It is always funny the inspiration I get to do a post here, at times I have something in my head so inspiring and visceral I almost don't have a choice but to write. Then again at times I simply feel as though I should write but don't have a clue. Sitting here tonight after two very hardcore days of drinking until the sun came up I am tired and spent. I walked over to First Avenue and had dinner alone on the sidewalk with a bottle of Sicilian wine which I am always impartial to for some reason. Delaying laying in bed for a while until sleep approached I was texting a friend about a few things and reviewing each other's night I was still searching for a song until in reference to her night and one particular facet of it she stated: "I have to change my state of mind, that's really it. No expectations." With that she gave me an answer unknowingly and this sublime piece of old Stones shot through my head. A song that is the last example of Brian Jones' creative work with the group until he spiraled out of control and died at his own hands. A song that displays a narrator being at piece with his hopelessness and lot in life.
In construction this song is a monumental work. The open tuning used by Richards, at the time new for his playing, would become the hallmark of his style. Jones' earthy, metallic slide channeling the old Mississippi blues masters, Charlie Watts' simple claves is all that is necessary to keep the beat and Mick's lack of Rock and Roll, Hollywood pretense is refreshing; sadly it is something we would see less and less of as the years transpired.
And it is somewhat funny that the person who inspired this song would be someone who put me in the narrator's situation one day at a train station years ago. The station being out in eastern Long Island. I remember hanging up the phone with my mechanic after he just told me that I had a dead cylinder in my old Porsche. I had just moved back up to the northeast and living with my parents while I was looking for a place in Manhattan (at 31 years old) and, well let's just say it wasn't the homecoming I was expecting. While waiting for the train to arrive to take me back to Manhattan so I could take another train another hour back to my childhood home, broke and staring an engine replacement and at least another ten grand in moving expenses the final truss broke and we broke up on that platform. I could tell it was moving in that direction but the last thing I needed was to contemplate it with three hours of solitude staring me in the face.
As bad as it was in retrospect it was quite romantic to deal with it on a desolate platform in the cool spring air, alone surrounded by hundreds of people after boarding and watching the landscape sweep past in a small blur. If I was the artist that Richards and Jagger were I would have had a song for it, instead I went home and listened to this one in the bedroom I grew up in, a bedroom that still housed plane models, an old Nintendo and animal wallpaper that matched a shag green rug. People always love to tell others not to forget where they came from and the act of saying is strikes me as the biggest verbal dirarreah imaginable. That night surrounded by the child I had been as the adult that I was humbled me in a frightening way. There's a reason why you can never go home again, then again there's a better reason for events playing out in this life and whatever reason I bore that crucible of abject humility for two months, hopefully I'll find the answer one day.
