Rock n’ Roll
Between Rock and Old
Word Count 581
When I was younger, I had a wicked tendency to take things terribly seriously. Especially myself and my choice of rock n’ roll singer as a profession. I was born late into the era of the ‘Rock Star’, a mythical, half-mad creature, replete with flowing locks, bulging cock, and an attitude far south of gratitude.
I had such grandiose plans of dominating the world’s stages, rubbing shoulders with these Minotaurs whilst belting out my latest chart-topping single - that I neglected to address the rather glaring elephant of my femaleness that permeated any room I entered.
It’s All Right Now
Word Count 259
I used to be fond of saying I could get pregnant in an empty room if the radio was tuned to a rock station and something good was playing-- The Stones doing “Sweet Virginia” or Leon Russell’s rendition of “Jumpin’Jack Flash,” or any one of hundreds of other songs. I’m an old woman now with an old woman’s worries—four children, twelve grandchildren, one great-grandchild—there’s always someone with troubles. I love being old, life is so much simpler, but age doesn’t free you from worry--young lives headed into an uncertain future on a planet getting ready to shake us off.
What’s Your Name, Little Girl?
Word Count 450
The spring of 1987, my mother came to New York from Memphis, Tennessee to watch me graduate from college. We wanted to do something festive and “New York-y” , so we went to a jazz club in the Village to hear the singer B.B. King. I was standing at the back of the room, (my mom must have been in the bathroom) when the singer himself appeared at my side. King was jaunty but, at 62, ancient to my 19 year old eyes. We chatted. I told him my name, how I’d grown up in Memphis, how I was about to graduate. I took my seat with my mother and told her I had just met B.B. King!
Lollipop Epiphany
Word Count 625
Jennifer took the second-to-last lollipop in the bag, the root beer one, leaving me the green one. Lime was her least favorite flavor. Mine too. I stuck it in my mouth anyway, pretended to flick open a lighter, and held that invisible flame to the end of my lollipop stick. Jennifer did the same, exhaling around the side just like teenagers did with real cigarettes.
Like all the other fifth-grade girls we knew, she and I exaggerated. When we walked, we went on for “miles.” When we were thirsty, we drank “gallons.” So of course, she said her older sister Mary Beth would “die” if she found out that we were listening to her records. Happy to be playing in Jennifer’s basement; dying was the last thing on my mind.
The Radio Raised Me
Word Count 1223
Bob Dylan ruined me. Not in any #metoo or relationship-heartbreak way. But he and his ilk—male musicians, especially from the freewheelin’ hard rock 1970s--I’m looking at YOU, Skynyrd!—warped my romantic sensibilities.
“Tangled Up in Blue” came out in 1975. I was 12. I don’t necessarily remember the song from then. I didn’t find Dylan attractive. (Or a “babe” in my pre-teen SoCal parlance) But at some point, the lyrical storyline—about a woeful parting on a dark night, a chance meeting years later, the pair having become an oh-so-glamourous drifter working on a fishing boat and a stripper gyrating under a spotlight—became the height of tragic romance for me. To mix song metaphors, I wanted to lay across a big brass bed and have a version of Dylan who looked like Shaun Cassidy read me words “written by an Italian poet from the 13th century.
The King and I
Word Count 940
Elvis Presley was not my kind of guy. I thought he was over-blessed with testosterone and good looks and did not appear to have a brain in his head. I thought he was laughing at all those naïve girls swooning over him. Never mind that I had done my own swooning over Robert Mitchum a few years earlier. Still, you could hardly be a teen-ager in the late fifties and not be familiar with “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” or “Shake, Rattle and Roll. “ To this day, hearing “Blue Christmas” stirs a little spark in my heart. Maybe I was not as impervious to the Elvis charm as I thought. In any case, he was an icon. You could not be unaware of him.
I Saw Him Standing There
Word Count 636
My friend Lori and I were trekking home through Washington Square from our jobs as drug abuse counselors in the roughest schools in East New York, Brooklyn -- when I saw him standing there. He was near the fountain, and of course, my heart went boom. It was 1973, and his hat gave him away: a black Beatles’ cap that had become their trademark. I was 20; he was 33.
We were the only ones who noticed; he blended into the guitar strummers and pot dealers, an amalgam of faded bell bottoms and tie-dye shirts. We inched closer, as star-struck as when we were teenagers screaming to hold their hands. Staring into John Winston Lennon’s round wire-rimmed glasses, I was speechless.
A Fan’s Notes
Word Count 1236
As a baby, I could scream like Janis, “Cry cry baby!,” and hold my breath longer than Bill Withers held that record-breaking note on Lovely Day. As a pre-schooler, I woke up at five every morning, bouncing off the walls. My mother would put me in the basement, lock the door and go back to bed. I‘d sit on the floor with boxes of 45 records and my record player. I had three much older sisters, and my parents were old enough to be my grandparents, so we had quite a music catalog: pop, rock, soul, country, jazz, blues, opera, show tunes, movie soundtracks, Disney, you name it.
