It was 1969, and Janis Joplin was president. Woodstock was a place, a memory, an idea. High as hell, she’d sung Work Me Lord, asking for the strength to carry on. Two years later, they found her at the bottom of a bathtub. Before the work had even begun.
Now is not then. I am forty-nine and fat and lonely. The millennium is turning, and I run a second-hand record store. I buy oversized jeans as a precaution. I have forgotten the touch of my wife.
At Turning The Tables (I named it myself) we preserve a feeling that most have never known. It’s like you’re eight minutes into a Hendrix set, floating, fucking levitating, man. And there’s a cat to your left going at it with your girl, and there’s a cat to your right, trying to get it on with you, but forget that! Cause it’s Hendrix, and he’s riffing away your sins and you gotta stay focused. So you throw yourself back knowing you’ll be caught, and let the arms of this twig-like fella catch you. He sticks a J in your mouth and tells you to let loose. Your body melts to jelly, and it’s oh so sweet. He could lay you down, your bare back on the mud, or throw you up, your very soul above the crowd, and you’d still feel like a tree. Rooted. One with it all. Now feeeeel it. Let it turn you. Things happen in four four here. Life begins at the Electric Lady Land. Jimmy paved the way then, and he’s in these shelves now. His sermons spin 40 times a minute.
And, yeah, man, I guess I’m playing into it. My kid wants to know what Richie Haven has to do with Iraq. A smarter man might have an answer. But I can only say he feels it. He’s singing about freedom thirty years back, but he’s speaking to liberation for all of time. Show me the Jihad that wouldn’t affect. Brother, times change but the rhythm stays the same.
Ain’t nothing more real than delusion. I see the world spinning a different direction. But my friends died for the spirit of the summer, so I won’t let it fizzle away. They’re calling us hippies now, you heard that? Saying we were too busy shooting up to show out— that crap’s not catchy. But we were there, man, down and dirty in the name of love. We smoked grass and hugged trees and our sweat had sweat of its own. But we were a movement. And these kids can’t say the same.
I know cats living in cubicles. Guys who dropped acid for the career ladder, and aren’t mocking Nixon no more. They’re voting red and living in Ohio. These brothers can’t spit on the nuclear family from within it. Man, oh, man. Best to forget it. Slide on an LP and let it all go.
