Jay Bennett

I don’t know why, but whenever a musician passes on who never got his full due while alive, I’m on it. The last time I felt this way was for Sean Costello, the young blues guitarist who was just starting to find his voice before checking out in a run-down hotel room in Atlanta. When Ronnie Lane passed on quietly in a small town in Colorado, that hit me like a thunderbolt, as I had spent the past few years discovering the great music he made after leaving The Faces.

And, now, Jay Bennett, formerly of Wilco, checks out far too early. Not sure if it was misadventure or on purpose, but I don’t think anyone’s scoring that too closely. He was a year older than I am, which I found shocking … thought he was much older than I was, or I was much younger. He always seemed so middle-aged, probably due to his body type and big head. He had one of those burly midwestern bodies and head, you could picture him in a pair of horn-rim glasses, a black leather hat with ear flaps and a big-ass Woolrich coat. Shoveling snow, or selling newspapers on the corner in Chicago, or bouncing a niece on his knee at a cookout. The dreadlocks were out of place on him, but that was his thing, to be this typically midwestern-looking guy who had a lot more going on.

Apparently, he was in the process of suing Wilco over the issue of royalties related to his appearance in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart which, let’s face it, has created this “story” about Jay and the band that will be his legacy. (Jay was also needing a lot of money for a long-delayed hip operation, without health insurance.) In the documentary, Jay is made out to be this mad genius, constantly smoking, who spends all his time in the studio and eventually gets too nuts for Jeff Tweedy to deal with, so he’s asked to leave the band. We never get to see this happening. Sure, there’s a scene where Jay’s fretting over an intricate segue between two of the songs, complete with Tweedy vomiting in the rest room when the tension over their disagreement on this issue boils over, but that didn’t seem all that harsh to me. If you know bands, you know that break-ups tend to result over a long period of fights and issues that make stuff like that passage seem like small change. Whatever caused Jay to be dumped from the band, we didn’t see it happening.

And that’s a shame, because Jay was responsible for pushing the band to its creative peak, with Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Only the band knows for sure, but both those album, Jay’s presence is all over them, whether as a songwriter, arranger, producer or musician. When he left the band, that musical density and greater pop sense disappeared with him. I still love the band, but you can hear what Jay meant to them when he left. This two-part interview from Glorious Noise – the first part letting Jay expound upon why he left and the second outlining exactly what he did on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – gives excellent insight into just how integral his role was to the band.

I’m guessing his imprint was even larger on the previous album, Summerteeth, which many fans consider the band’s peak. I do, too, although I didn’t think much of the album at first. Brother J was a Wilco fan before I was, because of their alt country beginnings, but Summerteeth, he threw his hands up and said fuck these guys. Their previous album, Being There, was considered their creative breakthrough, and even then, Jay’s imprint was being felt in more loose/trippy arrangements. I know more than a few people who couldn’t stand this sort of “branching out” and thought the band was over-rated, but there are certain songs like “I Got You,” “Red Eyed and Blue” and “Dreamer in My Dreams” that are the sound of a band hitting its stride.

Jay leaves the band, and Tweedy veers Wilco into a more lean, less poppy direction. Which I still love. Every time I listen to Wilco, I feel like I’m listening to a guy, Tweedy, who really likes marijuana. Everything he does is trippy in a way suggesting that intelligent, but slightly askew take on the world so many heads have. But you can hear that pop sense Jay imparted greatly decreasing, and when Jay was with Wilco, he was writing material that’s about as good as pop music gets. Two songs in particular represent Jay’s creative peak.

“My Darling” from Summerteeth underlines the issues so many older Wilco fans had with the band: too much shit going on. I recall Brother J’s reaction to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: “These guys are writing basic songs that sound fine and then lumping all this sonic shit on top of it to make it sound experimental.” Which he thought was bullshit, and sometimes it was. This was truly the case for “My Darling,” which was mostly Jay’s song, maybe all Jay’s song from what I gather, and if you want to hear the best version, try this one from his first post-Wilco album, The Palace at 4 am. Less is more in this case – I put this song on the same shelf as “Imagine” by John Lennon. It’s that good! To come up with a melody that basic that hasn’t been used before, to me, is a sign of someone who has the ability to function on a higher creative level than most musicians.

