In Praise of My Playlist

In praise of my playlist.

It's not just a playlist...it's the monster big daddy-O of playlists and includes practically every piece of music that I can claim as favorites, and it shouldn't surprise you that there are many. Very many. Like over 4000 songs/tracks. It's like a musical biography of sorts. The music I enjoyed best from before I was even 10 years old (which explains the inclusion of the Partridge Family). Almost 50 years of seeking and finding new music, this playlist is where I've stored all the treasures and it is a constant reminder of how versatile and varied my musical taste has been throughout the years.

I whip out this playlist and put it in shuffle mode to mess with my head a little (never know what's coming next and you have to prepare for the next song being potentially a buzz buster. It's hit or miss on that front.

But here's what I want to do here, and you can listen to all the music if you want, this next little bit are some thoughts I had about what the algorithm is picking tonight, as it's been good starting with Devo's "Wiggly World" and then reeeally slipping gears for John Denver's majestically beautiful "It Amazes Me". Denver is, in my opinion, the single most under-rated songwriter in popular music. He was so far ahead of his time with his activism, his love of nature. "It amazes me and I know the wind will someday surely blow it all away"...that line just knocks me right out it's so insightful.

Nazareth are up next with their micro-rock opera "Telegram" (from Close Enough for Rock and Roll). It's about the band in the hours leading up to a rock show they're headlining, the soundcheck and eventually the performance. More an action narrative than a philosophical libretto but it's to be expected with the harder edge to the music and the singer's gruff vocal. I actually like his voice and have since the days of "Love Hurts" and "Hair of the Dog".

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds step up to the plate with a ballad from The Good Son, "Foi na Cruz". "Love comes knocking, comes knocking on our door...but you, you and me love, we don't live there anymore". I don't know what "Foi na Cruz" means but I can sure relate to the rest. How can you not love Nick Cave? I should probably listen to a lot more of his stuff than I do. It's just that it leaves me with this impression that my soul has been soiled by getting in so deep with his bad seed clique. It's one of two songs from The Good Son that made it to this king playlist, the other being "The Ship Song".

Surely I'm the only one who remembers "Corporal Brown" by Toad the Wet Socket (still reigning champion of Band With the Most Idiotic Name)...you may not recall the song or even the band but it's worth checking out if you're into REM and that 90s Counting Crows Gin Blossoms sound. Worth 3 minutes.

Howza ya like my playlist so far? Well here's where it starts to get a tad trippy. The acoustic version of "China Doll" by the Grateful Dead on the Reckoning album is by far the best I've personally heard. When the band modulates into the major key after meandering in a minor for the duration of the song until that point it will give you goose bumps. The solos are on point, the band so relaxed you can bet it was Indica stuffed in that pre-roll they must have shared before taking the stage... Jerry's singing voice matches well the weary tale of the teller. Reckoning is an album worth having, especially if you like the acoustic Dead (the entire concert is all acoustic).

Next up... it's "Plowed" by  Sponge. Never was a huge Sponge fan but this one was fantastic and they had a song called "Molly" that I dug. And yes, it was about THAT Molly (Ringwald), perhaps you've heard them? One other song they did that was kick ass, "Rainin'", all of which made it to the list. Congratuations Sponge.

I used to have a higher tolerance for songs like the Moody Blues' "Ride My See Saw", it's still pretty cool, I couldn't leave it off the list. Two other Moody Blues songs on the list that I can recall, "Story in Your Eyes" and "New Horizons".

Next up, Lindsay Buckingham performing one of his more bizarre songs, "Bwana". I will not pretend that I could ever describe this song using any language which doesn't utilize a multitude of platforms, you see, it's just making me write silly things. If you've ever heard "Bwana" you'd understand what's happening here. But I'm sure most of you will not have heard it. Somehow made it onto the playlist with a handful of other great Buckingham songs.

I got all genres on this list. Including this Alan Jackson country hit "Someday". I know it well, having played it in a country band for over a year so there's a sentimental value attached that insures it's inclusion on this list. I do reserve the right to click through cuz I'm not in the mood for country...

"I Hear You Knocking" - Dave Edmonds. Holy Moly I was rocking to this song when I was a little kid, I remember it well. I was fascinated by the effect on the vocal and face it, it's the kind of song a kid SHOULD like.

To be continued

Trigger's Revenge - based on a true event...yes, based on yours truly

Looking out his front door that cold winter afternoon he found himself lost in the fields just across the road. They must belong to someone, he thought, but to whom? He hadn't a clue. There were times he'd taken a fancy to calling them his own, seeing as how his family had shared the house for most of his 55 years. But the livestock that grazed the dry Oklahoma "cold-weather grass" didn't belong to him, nor did the wild animals and feral cats which lived nocturnally in those woods.

