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?

Spring is here again.

This is a recycled post. This date comes up every year. Someone I never knew but who loomed over a short but significant time of my life end it on this day. I was sitting at a desk, as I have, ad infinitum, when I found out from my older-but-not-that-much-that-he-didn't-know-Nirvana boss that, yep, that was it. Or someone called me, because that's how you found out anything then, someone made a real effort of physical movement to a phone or your location to utter words to tell you. I guess someone could have mailed me a letter, but that's even more work, for chrissakes. 

What I would like to repeat is this song, a perfect marriage of sound and meaning, and what I said 9 years ago about it:

I like Kurt most of all because he was a keen observer of human behavior, and I think that skill is simply visceral in this song. 

I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside

Last week, I heard this in Jewel--the nice, big one on Western, where you'd expect more of an elevated, er, moment, as they say now. I finally get it, this song. 

I overlooked it, the first song on The Joshua Tree, all this time, fast-forwarding my tape purchased at Rose Records on Michigan Avenue Rock Records/Rolling Stones Records on Washington [edit: I think I've misremembered where and what the records store was. I was sure it was across from a Bennigans on the east side of Michigan Ave, but who can reconstruct chronology and geography from 33 years ago?] in the fall of 1987 to deeper cuts and deeper meanings. "Bullet the Blue Sky" fit my unending teen rage, "With or Without You" to whine and feel longing, and, later, "Red Hill Mining Town" and "One Tree Hill" squeezed my heart tight.

Sure, it sounds like winding through the curves of Jackson County, Kentucky, or coasting down the foothills of Virginia to sea level. This was a road-trip album. 

But now, now, this song feels like freedom to me. And I don't mean the freedom to move about afforded by the bigger-footprinted, latest version of Jewel, retooled for the 2020s for the yups or whatever you'd call them now of Roscoe Village. Bigger aisles, more shelves to scan, less dust, less grumpiness.

No, it's the freedom I am going to feel so soon I don't want to even let myself think about it. Keep head down, keep in the game of working and preparing meals, keep making headway through tv episodes.

But I don't have to, any more, much longer.