The absolute best, though is “California Stars” from Mermaid Avenue. I don’t know what Jeff Tweedy has to do with the song, and I suspect that asshole Billy Bragg just sat in a corner strumming an acoustic guitar. It’s my understanding that this was one of Jay’s song, too, with lyrics, of course, by Woody Guthrie. “California Stars” is one of those songs that defined the 90s for me, maybe the best song of the 90s, along with other songs like “Creep” and “Common People.” First time I heard that song, it made perfect sense: that sad, floating feel that did impart someone looking up at a night sky and wishing he was back in California. The lap steel work by Corey Harris is also outstanding, really makes the song.

Those two songs alone put Jay Bennett on a higher plane for me. He didn’t stop making music after Wilco either, putting out solid solo albums that had flashes of the same brilliance. Try “My Little Wicked One” and “Hank,” which now takes on new meaning. I hadn’t known it at the time, but Jay’s musical presence was in my life back in the early 90s. Brother J had read a review of the band Titantic Love Affair that compared them favorably to The Replacements, with their first album having a cover designed by Chris Mars. “Planet Strange” was their big song, and they weren’t quite The Replacements. I never warmed up to that album; it just wasn’t on quite the same level. Still, that’s Jay Bennett, skulking under his straggly hair in the background. I think Brother J still has that CD back home in his rack, although I’ll bet he hasn’t looked at it, much less played it, in years.

His legacy will always be the work he did with Wilco which, of course, will be tainted by the negative vibe attached to his departure. I’m watching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart right now, and it still seems like Jay got a raw deal, although, again, none of us have any idea what went down between him and Jeff to blow things apart. Like most bands, Wilco seems like a strange beast, full of guys jockeying for position and “yes men-ing” it to maintain status quo in that floating perception of power within the band. Which never seems real until you’re thrown out on your ass. I gather being in a band is like being in a reality TV show, like Survivor, where you can tell yourself this isn’t real, but it is. I would never do these things in my real life, you tell yourself … but this is your real life. The camera following you around is your fame, your image, and it’s always watching you and influencing how you act. I don’t think Tweedy or Wilco are bad people at all – quite the opposite. But I’d gather they’re a bit fucked up, like all bands are, which is what happen when you travel around for years in a bubble with the same people all the time.

But poor Jay punches his ticket over the Memorial Day weekend. He deserves better than to be thought of as some talented crank who talked his way out of a great band. He wasn’t full of shit regarding his place in the band, as it became evident how important he had been when he left, and the band’s direction took a sharp turn. Summerteeth will be like summer itself, representing a time and place that stays the same while you go on, or don’t go on. Man, Jay looks like hell in this documentary, constant cigarette, hangdog face, clearly some kind of drug usage going on. Ditto Tweedy, they look like hell. But that hell they put themselves through left behind some great music. I don't doubt Jay was a pisser to work with, but the end results speak for themselves. Hats off, Jay.

Forgetting How to Ride a Bike

I haven’t been to a high-school reunion in a few years, think the 20th was the last. The 25th didn’t happen – apparently not enough interest. The old class seems to function better on the zero years, and 10 years is a nice round number to see people again. But this isn’t about high-school reunions, per se.

I commented a few weeks back about Facebook – the concept of our lives turning into permanent high-school reunions by constantly keeping in contact with people from our past. When I first moved to New York, and even now, it felt important to me to maintain contact with people “back home.” Some people move to cities to leave their pasts behind, but that always struck me as foolish. You can’t escape it. Whatever you were there, you’ll still be that here, no matter how hard you try to bullshit yourself. New York is crawling with douchebags – a lot of them were born and raised here. And you get that certain kind who moved here, who would be chased out of any town where more than a small circle of acquaintances and coworkers knew who they were. They move here to escape, not realizing they can’t escape themselves, that it’s not where they’re from, it’s who they are that’s so troubling.

