There used to be records called “45’s,” young people, that you popped onto what was called a “turntable” inside the listening booth at Brown’s Music in San Luis Obispo. Since my big brother, Bruce, had four years and a driver’s license on me, he would bring 45’s home and play them in the back bedroom–the back back back bedroom—of our house in rural Arroyo Grande.

I was into, even then, in sixth or seventh grade at Branch School, the Beach Boys and then the Beatles. Not Bruce. He didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. Bruce was into The Rolling Stones. If I could think of a classic film comparison, the Stones would be Humphrey Bogart, with his .45, as Duke Mantee in The Painted Desert, dropping into the middle of jubilant singing Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.

The Stones, you must understand, were hard-edged,, a bit scruffy—they’d rejected the matching Edwardian suits that the Beatles and all their imitators favored—and they were, in 1965 terms, salacious: “Let’s Spend the Night Together” did NOT imply reading the Book of Proverbs aloud with your girlfriend with a plate of ginger snaps and some steaming hot chocolate.

Nossirreebob.

So imagine our Extremely Beautiful Dear Sainted Irish Catholic Auburn-Haired mother finding this 45 record cover sleeve (not “album” sleeve. With a 45, you got a song. With the bonus “B” side, you got one more song. That was it). in Bruce’s bedroom. This was for the song “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?”

We would get used to this kind of thing with Monty Python, but we weren’t there yet, not on Huasna Road. (I am pleased that two of the lads are in uniform, one, Bill Wyman, as a World War II U.S. Army WAC, a top sergeant, and Brian Jones, very blonde, as a female RAF member.) That wouldn’t have impressed Mom.

I can almost hear a little shriek from the back back back bedroom punctuating the bucolic quiet of our three acres near the Harris Bridge.

Oh, here’s the song, reflective, as the Stones often were, of the way postwar middle-class life could suffocate young people. This is, quote, “The Official Music Video.”

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Another shriek must’ve escaped my mother when she found this full-length poster on Bruce’s bedroom door.

Yes, that’s Janis Joplin. And her left nipple. It took me a few more years, thanks to my friend David Cherry, to discover Janis and this album, which remains one of my all-time favorites.

It would be many more years after that when I first saw her perform Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain,” filmed at Monterey Pops. This video still flattens me, in the best way. The performance amazed Mama Cass, too—you can see her in the audience.

Luckily for our Mom, this was the next poster Bruce put up. Considerably more wholesome, I think.

By then, I was beginning to catch up to Bruce. Maybe his hard edges were softening. Maybe my tastes were maturing. By my early teens, I loved any music—the Byrds, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Buffalo Springfield, Judy Collins—that came from Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. The other half of my palette was British Blues, thanks to my friend Paul Hibbard—Cream, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds. And, thanks to my Dad’s 1965 Chrysler car radio, which picked up Wolfman Jack and XERB, all things Motown.

But that poster—and that young woman, another drifter in Laurel Canyon—is where Bruce and I found rich common ground. I’ve written a lot about LInda Ronstadt—along with Aretha Franklin, the greatest voice of our generation, Bruce’s and mine. But this seemingly innocuous little pop song, written by the Monkees’ MIchael Nesmith, made my big brother and I fall in love with the same woman.

Sadly, there is not one damned decent video I can find of Ronstadt performing the song, “Different Drum,” from 1967. But I did find this touching cover:

And I wouldn’t want you La Ronstadt fans out there to go away mad, so I do have this performance. Her range was amazing, and the last note might just be as close to Heaven as the Good Lord will ever permit me.

But that’s not the big news. Nope. And I know I will lose some of you here, but you can go listen to your Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Bruce texted Elizabeth, my wife, yesterday morning: “Have you heard Taylor Swift’s new album yet?”

She had not. Neither have I.

Maybe I should’ve read the tea leaves. Ronstadt indicates that, even by 1967, my Stonesy big brother was already edging into what we would eventually call “country rock.” And now, at 75, he’s gone plumb over the edge.

