Take a Load Off

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead;
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, “no” was all he said.

The Weight – The Band

 

            I haven’t really watched the concert film, “The Last Waltz,” aside from the occasional stop for a minute or two while channel surfing.  I’ve heard most parts over the years, such as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up on Cripple Creek, and The Weight.

            I heard the Talking Heads concert film, “Stop Making Sense” on a cassette years before I saw it.  In my very humble opinion, with admittedly a very small sampling, I think those are the two best concert films to have been made. Or maybe I’ve determined that the best way to watch a concert film is to not watch it.

            But between the two I’m going to stick with The Last Waltz because last Thursday Levon Helm; drummer, singer, and songwriter for The Band, passed away at the age of 71.  The Band music has always sounded a little worn around the edges to me.  Not polished with hours of studio remixing or adding Walls of Sound, but comfortable from the get go, and as American as a rusting Route 66 sign.  Although the only American in the band was Helm.

            Some songs make me stop and up the volume no matter when or where I hear them; Neil Young’s Helpless – which is featured on The Last Waltz – Pure Prairie League’s Amie, the Allman Brother’s Melissa, and The Weight from The Band.

            Years ago, when American Idol was mowing them down, there were a handful of copycat shows that came out.  On one a teenage boy sat down at a piano and simply played and sang The Weight.  When the song was over the audience jumped to their feet and the other contestants followed with a standing ovation of their own.  The British judge –why is there always a British judge? - thought it was excellent, the record exec judge said the kid was “on his way” and the female flavor-of-the-month-pop-singer judge asked, “Did you write that?”

            But writing is what that song was.  Look at the economy of words from the passage quoted above, "Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?
He just grinned and shook my hand, ‘no’ was all he said.”  Many writers might have said something about meeting a man, or even describing that man before the “Hey mister” quote.  Elmore Leonard, whose 10 rules for writing include “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters,” would have been proud.

            Levon Helm didn’t write The Weight, but he sang it, along with most of The Band’s other songs, while playing the drums.  Today’s pop divas cheerfully admit lip-syncing their hits because they can’t be expected to do all that dancing and still sing.  Have you ever seen a fat drummer?  So thanks Levon, and take a load off.

King Missile, Led Zeppelin, and The Salvation Army

“Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place, where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street, I saw my penis lying on a blanket next to a broken toaster oven.  Some guy was selling it.”

                                                       Detachable Penis – King Missile

            Today we had a garage sale.  Our garage, while quite large, is proving inefficient when it comes to holding all our stuff.  Basically we have more stuff than garage, so we decided that part of our downsizing would include getting rid of things we don’t really need, don’t really use, and more often than I’d like to admit, didn’t really know we still had.      

The day for me started at 5:00 when I got up, pulled all this fine merchandise out into the driveway, and hoped people would find some of it worth giving us a couple of bucks for.  I remember when a good friend’s father had a yard sale in the classified, (pre craigslist you see) and people were banging on his front gate at 6:00, demanding to be let into his yard.  I wanted to be ready.

At six our first customers showed up.  They were the construction guys who were pouring a new patio for the guy across the street.  They bought a couple of things then started up the very large and very loud contraptions that would pump the wet concrete from the curb to wherever the patio was to be.  That lasted for about 2 hours and was like running a boutique in the engine room of the Titanic.

The sale went well.  While we didn’t make enough to retire on, we did make enough to be worth driving over to the bank to deposit and I actually sold a metal bed frame that I’m sure has moved with us at least three times.  More importantly, our garage only looks half full now.  Or half empty depending on your disposition and to many of my friends whether or not their meds are working.

As I was sitting there, waiting for the next customer to show up and contemplating having an “every thing is a dollar for the next 30 minutes” sale, I wondered if yard sales are strictly a suburban phenomenon or do urbanites occasionally throw handfuls of their junk out front and ask for money for it.  Then I remembered a song (quoted above) from years ago that mentioned people doing that exact thing on a steet on the way to St. Mark’s Place which is in Manhattan.  If you can't believe what a guy singing about his penis puts in a song, what can you believe?

            St. Mark’s Place also hosts a building that served as the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album which in turn could have served as a description of what occupied my driveway this morning.  That graffiti has been cleaned up and all that wasn't sold went to the good people of the Salvation Army, which also was a short-lived band in the early eighties.

The Lost World

"I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen."
Authur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Spoiler alert!

The Tooth Fairy is dead, gone from the imaginings of both of my sons forever. With her loss, can Santa and the Easter Bunny’s last full measure be far behind? The most recent dislodged tooth from my youngest boy was still on his nightstand the following morning; cold and forgotten, a dried spot of blood on its roots. His mother and father, possessed by job-hunting, bill-paying, and the stress of moving for the seventh time since their marriage, had done something they had managed not to do before. While the boy drifted off with the excitement of knowing that a magical being would enter his room while he was asleep and trade a dollar for that tooth, his parents just drifted off.

The next morning it was the first thing out of his mouth since the tooth, “The Tooth Fairy forgot me.” The first thing out of dad’s mouth was, “Oops.”

We used to take a dollar and fold it into an origami square (Something else the Internet is good for). Somehow that seemed more magic than just leaving a bill there. But we had forgotten and that was simply that. Later I took a dollar to him in his room and when he asked, “There is no tooth fairy, is there?” I told him yes. He took the dollar, the final one, and I took the tooth. The king is dead there will be no more kings.

Every person has to face losing innocence and every parent has to face their child losing innocence. It’s not the end of the world for either of them, just the end of a world. It’s the end of world without the stresses and pressure of relationships, jobs, money, health, or death. It’s a world where you’re always taken care of, where fairies and jolly old elves are real and there are no consequences, only rewards. And those rewards often come in the form of chocolate.

The loss of anything is always painful, but the loss of an entire world can be impossible to get over. We are tempted to long for that world. Sometimes it’s where we leapt from bed on cold winter mornings and made a made dash to the living room to check under the tree, or a mad dash to the yard to hunt for colored eggs or chocolate leporids, or just rolled over and checked our nightstand. Sometimes it’s where we never had to lock our doors or we trusted strangers. The former world was imaginary and probably, so was the latter.

This longing probably contributed to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Author Conan Doyle, being taken in by a fairy discovery hoax, pictured above.

This Sunday will be the first Easter for my youngest since the revelation that the Tooth Fairy was his mom and dad. We don’t plan on a visit from the Easter Bunny. I hope he isn't planning on one either. But to sooth the way, there will be chocolate.