Commentary

I will resume the reminiscing soon. Just back from vacation where I got a chance to talk with someone who helped me remember some things I had forgotten. I was trying to follow up and figure out when I saw Joni Mitchell and I found a wonderful thing on Joni Mitchell's website. All her old concert dates are listed and there is a place for browsers to record their memories of the concert. I love that. I wish I could find that on The Band and Little Feat sites. Now I know that I saw Joni in Tuscaloosa in 1976. It was a mesmerizing concert, and we were lucky to have her performing in Alabama.

Having just seen Bob Dylan last Saturday in Berkeley, I am reminded of how few opportunities I had to see the greats of our time, and how special those time were. Dylan, bless his touring heart, has been to Alabama several times. He is still going strong, has a great band backing him up, and was very magical in concert this time, conducting and shaping the music. There was no warm up band, just a two hour tight set, in the open amphitheatre on the campus. Nice!

Local Music

Someone I dated was friends with the folks in Red, White and Bluegrass, a local bluegrass band. Bluegrass music was becoming very hip. Within a couple of years my friends and I started going to wonderful bluegrass festival weekends at Horsepens 40. We listened to Norman and Nancy Blake and Glen Tolbert- a fast pickin' guitar player from Alabama- and many other stock- in-trade bluegrass groups.

I was invited up to the mountains of North Carolina for a weekend with the Red, White and Bluegrass band members, and got to hang out with band members, including Norman Blake who was playing with them at the time. This was before he got together with Nancy I suppose. He was an odd, quiet fellow, but just amazing on the mandolin. It was winter and they were playing at a ski resort so it was a nice, cozy atmosphere. I was in awe of them all. I loved the way Ginger Boatwright sang, and the fact that they wrote some of their own music. I think Byron Berline played with them as well. Check out their album if you can find it. It is my only album that is not square (really, it is not made in the shape of a square, it is a can shape).

I noticed that Grant Boatwright now plays with Neil Young and was on Saturday Night Live with Neil last year.

Songwriters

So I just go on and on about the music. Really, it permeates everything having to do with 1972. Here are two wonderful, witty and wry dudes that touched my soul. I still listen to these songs and think Glory to the Day by Jesse Winchester might be one of my top ten essential singer-songwriter-y songs. Jesse was off in Canada because of the war, and Jackson Browne was just arriving on the scene. If you will indulge me here, I will later submit a blog to the lady songwriters whom I must salute and thank for inspiring me to write songs. And I will come back to Jesse Colin Young. But first accolades to these princes...






Thank you both for sharing the love!

Honorable Mention

I have to devote a whole blog to Layla. It came out in 1970 but I did not start listening to it obsessively until 1972. It means so much to me musically, and sentimentally, due to Duane Allman's ethereal presence.

It also foreshadowes my move to Macon, Georgia later in 1978.

The album has tones and echos of the South- stories and romace and unrequited love. The cover art is beautiful. Every song is a gem, and it was such a collaboration!

Layla itself is a blend of styles that are seamlessly joined like a luxurious garment- it wraps itself around you and holds you in a special place that is timeless. Just listen to it again- it has no trendiness at all.

Lucky for us in 2009 there is a young musician who has inheirited this quality of musical presence. His name is Derek Trucks.

Bell Bottom Blues, don't fade away....

Mixing and Mingling

I really wanted to skip this year. Why? It seemed rather jumbled up at first glance. Kind of crazy and surreal. I got divorced for one thing. Too many Sopers and no sense of direction. And what else was happening? Watergate, Jane Fonda in Hanoi, weird stuff- like George Wallace running for President of the United States, and then surviving an assassination attempt as a paraplegic. It was also the last year of freedom before I started working and paying taxes. I had a lot of fun, too.

I was back in Birmingham in the fall of 1972. I was disappointed to find that the good-clean-living jaunt in the country did not last. Back on the Southside,there was no longer a psychedelic shine to everyday life. It seemed easier to go back to drinking beer and joining in with the rest of the gang. I had several buddies back in the 'Ham that I could hang around with. I was trying to finish nursing school but actually I was just going through the motions, determined to just get out. I really enjoyed nursing school in Dothan, but when I came back to Birmingham, the Jefferson State experience was not that pleasant.

