14 February 2025
Today is the anniversary of my first “real” date with my wife. It was 47 years ago. Time flies.
Last night I did the dishes. A copious amount of pots and pans had accumulated during the preparation of ossos. Hey if you want an excellent meal you have to experience the clean up afterwards. This is what cosmic balance requires.
I have been washing dishes since I was 12. Yeah I came to kitchen work in the era of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. I came into the washing and drying of dishes back in the days of free form FM radio. You may not have been around and you may not remember that time. However, back then a DJ might play 12 songs in a row and never tell you what they were. It might go from Muddy Waters to Love to Fairport Convention to Julie Driscoll to the Mahavishnu Orchestra capping it off with ELP.
In the middle of those twelve tracks, you might hear a song that just made your heart really respond. This might be with meditative love or agitation about the world as it was. It would take you weeks and sometimes years to figure out what that song you love was. It was during these dishwashing sessions that I first heard Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London”, Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”, and Fairport Convention’s “Matty Groves”. I had the pleasure of seeing Ralph McTell two weeks ago and his voice is still beautiful. He is 82.
These days I play Apple Music’s stations emblazoned with my name. It picked up what I like using one of its many nefarious algorithms. While I washed many pots last night I realized that my musical favorites with only a few notable exceptions were created between 1967-1984. The notable exceptions are songs crafted by artists performing in those years but still out on the road creatively, like Tom Waits or Emmylou Harris. This clicked for me when the station played a Steve Miller Band song that long predated "The Joker."
Yeah even my modern devices tell me I am old. But there really isn’t another alternative that I like.
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