My big brother is a Swiftie.

Damn!

I am not in the league of one of my all-time favorite AGHS students, Robert Kobara, who is a confirmed, devoted, memorize-the-lyrics kind of Taylor Swift fan, but I am pretty darned close, and I’d love Robert even if he were a devotee of polka music.

Bu there are, in great part hanks to Robert, are at least forty Swift songs on my mp3 player (along with Of Monsters and Men, The Chicks, Imagine Dragons, Bikini Kill, Lykke Lei and oldies like The Velvet Underground and Quicksilver Messenger Serice and The Supremes).

Swift wins, on sheer volume and disk space.

The girl writes a mean hook, her arrangements are stunning, her backup musicians are sublime. Yeah, I could probably do without the Stadium Exploding Special Effects

Stadium Exploding Special Effects are okay for this song, my favorite Fleetwood Mac songs, and that’s a mighty tasty Keith Urban guitar solo. His wife, Nicole Kidman—sigh!—is in the audience.

Also rocking out, for a brief instant, is bigolly Taylor Swift, about 35 seconds into the video posted below.

She had another moment, a little longer, when she was captured on video in the audience at the Grammy Awards. She was swaying along to Tracey Chapman and Luke Combs in their incandescent performance of “Fast Car.” Swift was singing along, standing, eyes closed, enraptured. It was a touching moment of respect. She had recorded this song, and it was fine. It was not in Tracey Chapman’s league, and I think Swift understood that.

But. by the way, here’s Urban, being mighty fine but with far too many explosives, a development that bothers me about Swift.

Urban’s guitar solo is terrific, but you wonder how much dry ice had to die for this performance and whether the lighting bursts provoked seizures in the audience that lasted for months afterward.

I need to check with Bruce, but I don’t need the stadium explosives to love Swift. Maybe he yearns, as I do, for more intimate days, like this performance on The Letterman Show. This is one of earliest songs, and it’s still simple. That’s what attracts me about it.

I’d guess you could say she’s “working” the audience in this video. Then she kisses the little girl, so I don’t think that’s the case, not at all. I am not saying I’d want to be one of her ex-boyfriends, but you get the sense that she loves touching people. Then this morning I found one of those fluffy news articles about “Celebrities Who Are Either a Dream or Nightmare to Meet.”

She was a “Dream.” Despite the possibility that she’s gotten far too big for us—the music equivalent of WalMart, the biggest conglomerate on this here planet Earth—she is genuinely kind.

I don’t get it, either, Maybe my big bro and I can figure this girl out together. Maybe we’ll find out we were right about her all along.

Just one more. Red remains my favorite album, and this is one of my favorite songs, and not at all like the version on my mp3 player. From the BBC, without pyrotechnics. Delicious.

Apologies to Eric Clapton

When we took our high school students to Ireland many years ago, we of course visited the General Post Office, the GPO, the headquarters and last stand of the Easter Rising in 1916. And, yes, you can still the gouges and chips left by British Lee-Enfield rifles (the same weapon that killed American civil rights leader James Meredith) in the columns and the face of the graceful Neoclassic building on O’Connell Street. That attempt to free Ireland from British rule was a disaster: poorly conceived, poorly equipped, a grand vision of noble Romantics. When they surrendered, they were vilified by Dubliners as they were led off to gaol.


This clip, from MIchaell Collins, captures the end of the Rising (Alan Rickman is Eamon de Valeara, the future president of the Irish Republic.)

The Rising didn’t work. It was the executions that did. Sixteen rebel leaders were shot (one hanged) at Kilmainham Gaol. One of the rebels, James Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the assault on the GPO that he had to be propped up in a chair for his firing squad. Another, Joseph Plunkett, was given the brief mercy of marriage to his sweetheart, Grace Gifford, on May 3, 1916. The couple were allowed ten minutes together. Plunkett was shot the next morning..

Grace kept his eyeglasses, and they are now on exhibit at the Kilmainham museum. She was later a prisoner there, where she painted the image of Our Lady on one wall of her cell.