He wished he owned horses. Equine beasts would make good companions for the cows and a particularly large bull penned in behind cheap farmer's wire line. Barbed wire kept them from escaping their universe...his universe...the one where his father raised a beautiful black mare and a shetland pony someone had named Trigger.

It dawned on him, perhaps for the first time, that he never knew who had named the small horse. It didn't seem like the kind of name that would come from the imagination of the same person behind Tootsie (the well groomed female) and Penny (the foal, only recently born and still a tad wobbly in the legs). "Trigger" had to have been from the mind of a child.

Who knows? he thought. It could have been me that named her.

It may well have been, or more likely from his father's favorite, his brother that the moniker had been fitted for the animal, although it must be noted that Trigger's overall sluggish demeanor never merited the kind of vigorous nature you'd expect from Roy Rogers' steed. Heavy odds would pay off for any gambler who made a bet on Mr. Rogers being the sole inspiration...the only triggers he and his brother had ever known of were clutched between the fingers of heroes like Marshall Dillon, the Rifleman, the Cartwright family on the Ponderosa (and just what does the word "Bonanza" even mean???)...Have gun will travel, it was a strange saying to their pacifist ears, unfamiliar with violence.

Though he preferred the Sunday afternoon Monster Movie on Mystery Theater he would sometimes hold back pestering his old man long enough so that the part-time cowboy could finish watching a western. Somewhere along the line he'd picked up a taste for them, though he could not recall when it had happened or over which overwrought melodrama the conversion was experienced. He came to relish the time spent with his father and grew to love the look that came over the bearded face when the bad guy hit the ground.

And the horses. Of course. All the cowboys seemed to have been assigned a horse to convey them across desserts and plains, like indestructable automobiles that seemed awfully fun to ride. In those younger days he couldn't conceive of the downside, the saddle soreness, the need to be groomed, not to mention fed and watered...those responsibilities did not come across well on the cheap black and white television his mother had bought at an OTASCO store.

Fact is he may not have loved horses so much if he'd paid attention to his father's burden in caring for them and less about Hollywood cowboys. Like Dracula and Frankenstein those horses were nothing like real life. Real horses can cause heartbreak and despair just as easily as they can win events in races and rodeos.

The "pacifist cowboy" had grown up. He continued staring at the pasture land. Even now, knowing full well the investment of a good, healthy beast, he persisted in his self-inflicted ennui.

He must have a horse!

I could take care of at least a couple now, his train of thought obsessed with the idea. At last he caved in to a memory that reminded him why it had taken most of his life to even consider owning one.

He was perhaps seven or eight years old. He measured the age by how long his family lived in the Morgan road house subtracted from how many years since the move to the west side of town. He knew that anything that happened before that migration would place him at no older than nine at the very most. The horses had to be sacrificed in that move because the house his parents had bought shared no adjacent pasture land. It surely broke his dad's heart to lose those animals...knowing him, he probably cried...

He knew he was awfully young and this was one of his oldest recollections...

A black and white photo of him astride the pony was further evidence that it took place "at the old house". Apparently Trigger had been tamed when that picture was taken...

Or perhaps it was taken just before...

On that hot summer afternoon he spooked the horse. Maybe he accidentally kicked him, he never knew what enraged the Shetland but most definitely something had.

Bucking like the most fierce bronco in the Pro Rodeo circuit he took off running as if ponies were somehow capable of winning the Kentucky Derby and the Remington Park Annual race in one fell swoop. His rear end rose from the saddle involuntarily.

He screamed but held on to the reins for as long as he could. Now that the memory had lost much of it's sheen he would not be able to tell you just how far he'd flown before being rescued by gravity. Lucky, however, that he didn't break his neck, it was an extremely young age to have cheated the Reaper but only now did he think of it in those macabre terms.

How his father must have worried. How his mother must have yelled at him for letting "the kids" get on those horses in the first place, obviously they were too young. But his father wouldn't hear of it. He'd been forced at a very young age, by a death in the family, to work the Arkansas farm land from whence his family migrated to Oklahoma. He had a lot of expectations for his own offspring but lacked the education to understand what his mother saw so clearly...they had not raised cowboys. They were bringing up rock stars and you know what that means: a latent inability to recognize responsibility in favor of the dream that never comes true.

Trigger had his revenge, that was for sure, and he continued daydreaming about the scene, playing it backwards and forwards in his mind. He chopped it into a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle and relished each piece he found that fit into what he'd been able to retain...

His father, calling out his name, leaving his brother and the horses free to escape the pasture to run towards the inert body. The fear that would have been inescapable and easy to detect in his face...one of those bad TV westerns turned all too real... The sense of relief he must have felt like a wave when it was obvious there was no serious damage here, only a few bruises and a miracle.

