What I've Learned About Music In Sixty-Four Years

Sometimes it seems my entire life has been about music. That's not really true. I'm not a weirdo. I have and have had a life. It would be more accurate to say that music has been my backdrop.

Sure, as a kid it was all about music ~ listening to music on the radio and on 45's, whether bought or borrowed from my older sisters and brother. But when you're a kid, how much, really, do you have to fill your brain with? Basically once you learn to read, there's not a lot of interesting endeavors. I wasn't studying the old master's paintings or developing the next vaccine.

I was one of those odd kids, maybe a bit precocious. I honestly don't remember a time when music didn't gush through my veins. I recall peculiar songs from when I was barely two, the ones my parents liked, like "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window" and "Catch A Falling Star".

By the age of five, music was everything to me. My big sisters collected records and our kitchen radio was always on. My sisters did The Twist on our kitchen linoleum. Music was different then ~ not segregated. Our local radio station played everything. I didn't even know there were different genres. It was just "music".

The hugest influence on my youthful musical development was my big brother. He was nine years older and a teenager who was tuned in to the tasty crackling hits of the early-to-mid 1960's. He also had money to buy LP'S. By age nine I was crossing the bridge to Poppler's Records to purchase a 45-RPM record whenever I'd collected enough pennies to afford one. One. If you only have enough money to buy one record, it's an excruciating decision. Because of my brother, I was exposed to music I was too poor to purchase for myself.

When I began my singles collection, it was mostly The Beatles. It's not that The Beatles were the only act, but they were the utmost. Honestly, nobody else came close. I'm not sure who discovered The Beatles first, my brother or me, but I think it was me. By third grade I was smuggling my little transistor radio to school with me, and I distinctly remember having a very serious conversation on the sidewalk after school with Cathy Adair regarding this new group called The Beatles. "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was the current hit, but I sort of liked "She Loves You" better, although it was hard to choose. Each had its virtues.

Cathy and I knew that the guys in the band were named John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and we'd seen pictures of them in our fan magazines. Clearly Paul was the cute one, so I decided he was the singer on The Beatles hits I liked the best. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my favorite Beatle, voice-wise, was actually John.

My brother, on the other hand, was bringing home LP's. When I heard The Beatles' Second Album (yes, that was the title), I was amazed they could write such great songs. I had no inkling the songs on the album were mostly covers.

I continued on my Beatles journey, skipping to Poppler's to buy the single, "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out". Meanwhile, my brother bought Help!.

"Help!" was a revelation to me. It doesn't make many people's lists of their favorite Beatles album, but it's mine. I was obsessed with it. Granted, the drill was, once my brother left the house and once I watched from my bedroom window as his red Ford Fairlane zoomed down the road, I sauntered into his room and pilfered two or three of his albums and slipped them on my tiny record player and listened to my favorite songs over and over. Then I carefully placed the LP's back on his shelf in the correct (memorized) spot. 

To me, the tracks on "Help!" naturally lent themselves to a musical, so I created one. I was ten. This was most likely my first foray into creativity.

Then later that same year came "Rubber Soul". 

In reality, "Rubber Soul" is the best Beatles album. "Help!" is my sentimental favorite, but this is The Best. After each Beatles album, I was ravenously hungry for the next. I salivated when I saw my brother bring this one home and I couldn't wait for him to drive away...

Discovery is a hazy memory. Probably the last time I was chilled by brand new music was 1993. And that was a fluke. "Rubber Soul" is practically perfect, and was especially perfect the first time.

In '65 The Beatles were still a band; not simply a group of solo writers. "Rubber Soul" isn't perfect ~ what album is? There are some clinkers. Even though there was a song named after me on the album, I honestly didn't care for it. John was at his strongest on the LP, although Paul had a couple of nice songs. But there's no denying that the most enduring Beatles song of all time is John's:

Revolver was released in '66, and frankly, I was disappointed. It did have some classic songs, but only maybe two.

 

Then I moved on.

Life changed, The Beatles changed; I had other priorities. But every September 10 I bought my brother the latest Beatles album. I owed him for all those Saturday afternoons when I'd purloined his Beatles LP's. It was only right that I paid him back. But he'd changed, too. He was married and didn't care that much about The Beatles. When I asked him how he liked the Sergeant Pepper album, he said, "It's okay." I was kind of hurt because I had little money and yet, as tradition dictated, I'd plunked my money down to purchase the album for his birthday.

