Yeah, me too.
I’ve been seeing more of an old friend lately, hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years even though I’d heard he was back in town. We have a few things in common, similar taste in music (we both have an affection for roots music of various sorts, folk ballads, bluegrass(he actually plays in a fairly successful bluegrass band called Runaway Planet), dead hillbillies of all sorts, that kind of thing), similar taste in pop culture, similar taste in literature apparently. The thing we have most in common though is that we’ve never met anybody’s expectations. I didn’t go to college despite the decent ACT score and scholarship offers, he went to college but unlike most folks of our generation didn’t fall prey to the mercenary approach to a degree and a profession and instead went to Germany to study philosophy. Most of my friends from high school are highly successful and would have been successful in almost any field they chose. There are a disproportionate number of engineers in our little circle of friends, but most of them could just as easily have gotten medical or business degrees and their lives wouldn’t have been much different. Me and old Steve took a different path and that kind of ties us together in some way.
I spent the fourth hanging out with him, mostly just conversing about balancing the creative and commercial aspects of grown up life, but also exchanging opinions about a lot of music and books that nobody else I know even cares about. With Steve it doesn’t take much to go from Segovia to Bobby Thompson to Seldom Scene to the Violent Femmes and from there it’s just a short hop to Knut Hamsen by way of Bukowski. It’s funny how much of that comes from having watched the same reruns and read the same comics in high school. He’s still one of the handful of folks who actually laugh at my jokes. I normally don’t talk too much, most of my conversation is expended on phrases like “is that so?” and “really? I did not know that”. I actually talked myself hoarse that night. To the point that I willingly drank water. Most of the people I can talk about music with are not into the same kind of things that I am, mostly they are younger and get excited about things like Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins that just seem so tame and by the numbers to me that I kind of glaze over and find myself thinking about people like Lou Reed and The Stooges and actually that’s the only point of intersection I seem to share with the twenty-something’s out there. Now if they will only do their homework and pick up some Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan we’ll really have something to talk about. Well, Audie of course knows all when it comes to music (Back when he worked at Barnes and Noble he shocked me one night by not only knowing who the Skillet Lickers were but by knowing that they might be shelved under Gid Tanner instead.) but he’s so much younger than me that we don’t share a lot of common experience as a frame of reference. With Steve it’s not just the fact that we grew up on the same reruns when reruns were actually reruns and not the sole content of a hundred cable channels, I think it’s also that we both knew what it was like to live outside of the main current of American culture from a fairly young age. Maybe it’s just that we’re both a little weird. After all the first thing he noticed the first time he was in my house was that I had ear plugs on the kitchen counter and this struck him as perfectly normal and didn’t require any comment other than, “you too?”
Yeah, me too.
Tags: bluegrass, ear plugs, old friends, Runaway Planet