In and of itself that wasn’t strange. Windows calendar sends those alerts out all the time for various friends of mine.

The thing is, I don’t know Yancy Noll. The only reason I know his name is because he was was shot dead in his car on September 3, 2012. At first they thought it was a road rage incident up in Lake City. But now there’s some thought that it might have been a thrill kill.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

(Poster above by Ed Fotheringham. Printing by the Vera Project. There are still a limited number of posters for sale. Proceeds go to Music for Marriage Equality. Starting on August 27, 2012, you should be able to buy one at www.music4marriage.org. Nice, professional, B&W photos below by Niffer Calderwood. Video by Chris Swenson. Blurry color photo of Ed Fotherginham’s feet by me and my Droid Incredible.)

I saw an impromptu reunion of the band Flop last Saturday night in the living room at my buddy Whiting’s house. For those who don’t know them, Flop was a band from the era of the Seattle grunge explosion, but never quite of the Seattle grunge explosion. They made three great full-length records, filled with melodic pop/punk. Then they disbanded around 1995.

In a alternate universe, destiny might well have delivered to Flop the fame that Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden received in ours. Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain, after years spent touring and trying to make it in the music business, might have put his art skills to use and stumbled into a successful career in web design, all the while continuing to play music shows and release records of great quality.

But in our universe, that fate belongs to Rusty Willoughby: art director by day, musician and songwriter 24/7/365. Whether with Pure Joy, Flop, Llama, or his most recent project, Cobirds Unite, few Seattle musicians have matched Rusty for longevity and consistent quality of output. Indeed, the Cobirds Unite album is easily one of my favorite records of the last 5 years.

Rusty may have never amassed a fan base comparable to that of the icons of grunge, but his audience remains passionate and loyal, a fact that was plainly evident last Saturday night. People were in high spirits, and Rusty, Bill, Paul, Nate, and Dave did not leave them disappointed.

The show somehow managed this amazing trick of being filled with wonderful nostalgia while simultaneously remaining absolutely rooted in the now. Maybe it was having everyone packed into such a small space (a great call on Flop’s part). Maybe, because Rusty’s current songs are still so great, nobody had to feel secretly sad that all the good stuff was in the past. Whatever the reasons, Whiting’s living room felt refreshingly devoid of ironic self-consciousness.

This, in and of itself, was notable. For few in the annals of history have wielded the protective shield of cynical, self-aware, irony more proudly and completely than the people of my generation. Boomer hippies have their free love, patchouli, tie dye, consciousness raising protest marches, and self-righteousness. We have our irony.

If I had any doubt about just how much our ironic outlook marks us as creatures of a particular time and place, a recent weekend spent amongst the sincerely earnest young songsters at the Doe Bay Music Festival made it plain for me again.

But last Saturday there was no one foot in the water and one foot on the shore. Everyone in the room seemed to want to be there all the way. And they looked like they belonged there too. Scanning the proceedings, I had an odd sensation, as if somebody had taken a picture of a house party from 1992, put it in Photoshop, and applied the “middle-aged” filter.

I know that probably doesn’t sound very attractive in the abstract. But it was really quite awesome in the flesh. The years had not transformed anyone into a sad, unrecognizable caricature of their younger self, and Flop was still great too. Yes, there were some bald heads and grey hair. But cosmetics could not obscure the unbroken thread running from Whiting’s living room all the way back to where it all started for Flop years ago in a shared U-District house.

There was no bittersweet paradise lost vibe. There was only a joyful feeling of renewal, as we reconnected at the most basic and visceral level to what for many of us is the formative, shared-cultural experience of our generation, our storefront church, our Festival Express: the small-scale rock show–band and audience crammed together, wall between them destroyed, pulsing and undulating as one, senses completely immersed in the moment.

I’m not sure how the night could have been any more right. For my people have always been mostly about little cultural moments like this, shared with our immediate community, in places like basements and living rooms. We might not have invented doing it yourself, but our most significant cultural contribution has probably been making it something that everyone throughout the world immediately understands when they see the letters “DIY”.

The ethos of DIY is a modest one. Rarely, does its reach exceed its grasp. To a large extent, it exists in opposition to the grandiose. Indeed, it was probably observing the very public foibles of the Greatest Generation and the early Baby Boomers that led many of us to cling so tightly to the more modest goal of keeping things real enough that they don’t get too overblown and polluted.

Perhaps, it’s fair to criticize our lack of grand, widescreen audacity and ambition. But on the other hand, our DIY ethos seems to have aged better than tie dye and patchouli.

And that’s no accident. It was by design. For metaphorically speaking, DIY isn’t one particular suit of clothes or a specific fashion trend. It’s whatever you happen to be wearing at the moment you decide you’re going to get off your ass and do something, however small or personal it may seem in the grander scheme of things. In this regard, DIY is a timeless outfit that’s always in style.

Over the last 30 years, we’ve helped grow a lot of cool stuff out of the DIY soil. Even if it wasn’t a stated goal to begin with, some of it has changed the world. In the process, we’ve acquired power. Many among us are now the Man or the Woman.

So it’s both foolish and impossible to pretend that we are still part of some sort of underdog insurgency. Our sensibility is everywhere, in all kinds of improbable places, like State Farm Insurance commercials and sports talk radio.

Indeed, it increasingly feels like the entire mainstream is populated with people like us, cultural omnivores, making sly references to things like Gilligan’s Island; John Cage; Rush; Miles Davis; the Three Stooges; Apocalypse Now; and Tony Orlando and Dawn. It’s not just for margin dwelling hipsters anymore.

That can be pretty weird to contemplate sometimes. But still, even in middle age, a different thread also remains, one running slightly under the surface, but nevertheless hardwired into our collective identity. We don’t seem to know any other way than to keep going back to the DIY soil, wherever we may find it.

When in doubt, go to the basement, the living room, the practice space, the workshop, the drawing board, the word processor, or wherever else you do your thing. Make something.

Why? Because you want to. Because you have to. Because the act of doing it feels good in and of itself, even if the process ends up being more important than the outcome in the grand scheme of things. Express yourself. Remind yourself that you are still alive. In doing so, maybe help remind your friends and family that they are alive too.

That’s what Flop invited us to do with them so joyfully last Saturday night, put our hands in that dirt, rub it on our sweaty, beer-soaked faces, and remember something that has shaped so much of what we’ve done to date: No matter how much our worlds may change, with careers, kids, and lots of other cool (and not so cool) distractions and responsibilities, that soil remains ours to work in. We don’t need anyone’s permission to sow our seeds there. All we need is a little inspiration, the tools at hand, and the will to follow through.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

In response to the Pulitzer Prize winning Eli Sanders and some other folks, Brendan Kiley posted Two Additional Notes on Violence vs. Vandalism on the Stranger’s Slog this morning.

Once again, his post engendered a bunch of comments. At #84 in the comment thread, Brendan posted the following:

Again: I *do not advocate* any of this stuff. But I do not believe that vandalism and violence are the same thing. Smashing a person and smashing a window are both scary, but they are not moral equivalents and should not be regarded as such.
I’m surprised by how difficult that idea seems to be for some of you.

I agree with Brendan. Vandalism does not always imply violence. But as I said yesterday, vandalism and violence are both acts of aggression.

Along the continuum of aggression, violence is morally worse than vandalism. An act of violence always intends violence as its outcome. An act of vandalism, on the other hand, does not necessarily have this intent.

Nevertheless, the possibility of violence is almost always imbedded within acts of vandalism, and the two have often walked hand in hand throughout human history.

That’s why people commonly lump vandalism and violence together. And that’s why many people believe that the moral distance separating these two categories of action isn’t wide enough to be conceptually meaningful most of the time.

One of my problems with vandalism is that too often its perpetrators don’t consciously appreciate the possibility of violence embedded in their act of vandalism.

Instead, their vandalism has an aura of being mildly transgressive but mostly harmless, as when high school students drive around the suburbs kicking down people’s mailboxes.

The risk of getting caught is part of what makes it exciting for the vandal. But embedded in the fear of "getting caught" is also the unconscious knowledge/fear that "getting caught" might also mean "getting hurt," if the wrong person happens to do the "catching."

How many people have heard a story about about some kid who was out throwing snowballs at cars, hit a car with a snowball, the car stopped, a dude got out, chased the kid down, and put a whipping on him. It wasn’t an everyday thing. But these stories underscored the riskiness (and enhanced the thrill ) of partaking in this activity.

(So the violence embedded in the vandal’s act might not be violence on someone else. It might be violent retribution visited upon the person doing the vandalism.)

There’s a lack of empathy at the root of most vandalism. Perhaps the people who put the rocks through Mayor Mike McGinn’s window did not intend to do violence to McGinn and his family. But they also didn’t really show much empathy for what the experience of receiving those rocks might mean to them. In that moment, McGinn and his family weren’t people. They were just abstract symbols.

Sure, it’s different when the window is at Niketown. A multi-national corporation doesn’t have feelings. As someone else in the comments thread on Brendan’s post said: “Corporations are made of capital; people are made of carbon.”  But there are carbon life forms who work and shop at Niketown. These people do have feelings. One of them could have been hurt. Somebody will have to clean up the damage. Somebody could be hurt in the process of doing that too.

There was similar property damage in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood a couple of days ago. Every storefront involved was not a Niketown. Some shops were small businesses made of both capital and carbon, capital they may not be able to replace. But as with the Seattle property damage, at the point of impact, those people with those businesses were just symbols. In the process of making their statements, the political vandals stripped these people of their humanity.

