revision99

I do the laundry at my house.

OK, let me refine that: I take the laundry from my house, once a week, down to the local laundromat, and do it there.  Three to six washer loads, two to four dryer loads,  bring it home, fold it and put it away. Real men are not embarrassed to admit stuff like this. I do a damned fine job of it, too, producing visibly whiter whites, brighter brights and sharper creases. Because I have moved around a lot, and never really got set up with a washer and dryer, I’ve been doing it this way for most of my life.

For about as many years, I’ve been playing guitar in rock bands.  At first I had a guitar bought at Sears, a Silvertone.  Later I had a Harmony thin hollow body two-pickup single cutaway electric, shiny black and looking from a distance quite a bit like George Harrison’s Gretsch Country Gentleman (the only guitar I’ve ever seen with button upholstery on the back).

In San Francisco I started a band called The Hots, with a couple of guys from New York named Thom and Pfeffer.  They had packed up and driven their ‘67 Mustang to California, where they found that nothing was as good as it had been in New York, and the stores weren’t open as late, either, goddamnit. Still, they had come to town hoping to catch a little of that San Francisco Airplane-Dead-Quicksilver-Santana mojo, so they stayed and we played.

I thought things were going pretty well, but one day they sat me down to tell me that I needed a better instrument.  They said I didn’t seem to take pride in my guitar, the way musicians in New York did. They said my guitar didn’t sound right, didn’t look right, that it was shabby, and too cheap. Since they wouldn’t shut up (New Yorkers, remember?) and since we were going to be big stars and have lots of money, I decided to humor them, and that’s when I made the first truly killer deal of my young life.

I went to a hock shop on 3rd Street, just below Market, and bought a 1961 Cherry Wood Gibson ES-355, with a hard shell case, for $275.  I’ll wait while you look on eBay to find out what that guitar is worth today.

OK, got it? No, it’s not for sale. $275 was a lot of money to me in those days. I had to borrow some of it and I really sweated the purchase. But once I had that guitar in my possession, once I played it in the band, stroked it and fingered it and caressed it, once Thom and Pfeffer got a load of it, I was so high that I didn’t need to smoke anything for a month, and I dreamed about that guitar for the whole month, played it every waking moment, polished it every day.

Over the ensuing decades I’ve played that guitar and others on a thousand bandstands from cheesy to regal. I became a journeyman player, but even though I never got to be a rich rock star I never regretted the money I spent on the 355, or the J160, the Strat or the Blackjack.

Lately I’ve been thinking I need a new guitar, and the one that’s calling my name is the Fender Telecaster.  I’ve looked at them online, and discovered a bewildering array of sub-models: the Standard, the American Standard, the Deluxe, the Baja, the Highway 1, the Classic ‘72, the Vintage Hot Rod ‘52, the Thinline… well, the list goes on for 9 pages on the Musician’s Friend web site, with ten entries per page.

But I went to a store that had a bunch of them, and I played them all, compared the sound and the playability, sorted through the various features and I picked one. I picked one, but I didn’t buy it, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. With this guitar, I imagine, my life will change. I will find The Lost Chord, and when I play, the angels will sing! I wake from a sound sleep with the Tele twang ringing in the room, the fretboard under my fingers, and I think maybe today I’ll go back to the store and bring that baby home.

But I hear this other voice in my head, a practical voice, and this other voice is making a sensible suggestion:  Instead of another guitar, when you already have so many, it says, why not get something for the home, something you can really use, something you don’t already have? Why not buy a washer and dryer?

