Top Ten Make that Top Eleven Songs 40 days into the Plague Edition and a Coda

29 April 2020

The top eleven list as it exists today.

• ·      Amelia -Joni Mitchell
• ·      Wharf Rat - Grateful Dead 
• ·      Lives in the Balance - Jackson Browne
• ·      Highway Song - Aztec Two Step
• ·      Beeswing - Richard Thompson 
• ·      Donations - Loudon Wainwright III 
• ·      By this River - Brian Eno
• ·      Leave the Light On - Chris Smither 
• ·      Just Us Kids - James McMurtry
• ·      4th of July – X
• ·      Multicolored Lady – Greg Allman

The past few days have not been days for writing.  One day was too sunny and I went out and walked just an immense amount. Think I set a record for such activity on my Apple watch. One day was dreary and I sat inside and binge watched ten year old teen angst dramas, see entry for The Vampire Diaries. Mostly I have been frittering away the time listening to music and making the bed, taking out the garbage, washing dishes, etc.

As has always been the case in my life I have been playing a soundtrack for whatever I am doing.  The stuff I have been listening to has mostly been new acoustic stuff.  I love my Apple Music New Music Playlist.  

Last night as we were travelling out to pick up our organic produce from our nearby organic farm, I heard a song from a couple of decades ago that I really liked.  Liked not loved.  At that point I started thinking what songs do I really love at this point in my house arrest.  A couple of songs came up immediately and some others were circling in the ether. Thinking about those songs I decided I would write an extended piece about them.  This is it.

Note the newest of these songs is at least a decade old.  Most are 35-40 years old.  This don’t not mean I don’t have songs that I like that been put out since then.  It just means that these songs were hard wired into my brain engrams at the time when my brain was still malleable.  Below we be a hyperlink to each of the songs and a couple of paragraphs about each.

I was probably in my third year at university when Hejira dropped.  I bought the day it came out.  I listened to it once that day all the way through.  I listened to every song again that same day. Not a real clunker on the whole disk but three songs stood out.  In no particular order they were Amelia, Hejira and Refuge of the Roads.

Each of the three songs had a unity, the idea of flight from self, from relationships, from all that one had known or that they had found themselves entrapped in. Of the three I think Amelia is the clearest articulation of flight. The narrator is on the road escaping from smothering relationship issues.  

The song is both austere in its imagery and musically quite daring.  Jaco Pastorius’s bass parts on this album were like nothing any of us had heard at the time.  His sound was sui generis. The bending of bass notes is much more common now but when the album came out, they stood alone. Where you hear this song, I dare you not to imagine yourself headed west across flat plains of wheat and corn with your well-worn leather journal sitting in the passenger seat and a recording of Charlie Mingus in the cassette deck.

                                                                                      

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What can I say about the Grateful Dead?  Well, their studio records were mediocre at best.  Some were much better than others, say American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead.  Their live albums were much better but never really captured the spirit of a Dead show.  Live performances were sometimes transcendent and sometimes boring as hell. I had the luck of going to mostly very good shows but I have listened to recordings of average performances.

The songwriting was of its era. There was a sort of trippy beyond-ness vibe to a great number of the Hunter/Garcia compositions. But some of their compositions were truly grounded and quite spectacular telling of stories.  I think Wharf Rat both musically and lyrically holds up as one of the great songs of the Grateful Dead canon.  Wharf Rat tells a clear story and it builds musically to a crescendo like so many Dead songs due.  It has space in the music where at any point the band could wander off into a great jam. 

If you want to feel a little of the magic of a Dead show without the nitrous or the acid Wharf Rat off this recording takes you part of the way there.  If you never saw the band when Jerry Garcia was alive you missed something special. But here is just a little taste of that.

Jackson Browne was seduction music of the highest caliber when I was college.  Albums like Saturate Before Using and Late for the Sky played over Thorens turntables and Pioneer receivers (with their soft blue light), were the soundtrack for the conception of many of the 40 year olds alive in this world today. I bought all of the albums that Mr. Browne produced in the 1970s.  I loved the words and the music.  But then one day I didn’t find his writing all that interesting and I stopped buying the records.