People doing politically motivated property damage tend to be justify themselves by using the following logic:

"My vandalism is a high-minded symbolic statement. It’s no immature thrill seeking stunt. Besides, it’s minor small potatoes compared to the atrocities promulgated by the people and groups that I am protesting against. What about Mitt Romney, Bank of America, the IMF, and the US Army in the Middle East? These people and groups are hurting people. These are desperate times. People need to know we are serious."

And that’s all true. There are many cold, empathy-challenged, border-line (and actual) psychopaths who hold power in our world. They hurt a lot of people. But when we stoop to their level of non-empathy, we become them.

So while violence and vandalism are not morally equivalent, they are morally linked by the lack of empathy that is at the root of both them.

People who appreciate this linkage tend not to perpetrate vandalism. Conversely, people who perpetrate vandalism often don’t seem to understand (a) the real harm it can do to other people, even if these people don’t get whacked upside the head; and (b) just how easily it can slide into something violent, where somebody does get whacked upside the head (or worse).

Few people ever signed up for a revolution the goal of which was to liberate other people to run amok on the streets and lay waste to anything that might catch their fancy (including other people’s stuff).

Most people are motivated by a desire for security and some semblance of order. This is what frees them to think about and do other stuff besides protect themselves, their families, and their stuff 24/7/365.

Maybe sometimes violence and vandalism are the only way to get to that place. But to my mind, usually they aren’t. More often than not, this sort of approach and response just continues a cycle of aggression and violence.

So like Brendan, I don’t condone either vandalism or violence. But unlike Brendan, I’m not sure that trying to highlight the moral distinction between the two in this context is particularly useful either. Even if they’re not equally bad, they’re both bad enough that they should be avoided.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

In that piece, Brendan draws a distinction between “violence” and “vandalism,” suggesting that the news media too often lumps these two things together under the singular heading of  “violence.”

While I agree that Brendan’s distinction may well be worth considering, particularly at the level of theory, I’m not surprised that people typically link the term “vandalism” with the term “violence.”

Here’s why: Both vandalism and violence are forms of aggression. Yes, they take place along a moral continuum. Violence is worse. But when people, animals, etc. are nearby, the distance between vandalism and violence can be very short indeed.

Most people are cognizant of this reality. They know that once you let out the genie of aggression for whatever purpose, righteous intentions may not be enough to prevent a situation from careening into violence.

When I was in school in Madison, Wisconsin back in the mid to late 1980s, there was a fruit smoothie stand on the Library Mall called “Loose Juice.” It was owned by a guy named Karleton Armstrong. On August 24, 1970, Karleton, his brother and two other dudes blew up the Army Math Research Building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It was intended as an act of vandalism or targeted property destruction to use Brendan’s terminology. Karleton and his cohorts tried to make sure that nobody was inside.

But a post-doctoral fellow named Robert Fassnacht apparently didn’t get the memo. He was in the basement doing research that night, trying to wrap some stuff up before starting his family vacation. When the building blew up, he was killed.

Karleton and some of his cohorts went to jail (one of the four dudes is apparently still at large). When he got out, he opened the smoothie stand.

Karleton made a good smoothie called the Dick Gregory with strawberries and bananas. He seemed like a humble, soft spoken dude. I’m sure his intentions were good back in 1970. But his act of targeted property destruction killed somebody. That was real. That was violence. That he intended something different didn’t change the outcome.

This reality was hammered home for me years later here in Seattle. A distant cousin of mine came to visit and pinged about having lunch with my brother and me. We met him and his wife at the Saigon Bistro above the Viet Wah in the I.D..

My cousin was older than us, and we didn’t know him really at all. As we talked, it turned out that he had attended grad school in Madison during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I made a comment about that era being crazy times. I think I must have referenced the Math Research Building blowing up and how Karelton had the smoothie stand on the Library Mall while I was in Madison.

When I said that, my cousin tensed up a little. “The guy who was killed in that bombing was a friend and colleague of mine. He had a wife and young kids.”

That put a razor sharp edge on things. Maybe Karleton had had a weird life he didn’t expect, blowing up a building, going to jail, selling smoothies, and later owning a deli called the Radical Rye on State Street in Madison. But he was still alive. My cousin’s friend was dead, and his kids never got to know their father.

My take away: Any time you move into aggressive destruction mode, you create a risk of hurting somebody. In an urban environment like downtown, where there are a lot of people around, that risk goes up.

Probably, the most brutalizing aspect of modern capitalism is the way that it turns people into abstractions on a spreadsheet. Philosopher Kings of the market make decisions that don’t take the human costs into account and a lot of people suffer. Generals and government officials do the same thing on the battlefield.

But when “anarchists” do targeted property damage vandalism, they’re kind of just fighting one immoral approach with another one. They replace the spreadsheet with some sort of theoretical revolutionary framework. But they’re still trying to play the role of Philosopher King, taking their cues from a place of abstraction, where the human costs of their actions don’t seem any more well considered than the actions of the people they are protesting against.

Sure, the wine in their glass may be different, but the glass itself is the same. It’s the same pattern of thought. It’s the same psychological impulse. It’s two wrongs don’t make a right.

To me, this is the power of non-violence. It mostly avoids this mirror imaging problem. It’s a different kind of vessel entirely. Yes, it is slow. Yes, it requires lots of discipline. No, it is often not emotionally satisfying. But like interest compounding, if people can stick with it long enough, it’s been known to add up.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve had a K-Mart radio for over 30 years now. It receives AM, FM, and shortwave frequencies. It was made in Japan before that was a compliment. Nevertheless, it aspires to be hi-fidelity, with knobs and switches for bass, treble, volume, and loudness, plus a separate woofer and tweeter. It even has inputs on its side for things like microphones and electric guitars. Yes, I have played guitar through it.

A while back, a housemate of mine moved out and took the boombox from our kitchen. After months of cooking without music, I remembered the K-Mart radio, dug it out of storage, and put it back into service. Worked like a charm. No CDs, cassettes, or MP3s. Just whatever’s on the terrestrial airwaves when you power it up.

Around 1975, my dad gave both my brother and me one of these radios for Christmas. For me, it replaced an old tube table radio that had originally been my grandmother’s. That radio had a cool orange light on the front of it and wood on the sides. But it was on its last legs. As it heated up, the volume would drop until you couldn’t hear much of anything. It also didn’t have good AM reception. So I couldn’t listen to WLS, the Top 40 station from Chicago. But I did listen to Champaign’s  WLRW Solid Gold FM on it: “Poison Ivy,” “Charlie Brown,” “Rag Doll,” and things like that. Strange to think that those oldies were younger in 1975 than the K-Mart radio is now.

I come from a mixed faith marriage. My mom is Episcopalian. My dad is Jewish. There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons why the faith of the mother determines the faith of the child in Judaism. But one reason might be that women are often the ones who maintain the family cultural traditions. That was pretty much true in my family. Perhaps because of the mixed marriage, I got very little traditional religion growing up. We never attended church or temple. Mostly, we worshipped in the Church of Dissonance, which really wasn’t a place as much as a way of being. But that’s a subject for another time.

We did, however, celebrate Christmas. Presumably, my mother was the instigator of this. As a very little boy, we went at least once out to Oakland, California to celebrate it with her mom. Probably, there were more times before that. But I don’t remember them. Maybe we celebrated it for Grandma’s sake. I don’t know. But when I was 5, Grandma died, and we kept on celebrating Christmas. So it either meant something to somebody, or by that time the habit was formed. The Londons are nothing if not creatures of habit, and Christmas certainly helped organize our yearly consumption of consumer durable goods. It also gave me one less thing to feel like a freak about (let’s just say that most of the kids I knew growing up did not worship in the Church of Dissonance).

Kids and Christmas are a very comfortable fit. At least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. Everyone is happy to see kids. People give them things. And why wouldn’t people give them things? Kids really make Christmas fun. They embody the joy of the season. Even today, it’s easy to please a kid with less than ten dollars. Try really pleasing an adult with less than 10 dollars. It’s virtually impossible. Only a kid delivers that much positive feedback for ten bucks.

As a kid, I didn’t think much about Christmas. It was just something we did. Consequently, I never really considered the possibility that my dad, the Jewish guy, might have a more complicated relationship with the holiday than I did. Of course, in retrospect, it’s clear that he did.

On the one hand, my dad definitely had the outsider’s anthropological curiosity about Christmas. In the late 1950s, he wrote an opera about Santa Claus to complete his Ph.D. in music composition. And in the 1970s, he composed a suite of Christmas music under the pseudonym “Bjørne Enstabile”. (Maybe he determined that since Irving Berlin had written a famous Christmas tune, it was a rite of passage for all Jewish composers to try their hand at writing one too.)

On the other hand, I think celebrating Christmas was always a little bit weird for my dad, like getting an invite to an annual party you have routinely been excluded from in the past. Even if the party is pretty fun, you never completely shake the sense that there’s something a little wrong about being there.

I’ve dated a few Jewish gals over the years, and on a couple of occasions they celebrated Christmas with me. While I don’t want to project too much of their experience with Christmas onto my dad, talking with them about it did provide me with at least a little bit of third party Jewish perspective on what it feels like to participate in the Christian rituals.

My takeaway from these conversations? Dad liked the family togetherness of Christmas. He seemed to like that low budget positive kid feedback part too. But he was nevertheless ambivalent about the holiday, and he expressed this ambivalence each year by putting off his Christmas shopping until the last possible moment.

Typically, the drill went something like this: Finals would end a few days before Christmas at the University of Illinois, where my dad taught music theory and composition. Then on December 23 or December 24, my dad would go have a few afternoon drinks, maybe with his friend Salvatore Martirano, maybe with some other folks, maybe alone. I don’t really know. But having some drinks was usually involved. Then he was ready to head off and do some Christmas shopping.

