The best stays the best: Lucinda covering Gram

I have posted this song before. It was deeply hidden in the post and so long ago, maybe you missed it. I don’t mean to make it a habit—reposting songs that I’ve put up before. It’s not like we’re gonna run out of good music. It’s just that some of the best music stays the best again and again, you dig?

I am working on all sorts of things, mostly just in my head while I sit around in pajamas; still, it takes my time. Things like the words pajamas and madras which come to us by way of India. Poems. Rejections. Kids. Lunches. Schlepping. Taxes. Being a travel agent. Shopping for food and accoutrements for my new phone. Make that simply learning to operate my new phone….

I’m trying to shake some bad shit I’ve been seeing on the internet—instruments of torture, abusive mothers, rape, idiocy, humanity.

I do so love this, forever and always.

Good music: a balm for the weary soul. Dig it.

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Music Monday–I don’t feel so bad now in the car, I got the radio on

We went to Crane Beach on Friday, which entailed about 2 hours, 15 minutes in the car each way (we stayed overnight). Not bad to get to an ocean beach (compared to 12-14 hours, one way, from Kent, Ohio where we used to live).

I’ve written about this before: kids in the car on road trips. Of course, they’ve graduated from singing songs at the top of their lungs to us playing CDs to them feeding songs through the car stereo via iPod. Not so much the radio on, but it all works, it’s fun, and it’s All-American.

Current Top Ten Road-Trip Songs (in almost no particular order):

ONE

This works especially well because we have to drive on “128 when it’s dark outside” to get to or home from any North Shore beaches. A classic.

TWO

“swear it had the power to repair itself”:

THREE

How can you go wrong with Lucinda covering Gram Parsons? We all belt along with Lucinda and we sound real good.

FOUR

You already know how I feel about Woody and Songs to Grow On. My dad used to sing this to me.

FIVE

This made my top ten Beatles’ songs on our Christmas card last year, so you know it had to make this top ten list, too. Hubby says it’s a bit obvious, but I told him baby, you can drive my beat up old mini-van and baby I love you

SIX

Who says you can’t dance and drive at the same time? Safer than texting!

SEVEN

The Man in Black. ‘Nuff said.

EIGHT

I sure can’t choose a favorite Hank Williams song, but I do have a 2-disc CD compilation that I play ad nauseum on car trips. Not a song about the road, but all of Hank Williams’ songs are road songs.

NINE

Switchin it over to AM, searching for a truer sound/Can’t recall the call letters, steel guitar and settle down/Catching an all-night station, somewhere in Louisiana/ It sounds like 1963, but for now, it sounds like Heaven

TEN

Would any top ten music list be complete without a Wilco song? Well, no, but you’ll have to listen to “Passenger Side” on your own because I wasn’t too happy with the youtube versions. Instead, you get J. Richman and the Modern Lovers again. This is sans the intro which is half the reason the song is so good. Gotta find that intro by your lonesome, too.

ELEVEN

It goes to eleven? I tried to find the scene from Spinal Tap in which Michael McKean sings “All the Way Home,” but could not.

Postscript: I am well aware of the lack of females representin’ here. Chrissy Hynde “Middle of the Road” was a thought and Aretha is good music in (and out of) the car, forever and always. I love my Mahalia in the mini-van, Sweet Honey, too…you know I may need another top ten road-trip songs some day. I am an American after all.

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Addendum–trying to get closer to accurate

Oops. I’m being anal retentive, but I meant Right in Time as far as the Lucinda Williams song that I cited in the last Thankful Thursday.

Also, I think I exaggerated the whole thing about day light and sundown in the Ohio v. New England thing. Embellished maybe? I do think the sun is almost the same between the 2 places, but certainly not quite. Here’s another tidbit to add to my defense: a friend who moved from Connecticut to the Pioneer Valley said she’d never seen clouds sit like they do in the Valley, just hang and hover all day. Maybe the sun thing is a similar phenomenon.

That’s all. Off to see my friend, walk on campus to see what they have done to the May 4 Memorial, and to see some black squirrels.*

*I looked for links to Kent State’s website on the topic, but thought the better of linking. I encourage you to do your own information-gathering on that incredible time in America.