The Good Shit
Word Count 944
The night of my 16th birthday party Laurie Pile threw up in an orange and white Chinese porcelain bowl in my parents’ front entrance hall. Henry Childs fell through a window. My father glanced up from the garden shortly before the party began and saw a bedraggled, barefoot troupe of scraggly-haired musicians dragging battered guitar cases across the lawn to the white pavilion we called the Summerhouse to set up. One of the females was visibly pregnant under her Indian bedspread of a dress. Jesus Christ! He must have thought. Because of the “drug problem,” he had hired Nick, an off-duty detective who worked security at the Creek Club. Everyone knew he was a nark in his dark suit, Columbo shoes, and military crew cut.
The Yellow Submarine
Word Count 511
When three friends came to my apartment for dinner on the day John Lennon was shot, all we could talk about were the Beatles.
In the middle of the meal, I got up to show them my treasured Yellow Submarine sitting on the shelf above the fireplace in the living room.
We spent the rest of the evening rolling the toy back and forth across the coffee table, four periscopes turning, as we opened and closed the two red hatches from which John, Paul, George and Ringo popped up and then descended. They loved it.
The following morning, while cleaning up, I realized that my Yellow Submarine was missing.
Joni
Word Count 12547
The word-of-mouth that Joni Anderson Mitchell had earned for herself in New York accompanied her to Los Angeles. She arrived around Christmastime with her new, devoted manager Elliot Roberts and her boyfriend and chief champion, David Crosby. Having as strong-minded and talented a woman as Joni for a girlfriend was new for David, who had dominated his previous girlfriend Christine Hinton (he'd broken up with Christine when he'd fallen in love with Joni, but they would later reunite). All he’d had to do was shout, "Christine! Joint!" and she was rolling and handing him a slender reefer. "Christine was always anxious, always ready to please," remembers Hinton’s then-close friend Salli Sachse, who lived at Peter Tork's artistic collective. "David treated women badly, but then, so many guys did."
By contrast, Joni would never be servile, and, according to Salli, David “respected her as a peer.” She was also emotionally "turbulent" -- David's word -- and so, in those first weeks in L.A., it was often left to Estrella Berosini, who'd moved from Florida to L.A. at the same time, to play the little sister buffer and mediate between the two headstrong singers.
When Does Happiness Arrive?
Word Count 189
With the husband making coffee at the kitchen sink,
his t-shirt still warm with sleep. The cat blinking
from her window perch and the coreopsis
still in bloom behind her. With the neighbor’s bamboo
swaying in autumn light and the single white mushroom
in the front lawn that appears and disappears in a day.
Anything that says I am not inert
matter. I can be jolted awake
by the everydayness of the world.
Some Dance to Remember, Some Dance to Forget
Word Count 3079
Shortly after I left California and moved to Arizona for a few years, I began pining for the Golden State; as I hiked among the saguaros of the outlying terrain of Tucson and elsewhere, I realized that these were not my people. (Yes, I’m referring to the saguaros; while ’tis true that we are all part of the web, plants and people alike, these cacti were outliers among my crew, and I just could not get with the program.) Try as I might, the saguaro was no Joshua tree — the freaky, mighty totem of my life, one of them anyway; it was sending me no messages or information and nor could I find a point of connection. All it did was stand tall and point to the sky — a characteristic that I would later appreciate and take with me on my return to SoCal — but in general, the whole time I was in Arizona, I felt like I was cheating on Joshua trees, and in fact, a good friend told me that I was: evidently, on a hike in their national park, she heard them talking trash about me as soon as I had left.
I’m With The Band
Word Count 835
The sound of my husband's angry voice drew me away from the bathroom mirror, where I was applying my second coat of mascara in preparation for our gig later that night. It was Halloween, and I was about to don my honky-tonk witch attire and was humming happily in anticipation of a frivolous night of Halloween antics.
“What now?” I thought. Weirdly his voice was coming from outside. Through mostly closed windows, Ron’s ringing baritone pierced the neighborhood quiet, as he raged into his cell phone with a string of expletives.
Obscured by our vintage curtains, I lurked by the window with the best view of this one-way melee, mascara wand frozen in my fingers.
Rock Star
Word Count 742
1. At the age of 46, Dolores O’Riordan—lead singer of Irish rock band the Cranberries—died in a hotel bathtub. Her death was declared an accidental drowning after excessive drinking.
2. It’s 2023. I’ve outlived Dolores by six years. I haven’t ugly cried since my mid-forties. I’m experiencing a saltwater deficit.
3. All I’ve ever wanted is to write and publish a book. But wait that’s not completely true. I’d give up that dream if I could be a rock star.
4. During the eight years I was divorced—in the early to late 2000s—I hated sleeping alone. Now, fully ensconced in menopause, I sometimes want an entire queen (not king) bed to myself, I want an entire room, and sometimes … an entire house.
Metallica Made Me a Mother
Word Count 634
When it came time to deliver my baby, I had planned for an absurdly ideal setting: The comforting glow of fake tea lights flickering in the background as Fleetwood Mac streamed from a wireless speaker by my hospital bed. Stevie Nicks would sing about gold dust women and players only loving you when they’re playing as my baby arrived and was handed to me like a gift, wrapped in a soft swaddle blanket and pink-or-blue cap. We’d cuddle for a while before both of us drifted off into a deep, recuperative nap. But as minutes of labor turned to hours turned to days.