Everettsville: News/Blog

Inspired by a conversation with a friend about how specific moments in your life come to be associated with certain songs, and viceversa. Call it the Soundtrack Syndrome. Here's a story of one of those moments.

Song: "Lodi" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Scene: a living room in Oceanside, California
Year: 1989

Introduction/Background

Chuck liked to drink. My girlfriend, Carmen, called him "El Borracho". She was twenty-one, several months older than I was, and working as a live-in nanny to Chuck, his two little boys, and his petite and mousy wife who was about 7 months pregnant with their third child. Carmen was from Tijuana and had no legal papers to work on this side of the border, so under-the-table nanny work was a good way to go. She had her own room in their small 3-bedroom house in a faded 60s-era housing tract in Oceanside, California. It was late spring of 1989.

I was in a local 99-cent store the other day when this familiar kernal of wisdom descended from somewhere in the ceiling:

"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them...if you did."

Thank you, Sir Elton. Thank you.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and the look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

This is the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939). This is the kind of writing that can make you forget you’re reading pulp fiction.

Raymond Chandler was essentially the guy who invented the hard-boiled, world-weary, first-person narrative style that came to define the pulp fiction detective novel genre. Chandler’s protagonist is Detective Philip Marlowe. He’s the kind of character that Garrison Keillor parodies with his Guy Noir: Private Eye radio sketches. (If you want to know more you can go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler)

It’s Saturday afternoon in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. A rotating throng of about 20 people, interchangeable in their giddy & chatty demeanor, swarm around the painting. Most of them are holding up their phone cameras to the work. People take turns posing next to the painting. It’s constant photography.

Is this Starry Night or the baby Panda? Is this a world-class art museum or a zoo? How can I focus on the painting itself when every 5-10 seconds somebody’s head pops up next to the frame grinning back in my direction? (“Oh, pardon me, am I blocking your shot?”)

On Tuesday morning, I think it was, or maybe Monday...just before the news broke that Levon Helm was in his final hours, I got home from work and picked The Last Waltz off of the DVD shelf. It was about the half-dozenth time or so that I've watched this great Scorcese-directed concert film of The Band's farewell concert in 1976.

Levon Helm in 1976 (still from The Last Waltz)