I have to admit that there is logic to this idea. I spend two hours doing the laundry every week, and that time is devoted entirely to the mundane task of getting our clothes ready to wear for the next week, over and over, every week.  Nothing new is produced, and nothing permanent.  The next week, I have to do it all over again.  If I had my own mini-laundry at the house, I could do a load of laundry whenever one was needed.  I could do small loads, hot loads, delicate loads, using settings that don’t even exist on commercial washers.  Of course I couldn’t do six loads all at the same time, but this inefficiency would be balanced by the convenience and efficiency of being able to wash some stuff whenever. While the machine was doing its thing, I could be in the home studio, playing one of the guitars I already own, writing new songs, creating my Art. And let’s not forget about all those quarters - it’s costing 400 bucks a year in quarters to do things the way I’ve been doing them, so a washer and dryer would pay for themselves eventually (you could make a similar argument for the Telecaster, but it would really be a stretch).

Why does life have to be cluttered with these compromises? I can hear both of these voices, both of their arguments, clearly. They both make sense to me. One tugs my heart, one appeals to my brain. Is one more important, more valid than the other? Ben Franklin’s handy cast-iron indoor fireplace (the Franklin stove) brought modern technology to bear on an enduring problem of life in much the same way a washer-dryer would address my own situation, but what have we lost because of it? While Ben worked on his invention and all his other devices (bi-focals, mousetraps, etc.), he may have solved practical problems and made life easier for us all, but he wasn’t putting his great mind to work on the Eternal Questions (who are we? why are we here?). There’s no doubt now that humanity has decided to rely on technology and engineering, but are we really better off with homes that are comfortably heated at all times? What if there were more philosophers, painters and songwriters, and fewer answering machines and 500-horsepower sports cars? Are we in balance with our planet, with our nature?

In short, which fork in the road do I take now?

Eternity?

or the Franklin stove?

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*Title lifted verbatim from an essay in a textbook collection I read in high school. Can’t remember the name of the book or who wrote the essay. Help me if you can.

When we lived in Austin, the “lake” was a couple of hundred feet outside our back door.

There was our back door, then a little patch of dirt that would be the back yard in a nice neighborhood, then a gravel track, not a street, not an alley, then a short embankment that led down to the polluted water.  Everybody in town knew not to go in it, because the Hormel packing plant was using it to dump their waste. Whatever chemicals and entrails they didn’t put in the Spam went in the water.  The lake was brown and lifeless.

When I was a little boy, I killed a frog back there.  I remember it was a cloudy morning, and wet, I think.  I found the frog near the gravel track.  I must have been afraid of it.  I held it by one leg and threw it into the air as high as I could.  Again and again.  I was laughing, to convince myself that I was having fun.  After a while the frog stopped writhing on the ground when it landed.  I threw it in the lake then.  Walking back to the house I had a strange, empty feeling, with all the mirth drained out of me.

I had to tell someone I had killed a frog, and how funny it had been, to see him flying so high, spinning out of control, then falling, falling helplessly and splat!  Hitting the gravel, or the dirt, and bouncing, and then the stupid thing couldn’t get away from me, so I caught him again and threw him up again, ha ha.  I wanted it to be so funny, not serious at all.

My mother was shocked.  The look on her face told me what my heart already knew: I had sinned against Nature, snuffed a life.  I had been the ultimate bully, torturing and killing for no reason at all.  When my father came home, he suggested that the frog might have been a father himself, and there might be a frog family waiting for him to come home.  But he would never come home now.  I pictured our family, my mother and me and my brothers and sisters, waiting for my dad to come home, not knowing what had happened to him.  I was devastated.

Years later, when I was living in California, I heard that Hormel had cleaned up the lake, and promised not to dump any more poison in it.  I don’t know.  The maps I’ve looked at don’t show poison or death, only streets and buildings.  But I know there are some things you just can’t clean up.

As I predicted yesterday, we all get to have guns now.

The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the 2nd Amendment since it was ratified in 1791, probably because it’s so simply written and so clear in its meaning that no interpretation is needed. But the current Cowboy Court has ended that neglect today by declaring that it is our legal — if not God-given — right to own as many guns as we want, and to keep them around the house, assembled and loaded. And oh, by the way, no one can make you use one of those cumbersome trigger locks, either!

