novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and i didn't even know july had started yet "it's two forty five in the mornnnning, and i'm putting myself on warnnnning...dah dah dah nah na nah...." all i have been listening to lately, heavily, has been elliott smith. and now one of his song titles graces my time zone. whenever i'm awake at 2:45 am, i think of that song. can't help it: guilt by association. just like whenever it's 4:30 i think of that spin doctors song. "it's not late, it's early early early!" i used to love them in seventh grade. on friday night, my parents, evelyn and i went to see bob dylan at the vta fairgrounds. mom got free tickets because she's on the fair board. phil lesh, a guitarist for the grateful dead, was headlining, so of course the crowd was 65% hippies. the other 35%: people who actually lived during dylan's heyday. thus, my parents. it was so interesting to see my dad sway and croon, slapping his thighs. the whole event was intriguing: evelyn and i viewed it as a sociological study. we crowd-watched the entire time, postulating on whether or not the older people in the crowd of thousands have listened to dylan or the dead in the past decades, or if they were just there for the nostalgia effect. mom was indignant--she insisted that she'd still listen to him if she had a working record player, if i hadn't stolen all of her old dylan records, if she had any cds of his greatest hits. but most of the 35% had eyes glistening with nostalgia, and nothing else. the crowd pleasers were his legendary hits, and everybody sang along. his newer stuff floated over the baby boomers' (including my parents) heads: obvious testimony that they were there to stroll down memory lane. the hippies were amazing to observe, too, with their extremely loose clothing and dirty hair, and elated, peaceful faces. evelyn and i counted two flower garlands on women's heads. thousands of people follow this phil lesh guy around the country in campers, selling blankets or shrooms for gas money, drinking beer in the dirt parking lot if they didn't get enough cash to pay the tickets, or if they couldn't climb over the fifteen foot wire fence. inside, they whirled, shared joints, played with their children. somebody snuck in their dog (hippies seem to only have dogs, and almost all of them have either a dog or a child or both, and no cats were seen), and he pranced around with his red eyes. at first i thought the pooch was pink eye, but then realized that he, like everyone else in this throng, was buzzing on a contact high. dad made us stay for "just one phil lesh song! he might play some classic dead!" which turned out to be forty five more minutes, because as everyone knows...the grateful dead DON'T END THEIR SONGS. they SEGWAY. mom explained to me, in-between her yawns and whimpers of "i want to go home, i never liked this music, i was only here for bobbie" that when the musicians forget where they are and just go off on some strange melodical tangent, that they return "home:" this base song upon which everything else is built. we listened for home and found it four times---four different homes. dad finally relented and let us leave. i wondered if he was thinking about his college days....no, i KNEW he was, due to his stanford sweatshirt. he even ran into some girl who danced with him at a dylan concert in '69, the year he graduated. my dad, the surf bum acid dealer that everyone called "trip", and for good reason. he's still dealing, but not drugs: since his school days, he's been selling cars. saturday, i hung out with grandma and tried to crochet. i keep getting my strand twisted though, and it looks like i'll never make m those mittens i promised. but i'm still hopeful. i got tired an hour into it and just listened to grandma ramble on about our crazy family. she doesn't have anyone else to confide in, and i love her stories, so i have assumed the role of her confidant. today she told me about grandpa w's brother j killing himself by driving into a train. his wife married a guy with three kids not a year after j's death, and j left her with six, so i expect that family beat the brady bunch to smithereens. here's a story, of an abused lady, who was bringing up six disgruntled children of her own, da da da da duh. etc. elliott smith song - 7.2.2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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