Mental Jukebox

I don't know if today's holiday is why the Tribune decided it was time to run this story.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-0705-freebird-2ndaryjul05,0,2598735.story

As the article notes, Skynyrd's most revered and reviled song is a declaration of independence of sorts--though it definitely feels even longer than our nation's more sacrosanct Declaration.The time when you'd go see a band, whether a sweaty night watching a just-under-the-cusp band in some shithole club where "Freebird!" filled the air like some kind of ironic rallying cry (and it worked; I mean, try shouting "Don't Fear the Reaper!!" between songs at a show), or just cynically muttered to your friends while watching that band you used to see in that shithole but now for whom you paid 75 bucks in tickets and warm Miller Lite, is gone, and that's because, if you ask me, irony died sometime between 2000 and 2006. But that is matter for another "Note."

It was shouted because, um, yeah, no one was ever actually going to *play* "Freebird." I never saw it happen. Maybe a few chords, first line, whatever. We're talking about a nine-minute, nine-second song, the anthem of what was the anathema to all the folks chuckling at and musicians shaking their heads at the the insistent interruption of Skynyrd's signature title: a long-ass, old-ass, over-indulgent rawk opus from the Seventies.

I never experienced the not-ironic power of "Freebird" until it came on the radio while I was driving up a mountain, in the rain, on I-40 in the Pisgah National Forest in western North Carolina about eight years ago. God, it was gorgeous, the roiling clouds that were literally overhead, the patient old trees marching up the mountainsides, my frantic inability to figure out how to work the defrost in the rental car to de-fog the windows. And something about that damn song and that drive somehow...melded. The languid guitar whorls sweeping through the song's (too-long) intro eased the car through the crazy-ass long curves up the grade, and that (way too long) 4-4 chunka-chunka trenchant guitar ending with the over-indulgent solos wailing on top, played by what seems like between six or seventy-five guitars (when it was really just Gary and Allen on Gibsons--thanks Wikipedia!), dammit, that four-minute hillbilly breakdown freaking propelled my economy rental auto up that hill.

Maybe it was that it was the first time I'd done this drive myself, one that was undertaken countless times before, going to and from Kentucky to beach vacations with me in the backseat clinging to the door handle and gaping at the Smokies, wondering how my dad was going to manage to keep us on this road with all these--holy shit!--semis belchingly downshifting and upshifting *right* next to our car. And here I was, freaking mobilized by Skynyrd, wondering how I was going to keep this rented Kia on I-40-NC in the steaming August rain.

Or maybe it was that this song just somehow sounds like the South to me, and I mean the South of my admittedly cheesy, golden-hued memory: of late-afternoon sun-heat, big trees throwing shadows on canyons of grass, walls of humidity, the sound of millions of bug legs scraping against a million more bug legs, of pool chlorine and chicken and porch swings. I was back down there, in the summer, where the summer should be spent.

I guess I gave all that up to look at other views, at man-made mountains with people implacably climbing within and around them and to hear the grate of metal train wheel on metal train track down the amber-lit street. That happened when, in the course of human events, it became necessary to dissolve bands and declare the causes that impel one to move...so to speak.So yeah, anyway: after that drive, those smug, attention-seeking hipster shouts, although waning, as this Trib story reports, seemed less amusing and really...lame and superficial. Taken out of the context-it-was-never-intended-for, there's something really real down in the manginess of "Freebird."

I mean, it is a nine-minute, nine-second song, after all.

This is one of the first albums I remember owning. It must have been given to me, likely as a birthday gift at the same time as the Grease soundtrack and the tickets to the Osmonds concert at the newly-opened Rupp Arena in downtown Lexington.

Check out the little taste of heaven this double-record K-Tel exclusive offers:





Record One / Side One:

Shadow Dancing - Andy Gibb
Hot Child In The City - Nick Guilder
Shame - Evelyn 'Champagne' King
Boogie Nights - Heatwave
Every Kinda People - Robert Palmer

Record One /Side Two:

It's A Heartache - Bonnie Tyler
Handy Man - James Taylor
Emotion - Samantha Sang
Smoke From A Distant Fire - The Sanford/Townsed Band

Record Two / Side One:

Two Out of Three Ain't Band - Meat Loaf
My Angel Baby - Toby Beau
Too Much, Too Little, Too Late - Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams
I'm Not Goona Let It Bother Me Tonight - Atlanta Rhythm Section

Record Two / Side Two:

Dance With Me - Peter Brown
You & I - Rick James Stone Band
Get Off - Foxy
I Can't Stand the Rain - Eruption
Baby Hold On - Eddie Money

Yep, that's right, someone in my family bought an eight year-old a record with a song called "Get Off" on it. And no, this is not Prince's New Power Generation elegy to, erm, whatever Prince is elegizing. It's not the same song, but oh my, a definite precursor.

