I Pity The Poor Inuit

As faithful readers of this space (and this is Post # 100--raise your hand if you've read them all, then send in the attached postcard for your fabulous gift!) know, I find it hard to cope with the madness that is our world.  I want daisies and puppies and banks of snowy white clouds in all sorts of cute animal shapes, and Love and Happiness everywhere, for Everyone.  Instead I get the Koch Brothers, the NRA and gun crazies (74 school shootings and counting since Newtown), sectarian conflict and violence in nearly every country of the world, the resurgence of neo-Nazis and the far right the world around, and Fox Noise and its relentless disinformation and indoctrination campaign in the U.S.  What's a poor aging (naw, let's be honest: "old") boy to do?

Well, I guess, go with the flow.  Throughout human history, there have been three or four or five primary drives, depending upon whose thinking one follows:  food, shelter, clothing, procreation, and altered consciousness.  Right now, I wanna focus on the consciousness part, although praps in a slightly different form, like maybe unconsciousness.

Michael Pollan, in The Botany Of Desire, put forth the proposition that all societies have looked for means of coping with, as Robert Frost put it "our place among the infinities."  As Pollan has it,

                                       In every society except the Inuit, whose climate is too
                                      harsh for vegetation, people have sought to change the
                                      way they experience the world by using a variety of mind-
                                      altering plants.  Some of them, such as coca, poppy, and
                                      cannabis, are considered intoxicating because they can 
                                      cause profound changes to our consciousness.  Other plants
                                      that yield psychoactive products ... like coffee, tobacco and 
                                      tea, affect our thoughts and perceptions in subtler ways.  
                                     The relationships between these various plants and the people
                                     who use them have evolved over time, both influencing and
                                     reflecting the values of the societies in which they are used.
                                     And all of these plants contain molecules that cause changes
                                     to the biochemical processes that go on deep inside our brains.

Now I know that I'm not the first to suggest this, nor, by far, the smartest or most knowledgeable, even in my own home, never mind the world at large, but doesn't the above
paragraph also describe societal experience of god, or at least religion, over the millenia?  We're all looking for ways to cope, to, as John Lennon put it, "get...through the night."  It seems to me that we've all always been choosing various means of putting a distance between us and what we, alone, as a species, as far as we know,  know to to be our inevitable fate: "the wages of sin is death" and, while there may be "no such thing as an original sin," as Elvis Costello sang it, regardless of how death came into being, it came, and it comes for us all, and we know that, and that's a huge burden to bear.

So we--and in that "we" is absolutely, incontrovertibly, a huge, neon "I"-- look to psychotropic drugs, alcohol, sex, sports, religion--something, anything--to act as a buffer between, and passage through, the exploding plastic inevitable, and whatever awaits us on the other side.  Knowledge, indeed, as the story of Adam and Eve teaches us, can be a terrible thing.

What I'm about here, then, while nothing new (c.f. Marx and "opiate of the masses," which is why I'm choosing religion and drugs as the polarities of example here) is simply to suggest that we make our choice of buffer between us and our ultimate fate, follow the path that seems most appealing at the time (and is eminently changeable), and that all choices are, when you boil them down, the same: a way to explain, to ease, to enable us to get through the life thrust upon us.  No one way is correct, or better than another; they are all just means to get us to our ends, and they all have their benefits and drawbacks.   The problem is that, as with all things humans touch, some of us are excessive with each, and so find a way to fuck it up: drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, sexual addiction or perversion (whatever that means to you), sports fanaticism at the expense of attention to real life's duties, religious extremism, the belief that any one religion is better than another, is "the one true religion,"  leading to, ultimately, the sectarian-violence-cum-civil-war we're seeing happening in Iraq right now, thanks in no small part to our meddling there.

Here's a bunch of songs that (I think) address this whole mess:

Choose Drugs                                                                 Juliana Hatfield
Jen Is Bringin' The Drugs                                               Margo & The Nuclear So And So's
Let's Take Some Drugs And Drive Around                   The Silos
Electricity (Drugs)                                                          Talking Heads
Drugs (Electricity)                                                          Talking Heads
Summer Of Drugs                                                           Victoria Williams
Handshake Drugs                                                            Wilco
Rainy Day Women #s 12 & 35                                        Dylan
Let's Go Get Stoned                                                        Joe Cocker
And It Stoned Me                                                            Van Morrison
How Long Have You Been Stoned                                  Ohio
Acid Tongue                                                                     Jenny Lewis
The Acid Song                                                                 Loudon Wainwright III
Ball Of Confusion                                                            The Temptations
Whatever Gets You Through The Night                          John Lennon
Losing My Religion                                                         R.E.M.
No Religion                                                                      Van Morrison
Dirty Little Religion                                                         Warren Zevon
Oh God (Prayer)                                                               Annie Lennox
God Song                                                                          Beth Orton
God's Great Banana Skin                                                  Chris Rea
God Shuffled His Feet                                                      Crash Test Dummies
God Said No                                                                     Dan Bern
The walk to the god house                                                Dan Reeder
Little Tin God                                                                   Don Henley
In God's Waiting Room                                                    Garland Jeffreys
Good For God                                                                   Harry Nilsson
My God                                                                             Jethro Tull
Go With God (Topless Shoeshine)                                   Joe Henry
God                                                                                   John Lennon
God Ain't No Stained Glass Window                               Mark Germino
Only God Can Save Us Now                                            Over The Rhine
If There's A God                                                               Ry Cooder
God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)                       Randy Newman
He Gives Us All His Love                                                Randy Newman
Beneath The Vast Indifference Of Heaven                       David Lindley

