I can have animosity towards my literal neighbor with no moral difficulties.
I live in the city, a few football fields' length from an interstate with people all around me. Which is why I'm curious as to how I wound up with the neighbor that needs a rooster in the backyard.
That's right. My neighbor, in the middle of Oklahoma City, has a rooster. How do I know this? Well, it's really quite simple. I hear it crowing every morning- unfortunately, while I'm still in bed.
This is not my first incident with my neighbors and animals. Oh, no. Last year, they kept a family of rabbits in their backyard. Theoretically, they kept a family of rabbits in their backyard. Practically, they had rabbits that roamed the neighborhood. That didn't really bother me so much as the uncle or Dad, (I can't tell who is who, it's a big Hispanic family that I've never oficially met or talked to, apart from the kids, who are all best buddies and constantly outside.)
One day I saw one of the adults in my backyard gathering handful clumps of grass. I was nonplussed for a moment, then realized that he was stealing my grass to feed the rabbits, since his backyard is mostly dirt. While I was perplexed by the idea of an adult jumping a fence to steal grass, I was really more concerned with why you would acquire rabbits if you can't afford to feed them or provide for them using your OWN means.
But things have a way of working themselves out around me with little intervention on my part and sure enough, one day a dead rabbit appeared in my backyard, surely the work of the neighbor's German shepherd two doors down, which can also jump the fence.
I don't imagine I'll be hearing the rooster for much longer either, due to death-by-dog or the BB gun I have fantasized about purchasing for the last few mornings...
Every now and then I'm reminded of a principle I learned as a young musician that is equally appropriate and reliable whether you are talking about playing a trumpet, strumming a guitar, or preparing to speak:
Sometimes, the best thing you can contribute is silence.
Watching re-runs of The Wonder Years as of late has me contemplating my younger days...
I was in sixth grade. It was the week approaching summer vacation. All of the other kids and I were enjoying our last week of being the kings of the hill, the oldest, and therefore the coolest, kids in the building. At the end of the summer we knew we faced a total reversal. We would be seventh graders, lowest ones on the totem pole- peons in a totally new school building, new teachers, new expectations...in short, a new culture.
Which is what made this last week of sixth grade so memorable. And I remember Mr. Springer had been building up to that last day. He was our English teacher and he looked like a cross between the teacher at the beginning of Red Dawn and Adolph Hitler, with the body of J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons. He was also greatly feared amongst the kids I knew for a couple reasons. 1) He was a stoic man, hard to read. He was never overtly kind or rude. Just very matter-of-fact. Those kinds of people are trouble for the sixth grade brain. I at least imagined how horrible it would be in the event that he actually did explode. 2) Other than the gym teacher Mr. Fowler, he was the only other male teacher in the building. I remember the absolute shock I felt when I first found out there was a man who was teaching in the building. It was a whole new world. All of the other men I knew at that point merely tolerated children. None of them chose to spend eight hours a day amongst them.
Like I said, that last week Mr. Springer had been hinting at his yearly speech he made to all of his sixth grade students on their last day. He would mention how kids in the past would always be blown away by how great his yearly speech was. There seemed to be this tacit understanding between teachers and students that we were about to be released for battle or thrown to lions or other such life-changing struggle.
Well, that kind of anticipation was enough to pique my curiosity. And the last day had finally arrived. The class hour was drawing to an end and I wondered, "Has he forgotten?"
But he hadn't. He calmed the class down to an expectant hush. "And now I will give you this important speech I give every year to my students going into seventh grade. Listen closely..." he said, slowly lifting himself from the stool behind his lectern, where he spent the majority of time that year, challenging us to correctly diagram sentences, distinguishing between nouns, verbs, commas and all sorts of other things I now misuse all the time.
With the class absolutely silent by this time, he spoke: "Make. Good. Decisions."
He said it just like that. Each word a seeming philosophical treatise of its own.
Here it is, almost twenty years hence and I can still hear Mr. Springer's voice in my head, how he took those words and turned them into something important. I wonder whatever happened to that man. I knew him for a total of about nine months, but still his gruff voice rattles around in my head from time to time, when the chips are down or I'm straining against an adverse wind.
James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, (with apologies to Naomi)
When you're working your way through the Rolling Stone Top 100 Albums I am finding out that you have to wade your way through a lot of singer/songwriter sensitivity. (See also the post on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and the post I didn't have the heart to write about Joni Mitchell's Blue.) Maybe the early seventies was the magazine's heyday, so they proclaimed a larger amount of the cultural artifacts to be "genius." Whatever the reason, I've probably said before that this type of "guy-and-a-guitar" stuff is not really my specialty. I don't worship at the church of the holy lyric.
