It's Not Only Rock and Roll

Nostalgic Preparations

My new Smart phone is driving me crazy. But what of that? It plays music, doesn't it?

It does and I have been streaming Pandora, listening to old tunes that I haven't heard for years. My taste in music, as you may imagine, does not exactly run to the sound of the Top Forty. (Do they still call it that?) Or maybe it does. A lot of this music was on the charts 'back in the day' (I promised myself I would never use that phrase, but by putting it in those single quotation marks (whatever they are called) I have marked my usage as 'ironic' (another word I swore never to use.))

A Labyrinth of Words

Good lord. I certainly have a knack for getting myself lost inside a sentence. Also lost inside an old tune. Never did I like the television, the canned laughter made me sad and seemed to not fall in the proper places. The commercials made me hungry for things I never knew existed (also making me feel like a failure for not owning those things) and there was usually a roomful of cigarette smoke in the room where the watching was done. I cannot abide cigarette smoke, which is ironic for someone who has spent a lot of time in smoky saloons...

Left-Handed Labor Day

It is Labor Day. I'm making preparations that involve not ribs and potato salad and baked beans, but rather I am preparing for future labor (tomorrow) in the hot Florida sun, long, lucrative days that may not end for many weeks. I hope not. By experience and planning I have learned that by going out with a road crew and working myself nearly to death over an extended length of time I end up tired, lean, and wealthy, for me. Tomorrow we head back out.

The Importance of Being  Grateful

I have earplugs stuck in my ears and I am listening to my personal Pandora station called Grateful Dead. The music is old and damned funky and as I listen something occurs to me. I see how much this music shaped my world-view over the decades and how it also affects my writing. An old Faces tune, “Angel” was just on and with these earplugs the lyrics were clear and I was thinking how much I loved the poetry of the song, made particularly poignant by Rod's whiskey-soaked voice.

Angel came down from Heaven yesterday, stayed with me long enough to rescue me...

Man! That's what I'm doing, here, hunkered over a keyboard, whiskey-soaked and trying to capture the essence of these old rock lyrics. Many of them made no sense at all, and yet they got the point across just fine.

And she told me a story yesterday about the sweet love between the Moon and the deep blue sea...

Sound familiar? Argh! I'm a plagiarist! Crap! I always thought I was just some kind of soulful white boy who paid his dues and earned the right to sing the blues. A Skydog of prose, as it were.

I live by the sea: and the moon, always there, is an unavoidable reference. Does 'channeling' count as plagiarism?

My Hands Are Not Idle

I have a big pile of tools to clean and prep and pack.  I find myself wondering how many of the other guys who will assemble tomorrow at dawn will have done this; this worshipful preparation, old rock hymns blasting and small prayers in the form of tool cleaning and oiling and sharpening...it is my life story, really, wrapped up in this music and these tools, these preparations.  I treat my career (for what it is worth) like a good gunslinger or practiced samurai:  if it is worth doing, it is worth doing as though the gods are watching.  Because they usually are: watching, I think.

More From the Jukebox

Here's another one: When I'm old and able to rest...

Check out the bass lines on that tune. Pure hypnosis. Or how about this: 
Saturday night I was downtown, workin' for the FBI...about as odd an opening rock line as ever imagined. The Hollies.

Where There Is Classic Rock, There Is Hope

Here's another thing I find ironic (hey, once you get started it's hard to stop.) At the job the other night, while remodeling a Carraba's Restaurant, somebody had their smart-phone plugged into a jobsite radio. I was working away at some simple task when it occurred to me that I was hearing the old good stuff. I asked who had that music playing? It was the youngest kid on the job. Twenty years old. Me, (the oldest guy on the job):  well, I was comforted and reassured that there was hope for the future if these young guys could still connect to the tunes that shaped our world back in the sixties, back in the day.  

I'm incorrigible.  But again, what of that?  I'm a dreamer and a rock star and a cowboy and a samurai.  The pay ain't much, but it makes Labor Days like this one, days like this, when it is just me and the Universe and a peaceful easy feelin', it makes days like this one count.  Big time.

tj the dj

The Whispering Pines Trailer Park and Juke Joint

Labor Day 2013

By the way, for those of you who are interested,  I started a new Blog for posting stray chapters of Smiling In the Sunshine.  You can link through to it on my Blog List.  And by some kind of cosmic coincidence, just as I finished putting together the new Blog, I was startled and honored to see that Lloyd Khan, one of the spiritual gurus who set me on the path I tread, had featured one of my favorite chapters on his great Blog.  Check it out!  Thanks, Lloyd!