Fast forward to 1986.  I was married and living in Wilmington Delaware.  Jackson had gotten very political.  He was instrumental in the No Nukes concert.  He was avidly protesting against our use of troops in Central America.  Amnesty International was a force trying to free people like Nelson Mandela and Jackson Browne was there.  He participated in their concerts trying to raise money for the work of Amnesty and awareness of some of the shadier things our country was doing.

There was a big concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey with Little Steven, Joni Mitchell, Jackson and Peter Gabriel.  We were all glued to the radio for those shows.  And Jackson Browne came out and sang Lives in the Balance and it was understandable, clear and passionate. I loved the song as he played it live and it has stuck with me all these years.  His message was that our government is not always transparent about its motives.  How accurate that seems even to this day.

I can still see her standing there at Christmas 1974 as she handed me this album.  Kathy Logiovino told me that she and her RA Eric loved this disk and that the band played frequently up around Rutgers where she was going to university.  Kathy and my musical tastes were so aligned that I knew I would love the record when I played it and I did.

There is something about this disk that is almost mystical.  Every track at one point or another has been in my top ten songs.  And then it won’t be but another song on the recording will be.  This is an organic record, whole cloth from end to end.  Of all the great songs on the album Highway Song has always stood out. 

Highway Song is a song about a choice to leave and maybe about love lost.  It is soft and the instrumentation really captures the forlorn feeling of one going out into the unknown.  Every single time I hear the song I am transported to one of those days when I had to leave and in going left love behind. The song is a perfect song from a near perfect album.

In the early 1970s I was exposed to albums by Fairport Convention, Ian Matthews and Sandy Denny.  I loved Sandy Denny and Ian Matthew’s voices.  On the albums of each of these artists there was an unmistakable guitar sound.  It was a raucous ringing sound at times and a perfectly nuanced acoustic sound at others.  But the fretwork was unmistakably the same person.  Richard Thompson was the man of the hour for these records.

By the time I got to university Mr. Thompson was extending his range with some incredibly great duo and solo work.  Turn Out the Lights is probably one of the greatest albums of all time. Hand of Kindness was a substantial follow up work. While I love Richard Thompson’s wild electric guitar lead work, it is on the acoustic ballads where I think he has made his mark.  His songs like Vincent Black Lighting, King of Bohemia and Beeswing are our era’s Child Ballads.

The telling of this tale of a failed relationship captures so much of the history of the children of the late sixties, early seventies that it is hard to ignore.  You experience the wistful longing of the narrator for a love that is gone, a love that is “sleeping rough”. You can feel the empty space in the heart of the narrator.  No artist besides Thompson working today does such an excellent job of capturing heartbreak in a soft ballad.

I was gifted the disk Last Man on Earth by my niece.  I let it sit around for six or maybe nine months but I eventually got around to putting it into the CD player.  I loved the entire disk.  But Donations stood out.

Donations is a song that basically frames the story of a former spouse (or long-term lover) asking the estranged partner to be his emergency contact in case of a terrible event.  The song assumes a fatal event has occurred. “When they tell you the bad news, I know you won’t snicker. You’ll remember the good times and all we went through. Then I suppose you’ll tell all the others.  Performing that awful task that someone has to,”

A meditation on the end of life.  I was fifty when I first heard this song.  I found it to be a song filled with wry humor on a macabre topic.  Since I first heard the song, I have undergone several operations where you have to sign the paper that said I understand that one of the things that may result for this operation is my death.  I no longer see the song a macabre but rather a meaningful meditation of one aspect of the end of life.  

A song like this could be a totally depressing piece of art.  However, Mr. Wainwrights’ simple instrumentation and jaunty voice make the song merely melancholy, and the kind of melancholy that leaves with a knowing smile.

This is one of the more recent songs on this list.  It is the centerpiece of an incredibly strong album by McMurtry. The singer has been chronicling the problems in America for decades.  He has looked at larger issues and very personal issues.  The lyrics in this song especially the first and last verse tracked with my life.  It was like he was there behind the Pedricktown bank hanging with Bear and the P-City boys and he was there as I contemplated when to retire.

