Silly Love Songs

 

In 1985 I was in college
Living in a basement dorm room
That my roommate
A punk rocker
From Gainesville Florida
Called the Hellhole
The third roommate spent his days
With enormous headphones
Plugged into a radio broadcasting news reports
From an AM station in New Hampshire
We didn't know who lived aboveground
Or if anybody did
One night bass guitar frequencies
Began transmitting through the floorboards
And into the Hellhole
The notes appeared
As thick black sonic tires
Bouncing around the Hellhole
Ricocheting rolling plopping
The force of the notes was such
That nothing else could be heard
The notes said:
Dee dee doot dee do da di da doot dee do
In a tumbling inevitable way
They were insistent relentless
I listened beyond the bouncing tire notes
And detected a Liverpool voice
"What's wrong with that?"
The torrent of Rickenbacker hail
Issued forth in the early morning
In the afternoon at night
And from the movement of the feet
Across the floor upstairs
It sounded like a good time every time

The Times, The Changes

Die Kruezen, Cement - cassette, car stereo, blue Chevy Caprice

Meat Puppets II - blue Memorex cassette, boombox, driveway behind family house

Beatles "blue" double album - blue vinyl, grade school bedroom

Happiness Is Being with the Spinners - 8-track, car stereo, cream colored Cadillac convertible

Pell Mell, Flow - CD, boombox, bedroom third floor of family house

Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician - vinyl, Portland, Maine, roommate Matt's room

Pixies, Surfer Rosa - Portland, Maine, Brackett St., living room, music played from an upstairs bedroom, source unknown

Miles Davis, Big Fun - vinyl, Bart or Joe's dorm room

The Harder They Come soundtrack - vinyl, Zach’s house, living room

Cesaria Evora (eponymous) - CD, store sound system, Tower Records, Chicago Loop

Neil Young, Decade; Bob Dylan, Infidels; REM, Murmur - vinyl, in a room we never named, family house

Running Fence

 

In Junior High

When I went
To my best friend's house
To sit on the puffy orange
Corduroy couch
And listen
To Cheap Trick records
We would pick up a book
Off the coffee table
And leaf through it
Kind of enjoying it
Not really understanding it
It was oddly shaped
With an off-white cover
Made out of some
Sort of textured material
Inside were photos of a fence
Stretching across hill
After hill after hill
And through meadows
And across the sides of mountains
And the fence didn't seem
To serve any purpose
It was made of mere fabric
White glossy textured fabric
Tethered to steel poles
Stuck in the ground
Winding through miles
Of western landscapes
I was indifferent or confused
By this book
But I kept on looking at it
Visit after visit
There was wind across that land
Sun pounding down on the fence
One day I chanced to look at
The inside of the back cover
Tucked into a pocket
Was a piece of the fabric
Seen in the pictures of the fence
I felt one step closer to it

Sometimes

sometimes i really
miss the late night
cable access
political talk shows
arts talk shows
of the 1980s
the creaky sets
the off rack suits
the audio problems
the Q & A tinged with nerves
because you knew they were in it
in it for the love
in it for the dream
in it for the beauty

of those moments

15 Hallucinations on 15 Separate Patches of Sand

 

You Can Go Your Own Way

As he lay in the gully with a broken ankle, the snow gently falling onto his bare head, a Fleetwood Mac song whose lyrics he could never quite understand played on his mind's jukebox. "You can go your own way. You can call it under a long and day." It made no sense, but that's all he could make out through the little speaker in his clock radio back in the 1970s. I should have listened to more Fleetwood Mac, he thought. I never even listened to a full album, never bought one. They had songs composed following unknown strategies. Who was doing what in the songs? He couldn't tell. The drummer looked like a giant, and the band was named after him and the bassist, John. But then he knew more about Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Were they writing rock songs or pop songs? Could the lyrics be understood if one really focused? What were they about? Coming and going? Movements up and down hills? The movement of days? Love staying and love failing? He had heard about all the drug use in California in the 1970s. Those drugs must have been miraculous stuff to permit them to compose such music in the middle of the night in a wooden chalet studio in Sausalito.

A fox approached the man, sniffing him curiously. He tried to talk to the creature. "What do you know about Stevie Nicks? Do you know how Fleetwood Mac went from being a blues band to a rock and pop band?" The fox didn't answer and trotted off in the snow, leaving a trail of little paw prints.

The sun moved across the dome of the sky. A majestic 10-point buck approached the man, looking at him impassively. The man said to the deer, "Do you know how Fleetwood Mac wrote their songs? They don't seem to follow any pattern." The deer gestured upward with his powerful neck and head toward the road. He seemed to be letting the man know that it was time to try to drag himself up out of the gully. The deer traced some shapes in the snow with its hooves. The man interpreted the shapes as the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs. The buck bolted away. And the man began to pull himself up the bank, singing the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs, "Listen to the wind blow/ watch the sunrise /Run in the shadows / damn your love, damn your lies."

                               Scioto Lounge by Terry Allen

                                                               Columbus, Ohio public art

NOT

I am not an art thief plotting my next move

I am not a post rock bass player

I am not a merchant seaman ready to embark north

I am not a longshoreman getting ready to maneuver a crane

I am not a lumberjack afraid of the direction the tree may fall

I am not a jewel thief hiding in the basement until the shop closes and night falls

I am not a boxing coach

I am not a hipster mathematics professor

I am not a sculptor who builds little motorized things that race around going "wizzz wizzz" and that bump into each other and topple each other over

(I am not a pompous jackass - at least I don't think so - even though I kind of look like one in the picture, I think it's just being bad at selfies)

I am not a guy who makes weird sounding hybrid electric/ acoustic instruments - like two cantaloupe rinds with a thin tin cover that can be bonked in a resonant way

I am not a guy who was once a European dead lifter in a very low weight class

I am not a chef who opened the only Portuguese restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin