Updated 07/08/08

the revised devil's dictionary essay 62

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Greetings all,

As I’ve said, recently, been a while. Not to worry, some long awaited changes have gone down and I can say, now, freedom calls. I officially retired from the Oregon Department of Transportation after 30 years of employment. I have a full pension – indeed, a very good pension though it’s not as good as my wife Susan’s. She made more money over the years being in management and also opted for variable rates in part of her retirement funds, which paid off pretty well, all things considered.

So, figure that I’ll be able to spend more time on the newsletter. And that I’m having an easier time writing things, which is true. The last three years were not joyful employment, to say the least. Anyway, this time out, I thought I hit you with a curious little essay called …

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Louisiana Blues

Most people who know me do not know that I learned to play guitar. Not well, I admit, and certainly much later in life than any of my friends would have guessed. I took it up when I was forty-three years old after I came to the realization that I really didn’t care how good I was or would get; I just wanted to learn. And I had another reason as well. At the time I was doing a lot of traveling in my job and it was cheap entertainment. I bought what is called a backpack guitar on the cheap and took it with me.

Naturally, with my tastes in music, I learned a lot of blues songs and was actually starting to get middling proficient on finger-picking. I could play about ten different blues songs pretty well finger-picking, and it was one hell of a lot of fun. No performances, no pressure to be good for someone else. Just the enjoyment of doing something I liked.

As is, again, natural for me, I never played guitar with anyone else. I’m not much for group activities to begin with and I’ll be honest. I was probably horrible by any reasonable standard of music.

Times change. My hearing went way south on me and about the time I discovered that I could no longer tell the difference between a D minor and a D7 chord, I figured it was time to call it quits. I sold my guitars off (my Strat and a Spanish acoustic to a fine friend at work who actually performed), gave my backpack guitar to a guy who played blues in a bar on Edgewater Street (big surprise to him, let me clue you. The look on his face when I refused the money was priceless), and then packed away my favorite guitar, a standard size Fender acoustic that I loved. Still have it. Don’t know why, but I still do.

Segue back in time: It’s 1972 and I’m holding a delightfully weird album cover. A grinning, monstrous beast with arms held out, side to side. Cover is done in brown. The beast drips. Face, arms, body, looks like a mud monster of some sort whose been in a hard rain. Under the right arm (from the monster’s point of view) drips the album title: Blue Matter. Under the other, the group’s name: Savoy Brown.

There was a live cut on the album called “Louisiana Blues” which is repetitive as hell, and probably not a great song, but the fact that it was live and done with verve, makes it worth listening to. Al Kooper, one of music’s great observers, could probably explain why I loved the song far better than I should. I’ll just say it was LIVE. Somewhat raw. Rough, blues vocals and long guitar riffs. If you’ve ever heard any Savoy Brown, you know Kim Simmonds can really play guitar and excels in live performances.

I'm going to New Orleans, get me a Mojo Hand
I'm going to New Orleans, get me a Mojo Hand
I'm gonna get you women, right under my command
“Louisiana Blues”
Muddy Waters

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Back to here and now: I’m deaf, but I can still hear that cut. Just like I can hear “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals. Just like I can hear a number of other songs done by blues artists over the long years (and two I heard live, myself, in Salem: “All I Can Do” & “Hellbound Train” by Savoy Brown). The songs I’ve heard that were important to me are part of my mental landscape, hopefully forever, and shape what I do and think. Which is why …

I just got back from Louisiana, New Orleans to be precise. Had a wonderful time. If anybody asks, as far as I’m concerned, FEMA should be horse whipped and New Orleans rebuilt, no matter what the cost. It’s a unique place and I will return there, more than once.

Now, the strange thing is this. This was a retirement trip. I’ve officially retired from working for the Oregon Department of Transportation after thirty years and Susan and I thought a trip, by myself, would be a good thing for me. However, everybody who learned of my plans to fly into New Orleans, spend a couple of days and then drive to St. Petersburg to meet my daughter, looked horrified. They thought I was insane. It was dangerous, didn’t I know?

That included my wife and my daughter, by the way. They gently tried to dissuade me but quickly gave up, knowing there wasn’t much chance of doing so. But all of my friends from work worried that a deaf guy, looking as I do like a cheap, imitation David Crosby, would be an instant target for Southern-style mayhem. I couldn’t understand that then and I certainly don’t understand it now.