The year of the K-Mart radio was definitely a Christmas Eve shopping year. In fact, I think it was an unprecedented Christmas Eve night shopping year. This is probably how K-Mart got involved. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been dad’s go-to shopping destination. But it was one of the few stores open late on December 24th. So he didn’t have much of a choice.

The K-Mart in Champaign, Illinois was on Bloomington Road near Prospect Avenue (it’s a Home Depot now). From our house on West Hill Street, you drove north up Prospect across the railroad tracks, past Unc Blacker’s Tavern (“Coldest Beer in Town”), Top Boy Hamburgers, Putt Putt Golf, Dairy Queen, Shakey’s Pizza , Dog and Suds, and Foremost Liquors. I think there was a Red Lobster up there too.

We didn’t live far from the K-Mart, maybe a mile or two away. Once I got to junior high school, I biked it pretty regularly (indeed my junior high school was between our house and the K-Mart). But it was definitely in a different part of town. Our neighborhood sort of defined the northern edge of the nicer part of Champaign. It was nothing fancy, but it mostly consisted of reasonably well-kept, middle class, single family homes. As you headed north out towards K-Mart, things got progressively more low rent and run down. If you headed due east from K-Mart, you eventually found yourself in a poorer, African American part of town. And if you headed due west, you’d find a lot of poor and lower middle class white folks.

Whatever their ethnicity, these people were the regular customers of the K-Mart. And that Christmas Eve night was no exception. My dad later painted a rather bleak picture of the scene: people struggling under the dingy glow of the fluorescent lights to get some last minute shopping done with whatever cash they’d managed to scrape together before the impending deadline–many of them undoubtedly hoping their meager budget would be enough to win some positive feedback from their children.

Dad, the tipsy, middle-class academic, was most definitely a tourist in that sea of desperation. But he was not a stranger to it. He’d grown up poor in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. While he never said so explicitly, I’ve wondered whether the scene conjured up some unhappy childhood memories for him. All I know is that he never hit the K-Mart on Christmas Eve night again. And he rarely went to K-Mart at all after that.

So this night was different than all the other nights. It was like a higher power drew my dad to the radios. For they were of a quality rarely encountered at K-Mart before or since that day. I can’t remember anything else I received for Christmas in 1975, but the K-Mart radio left its indelible mark almost immediately. How different our lives would have been if dad had not gone to the K-Mart that night.

The day after I got the new radio, I was a little more of my own person than the day before I got it. Receiving it was like encountering Martin Luther’s 95 Theses during the Protestant Reformation and contemplating for the first time the possibility that no sacerdotal middle man was necessary to convene with the divine. Suddenly, I had my own direct connection. Now, it was about me and my peers. What did I like? What did we like? Who was cool? Who wasn’t? Before too long, we had our own cultural theology.

Of course, thinking about it almost 40 years later, my illusions of autonomy seem pretty quaint. Even if the K-Mart radio took my parents out of my cultural loop, there were still plenty of adults in the abstract ether of the mass media, constructing and structuring most of what we kids consumed. Sure, there was a symbiotic feedback loop. These people were eager to see what we liked, because their livelihood depended on it. But ultimately, it was a very top down system of dissemination with an incredibly powerful supply-side filtering mechanism. Many were called. But we only heard the very few who were chosen by the gods of the mass media.

Today, we live in an era of media fragmentation. Choice and individuality are buzzwords. The old enforced scarcity of mass media and supply-side filters has given way to a networked, hyper-abundance of digitized culture products. Often, it feels like almost everyone is both a publisher and a consumer.

Contemporary kids embrace a cultural theology far more radical than anything we could have conceived of in the 1970s. Many aren’t just skeptical about the privileged role of the sacerdotal middle man. They question the entire notion that any divine “other” exists outside the confines of the peer-to-peer Hive Mind.

Devices like the iPod allow people to carry tens of thousands of songs around in the palm of their hands. To anyone born before 1980, having easy access to such a huge archive of recorded music feels like an episode of Star Trek. All you have to do is say “Computer, play me some John Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Mississippi John Hurt, Minutemen, Hank Williams, Nick Drake, Death Cab for Cutie, and Soul Asylum.” A few moments later you’re listening to it.

In the face of this abundance, the shuffle feature has become a popular tool for addressing its challenges. Don’t know what to choose? Put it on shuffle. Who knows what it will play next? When shuffle does a good job, one may even entertain the possibility that the algorithm is tapping into something divine. But this is an illusion. Ultimately, all the control remains with the user. Don’t like the song that comes up in the shuffle? Skip it. Or put on your own customized play list. In the end, each iPod user has the godlike power to craft their own personal pop cultural experience.

That sort power seems pretty great in theory. But in practice, wielding it can be rather overwhelming. Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, eloquently addresses this conundrum. More choice, he argues, doesn’t necessarily mean more happiness. Often, it leaves people drained and dissatisfied. So many choices. So many what-ifs after a choice is made. Did I really make the best choice? Maybe I should have gotten the Chipotle, Cool Ranch Doritos instead of Extra Spicy Nacho Cheese.

This problem is particularly acute in the context of music consumption. So much old music is easily available and so much more new music is constantly being released. It’s like trying to drink from a high-pressure fire hose. Gerald Casale from the band Devo recently addressed this in an NPR interview: “What’s happened is that so many CDs are put out per month, possibly 10,000 a month. Nobody can possibly even know half the music that exists out there.”

For the people who try to keep up with current releases (e.g., critics and super fans), it can feel less and less like it’s about the pleasure of listening and more and more like it’s about just trying to find a way to process the never ending stream of data.

One wouldn’t want to miss out on some important new release. Yet is any release important anymore? How do you even locate and contextualize various releases when there’s such a glut of old and new music floating around in the big atemporal reservoir of song.

Radio, of course, doesn’t work like this. It’s less about control and more about collective experience. As my buddy Pete Sheehy put it to me a while ago, “a radio is a wePod not an iPod.” Everybody gets the same playlist and the same three choices when they tune into a radio station: (1) listen to it, (2) change the station, or (3) turn it off. That’s not a lot of choices compared to an iPod, especially given the limited number of terrestrial radio stations in most markets.

But even with these limitations, radio remains a great deal. It gives you the music for free, and it simply asks you to keep listening when the commercials come on (or the sponsorship messages, or the pleas for donations). Evidently, enough of these commercials have been listened to year-in and year-out to keep the business model viable for many decades.

Probably, I’m just getting old and nostalgic, but I often prefer letting someone else choose the playlist, especially if they are good at it. Compared to the average shuffle mix on an iPod, the classic top 40 of the 1960s and early 1970s still provided a more cohesive mix. Whether it was Motown, British Invasion, Stax/Volt, or San Francisco Psychedelia, if it made it on the top-40 in this period, there was something catchy and pop at its core.

Hell, the same could probably even be said about the average 1970s free-form station. There was a human filter involved, somebody with judgment. There was also the knowledge that a bunch of other folks in your town were listening to the same thing at that very same moment that you were.

When I first visited Seattle in the summer of 1990, my brother had KCMU on in his house (the predecessor to KEXP for any youngsters or Seattle newcomers reading this). As we moved around his Capitol Hill neighborhood, it seemed like every business we entered also had it on.

Fugazi was scheduled to play a show at some movie theater in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood that has long since been razed for condos or something. Riz Rollins was the afternoon DJ then, and on the day of the Fugazi show, as he talked about it on the air, it really felt like Seattle was a very small town and everybody who lived there was going to be attending the show that night. I found that astounding, especially in a city the size of Seattle.

At that moment, I was reminded of the power of the wePod, and I understood why Seattle’s vibrant music scene was fast becoming an international phenomenon. Along with local music magazine “the Rocket,” KCMU was taking the energy of the local scene, aggregating it, amplifying it, mixing it with complementary stuff from the world outside Seattle (like Fugazi), and reflecting it back to the local community. All you had to do was tune in to be a part of it.

Today, social networking sites like Facebook seem to offer a richer platform than radio for aggregating and sharing these sorts of social experiences. So perhaps we don’t need radio as much for that anymore. But as I celebrate another year with the K-Mart radio, let’s not prematurely write off the venerable wePod either.

Sure, its status and cultural relevance may have declined somewhat in recent years. And it certainly has its flaws (the present state of most commercial radio offers ample proof of that). But in the right hands, a radio can still change your life, just as it changed mine that Christmas morning many years ago.

Everyday, staff members at stations like KEXP continue to drink deeply from the fire hose of cultural production, distill it, and beam the results back to the people. In doing so, they reaffirm that a carefully curated set of music provides an unparalleled opportunity to sidestep the noise and commune with the divinity of the pure signal.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

I have a vivid memory of my first encounter with the Apple II, at the house of a friend of mine in around 1980. I had more computer experience than most people at that point, having logged many hours on the PLATO mainframe system at the University of Illinois during 8th and 9th grade in the late 1970s. My dad was a professor at U of I, so he was able to get a sign-on for PLATO. He let me and my brother use it, and use it we did.

The PLATO system was very advanced for its time, with powerful graphics and multi-player games that didn’t see the light of day in the mainstream until years later. The Microsoft flight simulator was a direct descendent of a simulator developed for PLATO. Ray Ozzie, most recently the technology guru at Microsoft, was a computer science student at U of I during this time and developed a notes program on PLATO. Later, it became Lotus Notes. Looking back on it now, most of the central attributes of the modern Internet were already in place on the PLATO system in the 1970s. But I’m digressing. Sorry. Just trying to establish some context. Let’s get back to the Apple II.

