Pickin' and Grinnin'

"I Need Pickers?"....hmmm.

     I was just now contemplating what, exactly, motivated me to create a blog, (or, with little forethought, to name it this - except because of my high  frustration at that moment with all my excesses of stuff!) My first post was written shortly after watching an episode of the show on History Channel named "American Pickers", which I adore. At that minute I was wishing that Frank and Mike would pay me a visit, (but driving a tractor trailer, not that skimpy van), and to whisk it all out from under me ~ making me a huge profit while they were stomping and kicking and hooting out loud to the cameras about what amazing, irresistibly great junk that good old gal Kathy had accumulated! 

     Was just now also contemplating how I find myself yet again at my computer on a late Sunday night, listening to the Pandora internet radio station which I've created named "Bluegrass and other tunes" - and I realized that it's imperative that I must have another kind of picker in my life, too, besides my junk guys.....

     I mean the kind of pickers that get together and JAM, man....simply making music and hanging out together. Many types of music levitate me into a different place and time in my life: back to when the music industry was actually a paying job for me. I met lots of the acoustic legends of folk, bluegrass, pop; even some authentic country pickers (writers/performers) that are, to my astonishment, still recognized names. Some of the old timers are gone now, probably having lived longer lives from the sheer joy of making music. A couple top artists that I met went out far too young, such as Jim Croce and even John Denver. I saw John, close up and personal, at a local small-venue concert only weeks before his death, and that was a night I'll never forget. He had hit his fifties, but was absolutely at the top of his game that night. I have the curse/blessing of perfect pitch, and was pleased that neither he nor his talented band hit a pitch-glitch (an off note) during one song of that entire concert. I was literally three feet off the ground at the sheer entertainment perfection of it all. Best of all, during the entire two hours, you didn't hear a pin drop, nary a cough, from the audience.

    I am nobody special. And yet, somehow in spite of myself I landed a job for a couple years, during the mid-Seventies, out of my usual office jobs into a new world outside of the musical mainstream, nearing the end of the "folk era" -  and was able (blessed, nearly), to worship at the feet of Doc Watson, Tom Waits, Janice Ian, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell and countless other talented individuals that you'd recognize if I listed their names and their hits. Many are currently still successfully performing, and even my daughter's generation, I have discovered, appreciates their music. Remind me some time to tell you about Tom Waits, a down-and-dirty, lone freewheeling  folkie back then, who I recently was delighted to see in an excellent supporting acting performance in Denzel Washington's movie, "the Book of Eli".

                             Janice Ian & Friends circa 1974 - recognize anybody?!?

      I was so damned intimidated by their talent and guts.... when all I was doing was working a job helping to run and maintain a windowless, 270-seat coffee house which - compared to the stadium concerts of today - was an intimate room of hushed musical worship. Don McLean never failed to hold us spellbound with "bye, bye, Miss American Pie" or the still-recorded "Vincent": (Starry, starry night, paint your portrait blue and gray.....Now I think I know, what you tried to say,to me, how you suffered for your sanity, how you tried to set them free....)


     I'd listen to them all talk with the staff between sets, and never admit that I owned and picked around with a half-decent acoustic six-string that I'd bought off a friend back in high school, for what I could put together from waitressing tips. Hell, I was already a married woman, working for money and putting myself through college at night while trying to keep together a precarious relationship, plus maintaining a home that I wanted to look like the magazine ads. (I was Martha Stewart before Martha was, but that's yet another backstory not for this post!).

    Anyway, what would I give.... to go back and really be "in the moment" and realize that what I was experiencing would have been so enhanced if my mind hadn't been elsewhere half the time, worried about material things and keeping up an appearance of "normalcy", instead of relaxing and having fun with it. I was so young and so serious! But I was programmed from birth, I swear, to keep my nose to the grindstone -  what an experience I was having without even appreciating it!

      So, wouldn't it be just great to get a few of those guys and girls over to my house - we'd light a fire tonight and boil up some expresso, pour into heavy crockery mugs, add a taste or two out of the Bottle, put a pinch of cinnamon and whipped cream on top, plates of cheese and crackers (being the normal fare back then) scattered here & there. Everybody'd be on the edge of a chair or on the rug with an instrument on their lap...pretty soon we'd just start fooling around with chords - strummm, lick, tickle those strings  - a little pickin', a little grinnin'....fast on the bluegrass but some sweet ballads in harmonies, too.....and sure: pretty soon I'd be picking up the back strums and singing along, and they'd tell me that I had potential, guitar-gal. I wouldn't be the mother-figure, the problem-solver, the ashtray-emptier ~ wouldn't be paying them in cash at the end of the night on the "gate" plus fixed price....I'd be one of them for sure, and we'd be having us a good old time. I could sure use those kind of pickers in my real life again, instead of my imaginary treasure hunters and the harsh realities of mid-life crises that require much multi-tasking.

    
     It's ironic that Robert just came up to my office to say he's been flipping channels and that the Grammy awards are on TV tonight.... he caught the end of Mick Jagger's high-energy performance and was amazed that the guy's "still got it".... No offense intended, Mick - but your stuff was never my gig. Though almost over, I turned the Grammy's on the TV in my office for a few minutes and watched Lady Antebellum win for the year's best recording, "I Need You Now".  Yes! I'm not so old that I can't love that song (and secretly pleased that their fresh new/old style won out over all the unfathomable rappers!)

    Hey, I'm just chilling out here with Alison Krauss crooning "When You Say Nothing At All". That's one of merely a thousand songs that tell my story. I forgot for a long time who I was, and what that's made me. I'll have music forever, integrated into the daily grind to lighten the load. A pickin' fantasy now and then never hurts, either....