My Future

Right now, my future is a freaking open book. I could do pretty much whatever I want from here on in. It's a weird feeling. Not as liberating as I'd like. Not annoying. I feel like I'm swimming in gravy.

People peg me as being really competitive. Which is true. But in the grandest scheme of things, I prefer doing things that are purely expressive that don't get judged. Conversation. Playing music. That's where I have my fun.

I've been thinking about the other John Stewart a lot recently. What a great, brave body of work he has. Aside from "Daydream Believer", which is a fine song. But "Mother Country", "Lost Her In the Sun", "Kansas Rain" and "Armstrong" are fantastic songs.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I started paying a lot more attention to music. I grew up in the Central Valley of California, the area known as the San Joaquin Valley, Stanislaus County, between the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus Rivers which, during the Spring were large and powerful rivers.

The area, the city of Modesto - my birthplace - was about 60,000 people at that point. Too large to be quaint, too small to be thriving.

I spent a lot of time listening to KNBR 68 from San Francisco, which at that time was an AM station that played music. Soft rock, much of it popular and much of it [I didn't know this at the time, how could I!] obscure.

So I grew up listening to the aforementioned "Mother County" by John Stewart, the John Prine-penned "Hello In There" as performed by Bette Midler, Neil Young's "After The Goldrush" performed a capella by the English folk group Prelude, Pink Floyd's producer singing his novelty hit "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?", and many other songs that were - to the mass record buying public - obscure to say the least.

So when my family moved to Southern California in 1976, I was shocked to hear what other teenagers liked to listen to. I had no idea that groups like Kiss, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin were popular. If they weren't on Kasey Casem's American Top 40 or on KNBR, I was pretty much ignorent of them.