If You Want It, You Got It

You Probably Think This Song Is About You

Finally! Here you go -- the Question of the Ages, answered!

But only if you listen to the entirety of my new album*.

*sorry, no extra answers are available if you purchase Carly Simon Heirloom Box edition.

Oh What A World We Live In

Not only have these reliable but gross-tasting treats been brought crashingly into the SMS Text Era, your major American candy heart manufacturer (though the photo can't quite capture it) has started using some sort of computer program to inscribe the edible messages in an LED-kinda font.

So they look like they are lifted right off the screen of your Sidekick. Or, ur Sidkck.

Hold My Life

Though the sky was gray this morning, I happened to look up at a street-side tree near my office on Chicago Avenue at the right time. Someone nailed a couple of two-bys to each other, and to an upper branch to, apparently, cradle a nest, a fairly large one composed not just of twigs and raffia, but larger stuff -- we're talking sticks, branch-size stuff. This was a substantial homestead. In a neighborhood of smart highrise buildings thrusting plush condominiums up into the sky, this rustic penthouse suite fit right in.

I like to think that some tenderhearted (and weatherproofed) soul spied the nest teetering on the edge of disaster, and took steps to save it. There's been a lot of construction in the area, so perhaps a bit of scaffolding biffed the tree and dislodged the nest, or, I don't know, some crane action put the avian residence in peril. Whatever the cause, a Good Samaritan grabbed some leftover lumber (or perhaps made a Home Depot run) and a ladder and constructed a ballast so that whatever is living or will be living inside this nest will survive the winter.

While I'd be keen to get hold of a ladder myself and climb up to see what, if anything, is resting inside it, instead I'll be looking up when I walk toward work, in case one day, once spring gently envelops the city, a beak or a wing or a whole entire tiny bird might emerge from this delicate domicile.

...I Don't Want To Fall In, Though

I do hope this adventurer will be alright and that this tale will have a happy ending. But I also couldn't help but immediately think of this song while reading that a climber fell 1,500 feet into the crater of the Mount St. Helens.




He fell. Into a volcano.

And You Shall Dwell in the Maze of the Mule Forever, Starchild

I didn't actually recall having seen the 1979 Disney space epic The Black Hole --and I definitely did, and it definitely was in the theatre, not later on incessant replays on a nascent HBO-- until hearing this unidentifiable P-Funk song the other day.

Only the Starchild Clinton and his alien et al could connect rump-bumping funk with terra incognita, the incalculable void, with -- Ernest Borgnine?? Sure, a black hole could be a, um, "vacant booty."

The movie itself doesn't merely jump on the Star Wars bandwagon (looking at you, original Battlestar Galactica). The first Disney film to garner a non-G-rating treads on more existential ground, depicting the space crew eventually and blindly descending into the eponymous black hole (that's no spoiler; c'mon) and possibly into heaven (or hell, or both); reading the synopsis brings Lost to mind, actually, with its push-pull between faith and fate, humans' superior will and the supernatural. I remember it being strangely quiet and weird for a space-age movie aimed at kids over nine like myself.

And while The Black Hole had the voice of Slim Pickens, it's P-Funk's presence that makes me go, What in the wide, wide world-a sports is-a goin' on here?

Look At The Moonless Night And Tell Me

I'll admit it: there's something right about walking in an evening snow shower and hearing that Dan Fogelberg song* no one knows you downloaded.

*it was for a show. I swear!

Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me

My grandmother, Charlotte Patricia Murphy Powell -- indomitably independent, confoundingly stubborn, endlessly supportive. Definitely unforgettable.

There's Too Many Places I've Got to See

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.

Music May Ease And End All Discretion

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.