It's not as if The Beatles were my only musical inspiration, ever. There's much more to come in future posts.

But they were, well...basically, everything.

Sixty-Four

(Yes, I 64)

To be honest, I don't think about age much. Sometimes I forget how old I am and I have to mentally subtract the year I was born from the current year to arrive at the correct number. Oh, I know I'm sixty-something; it's just that I lose track. I'm keeping track better now because I'm a year away from the magic number. It's not exactly like the anticipation of turning eighteen ~ I get (now) that life has an expiration date. Still, I'm looking forward to finding out what life is like without my clock eep-eep-eeping at 4:30 each morning.

Old people always say they don't know where the time went. Guess what ~ it's true. I distinctly remember when I was giddy with excitement over my upcoming high school graduation. I had no plan, but I was pretty sure I'd have some kind of exciting career. Apparently by magic. My town held two institutes of higher learning, Mary College, which was private and out of the question financially; and Bismarck Junior College (which I'm sure is called something much more pretentious now). I got one of BJC's catalogs and perused it for about ten minutes. The journalism courses caught my eye, but then I thought, what the hell ~ that's never gonna happen ~ so I just looked for a job instead. No one in my family had gone to college and who was I to break the mold? Frankly, I depended on serendipity, which I learned was difficult to come by.

It's not that I was lazy (okay, I actually was). It was easier to surf through life and see what came of it. I assumed crappy jobs were a rite of passage. And in the recesses of my brain I was futilely chasing the dream of being a disc jockey, which would have been a stretch, considering my verbal skills were essentially non-existent. 

So, what did I do? What I knew how to do ~ type. State government jobs were handed out like candy, although one did have to take a merit exam to be considered. And I did have another skill in my back pocket ~ I knew shorthand. Strangely, no one ever asked me to "take a letter". Two years of instruction wasted. The whole time I worked at the Capitol building (a year) I was looking for a plausible means of escape. If one searches out the definition of "drudgery", it says "North Dakota State government". 

I was sadly a classic under-achiever. In my defense, nobody in the early seventies was looking for someone with my singular skills. After zipping down those eighteen floors for the final time, I returned to my other skill, operating a cash register. I didn't even realize how pitiful I actually was.

Then I got married, as all we seventies girls were expected to do; and then I became a mom, which was essentially the only thing I managed to do right. I stayed home until our bank account cried out in anguish, and subsequently returned to operating a cash register. I no longer needed a career; just a steady paycheck.

Around 1980 my working life became more interesting when I answered an ad for a ward clerk at our local hospital. I had no clue what a "ward clerk" was, but it did require typing skills, which I still possessed. I absorbed the inner workings of life on a nursing floor, and found it fascinating. I liked learning things that had some correlation to actual life. I functioned as a de facto nurse's aide when staffing was short, and liked doing it. I acquired something I'd never once possessed ~ self-confidence. When I took the job working second shift, it was for practical reasons; but honestly, that time of night fit me like a glove. Everything, however, is mercurial. After eight years, my impulsive mind told me it was time to move on.

For a couple of years, I drifted from one secretarial job to another and suffered the inherent indignities. Strangely, no one wanted me to leave when I gave notice ("I was going to give you a raise!" "Oh, we were ready to offer you a full-time position."), but had the powers-that-be acted like they wanted me to stay before I took matters into my own hands, I never would have resigned in the first place. I tucked that little fact in my pocket and never forgot it.

Desperate to get away from my icy boss, a classic 1920's stern school marm, at the farm tax planning/prep business, I scoured the classified ads, all three or four of them (it was a small town). A large health insurance company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania had the novel idea of expanding into a relatively rural area, where people had a work ethic and would be happy with paltry pay ~ right up my alley! I knew absolutely nothing about health insurance and frankly it sounded boring as hell, but I did possess a knowledge of medical terminology, so I hoped, hoped. I actually practiced interviewing at home in my garage ~ practiced selling myself and answering any question I could conceive. Interview day turned out to be a cacophonous assembly line ~ move to the next queue, answer a question, move along, answer another. My carefully rehearsed talking points never had the chance to escape my lips.

I went back to work and waited. And waited. After two weeks of hearing nothing, I knew I'd blown it. I was despondent. And my chilly boss was there every morning, offering a peeved "good morning" through pursed lips.

