When you’re 14 years old and learning to play the guitar, you think that when you’ve learned “Stairway to Heaven” you will have mastered the instrument and life generally.  And when you can do that song plus “Dust in the Wind” and “Blackbird,” you will preside over soft-focus campfire sing-alongs in which the rancher’s daughter ditches her dumb rich boyfriend in favor of sensitive, “Dust-in-the-Wind”-playin’ you.  But it’ll never last, because the lonesome highway’s a-callin’, etc.  Fade-out, roll credits, dedication to your favorite dead naked celebrity, etc.

The new “Stairway to Heaven” for a certain variety of middle-aged white guy guitarist is Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”  I didn’t link him when I mentioned him a few weeks ago but do today:

A happy casualty of my trying to figure that song out a couple of years ago is the guitar part for “Red Ball Freight.”  That was before the nutcracker thing, so I didn’t feel compelled to “do” anything with the guitar part.  But once this enterprise started, I started thinking of things I could do with all the random guitar parts I’d accumulated over the years.  The first lyrics I wrote for this one were pretty generic—something about rain on a tin roof and the lonesome highway a-callin’, etc.  Then I found those photographs and remembered my Melissa Etheridge t-shirt, which was my favorite t-shirt for a long time.  So, what the hell, it became a Melissa Etheridge t-shirt song.

It’s true that I’m not particularly a Melissa Etheridge fan and that right at this moment I can’t remember what approximate place she occupies in my ordering of the universe for the years she was present in my consciousness.  I remember her as being pretty good and perfectly honorable but maybe not a music choice you’d stand by wholeheartedly later in life, somebody you might eventually need to clear out of the way to make room for others.  Sort of like the Marshall Tucker Band.  I mean, the Marshall Tucker Band, they sounded pretty good and all, but then there was a flute in those songs.  There’s nothing wrong with that maybe, but as life goes on you have to make choices—the road is narrowing, time is growing short—and there are lots of worthy contenders for a berth on the ship and you find that you have to make rules that may sound arbitrary, but that’s just reality, and, sorry, but rock flute is grounds for dismissal without appeal.  Of course it isn’t fair, but the Marshall Tucker Band has been around long enough to have learned life isn’t fair.

But I liked that Melissa Etheridge t-shirt very much.  It was one of those t-shirts that fit exactly right.  I stole it from Spencer, who’s standing in the middle in that photograph (that’s Larry on the left.  We’re at a crawfish boil in Lafayette, visiting the Cajuns.  I think this was 1994.  The other Melissa Etheridge t-shirt photo is me and Brad, probably later, since Melissa’s looking pretty faded.)  Most of my wardrobe from about age 15 to age 27 came from friends.  I didn’t think of it as borrowing or as stealing.  I simply took their clothes.  I wish I still had the capacity to do rotten things without feeling bad about them.

I don’t have the Melissa Etheridge t-shirt anymore.  I don’t know what happened to it.  I don’t know what happened to most of my old departed clothes.  It’s rare that I ever consciously throw any item of clothing away.  Clothes seem to just have some sixth sense of when it’s time to go.   (Not “sixth” necessarily, since we’re talking about clothes-one sense is one more than you’d expect from a t-shirt.)  Janet tries to get me to get rid of stuff, but I don’t see the point of that.  The clothes will know when it’s time.  One day you wonder, “Whatever happened to my . . . ?”  You can’t remember the last time you wore it or saw it, you know that you didn’t take it away with you anywhere and you didn’t give it to Goodwill.  It just left.  It was time. 

Or maybe Janet’s been throwing stuff out.  Or maybe my friends are stealing from me.

Houston Aquarium.  There’s no hidden meaning in the video, so don’t go looking for any.  I just realized Monday night that I hadn’t done the video yet, so I threw together what I had to work with plus a few hastily shot things in the closet and in the bookcase (Fussy‘s dead set on making me famous.  She writes entire novels for the sole purpose of giving me a cameo.)  The carnival-looking stuff is from the downtown Aquarium, which is a convenient attraction because it saves you from having to drive all the way to Kemah to be ripped off.  Saturday Janet had a “Pimm’s by the Pool” party (long story, but it has to do with a school fundraiser pledge we made a year and a half ago) so I had to get the kids out of the house.  We tried the Children’s Museum, where all the art is displayed on refrigerators (that’s a Steven Wright joke), but couldn’t get in with a crowbar.  We went to Star Pizza and the kids ate two slices of a $16 pizza.  We made our way back to the house, and a block away I got an email from Janet telling me not to come home until 3:30.  It was 2:00.  I headed down to the Aquarium, paid $8 to park, $12 for that weird frozen dot ice cream that has no taste at all but is frozen to some temperature measurable only on the Kelvin scale—I think it’s actually frozen directly from a gaseous state—and $6 for a carousel ride Rona wouldn’t get on.  She hates noise.  So do I.  Neither of us likes to leave the house.  So that’s a $26 very boring carousel ride in the handicapped seat for Thomas if you’re doing the math.  And the rest of that pizza cooked in the car while we were there.

The Way it Is.  I was going to do a Walter Cronkite cover until I realized the one I was thinking of is actually a Bruce Hornsby song.  Everybody has to live in the times he’s born in, and Cronkite seems to have done that admirably.  But the notion that anyone with any sense today could confidently claim “That’s the way it is” is pretty quaint.  (People on AM radio make that claim, of course, or tell you “the way things ought to be.”  But I specified “anyone with any sense.”)  So all those comparisons of Cronkite to the present crop of journalists aren’t really fair.  Cronkite reigned back when you could pretend a Coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be (thanks, Merle.)  You could ignore all kinds of stuff back then and pretend that what you were looking at really did represent “the way it is.”  I doubt things have ever really been the way they were.

Verdict.  Upon further research into Melissa Etheridge, I’ve determined there’s still room for her.  Here she is doing a very nice cover of the Joan Armatrading torch song, “Weakness in Me,” with supercute facial expressions. 

But the Marshall Tucker Band has to go.  You, too, Jethro Tull.