The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#162) "Allentown" by Billy Joel -  If this playlist really is more about the road I've traveled than the road trip I plan to take, then there may be no more seminal song to put on it than Allentown. 

I was ten when this song was released, halfway through the task of growing up in my very own rust belt. And while my family was not directly affected by the broken promises and eventual vanishing act of the Great Lakes shipping industry, which in the late 1960s left my hometown with an economic hangover it's only recently started to get over, I grew up in it nevertheless, grew up amidst the same post-industrial grimness described in Joel's song. In fact, it was the very same industry that dipped out on Allentown, Pennsylvania...just the other end of it. My hometown shipped out the iron ore that wound up in places like Allentown to be turned into steel. But as the latter half of the 20th century unfolded, the ore was depleted, demand diminished, overseas competition hardy, and the industry collapsed, leaving a generation of men with no reason to get out of bed in the morning, and a generation of women with no reason to try rousting them. Make no mistake; I think Allentown, Pennsylvania fared much worse. My region managed at least to preserve a glimmer of hope by letting the natural beauty of Lake Superior become a tourist destination. But still, a lot of what made my hometown what it was when I was growing up was not all that pretty.

The strange thing is I was aware of it when I was ten. Yes, it would seem likely that I'd come to such a realization as an adult, but I saw my hometown in Allentown when I was a kid, walking along railroad tracks (the words Soo Line became an epitaph in my young eyes, printed in huge letters along the side of every abandoned train car, every rotting or rusted trestle spanning downtown streets), climbing over chunks of street concrete booby-trapped with gnarled tentacles of rebar that had been dumped along the lake shore, dodging handfuls of taconite pellets whipped at me either by a friend, a neighborhood bully, or worse, a hard-scrabble pack of neighborhood bullies. Perhaps I could not yet wrap my head around what it all meant, but I was making a connection, figuring something out, when I heard the song Allentown blaring from my older brother's dual-cassette boom box speakers.

Ashland, Wisconsin is no longer an ugly, abandoned train town. It's gone to great lengths in the last decade to clean up its act and look forward, capitalizing on the stellar beauty of Lake Superior, and letting a burgeoning environmental and organic movement (which I made fun of as a kid, but now understand and fully embrace) lead the way. But the way it was as I grew up certainly informed my personality, my worldview, and it still haunts me a little when I visit now.

"Every child had a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their old man got / When something happened on the way to that place, they flew an American flag in our face..." 

#163) "Sunday Morning Coming Down" by Kris Kristofferson - This song, I'm happy to say, I can't relate to all that much. I've never been down and out like this, nor let chemical dependency rule my life. I've never had "beer for breakfast and then one more for dessert."

Actually, come to think of it, I may have once or twice when I was in my early twenties.  But thankfully, it never turned into something that transcended a young man's contrived flirtations with rebellion, his stylized desire to find romance in greeting each sunrise through bleary eyes.  Sunday Morning Coming Down speaks to what was merely a dalliance for me becoming a lifestyle, in which there is no glamour or romance to be found; fading dreams by night, cold reality by daylight, and that daylight sullied as much by the mere fact of the Sunday as by alcoholism.

Johnny Cash did a stupendous version of the song in 1969, and this, understandably, became the more well-known. Kristofferson's strength lies in his songwriting and storytelling more than his performing. But for its poetry (a reminder of what country music once was, should be, and still could be if it stopped trying to be a caricature of itself), and for the solemnity of its arrangement better fitting the subject matter (in my opinion), I list Kristofferson's version here. Either one would do.

I can relate to this song in one way: there really is something about a Sunday that makes a body feel alone.

"And then I headed down the street, and somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing / And it took me back to something that I lost somewhere, somehow, along the way..."

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#160) "Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9,  No. 2" by Frederic Chopin - Of all the classical composers, many of them gifted (to say the least), nobody intrigues, moves, or impresses me like Chopin. Though most of his work was written for solo piano, I watched a BBC documentary recently that explains there was often a female vocalist on his mind when he composed, and as a result, his pieces tend to be emotionally expressive as well as astonishingly intricate. This is not always the case in classical music. Many of the genre's best works are soothing, impressive and lovely, but emotionally dry.