The British made a mistake in executing the sixteen men. The prisoners whom Dubliners had hissed in April had become martrys by May.

We had an uncommonly wise bus driver on that student tour to Ireland. “JIm,” he said to me, “the winners write the history. The losers write the music.”

And so that is what the Irish did.

This song, with Sinead O’Connor and the Chieftains, memorializes The Rising. (The Middle Eastern place–names refer to distant battlefields where irish soldiers were giving their lives for the British Empire; the “LIffey” is the river that bisects Dublin and connects to the Irish Sea.)

It’s the same old theme/Since 1916 …

As Faulkner famously—and accurately—proclaimed—“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” That snatch of lyric above comes from eighty years after the Rising, in a song that led to one the most extraordinary music videos ever made. From Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries:

So history has a habit, life the cottony contrails of an overhead jet, of leaving a trail behind it. The problem with Irish history—or, in my experience, wtith Mexican history or Civil War history—is that the vapor trails far above us, unlike those of airliners, never quite go away.


And this is “Zombie,” as performed by Australians. Some of them have Maori ancestry, some had parents from Singapore or Indonesia, and maybe some are descended from the Irish banished to Australia when it was a penal colony. The losers write the music, Ken said. There’s not a loser in this video. For a few minutes, they are, instead, Irish. Every last one of them.

Sandy Mershon is a friend Elizabeth and I love. And she just had the audacity to post THIS song on Facebook.

So hearing this song again led me to several more meditations, none of them invited. Mind you, the Seventies was when I was wearing embroidered cowboy pearl-button shirts, listening to the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. And then something like this would come on the radio:

And I was reduced to Silly Putty. Or maybe a Slinky going down a long, long staircase.

This one might come on the radio, too. I loved the singing, so smoooooth, and maybe I loved the costumes just as much—you will notice that winged shoulders were in vogue.

It didn’t take very long for Funk to kind of meld with Disco, which, among my people back then, was about as popular as Pneumonic Plague. I’d graduated to Fleetwood Mac. But, every once in awhile, I’d kind hop up and down in my car seat when this came on the radio.

This song is sublime.

And then there was that whole “Toot toot! Beep beep!” thang.

We’re talkin’ mid- to late-1970s here. But my whole thang began when I was nineteen, a student at Bakersfield College, and so deeply depressed–I’d just moved from Arroyo Grande, okay? I was on my way home from school and four kids needed a ride. Three girls, one boy. All Black. For whatever reason—I’d prefer to credit the Lord God Himself—I pulled over my little yellow Mustang and beckoned them to hop in.

The girls were packed, uncomfortably, in the back. The guy sat next to me, looked through my eight-track tapes, uttered a little yelp, and put this song in. It was performed at Woodstock in 1969.

We all danced, all five of us, as much as the confines of a 1965 Mustang would permit, all the way home, until I dropped them off.

I won’t say that I have loved Black people ever since that day, because that would be a generality just as pernicious as any hateful racist generality can be. But I will say this: That ride home made me love being an American.

Many years later, for John’s birthday, we went to a Niners game during a woeful season. We had seats in the end zone at Candlestick, facing the sun, and so resembled lobsters by the fourth quarter. But when Our Guys kicked a field goal with no time remaining and won–one of their two victories that year–I jumped up and yelled. So did the Black woman next to me. We turned to each other without hesitation and hugged. And then we jumped up and down, still hugging.

That ride. That hug. Those are the kind of moments the Good Lord intended for me, from the moment He knit me in my mother’s womb.

How I concluded a lesson on the Risorgimento–the unification and creation of modern Italy. I do love that place.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hhaS_FHHmCIr7cuG_UYvEVj6csP8QEJ5/view?usp=drive_link

Bryson DeChambeau is leading the Masters with a first-round 65. About him I do not give a damn. He’s built like a middle linebacker and hits the ball just that violently. His swing, looks like he’s splitting rails inside a porta-potty.

But that’s not the problem.

