No Thanks: Doctor My Eyes

Jackson Browne: Doctor My Eyes
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One more quick post on this theme. 

Another crappy thing that happened this year, totally unrelated to the COVID pandemic, was that I had eye surgery, and it hasn’t really gotten better yet. 

In November, 2019, I stopped a very hard soccer shot by a very good player from very close range with my left eye. Being the weekend warrior that I am, I shook it off, because, really, I felt fine. That my contact lens was dislodged, and could not be found on the turf field, didn’t faze me, and I finished the game. 

Months later, as the coronavirus became a thing, I started seeing flashes in my eye, which I ignored. Because sometimes, I can be an idiot, and the world was going crazy. Then, one day, at the end of April, the vision in my left eye was partially obscured. I quickly went to my eye doctor, who, after a brief examination, hustled me off to a retinal specialist, who diagnosed a retinal detachment and started treatment by putting a bubble of gas in my eye. That was followed by lasers to tack down the retina. Unfortunately, I then developed a macular hole, which required surgery, followed by a period where I had to stay face down as much as possible, facilitated by what looked like a massage chair, and a similar headpiece for bed to allow me to "sleep" face down. It sucked. That’s me, right after the surgery. You don’t want to see what’s under the bandage.  So, "No Thanks," eye surgery.

My vision remains imperfect. Not only is it slightly distorted (although it appears to be healing, but verrrrrry slowly), the surgery has caused or accelerated the development of a cataract in the eye, making my vision blurry. Despite some souped up glasses, things are not back to normal, although I can do pretty much everything except read really small print on the TV screen. I’m even playing soccer again, with goggles, and a “no heading” policy. I’m back to the retinal doctor on Friday for another report, and some guidance as to when I might be able to arrange to have the cataract removed, to bring me closer to my pre-damage vision. 

I know that Kkafa wrote about this song in February, 2019, but it seemed like the right one. It’s a good song—probably the first Jackson Browne song I heard (I think back in my sleep away camp radio days), and still probably my favorite. It isn’t about eye surgery, but instead about a man who has suffered, but comes to accept his fate. So, maybe it works for my situation, anyway. It also features David Crosby and Graham Nash on harmony. 

One positive thing was that because of COVID, most doctors and hospitals only took emergency cases, and I qualified, so I probably got treated a little faster than I might have had there been no pandemic. And I got a COVID test—which was negative, not that that means anything now.

What?!: What Are Their Names

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Wikipedia tells us that Crosby's 1971 first solo album <If Only I Could Remember My Name> was selected for the Vatican's top pop 10 albums of all time list. What? David Crosby? The Vatican?
Said Crosby: It baffles me as much as it baffles you, man.

If Only I Could Remember My Name came on the heels of Deja Vu and was Crosby's solo album that coincided with the solo albums from each of the rest of CSNY.

The album seems rather raw to me. Others have labeled it as experimental. That is certainly true of this piece: the lyrics don't even kick in until the song is more or less finished, and up until that point, we listen to what I would call a rather wandering guitar. Very much <a la Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead>. No surprise then to learn that Garcia helped to arrange and produce the album.

A news article in a recent Guardian noted that 1 percent of Brits own virtually all the land in the country. Although Crosby was probably more focused on the US, this song rifs on that theme.
What are their names? What do they care about you? About the state of the world beyond their wealth?  What does their "charity" mean for the future of the planet (like rebuilding Notre Dame)?

The entire lyrics aren't long and the "choir" singing it includes most of the Airplane, the Dead, Joni Mitchell and CSNY

I wonder who they are
The men who really run this land
And I wonder why they run it
With such a thoughtless hand
What are their names
And on what streets do they live
I'd like to ride right over
This afternoon and give
Them a piece of my mind
About peace for mankind
Peace is not an awful lot to ask

Re/Again: Deja Vu

Crosby Stills Nash & Young: Deja Vu

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David Crosby and Graham Nash: Deja Vu

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Our instructions for this theme indicate that they are intentionally vague, so I thought I would make them vaguer. Yes, one can post songs with the word “again” in the title, but here are two more approaches. My hope is that this will encourage everyone to post to this theme. And then do it again. And then do it again. I will try to do the same.

Déjà vu fits our theme, because it is the unsettling sense that you are again somewhere, or in some situation, that you have experienced before. Crosby Stills Nash & Young powerfully evoked the unsettling part of that feeling with their use of time signatures in the song Déjà Vu. The song begins in 12/8, and then switches to 4/4. The 4/4 seems oddly familiar because 12/8 is just 4/4 with triplets, but the transition is just as jarring as it should be. The lyrics are simple enough, serving simply to define the term for those who might not know it. The point of the song is the playing and singing, and that works perfectly.