The first song I heard by X was Adult Books.  I didn’t understand the exact message of the song but it had a great hook, lots of guitar thrashing and drum and pounding.  It also had very tight vocals.  X came out of the LA punk scene and I was just entranced by them.  When I first saw them perform was on Dick Clark’s Rocking New Year’s Eve.  They came on and tore up their song Devil Doll.  

X for all the thrash and speed struck me as being the punk child of the Jefferson Airplane.  The combination of the male and female lead singers and tight musicianship really seemed reminiscent of the late stage Jefferson Airplane, think Volunteers.  X continued to evolve and, on the disk, See How We Are, the members of X set out a stark vision of a declining America.  The track above just captured perfectly the ennui of the 1980s in America.  

On the fourth of July each year for a good third of my life I was in Canada.   On June 30 we would throw a couple of changes of underwear, a tent and a beer cooler in the car and head for the north side of Lake Superior.  It was always a magical time.  X and especially this song became an important part of the soundtrack of those trips among the petroglyphs and the bears. Sitting around a campfire with a Labatt Blue in hand singing, “Hey Baby it’s the Fourth of July…”, well there are few things that can beat that.

This song means two things to me.  It was a break up song from my first real girlfriend.  So, there is a tinge of romantic sadness to it.  But mostly it takes me back to Allan Jones Chevy Vega and riding round the back roads of South Jersey drinking pony bottles.  I have already written my story on that and it can be found at the link below. But the memories of Allan’s “Aw Shucks” smile and his amiable decency always come up when I hear this tune.  https://pedricktown.blogspot.com/2012/06/if-i-might-make-suggestion-to-reader.html. 

Greg Allman’s voice on this song takes me to a place of distanced loneliness and loss.  The timbre of Allman’s rough vocal tones conveys an awareness of the world and all its hurt and agony that a lesser singer could never pull off. 

Brian Eno is a genius pure and simple.  He has taken the technology of recording and elevated it to the status of musical instrument.  Many people at the time he was working solo in the late 1970s didn’t get this.  Brian Wilson knew that the studio was an instrument, but besides him I don’t know of many other artists that both understood this fact and make effective use of it.

Eno who is probably best known for his production work with Daniel Lanois on several seminal U2 albums. Some people may remember his work with David Bowie most notably the song Heroes. But when he was alone, Eno was always pushing boundaries with recording tape and time delay and sonic decay. Eno when he was on the mark was a genius and this song is one of the home runs.  People who followed him like Moby and the trance music folks owe Eno a large debt for his pushing of the boundaries of sound.

I so remember this song from one night spent on Grayfield Court in Birmingham, Michigan.  3 a.m. had come and every single person but me had left the house.  I had listened to the album by Todd Rundgren that had Can We Still Be Friends on it.  Left me cold for the most part.  I dropped this on and with a shot of scotch in my hand I just gravitated to this song. The sound is just so enveloping on a good set of speakers.  Time slips away now don’t it?

Chris Smither is an interesting old coot.  He has been around forever and his voice shows some of the wear of the years. I had a live album of Mr. Smither’s from the years when my niece was promoting records in Nashville.  On that recording was a clear an analysis of the male’s breakup mindset as I have ever heard.  The tune was called Your Winsome Smile. Once I heard that song, I was captivated by both what the artist had to say and how he said it.

As the year’s went on, I kept on listening.  When Leave the Light On was released and I listened to the title track I knew that Smither was a truth teller of the highest order.  I am now 64 and the lyrics in the early part of this song are so meaningful to me.  I mean who at this point in their life can’t understand what the singer means when he says this:

If I were young again, I'd pay attention - To that

Little-known dimension

A taste of endless time

It's just like water – it runs right through our fingers

But the flavor of it lingers - Like a rich, red wine

I can remember when time was endless.  I can never go back there, but I can remember it with fondness.  I am so sorry for what I lost not paying attention to it. Had I known I would get to sixty-four I would have done so many more things. But I won’t dwell on regret but I promise I will make what I have left of the future count.