The problem is That De Chambeau plays on the LIV Tour, sponsored by, among others, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is prone to having his political opponents whacked and who believes, bless his heart, in the moral instruction conferred by public beheadings.

So I’m rooting for the guy in second place, Scottie Scheffler. I might even root for the ghost of Gene Sarazen. This guy:

In 1935, Sarazen, was very unlike Bryson DeChambeau. Sarazen’s legs, in his plus-fours, looked like toothpicks. He was playing in his first Masters. His partner was Walter Hagen, the suave party boy who urged Sarazen, as they marched down the 15th fairway, to hurry up for his second shot. Hagen had dinner to get to. There would be Martinis and honey-baked ham and smoked oysters. That was where he was headed, maybe in a yellow Stutz-Bearcat convertible.

Sarazen was diplomatically ignoring Hagen. He instead haggled with his caddie, invariably, back then, a Black man. The caddy, in the convention of the time, referred to Sarazen as “Mr. Gene.” They were debating which club to use. Sarazen thought he’d need a brassie, a 2-wood, a club that is today obsolete.

The holes at Augusta have nicknames. The fifteenth is called “Firethorn.” Sarazen’s caddy had a nickname, too, in the days when Black Americans were meant to be invisible. They called him Stovepipe.

No, Mr. Gene, Stovepipe must’ve said. A brassie is too much club, sir.

As Hagen lit another cigarette, Sarazen took his caddie’s advice. Stovepipe handed him a spoon–the modern equivalent of a 4-wood–and then Sarazen hit his shot. It must’ve felt good, but Sarazen didn’t know how good it was until he approached the 15th green and saw the crowd–that would be about twenty-five people, back in 1935–jumping up and down. Then he heard them hollering.

He didn’t know just yet why they were hollering, but among the golfers who did know, because they saw Sarazen hit the fairway wood, were Bobby Jones—the closest, outside Hobie Baker and Brad Pitt, that we Americans have ever come to blonde Adonis–Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan.

The spoon traveled 215 yards in the air, rolled another twenty, and dropped into the cup.

That’s a replica of the club Sarazen hit, thanks to Stovepipe. The ball is the original.

That did not win the comparatively elderly Masters rookie–Sarazen was 33–the tournament. It took him another day and 36 holes to break the tie with Craig Wood, who’d been three shots ahead going into the 15^th hole.

But the newspapers had already labeled Sarazen’s spoon at the 15th “the shot heard ’round the world.”

When I was a little boy, I used to watch Sarazen, as a commentator, on Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, and I was charmed by both his knowledge of the game and the grace of his manners. I am sure the same things could be said about Stovepipe..

Call me old-fashioned. I don’t mind. But I’m not so old-fashioned as to wonder what became of Stovepipe, the man who made this moment possible. I hope to somehow find him someday and find out what his life was like after the 15th hole.

I’m in a kind of spiritual desert right now, so I went to visit the Rev. James Johnson-Hill of the SLO Agape Church in SLO, a church far afield from the structured tradition of the Episcopal Church in which I was raised.

As neglectful as I’ve been toward my faith, and how much I’ve tried to hide it, are hallmarks of my life. But in every minute of my teaching, I was also artfully and subversively, preaching, the message that we are all brothers and sisters, even with the dead, and that the membrane–Walt Whitman’s word choice–that connects us is love. This is the message my mother, a devout almost-but-not-quite Roman Catholic, taught me. Mom and Jesus were always there with me in the classroom.

Maybe missing my kids also means that I am missing the passion I felt in teaching.

So I drove up to San Luis to visit James, the husband of a former Mission student, Anicia Bonds, who is very dear to me.

I just needed another perspective.

Once we’d finished talking, I understood that what I take for a crisis is really an opportunity to come closer to God. Talking to, and learning from this wise and wise man, was an immense gift.

Guess whose gift he really was.

And when we were done talking and praying, Anicia was there and we shared a hug. I needed that, too.

Thank you, Pastor James. Thank you, Mom. I think you were right next to me today.