What ONE song best describes you/your views on life?

You can't ask a musician a question and get just one song for an answer. But I'll start with this one:

HOTEL CALIFORNIA by the Eagles.

I lived that song. I grew up in a little shit-hole in Arizona called "Tucson." Today it is more of a city, but in the 1950s it was, almost literally, cowboys and Indians. (And no, I never really grew up, but during the 1950s, the years in my life when most people grew up, that's where I was.)

I managed to escape to attend a university in Los Angeles. I didn't come in on a "dark desert highway," but a "dark desert railroad track." When the train stopped in L.A. and they opened the door, it was like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when the world changed from black-and-white to Technicolor.

I stayed in L.A. for 37 years, and every day was still like that: Technicolor. The people, the music scene, the museums, the international restaurants, the dozens of foreign cultures, the beach, the freeways, the La Brea Tar Pits, Sunset Strip, all the friends I made. It was wonderful!

Sure, there were some weird ladies whose "minds were Tiffany-twisted" and who had "mirrors on the ceiling" and "pink champagne on ice" and a monster in the master chamber that they "stabbed at it with their steely knives," and I think I dated most of them. But it was a non-stop, wonderful adventure.

Eventually we moved up to northwestern California, and it's just as wacky there, but in a totally different way. Seems like everybody's an artist, and many of them swear they saw Jerry Garcia in a bar last week. Considering what they're always smoking, maybe they did see him.

I've been working in Washington DC now for 11 years. And I've discovered the truth in that last line:

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

I play that song in my band, and when I'm between bands I sing it at karaoke. It's always popular and a surprising number of people here in Maryland know all the lyrics.

 

Installment #2:

ME AND BOBBY McGEE by Kris Kristofferson

This has to be the original, not Janis Joplin's gender-bending version. The whole point of the song was to explain why the 1960s had to end. Us guys, we'd still be out there ridin' our motorcycles, gettin' high all the time, sleepin' in crash pads and panhandlin' for food [disclaimer: I didn't do all four of those things personally], except OUR WOMEN GREW UP! Their bodies dragged them kicking and screaming into adulthood.

I had a wonderful girlfriend. But she wanted to have a family and I didn't. We weren't in Salinas (which stinks on certain days because Gilroy, America's Garlic Capital, is upwind from there), but "somewhere near Lawndale (don't try to find it on a map, it's near scenic El Segundo) I let her slip away, lookin' for the home I hope she'll find."

For years I wished that I could "trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holdin' [name redacted]'s body next to mine." But eventually I realized that although I was willing to grow up in many ways, I did not want to be a father because my parents were the worst role models for parenthood in the entire galaxy. Ironically, the lady moved to the Washington area, where I now live, but I've made no attempt to find her. Friends who kept in touch reported that she had gotten married, had a baby, got divorced, and gained 200 pounds!

I still have a job and a home, and I'm still happily childless. (Found a wife whose parents were worse role models than my own.) Although I did give up the motorcycles after having the same identical accident twice.

But that song still haunts me because it puts me back in touch with my feelings in 1971. I sill miss "the Sixties," that mis-named twelve-year period that began with the first Beatles hit in 1963 and ended with our withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

And I still hate Janis Joplin for making her idiotic, pointless, gender-bent monstrosity the standard version of the song. How many times in all of human history has a WOMAN let a MAN get away because HE wanted to settle down and SHE didn't????? It simply doesn't make sense.

 

I've been repeating that remark for 35 years and you two are the first people of either gender to question it. Women just roll their eyes and say, "Yes indeed. It's always the damn MAN who doesn't want the commitment. Janis was a spoiled loser who opted out of life itself by overdosing. She knew nothing about life or relationships. Kris never went on record to bitch about her ruining his song, because it made him rich."

Sure, there are a lot of immature, clueless men who suggest setting up housekeeping as a tactic for getting sex reliably, or maybe even a cook and housekeeper to replace the mother who kicked them out. No sensible woman is going to accept that. But that's not what the song is about. It's about the more typical man who doesn't want to settle down, but still wants to hang onto a really nice lady.

Notice how the song says, "I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday." He's not offering to move into the future and become more mature. He just doesn't want the past to end.

Women's bodies drag them into maturity, whether you want it or not. Perhaps with today's more reliable contraceptive technologies it's easier for a woman to defer growing up than it was in 1969. I'd say half the women of my generation, whom I know well enough to talk about it with, had abortions. It leaves a permanent scar.

Maybe this is just one of those cultural things that doesn't resonate anymore.