Well, James Taylor's second albumSweet Baby James is another one of those revered albums that I just don't understand. While "Fire and Rain" is admittedly very pretty and his re-working of "Oh Susanna" with extended-voiced jazz chords is interesting to me and a demonstration of how able Taylor is as an acoustic finger-picker, it doesn't cover up the fact that there is a grievous musical sin present on this album.
It is called "Steamroller."
It is your basic twelve-bar blues, the standard form for improvisers in bar bands the Western World over. And I'll let that idea sink in a little bit...James Taylor...singing "blues."
I'm talking about one of the most pleasant, non-confrontational voices in all of pop music. When he sings "Well, I'm a cement mixer/ A churning urn of burning funk," it is mind-blowingly wrong on a couple different levels.
One, the blues idiom is certainly no place for clever word play and alliteration. Save that for the college-sweater-and-tie crowd.
But more importantly, when that kindly, soda-jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold, voice sings "I'm a churning urn of burning funk," it is self-reflexively false and impossible. Kind of like writing "This sentence contains no words."
I can't think of anything less funky right now than James Taylor's voice and music. (Actually, I can: Mozart. Bill Gates. Stephen Hawking... But you get the point.) It would be like Mister Rogers rapping some Tupac or Biggie Smalls. Just not believable. Now... Prince. Albert King. George Clinton. James Brown. Marvin Gaye...I'd believe it if one of those guys told me they had some "burning funk" within them.
And "Steamroller" is just the most notable of two or three blueses performed by Taylor on this album. And each time I played them I think I also heard the sound of Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters rolling over in their graves.
A couple nights ago I watched a pretty good documentary/concert called Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It's the story of the musicians who played on every Motown hit, from the beginning until Motown moved their operations to Los Angeles. They were known as The Funk Brothers and they were responsible for some incredibly layered musical creations. (This movie was, however, a little lacking in explanation of the process a song goes through to get from songwriter to arranger to musicians.) I was curious as to just how much creation these guys were responsible for. My hunch is that the staff arrangers were responsible for getting lead sheets together and left the details up to the band.
Anyway, it's an interesting, sometimes sad, story of musicians plying their craft in a strange purgatory of notoriety and anonymity in that everyone heard their work, but they were never credited, (until Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On?)
I recommend this movie to anyone interested in music in general and Motown music in particular. There is also footage of a live reunion concert of the surviving Funk Brothers paired with soulful singers- my favorites being Gerald Levert, (who knew?) and Joan Osborne, (again, who knew?) And you can't beat Bootsy Collins covering "Do You Love Me?"
Queen's A Night at the Opera I have no problems calling this one a masterpiece. The amount of work that obviously went into these studio creations is mind-boggling to me. The amount of arranging that is behind the multi-layered vocals and guitar parts is pretty much orchestration. This album is the original home of "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song I have always loved and whose genius speaks for itself. And it kind of encapsulates the entire spectrum of musical ideas contained on the rest of the album. There are lovely lyrical moments such as "Love of My Life." There are bouncy moments, like in "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon." There are majestic rock moments like "I'm in Love With My Car" and "The Prophet's Song." Just a fantastic album and I TOTALLY understand why this is considered a "classic." I couldn't stop listening to it.
Marvin Gaye What's Going On? At first I was kind of ambivalent to this album. Having heard the singles and liking them a lot, the rest of the songs kind of paled for me, even though there is also an obvious attempt at linking these songs together into suites--an idea I usually like. And it's hard to imagine a ime when orchestral strings over funk music was a new idea.
But if you're into art describing the zeitgeist at the time of its creation, I can see why this one is vaunted. This is an album of political unrest right smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War.
But I was more interested in Marvin Gaye's artistic moment here. This was a guy known for love songs and seduction. The love he speaks of on this album is the universal, "brotherly love" that I hear Christians and other religious folks talk about a lot. (And Gaye's strained relationship ith his minister father probably played into these themes as well.) That makes this album a lot easier for me to like, since I like the idea of love conquering hatred, as naive as it all sounds. Deep down, I want to believe Marvin when he says "War is not the answer..." Bearing that in mind, this might be an album written for today as well.
As Queen said in "Flash Gordon":
Just a man with a man's courage
He knows nothing but a man
But he can never fail
No one but the pure in heart
May find the golden grail
