearly as much anymore), but part was simply letting the guard down and trusting people enough to get blasted with them.

Getting home to the Bronx from that bar was always a bitch. One thing I’ve learned: if you drink a gallon of beer, which isn’t hard to do over the course of 3-4 hours in a bar, it’s a good idea to take piss breaks, particularly one before leaving. If I didn’t, man, my bladder would be bursting by the time I got home. Trains run later at night, thus I could wait anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes in the station, and then take a roughly half-hour ride back to Kingsbridge Road, at which point I had a brusque 10-minute walk to my place. There were times I pissed in the street like a lost dog marking his territory. I just couldn’t hold it in. We’re talking the Bronx – not too many people were keeping score. I wouldn’t pull my penis out and go right on the sidewalk. I’d scout out some quiet spot between buildings, or slip behind a dumpster, and let loose for upwards of a minute. At that time of night, probably around midnight, the streets weren’t exactly teaming with people.

Never puked, from what I recall. But at the very least, stumbled home, feeling pretty fine after an evening of softball by the river, hanging out with some cool people (one of the few benefits of advertising), eating pizza, getting hammered on cheap beer and commiserating over our lots in life in one of the most over-rated industries ever created. Most nights, I could barely even remember who won or lost, or who screwed up on the field. Advertising parties in general, and there were a lot, got way too wild – too many people doing coke in the bathroom and such, and too many uptight upper management types either being too stiff or getting too strange. The creative people would be even worse, manic depressives already blown out on the fact that they weren't famous artists and writers, doing hard drugs and feeling like failures despite making fortunes. The softball crowd felt just right – not too stiff, not too crazy, no Van Gogh's cutting off their ears. “Even the Losers” by Tom Petty could have been our theme song. We kept a little bit of pride and got lucky sometimes.

Web Gunk

Lately, it seems like I can’t go five minutes without hearing about Facebook or Twitter. A handful of people I know have gotten on Facebook in the past year or so. The pattern’s usually the same. At first, they’re amazed by the number of people from the past this thing turns up, as if by magic, they had ceased to exist before Facebook waved its magic wand. They spend a few weeks exchanging pleasantries with the girl who gave them a hand job in the seventh grade, or the guy from their dorm who used to rule on the beer bong.

After awhile, they realize knowing these people again is no big deal, don’t really have a lot to say to each other, and the “Dude, can’t believe you still tread the earth” vibe wears off. (As if people die when we stop knowing them ... the level of self absorbtion in our society never ceases to amaze.) And they find themselves annoyed with the constant stream of updates, also noticing the mercenary sorts who use Facebook as a way to generate publicity for whatever cause they’re into. I’ve never actually started or looked at a Facebook account, save to see that home page for various people, so I have no idea what goes in the day-to-day function of it.

But I’m willing to bet the reaction after awhile is much like mine, without even using it: I spend enough time screwing around on the web already without adding another serious waste of time. When people first get into Facebook, they’re addicted, and begging you to join (in the fun). After a month, you never hear it mentioned again. It seems like some people strike a happy medium, where they check in once or twice a day to see what’s going on, post pictures for family members, etc. … only to find the guy they rode the bus with in fifth grade noted that he took a legendary shit this morning after having a bran muffin.

Which seems like the kind of thing Twitter is used for. (I’ve gathered you can stream Twitter posts on Facebook.) I sort of resent being made to feel like I’m somehow “behind the times” for not indulging in this nonsense. Facebook is a more tasteful Myspace, and Twitter is texting on a computer (although you can share the nonsensical minutiae of your day with X number of people as opposed to one, what a breakthrough). I recognize texting and Myspace for what they are: meant for kids and self-absorbed adults.

I gather the younger you are, and the more spare time you have, the more likely it is that you’ll indulge in this stuff. My frame of reference regarding communications goes back to rotary-dial phones and letter writing. Try calling five people on a rotary-dial phone … you’ll probably be wearing a finger splint afterwards. When you called someone, that meant something, and if the person wasn’t there, the phone just kept on ringing. (I even pre-date answering machines – technically, not, but answering machines were not a given when I was a kid.) That wasn’t such a bad thing, unless you were madly in love or closing some type of deal. Person’s not there? I’ll try again tomorrow. Do something else in the mean time.

It would take me days to write letters to friends, and I used to love doing that. My emails tend to still be pretty long-winded as a result. (I’ll never text anyone … texting is pure dogshit to me, the devolution of thought and language. May also be why I’m holding off on an iPhone, which I like in theory, but don’t like the idea of thumbing incessantly to send an email.) I love to communicate with people through writing. They write back, and with the people I know, that tends to be a pretty worthwhile exchange of ideas. Not “C U LTR, QT.” Or whatever the fuck else people functioning on a much different wavelength than mine put out routinely. The letters I wrote were rambling, hand-written things you had to spend time on. We should all be forced to hand-write everything for a week to gauge just how much things have changed …

… And how much easier it is to communicate now, yet people seem to communicate much less, or much less effectively, than ever before. Particularly people raised in this culture. Everything is a glib, never funny, never insightful one-liner, or symbols that suggest the person now thinks in terms of text messaging as opposed to fully-worded thoughts. For them to write a paragraph of any size seems to be an alien undertaking. You write a well-worded reply to them, and their reply is, “Y don’t U write a novel.” No, motherfucker, this is two or three paragraphs, not a novel … you ought to try reading one some time to grasp the wonders of attention span.

You grasp this when you overhear a superfluous cellphone conversation. For me, that happens constantly on the subway train, when it comes above ground in Queens. If you need a good thumbnail description of “asshole” … an asshole is someone who pulls out his cellphone just as a subway train surfaces from below ground and immediately calls someone on it. Always, and I mean always, to have a totally meaningless conversation, in a crowded public place. What you doin. Oh, not much. I’m on the train. Yeah. Yeah. No shit. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so cool. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll see you in five minutes. The conversations seem to take place only to convince the caller and listener that each is still alive and walking the earth … although they’ve already texted each other earlier in the day that they’ll meet later. That’s a strange sort of insecurity I don’t understand. I think part of it is demonstrating to the people around you that you are more important because you’re making a call on your cellphone in a crowded public place. You have shit going on in your life, people to call, things to do. (Generally, if my cellphone rings on a subway train, I let it go to voice mail. The reception on a train is horrible, and I know how uncomfortable it is to be sitting next to someone on a train indulging in one of these conversations.)

The mindset of someone raised with all this gunk has to be fragmented. I wasn’t even raised with it, and I’ve noticed how much more fragmented my thoughts, and my life by extension, have become. Just because you can communicate with people much more quickly, and have so many more options to do so, doesn’t mean that you can communicate any better than how people have in the past. Communication is one thing; modes of communication are another. If you don’t learn how to communicate in certain ways, you just won’t be good at it, no matter what you do. So much of our communication these days is focused on the written word, be it simple email, Twitter, Facebook, web message boards, etc. And I’m gathering people simply aren’t learning how to write well. How to string together numerous thoughts into a cohesive statement. How to imbue their words with emotions and concepts that communicate with readers on a much deeper, more human level.

I used to get in trouble on message boards for stating the obvious: that some people on them were bad writers. I’m not talking syntax and grammar. I mean just the ability to communicate through writing. A lot of people on message boards are like cardboard cut-outs, or crash-test dummies, when it comes to writing. They’re dull, at best, which is probably why they’re spending so much time there. And these things never die. You can get off the merrygoround whenever you want, but it will keep spinning. I’ve never seen the guy or group running a message board state, “This place has seen better days – let’s close it down.” Message boards are like high school or work – you have friends, but you have to spend serious time each day hanging around a certain number of people you really don’t like, and a larger number of people you’d normally have nothing to do with. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about sound mental health, it’s that you shouldn’t spend any time around anyone who inspires negativity and loathing, and vice-versa, of course. If that’s the work situation, good luck, but to do it on a message board, all in the name of false sense of “community,” man, you tell me.

I also find an alarming number of people on these boards who went to college through the 90s and after: a strange tribe that indulges in therapy-style jargon about feelings and such, yet have a Lord of the Flies style of dealing with anyone or anything that threatens their homogenous little worlds. There’s a sameness about these people that’s spooky: liberal (but not too far left, no sir, I’m a regular joe), WASP-y (my Dad owns a chain of restaurants ... could we not talk about this ... how do you like this bowling shirt I bought at the Salvation Army?); let’s cut the crap, they’re always white, and filled with self loathing (for reasons I will never understand). Used to be you went to college to set yourself free – in the past two decades you do so to be indoctrinated with a truly bullshit way of seeing the world. Used to think the future would be a bunch of enlightened people walking around in robes … it’s more like an Alanon meeting of sensitive 13-year-olds.

The whole idea of message boards, Facebook, Twitter, etc., seems to be to generate traffic, heat, immediate contact, and contact with an unbroken flow. This is bad news for writers. One, printed media is being phased out, more rapidly in the past year or two than anyone had imagined. Two, writers are going to be making less money writing on the web for whatever given publication; no one seems to have cracked how to make real money on the web via advertising, and subscription services have not done well. Three, the writers will have to adjust their styles to fit into this condensed, fragmentary way of writing … and I’ve already noted why this is cancerous. It will be dumbing down our writing skills to reach people who don’t know how to communicate anything real and have mistaken nothingness for reality.

Worst of all, the web is crawling with people who just can’t accept how mediocre they are as writers, and they have the mistaken impression that anyone can do it. Because they’re doing it. And when someone tells them the truth, that they suck at it, that person gets shouted down for noticing, because everyone’s equal on the web. Again, we’re talking black, organ-chewing cancer of the worst kind here … but these are misguided attitudes I see routinely displayed. And these are the intelligent people! Check out the responses to videos on You Tube or the greetings expressed on Myspace pages – fucking unreal. I wish these people were joking, or parodying idiots, but they’re not. I’m picturing some slobbering, cross-eyed, egg-shaped being with a propeller beanie and one big tooth, tapping on a keyboard with one hand while eating a snow cone with the other.

Am I being too dark here? Probably, but I’m also being honest and have spent enough time with this to know what I’m writing about here. And don’t get the impression that I’m against new trends and technology. Christ, I love these things when they make sense and make clear how much easier life can be by using them. Cellphones truly are a blessing, especially in emergency situations, and I love the mobility of them. (As noted, I’ve pondered getting an iPhone, but have to be honest with myself in that I don’t really need one, despite all the cool gadgets contained therein.) Email is fantastic – it changed my life in terms of maintaining relationships that would often go months or years without any sort of support. (No one with email needs Facebook. If the god damn person isn’t in your life already, take a hint, no offense, some people just fall by the wayside, as you do for them. Are we that lonely that we need to dig up people from our past and pretend they're in our lives now? It's like a never-ending high-school reunion.) MP3s, and now video files, have simply changed how we’re going to consume these types of media, and I love it, the possibilities seem endless with this stuff. Any time I pick up a copy of Wired or talk to a gadget-leaning friend, I have my mind blown over some of the innovations that are headed our way.

I just didn’t anticipate communication skills going down the toilet conversely to the rise of technology. If anything, I thought more and faster options would mean better skills – if people were forced to communicate all the time at top speed, they’d simply get better at it, be more expressive and descriptive. Writing is like any other endeavor – the more you do it, the better you get at it. I think the issue is we pull ourselves in a thousand directions with all these innovations, performing high-tech juggling acts every day, and often end up doing a number of things either passably or poorly, and nothing very well. If you never had the foundation of someone teaching you how to write well, and then had time to nurture this skill, it appears all you can do is tap out graceless one liners and have conversations that are more like monologues where no one really listens to each other.

When I see someone dogging a cellphone on the street, you know the type, the motherfucker can’t be off the thing for more than a minute at a time, I can’t help but think that person is more in the love with, and addicted to, the concept of using the device than feeling any real need to communicate with anyone on the other end of the line. The overheard, meaningless conversations bear this out. I gather people are more enamored of their iPods and all the accessories that go with them than they are the actual music on the iPods … the music is secondary. Simply having one, and displaying it publicly, that’s the main thing these days. How we got into this bizarre state of affairs, I’m not sure. Gadgets are now more valid than art.

It’s not an age thing. I’m hoping there are younger people out there looking at their friends and associates caught up in this crap and thinking the same things I am now. I’m assuming there are still plenty of sane people out there. I spend five minutes around someone stuck on his cellphone, texting or talking, and I just want to get the hell away from that person, whatever his age is. The lack of manners involved with this is another huge issue, but people stopping conversations to read a text or answer a call has become so routine that I don’t think most people notice what a breach of manners that is.

Am I full of shit? Making too much out of all this stuff? I hope I am, but suspect I’m not. If there’s good stuff I’m not seeing from things like Facebook and Twitter, texting, Myspace and such, someone, please, for the love of Christ, enlighten me. All I’m seeing is a childish waste of time masquerading as progress. Something that starts out fun, but turns tedious real fast. When I eat candy now as an adult, the first five seconds are a blast, and then I start feeling like a horse’s ass for eating such junk clearly aimed at kids in every conceivable way. Here’s what happens when I eat too much candy. Happy Easter!

Changing of the Guard

Something odd occurred to me while shopping in Best Buy the other day. Best Buy … even in Manhattan, you want to buy physical product of a CD or DVD, unless you go to J&R Music World, or one of the few indie stores in the Village, that’s all there is. That is what occurred to me. This is how life was circa 1975 or so, when I bought most of my albums at Woolworth’s.

I’m talking purely retail here, of course. You go online now, you can find just about anything for free. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there’s been a recent explosion of blogs putting out RAR files of entire albums for even the most obscure artists – I’ve found everything I’ve been looking for on recent spelunks for out-of-print material … and realized there was plenty of in-print albums on these blogs, too. Each blog will have page after page of complete albums -- hundreds of albums in a lot of cases. If you feel like paying, you can go to Amazon or Half and get it used at reduced cost. Like a quirky new single you hear on a commercial? Go to Hype Machine … chances are, more than a few blogs will have the single posted.

It’s a radically different world for music from 1975. But in terms of retail, that’s how it feels to me. (Best Buy even had a row of vinyl albums for sale – Van Morrison’s Moondance staring me right in the face.) You want to physically buy product, you go to what amounts to a department store having a sale. I bought many great albums at Woolworth’s – the building blocks of my rock years, Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Elton John, Bowie, etc. And then there were Listening Booth and Record World in the local malls. Listening Booth had surprisingly deep catalog – they’d always have at least one copy of rare or punk albums I’d read about in Creem or Rolling Stone. These were infinitely cooler places to hang than Woolworth’s. But Woolworth’s often beat them on price. I didn’t discover truly cool record stores until I went to college.