Another way to work with our theme is to explore what happens when an artist or band revisits, and drastically remakes, one of their own songs. I’m not talking about a cover, because this is an artist reexamining their own work. A cover is when one artists explores the work of another, and that seems to me to be too broad for this theme. The album Déjà Vu, from which the first version of the song comes, is rightly regarded as a folk-rock classic. But David Crosby and Graham Nash brought more to the band than the folk rock label covers. The song shows great potential for a jam band treatment, and that is indeed how CSNY approached it live. But Crosby and Nash on their own took it further. The jam band element is certainly their, but so is a keen ear for the fusion jazz that was just emerging in 1976 when this live version was recorded. Their band included many California folk-rock stalwarts, who must either have relished this opportunity to show another side of their playing, or been stretched to the limits of their musical abilities. Either way, this expansion of the original song really works.

The Age of Aquarius: Almost Cut My Hair

Crosby, Stills, and Nash: Almost Cut My Hair

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Yes, that's me up there, in 2002: prep school teacher, daddy, and long haired hippie freak. Though I've never identified as terribly liberal or hippie-ish, I managed to avoid cutting my hair from the middle of high school; by the time I turned thirty, I could sit on it. The stories that this brought about are numerous, and include multiple old ladies stroking my head without asking first, a long-standing reputation as one of the "cool teachers" on the faculty, and a long tense standoff with the well-intentioned folks at the Amsterdam airport, who seemed convinced that anyone who looked like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers was surely trying to smuggle hash back into the United States.

I swear, I only cut it because the changing table was higher than my hair hung down. That, and the sheer weight was starting to cause serious back and neck problems.

David Crosby's freak anthem, written and recorded in the midst of some pretty heavy drug use, has been recorded several times by Crosby and company, but I've always liked the long-form take above, recorded in 1970 but not released until 1991. It was played multiple times to welcome me to parties, in my long and misbegotten youth.

In my defense, I liked having long hair. The way it functioned as a bullshit detector for people carrying the weight of stereotype, and the way it lowered expectations from the universe, leaving room to impress, were a shield against the world as I learned to become a late-blooming adult. Unfortunately, I have no such excuse for the hemp necklace, nor the patchouli vial which hangs suspended from it, which you can see in the picture above.

Cars: Drive My Car

David Crosby: Drive My Car

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It was one of those nights when you drive
Right by your own street
And you wonder who's running
Your hands and your feet

And your car becomes a capsule
Sometimes you can hide
Last night I just needed
I needed to ride

Sometimes, when the world starts to feel like something that happens to you, and you feel like you've lost all power over your own destiny, a car is the perfect haven: an island of control, and a bubble of peace amidst the chaos. Recorded several times over three decades, both by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and by songwriter David Crosby as a solo artist, Drive My Car is a perfect fit for Crosby's infamously turbulent lifestyle, and a perfect showcase for Crosby's sentimental, anthemic folk rock at its electric best, with and without Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young; this nominally solo outtake, released on CSNY B-sides collection Carry On, is my favorite version.

Little Black Book: Guinnevere

David Crosby: Guinnevere

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Once upon a time, the recording was the recording; the very concept of demo versions would have made little sense in a world in which the point of record-making was that it captured the live performance event. These days, of course, performance is repetitive and constant, and some days it seems like every scrap of material is recorded. The end result is a blessing and a curse, part and parcel of the very newness which confounds labels and pits artists and fans against the very recording industry that is supposed to align and represent those parties and more, and going into why and wherefore would take a good couple of hours we just don't have.

But just because something has been recorded doesn't mean it has value. As I discussed in a post about B-sides and rarities over at Cover Lay Down yesterday, many non-album tracks truly belong in the vaults and dusty hallways where they are ultimately unearthed. Demos, especially, often suffer from poor recording quality, not to mention as-yet-unperfected songwriting; though there are plenty of collectors who drool to hear even the muddiest scrap of Nick Drake or Beach Boys outtake, there's a reason why this, after all, was not the version the artists and engineers chose to press into wax for all eternity.

Which makes David Crosby's predominantly solo version of Guinnevere, originally recorded in-studio a year before the release of the full-bore Crosby, Stills, and Nash version, a tripartite anomaly: a demo recording, released by the artists themselves, which is both crystal clear (thanks to some decades-later remixing and a surprisingly crisp source tape) and hauntingly beautiful. It may not have the full-bore CSN harmonies we know from the "original" version, and it seems to have traded the slow build-to-rock we're used to hearing for an acoustic envelope of singer-songwriter sound. And maybe it's my bias as a folkfan. But in my mind, this is the keeper.