Going back home these days implies knowing a lot less people: a handful of old friends and immediate family members. This has been the case for a long time now. There was that era in my 20s where there were still plenty of other guys in their mid-late 20s at relatively loose ends (unmarried, going to bars, etc.), but that scene faded out over time as people either got married or moved away. I go back home to clear my head out for a few days in a rural area as much as anything else. But it’s still important to me to maintain that connection. What something like Facebook would do is point out numerous, maybe dozens of, other people back there whom I’ve lost contact with and put them back in my life in some respect.

While that would feed my ego in terms of hang-out options, I’d also have to wonder how genuine it all was. I don’t crave having dozens of people I’ve lost touch with pushed back into my life – the concept neither offends or appeals to me. It’s just not something I’d do on my own … so why have a website do it for me? I’d see through the ruse and realize this “homecoming” of sorts would be more a tribute to social networking websites than any real urge I had to know these people again. I’d rather a relationship developing like that be more organic – you meet someone by chance, hey, we still get along, let’s keep in touch, here’s my email address, etc. This is what high-school reunions are for: to meet with these people again, have some drinks, kick back, talk about old times, then all go our merry ways again for another 10 years.

I don’t think that particular social construct was meant to permeate our every-day lives. It’s a privacy issue at heart. Or maybe just relates to the kind of person you are. I’ve come across many people in New York offices who don’t seem to have any real sort of relationships: the ones they do appear to have are related purely to what the other person can do for them. That may sound mildly evil – it’s a way of seeing the world I’ve never quite accepted – but that’s just how some people are. They’re “networking” sort of people no one ever really gets to know. They don’t know you – they network you, in hopes that if they scratch your back, you’ll scratch theirs somewhere down the road.

And that odd way of seeing the world is in synch with horseshit like Facebook, Twitter and the Permanent High-School Reunion these things hope to perpetuate. You’ll never really get to know anyone, but you’ll “know” hundreds of people. In effect, everyone you know will be an acquaintance, and only in way that somehow serves your sense of well being, with little regard for theirs. It’s an extremely mercenary form of friendship that, as noted, I’m already familiar with via dealing with business people in NYC offices. The focus is on self, not on others, not on how self and others interact. It’s all about you, which is why this stuff gives me so much trouble. The ruse, the selling point, is that you’re building this wonderful world of people around you to help each other get through with life, when the reality is you’re only building a monument to insecurity.

What are real friends? That’s always a good question to ask. I look at my own life and can see how these situations change over the years. It’s obvious how it works when you’re a kid, and well into your 20s: these people are around you, you spend real time together, you go through a lot, most importantly, at times in your lives when you’re far more open to trust people and create lasting bonds that could run the rest of your lives. Before you get out on your own, you’re forced into these relationships simply because the people are physically there in your life, in the same house, or street, or town, or home room, or math class, etc. You find some like-minded individuals, and you bond, in ways that you think will last forever, but you’re not fully aware that the simple passing of time will push you in different directions, with some of these relationships ending, some going on.

It’s not as easy after that. You get exposed to the world; you move around in it. You see how genuinely awful some people are, and this taints your view of humanity. You become more careful with whom you trust. Some of the people you trust turn out to be awful; some would die for you. Some people you thought were assholes turn out to be all right. Most are varying mixes of both. Chances are good that the physical sense of everyone you know in your life being right around you will disappear – either they will, or you will, or you’ll just stop knowing each other once you no longer have reason to be in regular contact. Marriage, kids … things like this tend to take up people’s every waking hours on top of work. Some people will work like fiends, with time for nothing else.

