All Posts Tagged With: "music"

I was driving home around midnight tonight. It was cool outside, probably around 60 degrees. It is dark on the country roads that lead to my new, modern condo. I came upon Curtis Road while driving my usual route south on First Street. I am supposed to continue heading south on First to get to my place. Just before I got to the intersection, House of the Rising Sun warmed the radio. It was the good version, too. The one by the Animals. Often, or maybe always, I prefer the radio to iTunes or a CD. The radio is wild and spontaneous. The radio is opening a present on Christmas morning, while iTunes is buying your own presents year after dreadful year. With radio you will more often be forced to listen to unwanted notes and songs, but when the perfect song crackles on the imperfect airwaves there is not a better moment in my life. I sing and shout along with these perfect songs when they come along.

On this night, about two hours ago now, I turned left onto Curtis Road, instead of proceeding straight to my home. Country roads are often grids with cross streets spaced apart by about one mile or more. Savoy country roads conform to these traditions. I had noticed a slight fog before, but a half mile into my journey down the mysterious and dark road the fog grew more dense. The canopy of fog hovered over my car. It skimmed the turquoise roof of my 1993 Beretta. I reached out the window a couple of times to touch it, but it felt no different from regular air. House of the Rising Sun was only about halfway through its 4 minute and 32 second duration when the fog became very dense such that I had to slow down for caution, though this adventure was intended to lack caution. My chest felt with anxious certainty that something awful, something bloody and gory would soon happen. Perhaps a person would appear in the road and I would not have enough time to avoid winning in an unfair joust to the death. Perhaps one of the farmers would shoot at me for shouting the lyrics so madly and loudly out of my lowered, hand cranked windows. Perhaps a lonely Midwestern ghost would say hello to me. The Animals’ version is eerie and mysterious and ambiguous and beautiful and burning with orange Louisiana chords. The fog and the music and the madness and the darkness and the fate all crashed into one moment. They all crashed into one moment of calm and soothe and freedom and youthful wonder and wander. I floated as still as the fog.

In all, my journey was about 4.12 miles, according to Google Maps. Nothing eventful happened, unless you consider the above events to be eventful. Maybe this is a pointless story not worth sharing. Maybe the point is buried or subtle. Maybe I’m just full of shit and thought it funny to waste your time.

Now I hear beats everywhere I rove. The pumping of the train. The dropping of the rain. Sometimes I’m alone and I hear the beat in my brain. I attended Lollapaloozalaoapoaallozzapoallozaalollazpoalloozalooza a few days ago. It was my first music festival. For many years I was stuck in the 1960’s, but since I have begun writing my own lyrics my appreciation for all genres of music has flowered.

Freedom and liberation and inspiration floated everywhere. I kept thinking about freedom. A music festival is the ultimate expression of freedom. Everyone acted as they pleased. Fans smoked pot in full public view without fear of arrest. The security seemed stricter about people sneaking in food than sneaking in alcohol or drugs. Everyone expressed their peculiar identities through hats and dirty shirts they bought in high school (I wore my Jim Morrison Doors shirt on Saturday. I purchased it freshman year while at Elk Grove High School.). Girls wore bikini tops and jean shorts and didn’t care that every nearby guy stared at their exposed skin. I didn’t realize how many people have tattoos until surrounded by dragons and butterflies and flowers in the dried fields of Grant Park.

The colors of the diversity and the freedom and the music melted and swarmed together to create one new and brilliant color. A light blue. The musicians leaned with all of their weight on the definition of music. Jamie Lidell did a white British funk fun groove; I had the most fun at his show. Newton Faulkner showed me his ability to simultaneously strum acoustic chords and thump a beat on the body of his guitar. He closed his show with a raucous and fun acoustic cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (shout out to Univ. of Illinois friend Zenobia Ravji, who is the niece of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury). Saul Williams jumped furiously around the stage trying to scare and awaken white people with his race conscious lyrics and his urban guitar riffs. His spoken word poetry makes me jealous of his lyrical command. I admire the courage of musicians and artists who throw all of their blood and chance for a practical, normal life on the floor to blindly and hotly pursue the impractical dream of becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star. I admire them because I got a law degree instead.