The 5-4 decision split pretty much as you’d expect, with the “strict constructionists” Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, Chief Roberts and Scalia toeing the NRA line. They went with a “strict” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, which states:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Well, it was strict except for the part about a well-regulated militia. The majority on the Court didn’t include that part in their interpretation. I know — you’re saying “If you leave that part out, it changes the whole meaning of the amendment!” And yes, completely reversing the meaning of part of the Constitution does seem to go against the principle of Strict Constructionism. But, as the right wingers are fond of saying, “You lost! Get over it!”

The other losers will include the sad people who will use their guns to shoot themselves, their wives and children, and the kids who will accidentally shoot themselves or their friends, and the surprised homeowners who will have their guns taken away and turned on them by burglars and home invaders delighted to find that their victims are thoughtfully providing loaded guns for the party.

My favorite part of Scalia’s written opinion is where he says that guns are the weapon of choice to defend your home, because you can point your gun with one hand while dialing the police with the other hand. What a dumbass! If he’d watched even a few episodes of Miami Vice he’d know that you’re supposed to use two hands when you point your gun. But probably Scalia is trying to show that only God-fearing law-abiding, police dialing citizens will be pointing guns and that this new Arm America decision won’t create an epidemic of bullet-related civilian casualties.

Me, I’ll be practicing my quick draw.

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PS: This and many recent decisions of the Supreme Court have been split 5-4. Justice Stevens is 88 years old. Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter are near 70. They can’t go on forever trying to uphold justice against an ever more right-leaning Court.  Do you see now why we can’t let John McCain be President?

Today the Supreme Court, which is in no way controlled by large corporate interests or appointed by those who are in the pockets of Big Oil, finally ruled on the Exxon Valdez class action suit, a case that has been going on now for nearly 20 years.

They decided that Exxon should pay just 10% of the original damage judgment.

You remember the Exxon Valdez - a few minutes after midnight on March 24, 1989, the supertanker crashed into a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into the water, which then washed up on the shore in an incident that has been described as “…a severe environmental insult to a relatively pristine, ecologically important area that was home to many species of wildlife endangered elsewhere.” The ship’s captain was not at the helm, but in his quarters sleeping off a night of heavy drinking. The incident was characterized at the time as the worst environmental disaster of all time. The cleanup lasted a few months. The litigation didn’t end until today.

The first damage award against Exxon, in 1994, was 5 billion dollars. Exxon appealed, of course, and the various courts involved over the years have reduced it bit by bit until the Supremes got hold of it. They decided that 500 million dollars, or 90% less than the original award, would be fine.

This is an amount approximately equal to six hours worth of Exxon revenue, so obviously the 19 years of denying responsibility paid off for them. It’s amazing how useful the Supreme Court of the United States can be when the President works for you.

Not so fortunate are the 32,000 people who lived along the 1200 miles of coastline that was damaged by the spill, some say forever. According to them, the spill has never been fully cleaned up. They say a lot of the wildlife, killed or driven away by the toxic mess, haven’t returned. The full amount of the original judgment wouldn’t have compensated them adequately for what they suffered. This latest reduction is simply the final humiliation for them.

Legal scholars may be scratching their heads trying to figure out the Court’s reasoning here, but, hey, what’s done is done. Fish, birds, plankton, fishermen: You lost! Get over it! Tomorrow, the Court is expected to rule that the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is meant to permit all of us to own guns. All of us, not just those darned “well-regulated militias.”

Yeehaw! Once we’re all armed, we’ll be able to assess our own punitive damages in the future.

George Carlin, 1937 - 2008

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

It happened on Sunday night. Goodbye, George. I’ll miss you.

I have no excuses.

I wasn’t misunderstood.

I wasn’t ahead of my time.

I wasn’t fiercely independent.

I just missed the train, all the trains, over and over again. Stood nervous on the platform, and waited.

Waited for the next train, and the next.

Drank at the station, taking notes, making lists. Ready to get on, soon as I completed my list.

