This is Where I’ve Been

  Week Nineteen: Deacon Blues They got a name for the winners in the world I want a name when I lose. They call Alabama the Crimson Tide Call me Deacon Blues --Steely Dan, Deacon Blues from Aja Ever get a tune stuck in your head? It happens to me all the time. Ever since we asked Alexa to play music by Steely Dan, Deacon Blues has played over and over in my head. That might have been ok if I actually knew the words. Instead I had “ They call Alabama the Crimson Tide ” in a loop. I might be exaggerating a tad, but for days this song haunted me. I actually Googled the lyrics just to add another line or two to the one line I knew. It also got me thinking about nicknames. My given name was shortened to Jay. My brother, Lawrence became Larry and most times even now he goes by Lar. In the same tradition that Theodore Clever was known as Beaver , my father called me Worm , which had everything to do with my inability to sit still. No harm there, you might agree, but his “nickname” for a ...

  Week Eighteen: Shelter from the Storm Now there’s a wall between us, something there’s been lost I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” --Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm, from Blood on the Tracks Years ago, at the home of my wife’s parents in the mountains of western North Carolina, two hundred miles from where we lived in Wilmington, I monitored with concern the progress of Hurricane Florence as it approached the east coast of the United States. Great concern. Landfall was expected in two days. Descriptors such as monster, the worst in history, and storm of a lifetime had convinced us to evacuate, and had me believing that we should expect catastrophic results. My anxiety was the most recent in a series of stressors that began more than 13 months before. Apparently the best was saved for last. Back then we lived in Wake Forest, and after a couple...

  Week Seventeen: It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me Hot funk, Cool punk, even if it’s old junk It’s still rock and roll to me --Billy Joel, It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me from Glass Houses  What do the following names have in common: Diana Ross, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, Louie Armstrong, Chet Atkins, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and Dolly Parton? How about Grandmaster Flash, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, The Notorious B.I.G., and Tupac Shakur? The answer is simple: all are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame yet none of them ever produced one note of “rock and roll” music.  I think we have Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed to thank for the term “rock and roll.” By the mid 1950’s artists like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino had transformed the rhythm and blues music often referred to as “race music” into what we now think of as early rock and roll. Interesting term that. “Race music” was primarily blues-based rhythm and blues music cre...

  Week Sixteen: All Things Must Pass pt.2 All things must pass All things must pass away All things must pass None of life’s strings can last –George Harrison, All Things Must Pass from All Things Must Pass Like I said, I was not ready for my mother to die. I probably should have been. She smoked nearly two packs of cigarettes every day for forty-plus years, she suffered renal failure three years earlier, and her heart was not strong. But, the shock of that Saturday morning hit me like a bolt of lightning. There are details to which one must attend when someone dies. Some are more significant than others. What clothes she would wear at the viewing. What casket we would buy. Whether the identification plate on the concrete vault would be bronze or plastic. Details. Maddening details, but as infuriatingly tedious as was arranging her funeral, it had to be done. Her first viewing was a Monday afternoon. My wife and I went early for a very simple reason: I couldn’t stand the thoug...