Good Day In The Field

(HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: PLEASE SEE ANNOUNCEMENTS AT END OF POST. THANKS!)

One advantage to being unemployed is that, while I am stuck at home working up resumes and scouring the Internet, I get to listen to music as much as I want as loud as I want. I am free to play the air guitar and the air drums (even the occasional air bagpipes) and shake my moneymaker all over the damn house without shame, censure or scorn. Well, perhaps a little scorn. I am pretty sure my cats look upon all these antics as a truly vulgarian display of poor taste and worse manners. I care not, for I am an artiste.

Of course, all of this imaginary musicianship does little to further my career as an architect. It pays to be creative in that profession, as a rule, but I have yet to encounter a single prospective employer who wants to know if I can accurately play the chord sequence to “Monkey Wrench” by Foo Fighters while grimacing musically.* This is quite the pity. I have been practicing, I know I can nail it if they just give me the chance!

I have been assisted greatly in my musical excavations by the receipt of an iPod as a gift on my most recent birthday, in conjunction with a wireless rig to some pretty good bookshelf speakers that I purchased with some bonus money.** A consolidated music library with the flexibility of streaming from the iPod or my laptop has allowed me to listen to a deep catalog of stuff I haven’t listened to in years. Thank the lawd for shuffle!

One of the most striking aspects of “Music Appreciation Month” in the Gumbo house is the sheer breadth and depth of memories and emotions I have experienced. At various times I have been nostalgic, deeply pensive and riled up. I have been sad to the point of tears and overjoyed to the point of crazed laughter. Sometimes all within the space of a few minutes. All sorts of memories:

1: Sitting on the benches at a local playground on a summer weekend, my friends and I eating cheap carryout pizza and ill-gotten beer. When we could, we would pitch in and get someone to buy us a case: Three six-packs of Budweiser and one of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Guess who drank the PBR. Heh. “Free Bird” wasn’t far away, either.

2: Carrying around my brand new (drum roll) boom box with an 8-track player in it, wearing out my copy of “Deguello” by ZZ Top. Yeah, it was the definition of unhip, but it was mine and I didn’t care. “…Spied a little thing and I followed her all night, In a funky fine levis and her sweater's kind of tight, She had a west coast strut that was as sweet as molasses, But what really knocked me out was her cheap sunglasses…”

3: I can remember sitting on the edge of my bed, head in hands, wallowing in anguish and self-pity because the first great love of my life didn’t love me back, she just really wanted to be friends. “Thank You” by Led Zeppelin was on the stereo. I hated that song for the longest time after that day, but lately it has worked its way back into my playlist. It is a great tune.

4: Freshman year in college, the blond streak in my hair, skinny ties in the closet and I had Oingo Boingo’s “Cry Of The Vatos” on the turntable in my dorm room. Not so much a song as a collection of funny noises set to a melody, it always put me in a silly mood. My next door neighbor, a true son of New Jersey and a die-hard Bruce Springsteen fan(atic), knocked on my door and said “What the fuck is the matter with you?”. I laughed and said nothing. Later that year, he got me drunk the night my nephew was born and I was trying to study for a calc test. My nephew turned out fine, but the calc test was a train wreck. Ouch.

5: My fourth year in college and I had moved in with two of my friends, into an off-campus apartment. One of my roommates was the Audio Equipment guy, had a great rig with huge speakers and a CD player. Because of that, I bought my first ever CD: “Electric” by The Cult. The song that did it: “Wild Flower". It still gets me, right there.

6: Senior in college, and I am heading back to my apartment after a late night in the architecture studio. It was some distance off campus, and I was (in my mind) lucky to have a creaky old 1977 Chevy Nova as a form of transportation. Sort of a pre-hoopty, but it ran and it has a radio. Zipping down the road, and “Copperhead Road” was blaring out of the speakers. At the time, listening to Steve Earle snarl out those lyrics, I thought he was the bad-assest of the badasses. Great song, just don’t drink whiskey while listening to it!