Honestly, compared to PLATO, the Apple II seemed pretty weak. It had a grid based Star Trek/Space War game similar to one I’d played on PLATO. But this was a really basic game compared to some of the games on PLATO, like “Empire” or “Avatar.” Nevertheless, the idea that a computer was now affordable enough that you could have it in your house, well, that was still really cool. I wished we had one at our house. It was also clear that the Apple II kicked ass on the computers I had seen in the Radio Shack store in the North Randall Mall. Everything about the Apple II seemed better: the way it looked, the Apple logo, the advertising. It was all cool, and it definitely made Apple seem like a club you wanted to be a part of.

By 1983, IBM was starting to steal Apple’s thunder with its “Personal Computer” (“PC” for short). Not long after that, Asian PC clones starting coming out, running Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system. The personal computer stampede was on. My dad bought a Sanyo PC clone at Christmas time in 1983. It had a single 5.25 inch floppy drive and maybe 128K of RAM. It came bundled with MS-DOS, Wordstar (word processor), Calcstar (spreadsheet), and Datastar (database manager). He bought a daisywheel printer to go with it. So all the printed output looked just like an IBM typewriter.

While I was home on holiday and summer breaks, I learned how the Sanyo PC clone worked. The lack of games was a drag, and the thing did not scream fun. But the word processor was a revelation. I had a lot of writing to do for school, and this was just the utilitarian tool I was looking for. All of a sudden, I could write with ease. No more left-handed pencil smudges, illegible script and multiple cross-outs. Suddenly, the writing process had a heretofore unimaginable level of plasticity. I could write and edit at the same time (just like I’m doing right now). This was huge.

In the fall of 1984, when I headed back to University of Michigan, that Sanyo machine came with me. My dad got a newer Sanyo with two floppy drives. At that point, I was pretty much the only person I knew who had a computer. My housemate, Bill Potter, had studied computer programming in high school, and he was much more technically inclined than I was. He dug right into the manual and figured out things that were beyond me, like batch files and using Datastar and Calcstar. I definitely learned a lot of stuff from him. But mostly I just wrote numerous history papers and my senior honors thesis, feeling very technology forward.

Up to this point, I only had a rather dim awareness of the Apple Macintosh. I had seen the big 1984 commercial during the Super Bowl and perhaps some pictures in magazines. But it wasn’t until late 1984 or early 1985 that Macs started appearing in increasing numbers on campus, both in computer labs and in student dorm rooms. I think Apple may have instituted favorable education pricing around this time to try and jump-start sales of the Mac amongst college students. Or maybe this new innovation was just finally arriving in the midwest.

At first, I dismissed the GUI of the Mac, much like command line junkies before and since. But then one night, I found myself in the dorm room of Phil Dürr (later a guitar player in the band Big Chief of Detroit, Michigan and SubPop Records fame). He had a Mac and he was playing with the program MacPaint, drawing on the screen, typing text, changing font sizes and doing all kinds of stuff I’d never seen a computer do before. Creative stuff. Fun stuff. This was not just a utilitarian writing tool. It was clearly a lot more. It was like PLATO, only it had even more to offer, especially its grayscale graphics.

My Sanyo was a generic “Personal Computer.” Phil’s computer had its own personality. It wasn’t just a “PC.” It was a “Mac.”

Notwithstanding that reality, I stuck with my utilitarian Sanyo for quite a while after that encounter with the Mac. First and foremost, I didn’t have the coin to switch. Moreover, while MacPaint was cool, I didn’t have much of a use for it, beyond thinking it was cool. MacWrite was certainly a functional word processor, but it wasn’t a huge step up over Wordstar in terms of functionality (indeed it might have been a step back in many ways). My daisywheel printer had better quality output than the dot-matrix ImageWriter printer that was bundled with the Mac. Nevertheless, the seed of Mac had been planted in my head.

When the Mac II came out in 1987 or so, my dad picked one up. It had a then unheard of 40MB hard drive. He had to drive down to Columbus, Ohio from Cleveland to pick it up. Some electronic music students from Ohio State loaded an ass ton of different software onto the hard drive of the Mac II. But it was in no discernible order. Home on a break, I spent hours exploring all the stuff on that hard drive. Yeah, I know it’s smaller than the size of 10-15 average length mp3s. But at the time, it felt like a massive, almost infinite library of stuff. Subsequently, he also got some early MIDI sequencing software (Professional Performer), an early two-track Pro-Tools editing system, and a 500MB external SCCI hard drive to store digital audio on. That was some mind bending stuff in its time.

About a year after my dad got his Mac II, I stopped working on my Sanyo at home and started writing papers on the Mac SE/30s they had in the computer lab at the University of Wisconsin (where I was in law school). I really started digging into Microsoft Word and appreciating its GUI and WYSIWYG layout. They also had a laser printer in the lab, and I really liked the typeset looking output you’d get with it if you used Times font. At that point, I’m not sure I would have said that MS Word was better than Wordperfect 5.1 on the PC. But it was definitely growing on me.

I finally got my first mac in 1991. It was a used Mac II, purchased from Pre-Owned Electronics, in the Boston suburbs. Like my dad’s, it had a 40MB hard drive. When I moved to Seattle in 1992, I purchased a Personal Laserwriter NTR at Ballard Computer (now a Thai restaurant). Having my own laser printer was, of course, a revelation. Like most Apple hardware, the printer was very well built. I used it for well over 10 years. Even after Apple discontinued the Localtalk standard, I bought an adapter that allowed me to hook it up via Ethernet. It just kept on chugging through a series of new Macs. There was a Mac IIvx (100MB hard drive), a Performa 6230 (1GB hard drive), a Beige Powermac G3 (10GB hard drive), a Powermac G4/400 tower (40GB hard drive), which I’m still using, and the Macbook I’m typing this on (250GB hard drive). I also got an iPod Touch 16GB when I bought the Macbook. This handheld device probably has more computing power than my first three or four macs combined.

That’s 20+ years of personal computer use in one long paragraph (almost my entire adult life): 20 years of writing, reading, making music, listening to it, drafting contracts, watching video, and so much more. Steve Jobs played a huge role in shaping the technological contours of all that. His work empowered me to do my work. So his passing definitely feels personal to me.

Where most other people in the computer industry somehow never seemed to get things quite right, Jobs usually did.[1] He seemed to have this innate sense of what good is. I don’t know why this sense is so hard to come by. But it is.

I’ve interacted through the years with a whole lot of musicians, artists, and other creative people. Many of them are very skilled. But only a few of them also seem to have this innate sense of “good.” These are usually very special people. If they make or record music, you want to hear it. If they do interior design, you want to spend time in that space. If they build something, you want to use it. If they cook something, you want to eat it.

Often, I think, these kinds of folks tend to work in smaller, more individualized environments, where they can do their thing and avoid butting heads with people who don’t get it and never will. That Steve Jobs didn’t do this makes his accomplishments even more impressive. He somehow managed to imprint his sense of what “good is” onto a large, global organization.

Was Jobs often an asshole? The public record would indicate that the answer is “yes,”  Was he a hard guy to work for? That answer also appears to be “yes.” Was he a bad manager of people? At least as a young man, yes. Did he get better at this with age? Perhaps.

But that’s all inside baseball stuff, and as consumers most of us aren’t amateur business ethicists (even if we should be). We’re concerned with outcomes, not process. We don’t usually spend a lot of time examining how the sausage is made. We just eat it, evaluate it, and enjoy it when it’s good.

The Jobs sausage was very good indeed. It will be missed.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

You can spend so much time looking for that powerful person who is going to change your life that there’s not much time left to do the work that might actually get you somewhere someday. In my lexicon, the search for a magic lottery ticket is a particularly deluded and futile airpower strategy.

It’s not that powerful people don’t swoop in and help make low profile people better known. That does seem to happen pretty regularly. It’s just that most of these low profile people are a lot less low profile than you realize. That whole overnight sensation 10 years in the making thing is almost always true.

When “unknown” bands get elevated after a music conference like SXSW, they’re rarely really “unknown” to music biz insiders. Probably, they have been busily working on the ground for years to connect all the dots that lead up to more powerful people taking 15 minutes to see their band play in Austin. In Seth’s lexicon, they’ve been building their tribe. To use my lexicon, they’ve built a good ground game.

From the outside looking in, it looks like they just found a Magic Lottery Ticket. But that’s an illusion. For the project was actually built to grow even if Oprah never showed.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

Recently, the band Kiss made a triumphant return to the limelight. It was fun observing the whole resurgence. It got me thinking warm thoughts about my life as 7th grader, listening to the Big 89, WLS AM Chicago, and the 50,000 watts of top forty power it beamed down to Champaign, Illinois. But before I’ve even finished singing “Beth” to myself, my mind invariably wanders forward to more recent Kiss related memory: a night a few years before this recent resurgence when I unexpectedly found myself going to see Ace Frehley, Kiss lead guitarist, perform at a local rock club with his own band.

“Whadya think he’ll play?” one of my friends wondered out loud as we drove down to the club.

“Hope he plays some Kiss songs,” another one replied.

“He better,” we all agreed. “Or it’ll be a rip-off.”

Inside the club, the band room had been transformed into the “hard rock zone.” The stage was filled with tall stacks of Laney amplifiers belonging to Ace and his band. In many trips to this club, I had never seen a full wall of amps like that in there.

Outside the band room, by the bar, I ran into an acquaintance of mine who said he had been there when the bands loaded in their equipment and that Ace was surrounded by three body guards.

“I couldn’t tell if they were protecting him or holding him up so he wouldn’t fall down,” he explained.

About twenty minutes after the second opening band finished its set, Ace emerged with his band. From my vantage point he looked like a cross between a puffy-faced vampire and Elvis after he discovered Carbohydrates. “Relaxed fit” blue jeans were a necessity rather than a fashion choice. Surrounding Ace were three comparatively younger musicians of the hard rock persuasion, sporting an array of tight jeans, colorful vests and scarves that would have made Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler proud.

At this point, even a jumbo helping of Generation X ironic whimsy seemed unlikely to salvage the evening. But when Ace slung on his cherry-sunburst Les Paul Custom and the band launched into “Detroit Rock City,” I was forced to reconsider my position. The band sounded good, even if Ace’s vocals were a little thin. All those amps made one hell of a loud pummeling sound. The kind of loud you get when you send two Les Paul guitars into eight hundred watts of overdriven tube amplification and back out through thirty-two 12″ Celestion speakers–a muscular, we’re not even pushing these rigs, kind of loud. I stood there, slightly in awe, the bottom end of the guitars washing over me, and pondered whether the best Kiss songs didn’t embody, in a hard rock context, the very principles Strunk and White preached in their Elements of Style: clarity, directness, concision, and careful organization.

Then a strange thing happened. The voice of my sixty-five-year-old dad echoed through my head:

“He’s really working up there, isn’t he?”

Although the meaning of this statement was immediately clear to me, it probably needs some explanation here. My dad has been involved in music professionally for about fifty years. He started out doing popular stuff, playing trumpet and french horn in jazz and swing bands back in Philadelphia in the 1940s. Since 1960, he’s been a composer, a conductor, and a professor of music composition. He’s written three operas and numerous other orchestral and choral works, most of which have far more in common with the work of Schönberg and Cage than with that of Ace Frehley.

But despite their stylistic dissimilarities, over the years, dad, like Ace, has made his living through music. It’s art to him, and he takes his art seriously. But it’s also a job and a career. So when my dad says “He’s really working up there, isn’t he?” it’s a knowing comment about a reality that binds all professional musicians together, regardless of how different they may be in musical style or taste. They’re all hustling and trying to make a living. They’re not just artists. They’re workers too. Music may be everyone else’s break from everyday life, their entertainment. It may even be a welcome escape from the tedium of the nine-to-five world for the musicians themselves. But if you do it regularly for money, eventually it’s work.

So when my dad made a similar comment as we watched James Brown do the splits on the David Letterman Show about thirteen years ago, I took it as a statement paying respect to James Brown for taking his craft seriously, for being my dad’s age and doing the splits on Letterman, for still getting out there and singing “Cold Sweat” with energy and conviction. I took it the same way when my dad used similar language to describe seeing Elvis in Las Vegas in 1972. And when my dad took my brother to see the Who in 1982 and he came back and said the same thing, I knew what he meant. I doubt the Who touched his life significantly, but the fact of their longevity did make an impression on him. They were still doing it after almost two decades. And they put on a good show. Their job was to entertain and they did their job.

We children of the rock and roll era don’t have much respect for the notion of craft to which my dad’s comment refers. It’s really a pre-rock-and-roll notion, one born in a time when craft was usually a precondition to making a living as a musician. Songwriters wrote songs. Musicians played these songs. There was a lot more live music and bands were bigger. They had big horn sections with intricate arrangements. To make these arrangements work, bands generally worked from sheet music. This practice also facilitated more fluid employment relations. Individual musicians were less tied to particular bands. The “show went on.” If Saxophone A couldn’t show up, you brought in Saxophone B, gave him the music, maybe rehearsed once and played the show.

This still goes on today in at least some segments of the music industry. But in many respects, rock and roll changed all this, because the ethos of rock and roll is hostile to such notions of craft and professionalism, even though this sort of craft and professionalism has always been a part of rock and roll. As an ideology, rock and roll has always been about “anyone can do it” and “raw emotions” expressed in an “authentic” way. So a song’s a little raw. So the guitars are out of tune. Who cares? It’s sincere. It’s honest. It’s what I was feeling. Don’t put you’re standards on me. I can do what I want. It’s rock and roll.

In this ideological framework, craft, in the pre-rock sense, is among the worst evils. It’s about elitism and exclusivity. It’s the end of innocence, the beginning of self-consciousness, the arrival of artifice and insincerity. It’s the hand of “the man” sanitizing the music, white-washing the truth. It’s the world of commerce rushing in and trampling the sacred world of “real” artistic expression. It’s people carrying on after the thrill is gone in order to make a living. It’s people making decisions for business rather than artistic reasons. It’s not very romantic. In short, it’s the everyday life of the real world, the world from which rock and roll is supposed to provide an escape.

In this regard, rock and roll seems to share more with the world of sports than with the musical genres that preceded it. You either make it big or barely make a thing (The NBA vs. the CBA). In addition, rock and roll seems to be viewed as a game that you play, not a job that you do. God forbid you ever think of it as a job (especially out loud). You’re supposed to play it for the love of the game, and feel grateful for the privilege. You’ll work a day job if you have to, in order to play on your own terms. That’s far more honorable than sullying yourself in a cover band playing weddings.

Rock and roll is also like sports in that successful rock and roll musicians aren’t just musicians. They’re “stars.” As a result, we’ve tended to look at successful rock musicians in much the same way we look at successful ballplayers. There’s a tacit agreement: you play the game as well as you can and we’ll give you more money and adulation than most people receive in a life time. But remember that it’s a young man’s game. When the time comes that you’ve lost the spring in your step and you can’t pull the ball down the line anymore, leave the game gracefully and retire or go sell insurance. We don’t want to feel embarrassed for you. Because if we have to see you as you are now, we’ll have to look at ourselves as we are now. We’ll have to face the here and now, as opposed to that fantasy world of the past that your music creates for us, that place where we’re all forever young.

Ace Frehley is the walking embodiment of this phenomenon. In his case, it’s even more pronounced, because he spent the most successful years of his career performing in make-up and a costume, surrounded by a vast array of pyrotechnics. Maybe he looked like a puffy-faced vampire in 1975 too. We never knew, but we could sure see him now in all his middle-aged, burned-out splendor. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

But there’s more to it than that. Even if Ace was as fit as Steven Tyler–the Dorian Grey of Hard Rock–seeing him perform would still engender a complicated mix of emotions. For at some level, seeing Ace is seeing Kiss. And unpacking the cultural significance of Kiss has proven to be far more complicated than anyone ever expected. After all, rock critics and the hipoise always hated Kiss, precisely because Kiss was always about craft. It was crass. It was completely contrived. And in the eyes of the critics, the “philistine masses” ate it up, because they lacked the hermeneutic skills to shed their false consciousness and see the horrible truth about the band. They were too stupid to see through the artifice, to see that there might not be any “real” emotions underlying Kiss’s music, to see that “Art” took a back seat to entertainment.

What the critics missed is that music is a two way emotional street. It isn’t just about a musician bearing his or her “real” soul and the listener bearing witness to the “authenticity” of this experience and absorbing it. It’s about listeners making their own meanings out of the music. At this level, the distinction between “real” emotion and craft is a lot less important. Craft can be a virtue, because craft is a powerful thing. That’s why rock and roll has always been wary of it, even as it tacitly embraces it. Craft is knowledge. It implies an understanding of the ways in which music effects people physically and emotionally and the ability to use music’s power to manipulate people’s emotions and senses. In the case of pop music, it’s the ability to write and record a song that people like, a song that people will pay money for.

On this level Kiss was always a phenomenal success. Whether the band members wrote the songs themselves or brought in song doctors like Desmond Child, someone knew what they were doing and cared about doing it well. Hell, the band might not have even played on the records. And whether the songs expressed “sincere” emotions is anyone’s guess. Maybe they just wanted to make money or be famous. But someone had pride in the product. Sure, it was candy, but for those of us who came of age with Kiss, it tasted pretty good.

We were touched by the band’s craft. It seduced us and made us like the band’s music. And we’ve built emotional attachments to Kiss’s music that are personal to our own experiences. At least for me, these attachments don’t have much to do with the “deep issues” of pain and loss and the contemplation of the artist’s soul. They have to do with being twelve years old and listening to the radio and singing “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day” without really even knowing what the hell these words meant. They were just catchy. They still are. And I don’t want to belittle this experience just because I was twelve years old and lacking the sophisticated interpretive tools possessed by rock critics and my friends’ older siblings. I learned those later. They’ve brought me pleasure and enlightenment. But so has Kiss, a pleasure I’d hate to lose, but can never fully explain.

So as I watched Ace playing up on the stage that night, it was strangely uplifting. “Rocket Ride” felt good. “Back in the New York Groove,” from his solo album, felt good. So did the encore, where he pulled out “Rock and Roll All Night.” Sure it was bittersweet. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for Ace. There was no big arena, no make-up, and no pyrotechnics. Ace was no longer a mega-star. But even knowing how drunk Ace probably was, he did not seem pathetic to me. Ace was working and there was a love and understanding of the craft that came through. He was up on that stage entertaining us, and he acquitted himself quite well. The band sounded good and Ace’s guitar playing was there too. Nobody ever would have confused him with Ritchie Blackmore or Eddie Van Halen. But nobody ever has. So why start now? He played his solos and rocked out in a down right dignified way. Well, as dignified as a person can be who uses the words “fuck,” “fucker,” and “motherfucker” in every sentence. But after all, Ace wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t. He’s a free bird. It’s rock and roll, and Ace is a rock and roller.

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

For example, in his book, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson called it "a 1996 lost classic of rock criticism..."

