What's wrong with that?

I'm reading Macca's 2016 biography right now, pushing to finish it (not too hard a task) before a long trip, so, of course, I'm kind of tipping on the edge of a rabbit hole with this video. The audio in the song must be the single cut, and it must have been speeded up, because he sound positively squeaky compared to the Wings at the Speed of Sound remaster from 2013 (or 14?) version that I keep coming back to.

But the sweet pleading in the Wings video is as familiar as the sun--streaming through a backseat window, angling lower as the highway rolls by. Oh, indeed, this is one of those as indelible as the vinyl seat seemed to be on your bare legs below your shorts in the car back then, summer of 76, watching the world go by and thinking that it must hold as many good things as the tinny melodies wafting back suggested. Now, what I am pondering as I need to seek the early evening summer sun, is how Linda became a musician through fortune and sheer force of will. And how, exactly, do you keep becoming something when it's all on you, and fortune seems far?

 

It could happen to us any day

This is one from the backseat of the car. It's also one that I will never tire of, that I stop everything and hop on for the whole ride, no matter if it's from the tinny Toyota radio or coming out of a sleek device. Is it the bass line, the loping stride of it, Carrack's buttery voice, that puts my head against the seat back, gaze out the window at nothing and everything. It wasn't the words; I wouldn't have understood the knifepoint of the lyrics. I do know now what I wouldn't understand back then: you'll have scenes breaking up over and over and over again. 

You might say it's just a case of giving up, no

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.

You're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need

Billy was giving me words for a far-away future, only I didn't know it when I was swaying to this over my chemistry textbook with the big curly-corded mid-70s headphones on, feeling every note, but not understanding every word. Like I do now.

If it don't turn you on Just say the word and I'm gone

Every half-week, I remember what beloved First Stage Theatre Academy Director Ron said to or in regard to a deflated theatre student who wouldn't be able to take classes that particular summer: "Sometimes doing Theatre Academy means not doing Theatre Academy." 

Sometimes, your absence is action. 

This one keeps making moves. It's all action, now, 37 years later, without the pleader and the leader of the song.

And, sometimes, writing here means not writing here, but going outside for a walk. I need that too. 

I am on the road to see if anything is anywhere and waiting just for me.

This one is pretty ponderous for a LRB song. They seem to be able to get it done more efficiently and dreamily later, but here, they seemed aimed directly at CSN's Laurel Canyon backyard jams from several years before, executing it at jam length for sure. My favorite soft rock internet radio station sure does love it, and I hadn't heard this in a while, until today, simply because I've become profoundly tired of hearing year-old, now kind-of-irrelevant-guys PSAs intoned between the Dan and and Lobo.

But I went back to this place that's been the weighted blanket/plate of buttery mashed potatoes for me a solid year: Styx telling me "Babe, I love you," the Dan reminding me I don't have to "do the dirty work no more," and George reiterating that the sun, here it comes. 

[The Jitterbug Waltz]

Some days--not today--all I can handle is vibes. 

It's amazing how well you feel when you feel well. But when there's no rain or wind or location obligation making you push through, and you're just inside the house, mostly, then you're more finely attuned to the primary vessel you're living in. And I suggest--strongly--that you really feel what you're feeling, your "astounding nervous system," when most of your external inputs have gone pfft, or mainly emanate from a computer screen or a cat, and you're not dodging raindrops, traffic, stinky train cars, or people you don't want to speak to at or around the workplace.

Or, in short, do I feel it more when I feel like shit? I think so. And a salve, aside from sleep, is vibes.

I don't know exactly what it is about the sound, if it's some kind of binaural beat created from its vibrato effect, but vibraphone soothes, smooths, emulsifies all the competing mind/body war that has, whoa, seemed to happen almost every day around here.

So I thank the vibra-godz for leading me to Bobby Hutcherson, a one time "Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition" (aren't we all) who carried on into this century what Lionel Hampton started. 

I'll let vibes drive the days when I need them to.

So don't you have no doubt, I'm gonna spell it out

I listened to this today because, of course, Questlove posted all the shiz about the Street Songs album. But, okay, it's this 7-minute live version of a song I never liked that's not even Rick's stuff, but god, is it a jam. 

Slick Levi and Lady T are exactly what I need when I get too into the work biz. Sheets? Who gives one? I don't. 

This could be the biggest sky

(How do I write this without any working jargon? No "aligns" or "frameworks" or "meet?")

In the absence of feelings about the time this song emerged, or about its content (this is SUCH A WORK EMAIL RIGHT NOW), I am going to pull myself out of dutiful, scheduled, timebound thinking by wondering about the genesis of it.

Here it is, a snapshot about him, and his reminder to me that you can be both deliberate and spontaneous in your creating.  

That structure will set you free. 

That I admire the freedom of improvising, and understand viscerally how that freedom happens because improvising, though improvising, still has a...framework. 

Babe, tomorrow's so far away

What the hell do you do when, suddenly, tomorrow is presenting itself to you as a reality? And you can be done with certain ways of being, thinking, and words (bubbledropletcasespreadrestrictionmandatory) at a time within reasonable expectation? When you can have expectations? 

Shit, there is real freedom in not expecting anything to happen. But when you're doing it for so long that, maybe, anything may not actually make you happy any more (if it did at all), what does make you happy?

What happens when you can't connect to that cellular-level feeling that, yup, something good is going to happen, I am going to go to X dance or walk by Y's locker and they or the events are going to respond in kind. The kind of feeling that makes someone say, I'm going to surprise you or be surprised by what happens, but I will like it?  

Around 86, it was always all about longing for the Big Moments. And they happened. And if they didn't, you at least had the longing to caress and nurture with the wails of multi-tracked guitars and gooey lyrics, until another song or Y to long for replaced it.

But now is now, and there are no lockers to linger-while-you're-walking by, and you can't conceive of events because you've been in an event horizon for months. Is tomorrow too late?