Three weeks on, I got a call and an offer. The woman on the phone didn't tell me I was a second choice and that an original hiree had dropped out. I learned that later. I truly despised Mrs. Frostbite, but when the opportunity arose to tell her exactly why I was leaving, I lied and said my new position paid twenty-five cents more per hour (it paid exactly the same). She seemed genuinely disappointed and apologized for not being able to offer me more money. (What??)

I began my new insurance training in a rented office with twenty-nine other women, some of whom actually knew what a "claim" was. The corporation didn't want to over-tax our faculties, so they taught us how to process eye exams. Eventually we all graduated and moved into our brand-spankin' new building.

Fast forward....I earned a promotion to assistant supervisor after less than a year, and then, when the company realized it hadn't been folly to open for business on the God-forsaken prairie, they expanded and I was promoted again, this time to supervisor. Only then did I become fully acquainted with The Devil Herself ~ my new manager. She rarely spoke to me, so I went on my merry way, chalking up success after success (thanks to my people and to that thing I'd tucked inside my pocket a couple of years before ~ tell people you value them before it's too late). Thus I was confident heading into my yearly performance review. My team had outperformed everyone. I was going to receive so many kudos, I worried that my head may not fit through the door on my way out of her office.

I don't know if it was the shock of realizing I'd entered bizzaro world or the cruel slash of her words, but I was gobsmacked. "You're making the other supervisors look bad. You brought donuts for your people last Saturday." "You never stop by and say goodnight to me when you leave for the day." "If you can't be part of my team, I'll replace the team."

What I'd assumed would be well-earned acclaim turned out to be the threat of being fired. Tears started flowing ~ and The Devil Herself wouldn't even offer me a Kleenex. I couldn't afford to be unemployed. I went home and sobbed through the night...and then I swallowed my pride and kowtowed to Satan. Eventually she began including me in group conversations (her soliloquies) and even started kidding me in front of the other supervisors. I was happy and relieved and I loved her...she was awesome...she took us out on her boat one evening and we all laughed and laughed...

I'm not sure what The Devil Herself did that displeased management back east, but apparently she did something. One day a couple of big honchos showed up unexpectedly and commandeered an empty office and asked the supervisors, one by one, to stop by for a talk. Gosh, what could I possibly say about this amazing woman? Everything. I told them EVERYTHING. At five o'clock that afternoon, I headed out to my car in the lot and turned the key in the ignition. Before I backed out of my space, something unusual caught my eye. The blonde-headed demon was exiting the building with a couple of large paper grocery bags. I came back to work the next morning, but she didn't.

All you have to do is treat people right. And guess what? If you don't, we never forget.

Life went on smoothly. We got a new boss eventually who was a moron, but harmless. He seemed like a complete dolt, but one day he offered me a new position. I don't think it was his idea. The big honchos back east maybe admired my pluck. Maybe they wanted somebody who wouldn't take any shit. I didn't want the job ~ it seemed like a demotion. He said, "Sure, you can think about it overnight and then come back and say 'yes'." I did.

I eventually became a manager of a 150-person staff. "Manager" in name only. I got a corner office. My new young manager was off-site, far away in Pennsylvania, just the way I liked it. I cherished my people and they hit it out of the park. We took an idea that existed only in somebody's head and turned it into a high-performance part of the operation. We became so good that....they eventually out-sourced us.

The morning after the big-wigs took my supervisors and me out for a fancy dinner and sprang it on us, I showed up for work red-eyed from a sleepless night. My young manager, who I'd assumed was on my side, dropped by my office and asked why I hadn't attended the management meeting that morning. "What's the point?" I asked. My time at the company was done; that much I'd decided somewhere around two o'clock in the morning. And it stuck like a burr that he'd never pulled the trigger and promoted me to manager, even though that's exactly what I'd been for the past three years. The next day, after he'd jetted home to PA, he sent out an email naming a simpleton in Allentown who'd I'd torn my hair out trying to train, as a manager. Just a nice little parting gift to me.

The lasting lesson from all my working years is, no good performance goes unpunished.

I will celebrate twenty years at my current job in December. I've lowered my expectations. I have no delusions. I like where I am; it's comfortable. I will drift off into retirement in a year having accomplished little that I can flout, but I've done my job. Career accomplishments don't amount to a hill of beans anyway.

My parting advice is not to do your best ~ do your best ~ but don't expect rewards. And prepare to be blindsided. Always be prepared.

I have to do this. Everyone who turns sixty-four does it.

Don't get me wrong ~ my life is not defined by work.

There's music.