This'll be happening, as usual, on Tuesday, starting at noon.  There're way more songs here than'll fit into a two hour show, so it'll end when it's done, the radio gods willing.  WOOL FM, 91.5, WOOL.FM on the webs.  See you then, I hope.

And remember: in all things, moderation.

The King Of Polyester

When I started this foolishness, this blog, at the urging of my friend Travis, in his mind it was simply a way to promote my show on WOOL-FM, to talk about the music, the songs, the important stuff.  I subsequently took that idea and twisted it and ran with it, using the blog and the show to espouse my lefty views, to address controversial (mostly) issues, and to tie them to the show's weekly theme.  This week, a return to the original purity of intention.

On Tuesday, after my show, Travis and I are heading down I-91 to Northampton, MA, to the hallowed Iron Horse Music Hall to see David Lindley, stringed-instrument wizard and sideman extraordinaire.  You've heard him, even if you've never heard of him.  I would guess that, for most of us, the first exposure would have been the opening fiddle notes of The Youngbloods' classic "Darkness, Darkness;"  most familiarly, though, he was Jackson Browne's sidekick and lead guitar and lap-steel (among other stringed instuments) player on Browne's first four albums.  I first saw him on the "Running On Empty" tour, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston in 1977.  That album was probably the first time any of us heard Lindley sing, too; on "The Load Out/Stay," Lindley's is the falsetto star turn that culminates the increasingly high-pitched series of verses in the "Stay" portion: Browne to Rosemary Butler to Lindley.

David Lindley is a gnomish figure, dressing, at his shows, at least,  almost entirely in polyester, using the cheapest guitars Sears sells, just for their sound and what he can do with them.  His muttonchop sideburns, which put Neil Young's to shame, have long since turned white (the guy's 70, after all), although his long and curly hair has, for the most part, remained dark.  His travels around the world have led to his introduction to, and subsequent mastery of, such exotic instruments as the oud and the bouzouki, among others.  He's appeared on nearly countless albums, hired string-slinger to the stars; as is so often is the case, those behind the scenes are responsible for the reputations of the folks with the great name-recognition.

Here's the playlist, then; the first batch is Lindley accompanying those of, perhaps, greater renown, while the second is Lindley on his own:

Darkness, Darkness                                                                        The Youngbloods
Stay                                                                                                 Jackson Browne
Sing My Songs To Me/For Everyman                                            Jackson Browne
Face Of Appalachia                                                                        John Sebastian
Yodelling Song                                                                               Tanita Tikaram
Coming Back To You                                                                     Jennifer Warnes
World Outside Your Window                                                         Tanita Tikaram
Pictures Of You                                                                               Rory Block
It's A Big Old Goofy World                                                            John Prine
Save The Last Dance For Me                                                         David Bromberg
Heart Like A Wheel                                                                        Linda Ronstadt
Simple Man                                                                                     Graham Nash
Wild Tales                                                                                       Graham Nash
Grave Concern                                                                                Graham Nash
Scattered                                                                                          Taj Mahal
Nothing Like A Hundred Miles                                                      James Taylor

Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse                                                        David Lindley
Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas And The Sinus Blues                                         David Lindley
Pay The Man                                                                                   David Lindley
Ain't No Way                                                                                  David Lindley
7/8 Suite II                                                                                      David Lindley
Gimme Da'ting                                                                                David Lindley
Do You Wanna Dance                                                                     David Lindley
Tiki Torches At Twilight                                                                 David Lindley
Jah Reggae                                                                                      David Lindley
Talk To The Lawyer                                                                        David Lindley & El Rayo-X
Premature                                                                                        David Lindley & El Rayo-X
Mercury Blues                                                                                 David Lindley & Ry Cooder
Jesus On The Mainline                                                                    David Lindley & Ry Cooder

Hope to see you Tuesday, noon till two, on Wool FM, 91.5, WOOL.fm on the webs--or at the Iron Horse Tuesday eve.