A nocturne is a piece of music intended to represent the night, and Nocturne in E Flat... is a deceptively simple slice of melodic ambrosia that captures, in vivid shades of white, silver and black, the nighttime's emotional entanglements, evoking a strong sense of peace punctuated ever so slightly by despair, a sense of sleepiness interrupted by occasional moments of anticipation, the notion - for this listener at least - that if you doze off, you may miss something. For my money, only Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (No. 14 in C-sharp minor)  paints as vivid a picture of the dark hours with just 88 keys.

Nocturne in E Flat..., of course, is not road music in the traditional sense...but reading back over the last two years, it's clear much of this musical list has drifted far away from road music, sometimes as far away as can be imagined (I placed the theme from The Jeffersons on here, for God's sake!). But that's okay; I think that's how it should be. This playlist (and I'd wager this is true of everyone's playlists) is not so much about the big road trip I'll one day drive, as it is the road I've traveled up to this point.

A special note should be made of the particular version of Nocturne in E Flat, Opus 9, #2 I prefer. Pianists can have a field day applying their own interpretative style to the works of Chopin. But there is a version of Nocturne in E Flat... by modern composer David Carlson, which seems to show up on a lot of classical compilations, a straightforward, more precisely timed performance that allows the richly woven finger work of the right hand and gorgeous ringing chords of the left hand (hallmarks not only of this piece, but Chopin's magnificence in general) to shine.





#161) "Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)" by Motley Crue - Like so much "hair metal", this song reminds me of being in high school. I was a child of the 80s, and for better or worse this was the music that played when I was a teenager. Here was the music on the car radio as I cruised up and down the main drag in town, the songs that blared out of boom boxes at parties in apartments above that main drag. These were the videos MTV played (when the "M" still stood for something...), the music we drove an hour away (to Duluth, Minnesota) to see performed live. Hair metal was nothing less than the soundtrack of my youth, and while to this day I don't think it was all that great, I don't shy away from it either, and there were some standard-bearers in the lot. Not all of it was Winger, White Lion and Poison. There was Metallica, Guns and Roses, Def Leppard...bands who made durable music that still holds up today.

Motley Crue was somewhere in-between, and they inhabited a finite but important time of my life. Metal music is best absorbed through youthful skin; it really holds no place in an adult world, unless you are legitimately "metal", in style and attitude, in which case, God bless. I just think it would get exhausting after a while.

But in the summers of  '90 and '91? Growing my hair long (though I think I looked more like Dave Mustaine from Megadeath than Vince Neil, and not in a good way) and learning fast what needed to be given the finger to, right around the time when Dr. Feelgood, the Crue's best album, was all over the radio? Yeah, it was a killer way to be, and Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away) felt damn good at just the right time that it should have.

In an interview somewhere, which sadly I haven't been able to find since discovering it on Youtube a few years back, Vince Neil draws a distinction between what the Crue was all about, and the grunge revolution that pretty much shut down hair/glam metal for good. He said he preferred his brand of rock and roll to that which resonated from bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains.

I'm inclined to agree. Everything may have sucked - very clear and present dangers in life and society driving the grim fatalism of grunge - but wallowing in the despair and rage is not really the answer. Vince Neil's point was that the aggression of metal, or rock and roll (or whatever you wish to call it...) was a method of blowing off steam in the face of everything sucking. There was a certain optimism, and sense of expectation, even a little entitlement, in Motley Crue's music, and most of hair metal, when I was in high school.

I miss that.

High school, not so much. ;)

"That's all right, that's okay, let's turn the page..."

Roads Wanted...

Although I have a general course pretty much mapped out for 1/48/50 (more on that later), I have started compiling a list of specific highways I'd like to be able to say I've driven when all is said and done, which began with this short article, from skyscanner.com.

5 Dangerous Road Trips to Take On in the United States

Time for a refresher course on the concept of 'living nebulously' - what it means, and what it doesn't...

So once again, I've been asked what 'seeking the nebulous life' means, and this most recent inquiry got me thinking there might be some confusion about the extent to which I think someone can, or should, live nebulously.

First, some review:

From Dictionary.com:

'NEBULOUS: hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused'

'Confused' can just go away....yes, it's true; sometimes I am confused, but I'm surely never seeking it. Sometimes it just crawls up and bites me. :-)

The other three descriptions, though, are precisely what I'm talking about. A road trip, any vacation really, is first and foremost a move to feel, for a little while at least, 'hazy, vague, and indistinct', disconnected from everyday life. And for me, it doesn't require driving 14,000 miles. I enjoy the nebulous sensation even on the short two-hour road trips I take nearly every week, from which I return home the same day. I love how it feels stopping for gas in a town where I am a stranger. There is something almost sensual about that kind of anonymity.