I was not sure what I was going to do when I graduated, nor had I given any thought to whether or not I would even enjoy nursing as a profession. One of my instructors was insistent that I should enter the field of psychology, and found a job for me at a local Psychologist's office. I had a trial run to see if I might like it, and I found it rather boring- I did not want to do group therapy with a bunch of neurotic, depressed people. (Rather prophetic, since I ended up doing many, many group therapy sessions later in my career, and in fact participated in many sessions as the neurotic, depressed person) So I just partied on and kept up a brave front.

Birmingham was not utterly depressing at the time. There were things to do and the evolving youth culture was getting a foothold on the Southside.I started learning macrame and continued doing embroidery. I found ways to express some fashion sense beyond just being barefoot and jean clad. (Native Funk and Flash and Handmade Houses are my favorite books about the decorative arts of the time.)I had a lovely apartment with old posters and lots of plants. It was pretty and serene. And there was still lots of great music.


The music of 1972 reflects what I was also doing- experimenting with newly found freedoms and getting more seriously introspective about it all. Stevie Wonder went in the studio and produced Music of My Mind-writing the songs, playing the instruments, doing the arranging and recording. Some of my very favorite albums came out in 1972. I guess you could characterize it as a time of mixing and mingling. Just look at these albums!



I was following a philosophy of living that I later read about in an article on Picasso (no, not comparing myself to his genius). I cannot recall the French phrase for it, but basically it was throwing oneself into the mix, into the scene, into the jaws of life. I did not know any other way to do it.

I have a wonderful iconic photo from that time. It is a picture of some of us after a game of Frisbee, sitting on a wall. The photo was taken by my friend Java Man. There was no identifiable coupling, it was a group portrait a la The Big Chill, and for the next decade the only way I knew to survive and get by was to share food, housing, and transportation with my friends. I am so grateful to the people who shared their shelter, creativity, wisdom and ideas with me. I soaked all of it up like a sponge. You can see the images here that reflect the larger forces that shaped me.





Yes, I was close to the edge!

Southern Beauty

I have to take a break from the "scene" for a bit. There is too much turmoil and uncertainty that I remember. There are other images from that time that are less dramatic, but were there in the background, providing something that sustained me, I believe.

I am thinking about mimosa trees blooming in June- pink, deep pink and white and fragrant as only mimosa blossoms can be. (Yes, there are white mimosas if you look carefully for them.) And huge magnolia flowers on huge magnolia trees with deep green leaves. And blackberry blossoms, and blackberries. And fireflies in the evening in the warm warm summer evening. And deep red skies at sunset. Water- on the lake or the river or creek- water is everywhere in Alabama. Mountaintop views. Thunderstorms and the aftermists rising up from the rain cooled streets. They don't call it Alabama the Beautiful for nothing.

Watershed

I am awed looking over the albums that I listened to in 1971 listed on the sidebar. It is hard to place the branching and broadening of musical creativity (and with it the art and artistic consciousness that accompanied everything musical back then) in context with the daily images of death and destruction coming from Vietnam via the news. The mainstream mindset had not yet given up on the idea that to oppose the war was analagous to being a traitor. So finding myself in the outcast role, I did not think about having a career, owning a home, driving a nice car, or even having a television set. There did not seem to be much of a future to imagine. Even Lennon's song was an ideal set way up on the mountaintop. The imaginists were dead, never made it out of their 20s.

What we did have was very much in the moment. We had all read Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and we did have the means to intensify and deepen the experience of the moment. There was an awakening of sorts going on, and awakenings are not always pleasant. Reality was shocking, like the Manson killings, or the Weather Underground bombings. The feeling was something like a runaway roller coaster- exhilarating and scary- and with too much momentum to stop.

As James Brown sang- Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved- Something had to give, something had to change.