CHANGES AND MORE CHANGES

john cage

I see a brown thrasher has taken to perching on the wire fence where I give the donkeys carrots in the mornings. The ground the other side of the fence is trampled to dirt with donkey droppings mixed with the dirt, returned to dirt. It must be rich with bugs. I see birds lighting in the meadow going through the piles of donkey droppings for the bugs. Crows scour the meadow in early morning. The meadow has become rich in life forms. I see mushrooms I've never seen before, toadstools. Jack dug out a large circle of dust, tore up all the grass with his front hooves. I was looking at hiring somebody to trim his hooves, but now that the meadow has been his territory long enough it's home, he keeps his hooves trimmed himself. I've seen two of his dust circles he created before on the other side of the creek. All are on a place where the ground is sloped just a little bit. Perhaps it makes the rolling on his back easier to get up. Maybe if the ground were flat a donkey might fall into a turtle on its back situation, all four feet in the air and can't roll either way. Every move a donkey makes is fast, even when it looks like they're moving slow; these donkeys are fully attentive to every moment. They miss nothing. I'm imagining, since a donkey never likes to be vulnerable, the slope helps the donkey get up on its feet fast if need be. They process what they see in patterns of donkey thought, another world to me. I like all their experience with me to be benign, never a gesture that could be interpreted a threat. I don't kick them. They don't kick me. I like that Jack has made the necessary place for a donkey to roll in the dirt. Keeps the flies down, the parasites down. I'd like to do something for them to eliminate their parasites, but their role as bug magnets goes all the way back in their evolution, like fleas and dogs. I see the donkeys have their own bug-control knowledge by instinct from hundreds of thousands of years. Their swinging tails that look like windmills shoo the flies from their rear ends continually.

 

john cage

 

Flopping ears keep flying bugs in the air. I see flies now on Jack's and Jenny's faces and think of documentaries of African children in refugee camps with extended bellies and flies walking around on them. Of course it's a drag having flies walking around on your face, but we're spoiled humans who seal ourselves into air-tight houses and vehicles. We don't spend enough time in the world of insects to get used to them crawling on us. Farmers did. Farmers spent much of their time in silence. They lived in their minds, largely. The farmers I have known were deep thinkers. Their patterns of thinking were pre-Copernican, the Bible their intellectual and spiritual foundation. They don't seem intellectual to us, whose educations include knowledge of the solar system and galaxy, at least to some degree. We understand we are a part of the night sky, not separate from it. It's not because they're ignorant. William Blake was of the same cosmology and he was not ignorant. Because evolution was not covered in their education does not make them stupid. I knew incredibly intelligent men and women who did not believe the round earth theory. It didn't matter to me, or to them, that two cosmologies separated us, major generation gaps. Though I believed the earth to be a ball in orbit around another ball, I couldn't give evidence of it to somebody who didn't get it. Their way is right before your eyes, the obvious; the sun comes up, the sun goes down. The sun is in motion, not earth. I have a difficult time refuting the obvious. I don't know what to say after, It's really not like that. It's something quite different from the obvious. It's the opposite of the obvious. The difference I saw between us was that I saw myself included in the cosmos, the universe. They saw the universe, the cosmos separate from them. It's a big difference. It didn't matter that they watched television shows from satellites.

 

john cage

 

Much is yet unknown to the most advanced among us, cosmologies yet to be unveiled in passing time. Does that make us ignorant now? No more than it makes William Blake or Shakespeare ignorant. Our cosmologies characterize the time we live in. In 1614 there were brilliant minds all the way around the globe. They thought much the same as we do, though different because they had different experience. In my early years in the mountains, I saw the tail end of the people from the old-time ways. Grandpa wore bib overalls and a hat. Grandma wore a long dress and had long hair she kept twisted and pinned up out of the way. She was busy physically with a garden, the cooking, the cleaning up, taking care of everybody. They listened to square dance music. Next generation was the Hank Williams generation, blue jeans and white tshirts with a pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels rolled up in one or both of the sleeves. Skirts up to the knees and hairdos by permanent. Then the heavy metal, Southern rock country, and boys in cowboy boots and long hair. The babes in tight jeans and all lengths of hair. And the California surfer look, the kids in school. Since then, the last generation of bib overalls and long dresses is gone. The Hank Williams generation is on its way out. The surfer look-alike style faded away, replaced by the hip-hop rap style, gangsta, which, by now, has faded into the past. The cell phone generation now is dominant. Just before the cell phone was the Britney Spears look awfully common among teenage girls. These are the changes I have seen in microcosm in these hills. It's the end of the world as we know it every decade, it seems like, or even more frequently. Nascar is now the most watched sport on tv, according to surveys. That's a big change. The television network that purveys fake news as policy is now the most believed news source, as is Jon Stewart's Comedy Central news satire.

