CATAGORIES: BEER WINE SPIRITS, GENERAL NONSENSE — Yarbz @ 7:26 pm

POSTED BUT NOT PROOFED… YARBZ

It’s just a few minutes after eight o’clock Friday evening and I am sitting at my bar listening to Joe Jackson’s second release I’m The Man on vinyl. I am slightly buzzed from four beers at Famous Dave’s BBQ which recently opened in business starved New Britain, Connecticut.

It’s really nice hearing Joe Jackson again. This album was one of my anthem albums during my teens and early twenties growing up in the snooty ‘burb of Simsbury Connecticut. I played this album, the exact physical album, when I was 19. Oils from my teenaged fingers must be all over the cover. The sound is clean and crisp and the black pancake plays loud without a defect. The songs come one by one to remind me of my youth and how I truly yearn for those days. Those simple days? Or is it the ignorance of those times?

I worked for beer money and life and existence was not do or die. In reality life was always do or die. It’s just that I didn’t know it then.

Working at the ARCO station filling cars and cleaning windshields was all I had to worry about. If I was hung over, I had youth to overcome it. No stress about making sure I had health insurance entered my mind (although I was covered under my parents insurance while I lived at home but that was Greek to me then). Life was work, party, sleep, work, party, sleep, buy album, work, party, sleep.

This all floods back to me at one-hundred and fifty watts per channel as I listen to old piece of pristine vinyl that I purchased in 1979 when I was 19. It’s a wonder how such things jog more than memories, I get smells, anger and even sensual overtones of times gone by. Of course I remember my friends and my bedroom and my Chevelle as well. I also remember my innocence which was left in the gutter of time decades ago. I miss my youthful innocence and would give much to get that naive view of the world and life back a reasonable perspective of the planet for the rest of my years.

Tonight I get to travel back with my friend Joe. Joe Jackson. He rocks. He does indeed rock and this old vinyl is ass kicking fantastic and a far bit better than the sterile CD’s, DVD’s, iPod’s and mp3’s that the sonically ignorant kids use today. The youth of today will one day look back on the ancient technology of their youth with the same backwards yearning that I feel tonight. For all their pimply arrogant young ignorance induced know-it-all bullshit attitudes, they will, after all is said and done, have not one-millisecond more and any age than we’ve had. They are the ones who have to prove themselves! We are 40. We are 50. We are 60. They are 18,19, 25 and even 30. They have yet to get where we are and that is the hardest part of life!

On occasion I look at today’s kids and think they may in fact have it better than we did. But as time goes by I always realize that they have to deal with the ever growing dangers that we never had to deal with: The threat of anarchy, disease as well as the potent virus known as technology. This virus cannot be held back even with the most potent and aggressive antibiotics. It’s scary…

But tonight I have Joe Jackson and now 250 watts per channel and a few beers. They can deal with it as it comes. For now, I’m dealing with sonic heaven.

[2042hrs]: I just started Joe Jackson’s first album Look Sharp which is even better!