Read the big board, all the cities along the track, distant destinations. Oh, Atlanta! Memphis, Austin, Eugene. Might as well have been Mars.

Didn’t want to catch the wrong one, get my only ticket punched for the wrong town.

Along about midnight, picked up my bag and went on home, whistles cryin’ in the night.

Just a couple of random thoughts before I start my wild weekend.

I was getting a little tired of Tim Russert. He’s the guy who started the school of broadcast journalism known as “Gotcha.” He’d bring some lying scumbag politician on his show and read him a quote from a speech he made six years ago at the commencement ceremony of the Idaho Skinhead Academy or some such, and then ask “Do you regret making that statement?” Better yet, he’d play the video, and then we’d all get to watch Tim’s victim squirm and wriggle, trying to put some kind of acceptable spin on it. Really, it was a miracle that anybody ever went on Meet The Press.

But the technique was so compelling that everybody on the teevee eventually came around to thinking there was no reason to discuss actual issues with actual newsmakers when it was so much more fun and telegenic to just hoist them on their own petards and watch them sputter in the wind. What Tim was doing was taking advantage of politicos who had not yet figured out that the times, they had a’changed, and there was no hiding anymore. Stuff you said to a racist crowd in the deep South was gonna get played back in New Hampshire, and right before the election, too. Everything was on tape, and modern technology made it all available to the producers at NBC. The problem, in my mind, was that everyone has said something stupid in their lives, and Tim generally didn’t bother making any distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. He tortured them both equally, and he usually let both off the hook at the end.

Still, I admit I watched the show every chance I got, and I’m sad that Russert is gone. I mean, he milked the Democratic primary as hard as all the other pundits, trying to make it seem as if there was really any suspense to it, but when it was over (after the Indiana primary) he was the first to just come out and say it was over. I could tell he was crestfallen about it, too, not because he didn’t like the way it turned out, but because he was enjoying the ride and he didn’t want it to end.

I can’t even remember who the hosts of Meet The Press were before Tim Russert, and I can’t imagine the show without him.

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The concept of habeas corpus is the basis for a little thing I like to call “the rule of law.” Yesterday the Supreme Court upheld our right to have a legal proceeding before a civilian court whenever any part of our government wants to put us in jail. They have to say why they want to lock us up, and they have to prove their case. They can’t just lock us up because… well, just because. Let me rephrase that: Without habeas corpus, we got nuthin’.

The Bush Administration has been doing that whole detention thing without charges, hearings or evidence for six years now, and yesterday the Court smacked them down for it. But, of course, negative guy that I am, all I can think about is that four Supreme Court justices voted against the preservation of this precious right, which has been a sacred, untouchable part of Anglo-Saxon law for at least 500 years. That’s four votes out of nine.

We are one vote away from becoming a police state.

The next president will likely make the appointment that could change the balance, either in favor of the Constitution, or against it. So if you’re thinking you’re going to vote for McCain because of “the way Hillary was treated,” or because “there’s no difference between the two parties,” or because “the country isn’t ready for a black president,” or for the perfectly logical reason that Barack Obama is a Muslim, you might be really surprised at the way things look in this country in a few years.

As always, my heart beats only for you. Have a great weekend!

For the past five years I have been a one-issue voter.

My issue? Stop the war.

I’m not much of a fighter. I grew up with a father who was haunted by his experience in World War 2. He could not stop reliving it, and forcing his horrible memories on me and my brothers and sisters. Despite this, my understanding was that it was a “good” war, one that we all could be proud of. In 1950’s America this was the overwhelmingly predominant sentiment, and even today I think most would concur.

But when my war came along — the one in Vietnam — I was no longer a child, and I didn’t think about it in that childlike way: Oh boy! Competition! Let’s kick some ass! I love kickin’ ass! Our leaders say we have to do this, so I’m going to do this. We have to stop the spread of communism — if Vietnam falls, all of Asia will go down like dominoes. My nation is superior and in this way we will prove it. Better dead than Red. The honor of my country is at stake. God is on our side.

