l i f e
drifting
For three nights now I've chased the edges of violent thunderstorms almost all the way home, only to arrive late. A surveyor of the damage. Downed trees, branches in the road. No power. Traffic lights swinging by dead steel cable just above the road. Leaves spread like confetti across the landscape.
And tonight it broke. The clouds parted and I found this, which I really have to share with you guys. It comes from the liner notes of a new release of old words that until last year had no music. Whatever music they had died in the head of the man who penned them in 1967. Yet they seem very poignant to me in more shapes than one and so I don't mind borrowing them here. They deserve that. You deserve that.
"The world is filled with people who are no longer needed and who try to make slaves of all of us. They have their music and we have ours. Theirs the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare, and without their musical and ideological miscarriages to compare our song of freedom to we'd not have any opposite to compare music with. Like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never know its speed, its power."
Woody Guthrie
That last line kills me. Ever drifted with no obstacle to stop you? With nothing to prop you up?
Woody wrote these words just after WWII. By 1947 his recording career was over and in his world, the post war America, you were either on the left and loved him, or the right, and ostracized what he was and remains today.
For the past fifty years over 1000 pieces of Woody's life have drifted this way and that, finally collected, selected, sorted and put to music last year. Released this week. Got any ideas who did it?
Didn't think so. I'll spill it. My old musical mentor. The man who had me first pick up the guitar. The man who for some reason saw fit to put me in his music video back in 1989 during the Pitt coal strikes in West Virginia. The man whom which I've never shared anything but a bathroom stall. Billy Bragg.
And it seems so timely 'cause lately I've been drifting without an obstacle. The world is too large and too small at the same time and that just doesn't make sense. Money holds you back and sets you free. One big contradiction. Yeah. That's me these days.
Can't decide if I want to smoke or not. Hating myself for even thinking it. Drink it away. Pulling my weight at work, sure, but is it a weight I want to pull? No obstacle.
Know what happens to you then?
Neither do I.
I do want to leave you with a photo from the '40's. My grandfather was a Guthrie fan. This picture was taken in Florida just after the war when he got back from the Navy. You pick him out...now that you what I look like.
Still don't have my eyes though...
goodnight 7.1.98