Super Luminous Pumpkins, Muddy Waters, and Rabies
"If ever I get the rabies, you are high on my bitin' list," came sailing out of my Bose headphones while I was hard at work on a new piece of art in the studio. As most of you know, I work with headphones cranking, a respirator on my face and safety glasses keeping these eyeballs out of the fine metal breeze my hands create. Gotta love the Blues. "I been down so long, I should pay rent to the floor." "Nobody loves me but my mama, and she could be jivin' too." I have been an acolyte of The Blues going back to high school when my brother Kev turned me on to the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East. "Stormy Monday" was their dual guitar shredding of a classic T-Bone Walker cut. No better Blues lyrics on earth, although I have spent all these years hunting. "I asked him for mercy, he gave me a gun..." "I asked her for water; she brought me gasoline." Presumably to put in the car and leave town... But stick with me friends, we have some ground to cover.
Show of hands please. How many of you love a hot shower pretty much every day? In the 1920s and '30s only the wealthiest Americans had hot showers. Bathtubs were ubiquitous for getting clean and even then the business of hot water was a chore. In the post-war building boom of the '50s, a shower over a tub became a literal fixture in the "modern" home. All homes from the early sixties forward had integrated showers; by the '70s and '80s, everyone was taking daily hot showers. Shampoo was big business. So, I suppose celebrating a century of hot showers might be accurate.
"I'll be glad to get to Hell so I can lay down by the fire and rest." I saw Furry Lewis at the Memphis Blues Festival three years before he died. Joni Mitchell made him famous, but the old cat I saw singing and playing guitar on stage was the real deal. He said he was ninety-two. He wasn't. He said he was blind. He was. He was missing a leg. He pulled out a bottle from a vest pocket for a swig during his set and played an electric guitar that looked like it was made from a cigar box. He was born in 1893. Thomas Edison recorded "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in 1877 on a tinfoil cylinder, but it wasn't until 1925 that Western Electric used electronic microphones to record music, make metal master discs and stamp the first polyvinyl records to sell to the public. That was 101 years ago. "If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."
Homo Sapiens, modern man and woman, us, have been around for about 300,000 years. If you wanted to hear music two hundred years ago, you played it, if you had the money for a piano or guitar or a lute or a wooden flute... Or you could sing if you knew some songs or went to church. If you had plenty of cash, you might have court musicians for entertainment. Today? EVERYONE has music everywhere. I remember my first IPod -- 1,000 songs in one pocket. OMG. These showed up in November of 2001 after our long history of cassettes and albums and 45s and eight tracks and mini-discs and....
The Blues tell us that I "...been down since I began to crawl..." It's an art form founded on "what I ain't got." We see ourselves. Self collides with self-perception. Ambitions clash with failure. We are showered in TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook and selfies of the beautiful, the brilliant, the strong, the famous, the endless broadcasting of the brand of "I, The Magnificent." Mark Twain wrote, "Comparison is the death of Joy." We should see ourselves.
Just to be clear, for all of modern humankind, we are in the 0.03 percent who have had hot showers. We are in the 0.03 percent who have music at our fingertips. AND if we add the multiplier that there are now billions of us with these luxuries... I know it's not all spread equitably. Fortune is fickle. And yet, "Enough is a feast," said one of my favorite wise men, Alan Watts. We live like kings! Blueberries year 'round. A life expectancy that has doubled in the last 100 years. Pepper. Literacy. Jet lag. Podcasts. And if the last century gave us hot showers and infinite music, what's the next hundred years bringing?
"Summer done come and gone, my o my..." After the equinox last week and the full Harvest Moon last night, we have the opportunity to spin another orbit on a new tilt. The Blues reminds us, "even the bedbugs up and run." So the tilt of the axis is up to us. Are the days getting shorter? Is it getting darker every day? Yep. "There's no way to delay that trouble coming every day." But, art to our rescue. Songs remind us of our shared condition. Art sparkles. Colors soothe. Metaphors are mighty mighty.
Peace and love,
And please vote.
B Mac
P.S. What launched the above missive was my leaning out of my car to catch a neighbor's question, "What, no more quasar?"?? It took me a moment. Hmmm... Neil DeGrasse Tyson tells us that quasars are the most distant and most luminous objects in the universe. Yes. And it's also my license plate, and I am driving around in a new used car with that ugly white paper tag. She was wondering, "Where's Quasar?" Weirdly, at the moment, I own three cars. One is 44 years old. One is 17 years old. My "new" one is 12 years old. Who needs three cars? Not me. Who wants my old Quasar? Enough is a feast. Time to share. I am a common man who at this moment has three horses to ride. Two of them have stereos.
P.P.S. Back to the first sentence above. The new art piece is going to Boston for the Affordable Art Fair, October 22-25 at the SoWa Power Station. Musicians push back on the silence, with style. I push back on the darkness. Please come visit for some brightness in the waning light of Fall. It's pumpkin season. AND that last sentence is the setup to the next blog. Please add Havoc to your email provider's contact list. What's coming up you definitely don't want in the spam folder. Pumpkins. And every single atom in the known universe...
P.P.P.S. One of my smartest friends has framed on the wall: "At the end of the game, the king and the pawn both go in the same box."