We have at least one war every generation, and I have now been around long enough to know that there are two reasons: one is that wars are profitable for old guys. The other is that young guys like to fight, and are thus easily manipulated into believing they must fight.

I can look back at World War 2 now and see that it didn’t have to happen. International competition for land and resources, the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, the profit motive of arms dealers and the utter failure of diplomacy led to that conflagration. Don’t get all “Hitler was crazy” on me. I know that, but then what about Mussolini, Roosevelt, Tojo, Hirohito, Churchill? What about Charlemagne, Napoleon, George Washington, Che Guevara and Ghengis Khan? Were they all crazy? Are we all crazy? Because don’t we always, haven’t we always, resorted to robbing, raping and killing each other to resolve our differences? As if there were no other way! And doesn’t the end of each war set the stage for the next one? Didn’t we recently (90 years ago) have “the war to end all wars”? Heck, maybe we’re not crazy. Maybe we’re just stupid.

Look, I’m aware of all the practical arguments you can give me for fighting all these wars, and I’m sure to many of you I seem unpatriotic or naive. I admit I’m more interested in the world than the nation. I’d rather promote the survival of humanity than of Americans, and by definition this is unpatriotic. I can live with your censure for that. As for practicality, how many times are we going to “settle” things with mass violence, only to discover 20 years later that things aren’t settled at all, and we have to saddle up and go fight again? How many millenia of bloody destruction must we endure before we try something else? How practical is it to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different?

Am I naive to suggest that we find another way? Now that there are six billion of us and we can see the end of existing global fuel supplies and the very climate is changing as a result of our presence, isn’t it time we stopped with the mindless killing and started to work together, to pool the world’s talent and try to save our planet — our home? I’m not a doomsayer. I’m really quite optimistic about what we might achieve if we cooperate, if we learn how to listen to each other, if we stifle the greed of old guys and derail the bloodlust of young guys and focus instead on making a better life for all of us and for our descendants.

Somehow I’ve lost sight of my one issue over the past year. Healthcare, Reverend Wright, Hillary’s brave campaign, our government’s blatant corruption, Larry Craig’s foot-tapping, cyclones, earthquakes, the unconscionable profits of Exxon, dappin’ on the podium — so much has crowded out my one issue. Meanwhile, way out on the edge of the media bubble, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on. Atrocities are being committed every day. Even the legal stuff, the killing that has been officially sanctioned, the affronts to human dignity that are approved by international treaty, are hardly mentioned in the news anymore. I’m not blaming the press. It’s my bad that I’ve let this slip from my consciousness.

My One Big Issue is the reason I would have voted for any of the excellent Democratic candidates for president in 2008, and why I will now support the finalist, Barack Obama. It’s the overriding reason why I wouldn’t vote for McCain under any circumstance (although there are plenty of other compelling reasons not to vote for him). I know that the mess we have created in Iraq precludes any kind of immediate withdrawal of forces, but we must begin to wrap it up there and stop shooting, even if we can’t pull out for years. President Bush is trying to work out a deal — a “Status of Force Agreement” — that will make McCain’s dream of a hundred years there a reality. Congress needs to block this any way they can, and the next president needs to work out something that makes sense and actually leads to the U.S. departure from a country where we do not belong, playing a role that cannot be sustained, at a cost that is simply unimaginable.

Whatever the hell is going on in Afghanistan, it isn’t working. The Taliban is back big time, and the locals seems to be hiding and abetting Osama bin Laden, which I think makes our effort there a complete failure, so I would suggest looking for an alternative to the deployment of troops. The terrorist problem has always seemed to me a police matter anyway — it was the Bush Administration that tried to make it into an excuse for military action.