I know there are no songs by Springsteen or Bowie on here.  But if I had to add them and make this a top thirteen, I would pick Bowie’s Life on Mars and Springsteen’s Surprise Surprise. I will you to wonder about the whys of the choices of these two songs.

Walking

24 April 2020

Got up this morning and made the family breakfast.  Me and Mrs. Butterworth created chocolate chip-pecan waffles.  I also brewed coffee and made some espresso.  Today I had a waffle, not my normal choice.  I am more of a Wheat Chex kind of guy.  Once all the food was dispensed, I decided to get part of my walk in for the day.

You can see from the photos above I walked for 30+ minutes and covered a mile and 3/4ths. My pace was in excess of three miles an hour.  Not bad for an old geezer.  

As I walked the temperature was not very warm, a mere 38 degrees.  But there was no wind and there was no rain.  I saw three other people out while I was on walkies.  Everyone moved to the other side of the street and we kept our social distance.  The closest I came to another human being was 25 feet.  

Delightfully I noticed one thing on this walk. All the grass has greened up.  I mean with the recent rains the color of the slender spears pushing up toward the sky are a lush bright green. Bright new green is a color meaning spring is close by.  April and every early May might throw one more snow at us, but if it comes it won’t last now.

If during this period of social isolation, you have not actually left the house, I urge you do so.  There is real benefit to exercise, even the simple exercise of walking. When I finish a walk I find my mind sharper and I find my mood elevated. You don’t have to keep the pace I do, you can go slower or faster, I don’t care. The issue is that we have to take care of ourselves during this time. If you don’t have a health issue that bars and if the weather is not too ugly today, get out and go.

Walking, try and make it a habit.  I have and I feel so much better for those moments I am out and about.

And the Depression Seeps In

23 April 2020

During the day yesterday I felt out of sorts.  I know where it came from. The trigger was something that seems like it should not have mattered, but it did.  Yesterday was Wednesday 22 April 2020.  Every instance where I was asked to come up with the day and date, I kept thinking it was Tuesday. Either I would correct myself or one of the three people I am sharing social isolation would do it. I got angry with myself for not remember the day and date.  Anger led to a blue feeling. The blue feeling took me to that questionable place of asking myself how long I can go on like this?

I think what really got to me was how unproductive large amounts of this “distanced” time is.  Of course, the repetition of daily events played a factor but it was the overall waste of that precious commodity time. You can only rearrange the cupboards and the garage so many times.  On days when it is snowing there is limited opportunity for exercise in that my primary exercise is walking.  Without the buzz of endorphins from walking the mind gets mired down in the minutiae.  Tough slogging through paperwork and then boredom while I am folding laundry both take their toll.

By the time I settled in to bed with my e-book I was feeling better. Still, it just goes to show that this enforced moment of isolation is tough and getting tougher. I think it is important that we vary what we do each day.  I think it is important that we use social media and the telephone to stay connected to other people. Reading things unrelated to the coronavirus helps as does listening to new music. What is happening is grinding on all of us.  But we have tools if we use them to stay sane.

As always here is a bit of pop music to bring a little cheer into your day.  The link is an all-time favorite that matches well with the thought of serendipitous joy.  Breath, walk, talk and live.  Peace my friends.

Vaugeness

22 April 2020

Wednesday has come bringing with it a grey cotton sky and cold, cold air.  Still, no snow is upon the ground, always something to be thankful for. Walked out to the big green recycling bin just now.  My walk was short but it was darn cold for this month and this day.  Grey and cold, this describes both the sky and the mood of the world today.

Listening to a news podcast I learned that the government is blocking applications for permeant residency for 60 days.  This means no green cards will issue. I was made aware that a new stimulus (or recovery) package has taken shape and should be passed into law this week. Finally, the calm voiced announcers told me that Georgia has decided to reopen a variety of businesses in the next six days. Having heard all this I whistled a sad, short whistle.

