As I am sprawled out on my couching coughing away on some Albanian virus flown in by one of my lawyers, one wouldn’t expect to find me smiling like an idiot, but I am.
I am so happy with a new band I found — They dredged up all these colors I had been starving for in sound for a good long while.
And I have the wonderful luxury of my iBook and my iPod, my eyes full of pictures and words, my ears full of excellent headphone sound (thanks Mikeybear!), my stomach unhungry, and my windows not blown out by a hurricane. I am friggin, HAPPY, man! That is a statement I rarely say, and few things but music can make me like this.
It made me so peaked listening to this tune that I wished my mom were here to listen to it. She would have loved it.
This was a woman who was born well before plastic!
Before television!
Before REFRIGERATORS! …Yes!!
But she loved rock. She loved the latest, most crashing loud sumptuous sounds she could find. She cranked up our old Motorola TV speakers when great tunes came on, and they rattled permanently after one of those times. She danced in a way that looked like it couldn’t quite let go of something unrelated to my era — what was it? Swing? It just didn’t look RIGHT, but she was having a great time with it.
When the Beatles came out and there was such a scandal over “long” hair (what was that, two inches over the collar of their suits?), my mom planted her stance firmly against my Dad’s grumping. I was in grade school, and she was dressing me like a proper little Caroline Kennedy. We went to see A Hard Day’s Night in the movie theater whether Dad liked it or not (we took a taxi!), and my first Beatle memories are with her, sitting in a dark theater packed with weeping bouncing girls screaming at the tops of their lungs straight through it. I look at that as my first official concert experience, even if it was a movie. The fab four hadn’t set foot on our shores yet, I don’t think.
It was electric pandemonium!
I was an instant convert.
Once in a while on a Saturday afternoon, we’d go to the one little diner in town for our favorite cinnamon apple pie after doing errands around the tiny town square. Only a handful of old hicks in flannels were in the joint and a waitress with an old pink polyester uniform and no-longer-white apron. But the diner must have picked up at night, because the owner had put Beatle tunes on the juke box for the highschoolers. There in the midst of pork chops and John Deere hats, she clicked open her coinpurse, gave me dimes to feed, and she pushed the buttons for TWIST AND SHOUT!
NOW SHAKE IT UP BABAAAAAAAAy!!! blew out of the corner. TWIST AND SHOUUUUUT!!!
And they all looked around…….
….. and Ma and I giggled, conspirators in a great plot to change the world’s ears.
Much later, after the shock of my dad leaving wore off, she suddenly realized she could do things she wanted. She began to try it.
Suddenly we were a cat household. “!!?!”
We no longer had to have dinner every night at the same time.
She actually wore jeans to the grocery store one day. (Heavens!)
We ate pans of fudge together. (I still think my twisted food-reward syndrome was born in this period.)
And music bloomed for her, too. She began to reach for the soul she’d stuffed away.
She loved everything on the Derek and the Dominos LP, and when I figured out the piano section to Layla she was delighted.
She turned up Rod Stewart to an embarrassing level. I found a poster of him, SHIRTLESS!, in some head shop, and bought for her for her birthday. She actually hung the sweaty Rod over her bed (my friends found this very amusing).
She pounded on my door the day I first played YES, and demanded to know what that stuff WAS, and could I play that one again.
When her peers were complaining that no one could sing any more and Joe Cocker was just a screamer, my mom was right there comparing him to black scat singers from the 30s that she had liked. She loved his raggedness.
She thought Todd Rundgren was as adorable as he was catchy. I was for a while very much into a British band Wishbone Ash, and she played that till there was vinyl resist in the grooves of my record. Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another band whose records we thrashed. And Oh yes, she liked Pink Floyd.
Now don’t get me wrong: I kept my bedroom door closed a lot as a teenager, stereo cranking or not. I hid from her all my dirty little secrets that I knew she’d freak over. I knew she wouldn’t understand that new corruptness that went along with teen life of the late 60s and early 70s. I had huge fights with her over both stupid and dire issues.
She hated when I called her Ma!, like my friends (trash! she said) called their moms.
We argued over my hair, my clothes, my dates, my friends, war, politics, religion, and just about every opposite mental pole you could gravitate toward.
I bitterly hated her over many decisions she made about her own life and mine at times. And her nagging drove me to the point of having visions of chairs crashing down on her teeth. I really did imagine that one day. What kind of sound would that make?, I thought. The violence of my own thought that she conjured in me made me a bit sick to my stomach.
And I think her fear, her lack of going out and grabbing more of what she wanted in life, actually angered me most. She was from an era where the men acted, and the women were wallflowers waiting to be picked. When cast away, they wilted. The vestiges of that meant she didn’t end up with much but a tiny ramshackle house in the middle of a WalMart hick town, and her cats.
She was, after all, not a “liberated” woman, but a cast-off woman, in her own thought. She became a closet desirer. An armchair experiencer. A vicarious liver. How I wished she had come out, Come Dancing, like the Kinks sung.
In the early 90s, when those two packs a day finally got to her, and she could do very little but watch TV, her last request of me was to find a video of Seal. He was her new hero.
“We’re never going to survive unless we are a little crazy”, he sang.
And so she did.
Wish you were here.
Ma.
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“she clicked open her coinpurse, gave me dimes to feed”
~smiles~