But I was driving across Alabama and Mississippi, they worried. What about the movie Deliverance? Those southern boys would hurt me. (Keep in mind Deliverance was set in Georgia and I’ve never liked Georgia much, anyway)

They were wrong. I had a ball. Some other time I’ll talk about the rest of the trip (and there were some definitely weird Kodak moments), but not now.

The people were, oddly enough, nice. Perhaps that’s because I approach nice people, picking people who don’t look ready to chew iron and spit nails, which could skew the results. I would come up to some guy who didn’t look like he was entirely strung out and busy and, after firmly making pleasant eye contact, inform him that I was deaf and he might have to write out an answer to my question – did he have a minute. All but one person the entire trip did. Most grinned kind of sheepishly while they wrote their responses.

I had a couple of interesting, long conversations (well, when somebody has to write out what they want to say, all conversations tend to be longish, no?) with several people, the most interesting probably a guy named Ralph who worked as a street mime and living statue. He was done for the day and the local ordinances stated that no mimes, living statues or performance artists were allowed on the streets in the French Quarter after eight o’clock, so he answered a few of my questions while the two of us had a cigarette and watched the rising tide of foot traffic on Bourbon Street.

My first question was if the body paint he wore was uncomfortable and, risking imprisonment for working after eight o’clock, he shrugged. He showed me the small ointment jar that held the silver body paint he used on his skin and dabbed some on my arm. Didn’t really feel like anything. I asked him if it paid well, and he brightened and told me that the tourists, contrary to elitist swine seen on the CNN and in movies, loved it. Ralph opined that it wasn’t a bad gig, but got a little wearing after six or seven hours.

I could understand that.

Bourbon Street after dark, even in the off-season (which June most certainly is) got interesting, if not crowded. One could walk without getting bumped around but one did have to side-step here and there and occasionally put up with the tipsy types like the woman from Muncie, Indiana that popped up six inches in front of my camera while I was taping sixty seconds of Bourbon Street night life. My wife told me she burbled hello into the camera before I quit recording, but in any event, it was lost on me at the time and she blurrily giggled at me as she went in search of more enticing prey.

One nice lady in a tourista shop showed me a number of FEMA related t-shirts that I can’t repeat due to the high scatological content, but you can fill in the blanks. She looked delighted when I bought one for my friend, Robert. She also indicated that I really, really ought to take in the voodoo temple if I was interested in the real voodoo stuff, which was a shame. I was leaving at six o’clock in the morning the next day and wouldn’t have time to do that.

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I spent the rest of the evening enjoying the blues clubs, from the street. I’m not a drinker and since I’m deaf to boot, paying cover prices didn’t really strike me as a wise investment. But I did get to watch some obviously good music, if one can tell from watching the chords the rhythm guitarist is fingering. Such huge hands. All three of the ones I watched for a while could use their thumbs for chording, something I wished I could do but was physically incapable of even attempting. At least on the guitars I owned.

Only one made much use of barré chords (the barré chord is a nifty way of playing lots and lots of different chords with the same fingering. It requires a very strong index finger, however). I watched him sliding his hand from chord to chord and almost could hear what he played. I certainly could feel what the drummer and bass were doing, most of the time. I’m glad I stuck around, even if I was ten years too late to enjoy it, the way it should be enjoyed.

And that’s probably a lesson I’ll keep in mind for a long while. Sometimes things are too late. Sometimes too early. And when they’re just the right time, you may not be able to do them. I couldn’t. I had a life to live, bills to pay, kids to rear, a wife to love, a job that meant something to me. Meant a great deal to me, in actual fact. They precluded some things.

Tough. But living in fear is certainly not any way to live because life is dangerous, a lot of the time. Living in fear is no fun; you live a shadow life knowing nothing but more fear.

Cars can kill you. Food can poison you, especially French food that costs three times what you think it should, or anything that E. coli can possibly exist upon. That’s the way it goes. So, I say: Caution is for chuckleheads, which is why I flew to New Orleans to get my taste, albeit a bit late, of Louisiana Blues.

Late’s okay, ’cause it’s certainly better than never.

I keep searching for an answer
As I sit here in my lonely room
Till I find an reason to keep living
“All I Can Do
Simmonds/Raymond
Savoy Brown

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