Colors popping and chainsaws growling. We eat up these days as fast as they break each morning. Sunset before 7:30 -- what’s with that? I can’t stop growing cucumbers. Like always, unripened tomatoes are my specialty. We need to dig the potatoes and leave the carrots in the ground until the crispness of October arrives. Or did that happen already?
While I write this, I’m listening to Steely Dan. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker aren’t always part of my soundtrack, but whenever they stop in, they are always welcomed. They transport over decades like surfers of culture.
If they just played their music and never sang, the same feelings would be inspired by keyboard, guitar, bass, drums and their occasional inconstant accompaniment of brass and saxophone( s).
The issue for me though, is, their words. They do, of course, sing and those words aren’t the words of the unread or the uneducated. Their stories run deep into the ground and take root. When they do, they can’t be taken out by the winds of change.
You’re all familiar with our fallen trees with their giant root balls and wide berthed, shallow footprints. We have greenstone and granite underneath many of our trees and usually only a small amount of topsoil. Their root systems are tenacious and determined, but with so little to dig into, they become vulnerable.
Like a great pop song, these giants rise to extraordinary heights but they cannot withstand the persistence of time without bowing out to the pressure. I still listen to them; they remind me of many moments in my life that I treasure.
However, there’s something about Deacon Blues, Kid Charlemagne, AJA, Black Cow, Do it Again, Reelin’ in the Years, Rikki Don’t Lose my Number, Peg or Home at Last or Babylon Sisters or Pretzel Logic or even Any Major Dude that gets to me. I can’t listen to any of them every day, they bend my mind a bit too much, not unlike Phish.
Unlike Phish, Steely Dan’s words, though, wrap around me like the grapevine does my chain-link fence. They weave in and out of every opening in my thoughts while the guitar and keyboard magically keep pace with the high hat and the snare.
Somewhere along the line I start thinking of stories about why I miss New York City, even though I’ve never been. As soon as they return to the streets just outside New Jersey, I start dreaming of the ocean off of California and L.A.
Their vinyl spinning round and round always makes me think about my friend Bryan (not Byran) whom we lost way too soon. I think about hanging out at college and playing cards and listening to Steely Dan all night long.
I think about the stories that these songs planted in our heads and the ones we talked about writing ourselves. I think about the harmonies he and I made together and how much it hurts to be separated from a truly great and loyal friend.
To glory in words and directions and melodies and secrets dug up and discovered at My Old School. (Original photo from our School Newspaper at Lindenwood [College at the time] now University by Kelly Hamilton)