I buy about a dozen CDs a year now. I used to buy a dozen in a month. Nearly everything is downloads now, be it my 90-per-month take at Emusic, or whatever I stumble on going around the web, which these days is a lot. (Emusic features only indie artists, which suits me fine, as the major labels put out very little of what I want -- usually older artists, thus the "dozen albums a year" edict I made earlier.) With the Emusic stuff, I rarely download an entire album – I cherry-pick tracks. Think I always wanted to do this. Even with great albums that held together as albums, there were always one or two duds that I could live without. Ziggy Stardust? I don’t need “It Aint Easy.” Abbey Road? Don’t ever need to hear “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Octopus’ Garden” again.

But I’m starting to realize the real changing of the guard going on with music now isn’t how we purchase it. Sure, that’s a whole new world, but if you’ve been following along and listening to music in the past decade, what’s going on now has been slowly flowering and is not new to the experienced web surfer. We’re seeing the waning days of the CD as the dominant format, which is a shame, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s been the best physical format, and I got a few thousand stored away in my six-drawer dresser as proof.

The real change going on is how we “see” music, especially for kids. It’s just not the same anymore, doesn’t hold the same cultural value it once did. Even me … once upon a time, if any of my favorite artists was putting out an album, I’d be up on it weeks in advance, would have that Tuesday release date burned in my mind, and that day, would make a beeline to the record store after school or work and nail that album, rushing home to listening to it. There are a few albums like this that I have distinct memories of hunting down like that: Ian Hunter’s You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic, The Clash’s London Calling, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I had heard The Wall being played on WMMR in its entirety on Thanksgiving morning, 1979. The following Tuesday, man, I was on it down at Woolworth’s!

How did I get that fanatical? By reading magazines and books about the artists. Creem. Rolling Stone. Biographies about The Beatles, Stones, The Who, Dylan, etc. There was no MTV. I’d never miss The Midnight Special. Or Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert. Or the various pre-MTV video shows, like Night Flight and Radio 1990. I recall seeing cool British shows late at night on the weekends that would hip me to stuff like Alex Harvey and Roy Wood. I’d listen to Rock Over London every Sunday night and pick up on all the cool British new wave stuff that was going on in the early 80s. The local rock stations would play live concerts of my favorite bands, the King Biscuit Flower Hours and such. Radio didn't pick up so much on new wave, but it solidifed and constantly reinforced all those classic rock artists, often playing music that would be considered deep catalog now.

There was a thriving culture dedicated to rock and roll, and it felt huge to a kid. Now? I’m aware of my favorite artists putting out new material – I’m still tuned in. But when I buy it, often not on release day, I’ll let it sit in its cellophane for a few days sometimes. That “buzz” of new product isn’t the same. It’s there. I know it’s there. I know I’ll like it and pull a half dozen tracks from the album into my MP3 collection. The music ultimately still has the same value to me. I get excited when I know The Gourds are putting out a new album. Or The Flaming Lips. Or Wilco. Or even older favorites like Dylan or Ray Davies. But it’s nothing like the thrill I’d get buying a new album in 1978 – and I mean nothing like it at all. Part of that is experience, of going through life, getting older, different priorities and what have you. But part of it …

It’s just not as exciting as it was once was. Lately, I’ve been wondering why that is. What have I come up with? The simple fact that the way rock and roll culture was constructed and, basically, worshipped from the 60s through the 80s, no longer exists, and we are now left with a more honest, albeit less exciting, musical world, where it’s one of dozens of options in terms of “coolness,” especially to kids. The music hasn’t changed as much as we have.

That old world doesn’t exist for a number of reasons. A key one no one can seem to admit or acknowledge is that the culture of printed word about rock and roll no longer exists on that exalted level. The really good magazines, like Mojo, write mostly about older acts. Rolling Stone still exists, but is a shadow of its glory days, where different strands of culture were weaved into that overall sense of being part of something. People who write about rock and roll no longer have the forums, or the cultural power, to spread their wings, to try something new, to inspire fans, or share in that excitement of discovery. That was crucial in its time: it was how the myths were made around many of these hugely popular bands. Newspapers and magazines are downsizing all the time. Now you get thumbnail reviews and articles about artists well under a thousand words. I was raised reading sprawling stories about musicians, with the writer tagging along on the road for days or weeks, and bringing back excellent overviews of a world that seemed romantic and exciting as hell to kids anchored in small towns or nowhere neighborhoods. It wasn’t so much heroic as just different from anything we had known. I may think Cameron Crowe is a lantern-jawed pussy, but he tapped into that vibe with his movie Almost Famous.

This has been replaced by websites and blogs. You have to know where they’re at. And they’re not into myth-making – they’re into bringing the artist and the music down to their level, to fit them down into our media-crazed world and find a usable place for them. The reviews are often snarky and damning with faint praise. There’s virtually nothing legendary going on – a lot of good music, but nothing legendary. Which is fine. But it doesn’t build myths. Or make you long for life on the road, or wish you were a star. You got bullshit like American Idol for that which strips down stardom to its most empty, base, temporary terms. We’ve made the mistake of separating that level of stardom from artistic quality – once upon a time, they peacefully co-existed. You better believe Jagger and Bowie and Springsteen and so on wanted to be stars on that level: it drove them as artists. They made themselves good enough to reach that level, through touring endlessly and writing songs until they got it right. Now, this shit is delegated to a panel of jackasses and 1-800 numbers to phone in your choice … for inexperienced cover-band singers who are not artists in any real sense. It’s sickening to see how wildly popular this show is.

This whole “less is more” vibe started with alternative rock in the 80s, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and was, but was never meant to overtake the whole rock culture, which it has. It was meant as what it claimed to be – an alternative, not the main show. Throw this in with hiphop and boy/girl bands taking over everything in the 90s … and a huge void was created … all these aging classic rockers still doing their thing, but no one coming up behind them with that same burning desire to exist on that high a cultural level. The 90s were a morose time for rock music in general, whether we’re talking the sickly grunge-influenced spate of “daddy hates me” goat-boy bands, or the realization that rock wasn’t meant to be fun anymore. Cheap Trick was fun. The Ramones were fun. There were bands in the 90s who got that (Ben Folds Five, Flaming Lips, a few others), but it felt like various shades of emotion were wiped from the slate. The Backstreet Boys had fun. Pearl Jam was serious. Christ, how I hated that shit. Both of them! It felt that divisive and over-simplified to me. Rock became "serious" in a way that was utter horseshit and the antithesis of what rock set out to be back when guys like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lew Lewis were blowing the roof off.

And all of what I’ve written already may be meaningless in light of the fact that video games have dwarfed music in terms of “coolness” to kids. I don’t like video games. Too violent and frightening? No. They make kids docile and alone. If they do reach out, it’s to get with a network of kids tapped into the same game they’re simultaneously playing. And if you haven’t heard those online conversations, they’re idiotic, like Facebook, nothing real is communicated. White boys in the 90s pretended they were gangstas, en masse. That somehow morphed into video games, and kids pretending to be killers, en masse. Everyone pretending to be something they're not, nor ever will be. Granted, being a teenager is all about finding novel ways to waste time, but this shit was and is ponderous.



Like so many other things with computers and new media, video games isolate kids from each other, much less from their parents. Watching a kid playing a video game for hours is a pretty mind-numbing process – and reality is the kid is doing this most nights of the week. It achieves nothing. What was I doing at that age? Driving around with my friends at night. Listening to Van Halen and such. Shooting pool. Achieving nothing, too. But the point being I was with my friends and achieving nothing. Physical contact. Socialization process. However meager it was: it worked. We were ourselves. And we inter-acted with other people. I realize how fucking silly that sounds, but you watch a kid zoned out in front of a video game for four hours, and realize he's doing that nearly every night, you have to wonder.