 

john cage

 

It is a very different culture we live in from when Little Richard was banging his piano singing Lu-ci-lle, you ran off and married but I-I love you sti-ll. I've kept up to a point. It's become dizzying. I've already been through nuclear threat. I'm not going to do it again. I don't even want to know what's pop anymore. I have my own music in the house from years of listening and buying, I don't need any more in my mind. There's no room. My music file is full. On facebook different people put up music videos. I see James Brown, Night Train, I don't need to play it. I hear it in my head as soon as I see the title. One that just now came to mind, The Jamies, Summertime. I was fifteen the summer it was new. It was in the time of Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On and El Ranch Rock, Splish-Splash, Peggy Sue. I didn't identify the song with summer time. I liked it the way I liked Rockin Pneumonia, The Jamies were a straight-up Fifties Lawrence Welk acceptable family singing group. I about fell over backwards when I looked them up on YouTube. The song had the zip of Gene Vincent's Be Bop a Lula and Carl Perkins' All Mama's Children. Year after year it was the summer song radio stations played for so long the music changed so much it just didn't work anymore except on oldies stations. The vitality the song had then, it has now. Little Richard's Lucille is still beautiful, as is Chuck Berry's Maybelline, as is Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Coming in at the very beginnings of rock & roll, I've had the great good fortune to follow the music through several periods of its evolution as a music. Music is coming in from all over the world, everything changing so fast that what we call rock is now one of many genres. I like my Blue Ridge Mountain home. It's time to hunker down a notch further, take a step inward, allow even the thrill of seeing Eric Cantor unseated in DC pass on by as nothing worth notice. The seasons are far more interesting than the dis- and mis-information we're fed through the media, even NPR. I've come to like silence about the best of any form of auditory experience. I like face to face and facebook communication with others. But in between, I like the silence with a wind chime tinging in a light breeze, tree frogs and katydids, the katydids in my ears, all singing together such that I don't know what's in here or out there.      

 

john cage himself

 

 

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IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT

Hearing the Psychedelic Furs. I've not listened to enough music lately. The Psychedelic Furs is a band that has satisfied my ear for a long time. Having 2 of their cds, often when I want to hear some music and don't know what, the Psychedelic Furs is the answer. I see they have a website and they're still touring. They played in Charlotte 5 nights ago. I'd have gone to that concert if I'd known about it ahead of time. That would have been a good one to drive a hundred miles to. They're grown up now, 2 decades after, but I imagine their musicianship is that much better and their performance of the music is too. I don't usually listen to music when I write, because the music takes me over completely and all I can do is listen. The reason I've not been listening to music much is it takes me over completely. Before I put on a Patti Smith album or Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry, Jane's Addiction, The Clash, Generation X, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Angelique Kidjo, SE Rogie, Alternate Roots, Aerosmith, Skeeter & the Skidmarks, Ralph Stanley, Whitetop Mountain Band, to name a few that take me over unmercifully, allowing no wandering of mind, before I put them on I have to have enough time to listen to the album all the way through. SE Rogie coming to mind makes me want to hear him. Beautiful lilting palm wine music with acoustic guitar and singing from Sierra Leone.

s e rogie

The world has so much beautiful music in it, it's hopeless to want to hear it all. I've tried to hear it all, at least a general sampling, but it can't be done. I start listening to North African Rai and can't go on from there for a long time. Or start listening to Islamic sitar music from India. That's it. And then there is what happens when the Rolling Stones come on. I'm all ears. No matter what song by them, it has my full attention. On cd, the only Stones albums I have are the one live at very small clubs, Stripped, where they play almost unplugged greatest hits, blues songs, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and their first album that has I'm a King Bee on it. I tend to like everything by the Stones. Their first album continues, after all the great ones like Black & Blue, Exile on Main St, to be the one I return to. Just now found a website that plays the entire album, youtube, so it is playing now as I write. Didn't intend to do that, but am in a Stones bluesy mood. Velvet Underground had a similar groove as early Stones. Stones went to the big auditorium sound, not hardly by choice. There was no auditorium on earth big enough not to sell out immediately for Stones tickets. I never saw a Stones concert. It seemed too much to me like going to Woodstock to go to a place so big the band is the size of vertical ants on the stage, like seeing them from a plane. I like to be able to see that it is human beings on the stage. I don't like to be so close that I see how dirty they are. Too close, they're just people, like us, not big stars, not a fantasy of what a rock star oughta be. It's just dirty, sweaty, stoned American and English young'uns looking to meet some chicks and make some money.