Freedom is the perfect state for humans. This festival allowed and encouraged freedom to flourish. But, America allows that too. In both the festival and in America, freedom is allowed but is rarely seized. Idiots abounded at Lolla. Most of the people didn’t give a damn about the music, brilliant though it was. Many of the people there were 20 year old punks and ditzes who took the Metra in from the white suburbs. Their parents have money. They wore expensively torn clothes from Hollister. Lolla was the thing to do that weekend and the place to get drunk. The slightly older 26 year olds were no better. They all looked unique when compared to society at-large, but they all looked the same when compared to other 26 year olds at the concert. They wore bandanas and tattoos and they smoked and drank. The proportion of people who smoked surprised me. It seemed that 82.7% of the entire country smoked cigarettes or pot, and perhaps they do. They wore groovy hats and refused to shave (some of the girls too). They wore pins and shirts preaching about the environment, but at the end of each day the Grant Park fields were impossible to walk through without crushing a plastic cup or bottle with every step. They littered without shame, or at the least trampled the litter of others without offering to recycle any of it. Most of these people appeared poorly educated and without grand futures. When rebellion from a dominant society results in the creation of an identifiable and cohesive sub-culture then it is no longer rebellion; it is conformity. The hippies rebelled from the dominant culture to conform to a sub-culture, but in the process forgot the original idea: expression of individuality. So too with this generation of self-proclaimed rebels (sorry, sometimes I like fragments). I didn’t see individuals; I saw people who conformed just as much to the sub-culture as the kids wearing Hollister. It is all ironic and pathetic.

Whenever people get drunk or high I become an observer. As many of you know, I have never been drunk or high, so I have done much observing. I sat on the trampled tan grass while I was waiting for the Kanye West concert. A stupid, drunk girl dropped her cup of beer on the ground near me and it splashed all over the left side of my favorite cowboy shirt. It mostly dried after about 30 minutes. Then another drunk girl dropped her beer near where I sat. Her cup had twice as much beer as the first cup. She apologized profusely and we became friends for two hours. I also made friends with some cool chemical engineers from Florida.

By the end of each day my feet stung as I walked through the beds of jellyfish. I was starving and thirsty and my legs cramped up. I had a headache and my contacts dried out from the dust blowing off the softball diamonds and all of the pot and cigarette smoke. I don’t give a damn. I loved it. My body still hurts. On Monday, I got trapped in the stairwell of my building and had to go down 42 floors of stairs to escape, which doubled my aches. The music pounds in my head. Notes have dangled from every steel beam and gentle leaf seen on my Loop walks to the UBS Tower. I hear a beat in the 32 year old drugged out mother with gray hair who sits on the west side of the Madison St. bridge with her daughter everyday and shakes a cup to beg for spare change from the slick suited corporate men walking to Union and Ogilvie Stations to leave for white homes (I have become one of them; Borg). When she does not jangle her cup at a regular interval, my mind forces her to do so. I hear an urban beat backing up Shakespeare’s poetic rhythm as I read Julius Ceasar on my daily Metra train rides to Union Station.

The music. The irony. The freedom. Yea.

Today I sent Urbanagora founder Billy Joe Mills a Facebook message and noticed his profile had a link to Pandora, a wonderful free music database that plays streaming music. Billy had a link to music by one of our favorite songwriters, Warren Zevon.

He sung this version of Back in the High Life Again when his body was riddled with cancer. This is easily my favorite version of the song. Zevon passed away a few years back, but he really lived. Some might say he lived his life “Riding the Hellbound Train.” Zevon himself once said “I got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did.” Anyway, here’s a link to a tribute video of Zevon over his rendition of “Back in the High Life Again.” I hope you enjoy it.

If I were running McCain’s campaign, the classic song “Proud to Be an American” would play him on to stage at the Republican Convention and then be a common theme song/ anthem for rest of the campaign. There is something particularly stirring about the image of McCain with these lyrics:

“And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today. ‘ Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the USA.“

This taps into most of the key values that should be weaved together for a winning McCain narrative: nostalgia, patriotism, self sacrifice, honor, experience, toughness, and valor. It also resonates with blue collar voters. It was played heavily following 9-11, and the strong emotional connection some feel to it would subtly reinforce McCain’s attempts to focus the debate on national security. Most importantly, whether or not it should, extensive use of this song will make Obama’s criticisms of the war a little less effective with some undecided voters.

Today I thought of one of my favorite songwriters, Warren Zevon. I did a quick YouTube search and found a video of Zevon doing Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. If you’ve heard of Zevon, you’re probably most familiar with either his hit Lawyers, Guns and Money or Werewolves of London. I like those too, but this has always been my favorite: