What A Mess!

2-26-08 What A Mess!

Yesterday, I came to the point that I realized that I can’t ‘take it with me’; and nobody else is going to carry cartons of CD’s for me. Do I have to live in silence? Or can I just hum “Landed” by Can to myself for the next 50 years? Yeah! Let’s all hum “Unfinished”!

One of my pass-times is trying to figure out just how small / big is my ‘ultimate collection’. One of the times I figured it out recently it was 8,400 full-length titles. Yikes! All The Beatles, all The Rolling Stones, all the Frank Zappa – and we’re already into the hundreds! To paraphrase Freddie Mercury, “I Want It All”, eh, readers?

So, I’ve got my miniaturized music collection – all those Procol Harum and Gruppo Sportivo albums. I’m going to spend the rest of my days on Mars, teaching all the 20^th century Earth music to deaf mutants. I take the discs out of paper sleeves, and the miserable creatures wonder if we’re going to eat the discs. “No, but they will move the air around”, I tell them, reassuringly. The beasts see the music as the changing shape of air – a miracle. Damn. Wish I had brought more jazz. They tell me that the air formations made by Horace Silver are very beautiful.

So, I guess I think that my place in life is to tell the others about the beauty (usefulness) that I have found. This music stuff. And I’m so afraid that I will lose it all…that the message of The Beatles will eventually be compressed so…small…unidentifiable…

People in 400 years will only know “Yeah, yeah, yeah” – but have little or no idea about any of the contextualization – England, the 1960’s, change…to them, it will just be: 20^th century, Earth, Northern Hemisphere. That stuff that people used to just call “music”.

My cultural identity used to be “Male, L.A., 20^th century, music business community” – Couldn’t change the gender or the time – but I tried to find others like myself in New Zealand, Holland, England, Japan, San Jose, Florida…and not everybody was “music business” – some were like myself, merely ‘fans’ = music lovers. In short, I was a product of my times: A guy that hung out in record stores, mostly in Los Angeles – 1958 until the record stores went away. Oh, and we used to have these things called books. Now you just read everything on the internet. They used to call it the internet. Now it’s just that shit that flashes on the sides of buildings, above ground.

Anybody remember “Los Angeles, 2017”, the episode of “The Name Of The Game”, with Gene Barry? In it, they have ‘old people’ playing psychedelic rock music – 70 – 80 – somethings, all dressed up in hippie garb, with headbands, singing “Triangle, circle, square…” – I’m still waiting to move underground, you guys. “He just sits up there in his black tower, thinking he can do whatever he wants!”

Whoa, better go back underground. The air up here is killin’ me. Makin’ me forget. Better grab some Al Kooper LP’s before heading back down into the shelter.