Father was gone now and he came to one last realization. It wasn't the horses he'd wanted to roam in those woods across the old highway. It was the memory of the times shared with the rough handed full-time cowboy who gave it up to raise his children.

The dream wasn't even his, it belonged to dad who had already proven he could more than hold his own with the best equine breeds in local rodeos and in parades through town on Festival day... A man who made a name for himself not just as a working man, which is exactly what he was, but as a friend to many and well beloved. To be respected like that, yes, that's what he hoped he'd inherited from the man.

He turned away from the fogged pane of glass which had become a time machine and looked at his wife sitting in his favorite chair quietly darning her worn socks. He felt a wave of love rush over him so much like a tsunami that he was compelled to walk across the room and surprise her with a kiss. No particular reason.

She accepted it with a smile and a look in her eyes he recognized as true love. Closing his eyes he said a silent prayer for guidance and strength. Before he reached the Amen one last image of his own father broke through and he couldn't help but interrupt the communion with a sincere, heartfelt sentiment...

"Thank you, dad".

Paternal Grandfather and Great Grandfather

My paternal great grandfather, I don't even know his name. In fact I know nothing whatsoever about him wouldnt even know what he looked like if my aunt hadn't given me this picture to scan.

(thanks Wanda R.I/P.)

Here are a few more with my grandfather. Might post more later.

Paternal grandfather Sol Casey and my grandmother Anna Jane, the sweetest woman I have ever and will ever know in my life.

Sol with his first wife...I guess divorce must run in my family...

Pretty sure Sol is the one on the left.

No idea who the other two are. The whole lot are from Arkansas so could be just about anything.

The Sympathy of MIke Watts - a memoir

So here's the deal. I've spent a lot of time with a blog I maintained for about 1o years and was surprised at how much anecdotal and biographical information I'd allowed through what tiny filter I may have had back in those days. Intimate stuff, like the goings on during a night on stage with the band (Mad Laugh, if you want to know) and the events of the afterparty. Like the true tale of Mike Watt's sympathy.

I was the opening act for the band and I did about as well as could be expected. I didn't get hit by any flying vegetables (or the more potentially realistic risk of being beaned in the noggin with a billiards ball or a sucker punch from another bands bass player). Mike was playing bass for Mad Laugh at that time, as he had joined up with them immediately after I stepped out. He's a solid bass player, though his frenetic onstage demeanor sometimes resembled Sid Vicious on speed. This never took away from the music, the songs and performances of which were well polished by then.

On this particular night...remember, the gig I opened for them at (LiT in Brickton, OKC if you must know)...It was a great show but the club owners only paid the band $20 each and were not paying for the opening act, which wasn't expected.

So we get back to the house, a party in the works, Mike walks up to me and starts in with how it's too bad the manager fucked me out of what I deserved. Then he pulls his twenty dollar pay day from out of his jeans pocket and hands it over to me. "You deserve this, man".

I tell him I'm okay, I'm not broke but he insists, saying it's the principle of the thing. No one should have to play for free unless they have to and you're too good not get paid". Now I realize that sounds as if I'm being a tad immodest to suggest that he looked up to me as a bass player but he was very much impressed with the first time he heard me play Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Of course how can you not love a fan when you're not even in a band, maybe he was hoping to make an impression with the outpouring of generosity in what I understood to be was his last cash money...

He poked that bill into my shirt pocket and walked away, what's done is done. Never turned back...

...until about 2 hours later just before I was about to get in the car and leave. Apparently the need for cash money had presented itself to Mike Watt because here he come swaggering towards the doorway to stop me. I will not divulge my personal opinion of why he needed CASH money now, but damned if he didn't and damned if he didn't feel like a total ass coming back to ask if I'd let him have that 20 dollar bill back, "Something's come up".

I knew the score. It didn't bother me, after all, I wasn't broke, I didn't need cash. It was SO typical of the impression I'd formed of him over the year or so that I flew by his radar. I had to laugh and had no qualms in returning it to his possession, no hard feelings, would have done the same for you, right? Well I could have told him I'd spent it during the party or just flat out made a scene but not for that amount of money...

TL:DR... I don't get paid. Dude I know gives me his pay. Dude I know hooks up, needs cash back. Asks and recieves from generous author of this autobiographical essay.

I spent a long time in those old blog posts and they inspire me to write about the banal things in life that age like wine and good music, things forgotten and interesting to know were happening at the time I was writing. Perhaps not today or tomorrow but certainly in 10-20 years will become fascinating? And if to me why not to someone else? I get views on some of those pages all the time... The idea of blogging was fascinating to me back then, I think I might just have to give that muse the reins again cuz I'm bored as fuck over here... just kidding. Trying to be edgy. Failing.

Later Folks