Missed It By That Much

If you were kicking around the British Islands in the 1950s, and some knacker asked you who was going to be a big star someday, I doubt you would have said the Beatles. You certainly wouldn’t have heard of the Rolling Stones. People in the know might have offered Gerry Marsden, and his Pacemakers.

The video is the real deal. I like Gerry figuring out the hard way that a boom mike might be a no-no in a crowded club. He belts it out in the music hall tradition, in an unaffected Liverpool twang.

Brian Epstein went into the Cavern Club in Liverpool to discover his Silver Beatles and make his fortune, and found the lilliputian Liverpudlian Gerry Marsden, standing on a packing crate because the microphone stand wouldn’t lower to his height, sitting in and singing along with his friends Paul, George, John, and Pete Best, the Beatle’s first drummer.

Pete missed it by that much. Gerry and The Pacemakers had their cup of coffee in the big leagues, and faded back to obscurity. Still, it’s lovely to hear Ferry Cross The Mersey, and see a bit of that luminous postwar explosion of pop, still in its footling cradle.

Good on ya, Gerry.

What Time It Ain’t

What the hell time is it?

Doesn’t really matter, I expect. The rhythm of the day, the coming and receding of it tells you all you need to know. The whistle will blow. Then you’ll know what time it is. What good does it do to know what time it ain’t?

I love it in the morning. You walk down the decline through the pines, the soft, gentle shush-shush of the big needles grinding under your boot, the fog swirling around your feet and dashing off a bit — standoffish — and then collecting itself again in your wake, waiting for the sun to rise and put it to bed. It reminds me of Pa blowing smoke rings on a long winter’s evening. The stars are out strong though the sun is near to come. The idiot woodpeckers haven’t begun, but you hear the songbirds a bit, sensing the sun waiting on the platform for the day to begin. They know what time it is.

I used to have a watch, but the steam, the sap, the turps, the cosmoline –well, they did those little devils in one after another. After a while, you just let things go. I stand over this machine and I feed it like it’s a dragon, puffing steam, the great jeweled drops of amber sap boiling out like a bit of food on its smacking lips.

No one wanted to feed the beast. It roared and clanked and hissed and bit off the odd man’s fingers. You had to be first every day in the dawn to fire her and bring the gauges up like Vulcan’s clock. And once it was going you could never stop. It would pull itself to pieces with its unremitting greedy chewing if there was nothing in its maw.

Oh, I’ll take her. It’s my one, true love. A man can love the thing he understands, it’s true, but seeks the whole world over for the thing that understands him in return. And the steam in the beast’s veins courses through its body like life does in any man’s husk.

I feed it and it feeds me. I’ll lie on my bed someday all broke down from my exertions and feel the Lord’s hand on my shoulder and wish I had one more day of the smell of the loblolly pine in my nose. Extreme Unction with the turps, father.

OK, You’re Great

OK, you’re great.

BFD. Lots of people are great. But that man, along with many others who worked along with him to achieve that little confection, is also the raw material for further greatness.That’s a whole different ballgame.

You see, that’s different than just greatness.

Bernard of Chartres said we are like dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients. Truer words were never spoken.

I copy things all the times. I parse out tid-bits from the pattern books of the frock coat set, cobbling them together to make something good from something great. It’s instructive that Gene Kelly doesn’t smear himself with chocolate and scream Vagina! every ten seconds to achieve originality. He, like the people that followed him, distilled from what was worthwhile a recipe for what was sublime. He is inventive, not deliberately obtuse and strange.

I put the wood together to make furniture. I put the words together to make sentences. I try, every day, to find the thing that someone else can use for their own raw material. People tell me occasionally that they use the furniture as the raw material in their domestic lives. That’s a start.

But I may never know if I’ve succeeded. Since it is rare and unlikely, I will probably die without even an inkling of it. But I’m living every day with the trying. It’s enough, for us mortals.