rolling stones

Jagger is singing I'm a King Bee. It takes me back to the Fifties, high school, hearing Slim Harpo singing it on the black stations in Kansas City and Wichita, stations I listened to as much as the white stations. That's where I heard Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Etta James, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. Some of them were played on the white station, but when I listened to both, I heard the best of the new music twice as much. The white station would be where I'd hear Marty Robbins' Singin the Blues. Ray Charles singing Lonely Avenue was incredible. What'd I Say was stellar, like the Stones' Satisfaction a few years later. This Rolling Stones blues and r&b album takes me back to the music like this I heard on the black stations in the Fifties. That's where the music was played that I loved. Didn't have to listen to Paul Anka on that station. They played Mickey and Sylvia. Everything they played was something I wanted to hear. I'm hearing why the great blues guitar pickers, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry were impressed by what they heard when Keith Richards was making music with them. On the Stones concert video Martin Scorsese made, Shine A Light, Richards and Buddy Guy get to going on a guitar duet, whatever they call it when they play in perfect sync. They tore the place up. In an interview clip shown in the film, somebody was interviewing Richards and Ron Wood together. Asked which of them was the best guitar player, Richards said (I paraphrase), We're both just ordinary guitar players, but together, nobody can beat us.

dionysius and the satyr

 

 

I've let the Stones album play again, and again. It takes me to my very own foundation in music. The beginnings of rock n roll occurred with the Penguins' Earth Angel, the Coasters' Searchin, Bill Haley & the Comets' Shake Rattle and Roll, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Chuck Berry's Maybelline, Bo Diddley's Bo Diddley, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel, Jerry Lee's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, then the whole body of work by Chuck Berry and Little Richard throughout my Jr Hi and High School, the years when a kid really needs his own music. I had the super good fortune to see both Alan Freed Rock N Roll Shows. I think the years were 58 and 59. They were fabulous for a high school kid who by then had a head totally involved in rock n roll. Rock n roll was my escape fantasy. At one of the shows, Fats Domino played his set and filled out the time of two players who'd missed the show, Jerry Lee one of them, Screamin Jay Hawkins the other, from probably being too drunk and whatever else. Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the girl group I loved the very most, the Chantels, were there. I heard the Chantels sing their two hits, Maybe and Every Night, from twenty or so feet away in adoration. I was like a Catholic boy kneeling before statues of saints aching his heart out to be a real boy. Chuck Berry played at both the shows. After work, walking to the bus stop to go home from work the day of the second Rock N Roll Show, a gold 57 Cadillac with venetian blinds in the back window, mudflaps and a license tag that said, C BERRY, passed by so close I could have reached out and touched it if I'd seen it in time. Flipped me out. I had all his 45s to that date. The show was that night. Larry Williams fell off his upright piano attempting to dance on top of it drunk. I loved seeing Mickey and Sylvia sing Love Is Strange.

 

 

chuck berry

 

This music from the Rolling Stones' first album brought that period of music back to life for me. I was a hung-up Fifties lonely teenager listening to Dion and the Belmonts sing about it. Oh Susie Q, baby I love you. Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou I loved as much as any Little Richard song. Little Richard stood out for me way beyond everybody else. Bob Dylan took care of that zone for me next. I'm goin to tell you a story 'bout Mary Lou, she's the kind of a woman make a fool of you...She took the keys to my Cadillac car, she jumped in my kitty and she drove a-far. Learned many years later, his band, The Hawks, evolved into Dylan's band, The Band. I guess it's all right to call Elvis the king of rock and roll, but for that title, I'd have to go with Bo Diddley. I'd give it to Little Richard if he hadn't had so many facelifts. He's the undisputed queen of rock and roll. I say Bo Diddley because the Sixties bands leaned more toward the Little Richard and Chuck Berry sound, except the Velvet Underground that came after the Bo Diddley and the Buddy Holly sound. Punk that started in 75 went with the Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly sound funneled through the Velvet Underground. A very large portion of the rock ever since has been of the Bo Diddley sound, a tight, quick beat. His influence in rock is every bit as direct as Chuck Berrry's and Little Richard's. I had the good fortune to see Bo Diddley at Ziggy's ten or more years ago, when he was 74. He gave an all-out concert, and it was, indeed, Bo Diddley his very self. It was thrilling for me, loving his music my entire music-listening life, Bo Diddley playing all those songs that are standards in the jukebox of my mind. The Bo Diddley beat is in me as much as Carlos Santana's guitar. Ron Wood made a live album with Bo Diddley in concert at a small New York venue in 1988, Live At The Ritz, dynamite rock and roll.   

 

 

ron wood and bo diddley

 

 

 

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