I graduated from college just before the 90’s, entering the ‘real world’ and leaving behind the easy access I had to the same range of music I was lucky with in my studio and dorm. I was relying primarily on one local radio station, did a lot of listening in the car during my commutes. It’s weird, I have a bit of a musical memory drought from those years. Mostly what I remember is either goofy (Presidents of the United States of America), grungy/poetic (Soundgarden, U2) or angry and dark (Tool). What I can recall is mostly singing along with one or another of those groups (Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Alice In Chains should be in there, too), and being vaguely dissatisfied with life. It didn’t start out that way, it was a gradual thing, but looking back I realized a bit of a cloud had settled in on me by the end of the decade. I know it sounds really weird, but “Aenima” by Tool actually helped me through a rough patch.

2000 and beyond has been a bit of backwards and forward for me. I started getting into all the music I had left behind from my teen and young adult years at the same time I was expanding my horizons into “the softer side of Irish Gumbo”. I was getting much more interested in folk, country, funk and rap. I picked up a taste for some “alt country” and old blues. I ended up listening to a much broader range of styles, with an exponential increase in singer/songwriters in my music library. I can now count among my collection various works by Ellis Paul, Jeffrey Foucault, Eddie From Ohio, Johnny Cash, Son Volt, Parliament/Funkadelic and Jeff Lang***. It was also about this time that I started attending the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, New York almost every year.

It was at the 2001 FRFF that Jeff Lang provided me with one of my all time favorite music memories. Jeff is a blues/folk oriented singer/songwriter from Australia, and happens to be a monster guitar player, to boot. I was fortunate to catch Jeff on the Workshop stage, a smaller one than the main stage, in a group workshop with about 8 other performers. We were sitting on a blanket in the grass, and the weather was sunny and excellent.

The performers were taking turns playing songs based on a set theme for the workshop, I don’t recall the theme, but I’ll never forget the song. Jeff stood up to play “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (a Bob Dylan original) but discovered a problem with his guitar. He asked to borrow one from Mary Gauthier, who was sitting next to him. She gracefully obliged, and Jeff proceeded to play.

I wasn’t a big Bob Dylan fan at the time, so I didn’t know anything about the original. Jeff launched into the song, setting a fast pace for it, and tore into the lyrics. About a minute into the song I realized that I was hearing something special. Talk about passion for the music! Oh, lawd, he lit that thing up! He was really bringing the story to life, and his guitar playing was inspired. Possessed, almost. He did a bit of a solo, kinda fast and bluesy. My jaw was dropping, and when I looked around, mine wasn’t the only one. We were gobsmacked, flat out. When he finished playing, there was about two seconds of silence, and then everybody starting clapping and shouting and hollering. We were on our feet, standing ovation. The other musicians on the stage were just staring at him in awe, and clapping. Jeff turned to Mary to hand her the guitar, and she is looking at him like he’s a lunatic. She looks at the guitar, then looks up at him with a smile, and says “What in the hell did you do?”

What the hell did he do? Why, he amazed us by creating magic, that good day in the field.

*For the record, I cannot play the chords. I can grimace musically, in a variety of styles. Including klezmer and Tuvan throat singing.
**The last bonus before the Crash of ’08. I don’t regret the purchase one bit. I likes my tunes.
***Geek that I am, I actually have three signed CD’s from him, plus I introduced myself to him at a show he played at the Kennedy Center in D.C. Nice guy, and tolerant of doofuses like me.

PSA #1: Tomorrow, Saturday February 7th is another Pic and Prose collaboration with Michelle at Confessions of a Desperate Housewife. Please stop by both of our blogs and drop some comment luv, it’s a feast for the eyes and the mind!

PSA #2: The simply smashing Petra at The Wise (*Young*) Mommy has invited me to participate in a contest to win her affections, for the weekly “HeBlogs/SheBlogs” post that she runs on her blog. Ordinarily, Heinous at Irregularly Periodic Ruminations is the lucky fellow to keep Petra company, but Jim will be on hiatus while he takes care of some personal matters, and we wish him all the best and have him in our thoughts. Please visit with Petra for the rules and stuff. Myself and seven other strapping young lads are competing for the honor, and you lucky readers will get to vote on us! Contest entries will be posted beginning Monday, February 9th on The Wise (*Young*) Mommy, two per day for the week. My entry will posted Monday, so please visit and vote!