Say, shouldn’t you people be out looting or something? Waiting for a morbidly obese governor to hand you a check? Getting your stories straight for your fraudulent insurance claim? Shouldn’t you be waiting outside for FEMA to do that? Waiting for Brownie to come and do a heckuva job? Asphyxiating yourselves by running a generator indoors? Guarding your stash of non-perishable food by brandishing semi-automatic weapons at everyone that passes by?
How long has Eric Clapton been standing by the highway offramp, holding a sign that says: Will supply tasty, understated licks for food? I didn’t get the memo.
That song is, as they say, “a horse to ride.” Paul Carrack, the fellow pestering the Hammond organ and singing, wrote it back in the seventies, and had a minor hit with it with his band Ace. Number three, Billboard in the US. He’s British. I imagine he shuffles out to the mailbox every morning in his slippers and bathrobe, and finds a check in there that says How Long on it in the memo line, and shuffles back in to throw it on the pile. It’s good to plant perennial crops in this world.
That’s why Paul Carrack is a good example for me to show my son the musician. Paul Carrack works, and works with good people. Well, he works with everybody; I assume there’s some good people in there somewhere. I find it amusing that he was in Roxy Music, and then Squeeze. According to Wikipedia, he’s also either played, sung, or played and sung with:
Roger Waters
Mike and the Mechanics
Ringo Starr
Elton John
Eric Clapton
B.B.King
The Pretenders
The Smiths
Simply Red
Nick Lowe
John Hiatt
I’m sure I missed a couple of dozen more
As I said, I think he’s a good example to show to my son in this respect: Learn to sing, dude. It’s the only thing that matters. If you can sing, you’ll work. You’ll have some control over who you work with. You’ll be autonomous, if you like. You’ll be able to shuffle out to the mailbox in your jammies someday, and look for something besides dunning letters.
Learn to sing, son. Some day you might want old ladies to flap their bingo wings while they clap along to your songs.
A ship’s hull should be worth more than its rigging. Women should cast a shadow. They shouldn’t be able to break their nose walking into a wall if they tried. They should have lips without a trip to a doctor’s office. It’s shouldn’t be a straight shot from the armpit to the ankle. Beauty shouldn’t just be in the eye of the beer holder. Some girls’ middle name is Pavlov. Some women are the reason why some women distrust their whole species. No matter how bad a housekeeper she might be, a beautiful woman will get to keep the house. Some women have to point out Halley’s Comet. Behind every great woman — is me, looking at …
Here’s more of my two sons, AKA Unorganized Hancock, playing live at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture last month.
Some inside baseball: It rained like crazy all day that day; wetter than Noah’s shower curtain. We slogged it over to Skowhegan, about an hour and twenty minutes from where we live here in Rumford, Maine. There were a whole bunch of delays, as the closing ceremonies for the school were pushed back a couple of times. We sat in our van for an hour or two, and finally our waterlogged hostess came out and asked us if we wanted to leave and eat dinner, and then come back. She paid the boys in full right then, and whispered, “If you don’t come back, we’ll understand.”
Of course we came back. We dragged all their equipment through the downpours, not a soul in the big barn where they were to perform. Five hours after they left the house, they started playing. The whole crowd came in en masse, and they did the usual double-take when they see the midget behind the drums making all that noise. The video above is after an hour and a half of playing, without a break. They were the nicest, most fun crowd you could ever find.
The Heir carries a lot of weight, but it doesn’t always show. He’s singing and playing a night’s worth of tunes with nothing but his little brother to help him. To play unaccompanied by any other instrument but drums is a tightrope act. If you ever stop playing or singing, there’s basically nothing. He’s already a lot better than I ever was.
We’re careful not to put too much pressure on the Spare Heir. He’s precocious, but it’s not fair to expect any ten-year-old to work like an adult. But he really is a wonder, I think.
[Update: Many thanks to Kathleen M. in Connecticut for her generous support of my sons’ efforts, and this blog. Our world is better because you’re in it]
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