Silently Away
Monday October 21st, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
“The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
I memorized that quotation many years ago and have used it countless times and in a great variety of ways ever since, probably in a past TTW, but seldom do I fully appreciate or use the gifts of any given day.
We Americans are a spoiled lot by anybody’s standard. We have come to expect our days to be full of material gifts and we whine over the most trivial of disappointments. That we have a program on television like the Anna Nicole Smith show tells me that our values are reaching a disgusting nadir.
Our children demand expensive electronic games and gadgets and profess to be unable to function in life without them. They have become skilled in laying guilt trips on parents who equate love with material purchases: “Joey’s parents bought him a techno marvel-surround sound-wrap around vision-three dimensional-cyber cloning-virtual reality-warp speed-Satan worshipping-hip hop playing-million gigabyte-video game with its own refrigerator and heat sensing back scratcher, plus–it that will guide him through puberty and do his homework all at the same time whether he’s awake or asleep. Our children’s bedrooms are a snake-pit of extension cords.
I was born the year after World War II ended. The first of the baby boom years. I went to grade school before anyone had a television. I was forced to get my entertainment by playing in the back yard or the City Park and using my imagination. In the winter I actually read books. The library was a place of great joy to me. I don’t want to sound self-righteous. If I had the techno-gadgets available today when I was a boy, I’d have become addicted just as fast. But I fear we are collectively becoming desensitized to the most beautiful gifts life has to offer.
I make my living, meager as it is, performing as a blues music artist. The entertainers at the very top of my chosen genre of music sell only a few thousand records a year with the exception of BB King and one or two others. The hallmark of our music is the ability to be genuine. To instill heart and soul into each note. To allow the listener to feel the emotion and character of the artist. Most music charts revealing top sellers and influential music don’t even list blues music. Record stores allot only a tiny shelf space to blues, some none at all.
The rage these days is techno music where machines synthesize sound and computers measure every beat and note to precision–the antithesis of blues where phrasing and heart play hugely important roles in the end product. It is hard to get a young person today to submit to the discipline of mastering a real instrument. They want thousands of dollars worth of techno turntables and synthesizers and computer cards.
To accompany this synthetic sound are lyrics often obscene, Satanic, murderous, sexist, and certainly vulgar. The other day I drove by a blues club where we play and it was half full at best while just around the corner was a theater where a hip-hop band was playing and it was noisy and overflowing with many young people waiting on the sidewalk hoping for a chance to get in. I have seen this all over the country. Last March in Salt Lake City people were standing outside around the block in freezing temperatures waiting to hear an advertised Satanic cult band while we played to thirty people at a blues club right across the alley.
I read a book one time that said it wasn’t good for the human soul to be surrounded with plastic flowers and fake bricks and zircon jewelry. I believe that principle holds true across the board. Try reading the label on some of the foods you eat, it reads like a chemistry formula. No wonder we have a nation of cancer and clogged arteries. This cancer I’m afraid has invaded our souls.
I could go on to moralize or write a diatribe, but why? Mankind is playing out a Saga in a scope far beyond the call of my tiny voice. What I can do is be thankful and recognize and use the gifts each day brings to me. It is so easy to do just the opposite: to lament my lack of success, to complain about how hard it is to obtain meaningful gigs anymore, to wish that I had a nicer house, a better car, a measure of status in my society.
Blinddog Smokin’ just returned from a little tour of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Over the long miles I was able to read deeply into several wonderful books with the luxury of nothing else to do. I’d look up into splendid sunrises and sunsets, majestic mountainscapes, passive farm scenes, and billowing Old Testament clouds with their intermittent rays of sun spearing through to the Autumnal earth. I smelled rain on the freshly harvested dirt of Eastern Kansas, and smelled it in another way in the thick forests of Western and Central Arkansas where frogs sang in mighty choruses in the gloam of a stormy twilight.
On the way home we drove all night through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where we told stories and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breath. We had spent three days at the King Biscuit Blues Festival along the Mississippi River where a Fall moon rose up out of the swamp trees and crossed the sky over tens of thousands of people sitting on the levy listening to the heartfelt music of the best the Delta land has to offer. We had gone down to the gospel stage and “got the ghost” among hand waving black folk who smiled at us in love and welcome.
Most of all, we had experienced the love and appreciation of our fans. In Cherryvale, Kansas, our greeting included a huge spread of home grilled steaks with all the trimmings. We slept on the floor of a bail bondsman’s office complex and awoke to a hot breakfast he cooked in his kitchen and sent on our way with baskets of fresh fruit and muffins and leftovers. Our memories include standing ovations and warm hugs and handshakes, tears in the eyes of fans who wouldn’t see us for another year, and the sincerest of smiles by those truly glad to see us again.
In McPherson, Kansas, we played to a full house on a Sunday night where people knew they had to get up the next morning to go to work. Again the club owner met us with a feast before we played. We stayed in this little town three days and slept in their houses and ate their food and drove their cars and even got invited to the Movie Theater for free. My hostess took me to her sister’s house to learn how to make pottery and gave me all I could pack into our limited space in the van to take home with me. Her husband painstakingly wrapped every piece so it wouldn’t break. Another lady sent us on our way, each with his own loaf of banana bread. Another spent days creating a collage on canvas of our images as she had seen them over the years in Kansas.
In Oklahoma City Miss Blues got up at 3 A.M., to prepare all day a feast for us before we played that evening. Barbecued beef ribs, roast, beef brisket, three kinds of corn bread, fruit salad, regular salad, sweet potato pie baked with honey instead of sugar. What a blessed soul she is.
When I lament not having much in life compared to my neighbors who drive fancy cars and take vacations to exotic tourist towns, I stop and remember Emerson’s quote and realize I am a man most blessed. I have a loving and devoted wife, four gorgeous kids grown up to be healthy and prosperous adults, two fun and loving step children, my first grandson with another due in December. I still have my parents and my siblings, and I have you fine people who like to read my writings, and many of you let me know that to my deep gratification.
Each day allows me the time to read and write, to engage in fun and creative endeavors, to make music, and to love my fellow man who is in such desperate need of loving in this world of terror and uncertainty. I maintain tremendous good health for a man my age and every day bringing me that gift is a day to be savored.
Blinddog Smokin’ has two fans, one in Chicago, another in Nebraska, who are dying of cancer. A relatively short time ago they both took their health for granted and had plans for old age with their loving mates. Now it appears neither will see that time come to pass. It touches me profoundly to report that both of these human beings wanted a Blinddog Smokin’ song to be played at their funeral, but I suggested that we really don’t have anything fitting.
I played softball for years in Chicago with the one man. We were in our twenties and I remember him so vibrant and energetic and agile. His wife tells me that there were many things they planned to do and put off for another day. They will never get to do those things together; the gift was carried silently away.
The Nebraska fan approached me only this last summer, not knowing anything about his cancer at that time. He and his devoted wife took me aside and gave me a package. It was a beautiful and very expensive sixteen hole chromatic harmonica. It took my breath away. I can’t afford such an instrument. I don’t think they really could either. But there it was with a message of thanks attached for the many hours of enjoyment I had given them in music and in this Tales Told Well column. He named me “The Blues teacher.” I was overcome with surprise and deep gratitude. This was from a man I seldom even saw in our audiences. I had no clue to how grateful this man was for whatever transcendence Blinddog had provided him over the years.
On a business and political level, America doesn’t reward its musicians. We lead a meager and sometimes desperate life with hope as our beacon. But on the grass roots level, America loves its musicians and gives to them a poignant heartfelt appreciation that brings tears to my eyes.
I watch our performances on those special nights when people who know and love us come to let us take them somewhere over the rainbow. It is our job to lift these farmers, mechanics, teachers, businessmen, housewives, truck drivers, etc., above the mundane to a plane of human potential that only the dynamics of inspired music can transcend. They realize whether consciously or subconsciously that they aren’t animals, or machines, or numbers, or anything relegated to anonymity or insignificance. They are human beings with the unique powers of emotion and love, full of wonder and mystery, able to exhilarate and remember. Those days are so special because we are your gift and you are ours. This is my way of not letting you slip silently away, because none of us knows how many days we get on this earth.
Carl
*Blinddog Smokin’ now has a manager, Ronald Chew, an attorney on Wilshire Blvd in the L.A./Hollywood area. He is a very nice man with a big perspective and scope of our potential. He doesn’t think small. He has recently gotten us a headline gig at BB Kings club at the Universal Studios in Hollywood.
*Blinddog Smokin’ will be featured on the cover of Southland Blues Magazine in December. This is the leading Blues publication for Los Angeles and San Diego and should open doors for us. The publisher has become a friend of mine and is very supportive of the band. He is a sincere and hardworking man whose humble and honest demeanor goes contrary to the Hollywood image and gives hope to those of us who want talent and character to win in the end over hyperbole and Machiavellian politics.
*Look for all new Blinddog Smokin’ promotional material to be out soon. We have invested in a top graphic artist, David Vaughan, who loves the band and works as a labor of love as well as money. This will be the most professional and artistic image we have ever portrayed and hopefully will mark the beginning of a new level in our opportunities.
*Jason “12 Fingers” Coomes has had a new custom guitar designed and built by Scott Platz and it will be the subject of its own Tales Told Well if Jason allows me to write about it. It is a mysterious guitar with a lot of mojo inherent in it for certain reasons and it is destined to be the stuff of which legends are made. I doubt you will receive the story of this guitar with indifference. You will love it, hate it, be fascinated or repulsed, but you won’t be indifferent. Jason will be receiving it sometime in the next month.
*Our congratulations to the King Biscuit Blues Festival volunteers in the little Riverboat town of Helena, Arkansas, once again you have made your festival an experience to remember, the best there is. Readers of TTW would do well to consider this experience in years to come. Some things exceed anticipation. Don’t go if you prefer plastic flowers to the real thing. This festival is what the blues is all about.
Posted by Carl