Chaz Is A Music Snob: 2016

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Note To Self

I'm sorry I never became what I wanted to
Not Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe or Cameron Crowe
Not Rory Gallagher, Ryan Adams, Paul Westerberg or John Doe
Not Jimmy Miller, neither Glyn nor Andy or even Ethan Johns,
Neither Eno nor Lanois
Maybe one day I'll grow up and know what to be
Maybe ... one day

I'm sorry I never found my confidence or courage
And I never was able to approach 'that one' or 'that (other) one'
Or that oh so sweet friend of that friend - yeah, that's the one
I'm sorry I let my fear rule and tie me
Heart pounding louder than any bass drum,
Mouth dry as a cotton ball in the desert sun,
Brain firing faster than a Formula One spark plug
But I stood there tongue tied and muted
Smiling but dying a little more every second

And all those words I longed to say
I spilled them across the endless pages
And I have always carried with me
The weight of all those things I never said
All of the longing and desire and sadness and regret
Words unspoken, love letters never mailed

I'm sorry I let these things freeze me
I didn't want to get hurt [again] so I never let anyone get close
And then the loneliness throbbed and ached inside me
Worse than the momentary pinch and sting of rejection

I painted myself into corners, hid myself away
Always found the reason not to or just flat out lied to myself
I let opportunities pass, the decision made for me
Just by choosing not to choose
And I hid my sadness and self disappointment in so many drinks
Drinks of self contemplation, self condemnation and self medication
And sometimes I managed to numb it all out for a few hours
Once in a while I did

I used all the lame assed excuses not to put myself out there
"I'm not interesting, not good looking, not good enough, so not worthy..."
And anyone who tried climbing over the walls
I pushed away and pushed away and pushed away
Until they finally left me be
And I sank deeper into my cubby hole
Bathing in television blue and playing my records
Trying to make myself feel better
And once in a month of Sundays or every other blue moon it did...

I'm sorry for some of the things I've done
I'm sorry for hurting people, intentionally or not
I used some women and toyed with hearts and bodies
And I should and will probably always carry a little bit of sorry for that
But it's time to let the sorry and the guilt fly
Time to cast off mistakes and failures
Cast of those "you surely knew better better but you did it anyway"
And the "oh my God, you were so young and God damned immature" regrets
For so long the innocent naive boy in the body of a full grown man

I'm sorry that for so long I've carried sadness, guilt and shame that was not mine
This is the burden from the parent to the child
Never asked for, never explained
These things dog us in the subconscious
Passed through DNA, observation and experience
Isolated from a mother's nurturing
Disappointed with the father's example
The anger about the way it all went down
Of actions never owned up to or apologized for
The sadness of not being able to repair her broken heart
Or help her through the golden years now tarnished
With her own bitterness and bile

I'm sorry it took so long to get here
To finally say to the mirror
"This isn't working anymore.
"I've felt stuck for so long
"An island in a river, life and lives flowing all around me...
"Today is the day I make the change
"Today is the day I choose to make changes.

"I deserve to be happy.
"I deserve to have strong, healthy relationships.
"I am worthy of love and of being loved.

"I choose not to let the past control me any longer.
"I have been through these things but I am not of these things.
"These things have shaped me but the do not define me.
"I will remember the lesson but I choose to cast off the regrets, guilt and shame.
"I choose to forgive those who have hurt me
"But most of all I choose to look into the mirror and forgive myself.

"I choose to do my best and make the most of my time here.
"I choose to be the best person, child, brother, in-law, uncle, nephew and friend I can be.
"And on the days I do my best and I don't think I did good enough
"I will tell myself 'I did my best today but today is over.
"'I will get up tomorrow and do my best again.'

I do this for me.
This I choose to do for me.