The last round of “small” business money was depleted almost instantaneously. To the surprise of almost nobody this “small” business money found its way into the hands of publicly traded companies in quite a few cases. Steakhouse chains and fast food chains gobbled up a bunch of the green.  How did this happen?  Well, the drafting and passage of statute were rushed and many of the persons voting for it did not get the chance to read it. Even if they had read it the language was that damn murky legalize.  Such language would render the terms of the law murky to anyone but the drafter. 

According to the podcast the legislators claim this new bill will be different. Yeah, sure.  It may take a year or two, but eventually we will come to know who gets Christmas early with this bill.  Rest assured someone’s alpaca farm in North Dakota with fewer than 30 animals in the fiscal year 2020 (and related by marriage to a sitting senator) will be exempted from taxation by a small clause wedged in this law. Insert cynical whistling again at this point.

The immigration ban for 60 days is truly the epitome of cynicism.  There is nothing that shows a correlation between immigration and the spread of the coronavirus. However, this and an argument that newcomers might steal the jobs of the currently unemployed due to the coronavirus, are the reasons given for the creation of this executive order.  Horse feathers.  

The executive action is simply a ploy to gin up the base of the President. Why?  Well because they are not looking at him with favor due to his apparently inept handling of the pandemic.  Make no mistake, keeping brown people out has always been near to the top of Mr. Trump’s wish list.  The pandemic has just offered him the opportunity to take action on this under the guise of a national emergency.  My guess is that long before the end of the 60-day window this will be made a standing order based on a claim of long-term economic injury. Vague threats are dealt with by real harsh actions in this case. Yep, cold and grey and cynical.

The Georgia move is foolhardy.  I will not fall into the trap I have seen many fall prey to. People are wrong if they categorize the folks in the peach blossom state as dumb rednecks.  Modern Georgia is not the old Georgia of porch swings and sweet tea.  Instead I will say that that crowding people together in bowling alleys, gyms and on beaches is not supported by science, not yet. In almost every news outlet (save Fox) the words of the scientists are clear, to reopen we need proof of control over the rate of infection and this will be made using expansive testing. 

Expansive testing is simply not available.  Lacking the widespread availability of tests (something the President takes no responsibility for) it seems highly likely that Georgia may face a second wave of Coviid 19 infections. But hey, science has not really been given serious consideration by many of those in power for the last several years so why should now be any different?  Slow, sighing, sad whistle.

Okay to get your minds off my depressing rant he is a lovely song by Lyle Lovett.

From My Friend

For whatever reason the following is said to violate Facebook's community standards and is blocked from being directly posted.https://onetruenorthspace.blogspot.com/2020/04/at-evening.html C'est la vie.

The Day After

21 April 2020

Yesterday was my birthday.  Perhaps surprisingly (given the cantankerous bastard that I am), I got more positive wishes for my birthday than the number of years I have amassed on this orb. From my perspective that was a real plus. 

Outside Easter, my birthday was the first major ceremonial event I have celebrated since the Coviid 19 pandemic has struck.  Normally on a birthday I go out for some food that is not in the ordinary scope of what we eat. However, nobody is going out to eat these days, not here. Restaurants are closed to all but takeout and there are darn few open for takeout. In a normal year there might have been a little get together somewhere.  Nobody is getting together anywhere these days. We are socially distanced.  Given the potential consequences if we don’t socially distance, a low-key birthday was the right thing to do.

Social distancing is irritating in instances like these.  I use the word irritating as opposed to angering because while I am miffed, I am not hostile. I am willing to do what needs to be done to rein in this disease.  My hope is that the vast majority of people around me, my fellow citizens, are willing to do the same. I owe it to others around me not to injure them.  From my perspective they owe the same duty to me. According to the scientists, this six-foot no-fly zone is the bare minimum we can do to avoid a huge surge of Coviid 19 cases.

Trust me I know that not being able to shop for everything I want is irritating. Not being able to go out to dinner for a steak on my birthday is aggravating.  On May 4^th it will be my wife and mine’s thirty fifth wedding anniversary.  Not being able to gather friends around for that event will hurt.  Not being about to eat seafood at a fine dining restaurant will be a shame, a veritable crime.  But science says this is what we must do.  Therefore, I will grin and bear it, trusting that the vantage point of science is correct.

