If you dive into the entire realm of rock 'n' roll, no doubt you are going to find some lyrics that just burn brighter than others, in the darkness. “…barefoot girls dancing in the moonlight…” This, for some reason, is one of those memorable lines from rock and roll that just seems to have stuck in my mind, forever. This one comes from Creedence Clearwater Revival and it’s buried in the song called “Green River”. Although about half the words of this song are a blurry, unintelligible, country drawl, this line seems to stand out, and distill the essence of partying for a good old southern boy like me, in the backwoods of Tallahassee. As often as we could, we use to cruise a few miles outside of town and head to one of our favorite sinkholes. These were “lakes” that were maybe fifty to a hundred feet across with steep banks surrounded by pine trees. There were no beaches, and often as not, the only way to enter the freezing cold, spring fed, water was to drop from a rope swing. Then, of course, you had to climb back out over roots and rocks, keeping an eye out for snakes and alligators, and then do it again. These places had names like Big Dismal and Blue Sink, and you only went swimming on a hot, summer day. But on a warm, summer night it was just a great place to congregate with a bunch of friends and drink beer and listen to rock and roll.
There was somewhat of a quantum leap in “popular music” in the mid-sixties. I, myself, was quite involved with the Beatles, the Beach Boys and stuff like that. The Buckinghams, the Grassroots, Jan & Dean, the Young Rascals; these were just some of the groups we were happily grooving to. This was what was happening in the sixties…until “The Doors”. I can remembering buying this album and for some reason, when I took it home, to listen to it for the first time, I turned off all the lights in the living room and lay quietly on the floor with my eyes closed. I instinctively knew that this was how you should listen to this music. And it was an incredible plunge into the subconscious, into the soul. “The Chrystal Ship is being filled…” Within the first few moments, the listener was being drawn into a whole new world of what was really going on beneath the surface. I truly felt an affinity with Jim Morrison. As Jimi Hendrix so eloquently put it: “…and you’ll never hear surf music again…”
There are other lines in the pantheon of rock poetry that also have a special place in my brain. Perhaps, the most profound one came from Cream. One of their songs, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”, in one fell stroke, brought surrealism to this impressionable teenage boy, living in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, circa 1967. This song, and much of Cream’s music, was the equivalence of a Salvador Dali landscape that you could crank up to eleven. And, in the midst of it all, one line seemed to plunge this boy into pubescence: “…and when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body…carving deeper ripples in the tissues of your mind…” Music was never the same after that.
John Lennon, of course, had many passages that really stood out. Among those is “ I think I know, I mean.. oh yes… but it's all wrong. That is I think I disagree”. I don't think anyone has ever put into words, any better than that, the indecisions and insecurities that we all feel. None of us really know what we are doing.
Less than a decade later, Roger Water’s infamous line near the end of his epic masterpiece, Sheep, stood out, to me as one of the most moving words in all of rock music. He sings, in sinister sardonic baritone: “Bleating and babbling, we fell on his neck with a scream. Wave upon wave of demented avengers rushed cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream…” A beautiful way of putting the passionate angst of revolution, that we all wish we could muster, to throw off the yoke of industrial oppression, to make the world a better place.
I know another artist that too many of you probably aren't aware of. Randall Bramblett has a volume of songs that just seem cut to the heart of the situation. They just seem to speak to me, in a way I can’t explain. Mostly, they describe the life of downtrodden people, living on the edge, and the murky, quirky way they have learned to make it through this life. Many songs deal with these kind of rascals: “…worn out mini-tire, beat up van, faded phone number on the back of my hand… I ran out of ideas long time ago, driving on the shoulder with my muffler hanging low, head gasket busted, all I can see is steam, that's OK it's all just a dream… Hanging by a thread, mumblin’ a prayer, my mojo’s busted and I don’t have a spare. I might be a fool, but at least I’m free. That’s why they love me; I got no Plan B.”
I suppose all of these words are just a different way to express Shakespeare’s famous quote about the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. It’s all about what life gives us and how we react to it. I tend to notice singular moments in music when the words, the lyrics, just hit a unique note in our hearts, that seems to change everything. It can be just one word in a phrase, where the world just pivots on a new axis. In “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” it was “picture yourself on a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies…” With Jimmy Buffett, in the classic of all classics, Margaritaville, the words were “… blew out my flip-flop, stepped on a pop-top…” From that moment on, he had me and he had you. He was just one of us, clumsy and carefree, and we were invited into his wonderful view of the world. The Bard of Mobile explained it all in just one word. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune might be just be a misplaced piece of aluminum litter. And there is always a concoction to deal with it. Then he proceeded to paint the entire picture, in song after song, about a carefree life, on a boat, on a beach, in a banana tree… And man, what a ride it was!
If Hampton were here, he would not have stopped at just admiring these words. He would have done something about it. He would have put two and two together and forged a five. He would have made a memorial to these words that Jimmy gave us; these words that have guided us and compelled us to embrace these dreams of ours. In the case of Jimmy Buffett, this is just what he did. I was there when we heard about Jimmy passing away. We were all so saddened that the grinning son of a son of a sailor would no longer be plundering the seas in search of fun. Hampton wouldn’t let his sorrows dwell too long. He got the guys together, one more time. We gathered the coolers of iced down beer, and drove on down to that old make-shift workshop/storage unit of ours. This was our clubhouse, on rainy days. On that morning, late August, it was hot as hades in there. We were sweating and swearing, pulling pieces of metal around, firing up the welding tools, swigging on cold Coronas, and taking a much needed toke of the wacky tobacky, every now and then. Whatever concoction worked. We felt like we were doing what Jimmy would have wanted. Doing something silly, perhaps something monumentally stupid, but brilliant at the same time. It took several hours, and the work lasted well into the night before all of were just too wasted to weld any more.
Rallying way too early the next morning, was the hardest part. It was a comical thing to see a handful of somewhat hungover beach bums, struggling to get the structure lifted onto the trailer, then towing the trailer to the beach, using Wilbur’s beat up brown van, then transferring the structure to a makeshift barge to be towed out into the Gulf behind Richard’s Boston Whaler. The structure wasn’t really that heavy, just awkward as can be, towering twenty five feet or more. It took all of the cinch straps we could muster to keep it in place. And it took all of our stealth to keep this operation as secret as possible. We were out at the beach near Grayton, way before the sunrise, and we were cruising out to the location, just as dawn’s early light peaked through the clouds to the east. Wild Bill had the coordinates of where the Museum of Underwater Art was supposed to be situated, far below the surface, and with solemn respect, and a few hoots and hollers, we raised our bottles of beer in one last grand salute to Jimmy Buffet, and dropped the structure into the sea.
As it sank, weighted heavily on its base, so that it would embed itself firmly into the ocean bed, it was transformed, from a gangly structure of pounded steel and scruffy haphazard welding, into a sculpture of pure form, and, dare I say it, majesty. We all just sat there solemnly, bobbing on the ocean, as the bubbles slowly subsided, imagining what it looked like, in its resting place. And, as the familiar sun rose steadily, we cruised on back home…
It wasn’t until several days later, when some random, curious, scuba divers were exploring the Museum of Underwater Art, that they discovered our newest addition: a twenty five foot tall, gleaming, stainless steel, pop-top, sticking out of the sand, on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and, right beside it, was the lost shaker of salt.
