Not far from where I'd bike home, heading west on Kinzie, past the produce warehouses and distributors who'd finished for the day, some of the vegetables languishing in the gutter, no one really driving past me, no one interrupting my ride, my thoughts, I heard, live, for the first time, some of the songs that beat my feet into the pedals in the summers of 2001-2003. I was in as much of a trance as I'd have been on a dancefloor, except the ray of light was high summer sun of rush hour sluicing through the West Loop grid. I'd pedal, and feel, and dream, and feel some more. And, somehow know that something else was out there for me.
If that's not what she sings about in just about every song, and what this concert was about, then I don't know what matters, really.
Some might think (or just the animal in my head does) that every opportunity to make something outta this blog and its/my online, er, presence, was missed, from the first blog revolution to being deemed "comedy cognoscenti" by all the Twits to doing I-don't-know-what-the-hell on TickTock or whatever, has been missed.
Here is when my bike ride to the lake would time out exactly for me to fly down the hill at the northern end of Lincoln Memorial with this song on the tape player. The water-sky line, the sun, the wind, the speed, the water on the rocks, cars climbing toward Kenwood Avenue, all of it, mine and mine forever.
Spontaneous welling-up upon really hearing--really listening to the lyrics of--this? I guess it means I really want to bring the wheels of time to stop. I still want to jump off, run past the wheels, and go back because back there, everything was so much easier, less living-in-the-head and more living.
And that I think the time that stretched before, um, the last year was better. And the time before that, too. Or, maybe now is still a bit too raw, like the air after a storm, and new.
No one told me about Bruce. It sounds dumb, but I didn’t understand fully how deep he is, how troubled, how truly bardic. See, he was the loquacious songs on the radio, the chronicler of “real” America guy of Born in the USA and “Born to Run,” and, between ‘83 and ‘84, the perpetrator of a long-ass video I had to sit through time and again waiting for “Rio” or “Union of the Snake” to show up on MTV. I’m on limited time, JJ and Alan, and, now that I think about it, what the hell were they doing playing this song from 1973 and video of a 1978 concert? At over 7 minutes, my guess is filling dead air.
Speaking of MTV, this one’s straight from his prime time there, though I experienced it mainly through the radio, having become occupied with things other than sneaking as much MTV as I could in drips and drops and when babysitting.
I finished his autobiography today. Now that I’m not, I can say I was inside the man’s mind for a good portion, if not all, of that book, to the point that reading it at bedtime resulted in insomnia.
Too much to digest, and too much to discuss (yet).
It’s hindsight, but the summer of 2001 was so carefree. Oh, I had cares, listlessly pushing around the last pieces of a heart broken in the spring, really filling out the contours of some petty grievances with friends while becoming more friends with the friends who would be my tight friends in the next ten years, the exhilarating feeling of being generally peeved and deliciously, frightenedly, independent.
But from here, oh, here, I see myself and us all and because we had no idea what was coming, all of June-July-August is just aglow. Or whatever art practice descriptors apply: a bas-relief of freedom and fun, a monograph forever preserved, blah and blah.
I don’t know. Most of what I saw was from over the handlebars of the bike: the vanishing point of the L tracks over Lake street heading west, the discovery of dried, spilled chocolate on the street next to Blommer’s Chocolate factory,
The smell of the lake and acrid, cooked chocolate, and sewer gas from manhole covers in the Loop and pissed-in corners, and Coronas.
I bought this tape at Coconuts, which was in the new-ish retail space on Damen, Across from the Pontiac. Then I must have taped the most suitable songs for biking onto a second tape, abutting it with Madonna and...god, what else? Do I still have that tape? I don’t think I do. In my haste to move on and shed items (and after almost two decades of moving all my tapes around, I got rid of these mixes. I must look for it.
And, later, maybe I will think back on a more recent we-didn't-see-it-coming arc of sky, and what I saw under it, drawn-out September-to-February sunsets from Brown line windows, buildings moving past me, and me, always moving.
Oh, how many times did I play this on the Y-Not II jukebox? When I discovered it? I wish I could remember that first time I saw it spin past, and what number it was? The juke at the Y-Not looked like...? Was it the rounded dome or the broad table style box? There were stick-up buttons, the kind that satisfy when pushed because they're going in about half an inch.
What was I even doing there? Because it's what I did, what you did when you were 24, 25 years old and still exploring the contours of freedom since you were a teenager only less than a decade before? A lot of young adults accomplish a lot in those years. I remember aching with the understanding that I wasn't doing that--that accomplishing (something). Not raising hell, either. In the middle, having fun.
If what exists from that time is not a credit to my name but a memory of a feeling stitched across time by music, I'm okay with that. You were doing something all along. Pushing buttons that still satisfy.
Straight from too-bright backyards in summer 1983, the sound of big fluffy clouds momentarily darkening the grass or the pool. The *scronch* of an inner tube as you shift on it, the trees swaying. How could I have ever known I would caress all those little snippets and bits, but I must have known, somehow, that the song would be the bridge between then and now, rethreading it onto older skies, newer clouds, decades of generations of leaves and branches.
Expect the best of/from your collaborators. Give the best of yourself. Model what you want to see. Be them before they show up. Your tribe is out there, even if you hack away at it all alone for a long time.
I don't know or want to know where the drive crossed into being fueled by pain and chemicals more than just the drive, but he chased it and left the lab as much as he needed to.
Get your shit done at home and then get out there.
It's funny, though. That means almost nothing to me now.
And Bowie is...everything. Sharp, on target, on message, unifying, electrifying. And I didn't realize that until I saw it (again?) within the mesmerizing final room of the MCA show.
Also of note within these two: the Union of the Huge High-Low Backup Singer Shirts.
But this... sheer raise-funds, festival-busting perfection. Set the standard, really. And prepped me for dorm-room poster-level worship just a few years later, shifting from multiple, be-makeuped mullets to just...one love.
This track serenaded me during wheels-down in a gray, rainy France in June all those years ago--not to visit, to live. As we coasted on the tarmac at CDG, that guitar riff barked out of foam-covered headphones and a worn TDK in my player, and the cascade of drums urged me from apprehension to exhilaration. I was gonna do it.
What, I didn't know. But I was. I had to. I was already there.
And, funny, I thought I didn't have this--and I had wanted it--but it is already here.
That's the Beatles' story, isn't it?
That's Yoko's story, that's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream.
If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do
anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't
expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob
Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it
yourself.
That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying
ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and
little instructions in various books that are now called holy and
worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the
instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always
will be.
There's nothing
new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide
it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you.
You can cure you."
This is one of My Most Favorite Songs Ever, ever. It is the most favorite song wherein the favorite status is not caused or created by lyric, or the marriage of lyric and sound, but solely is its sound. Only its sound, which is, to me, the sound of a heart hoping. The ache conveyed in this song is the ache of re-feeling what has been felt, and anticipation of feeling more. Flying down East Lafayette Hill Road on a yellow bike. Push play. Rewind. Repeat. Inside the apartment, after shutting the car door, insides screaming like a girl who spied a teen idol's hair flop just so over his eye during the concert. Push play. Rewind. Repeat.
This song stretches luxuriously up, and up even more.