More to come...

1968 ~ Caught Between Two Musical Worlds

I was thirteen in 1968, transitioning between seventh and eighth grades, which was kind of a dead zone, really. Long gone was the heady anticipation of graduating from elementary school, yet I had a million years to go (it seemed) to finally transition to the new high school building and be "grown up".

My junior high was probably one of the oldest buildings in my little town. Back in 1910 or so, it had served as the high school ~ black and white portraits of stern long-ago high school principals adorned its sanitarium-grey walls. From the outside it resembled a prison.

And yes, this was our gymnasium (minus the fallen plaster, which would have been dangerous for playing dodge ball):

I had to take the city bus to get (almost) to school, because the school district had not yet established bus service all the way out to my home (in its defense, there were only seven kids who lived in my neighborhood). Last stop on the city bus route was the old Prince Hotel, which was one of those post-World War I hostels that featured tufted burgundy armchairs with gold buttons, as well as spittoons in its lobby; and housed derelicts and Spanish-American war veterans who from their vestibule repose liked to ogle adolescent girls; and its lone desk attendant was older than death and just as lively.

The school's dress code prohibited pants (for girls, I mean), and our dresses were audaciously short; so on minus twenty-degree winter mornings, I'd alight the city bus at the Terror Hotel and commence my six-block tramp along slippery sidewalks in my mini-dress, faux-rabbit coat, plastic knee-high snow boots and no hat (hats were for sissies), clutching my US history and earth science textbooks and three spiral notebooks.

All to frost-bittenly arrive at a place I didn't want to visit for six-plus hours, but an argument my parents (such as they were) were not of a mind to debate.

My only saving grace was that I had a best friend, albeit one who crazily loved country music (one has to take their best friends wherever they find them). A year or so before, I was grooving to The Rascals and Three Dog Night, and now here I was, taking a crash course in the idiosyncrasies of honky tonk.

By now I pretty much got it. I'd figured out who I liked (Merle, Waylon, Tammy) and who I didn't (Glen, Conway, Sonny James). I'd long known who Buck Owens was, but I also learned about new artists like David Houston and Dolly Parton.

Unfortunately, 1968 was a weird year in country music. The worst singles hit number one, while (now) classic songs languished far below on the charts.

My best friend Alice and I agreed that this song reeked. I've always hated political songs, especially those that preach (and which ones don't?) Our main objection to this single, however, was that it was barely country. That, and the fact that it was played on the radio all the time. "Stab 'em in the back, that's the name of the game" ~ we enjoyed making fun of that line. Plus the whole, "Daddy hates Mommy and Mommy hates Dad" really didn't need to flow out of my speaker. Unless my speaker was spewing my own personal reality.

And this song garnered way more fame than it deserved. Again, there are so many things to hate about this song, but the old standby, "overplayed" is number one. I never realized until I studied more of Tom T. Hall's songs that he rarely wrote choruses. Sure, he had refrains from time to time; but I think the absence of a chorus has caused his songs to not age well. Listeners like something they can latch onto. Most people who sing along to the radio mess up the verses comically, but they always land the chorus.

Great songs like this only reached #10. Marty Robbins was a conundrum ~ difficult to pigeonhole. On the one hand, he truly loved his western ballads, and on the other, he could be truly soulful. It seems Marty never once gave an insightful interview, so fans will never know why he wrote the songs he did, or if he even ever thought about it.

I came to appreciate this song later. At the time I frankly wanted twin fiddles and steel guitar.

And this was only number twelve? I won't get into the whole history of me and Merle and this song, but you can read it here. If I hadn't looked at the 1968 charts, I would have sworn this was the number one single of the year.

Twenty-one? Really? Tammy had appeared on the scene in 1967 and had many hit singles before alas, "Stand By Your Man" became both a phenomenon and a punchline in '68. In hindsight, one can pinpoint when a promising career began to stagger downhill, although it's not Tammy's fault that she wrote a song everyone latched onto. The same thing happened with Lynn Anderson, who I loved until "Rose Garden" vomited onto the scene.

Regardless, number twenty-one is good:

I found a new favorite singer in '68. I feel like whenever I post a Faron Young live performance, I have to apologize. Faron was a superb singer, but a real drag to watch live. I somehow convinced my dad to drive us up to the State Fair one year to see Faron in person. Dad, and surely Mom, didn't want to go, and sitting in the bleachers during his concert, I wanted to crawl under my seat and hide in embarrassment. It wasn't (I don't think) that Faron was tipsy; I just think he didn't give a damn about singing a song straight. Maybe he'd been around so long, he said, "screw it". But trust me, his live performances and his recordings were eons apart. Nobody was better in that era.