That traditional way of defining friendship no longer applies to my adult life. Most of the people I know are spread out. Some back home in PA. Some are in NYC. Some were, but most moved around the general area, so that even being 30 miles outside the city represents a travel scenario that's a pain to deal with. My neighbors are pricks and weirdos for the most part – I’m not going to befriend them. It would be nice to meet people around where I live, but as noted, the casual trust that’s so abundant with kids fails me as an adult. I find it a lot harder to make real friends as I get older. They seem to spring up here and there through various circumstances, but again, the way these things go, it’s never in that traditional way.

I recall in the 80s TV show Thirtysomething, there were the friends in that age group, all living in the Philadelphia area, who always seemed to be constantly, and physically, in each other’s lives (not relatives either). I feel like seeing Joe. Hey, I’ll just get into my car and drive over to his house, and we’ll have some beers in his den!

Does your life work that way? Man, mine doesn’t! I have to make appointments days, more likely weeks, in advance to hang out with people, and half the time those plans get jumbled or tossed along the way. I get the impression if you, as an adult, live where you grew up, you do have a more built-in network of people constantly in your life. I also get the impression you wish you could kill some of these people, and both they, and the concept that you never moved, gets to you after awhile. I like the idea of portraying myself as a rural sort of guy, but part of that is being in a city and really appreciating certain aspects of that way of life (more space, less traffic, more greenery, etc.) … while conveniently ignoring certain aspects that would drive me nuts were I to live there all the time. This last trip, I couldn’t stop noticing how trashy so many people look back there these days: missing teeth, idiotic tattoos, dingus facial hair … and this was just the women. I’m usually against using a term like “white trash,” but man, there were a lot of trashy white people around! Much more than a decade ago, much less two. And these folks seemed to be not just self conscious over how grubby they were, but taking a perverse sort of pride in it, too. Soap, deodorant and toothpaste are your friends, folks!

Every so often, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” will come up on the iPod, and it always gets to me:

While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself an' the first few friends I had.

With half damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon.
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing till the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words was told, our songs was sung
Where we longed for nothing and were satisfied
Joking and talking about the world outside.

With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
And our chances really was a million to one.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they was few so the thoughts never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter or split.

How many a year has passed and gone
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

I guess these days with that group of friends, one would be Twittering on his iPhone, while another sends a text to someone he'd be meeting in five minutes, while another cuts off one who was talking to take a meaningless call, and the last two would be stone-faced in front a TV set with a Playstation for hours on end. None of them would give a shit about each other. Dylan wrote this in his early 20s, a time in which I knew what he was singing about, but never would have come near defining it as well. The song means a lot more to me now. Of course, I also think if you reunited those friends in a room with Dylan, he’d shuffle around uncomfortably, making goat sounds, and would excuse himself after five minutes. He longs for that feeling of seemingly endless stability and certainty more than the friends. Another song by Jonathan Richman, “That Summer Feeling,” hits the same nail on the head with the great line: “Do you long for her?/Or the way you were?”.

A few weeks ago, I youtubed my old high school and town names around that area, and came across this: two teenage girls goofing around to 60s songs on an iPod. What really struck me was that both girls had memorized the lyrics to ALL the songs, so they knew how to anticipate each line and silly mannerism. And they're listening to great pop music that's 40 years old! I can guarantee you, we weren't sitting around in the 70s with megaphones crooning Rudy Valee and Bing Crosby songs... but I think their love and appreciation of the music is a very cool thing.

It was also a nice little moment, documented for all time, the kind of moment you rarely have as adult, but seems like second nature when you’re growing up. Every high school reunion aspires to a drawn-out moment with the same feeling these girls have effortlessly clowning around in the living room on a boring Friday night. What happens to that feeling? I don't know, but it gets harder to find with passing time. Call it forgetting how to ride a bike.