So, thank you all for the birthday wishes.  Give me the best gift there is going forward, follow the directions of experts about washing your hands, wearing masks, and staying distanced. Stay safe.

Paths No Longer Crossing

18 April 2020

“They say in the end it is a wink of the eye…”, Jackson Browne The Pretender.

Approaching my sixty-fourth birthday I am locked away in my home. I am locked away as I have never been locked away before.  In younger years I spent a couple of weeks at a time locked up in my room because I had a contagious childhood disease (measles, mumps, chicken pox). As an adult I have been locked away to recover from surgery (appendix, gall bladder or cancer). But now I am locked away like people haven’t been locked away in a century, i.e., to save me from a pandemic.

Understand I am not “totally” locked away.  At least once, and usually three or four times, a day I go out for a twenty-minute plus walk.  According to my Apple fitness apps I have gotten all my circles, calories, exercise and standing in for 49 days in a row.  I have only failed to get all of the rings on my Apple watch once in three months.  The incomplete day was rainy and miserable. While I am out on these walks, I yell hello to people on the other side of the street.  I never get closer than 25-30 feet from any non-family members. Yelling hello is not enough for me. Hate to say it but I am beginning to feel like the meme showing the blurry picture of Bigfoot captioned, “World Champion Social Distancer”.

You know, given my age and my health history, I plan to keep working on that world champion status.  Trust me, I am not going to strap on my AR and go marching around claiming my rights have been infringed.  I am okay with the restrictions of the Governor’s order. But I will tell you this, social distancing is driving me bat shit crazy. Nutso.  Yes, I know it is not a drive, but rather a putt in my case.

Why am I going nuts?  Well, I am by nature a very social person.  First and foremost, I like talking to people. I like buying coffee in coffee shops and then shooting the breeze with the baristas.  I enjoy talking to other customers at the tables. In the past after I conducted a hearing, I really had fun talking with the attorneys afterwards.  Be it a break room, or a post church coffee klatch, I enjoy interacting with one on one with other human beings. Social distancing has reduced my direct face interactions to three people, my wife, my first son and my second son. I talk to the cat but she is not a very good conversationalist. This lack of conversational variety is driving me out of my mind.

Over the past month and a half, I have had some long phone calls with friends. I have had some extended conversations over messaging.  Note well, I hate Facebook, it is unequivocally evil.  However, the bane of social networking has offered one thing that is invaluable, contact with people from various time periods in my life.  Once upon a time there came a point where we all said to someone we liked, someone we considered a friend as we moved or they moved, “We will keep in touch.”  Still, we knew that this was a socially comforting lie.  We were going to lose track of them. Back before Facebook there was no way in hell we were going to keep in touch with these people.  Now those lost people from grade school, high school, university, law school, etc., have come back into our lives only if it is through sharing pictures of their cat.   Facebook did that, and it has done it well.  All it takes is a click in Messenger and there is one on one contact. Still phone calls and messaging are not the same as face to face interaction.

On Facebook I posted a note asking if people remembered where they met me.  The vast majority of people met me in school or in a hearing room.  There are some outliers, a former roommate, some friends from church or the old home town. But I know for certain these people came into my life from in person conversation.  

What kind of conversations? Either before or after class when we would bitch about the workload or the teacher.  Or back at the dorm where we would talk about the state of the world over dinner (or music), over coffee and cigarettes. Between hearings in the hallways or the breakrooms of my office we would talk and talk about anything and everything.  Why did this work? It worked because you got some much information from the nonverbal cues, how did people sit, did their face twitch, or did the tone of their voice change. I totally miss this.  Sending DMs and making phone calls does not have the same quality as face to face conversation.  Argh.  

My guess is that most people are feeling the same way I do.  Maybe it is to a greater or lesser extent. But if you are really practicing social distancing there is a loss of connection that is inherent. Certainly, it will not last forever.  But most likely it will last for a goodly long time. Given my age I could be inside and isolated for many months. I sure hope they develop a vaccine soon.  I want to have a few more long conversations over coffee before my time on the mortal coil expires.