This single wasn't from 1968, but I think David Houston deserves a mention. Nobody remembers him now (well, I do), but David Houston was huge. Not only did he have many top solo singles throughout his career, but he recorded hit duets with both Tammy Wynette ("My Elusive Dreams") and a newcomer, Barbara Mandrell. In 1968 alone, he had four top one hundred songs. As life marched on, I sort of forgot about David Houston, until I learned he had died at age fifty-eight from a brain aneurysm. Houston is one of those artists that this blog is about, because some of us don't forget.

Country duos suddenly became a thing around 1967-1968. There had been duets before, but I don't think the CMA's had a category for Country Duo before these two folks got together  (before then it was "Vocal Group", which was rather awkward when only two people were involved). Then, suddenly, duets were everywhere. I remember hearing a song on the radio for the first time and saying, "I think that's Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty!" And thus duos were off and running. 

But it was these next two who dominated:

Here's another one of those forgotten artists ~ Wynn Stewart. Wynn was a pioneer in the Bakersfield Sound. Buck liked him; Dwight plays him on his "Bakersfield Beat" Sirius channel. I liked him, too, and my dad really liked him. Dad thought this next song was the bomb. It's not from '68, but Wynn had two top one hundred hits that year (and props to this video featuring the awesome Don Rich):

This is most likely my favorite song from 1968. Mom had shipped my little sister and me off to Texas to stay with my big sister while things were "disheveled" at home. I loved it there and didn't want to come back. We'd stay up 'til the early morning hours playing Scrabble, drinking Dr. Pepper, and listening to Bill Mack on WBAP. Johnny Bush was a newcomer and there was a lot of talk that he was trying to be the next Ray Price. I didn't care ~ I loved this song, and I still love Johnny Bush. Unfortunately, I can't find a decent live performance video, but here's the song in all its glory:

Overall, I wasn't too sad to leave my pop world behind ~ it was simply an adjustment. I liked the stability of having a friend with a semi-normal family, and I'd thrown my heart into country music. There was so much to discover ~ like traveling to a foreign country for the first time. In '67 I was still on the fence about music. By 1968, country had claimed me.

My Little Black And White Kitchen

If there was a worse cook than me in the mid-seventies, I don't know her. When I got married, I knew how to make absolutely nothing. I'd made Kraft macaroni and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches. I'd heated up Campbell's soup on the stove. Why was I so inept? I simply never cared. I had a mom who cooked dinner.

I also rarely ate actual food that didn't tumble out of a vending machine. My parents owned a business that had magazine racks in the lobby and cigarette machines and spinning candy dispensers; not to mention cold eight-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. Thus, I read every movie rag available and rotted my teeth on chocolate and developed a life-long nicotine habit. My sixteen-year-old dietary regimen consisted of menthol cigarettes, Seven-Up candy bars and sickeningly sweet Coke and Dr. Pepper. Not to mention refreshing Fresca, which contained enough saccharine to hobble an African elephant. Regrets? I have a few.

But cooking? That was so passe. Old women (in their forties) did that. I was young and hip and liberated. I had pantyhose and polyester mini-skirts and long swinging hair and Cover Girl makeup.  I had the Grass Roots on my transistor radio. Aside from the candy, I really didn't eat. I smoked a lot and hid the black plastic ash tray under my bed. Sometimes I drank a can of beer, if I was able to procure one. I was still pseudo-religious, so I gave up snacks for Lent, which meant I essentially ate nothing, since snacks were my only source of nourishment. My teenage years were a cornucopia of excess, as if life was tenuous. And it was, then.

At age eighteen, when it was deemed that life was passing me by, I became engaged. My fiance and I trudged the mobile home lots in the dead of winter to find a suitable home we could afford. Renting was not even a flitting thought. No one we knew actually rented except for my friend Alice II, and her apartment was only a brief stopover until she, too, became married and bought her own mobile home. We perused a few units, clambering the wrought-iron stair steps of each; and they were all essentially the same ~ except for the one that had a kitchen floor of black and white geometric linoleum. I became fixated on that floor, and no other selection would do. We purchased our first home based upon pretty flooring. The color scheme of the remainder of the home was burnt orange and lime green ~ long-stranded shag carpeting. And we didn't even yet own an upright vacuum cleaner. We hoped to secure one as a wedding gift. We owned absolutely nothing except the console stereo my parents wanted to be rid of.