Trash Weekend

I was going to call this one “White Trash Weekend,” but, as you'll read, that title wouldn’t have been all-encompassing. Back in my 20s, I used to get these “vibes” along the lines of “why is the world closing in on me,” generally based on a combination of minor things going off-kilter in my personal life, coupled with random events on the street or at work, that left me feeling like I was under some type of cosmic attack. I had somehow displeased the gods, as if Zeus was hurling thunderbolts at me.

Well, I’ve since written that sort of mental state down to self absorption. The world wasn’t spinning around me. Good and bad things happen to everyone all the time, the only recognizable pattern being that sometimes they will be caused by my previous thoughts or actions, i.e., you’re gonna’ reap what you sow. And the random things that happen just walking down the street are just that. Random. I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time and being exposed to douchebaggery, which never makes anyone feel good, but as I’ve learned, just keep moving, and that shit is gone. In other words, no reason to question why you’ve stumbled on a very minor, temporary losing streak for a few hours or days.

Friday started with the news that an old friend had been diagnosed with a severe disease, and that’s about all I’m going to say about that, because that’s about all I know at this point. Never good to hear news like that.

When I went to leave for work that morning, I took my usual glance down the side street to see if there’s anything I need to address on my landlord’s sidewalk: graffiti on her wall, garbage on her sidewalk, etc. Sure enough, there was garbage on her sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, the remnants of an informal party: two pizza boxes stuffed with uneaten crusts and about two dozen cigarette butts. Three empty six packs of Heineken. Various plastic bags with napkins, plastic cups and shit like that. Someone methodically made a neat little pyramid pile of all this junk, as if they were sitting in a car, everybody got done, very nicely put all their refuse in one spot on someone else’s sidewalk: how nice of them to be so thoughtful.

That’s pretty typical stuff for me to deal with – I get that immediate flash of anger (“what kind of wretch would knowingly dump garbage on someone else’s property?”), but sooner or later realize no one else is going to pick it up and throw it out but me, and if I don’t, the asshole Sanitation folks may very well ticket my landlord for that. At this point, I know the drill: deposit whatever’s there in the garbage bin and get over it, because it will happen again, and there’s not much I can do to stop it.

Rest of Friday was thankfully routine. Saturday morning, I wake up to what smells like burning plastic and rubber. A really harsh “this is not good” chemical smell. This part of Queens is routinely under attack by various toxic orders, usually of two kinds. One, a very sickly-sweet smell like burning maple syrup, or cow shit. The maple syrup smell has since been identified as some type of confections factory in New Jersey (!) wafting its odor over the entire New York City area, and the cow shit is a sewage treatment plant about a mile away that’s has had ongoing issues with a failing turbine. It must be hell to live right near that plant, but this entire part of Queens, you get “that smell” sometimes, and it’s foul. Welcome to New York … and this has grown into one of the more “exclusive” areas!

I never did found out what this smell was – if I had to guess, I’d go with one of our bozo, broken English neighbors who occasionally get up to some weird, illegal chemical disposal hijinx that people normally do in zoned areas of factories wearing space suits and respirators. Not a good smell to wake up to, and I never did find out where it originated. There must be a trailer park in Athens that’s spiritual home to some folks around here.

I get online and check out my home county newspaper to find that the gang of teenage creeps who beat to death an illegal immigrant in Shenandoah, PA have all been let off with a simple assault charge, i.e., a bunch of drunken kids in a mob got away with third-degree murder. Horrible stuff, makes me embarrassed for my home county. (Can’t write it down to a typically Shenandoah thing: the trial took place in Pottsville, the county seat, and presumably had jurors from all over the county.)