Note To Self

Thursday, July 21, 2016



Sand Y Sol 


 

Sitting on a deck chair

Sweating in the balmy breeze of the Mexican gulf

About a mile from the mouth of the bay of Mobile

Came down 49 highway through Mississippi last night

The road of the bluesmen rode north 

When word came round 'bout Chicago

Sweet home Chicago



I looked for the ghosts of Robert Johnson

Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Albert King

But on this moonless night 

There was nothin' unusual to be seen

On the side of the highway

Just rollin' on down the highway with the radio on

Rollin' down the road, rollin' to the sea



In a twist of fate in the driving rain

Pelting Jackson Mississippi this Saturday night

I hear Jacksonville Florida's Skynyrd band

Honkin' on Toronto Ontario's Mr. Neil Young

For ripping on Alabama from his California ranch

The song of course recorded in Georgia, not Muscle Shoals

I smile and keep driving through the Mississippi rain

Headed for the gulf shore

Heading into Gulf Shores



Sitting here now close by the sea

Pastel duplexes and homes on stilts all around

Normal architecture on or near ocean front property

Some with name tags like "Bama Breeze" and "Sand Y Sol"

The others have gone down to play in the surf and sand

Maybe I'll join them in a little while

But for a few minutes just chillin' in my chair

A little dead on the box and a big ol' sweet tea

Let my mind be at ease

Let my soul be at ease

Saturday, May 21, 2016

The Cars – An Appreciation

I came to the Cars in the middle of the story. Sort of.

I knew about the Cars, I knew a little of the Cars. As I’ve said before that if you turned on a radio turned to any FM rock station anytime after 1978 and listened for two hours you’d be more likely than not to hear the Cars. FM played the holy shit out of that first [self titled] album and not without reason. Of the 9 songs on that album, at least six [!!] are FM staples. [Good Times Roll, My Best Friend’s Girl, Just What I Needed, You’re All I’ve Got Tonight, Bye Bye Love and Moving In Stereo] Moving In Stereo is of course best remembered as the song to which Pheobe Cates bares her breasts in Fast Times At Ridgemont High [Yes there WAS music playing!] even though it did not appear on that soundtrack.

And I certainly remember Let’s Go hitting the airwaves, an amazing slice of power pop fitting in with Cheap Trick [I Want You To Want Me, Dream Police], Blondie [One Way Or Another, Dreaming], the Babys [Every Time I Think Of You] and the Knack [Good Girls Don’t, My Sharona]. Ah, junior high. Mixed times. Girls. Skating at Big Wheel on Saturday afternoons. Six Flags Over Texas. Rejection from girls. Cliques. Not fitting in. Kiss and E.L.O. going disco. Roller disco. Disco. Did I mention Disco?

But the Cars first showed up on my doorstep/turntable in the form of Panorama. I don’t even remember why it showed up – I think it was a present, so maybe it was a birthday? This was not a major album. People moaned that was cold and heartless and it wasn’t ‘the first album.’ Is it experimental? Yeah. Elliot Easton said “The first time Ric played the new songs for us, I thought they sounded weird – like inside out music.” Is it the Cars album that seems to fall through the cracks? Sort of. I don’t care, I love that record. This was something new, so different from anything else happening. And I ate it up. From the phased and slashing opening chords of the title track to the 5/4 meter of the “hit” Touch And Go, the riff heavy metal lite of Don’t Tell Me No, the brooding Chaz theme song Misfit Kid, the Roxy Music leaning You Wear Those Eyes to the bombastic closer Up And Down, the band just locked in and never let go. Keith Richards talks about he and Ronnie Wood and this “magical art of weaving” in the Stones. The Cars were more like a series of cogs and sprockets and gears all meeting together in precision.

Take for example Moving In Stereo. It starts off with one of those eerie space movie phased tones, then a deceptively simple guitar fill, then Ben Orr’s voice joins the mix for the first verse. Then the band kicks in. The drums holding a steady line, Orr’s bass slipping in and about, the oil in those cogs and gears, then secret weapon Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes add those hook lines, trading splashes, runs and fills across the steadiness of the drum line and the mercurial bass lines that keep it all pumping. And then there are vocals. Ric Ocasek has that distinctive nasal, reedy tone and cold, often flat delivery that works so well on Good Times Roll, Touch And Go, Since You’re Gone, You Might Think and Magic. Ben Orr has that warm tone that works so well on Drive, Candy-O, Let’s Go and Bye Bye Love. One could argue that the fact that Ric Ocasek [with occasional help from Hawkes] penned all of the Cars songs lends a certain uniformity to the catalog. The lyrics tend to be very abstract. Even in the notoriously upbeat You Might Think there are lines like “you think you're in the movies and everything's so deep / but i think that you're wild when you flash that fragile smile..”

In short order I had all four by the time or shortly after Shake It Up came around in the fall of 1981. Shake It Up contains my favorite Cars track, another odd time thing against a normal track, this time the click track on Since You’re Gone. [I add yet again that I SHOULD have seen the Cars on this tour, but some people who were supposed to be waiting in line went for coffee and I didn’t get to see them until the Heartbeat City tour when I got up early, drove the ‘73 Duster up the freeway and waited with a handful of kids at the Seminary South Sears. But oh, how jealous I was of the kids that fall in their jerseys from the Shake It Up shows.]

And of course, that brings me to Heartbeat City. The glory days of MTV. The summer of Magic, You Might Think and Drive. Over the years, my opinion of this album had dimmed quite a bit, maybe due to over-exposure. Listening again to the Elektra Years, I’m surprised at some of the album tracks like Stranger Eyes, Why Can’t I Have You and It’s Not the Night. On the other hand, no amount of time or wishful thinking can save I Refuse as in I Refuse To Listen To This Song.

Working at the Sound Warehouse, I remember buying the Cars’ Door To Door and Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation on the same day. [Wikipedia says they were released a week apart.] Permanent Vacation fell into regular rotation and I was wicked disappointed by Door To Door. The lead off tracks Leave Or Stay and You Are the Girl felt too sugary-pop and formulaic. History has been kinder to my appreciation of the Cars’ 1987 offering than Aerosmith’s. I will still occasionally slap on Door To Door [or a few tracks from it] while the less said about Permanent Vacation the better. There were/are some good songs on there like Strap Me In [the last single which barely made it to the Hot 100], Double Trouble, Fine Line and Everything You Say. It just wasn’t Heartbeat City or Shake It Up. That didn’t mean I or the public at large wanted them to go away. But Door To Door arrived to an amazing indifference and poor sales. A tour was cancelled and the Cars just kind of faded into the ether. Word at the time was that there was a lot of indifference within the band also. Orr and Easton had released one solo album each and Ocasek had already done two. Was Ocasek being accused of hoarding the ‘best’ songs for his own albums? Was drummer David Robinson still smarting from Mutt Lange programming all the drum parts on Heartbeat City? Was it just too much familiarity, ten years together now it’s time to go? Or some mix of all of these things?

But gone never quite meant forgotten. Various collections would show up every few years, the best being the 2 disc set Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology with the liner notes sadly missing from the recent Elektra Years box. And as FM because fragmented and boxed into smaller and smaller categories, the Cars were once again staples of what was now “Classic Rock,” once again besides the likes of Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, the bands they were so unlike both then and now. They fit better into the “Top 40 Oldies” format that has switched now from the Motown/ Golden Age of AM Radio era of our parents to the late 70s / early 80s / Golden Age Of FM Radio of my own youth.

Which brings me to the present. I picked up The Elektra Years after reading a couple of online notes about Ric Ocasek himself overseeing these remasters [or in the case of The Cars, Candy-O and Panorama, re-remasters]. And while I will once again bemoan the fact that there are no new notes about the making of the albums and there are still a handful of tracks “missing” which leaves the collection “incomplete”, I appreciate the effort to make the band again sound like they did on those licorice pizzas. But what I appreciate most is revisiting of the catalog of a band that was one of the first bands I found for myself, that started me on this never ending journey to discover new and old sounds. Coming back to a band like the Cars is like returning to Grandma’s kitchen in that it’s familiar, safe and heartwarming. Hearing them again gives me a touch of that feeling like I’m 13 again, eyes, ears and heart wide open.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

4:27

4:27 a.m.

I’m awake

Don’t know why, but I am

And I hear the shots

They’re more like pops, like cap guns so I know they’re not too close

They crack off in rapid succession like Black Cats, firecrackers on the 4^th of July

But it’s not the 4^th of July

Or New Year’s Eve for that matter

The guns pop off on those nights too around here so I am not unfamiliar with the sound

I suppose it’s ‘possible’ that these are firecrackers

If one wants to be an optimist…

But they way they pop off

Four or five, then a pause

A string of five or six right back

I know they’re not

Anyone else within earshot knows they’re not

Then it’s quiet again

As quiet as 4:27 a.m. usually is

Maybe a lone car going down the street,

Sometimes the fire truck, siren off but all the strobes cutting the night

Brilliant white and the danger of red

Or a train rolling through to places unknown

As the relative silence surrounds me again

I wonder how we came to be like this

We gather in parks, on streets and parking lots

We gather with placards and shout into cameras and camera phones

“Black lives matter!”

