I attempt to avoid introspection. It seems to me that it is an overly complex process of self-gratification. Not that I am opposed to self-gratification, but I prefer the more physical kind with tangible rewards. Occasionally though, the sub-conscious takes over and I am forced to reflect upon my dreams. Luckily, those are usually reenactments of events that have, or will, occur; giving me a rope to hang on.
Last night the vision of Otis slowly letting go “I’ve been loving you…too long….” echoed over and over, like a wolf’s wail in a deep canyon. Forty years have past since then, but the smell of patchouli and grass mixed with the bass notes of love, youth and hope, foolishly reverberates still. 1967 was an especially configuring year to my world’s fragile psyche.
Only two short years later most of us knew the wheel of change had gone as far as it would turn. Though I sat behind stage at the same venue playing my harp with Taj as he beat his National Steel rhythm and carryed us windward with a sad song, I felt like a cartoon character, like the capstan of that great wheel was spinning backward and hitting me in the head with each spoke driving me deeper into the muck and mire, cartoon stars and all. When Jesse Ed Davis chastised and chided my friend for his barefooted guitar playing I knew it was over.
Of course, it would take ‘till ’76 before everyone had become bought and co-opted and returned to the control of the corporation. They had to get rid of the war and a bunch of crummy 70’s automobiles first. Where’s my Pinto! By then it was even cool to be a rich black man; way cool! The “Me Generation” was not born, it was made. Now I’m not black, though I didn’t know it ‘till I was sixteen…or I should say I didn’t know I was white. Those were distinctions children didn’t make in Cincinnati’s Evanston ghetto in the 50’s. I did live on the white side of the street but my mom made my clothes by hand from my dad’s acid eaten work wear. We kids dealt in class not color. My best friend from across the street and I traded our little cowboy boots for 5 years old and Mighty Mouse was in black AND white. During the ’67 riots he let me know I was white class had become color. In ’68 they killed King and I was made whiter than ever, or, were they made blacker? In either case, they thrust upon us a false premise blurring differences that should have been accentuated and creating divisions that did not exist. It always surprised me that Burn was not a hit, then again I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was Brando’s best movie. Today I know I’m white and love my whiteness and I know black and love their blackness but a lot of in-between was lost.
I wish the revolution had been televised. I would watch the reruns like Star Trek episodes with Captain Kirk so I would know it had really existed. But there is contrary evidence, people still must work for starvation wages, war has not only NOT been abolished it has become regular fare, even preemptive, war criminals inhabit the White House, the rich are infinitely richer, the poor couldn’t get no poorer but there are so many more of them, poor children still die from lack of medical care as do their parents and grandparents and so will their babies, pollution of our world has become a God given right along with exterminating anything and anyone who gets in the way and the color of one’s skin is still a criteria for first class citizenship.
Oh, Otis you dead guy! I’ve been loving you…too long.
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