As a writer, it's hard to come to terms with the idea that you may have already written your best stuff. I will read over things that I wrote ten years ago and think, "Man, that's really good. I don't know that I have any more of that in me." I do it with poetry, short stories, songs, concert reviews, whatever, knowing full well that it's a defeatist and fatalistic way to look at things.
The saving grace is found within the problem itself: it's hard to come to terms with the idea. If it were easy to come to terms with it, I'd have long ago sold my Mac and my guitars; I would have given all my notebooks to my four-year-old to color in. I wouldn't agonize over the fact that I've only written two love songs for my wife, and I wouldn't walk out of the Salvation Army on an almost weekly basis with bags full of twenty-five cent books, hoping desperately that within them I will find more and more inspiration to put down age-old ideas into my own phrasing.
A wise woman once said, "Satisfaction means death." It was my wife Sarah, and she just now said it. How right she is. It all comes down to that one word forever immortalized when Keith and Mick put it to the music Keith had, according to legend, put on tape while sleepwalking. Unfortunately, legend can only take us so far—Alexander's obsession with Achilles got him as far as India (pretty far for an army of antiquity), but he knew there was more. I can't imagine his grief, dying in a bed and not the field, certain that there was more world out there. I know with near certainty that I will never wake up to find a piece of music on my tape recorder that will match the great import of what became the Stones' most famous work—the riff that inspired generations of musicians and will continue to inspire as long as humans are born with hearing. But I take solace in knowing that Keith would have never thought that up had he never learned to play "Louie Louie." I rest peacefully knowing that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would have never been born without several thousand listenings to "Satisfaction." "Seven Nation Army" must owe a lot to "Teen Spirit." Shit, look at what the White Stripes have birthed. The Black Keys? God, they are good. You know that Jack White must listen to a lot of the same stuff Richard Berry was hearing when he wrote "Louie Louie." Dirty words and all, if they're really in there.
So this is why I love the past, the history of it all. It reminds me that something great can be used to make something new that is also great. When Sarah and I are done writing out here on the deck, we're going to go inside and watch the newest episode of "Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special" I just got in the mail. I'm telling you, buy any one of these (I suggest the one with Aerosmith), get into your favorite chemical state, and watch this with someone or someones you love. It will change your life. It's just so wonderful to see all these artists really striving to be SO GOOD. Or, as in the case of KISS, not so good, but WHAT A SHOW. Damn. Do yourself a favor.
I know that my best work is not done. I delight in knowing that all of that old beauty is still floating around us, seeping into us. But I want to make something new. For now, here's something old... Keep in mind that I've really grown to love disco and funk and all that junk.
When the Brown Went Away
The world, for the most part, pretty much lost its charm around 1988. Perhaps it's the overwhelmingly odd repetition, visually, of that number, with its circles on circles and their silly resemblance to cloverleafs married to each other, sending car upon car back on to the same freeway. Or maybe it was just that it was the next Olympiad; four years after it was OUR Olympics, here in L.A. and for that one summer we were IT, man, we were the place to be if you could run fast, but this time around in was in Korea or somewhere like that, somewhere, not here, so screw them. This time around there was no stationary to be bought that shone red, white, and really blue at the top that said “Los Angeles Olympics.” McDonald’s was no longer giving out little enameled pins that really made me proud to live near L.A., be the kid whose Dad had once had the first female Olympic luger in his third grade class and love Big Macs like they were transubstantiated.
1988 told me that the 80s were here officially, that the 70s were long gone and that someday I’d be looking for a way to describe the way those first two decades of my life felt.
It’s a color and temperature and music and feel, thing, though, and it’s almost impossible...no, it’s quite impossible for me to ever find someone that gets what I’m trying to say about growing up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and not simply remembering them for their disco and their hair bands and their funk and all the other shit that crackers like me try to pretend embodied those times in full. We were really into it all, man. But here’s the feel, the feel for ME, and maybe a lot of other people, especially people older who remember it all better than I do. Here’s the feel.
It’s a record. It’s a record that came out in 1973, the year I was born. Of course I don’t remember its release, or even its ten-year anniversary, but it means so much to me now. It’s called I Got a Name, and it’s by Jim Croce, and man, if that record and its cover don’t say it all, I don’t know what to tell you. The whole cover is brown, with a touch of orange and green and even a little pink at the end of the cigar he’s holding. He’s blowing smoke and it half masks the enormous, comical moustache he’s wearing, wafting up past his wonderfully sloppy afro.
He has a huge nose to hold that huge moustache up, and if you pull the record out and flip it over (well, that’s what I had to do just now), you’ll see Jim laying on a big, wrought iron bed in what must be an apartment somewhere in New York City. I’d like to imagine it’s the Hotel Chelsea, the one bit of that city that made me feel like this record when I went in its lobby. Of course, I couldn’t go past that lobby; I’m not published yet, I don’t have a record out, and even if I did, I’m not skinny enough or enough of a smoker to stay there and get my Rolling Stone pictures shot on one of the balconies in my cowboy boots.