Around '75 we splurged on a microwave oven. Mom and Dad had a microwave, a monstrous behemoth that claimed almost all the kitchen retail space.

It was good for almost nothing, but like halter tops and leisure suits, it was the thing to do. It defrosted ground beef defectively, but it did work for boiling water. There were no prepared foods created exclusively for microwaves, so using the noisy apparatus was trial and error...mostly error. Major companies did have the foresight to market special ceramic serving dishes exclusively for microwaves, so there was that expense (we were scared to use paper plates ~ they might burst into flame). There was also the niggling dread that these "waves" could potentially poison anyone who consumed anything nuked in them, but we were young and indestructible, so we took our chances.

I eventually learned how to cook ~ in fact, I became more and more adventurous as the months ticked by. I shed my fear of electric appliances and began experimenting. It wasn't so hard after all! As unschooled as I was, I developed an affinity for Chinese cooking (and we didn't even own a wok). Like every other thing in life, cooking is scary until one actually tries.

My black-and-white linoleum required a weekly pan of Spic 'n Span and sore knees to maintain. I still liked it, though. It was the centerpiece of my home. Everything else in my trailer was shit, but I had that floor!

I was learning how to be a grown-up, bit by bit. It wasn't necessarily by choice, but it was time. I also was learning about poverty and how to make a life out of nothing. Our first Christmas tree was a two-foot-high plastic proxy for the real thing that I set on an end table and trimmed with decorations I fashioned out of folded paper. I scoured my checkbook daily to determine if money existed with which to buy groceries. Benevolent gifts from parents saved us from starving.

But I had music. That hand-me-down console stereo in the living room kept me company as I "housewifed". Memory is a funny thing ~ when we think about music, we cull the charts for those tracks that are timeless, but that's not how music actually worked in real time. These are the songs I remember:

In retrospect, aside from America, the hit songs of '75 were kind of mopey. No wonder I spent a lot of time staring into the abyss that was my shiny new, scary microwave oven.

1975 was the last time I could label myself a "kid", albeit a married kid. The last time I would prioritize music over everything. Before long, a completely new experience would change my life forever.

In the meantime, I did have that floor....

Music Autobiographies ~ A Surprisingly Good One

In my continuing quest for interesting autobiographies, I've discovered one that is surprisingly engaging. Don't get me wrong ~ I like Phil Collins as much as the next eighties MTV addict, but I wasn't sure his life story would be captivating, and more importantly, well written. I was wrong. I'm a patron of my local library Overdrive ~ sorry, Phil ~ it's not that I'm cheap; I'm just poor. I recently borrowed three autobiographies; one was semi-interesting; one was cringingly self-important, and then there was this one, Not Dead Yet.

Phil's writing style requires the reader to shift her conception of reading convention. The entire book is written in the present tense ~ "I stop in to see him"; "So I decide, what the hell". Honestly, though, it's a comfortable approach, once one adjusts to it. (I would never do it, but that's why I'm not a best-selling author, among other reasons.)

Truth be told, I skimmed through the obligatory childhood reminiscences. Rarely are those absorbing, but I understand one needs to begin somewhere. Quickly, however, the story took an interesting turn ~ Phil's pubescent career as a stage actor and his quest for a regular band gig. I learned about the early years of Genesis, of which I, admittedly knew next to nothing. I was happy to know that there never were any hard feelings between Phil and Peter Gabriel, who left the band of his own accord, which inadvertently allowed Phil to have a humongous career.

I liked reading about Phil noodling around in his home studio, sadly alone after his wife took the kids and moved to Vancouver, pouring out his feelings in scraps of songs; and not understanding that what he was writing would amount to the exact opposite of nothing. How he has no memory of not sharing "In The Air Tonight" with his Genesis band members, but maybe, subconsciously, realizing this was something special. I've written one or two like that ~ songs that are so close to my heart that I am loathe to let anyone else hear them.

And that he considered "Against All Odds" to be a "B" side.

Throughout his memoir, Phil is unceasingly modest; self-deprecating. That's refreshing. I'm used to reading artists' convenient recitations of how awesome they always were. Phil's insecurities are humanly relatable.

Unlike with many artists' memoirs, I came away liking Phil Collins a ton more than I ever did before.

Like Phil says in the book, "Ba-DUM-Ba-Da-DUM!

Sting and Peter Gabriel sang backing vocals on this one:

The "B Side":

As an MTV-watcher, none of Phil Collins' singles takes me back to the eighties as much as this next one. I remember seeing Dwight Yoakam on David Letterman's show being interviewed right after he performed "Fast As You" and Dave asked him about the last line in the song, "Ahhh, Sue-ssie!". Dwight said he'd gotten the idea from this song:

More Phil, with Genesis:

Summing up, Phil Collins is awesome....and a cutie, too.

Buy (or borrow) this memoir. You'll like it.

And, oh, by the way, Peter Gabriel didn't do too badly for himself after leaving Genesis. He did, after all, have the best music video of all time:

Blogging Platforms and Discovery

I love Google as much as...well, everybody. I use Google practically every day for something. And I'm quite sure that Google knows me very well, but it's a trade-off...information at my fingertips or protect my privacy? Frankly, I need Google. After all, Ask Jeeves has retired.

Everyone swears by WordPress for blogging, but I've used Blogger since 2007 and I like it ~ it's made to order for a writer; no confusing elements to configure; no resultant hissy fits. I actually have a blog on WordPress, but I'd never be able to find it...now.

The one advantage to WordPress, though, is that it's easy as pie to find blogs to browse. You just click "next blog" and voilà. Finding blogs on Blogger, however...good luck! The Google people are so smart, I just don't get it. Maybe blogs aren't actually a "thing" anymore, so Google figures, why bother?

I used to follow certain blogs, but then Google locked me out of my account and hard as I tried, I could never recover my settings. The email threads were (almost) funny...nobody at headquarters could grasp what I was asking, and each "representative" sent me to links that redirected me to other links that redirected me back to the original links. After months of frustration, I simply gave up and created a new blog. But I, of course, lost my favorite blogs and lost all my followers. I'm (kind of) over it now.

But now I can't find blogs to follow. I tried...well, Googling..."Blogger blogs" in my preferred category, but that was essentially useless. I feel adrift. I would love to find like-minded writers, to feel like I'm part of a community. I also would love to get my followers back ~ they at least left comments ~ but they lost me and won't ever find me again.

So, if anyone is actually reading this and either has a blog or knows how to search for them, please let me know. 

Meanwhile, I'll keep on keeping on. I'll keep writing. That's what I do, after all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE:  

I did find a Blogger search engine, Bloggernity, in which one can search by category. Sadly, most of the blogs I found have not been updated in ages. Maybe Google is right and blogging isn't a "thing".

What Inspires Creativity?

If I could live wherever I chose, I'd live by water. Not a brambly river bank, but near a cool blue lake, where I could stroll on the sand swathed in the rolling fog, my cheeks caressed by tiny droplets of spray.

Some people are inspired by mountains; others love getting lost in a dense forest. For me it's water, but a special kind of water. Not a dinky mid-Minnesota freshwater pool inhabited by leaping sunfish, but a BIG lake with a murky, mysterious history ~ Lake Superior, to be exact. Gordon Lightfoot will tell you ~ the skies of November turn gloomy there.

Lake Superior is my special place, a place tucked in the creases of my memory that I reclaim from time to time. It exists in the same state where I live, yet it's a whole world away, like nirvana chanced upon in the midst of a parched field of prairie grass.

I've ambled along the Lake Walk and spied painters, their easels braced into divots of grass, staining the canvas with splotches of sky blue and green and ash. I don't linger long, but I come away with the impression these people are true artists. They could be talentless hacks from The Joy Of Painting school for all I know, but they sure look like artists.

I wrote a song once as I lounged on a chaise beside the shore of Lake Superior. The words were good, but the song itself, unfortunately, turned into one of those airy Graham Nash ditties (he spent far too much time by the water). I also journaled a lot, which degenerated into amateur pencil drawings of trees. I, unbelievably, was blocked. And with all that nature surrounding me!

The bottom line is, one can be inspired, but don't look for miracles. It's not the place that incites creativity; it's the mind. I could write a better song about My Lake sitting in my desk chair in a stuffy bedroom than I ever did when I had the whole tableau before me.

So, what inspires creativity? It's part memory, part craving; but mostly it's simply long slog ~ elbow grease.

I still wish I lived by the Big Lake, though.

~~~~~~~~~

My Lake Superior song:

A better song: