Multisyllabic Vocabulary
Feb 4, 2007 Rock and Roll
Posted by
duck
Friday, February 14, 1964. I walked on to a makeshift stage at a country church south west of Longmont Colorado with a Harmony guitar in hand, and five Beatles songs in my head. Five days earlier, on Sunday night, Ed Sullivan had introduced the Fab Four. Monday morning, I bought the guitar and a small amplifier, the down payment was my life savings at the time, from Dick Bachman at Bachman Music in Longmont. I learned the songs and had my first ‘gig’ on Friday. Since then, I’ve picked, plucked, pranced, and piano pounded in a few hundred bars, taverns and nightclubs throughout the western us.
Holiday Inn Lounges… done ‘em… pool halls with a crappy stage in the corner… yup… ski resorts, golf resorts, country clubs, monster bars with country on the main floor and rock and roll in the basement.
Rock and roll, blues, protest rock, folk songs, hard rock… punk rock, new wave, metal and mosh… Zep and Zombies, Zappa and Zevon… Berry and Blondie, Beach Boys and… well duh… Beatles… Donovan and Dylan, the Knack and Greg Kihn… Sid Vicious and Stephen Stills…
Since the seventies, seems to be one song title gets yelled in every one of those places…
One thing makes me really glad about being an old fart… I can play what I want…
I’m doing sixties now for a lot of reasons, but in the middle of the gig I played last night, one of those reasons really came to mind.
Ya see, I remember Rosa Parks, and George Wallace, and Birmingham, and Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King… Diner sit-ins, and fire hoses, and night sticks, and the bodies of three young men…
From hundreds of stages, I’ve watched, observed and listened… heard an overly large population of people whose multisyllabic vocabulary is pretty freakin’ limited. 80% of it in half a dozen words…
n——, whiskey, redneck, pickup, she-it, and freebird…
Ok, Free Bird is really two ONE SYLLABLE WORDS, but that’s not the way you hear it when the Jack and Coke forces it from somebody’s mouth… loudly…
I guess maybe I play some southern rock… Southern Cross, and of course Southern Man… sorry, Sweet Home Alabama isn’t on the list… neither is Free Bird…
Why celebrate somebody whose life seems to be depositing samples of his gene pool everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line without any concept of personal responsibility…
Oh, well… I guess you can shout it out all you want… odds are pretty good you won’t hear it from me…
Quack!
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