Hmm, now that I think about it, that track was always scratched.

I do not find a silver lining here.

It is indeed ironic that I am [whispered] thirty-seven and [whispered] unmarried. Actually, I just typed "still unmarried" and deleted the "still," since that implies that I have somehow been longing to be married.

And why, may you ask, am I reappearing after twelve weeks to make this statement?

I am behind, people, in a lot of ways. But I always get to the good stuff.

So, yeah: this statement is a response to this (rhetorical) question from this essay and its source essay:

Does princess-worship mean that little girls will grow up thinking a prince
will rescue them from doing housework?

I demanded to be and was a bride for Halloween when I was six. I loved nothing better than big puffy playing-dress-up dresses and princessy-type things as a little girl, and also enjoyed "cooking" in my cardboard "kitchen," or teaching "school" to my dolls. Or braiding Barbies' hair.

Now I am over 35, unmarried, and hate wearing skirts. So yeah, I think "Princess" is a phase, and not just because I subsequently graduated to "horse" and "Olivia Newton-John roller disco" phases.

However, I would like a cute prince to cook me dinner every night. For the record.

Well, the Big Wheel is no longer turnin'...

I rarely read him, but when I do, I adore Garrison Keillor's cunning and nearly faultless compound of old and new, of the resolutely canonical and absurdly contemporary. This is particularly so. It's the droll brevity of the thing--maybe stemming from the wry, resigned way that you live in the Upper Midwest, where the women are strong, the men are...well, you know.

God help us, every one...

Today in Are You Effing KIDDING Me?:

Drew Peterson Asks Public for Money
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
3:16 PM CST, December 11, 2007
CHICAGO

A former police officer suspected in his wife's disappearance has set up a Web site to ask for financial help with his legal defense. Drew Peterson's site says he wants to collect money from people who believe he deserves a defense without going broke.

"For the cost of a few cups of your morning coffee, you can help to ensure that Drew can afford to support his ongoing legal defense, find his missing wife, and divert any remaining funds into a trust for his children," the site says.

Okay, this was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks ago--but, hey, it's good to have something in your back pocket.

Anyway, emails were aflame at that time amongst my female crew about which movie is better, Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles.

Now, PiP initially comes out on top because, well, Duckie. Duh. Not to mention, Andie (okay, also because of her name) works in a super-cool record store just like Cut Corner Records (, and wears perfectly mis-matched and utterly cool vintage or handmade clothes and hats.

But then the spectre of the ending looms: the fact that Andie goes stag to prom, then runs off with Blane (the proto-asshole rich guy name, and let's not talk about the fact that he was a floppy-haired wimp that, inexplicably, my friend Robin lurrrved) and leaves poor Duckie with tears running down onto his bolo tie. Let's just say there's a lot of people who'd snap up the version of PiP with the original, Andie-chooses-Duckie ending faster than Britney scrambling for a loose Cheeto under the sofa.

While Pretty in Pink, then, is as problematic as a Shakespeare Problem Play, Sixteen Candles is as uncomplicated and sentimentally entertaining as Barefoot in the Park. It features not just one, but two young Cusacks, was filmed in its actual location in north suburban Chicago (PiP was set in Chicago but filmed in LA), and was the most quotable movie until, well, 1985, when The Breakfast Club came out.

But this is not a contest between BC and SC; we were discussing the merits of the latter and Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles, without a doubt, has a trump card.

And that card's the king of hearts: Jake Ryan.



Need I say more?

Did you know that Republican presidential candidate--likely the most Bible-lovin' of the bunch; he's a Baptist minister--Mike Huckabee is in a band? The former Arkansas governor (who, strangely, also hails from Bill Clinton's hometown of Hope, AR) plays bass in a classic-rock band called Capitol Offense. Oh, hell yeah.

Clinton and his smooth 90s sax can step aside because this is no cutesy campaign trick: Huckabee received his first guitar after the Beatles broke, and--shades of Bryan Adams--played it til his fingers bled (though it was the Christmas of ''66).

The Huck (surely someone has bestowed this diminutive on him by now) and his pals from his Little Rock administration rock the free world, drifting from hard rock to blues-pop to soul with covers of "Born to Be Wild," "Fortunate Son," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Dock of the Bay," "Brown Eyed Girl," "Taking Care of Business," "Honky Tonk Woman," and, the track that spawned a million lighters held aloft (and rocked the house in Iowa), "Free Bird."