David Cantwell, co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles called it "one of the best, smartest, most insightful music pieces I've ever read. Period."

Have look. Maybe you'll enjoy it too.]

By Jacob London, copyright, 1996. All rights reserved. No commercial use without author’s express written permission

A while back, my local “alternative” radio station began playing a cover version of the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” by the U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. The first time I heard it, I didn’t think about changing the station, even though the Rollers were one of the most critically unhip bands of the 1970s. Instead, I sat back and listened, slightly amused, but mostly taking the whole experience for granted. Such is the state of things now that the practice of “alternative” bands covering “bad” songs from the 1970s has become so commonplace. If it isn’t Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, it’s Seaweed or Smashing Pumpkins doing some Fleetwood Mac song like “Go Your Own Way” or “Landslide.”

Few question the full-on embrace of 1970s popular culture anymore. It’s even got it’s own “American Graffiti” film in Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.” Linklater’s take on the past is a little more self-conscious and cynical than George Lucas’s vision of the early 1960s in “American Graffiti.” But Linklater’s remembrance of teen life in 1976 remains a warm one, especially in its unselfconsciously reverent use of the period’s music. It pushes all the same buttons as Lucas’s film, although neither Linklater nor his audience would ever completely admit it. For even as the residue of 1970s has reasserted itself in the American cultural life of the 1990s, a lingering tinge of reticence remains, as people continue to adjust to the idea that openly embracing the mainstream culture of the 1970s no longer entails being instantly labeled a loser or a philistine.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was starting college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, things were a lot different. There was plenty of risk involved in embracing the mainstream music of the 1970s, at least among the community of rock and roll hipsters I hung out with. A friend later summarized the stakes very well in a different context: “There’s a lot on the line when you tell other people what kind of music you like; people know they’ll be judged based on what they say. If they give the right answer they’ll be accepted. If they don’t, people may look down on them.” This was true in Ann Arbor during that time–as it has been everywhere I’ve lived since. The rules determining inside and outside were generally unwritten, but they weren’t hard to figure out.

Punk rock was cool. Some New Wave was cool. David Bowie, he was pretty cool (his glam rock was sort of New Wave and Punk before they were invented). Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who, Motown, and the other classics of 1960s rock, that was cool too, as long as you weren’t too much of a hippie about it. But the mainstream music of the 1970s was not cool. Disco sucked, including George Clinton and his P-Funk allies. Foreigner was not cool. Lynyrd Skynyrd was not cool. Neither were Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Peter Frampton, Foghat, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, or Alice Cooper. Black Oak Arkansas was not cool. Neither were Head East, R.E.O. Speedwagon, the Michael Stanley Band, the Eagles, Kansas, Styx, nor any of the other music Richard Linklater put in his movie.

In this environment, it is no surprise that my good friend Larry felt compelled to show his allegiance to the clan of the rock and roll hipster by throwing his copy of Led Zeppelin IV against the wall of the University of Illinois dorm room where he was staying during the summer of 1983. I seem to remember trying half-heartedly to convince him not to do it as he raised the record to hurl it.

“You sure you want to do that man,” I said. “A record is a record. You might regret it later.”

“No way man, I’m gonna throw it,” he said, cocking it behind his ear. “I’m ashamed I own this; it sucks. If I hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ one more time I’m gonna lose my shit. It sucks. ‘Black Dog’ sucks too. It all sucks.” And with that, he whipped the thing at the wall and it shattered into numerous pieces around the room (he told me recently he bought it again on CD a few years ago). We put something like “Armed Forces” by Elvis Costello on the turntable, opened up some cans of Stroh’s beer, and cracked up for a while, completely confident that justice had been done.

Then in the fall of 1984 something happened in Ann Arbor that turned the well ordered world of our little sub-culture upside-down. The Replacements came to town and played “Black Diamond” by Kiss. Undoubtedly, it was not the first such incident nationwide. Nor were the Replacements necessarily the only band at that time playing covers like “Black Diamond.” Nonetheless, in hindsight, Paul Westerberg and his cohorts were perhaps the most important purveyors of this practice.

Among the rock and roll hipeoise, the band’s influence was comparable to that of the Velvet Underground, who sold very few records during its tenure, but as many have jokingly observed, seems to have influenced every person who bought one of those albums to go out and start up a band of his or her own. In the case of the Replacements, a similar phenomenon occurred across the country in 1984-85: Almost every person in a band who saw the Replacements cover songs like “Black Diamond” went back to practice with their own band determined to find their own “Black Diamond” to cover.

For my part, I’m just glad I made it to the show. I came really close to staying home. I had seen the band once before in the summer of 1983, about three weeks after Larry hurled Led Zeppelin IV at the wall. They had opened for REM, my reigning favorites at the time, and I had not really enjoyed their set very much. In the band’s defense, the sound was bad for their set that night. But the truth is, I didn’t get what they were doing. I was simply unprepared to assimilate the broad range of styles they brought to their music. Was it punk? Was it straight hard rock? It certainly had guitar solos. Was it country

Whatever it was, I figured it out in Joe’s Star Lounge that fall night in 1984. Or maybe the band had figured it out a little better by then too. It was certainly a more cohesive unit that came into Ann Arbor that night. By this time, the band’s two LPs and one EP had been well received critically and they had just begun to tour on their as yet unreleased third LP, “Let It Be.” A buzz was building.

The band opened its set with “Color Me Impressed” from the “Hootenanny” LP. About twenty seconds into the song, my body began to tingle, as it occasionally does when I hear something really special for the the first time. Maybe I’d heard the song before at the 1983 show, but as the two guitars interacted, simultaneously supporting and playing off of each other, it finally registered.

The tingling feeling in my body continued for quite a while, because it seemed that every original song the band played was great, a part of this wonderful all-you-can-eat buffet for the rock and roll hipster, loud and fast like punk rock, but with a melodic pop sensibility, great guitar solos, well crafted lyrics, and wonderful stylistic nods to country music and rockabilly. Everything about it followed our unwritten rules of rock music hipsterdom to a “T.” Indeed, for many of us in the crowd, these guys had instantly become the coolest band in the land of the hipoeise.

Then boom!! The Kiss cover.

Immediately, I felt confused and self-conscious about how to respond. Everything in my rigidly disciplined rock music snob brain said that a Kiss cover was wrong. This was Kiss. A joke band. A pimple on the ass of good rock and roll, at least as good rock and roll was defined by my peers and the pop cultural elite to whom I owed my very sense of good and bad. But everything in my emotional experience and that of the rest of the audience simultaneously said the opposite. We all seemed to be loving it. Although as I looked around the room, I saw looks of guilt or confusion on more than one face–no doubt owing to the knowledge that however good the whole thing felt, one’s rigidly codified sense of cool and uncool was rapidly being turned inside out.

This cognitive dissonance was too problematic to endure for very long. So almost instantaneously we came upon a strategy for resolving our aesthetic quandary: We could overcome our weird feelings and enjoy this moment to the fullest extent, as long as we made fun of it at the same time. So we shrugged off our confusion, reclaimed a little bit of our white suburban past, and basked in the heretofore forgotten pleasures of “Black Diamond,” shaking our fists and really getting into the spirit of Kiss and hard rock cartoonishness in general. But on another level we were all knowing participants in a gag. We all looked at each other with this expression that said “I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but it sure feels good. And by the way, isn’t this really a funny joke?” Thus, when the moment was over, we had no problem minimizing the significance of the whole experience, self-consciously laughing it off as some sort of weird anomaly.

But reflecting upon the “Black Diamond” experience over a decade later, it is clear that those of us in attendance dismissed its cultural significance far too uncritically. In hindsight, the “Black Diamond” experience is particularly emblematic of the cultural relationship between my demographic cohort group– what I call the tailbust generation, the end of the baby boom and the beginning of Generation X–and the core baby boomers who have preceded us. Born between 1958 and 1970, we are a transitionary group, who came of age in the blurry and uneven terrain that separated the previously hegemonic baby boom culture from the now emergent post-boomer culture.

Those of us in the tail group, my closest cohorts, now in our late twenties or early thirties, were old enough to experience many of the pivotal baby boomer events first hand through the eyes of a four to nine year old child. But despite this first hand knowledge, most of us at the tail end of the baby boom share a lot more with the members of Generation X (e.g., an encyclopedic knowledge of Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Gilligan’s Island episodes). For in the final analysis, our popular culture framework has been almost entirely shaped by the core baby boomers of 1946-1953. They are the ones who were out in the streets in the 1960s, they were the ones at Woodstock, and theirs is the large and loud voice that has so dominated the popular culture in which we latecomers came of age.

Nowhere has the core baby boomer voice been more powerful than in establishing and shaping a rock and roll canon. To the extent that rock had a moment in which distinctions between “highbrow” rock and “lowbrow” rock had validity and were seriously debated, the parameters of this moment were set out by the rock critics who are members of the core baby boom generation (e.g., Christgau, Marcus, Marsh, Landau, Loder, Bangs, DeCurtis, etc.). In fact, it is the ongoing existence and institutionalization of this rock critic cultural elite in publications such as Rolling Stone Magazine that has made the notion of a rock and roll canon a viable one (Rolling Stone glories in its role as a sacrilizing force, releasing issues dedicated to subjects like the 100 best rock records of all time). The core boomer critics are the people who did the initial periodizing of rock and roll history. And in doing so, they effectively structured, and in many respects, continue to control the discourse surrounding popular music.

The core boomer rock music canon and the core boomer periodization of its history are very neatly represented and summarized in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. It begins with the canonized antecedents of rock and roll: blues from the delta, the urban blues, and country music (including western swing). After that it establishes the rock pioneers: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis and the lesser Rockabillies. Next it moves into the core of the canon: the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the whole of the Motown sound, and the Stax/Volt tradition. Following this material, there is some movement into the 1970s and 1980s by the authors. For example, Dave Marsh discusses Bruce Springsteen, there is a piece on Neil Young’s solo career, and punk and new wave get small mentions. But for the most part these discussions continue themes whose roots are in the ’60s.

For it is in the ’60s, we learn at least implicitly from this book, that the sacred texts were fully developed and most fully realized. And it was in the ’70s that rock music got out of hand and began to be crushed under the excess of its own pretension. Whether it was art rock or the slick studio music of California, on balance the whole affair was nothing if not bloated and flatulent. Elvis, it seems, embraced Vegas and its kitsch, and in the eyes of the canon keepers, so did much of ’70s popular music. Thus when punk came along to save the day, it did so through its reaffirmation of the basic values of rock and roll articulated first in the fifties by the rock pioneers and then more comprehensively by such “highbrow” rock artists as the Beatles and the Stones. Punk was a cleansing moment. It washed away all of the excess that had obscured the true essence of rock and roll. But it was devoid of any value unto itself. It’s almost as if the canon keepers had said that the 1970s (meaning roughly 1972-1977) were a big aesthetic mistake from which nothing of value could be learned.

But while the rhetorical force of this story of rock and roll is seemingly undeniable, it presents one serious problem for the tailbust generation: By pillorying the pop culture of the 1970s, it leaves little room for those of us whose formative cultural experiences occurred during this period. As a result, the self-conscious, internal conflict, exemplified by the “Black Diamond” experience, is ever present in the tailbuster psyche whenever aesthetic judgments are required.

On the one hand, we know we liked bands like Kiss, at least until we learned we weren’t supposed to. We know that liking bands like Kiss is a part of who we are; we have the positive associations and memories to prove it. We feel that the music of bands like Kiss has cultural value and that we should not be ashamed that we like it. We also know, at some level, that we must reject the story of rock according to the core boomers, because until we do, we cannot claim the part of our experience that makes us distinct from them.

But on the other hand, we can’t escape the core boomer narrative, because it has shaped us. It is always lurking in the background, an indelible benchmark of perception against which all of our aesthetic evaluations must be measured. And we are realists. We’ve known almost intuitively since we were conscious that directly asserting our autonomy from the core boomer narrative is not really an option. The core boomers have us outnumbered, they’re far more righteous than we could ever be, and they’ll do whatever it takes to insure that their story is the one that everyone hears and remembers. Consequently, we’ve developed a more covert, guerilla war approach to cultural assertion.

In the arena of rock and roll, the most important tool of subversion is a sneaky strategy that has been called “preemptive irony.” Preemptive irony is a process of mocking one’s self or one’s art before anyone else gets a chance to do it. This is accomplished by acknowledging explicitly in advance a self-consciousness of the pre-existing critical categories in which a given work might be placed. It’s calling one’s own song a “silly, neo-psychedelic ditty” before the critic has a chance to do it. It’s a way of saying “I already know what you’re going to say, because I know what box I’m working in, and besides, what I’m doing is kind of silly anyway, so how can you criticize it seriously when I don’t take it seriously myself? You’ll look silly.” Which is the whole goal of preemptive irony to begin with: to disarm the critic by calling the novelty of his or her enterprise into question before the critic has a chance to call the artist’s enterprise into question.

The Replacements’ practice of performing covers like “Black Diamond” is a text book example of the subversive power of preemptive irony and the terms and conditions of its legitimate deployment. Just any performance wouldn’t do. It was better if the underlying intent of the performer remained ambiguous.

The Replacements seemed to understand this intuitively. Thus while the guys seemed to enjoy playing “Black Diamond,” it was hard to gauge their sincerity. Was it an act of reverence from the heart? Or was it just a bit of satirical play acting? Would the band stop playing at any moment and start humiliating those members of the crowd who seemed to be enjoying themselves a little bit too unselfconsciously? Did the band think songs like “Black Diamond” sucked and deserved ridicule? Or did the band like them, no matter what everyone else said? It was never completely clear. And this was probably the way the band wanted it, because it always provided its members and the audience with a means of escape. If someone tried to make fun of the band for performing a cover like “Black Diamond,” the members could always just say it was a joke, the same way those of us in the audience did at Joe’s Star Lounge that night in 1984.

But the covers were definitely more than just a joke. Whether consciously or unconsciously, there was a full-on revisionist attack on the core boomer rock and roll canon lurking inside that fog of ambiguity. At the time of the “Black Diamond” incident, the Replacements were already a respected band in the “Indy” Scene. A respected band has cultural power, whether the band itself realizes it or not. The audience looks to the band for clues as to what constitute the unwritten rules and boundaries of a given culture or sub-culture.

So by including songs in their set like “Black Diamond” and “Hitchin a Ride,” along with its own excellent original material and other covers by critically hip English punk bands like Sham 69 (“Borstal Breakout”) and obscure American New Wave bands like the Vertabrats from Champaign, IL (“Left in the Dark”), the band encouraged those of us in the audience to see all of these songs as an interconnected unit. It was as if the band was saying, “The value of our original songs is indistinguishable from the value of these other songs we’re playing. Maybe they all suck, but if you like ‘Color me Impressed,’ why shouldn’t you also like ‘Hitchin a Ride?’ Fuck those old guys. Lets make our own canon.” And in its own half joking, uncertain, insecure way, this allowed, and maybe even encouraged us to entertain the notion that the pop music of our childhood, our guilty pleasure, the music we heard on the radio in between heavy doses of the Big Chill soundtrack, wasn’t pure fluff, but music which merited inclusion in our own personal canons, even if it did not comport with the established codes of hipness.

It was a subtle approach, self-effacing where the core boomers were self-righteous. But it was nevertheless one of the means by which the “indy rock” subculture established a cultural space, at least partially autonomous of the hegemonic boomer culture. And it was here, at least in part, that the work of establishing a post-boomer culture could be undertaken.

***

Even more than the rest of the audience, the musicians who witnessed incidents like the one at Joe’s Star Lounge were profoundly affected by them. Not only did these incidents encourage them to rethink the boomer canon, they pointed to a means by which musicians could participate in the revision process, while simultaneously marking themselves as fellow traveling cohorts of bands like the Replacements. This is undoubtedly why so many bands began covering critically unappreciated songs of the 1970s in the years that followed. For after “Black Diamond,” the practice of covering such songs took on a new rhetorical significance. When bands like Soul Asylum and Camper Van Beethoven covered Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero,”or Ringo Starr’s “Photograph,” they reiterated–at least implicitly–the same questions the Replacements had asked. At the same time, they also asserted their common membership in the “indy rock” scene.

And over the years, the practice of playing ironic covers has become such an institutionalized way for a band to assert its “alternativeness” that a self-consciously applied ironic cover aesthetic has developed amongst musicians in the scene to separate the wheat from the chafe. The specific contours of this ironic cover aesthetic are difficult to articulate. Nevertheless, while the whole thing might have begun as a drunken happy accident up in Minneapolis, the cover aesthetic has developed a high level of sophistication over the last decade. Just about every “underground” musician I know has a profound intuitive awareness of its boundaries. I admit that this is probably not empirically verifiable. But I have had enough conversations with enough different musicians in enough different places across the United States to be confident that such an aesthetic sensibility does exist as a fairly unified entity nationwide.

Generally, discussions of the ironic cover aesthetic boil down to a single binary opposition that Beavis and Butthead would certainly be comfortable with: “cool” vs. “lame.” In a band setting, the discussion might go like this:

Band Member 1: Lets cover “Whiskey Rock n’ Roller” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. That would be really cool.

Band Member 2: No way, that would be lame. Everybody always does Skynyrd covers. That whole southern rock “Freebird” thing is played out. It wouldn’t be funny. People would think we really like that stuff.

Band Member 1: But I do like that stuff. “Whiskey Rock n’ Roller” is a great song and I’ve always liked it. It rocks. I think people would really dig it.

Band Member 2: Maybe, but I don’t think we can pull it off. It’s too close to what we do already. We’re not the Butthole Surfers, you know. They could cover any song and it would probably be cool. It just doesn’t feel right to me. We need something more obscure like “Hot Child in the City” by Nick Gilder. “Whiskey Rock n’ Roller” is too obvious. People will think it’s lame.

As the above example illustrates, not all “bad” songs of the 1970s are created equal. Nor are all “underground” bands created equal. For most bands, the risks are high. The wrong cover choice will be perceived by the audience as lame, reinforcing the impression that the band is lame. But certain bands (e.g., Sonic Youth) could probably cover any song, no matter how lame or obvious it seems on the surface, and through pure will or attitude transform it into something that is accepted as really cool (see e.g., the Butthole Surfers’ almost mimetic re-reading of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”). Nevertheless, the goal remains the same for all bands: You want to be on the “inside” of the joke not the “outside,” because a successful cover legitimates your claim to membership in the “alternative rock” subculture.

In the decade since the “Black Diamond” incident, the gradual embrace of the ironic cover aesthetic by musicians and fans in the “indy” scene has reconfigured the cultural power relations of rock and roll discourse. Increasingly, a new set of post-boomer cultural standards and sensibilities have emerged, and the keepers of the core boomer canon have either had to respond to them or ignore them at their peril.

While it is not that difficult to learn the parameters of coolness implicit within the cover aesthetic and its cognates, leaping into this fray is not for the faint at heart. The poor boomer critic who foolishly believes that she can confront the post-boomer culture with her pre-ironic analytical framework is ripe for ridicule and embarrassment. For the practice of preemptive irony transmutes established critical categories: up is down, bad is good, stupid is smart.