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Thankful Thursday–Ohio Edition

Seems like a contradiction in terms, I know, but I am grateful for Ohio

Sun still present at 8:55 pm, sky just turning its oranges and pinks. (New England? By the end of our ride Monday at 8:20 pm, sky almost pitch).

Sun is somehow higher in the sky and less harsh on the eyes as it goes down here. I wish the sky was this high and bright in the Pioneer Valley without the intense sundown/glare. It’s something I’ve never gotten used to in New England. Why is it different between the 2 places? Amherst is only slightly farther north but quite a bit farther east, does this explain it? Oh hell’s bells, why don’t I just google it? No, that yielded no fruit. Help me.

I know Ohio is farther west in the Eastern Standard Time zone, so I get the clock part. But the quality of the sun is also different. I can hardly wait ’til the morning when the sun comes up later than usual. Ironic, isn’t it?

Once at the racetrack in Cleveland, we met a boy named “Sundown.” I’m not kidding. I bet that was 27 years ago. I thought I might name a boy Sundown some day.

Taco Tonto’s

Talking to my great friend, Sheila, on the phone in the parking lot of the Stow Target.

Walking into Taco Tonto’s and seeing 2 people I know well enough to remember all sorts of little details about even though I haven’t seen or spoken with either of them in over 11 years. One is the son of a woman who was at Annie’s birth, almost 13 years ago, and who was also part of the “older kids” component in Violet’s first (and only) play group. Wow.

Kent, beautiful Kent

The blues in Kent, nothing like feeling blue in Kent. Nothing.

Kent, my home for 19 years

My old house on N. Willow St. I drove into town, straight from the airport in Cleveland and pulled right up to the house, got out of the car, walked up to the door and rang the bell. Nobody home. New sign above the garage, the garden beds not looking terribly spiffy (where has all the coreopsis gone?), and some of the brick-work patio all busted up. Still, that is the house where my babies were born and it always will be. Labored there in many ways (“Here I have worked, labored a while,” Christian’s Farewell, Sacred Harp #347).

I suspect this has something to do with ale, but maybe it’s their last name. Do they rent or own? I’ll be knocking on that door again later.

When I left the car rental at Cleveland-Hopkins, I completely ignored the GPS and with no map was able to navigate after 11 years (yes, I’ve been back and driven around, but not out that way and not much with me behind the wheel). God that felt good. I was excited just to recognize I-480 and to remember to go East.

I was thinking of posting about sex toys and air travel, but there’s really no need. Apparently, you can pack sex toys into your luggage without embarrassment. No alarms went off, nobody pulled anything out and waved it around in front of everyone. Like Lucinda Williams said when she was intro-ing The Way You Move, “Nobody got hurt.”

I think it’s funny that sex toys are called marital aids (hey, that’s what O’Brien calls them), but maybe this can help explain.

The name of the guy who drove me from the parking lot to the terminal at Windsor Locks? Pierce Pearce. I am not kidding. He looked like Prop Joe from The Wire. Maybe it was Pearce Pierce. I didn’t write it down. Dang.

Look what I looked up this morning. Interesting, hunh?

Susun Weed says the best cure for menopausal women who have low sex drive is 7 orgasms per week. That’s her prescription. She says you can have them all in one day or one a day. Is she just fucking with us on this?

Yes, I love Kent. But there has always been the residual clash between town and University. Literally and symbolically, this has been the fight between establishment and the counter-culture. May 4 was a culmination. The town still bears it. Jerry’s Diner has been razed, but also the entire lot behind it. Gone, nothing, nada. The hardware store, Gone. Unbelievable. That’s why you can get the blues so easily here. Heart and no heart. When a place has this much heart, for some reason, it’s also easy to rip parts of it out. Right, Chrissy? (Oh, hell, I have to apologize. Sometimes that link has an ad; sometimes not. See what the fuss is all about? They are taking over).

I have a poem at home by an old Kent poet, Jake Leed, and the line I remember is

I’ve chipped away a Clark’s gas station

I lent out the little book that poem was in and I never got it back. If anyone out there has it, send me a copy. I’ll pay shipping.

The Clark gas station is still there, on S. Water St. Unbelievable.

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