Nobody really wants to deal with this as a serious issue. Nobody wants to get at the causes and try to make real change. Six months ago all the candidates for President of the United States said, in response to prompting from the press, that they couldn’t promise we’d be out of Iraq by 2013 — the end of a first term, which to me was sort of a promise that we wouldn’t be out by then. So we don’t have an antiwar candidate, and the wind is out of those sails.

Nevertheless, as the earth’s population continues to explode, water and energy supplies dry up and pollution threatens all humanity, we may be at a tipping point, a point in history at which we do something together, or die separately in bunkers, proudly waving our tattered flags.

Five years after I saw “Rock Around the Clock” I got my first guitar.

By that time, my mother had moved me and my two brothers and two sisters from Minnesota to Southern California, on the run from domestic chaos. I don’t know exactly when my parents’ marriage started to disintegrate. I was too young to understand, and I guess I still am, but that’s another story. I mention it here only because maybe coming from a “broken home” somehow made me want to be a performer.

Certainly I was a fish out of water in California. Shell-shocked by the divorce, transplanted to an immense and unknowable city, just about to start my teen years, I found myself alone among the super-hip, super laid-back kids of Torrance, California. I was far ahead of them academically, but that didn’t matter to them, and eventually not to me, either.

I started ninth grade with no contacts at the school. There were a thousand kids at Stephen M. White Junior High School, the largest student body I’d ever been part of. Ninth grade was the third year of the three-year program there, so everyone pretty much knew everyone else, except for me, or so I thought. It wasn’t horrible, but I found myself alone a lot. I made a few male friends and mostly fantasized about the beautiful, aloof, tan California girls. It was during that year that I heard live rock’n'roll for the first time, at school dances and assemblies. They were surf bands — lots of twangy electric guitars, lots of reverb, not much singing.

The next year my mom bought me the guitar. We got it at Sears, brand new for about thirty-five dollars. It looked like this:
I had no idea how to play it, but I’d been hanging out with another transplanted misfit, a transfer student from Oregon named John McClain. He’d taken piano lessons for quite a long time, and so he knew chord structure. By that time (1964) the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the guitar was going to be  cooler than piano, not to mention more portable, so John got a guitar, too, and together we figured out how to play chords, translating what he knew from the keyboard to the fretboard. Pretty soon we were copying licks from Rolling Stones records (themselves taken from Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records).

I can’t remember how long it was before we decided we were a band. Maybe six months, maybe a year, but here is where we’re starting to get to my point.

See, a rock band is a team, in some ways like a sports team. There has to be coordination and practice to make it work. The big difference is that in a band, you might find yourself playing with a bunch of people who all want to do something different. In athletic terms, it could be like playing on a team with a power forward, a quarterback, a shortstop and a goalie. Everyone’s a jock, and while this is clearly not the ideal situation, everyone is skilled, and whatever game you happen to be playing, there’s at least a reasonable chance the team can hold it’s own.

In bands, this mix-and-match thing happens because at first, you know who you know, and if one of your friends happens to play drums and you don’t know any other drummers, you sign him up, even if he’s mostly into Sousa marches. It’s not like you have a lot of connections and you can select the perfect drummer to complement your own musical style. Circumstance threw me together with John McClain, and it was a useful collaboration for a while, but in the end he was more Tony Orlando and I was more Hank Ballard. We still played together for a year or so after that.

As you grow up and play more places with more people, you have a better chance of hooking up with the “right” players, musicians who have the ability and the inclination to work in the same sort of musical style that interests you, but in my whole life I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a group or even known a group in which everyone was exactly happy with what was happening and all the players were on the same page musically. Naturally when there’s enough money involved you can take your pick of great players and make them do what you want, but A.) this scenario (tons of dough) is rare, and B.) if you’re a sensitive creative artist you might want to feel as if your bandmates are diggin’ it as much as you are.

Now I will tell all you aspiring musicians a secret. This is not the secret to landing a huge record deal and having a billion fans and hooking up with nubile models in the hotel room. Obviously, I don’t know that secret. This is the secret to making a living playing music. It’s so simple I don’t know why it’s a secret, or why it took me thirty years to discover it. Ready? Here it is: Find a niche and stay in it.