Don't get me wrong, I want to engage people on my road trip, I don't want to be invisible. In fact, a big part of 1/48/50 (which also for review, means: 1 road trip through 48 states in under 50 years...that is, before I turn 50...) will involve not being aloof, going out of my way to talk to people. But I want to remain on the periphery nevertheless, basking in that sense of spirited weightlessness that makes any and all travel so pleasurable. And I'll certainly revel in the old familiar feeling of being the kid on the school bus. 

But that's just on the road, for a finite period of time. When trying to apply the word 'nebulous' to day-to-day life, one is likely to get a vastly different result. I would never tell anyone to try living nebulously in the real world; it's a recipe for alienation and loneliness, the surest way to accumulate regrets.  I've said it more than once: I don't think of myself as the loner I once did, I put no stock in the drama and romance I used to find (or believe I was finding) in the lives of my lone-riding heroes. Seriously, engage your day-to-day life head on; make friends, keep friends, preserve family ties while you can. In the end, that really is the stuff that matters, and it's later than you think.

The 'Reasons to Live Nebulously' that show up on this page from time to time are not to be taken all that seriously. They're mostly just a way to fill space and pass time (that's what happens when you start a blog about a road trip that is still years in the future), but at their most pointed, I guess they are things that make me step back and take a good, hard look at myself and the world around me, assess where I've been and just where I'm going, before I make my next move.

But I do always make that next move.

It might be said they are things that could get me wanting to disengage from my life completely, or wishing I could, even though I know I never will. Admittedly, I admire people like Tim Treadwell and Christopher McCandless for the choices they made.  And further, sometimes the choice doesn't seem all that hard. What would I be leaving behind if i just stepped out of society?  Honey Boo-Boo? The Dumb Ass Housewives of Wherever, Whenever? The Kardashians? Dash Dolls? Drones in the sky? Cameras being worn as glasses? The predatory marketing of prescription drugs inevitably leading to the predatory marketing of law offices, when those drugs are found, as they almost always are, to have injurious side effects? Processed food feeding billions? Those billions at best getting in my fricking way at Wal-Mart or in line in front of me at the post office, at worst overtaxing the planet's resources?

There's no denying our modern society is kind of an agitated freak show. There's no denying the sorry state of our news media, our tread-worn political process, our lowered standards in every facet of Life - entertainment, education, politics, even finance. There's no denying our eroding privacy, our allegiance to corporate brands that control how we live by manipulating the decisions we make as consumers.

I can't be the only one who has been pushed to the fringe of his thoughts by the monstrosity our collective culture has become. I can't be the only one who occasionally gets set to wishing he could live out in the woods, totally off the grid, gardening and fishing in sun-lit (and wholly insightful) silence for the remainder of his days.

Everyone has some sort of fantasy about living nebulously. Nobody's okay with how things are all the time. To quote Louis CK: Everything's amazing, and nobody's happy.

But the answer, I think, is not to disappear; the answer lies in learning how to cope, how to embrace the good and manage the bad. It would seem Treadwell and McCandless could not cope. For both men it was demons, rather than a sense of adventure, that drove them into the wild. And while it's true their stories are fascinating, it's equally true, and glaringly so, neither ended well.

As to last week's post, Reason #34 to Live Nebulously, I'm sorry, I just don't like the thought of robots, or artificial intelligence of any kind. To be perfectly honest, a proliferation of cyborg beings, to the point where they walk and talk among us, become integrated into our daily lives with the ability to intuit, might be a real reason to live nebulously, to actually take the leap.  C3PO and R2-D2 are delightful on the silver screen, safely in that galaxy far, far away; I would not find them so enchanting in real life (nor, I suspect, would they be so enchanting). It's my one true prejudice; I do not like robots. I do not think any (further) foray into such technology will lead anywhere good, and when I see something as surreal (but real!) as 'robotic cheetah' lumbering clumsily along the grassy grounds of MIT to the cheers and applause of its madly intelligent and gifted creators, it makes my skin crawl.

Almost as much as the Kardashians do! ;-)

--------

While I'm at at, and on a related note, here is Reason #35 to Live Nebulously:

It would seem I'm in good company...

CLICK HERE

Reason #34 to Live Nebulously

There's just no way these kinds of stories, impressive as they might be, will ever not unnerve me.