Granted, you can say the same about listening to music. But from what I’ve experienced in my own life, music will inspire me in a lot of ways, make me want to create my own art, give me the energy to do things, a sort of understanding of the world that’s communicated to me through the music. I don’t know what you learn when you’re pretend you’re a shotgun-toting murderer killing everyone in sight in a blighted urban landscape or desert. What the fuck does that mean? I know there’s the thrill of killing someone in a video game, I can get off on that, but for how long. Hours every night? Night after night? Hell, no.

With music, even the bands have changed. The most notable change for me is with lead singers. It’s almost embarrassing for them to have real talent, to have big voices, to be able fill a room, with nothing but their voice, and make everyone stop and listen. Most indie bands I like, the weak point is always the lead singer. The singer’s voice will lack character or strength. Sure, it will have a certain personality, but it often sounds weak to me. A good example of this was the band Grandaddy from California. A band that seemed to aspire to ELO levels of rock artistry. But had a lead singer who sounded like a librarian. I liked Grandaddy – a lot. But if I played a Grandaddy song for someone who was into 70s rock and hadn’t made the jump to more current indie rock, they would laugh and always say something like, “The music’s great, but that guy sounds like a weasel!”

And they were right. Rock bands seemed to have accepted that they’re never going to be stars or cultural icons on that sort of Stones/Springsteen/Dylan level ever again. In a way, that’s liberating. In a way, all this is liberating. The pressure’s off. Only the people who like and search out this music will be aware of it. There won’t be hundreds of bloated, stoned, bullshit people milling around at shows who are there only for the event, and don’t really care about the band.

(Sidenote: another issue is how many people who go to shows don’t really seem to care about the band on the stage, even if it’s the headliner. They’ll talk through ballads, a constant buzz of talking, often on cellphones. I don’t get that. Never have, never will. Didn’t see this happen until the 90s. And it still unnerves me those rare occasions when I see a band now. I couldn't even hear my fucking cellphone ring at a show, and it wouldn't occur to me to call anyone while at a show.)

But I have to accept, as a fan who remembers life before, that the sense of rock music mattering on that high a level is a thing of the past as a result. If you treat music as music, musicians as musicians, and nothing more, than that’s all they will be. And there’s a simple beauty in that. An honesty I can appreciate. In fact, I ultimately might prefer it all this way. It’s just a complete 180 from the way rock and roll was once upon a time. The culture around music now is more familiar and less exclusionary. You can approach these people and talk to them after shows. They’ll often be friendly. Email them – chances are, they’ll answer. They’re one of you, basically. Shit, they probably even need a day job when they’re not on the road. The guy you see on stage might serve you a coffee in a Starbucks a week later. A result of that, too, is that you won’t have as many flamboyant, other-worldly figures floating around the world. You'll have nerds in Savlation Army sweaters. Imagine David Bowie as Aladdin Sane helping you out at the Home Depot. It didn’t work that way. But if these people need day jobs because they can’t make a living solely through music, they’re going to have to appear “normal” on a very base level to get work.

It’s all some strange shit to think about! But some of the stuff I’ve come up with recently on why I don’t feel the same way about rock and roll anymore. Conversely, I have branched out so far into other types of music – most recently celtic and reggae – that I never stop growing in terms of having something new to listen to. There’s so much to learn – and I’ll never learn it all, or even want to. My plate is always full with music, overflowing in fact, simply don’t have enough time or the inclination to digest it all. But these are strange times we’re heading into now, and not just because of the MP3 revolution. Much more than that has changed in the past few years.

Mellow 70s Gold

I used to have music on at work all the time, with a boombox on my desk, but it’s been years since I’ve had anything like this. The high point of this was at a job in the early 90s where I had a more isolated nook in the office, and would listen to Howard Stern first thing in the morning, often laughing uncontrollably when he got on one of those jags about his demented family life. Back then, I was buying 2-4 CDs a week as the golden days of that media format were just starting. I’d usually sample them at work.

Well, last month I got a sweet pair of speakers for the laptop that also service the shelf-style CD player I have. (The amount of stereo equipment I have now has fallen almost to zero; I use the computer constantly, or plug in my iPod to a small charger/speaker dock that works nicely. I use the CD player about as much as I buy CDs, which is to say once a month, at most.) I had a crappy pair of laptop speakers I got for $20 at Staples that I had been using, decided to drag them into work and load up my hard drive with a selection of MP3s.

I was pretty careful about this. Avoid hard rock. Song with profanity. Any sort of jarring music. While such constraints might seem cruel to a heavy metal fan, I gather most people in a workplace wouldn’t like being exposed to metal, or hiphop, or any other kind of loudly annoying pop music. The truth is I could still put thousands of MP3s on there with ease, the only issue being how to narrow down to what I want to hear on a regular basis.

It occurred to me after I was done, and throwing in more offbeat stuff like celtic, blues, reggae and deep country (which most people don’t “get” in New York), that much of what I would be listening to could be replicated by a good easy listening station. Granted, one with deep catalog and good taste, with a reach from the 1940s through now, but still, easy listening for the most part. It came out a lot like what I hear in the supermarket every Saturday morning, and I’ve already mentioned how enjoyable I find their sound system, on which I’ll hear anything from Otis Redding to the Flaming Lips to ABBA. That’s the kind of musical reach I like.

What also struck me was how much 70s pop I have on there, and how much I enjoy hearing that music now. Sorry, but when I hear “I Think I Love You” by The Partridge Family, I don’t groan. I think, “Shit, what a great pop song.” It’s a good thing, while working in an office, to have myself emotionally pulled out of my space for a few seconds or minutes to recall memories and feelings associated with various songs.

Last Friday, we had one of those freak March snow squalls in the morning, flakes the size of silver dollars that fell for about 15 minutes and amounted to nothing. I was at my work desk, looking out the window, and playing “Still the Same” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. When I first got that 45, I recall the exact same weather occurring as I hung my teenage head out my bedroom window and watched those freakishly large snowflakes fall in late March, the song’s melancholy vibe matching the feeling of watching snow fall too late in the season. Move it from rural Pennsylvania in the 70s to New York in the 00s, and that felt like the only difference. Of course, the spell was broken moments later by a squawking, deeply annoying, asshole coworker on the phone, but that’s work.

Below are a few songs that I’ve heard come up on the media player shuffle at work, and some of the thoughts/emotions they’ve inspired.

“Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain & Tennille. This was among the first singles I bought – must have been 11 at the time. Man, I loved that song, would listen to Top 40 radio for hours just so I could hear it. Nearly bought the album, too, which would have been a mistake. A few years ago, when I was piecing together a large “Mellow 70s” collection of MP3s, I nearly bought a box set of all their albums, simply because it could be had for about $20. A good friend talked me down from that dangerous ledge, and I settled on a singles collection, which had plenty of filler.

I always think of Joy Division’s song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in tandem with this one, sort of polar opposites in every possible way. And I’ll go on record – the Captain & Tennille song is much better. Don’t care how “cool” Joy Division was as a band. The Captain & Tennille were about as uncool as you could get in the 70s. Doesn’t matter. A good song is a good song. Last time I checked, the Captain & Tennille are still together (always wondered if he had sex with the captain hat on), so they weren’t bullshit artists. The lead singer of Joy Division killed himself in 1980. Guess he wasn’t a bullshit artist either. Sooner or later, you stop gravitating towards “love will tear us apart” people – I had a full dose of them through my 20s. That take on the world doesn’t age well – it doesn’t age at all, more in a “emotionally stunted” way than in a “timeless” way. I surely don’t play “Love Will Keep Us Together” day and night, but I own a copy, and when it comes up on the iPod, I dig it. That was me at 11, and I won’t deny it.

After playing this song at work, I completely lost my network connection – to the web, to the filing system, to Outlook. When the I.T. guy asked me why I thought this happened, I told him it was because I played a Captain & Tennille song on my media player. He agreed that this was just as good a reason as any.

Supertramp. Not just one song – about a dozen songs I’ve pulled from their 70s albums. The world needs another Supertramp, which is to say an under-rated pop band that crosses a lot of lines in terms of its audience. Bands like this – also think Fleetwood Mac – dominated the 70s, simply because they were good, with all sorts of subtle influences and a basic pop sense that worked. Pop music started dying when bands like this disappeared into the 80s, and nothing replaced them. What is “The Logical Song”? It’s a bit of a samba, a hippie tract, some Beatlish guitar thrown in, clarinet and sax solos, lyrics that appealed just as much to lost high-school kids as they did to aging hippies entrenched in their much more sedate adult lives.

Back in 1978, when I saw the Superman movie featuring Christopher Reeves, a nice moment occurred when Clark Kent was walking to the newspaper office building in midtown Manhattan in the summer, and a snatch of “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp played as he walked inside. What a perfect moment. You watch documentaries on the 70s New York music scene now, you get the impression the entire city was an out-of-control cesspool. It wasn’t. You watch movies filmed in NYC around that time, and it’s clear most of it was business as usual, which is something to keep in mind with how things are today. Now that I’ve lived here long enough, I’ve had plenty of those “Give a Little Bit” moments in the summer. Can’t say enough good things about this band – their music has aged well, and I thought it was good in the first place.

“Nights on Broadway” by The Bee Gees. Disco started out pretty good. I can’t even recall if this sort of soul music was even called disco before Saturday Night Fever. I’m sure the term was kicked around in the mid-70s and solidified into a movement, that become a cultural phenomenon with the release of that movie. But my favorite disco – a type of music I mostly hated at the time (and still hate for the most part, although I easily have a few dozen outright disco songs in my 70s soul collection) – is just the kind The Bee Gees were doing with songs like “Nights on Broadway” and “Jive Talking.” “Jive Talking” is simply one of the best singles of the 70s – consider it disco’s “God Save the Queen.”

“Nights on Broadway” is a strange song for me because growing up in rural Pennsylvania, the song presented a fantasy of New York City life – smoky rooms filled with strangers. It sounded like a very elegant, romantic version of city life – “Love’s Theme” by The Love Unlimited Orchestra/Barry White was much the same (before it became the unofficial theme for late-night network movies and golfing highlights). That’s how the city sounded to me, my version of it, totally removed from any vestiges of city life. After having lived in New York for a long time … I don’t know what the fuck “Nights on Broadway” is on about. I’ve spent many a night on Broadway. Went home with lighter pockets on an early-morning subway train filled with stinking bums, puked in the toilet at 4:30 to get some sleep. Still, I want to believe in the romance of a song like “Nights on Broadway” – sort of like how Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” doesn’t appear to be about anything, just a jumble of clichés and bad lyrics, but the music’s so good that you forgive it. The Bee Gees sure as hell don’t need my forgiveness – these guys were great before and after this song, in radically different ways. And for the record, days on Broadway usually find me walking in the street to avoid all the asshole tourists jamming up the sidewalks.

“Love on the Rocks” by Neil Diamond. File this one along with “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer. A sappy ballad that I can’t avoid loving. In Neil Diamond’s case, man, there it is, love on the rocks, like a wrecked ship or a mixed drink. Aint no surprise. On the rocks, amigo, on the rocks. Suddenly you find you’re out there, walking in a storm. Words of wisdom from a passionate Jew with chest hair to burn. As opposed to a nebbish white Brit with an afro singing “When I Need You.” My friend Jose said that this was the one song when played on ghetto boom boxes in his project that would break down the hard guys hanging out around the handball courts. I don’t know what it is about 70s ballads, but they worked and are even more distinctive now. Ballads became too heavy and slick from the 80s onwards – not saying they weren’t in the 70s. But the melodies and production just seemed more smooth, less bombastic. When “Love on the Rocks” kicks in, it’s a tasteful orchestra arrangement and the drums that do so. Compared to the wailing divas of the 80s and after, Neil Diamond sounds absolutely subtle in comparison. And he was a major cheeseball. But one with talent, and maybe that’s the rub. You can laugh at someone like Leo Sayer, but try writing one hit the way he wrote a handful. It can’t be that easy.

These are the mellow kind of songs featured in commercials touting soft-rock stations. I should hate these songs. I do hate a lot of them. But if you strip some of these songs down to just a vocal and guitar or piano arrangement, you’ll find sound songwriting, sometimes even brilliant. I recall Patti Smith unironically covering Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” on a kid’s program in the late 70s. Hate to say it, but it became clear that Debby Boone was a much better singer. Still, hats off to Patti Smith for copping to the slightly embarrassing realization that sometimes Top 40 fluff is popular for good reason – because the song is good. Do you think “Reminiscing” by The Little River Band is a shitty song? According to May Pang in her book about her time with John Lennon, it was one of his favorite songs. For good reason … it’s a fucking good song!

"What a Fool Believes" by The Doobie Brothers. This is one of the wisest songs ever written. It’s about a guy who deludes himself into believing a past relationship with a woman means anything to her now, and realizes it doesn’t, and may never have. What a fool believes, he sees. The wise man has the power to reason away; what seems to be is always better than nothing. Jesus Christ, how many times have I lived out these words – too many. Punk rockers would have laughed their asses off at The Doobie Brothers in the 70s. While they were writing songs about being bored and hating everything, here you had a guy, probably in his late 20s, going through all sorts of weird shit with women, and he’s smart enough, through his coke haze, to realize he’s a fucking idiot and mislead, always has been, maybe always will be. If that’s not punk rock, I don’t know what is. So the guy had too much talent to play three chords badly on an electric guitar. His salt-and-pepper hair and full beard designated him as a full-blown adult. As did his boozy, mellow growl of a singing voice. A guy named Skunk with sideburns and a pony tail was his band’s guitarist. But make no mistake – the message of “What a Fool Believes,” regardless of the bouncy keyboard arrangement, is profound. Many times I have played this song and longed for that sort of clarity in expressing age old truths.

Another of the wisest songs ever written: “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. Simply stated, you got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table; there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done. The mysteries of life are contained, if not answered, in this song. Kenny Rogers is a dick? His chicken places are terrible? Your neighbor, uncle, and boss at work look like him? Could be true. But you write a song this good, and I’ll kiss your ass.

I may have picked these songs because they’re not going to get anyone too upset at work, and you could surely hear them in the supermarket or dentist’s office, but that’s how life works, sometimes a song like this comes on when you’re idling at the computer, or waiting in the lobby, and you think, “Shit, this song is great, and I’m not even stoned.” We all have these weird, unexpected touchstone songs in our lives. No shame in liking them. Just figured I’d try to do the impossible and explain why in certain cases.

The Sweat Shop

On the same floor of an adjacent office building where I work, there was a space directly across from my window that we often called The Sweat Shop. This is the Garment District in New York, so all over that part of town, you’ll find small garment-oriented workplaces, most likely spaces where designers have a small staff doing their thing with fabrics: steam presses, sewing machines, pattern-cutting tables, mannequins, sheets of fabric hanging on rods.

We jokingly called it The Sweat Shop because most of the people who worked there seemed to be Asian women and Latinas, wearing t-shirts and jeans, a very informal workplace, and the place always had the look of these women buzzing around all day. It’s always strange to spy in on people in another workplace, especially when they’re doing a completely different kind of work from what you’re doing. They must have looked back at us, in our collared shirts and ties, and thought, “You couldn’t pay me enough to do that shit.”

Well, I almost feel the same way they do about what I do, but I go on doing the same, while a strange thing happened to The Sweat Shop the other week. The lighting changed, got a lot brighter. And then the women were showing up less. One day, they were gone. The next day, there were a bunch of construction-looking guys in there, appearing to re-arrange the office space. The next day, we found they weren’t doing that at all: they were removing equipment. Two days later, the space was empty, and it looked gigantic with no one and nothing in there. Now we look across the way, and see this tastefully lighted, empty space, the kind of gritty loft you imagine living in when first moving to Manhattan.

Who knows what happened to all that equipment. Some guys where I work specialize in “moving” that stuff when a company folds. It’s harder than you think. Sometimes it gets auctioned off, generally at pennies on the dollar. Other times, it just sits there for weeks, and then goes into storage once the owner realizes he simply can’t sell this stuff on his own, and owes so much that he has to give it back to the original lender and have him re-sell it to cut-down the enormous debt. That sounds relatively easy – we’re generally talking weeks or months of yelling on the phone with the lender regarding personal finances and such. He’ll often try to hide the equipment – and in some cases we’re talking machinery that weigh hundreds or thousands of pounds. Sooner or later, it occurs to him that he’s not going to magically re-invent his business. I don’t know what happens to these guys: it’s a spooky thing to witness. But I gather most came from money to begin with, lick their wounds for awhile, then figure out another venture that hopefully won’t torpedo them into bankruptcy.

The workers? They just struggle to find another “sweat shop,” and these days, that’s probably not as easy as it used to be. Of course, I suspect the people working there were getting paid a pittance, so it’s probably not as hard as trying to find work as a six-figured vice president. Life will go on. Not all of us are piling loads of worthless, over-priced shit onto our lives. “Close to the ground” is what I call it. In my mind, simply an easier way to live. I don’t have a lot of shit. I don’t want a lot of shit. The less shit I have, the better I feel. I don’t care if I have this wrong or right. I can only imagine how suffocating it must feel to be in constant, serious debt.

I can’t say what’s real or not with the economy. We tend to judge things like this by what we see in our own lives. I had a friend in the 90s who was always “getting vibes” about the world through his own life. He never got a good vibe. The general vibe tended to be: “The world is closing in on me … things are getting heavy … haven’t you sensed that things have gotten crazier in the past few months?” As compared to what, was my general reply. His job sucked, doing I.T. work for a company that was always having money problems, that he’d make his own, even though his only job was to make sure everybody’s computers ran right. I always got the impression he functioned better that way, in the belief that the world was this heavy, and it was falling on him. He attached weight to things to make them seem more important to him.

What doesn’t help that overall sense of doom are 24-hour news channels. Everything becomes more than it is courtesy of these outlets. The worst dose I ever had of this was 9/11, actually experiencing this first-hand in NYC that day, but later, that night and the next few days, being inundated with the repeated, horrific images of what happened. As I noted at the time, it was awful to see over and over again, and I couldn’t stop watching. It’s no different with the economy now. You will definitely develop a “sky is falling” feeling watching this shit all the time; it’s unavoidable. The sky, in effect, fell on 9/11. If it didn’t fall on you directly, life went on. I’m guessing the same with the current economy. You manage to keep on working, think about it, your life isn’t going to be much different from how it normally is. Save you’ll be encouraged to be wracked with dread and paranoia although you personally have no reason to feel it.

I just checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics – the unemployment rate is at 8.1%. That’s pretty high by normal standards. But far from a depression. I’ve heard put forth that these are low-ball numbers. They can’t be – they’re pulled directly from people filing for unemployment. You might get fragments of a point for people who lose their jobs and can’t file for unemployment, for whatever reason (quitting or being fired, etc.), but that’s not going to be some massive figure that doubles the percentage – I’ve seen a few ass clowns put forth that we have over 20% unemployment. Which is bullshit. We get that high, things are going to feel a lot more hairy than they are now.

Of course, I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture. I just looked at the wonderful nest-egg of stock-based savings I’d developed from being fully-vested at a job I had in the early 90s. Before this downfall, that thing was growing exponentially every quarter, by leaps and bounds. Now? The damn thing is cut almost in half. Cooler heads have told me to just grin and bear it, that it will come around again. And if it doesn’t, well, I sure won’t be the only one taking it in the ass financially.

There are some good things I’d like to see come about from all this financial darkness going on now. One, I hope real estate prices come back to earth and stay there. This has been one of the most grotesque acts of aggression to take place in my adult life – real estate in most places in America becoming over-priced to the effect that two people have to work like fiends to buy a house and keep it going. I grew up watching guys who pumped gas and work in factories own homes, and have to wonder how much that happens anymore. I know in the New York area, this is an insane issue, when people tell me how much it costs them to live here. You can’t have a “normal” life in New York like most people do in America. A boxy, deeply unimpressive apartment in Manhattan would get you a McMansion most places in America. And I don’t care what anyone says – the quality of life in New York is not worth that much. Sooner or later, all this shit is just background noise to how you live, or where you live. They don’t matter all that much. God bless you if you can run that ruse into your 30s and 40s, but you should know better by then.

But if there’s one thing I learned from 9/11, it’s that people don’t really change all that much, even after a traumatic experience like that. People said they would – they declared they were forever changed. But they weren’t – at least not here, and here is where you’d expect that to be the case. People went back to being just as self-absorbed and prickly as they ever were. Just as spoiled. Just as pampered. Just as neurotic. In effect, I wouldn’t want to have it any other way – this is how a lot of people who live here are. And they come off as complete jackasses when they pretend to give a shit about anyone else. Just the way they are. They’re not vigilant, or particularly brave. They’re just people. And they tend to live as they are, where they are, and have an attitude about it. New York can’t survive without greed and excess – the tax base would fall through. The worst problem we’ll have now as a city is the spending power and taxes created by all those financial workers who live and work here has gone up in smoke, which is no joke on that level. Ditto the taxes of all those financial firms that disappeared into thin air or merged.

I’m not sweating all this too much for a number of reasons. It’s an edict of mine to live affordably – always has been, always will be. I just can’t live otherwise. (And if I got lucky and came into a few million, hell yes, I’d upgrade accordingly – but again, within reason.) And I’ve come to the unavoidable conclusion that I’m a worker. It’s my mentality. I work. If I was in the army, I’d be a sergeant, like Dad was. I’d rise high enough to be of importance, but not high enough that I’d have to engage in the political nonsense of getting ahead. Good workers are valuable – boy, do I know this after two decades in NYC offices, and seeing the unbelievable amount of people who don’t like to work, and make the work lives of those around them misery. (Or, conversely, are obsessed with work and have nothing else to live for.) My goal in life is to always have balance.

Anybody who wants to work will find work. That’s how our country runs, save for a few moments in our history when things got strange. I’m not sure if this is one of those moments – let’s check back in 6-9 months from now. I’m having a hard time with all this talk of “opportunity” springing out of financial turbulence. Why not look for reason and sanity instead, where there was none before. Instead of always thinking about ways to get ahead. You can have the opportunity to stop living like a fuckhead, stop looking for any opening to screw everyone else, stop poisoning your mind with obsessive greed, and start creating a world where decent, hard-working people don’t need to feel like they have their heads in a vice 24-7. I know that’s asking too much, and probably won’t be a welcome byproduct of all this turbulence, but it’s nice to think we could return to a place in America where life didn’t feel like it was spiraling out of control in some larger sense, be it upwards or downwards. The way we live now can't go on forever, and that's a good thing in my mind.

Doomed Novel Excerpts

Got caught short-handed at the end of a short month -- trying to maintain that "three a month" pace for this thing. I have a few ideas for pieces, but I'd rather let them incubate in that writerly way, because they don't feel right just yet.

In the meantime, I've gone back to that doomed novel from my late 20s that I've excerpted once before (a short piece about a guy obssessed with his lawn) and came up with a few other passages that hit me right. This whole thing was a mess. Just little tidbits and recollections, shaded over and "fictionalized" from my life, applied to a canned story about a guy burying his father ... years before I actually participated in the actual event. In short, I had no idea what I was writing about. And even at the age of 28 or 29, surely didn't have the emotional depth to pull it off, or grasp the "big picture" element of death in our lives.

But people I grew up with will surely recognize elements of our reality in the mix. Especially the reality of growing up in the 70s in rural America. That's how the "first novel" often works. The writer plays fast-and-loose with his own life, changes a few names, a few situations, and tries to get that down on paper. In my case, I was simply lacking that "big picture" sense. Plenty of little flashes, but it never added up to a convincing story. Don't think I'm novelist. I tried, but my writing mind just doesn't seem to work that way. It works this way. Enjoy!

***

I may not mention it too much, but our television set was on day and night. Our father came up during the Depression, at which time there was only radio, and the old people in his life used to lecture him on the evils of listening too much. These were the kind of people who rode to church on horses and wiped their asses in the outhouse with tree leaves. So our father learned to resent their pious lectures and dove straight into radio, and the music on it.

Naturally, when television came along, that was like jets replacing biplanes. By the time George and I came along, the TV set became some strange mix between talking furniture and an altar. Our father would get up around six and turn it on. We would get up around seven for school and sit with him to watch the end of Sunrise Semester and the morning news. Our mother would be up by eight to send us all off. After we left, she would watch morning game shows as she cleaned the house and afternoon soap operas between laundry loads. George and I would get home around four to catch all the sitcom reruns we had stamped on our psyches. After dinner, which we would eat in the dining room with the television still on the living room, our father would sit down for the evening news. Sometimes there’d be a brief respite before prime time, but usually the television stayed on until eight, when all the shows came on, which would take us up to eleven. The day would end with the nightly news, and television generally went off around eleven-thirty. After he retired, the set stayed on until at least midnight, although it was turned on around eight in the morning.

Long before any drug-induced paranoia, George thought Big Brother was watching us through the TV set. It made sense to him -- the damn thing was always on, and it wasn’t only our house. Every house we had ever been in as kids had a blaring TV set. Sometimes you had to shout to be heard. And the set itself seemed unnatural. George would watch the tubes glowing in the back as the TV set turned on, and the fading of the screen at night to a single white dot unnerved him. He had me convinced that someone was in there watching us. Once in the junkyard, we found an old shell from a burned-out floor model Zenith, and George crawled inside to where the screen used to be. He started pretending he was a cheesy weatherman, but then he stared at me like he was Dracula. He scared me so much I ran away.

Our father used to lecture us about how much we watched, but in the long run, he watched far more than we did. I think “watch” is a relative term when it comes to television. Sometimes it held our interest, but most times it was left on. Once, to see what would happen, George turned off Hee Haw while my father was reading over his tax forms. He seemed engrossed in his paper work. We sat there and stared at the wall for a few moments until our father asked George to turn the set back on.

“But you weren’t even watching, Dad,” George said.

“Sure, I was.”

“If you were watching,” George went on, “what did Buck Owens say after Minnie Pearl stuck him in the can with a pitch fork?”

I knew it was “I got the point, darlin’, I got the point,” but our father looked at the blank screen.

“I don’t know, George. All right. So my attention’s divided here. I am watching it here and there. Roy Clark did the “Pickin’ and A Grinnin’” bit a few minutes ago. Right?”

“Right,” George said.

“So turn it back on. If you want to change the channel, say so.”

Our father went back to his taxes. George turned on a rerun of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, with special guests Deep Purple, because he knew Lawrence Welk was right around the corner.

I thought about burying the TV set with our father, but it wouldn’t have fit into the coffin. He liked it big, floor model, sitting on the far side of the living room wall. He warned us not to sit too close, that we’d get radiation poisoning and our eyes would go bad, but it didn’t seem like a few feet would make that much of a difference. When our father wasn’t around, George liked to get right up on it, so all he could see was the colored dots. He said he could feel the warmth from the tubes and the electricity on his cheeks. And it brought him face to face with the man inside the set. George said he knew he was in there, and that people acknowledged it all the time by talking to the set, as if it were a family member. It scared me, but it filled George with apprehension.

I remember in the summers, we’d walk home in the night after playing hide and seek with the gang, and in every home, through the open windows we could see blue lights glowing on the living room walls. We could hear the canned laughter and amplified commercials. Sometimes, if it was a popular show, like All in the Family, we could hear the same sound coming from different houses, leaking a strange, distant echo into the quiet streets. George wouldn’t let me talk, and we’d walk around for a long time, listening and looking. With the summer heat and the wind blowing through the trees, it was enough to scare me more than the basement and attic rolled into one. Once, George found some empty Coke cans behind a bush, and he crushed them onto the bottoms of his sneakers, as did I, and they gave our steps a slow, metallic sound. We went around all night pretending we were robots roaming the streets of our town after the A bomb had dropped. George liked that feeling.

***

Last Saturday, I passed by one of those huge front loaders digging dirt out of the ground. I barely caught it from the corner of my eye, the enormous shovel plunging into the hillside, its long arm straining then pulling back a load of black soil. I could barely see it because at least twenty men had pulled their cars and pick-up trucks over to watch. At first, I thought it was an accident, then I realized that a tribal right was going on, the viewing of working men, by other working men, as they operated heavy machinery.

It made me wistful, because I knew my father, especially after he retired, would have been one of those men pulled over. It took me even further back, and I pictured George and I as kids standing next to our father as he watched. I looked bored but tolerant. George looked like he was willing the shovel to burst into flames, all to the tune of some hideous Black Sabbath dirge.

***

George and I could attest to that, because for years we were his unwilling Saturday morning servants. And like a pool table where all the balls roll to one end, our house and cars gave testament to the fact that he didn't know what the hell he was doing. Showers that leaked, doors that swung open with a ghostly whine, toilets that had to be flushed three times, cars installed with manual chokes that popped out and shot flames from the tail pipe -- it was like we lived in a funhouse. Every turn of a handle was an adventure. The more he worked on things, the more he seemed to screw them up. Sometimes I think he did it on purpose so he could portray himself as a Mr. Fix-It when they broke down for real. Most of the men who worked for him were mechanical geniuses, if nothing else, the kind of men who'd turn on a car, listen to it, and tell you exactly what was wrong. Being around machinery, our father had to pick up a little mechanical ability, but he wasn't a natural.

And it chagrined George and me to have him nail us some time on Saturday morning, usually right after one of us sat down with a bowl of cereal or maybe a book. Both of us read a lot, and our father used to say, "How about leaving that book for awhile and helping me with the car."

It wasn't really a question, more of a healthy suggestion. This was a year-round thing, and it could be a huge pain in the ass to trudge out in the snow to hold a screwdriver in the carburetor while our father fiddled endlessly with the intake valve. I hated it, but at least I kept an open mind and picked up a few things as we went along.

George profoundly resented it, mainly because he didn't feel comfortable rebelling in this situation. Our father would often drop a comment on how lazy kids were these days, and every time, George would argue back that every generation said that about kids. So when our father came looking for help on Saturday, he reluctantly went along instead of losing face.

George was a great fan of paperback celebrity biographies, especially for rock stars. Invariably, he'd be laid out on the sofa, nice and cozy, reading a book about The Beatles or The Stones, maybe a blanket or a comforter wrapped around him, when our father would trudge in, shake the snow from his boots and make George an offer he couldn't refuse. Neither of us would ever answer. Our father assumed our silence meant "no problem, Dad" and walked right out, sure that one or both of us would be out in a few minutes. And we would, calling him names like "asshole" and "motherfucker" in our heads, but never to his face. George would say the same thing to me every time.

"Asshole, doesn't he know I'm getting to the best part of the book?"

"What part is that?" I'd ask, acknowledging one of his pet names for me.

"That part in the middle right before the picture section, where they're starting to get famous and turn into jaded creeps."

"I guess if you get famous, you can skip right to the middle and make that page one of your story," I'd answer. I had to give him reason for then farting on my head, otherwise he'd do it for no reason at all. The funny part was I knew exactly what he was talking about -- every book I ever read growing up George had read first. Those damn books were all the same, with the celebrities at the same point in their careers near the picture section. Mick and Keith’s first big drug bust. John crying out for attention in songs like “I’m a Loser” and “Help.” Dylan all strung out and drifting, mere months before the near-fatal motorcycle crash. Despite the constant similarities, we read them cover to cover every time.

So George would throw on his clothes to go out and hold a monkey wrench or keep his foot on the gas pedal for half an hour. It wasn’t so much the work itself as the idea that we had no say in the matter. Through this involuntary labor, George grew to despise anything mechanical. He associated it with a thug redneck mentality, that you had to be a man to fix things, and you were a sissy if you couldn’t. The experience itself could have been a lot worse. Our father simply did what he had to do and excused us, whereas some fathers would berate their sons when things didn’t go right, as they rarely do in these matters.

***

The best of those places was the junkyard. There was something to be said for field after desolate field of briar patches, junked cars and hornet’s nests, sliced through with craggy dirt roads leading nowhere. We would have loved to go at night, but they closed at sundown and kept guard dogs. Our father would rummage around old cars to find inexpensive parts. The trouble was getting checked out. These parts had no price tags, so it was up to the owner, a toothless old creep named Hugo, to determine the price. Actually, it was up to Hugo and his obese son, who didn’t seem to have a name. He was this strange guy somewhere in his 30’s who dressed like a vampire killer in one of those cheesy Hammer horror films from England -- a round black hat with a full brim, pegged black pants, white shirt unbuttoned to show his voluminous chest hair, pointy-toed shoes, long, thin side burns, and a cheap cigar. Sometimes he even wore a cape -- George said a bullwhip and a huge gold crucifix would have completed the picture. These two would haggle over the right price in some vague Eastern European language, and inevitably it was too much. I think my father hated these guys, but even their inflated price was cheaper than buying the part new.

At least the junkyard had a run-down element of fun about it. The worst were the hardware and auto parts stores. They had that smell of clean metal and rubber. The hardware store was more metallic smelling, due to the large number of nuts, bolts, screws and the like. The automotive store had more of a plastic/rubber smell, maybe because of the tires and different belts and hoses.

Either way, they both attracted the same clientele -- mechanics. I knew some engineers in college who had a mechanical background and used it as a foundation to build more knowledge on the structure of machines. The guys in these stores had only the foundation -- the house had burned down, if they knew how to build one in the first place. Their whole world seemed to revolve around cars. People who didn’t know about cars were idiots -- if they were men and didn’t know, then surely they were gay and clearly took home economics instead of shop in anticipation of their alternative lifestyle.

I hated those fucking places, and I know George felt like a caged animal in hardware stores. The minutes crawled by on those Saturday morning trips, and in my memory, it was always raining. I’d bet everything I own this is the underlying reason George got into computers, because he knew morons of the kind we encountered in hardware stores would be left behind in the computer revolution. It was his way of saying, “I’m a man, and I’m making more than any three of you put together.” We couldn’t understand how grown men got off by making kids feel small. It especially stung because we knew that when these men were our age, they were the dolts who dropped out in the sixth grade then went on to get their 14-year-old girlfriends pregnant. There’s nothing worse for a kid than having an adult dumber than he is insulting him and getting away with it.

The king of the mechanics was this guy named Elroy who worked at Black Diamond Hardware. We knew this because of his name tag, which he wore outside of work, too. It said, "Elroy, King of the Mechanics." There was a caricature of a Monopoly board king brandishing a wrench underneath the words. He didn't own the place, probably made about $2.00 and hour or so as the manager. No one would know this to walk in the store and encounter this bald old man with a booming voice. He was one of those guys who chain smoked and weighed 98 pounds. Elroy never laughed. If he thought something was funny, his left eye would twitch. I don't think I can really describe the man any better than saying John Wayne Gacey would have felt unnerved in his presence. Naturally, he knew where every wing nut and linoleum sample was, knew the price of every product, and whether the customer wanted it or not. He was right, too, although no man wanted to be made to look incompetent (i.e., effeminate) in a hardware store. So the atmosphere of one upmanship was a given with Elroy on the job. The customers were joking, but they were serious.

Elroy liked our father because Elroy's son had served in the infantry in Korea, too. He never mentioned what had happened to his son, but George often said he was probably living somewhere in women's clothes and whispering lines like, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" in the mirror. George and I represented maybe the first generation in America never to have to fight in any war or be drafted, so naturally we were on the outside with guys like Elroy. We couldn't ride the old man's coat tails when it came to service to God and country, no sir. Ungrateful little bastards, smoking pot and worshipping faggot rock singers while our fathers died in foreign lands. That was more than an attitude. Those were actual words Elroy would use with us when our father went off to find the right size paint brush. It was like something out of a Billy Jack movie. I've often wondered about the psychotic Norman Rockwell mutations I knew as a child. I don't seem to know any people like that now, and I'm getting old enough.

If we had looked under our beds at night in anticipation of seeing a troll or demon, we would have seen Elroy, winking joylessly and calling us faggots and communists while spitting tobacco juice into a dixie cup. The man was irrational fear made real. George said he couldn't care less if Elroy wore a gold crown with twenty servants bearing him in a carriage and blasting trumpets -- so long as he didn't have any contact with him. It wasn't so much that the man was frightening as that his presence immediately made us want to leave. Everything we were, he wasn't, and we knew he had the shit end of the stick. He inspired anxious pity -- a strange combination of emotions neither of us knew how to handle.