If you want to play the blues, play the blues. Or be a zydeco band, or a klezmer group. You could play R&B, folk-rock or bluegrass. But the key is to be consistent. Develop a style. Be the band your audience expects to hear, every time. Because there is a blues crowd out there, and a soul crowd, and a folk crowd. If you try to do everything, you’ll be competing with everyone. If you try to play a little blues, a little speed metal, a little punk and a little jazz, you won’t be as good at any one style as those who do only that style, and you won’t have an audience, because those who were hoping to hear a little jazz will walk in after you’ve played your jazz number, or they’ll leave before you get to it, and all they’ll hear is your rendition of Black Flag’s “Nothing Left Inside,” and they will never come back.

If you find a niche and stay in it, you’ll probably never have a billion fans. But eventually you’ll have 5,000 fans, and they’ll come to every gig. You’ll be playing music and making a decent living.

So I am dismayed when someone in my band wants to do a song that, in my opinion, doesn’t fit in with anything we’ve been doing, a song that is so not in the groove we’ve been building, a song demanded, perhaps, by some faction in the audience which does not like the niche we are working within.

A song like “Kryptonite.”

I know this was the long way around for this explanation, and I’m sorry. Believe me, I could have gone on for much longer. But down at the bottom, here’s what I’m saying: I can’t play with anyone I want. I have to play with who I know. I’m trying to have fun with this, and if I look for the Perfect Situation, the fun will be delayed, possibly forever. And I want to focus on a particular musical niche, and I want these guys to enjoy what we’re doing, because the pleasure is infectious and feeds on itself and makes everyone (especially me) happy.

We’ve got a gig tomorrow night. Lawyers. Why does it have to be lawyers?

Music has always thrilled me.

As a little kid I remember a cheesy portable record player, with a tone arm heavy as a log and a needle on the end of it as big around as a No. 2 pencil. Maybe it was the equipment that fascinated me as much as the music, because, really, all I had was a Gene Autry record, a 78, I think, Gene singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” b/w “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” There had to be other records, but I my memory is hazy. There might have been a comedy record by a guy named Yogi Jorgensen, who pretended to be drunk. I might have had “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” by the fabulous Patti Page. Hey, don’t blame me. I was four years old. But I enjoyed messing with that little record player, and I played those records until my parents must have wanted to scream. I shudder today when I think what the tone arm and stylus must have done to those poor old discs with every play.

You might think it was a lame time for white American music. But it was the very early 1950’s, and I know now that there was a lot of cool stuff going on. Just not at our house. Musically speaking, I guess my parents were dorks. It wasn’t their fault. I remember the music that came on the television: Burl Ives, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. I was so brainwashed that when Elvis showed up on The Ed Sullivan Show in the Fall of ‘56, when I was 8 years old, I was as disgusted at his filthy gyrations as The New York Daily News, which reported that Elvis “gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” Hmmph.

The following year I went by myself to see “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets, and I think I can say it changed my life. I had never seen anything like it. The bass player fell down on the floor and played the big upright bass as it lay on top of him. If the sexual suggestion wasn’t strong enough, girls in the on-screen audience twirled their poodle skirts so you could see their panties, and all the dancing was done with what seemed like erotic abandon.

I wanted me some of that.

I completely lost interest in Patti Page. I tried to get my father to build me an electric guitar (I don’t know why I didn’t ask him to buy me one. Maybe I thought such a strange contrivance had to be custom-made. It certainly didn’t look anything like my Uncle Ralph’s ukulele.)

That was how it started, the obsession. It would be five more years before I got my first guitar, but I was mesmerized that afternoon, and I haven’t really come out of the spell yet. Maybe I never will.

All this is in response to kStyle’s interest, and Smokin’ T’s advice, but it’s late and it’s a long story, so I’ll work on it some more and try to make my point here soon.