I've been on the run a lot lately and then when I finally came home just felt even more unsettled and wanting to ramble. Mentally I haven't been there, in one sense the creeping depression and misanthropy started creeping in while on the other side on the coin I discovered a treasure trove of Springsteen's finest years live (late 70's) that had me dreaming about Emerson-Thoreauian spouts of self reliance and self preservation through music. Since most everything comes back to Springsteen I couldn't stand to hear myself spout posts of saying the same thing over and over again. I mean this is supposed to be about music are likely to have not heard and I felt as though my message was getting somewhat redundant.
At the same time when I started this blog it was about the music and then something I never expected to happen emerged. I don't know why it wouldn't have but it became mostly about me, about women and I used the songs as a springboard to rant about whatever was in my head at that particular time. I think this last part is a good one and one that I not only like to write about but something insightful. Everyone hears a song in a different way and possibly my personal experiences bring to light a different side one has never thought of in regards to music.
For some reason right now I feel at peace with whatever mental muck I was sloshing though for the past month or two and finally clear enough to write about something with a clarity people would want to hear.
Jerry died only a year or so after I had gotten into his music. The Grateful Dead hour that week was an amazing example of a man's work constrained into a one hour program. A tough task indeed for a man who defied being stuck into a genre and had a working catalogue of over five hundred songs played not only on guitar but banjo, pedal steel and while never played himself, trumpet-jazz tunes played though midi machines.
Episode 362 began with this song. You can hear versions of it on "The Pizza Tapes" and "Shady Grove" but this particular version, an outtake from a Grisman Acoustic Disc Sampler shines in ways the others could never touch. Jerry plays a fingerpicked progression used by Elizabeth Cotten (famous for "Oh Babe it Ain't No Lie" and "Freight Train") of terrible simplicity and stark beauty. Such a simple song about a man being laid down under the clay. It encompasses a view of death that must have been the norm over one hundred years ago before advances in modern science staved off the reaper as they now do until we are wearing diapers, hooked up to machines under the ultraviolet, clinical light of the death factories we call hospitals.
Recently I was in one for a little while and while my affliction was not life threatening it dug in deep and possibly produced the malaise I've been feeling for the past month or so. I wasn't faced with my own mortality but rather faced with how I want my own life to end. It certainly was not like the person in the bed next to me in a building on 69th and York. Not to belittle that man's demise for possibly that was the correct choice for him personally but I can only pray that it is not the way in which I depart. I say this knowing full well that man had no intention of departing in that fashion when he was thirty three years old.
Maybe that is what Jerry was feeling, for no one really knows how he died, not that it is that important. Rather, the way he lived is the heart of the matter and Goddamn if I could just leave one piece of music this concise and beautiful, this honest and truthful with a somewhat shaky voice uttered over a simple chord progression finger picked on a utensil crafted by hand of wood and steel...well then that would be saying something.
It is a marvelous song and tonight after I arrived home, after the gym, after a few drinks and dealing with shitheads at the bar engaged with each other in miscellaneous ramblings it came to me. It had been years, possibly a decade since I had last played it both through speakers and myself taking my own utensil into my lap and trying to keep up with the old grey bearded man. She came back to me as when you go through your old drawers in your parent's home and find a note, a t shirt you once wore until the threads had worn beyond serviceability. When you take that shirt up to your skin it all comes flooding back and a blanket of good vibes comes over you with a striking clarity.
This song does all that and more. It floods the senses like walking into a neon electric steam room flooded with the scent of fresh cut grass and a shower of lemon ice water in the corner ready with a pull of the precisely cut stainless ring that is hot to the touch and it is something to immerse one's self in until drowned to death only if your mind hadn't short circuited and gave out well before the waters actually rose.