“Women’s lives matter!”

“Police lives matter!”

“ALL LIVES MATTER!!!”

But this isn’t the way we treat each other

This is NOT the way we treat each other

No one wants to see our young men dying

Not at the hands of the police

Not in foreign lands in wars where they may or may not even understand “why” we are there

With guns drawn and trying to force our beliefs and ideas on people who don’t want them

Not at the hands of other angry young people who have come to believe in a warped sense of justice

Wear the wrong color and get punched

Punch me, I stab you

Stab me, I shoot you,

Eye for an eye, body for a body

And they’re still counting bodies every night on the news

All the things Marvin Gaye sang about on “What’s Going On”

No one wants to see the innocent hurt and killed

Men, women, children

Walking home from the store, driving home from the soccer game, playing in the front yard

Minding their own business and living their own life

But somehow those places become right place at the wrong time

Catching bullets meant for others

Or people running from police crashing stolen cars through yards and over sidewalks

And down roads headed the wrong way

No mother wants to think their child is capable of these things

“Not my child. My child was a good person…”

I like to think we would all like to believe that of each other

But here we are

Back to the Old West and frontier justice at the end of a gun

For the gun has the final word

But guns still don’t kill people

Any more than knives, chainsaws, cars or baseball bats

The problem is still with the people who use of these things for bad purposes

We’ve lost respect for each other somewhere

De-humanized each other

And until that changes

It doesn’t matter how many people march

It doesn’t matter how many people chant the slogans

And carry signs and all of that shit

It’s 4:27 a.m. on Meadowbrook

I think I’m safe in within my walls

Friday, January 15, 2016


 


David = Stardust 


 

Like Freddie, Mick and Lou et al

The sentence handed down

That get us all in the end

A deadline somewhere on the horizon

A train has left the station at an unknown speed

And it will arrive - sooner than later



Sooner than later it catches us all

The people on posters and in magazines

The people we put in frames by TVs

And thousands of strangers littering the papers each day



A sigh, a stiff drink or three

Put on stiff upper lip

Back to work, get on with the business

What else can you do?

Create as long as you can 

Today, maybe the next day

A train is looming in the back of your mind



But the show goes on

The show must go on



And when the time has come

And the train has left 

Only your shell remaining on this side of life

The fans will pause and offer prayers and thanks

They'll reprise and review you

And say the things that get said at such times

"Icon","Legend", "Genius"



Then the show goes on

The show always goes on



But you've left a mark

YOUR mark

Major Tom, Diamond Dogs

Blue Jean, Tin Machine

Young Americans, Thin White Duke

"Heroes", Heathen, Pretty Things, Young Dudes

The Jean Genies, Cracked Actor, Aladdin Sane

And Ziggy

Finally a Blackstar

Future Legend, living legend no longer



And the show goes on without you

And the show goes on

                 And on

                    And on

                       And on

                          And on

                             And on

My Confession

This is my confession -

It's so easy to hide away
It's so easy to stay at arm's length
Too easy to say I don't care
But even though I say I don't care
I want your approval
I want to be acknowledged
I want recognition and praise
I need these things!
I desperately need physical contact
I want someone to listen when I finally open up
To tell me everything is okay
On those days I'm at the end of the rope
To take the lead when I falter
To challenge and call 'bullshit' when needed
I need someone to be understanding

I need to be understood
Not judged -
Just understood

Help nurture the scared little boy underneath all the bluster
Understand the disappointment of the misfit kid
Out in the sticks, solitary
Starry eyed dreamer

Innocence and youth lost a little bit early
Just too goddamned smart for my own good
Book smart, street stupid
Looking for the place you fit in
Never feeling like you fit in
Westerberg, you're singing to me
Longing, wanting, aching to be
"I just might lose it - I just might use it"