Croce is barefoot, lanked out on that old bed; he’s shirtless, smoking a cigar at what could be nine in the morning or two in the afternoon, depending on which direction his window is facing. There’s an ashtray on the night table—it looks empty, almost like it’s a prop, but maybe cigar smokers don’t leave their cigar butts laying around. The two coffee cups are most likely empty, or at least filled slightly with very cold coffee. On the bed next to Jim is a Car & Driver magazine with a Mustang II on the cover. Not just a Mustang; a Mustang II. The pin-up calendar on the wall is just far enough from the portrait over the bed to seem accidental, or at most an afterthought, while that photo—of whom?—John Sebastian, perhaps?—seems unnaturally focused and sharp compared to the rest of the scene. Croce is smiling—almost maniacally—and the photo, in black-and-white, or is it sepia-and-white, is tinted here and there, like the cover, with some red, some green, a little yellow, and are his jeans slightly blue? I think they might be.
I tend to think of that time and place like that photograph. Not colorless, but brown, mostly. And brown is good, brown is warm, and rich, and earthy, and skin-like. It’s soft, it’s dirty, you can smell it, and it’s the closest color to most people that I can think of. It’s like a thing baked, or cultivated, or carved. And those occasional other colors are thrown in, hand-tinted onto the jacket cover of that record that just feels like old bakeries, velveteen hallways, cigarettes, coffee, frocked wallpaper, old-looking taxicabs, macramé, corduroy, jean jackets, fucked-up guitars, and a good song here and there.
December 28, 2003
1988 told me that the 80s were here officially, that the 70s were long gone and that someday I’d be looking for a way to describe the way those first two decades of my life felt.
It’s a color and temperature and music and feel, thing, though, and it’s almost impossible...no, it’s quite impossible for me to ever find someone that gets what I’m trying to say about growing up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and not simply remembering them for their disco and their hair bands and their funk and all the other shit that crackers like me try to pretend embodied those times in full. We were really into it all, man. But here’s the feel, the feel for ME, and maybe a lot of other people, especially people older who remember it all better than I do. Here’s the feel.
It’s a record. It’s a record that came out in 1973, the year I was born. Of course I don’t remember its release, or even its ten-year anniversary, but it means so much to me now. It’s called I Got a Name, and it’s by Jim Croce, and man, if that record and its cover don’t say it all, I don’t know what to tell you. The whole cover is brown, with a touch of orange and green and even a little pink at the end of the cigar he’s holding. He’s blowing smoke and it half masks the enormous, comical moustache he’s wearing, wafting up past his wonderfully sloppy afro.
He has a huge nose to hold that huge moustache up, and if you pull the record out and flip it over (well, that’s what I had to do just now), you’ll see Jim laying on a big, wrought iron bed in what must be an apartment somewhere in New York City. I’d like to imagine it’s the Hotel Chelsea, the one bit of that city that made me feel like this record when I went in its lobby. Of course, I couldn’t go past that lobby; I’m not published yet, I don’t have a record out, and even if I did, I’m not skinny enough or enough of a smoker to stay there and get my Rolling Stone pictures shot on one of the balconies in my cowboy boots.
Croce is barefoot, lanked out on that old bed; he’s shirtless, smoking a cigar at what could be nine in the morning or two in the afternoon, depending on which direction his window is facing. There’s an ashtray on the night table—it looks empty, almost like it’s a prop, but maybe cigar smokers don’t leave their cigar butts laying around. The two coffee cups are most likely empty, or at least filled slightly with very cold coffee. On the bed next to Jim is a Car & Driver magazine with a Mustang II on the cover. Not just a Mustang; a Mustang II. The pin-up calendar on the wall is just far enough from the portrait over the bed to seem accidental, or at most an afterthought, while that photo—of whom?—John Sebastian, perhaps?—seems unnaturally focused and sharp compared to the rest of the scene. Croce is smiling—almost maniacally—and the photo, in black-and-white, or is it sepia-and-white, is tinted here and there, like the cover, with some red, some green, a little yellow, and are his jeans slightly blue? I think they might be.
I tend to think of that time and place like that photograph. Not colorless, but brown, mostly. And brown is good, brown is warm, and rich, and earthy, and skin-like. It’s soft, it’s dirty, you can smell it, and it’s the closest color to most people that I can think of. It’s like a thing baked, or cultivated, or carved. And those occasional other colors are thrown in, hand-tinted onto the jacket cover of that record that just feels like old bakeries, velveteen hallways, cigarettes, coffee, frocked wallpaper, old-looking taxicabs, macramé, corduroy, jean jackets, fucked-up guitars, and a good song here and there.
December 28, 2003
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