An unbelievable verdict. I know how court rooms work. A defense attorney’s job is to create reasonable doubt at every corner – the O.J. trial is a tribute to this. And if you get people dumb enough on a jury, they can be lead like sheep, i.e., made to feel they have to toe a defense attorney’s line of reasoning instead of recognizing a few basic truths. There’s a dead body in the street. Not suicide. A bunch of kids were seen by numerous witnesses beating this person before he died. No one denies this. They killed him. Want to get picky over minor issues of who delivered the final blow, or what color his sneakers were? Go ahead. Somebody got murdered. Someone is accountable. Only two kids were charged. From what I gather there were more than five kicking and stomping this guy as they yelled racial slurs. This is reality non one refutes. Courtroom reality is no one is to blame unless you can prove it without a shadow of a doubt; this form of reality blows, and our world would be chaos if it existed outside a courtroom. It's not justice; it's bullshit.

Shenandoah has always been a mess of a town, but this takes the cake. I have one friend who lives there (and I wish he’d move), but that’s all I’m ever going to have to do with that town from now on. Frankly, if there are demonstrations and riots all summer long, so be it. This is foul. What kind of message it sends to these assholes, I have no idea. I can only hope federal and civil cases are in the works.

And just when I’m getting myself into a nice “white racism/bad” lather, something else comes along to remind me jackasses come in every color. Later in the morning, I got into my usual routine: laundry, groceries, quick sweep up of the landlord’s sidewalk. My Saturday mornings tend to be pretty busy, nonstop activity once I get rolling. So, I’m out there cleaning up the sidewalk – an easy one this time, probably won’t be out there more than 15 minutes. As I’m doing so, two black kids, couldn’t be more than 13 or so, who had been playing basketball at the schoolyard next door come sauntering by.

From the corner of my eye, I can see that dumb walk long before they get near me. Walking very slow with their heads tilted back, frowns on their faces: they’re already mimicking the affectations and attitude of street trash. Just goofball kids who can’t even walk down the street without getting into shit. When I lived in the Bronx, I would see this transformation occur constantly – from a sweet/open 10-year-old to a fake wanna-be thug by 13. I can see the logic in adopting a stance like that as a defense against the world, but right there, that's admitting cowardice and defeat. You can’t face the world as you are, so you pretend to be something you’re not. Teenagers of all colors are prone to this sort of insecurity, and woe unto the numerous adults I’ve come across who never break through this shithead barrier.

As they get near, one of the kid pulls out a plastic bottle of some garbage concoction, looks pink, and it’s frozen. He makes a big show out of repeatedly smacking it against the wall along the landlords property (to break up the ice) … thinking in his mind that this is going to antagonize me into a confrontation. Got news for you, kid – if I’ve gone through years of black and hispanic kids spitting as I pass them on the street, you’re going to have to try harder than this to get me to hit you. Kids don't realize what adults are up against if they get caught beating some them on the street: not just various assault charges, but also child abuse charges, and in this case, probably some type of racial intimidation thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t serve my purpose to lay a finger on this kid; it could open up a very bad can of worms that could haunt me for years afterwards.

But the kids keep walking. Understand, this is all peripheral vision on my part – I’m not even looking at these kids. I didn’t see it, but at the far end of the sidewalk, the other kid drops a foot-long scrap of tin foil, obviously on purpose as he sees me out there sweeping, and thinks it would be cool to make “whitey” pick up after him, because he’s such a playah.

Can I tell you how many times I’ve come across this Dance of the Dumb in my travels in New York? Dozens and scores doesn’t do it justice: hundreds, if not thousands. Always the same attitude, the same “please hit me” vibe that, clue me in, I outweigh both of these kids put together and would pulverize them in a street fight. They might be carrying guns? I strongly doubt it; try playing basketball with a gun in your waistband.

What they’re doing goes all the way back to slave days, although they’re probably unaware of that. They’re treating me as the authority figure who must be “secretly” taunted to show how smart they are and how dumb I am. I have seen this lame, defeatist attitude thousands of times with black kids. These kids don’t realize they’re already conceding power to me by acting this way, that instead of treating me as a normal, equal human being and passing, they’re viewing me as an authority figure they feel some need to get over on, because they feel inferior, although they have no reason to feel that way. I don’t see them in terms of inferiority or superiority – they’re just kids walking down the street. I’m just a guy minding my own business. If they saw me as inferior and wanted to prove it, they would attack me, which I would welcome!

You tell me – I’d love to be enlightened on this. Rank stupidity and total lack of self awareness strike me as debilitating diseases of the mind. I’ve seen this sort of role playing enough to note it as a common occurrence. Do I feel sorry for this kids? I feel sorry for their level of stupidity, sure. But, no, I don’t feel sorry for them at all. As noted above, you’re going to reap what you sow. You go around acting like that, bad things are coming your way, and I’d rather not be one of them. I let them pass on crap this minor, because engaging assholes like this in any sort of real dialogue is a waste of time. I wouldn’t know how to tell these kids that manhood is not allowing anyone else to control your actions, that you don’t go through life burdening other people with your bullshit.

Besides which, I know that sidewalk, little things get dropped along the way all the time, whether I’m there or not: water bottles, empty potato chip bags, etc. I’d be like King Canute ordering back the sea if I got into a physical confrontation with every scumbag littering out there.

So, this, too, passes. I take a nap, listen to some music, then head out to the gym later in the afternoon, normally a relaxing walk down to 30th Avenue, about half an hour each way, and a workout that usually clears me out nicely. But two blocks from my apartment, I come across something odd unfolding. A man and a woman, in their 20s, white, arguing. At least, it looks like arguing – from a distance, they could be monkeying around in that annoying way couples do in public that comes close to physical assault. As I get closer, I can see they're not monkeying around. The woman takes a swipe at the guy’s head, and he ducks back with a grimace on his face. He’s got club-hopper written all over him: grotesque Ed Hardy t-shirt, little square soldier’s hat cocked at asshole angle, pencil-line facial hair and soul patch. If I were to look up "douchebag" in the dictionary, there'd be a picture of this guy with the definition. The woman is pretty good-looking: angular, long black hair, blue eyes, a real looker. What she’s doing with a guy like this, I haven’t got a clue.

Nor does she at that moment. I hear her blurt out, “You’re going to jail! You hear me? Jail!” She’s trying to dial her cellphone. I get the vibe that I’m walking in on an ongoing, bad confrontation between a woman who, for whatever reason, must have a court order out against this guy to stay X number of feet away from her. It has that feel, the “couple gone seriously awry” sense of two people about to get physical, like many times before.

As I’m about 10 feet away, she looks at me, and this is where I decide how I’m going to deal with this. If her look in any way says, “please help me,” or if she flat-out states that, I probably will help her, which would could mean nasty business with Pencil Beard. I’m not too big on violence against women, especially with a guy who looks like this, on the street, in my presence. This guy can see me, too, can see that I’m walking straight towards both of them, not moving, making eye contact, letting them know I’m not intimidated, just want to go along my merry way.

But her look says, “I can handle this.” I look at the guy, and I can see the same sort of stupidity and arrogance I saw with the black kids a few hours earlier. Just a lost little jackass who can’t deal with a woman properly, which I don’t care about one way or another, just don’t do it in front of me. And for however attractive that woman is, the burning question: “Whatever possessed you to be with a lost little boy like this?” So if she looks like she can handle it, and she’s dumb enough to have this clown in her life, I feel fine just walking on by. Hell, for all I know, I’d side with the guy on this if their full story was explained to me.

But all in all, I had a pretty good weekend! Wrote this, cleaned my apartment from top to bottom, did my usual routines, got about 400 new songs transferred onto the iPod for an upcoming trip to PA, a very productive few days. This is how life is. I don’t understand people who carry on about being happy or sad. Life isn’t like either all the time – if you think it is, you’re delusional. In the course of a day, I’ll go through both emotions, and then some, a few times over. As far back as I can remember, life has always been like this. Trying to label your life, or periods in your life, is a luxury you shouldn’t indulge. Just get on with it.

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.