Consequently, the critic is all but required to retool her critical categories to successfully evaluate the ironic cover and its relations, because failure would mean having to admit that one’s criticism is no longer culturally relevant. Then the critic would be forced to abdicate her most powerful role, that of the taste maker who discovers the newest and most cutting edge music. Because like all practitioners within the popular culture apparatus, critics risk extinction if they don’t keep up with the times.

In the face of these realities, more and more Boomer critics have re-tooled. They’ve assimilated the aesthetic categories wrought by preemptive irony, and in the process, hastened the collapse of the core baby boomer cultural hegemony. In truth, though, “erosion” may be a better term than “collapse,” for the process has been more like termites eating away at the frame of a house than a bulldozer leveling it. The house of 1960s rock isn’t razed, it just finally caves in one day and lo and behold, 1970s album rock is back in the hipster fold, after years of languishing on the margins of the serious rock critic discourse. This process is no more evident than in the critical establishment’s unqualified embrace of the Seattle “grunge” sound of bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam as a form of “alternative rock,” somehow aesthetically distinguishable from the critically disfavored heavy metal/hard rock of the 1970s.

Apparently, it is their enthusiastic yet self-conscious and ironically detached posture towards hard rock that has allowed the Seattle grunge musicians to unabashedly borrow from 1970s rock, recycle its musical content and yet make fun of the whole process in such a way that the end result comes off as an act of aesthetic sophistication comporting with canonized definitions of musical hipness. Through some fantastic process, the magical transmogrifying machine of preemptive irony has taken the supposed cheese of the 1970s, seasoned it with a little critically favored, earnest and authentic punk rock, and turned it into the pure “alternative” gold of the 1990s.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, I suppose. And so as we at the front of the tailbust generation settle into our thirties, get fat, grey, and some among us lose our hair, preemptive irony has allowed us to make a strange peace with the whole notion of nostalgia for our cultural roots. Over the decade since the “Black Diamond” experience, our past has been gradually reinscribed into the present in a form that doesn’t cause us too much discomfort.

In our case, we embrace it gingerly with a sort of self-effacing, satirical pride. Sure, the 1970s weren’t the glory years. We were late to that big party our elders threw in the decade before. Nothing really “important” happened when we were growing up. It was all old hat by then, at least for all the elite college kids who’d already outgrown pot, acid, and the counter-culture. Now it was the philistine masses turn to enjoy it. But we kids still had to get through it and deal with the dislocations wrought by the counter-cultural experiments of our philistine parents.

Now we’re all here. Grown up. But everyone still has to be from someplace. Some people get to be from supposedly cool places like San Francisco or New York. And some people, like me, did time in places like the Cleveland area, which, Pere Ubu to the contrary, has never been viewed as a very cool place. But over time, with some work, you make your peace with your past. Whether it’s Cleveland, the 1970s, or Cleveland in the 1970s, one way or another, you find an approach that works.

Maybe you do poke a little fun at it now and again. But when you go back to visit and you see those ugly decaying steelmills in the Flats or you think about those ugly elephant bell-bottoms of the 1970s, you find beauty in them and you take a strange pride in having done your time there. Maybe you don’t really want to have to live there full time. San Francisco and New York are actually pretty cool. But some smart-ass cultural snob from the coast better not make fun of Cleveland, because if they do, you won’t hesitate to tell them to fuck-off.

What the hell do they know? They weren’t there living it the way you did. So they’ll never know the beauty of being sixteen in Cleveland or Spokane or Des Moines or Milwaukee or somewhere out in New Jersey, and driving down some back road late at night with some friends, Bad Company or Zeppelin or the Eagles on the car radio, maybe drinking a few beers and feeling pretty damn good indeed. Maybe those snobs have got their own memories. But this one’s yours. Perhaps you are a little embarrassed about it now. But it still feels good to think about it sometimes, even if it is with some humor. Whatever works.

And then one day, you hear a Bay City Rollers song on the alternative station in between the Cult and Soundgarden and you don’t even think about it anymore. You’re not embarrassed or outraged. It’s not even really that novel. It just takes you back and it’s ok. It’s kind of liberating in a way. You push all of the air out of your lungs, take a big deep breathe, and let it all flow into you without a lick of shame. The hard, ambiguous, insecure edge of irony has vanished.

And it’s ok, because you don’t need it anymore. Its work is done. You’re basking in the comforting warmth of reverent nostalgia now, your own reverent nostalgia. Not the heavy, self-serious nostalgia of those 1960s baby boomers, people who really believed that they were going to “change the world,” and that their experience was unique in the annals of history, not just one more stop in a never ending process of cultural creation, disposal and reclamation. No, this nostalgia is pretty free of those sorts of pretenses. It’s more like “I remember this fondly. I’m not embarrassed to say it. No really, I’m not embarrassed. And that’s ok. Isn’t it?”

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.

February in Seattle has a way of turning my circadian rhythms around. So I find myself tired but unable to sleep tonight. This wired fatigue is an interesting place. The mind is quieter and slower. At the same time, a lot of psychic noise disappears, and an unexpected clarity of focus emerges.

Right now, my mind is filled with the taste of Toyoda Sushi and the beauty of the family dinner we had to celebrate my sister-in-law’s 43^rd birthday. Maxwell, my nephew, who is in the 2^nd grade, tried Wasabi for the first time tonight, tasting it carefully at first, but later asking for maybe just a little bit more to go with his Yellow Tail (evidently also his first raw fish Sushi experience).

As Max was trying the Wasabi, we talked about his cousin Alex’s first Wasabi experience years before, where in an impulsive moment he took a rather big bite and paid the price for it (smoke, as they say, was blowing out his ears). Afterwards, Maxwell asked, only half in jest, whether it was possible for smoke to blow out your ears. And we decided that while we had never personally seen it done, it might be possible, since your ears are connected to your nose and throat.

Then we explained that that phrase was more of a metaphor, and I referenced the Roadrunner cartoons, which Max had never seen, where smoke does sometimes literally blow out of the Coyote’s ears after one of his schemes to catch the Roadrunner has backfired on him. I wondered out loud if this is where that saying came from.

Reflecting in the middle of the night on my dinner conversation with Max conjures up memories of being in Vermont during the summer after I was in 2^nd grade. The picture should be blurry, almost 40 years removed, but it remains vivid: Driving out to Vermont from Champaign, Illinois in the Orange Datsun 510 my dad got around that time. Listening to the Five Man Electrical Band sing “Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign” on the AM radio in the car as we drove out (Dad really liked that one). Stopping in Northampton, Massachusetts, I think in part, to pick up the keys to the mobile home we would be staying in for the week (it belonged to my parents’ friends the Fitzgeralds, neighbors from when we lived there).

Then we were up there. Vermont. Green. Clean. Serene. Work shoes on, running around in the woods by myself. Fishing off of a small bridge. Listening to the Band’s brown album on the portable 8-track player my dad bought me for my 7^th birthday. We didn’t have a lot of different 8-tracks with us. In fact, we might have only had that one tape. And I suspect my folks were getting pretty tired of the Band in that mobile home, which was not so big for 4 people. But it was workable.

That brown album by the Band was the paradigmatic case: the first rock album that was really mine and mattered to me. I suppose I may have already had the experience of playing Revolver by the Beatles to death, developing an early favorite song on the album, but then listening more and finding things in some of the other songs that I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. But that was my parents’ album. This one was mine. So perhaps I was more aware of this process happening with the Band. “Dixie” and “Cripple Creek” were the early favorites, and I didn’t like “Look Out Cleveland” at all. But by the time we got to Vermont that summer, it was starting to grow on me. Little did I know we’d be living in Cleveland 8 years later.

Over the course of that week, I heard that song over and over again. And as I ran around in the woods, singing it to myself over and over again, it took up residence in my brain. In one form or another, it’s been lodged up in there ever since.

So as I write this, on the back end of my sister-in-law’s birthday, that old music still playing in my head, I wonder what sort of vivid moments Maxwell is having right now (and Sylvia too). They are still so small and seemingly unformed. But I know that isn’t really true. For while I may have been small during those days in Vermont, I was not unformed. I can draw a straight line from this moment right now back to that one. For better or worse, there is more continuity in that line than discontinuity.

That little dude in the woods was pretty happy-go-lucky, perhaps more so than this man at the keyboard tonight. But that little dude also thought about a lot of stuff. He was not oblivious to all that was going on. He was still growing and learning, but he could feel his mother’s irritation ebbing and flowing in the cramped confines of the mobile home. And it caused him concern, which would grow more prominent as the years went by, because this was a vacation, and vacations were supposed to be fun. So this unhappiness didn’t quite compute.

But it also didn’t obscure all happy things. For that little boy could still run around in the woods, something he had done very little of up to that moment, and something he has done very little of since. The running. The quiet. The music playing in his little head. Those were all happy things.

I see that process happening in my nephew now. He’s become a serious little dude. He can be silly. He often doesn’t know where the limits are, so his parents need to show him. But he is also taking more and more of it in with each passing day, already more of who he will be than anyone probably comprehends in the moment (including him). But also I suspect, more self-aware than we grown-ups are inclined to acknowledge or appreciate.

I hope the grown-ups at the table tonight get a chance to visit with Max on the occasion of his 43^rd birthday and see what he remembers about this night. The Yellow Tail? The Tempura Fried Ice Cream? Or that first taste of Wasabi?

©2013 jawjawjaw. All Rights Reserved.