I remain interested in “the days” of my childhood, but only because that one girl looked me up on AOL in the early 1990s, when we had fast modems at 28kb baud, and dial-up was a thing.
As I never vowed to do, I became nostalgic. For both joy and pain, I revisited my past. I found (or was found out by) three early loves. It’s all boring old school stuff, like actual phone calls and meeting in person, but it sparked something else in me.
Who am I, or rather, what shaped my personality beyond Mom and Dad?
I came across music, knowing that Mother spun “500 Miles” by Peter, Paul & Mary when me and my little brother were tykes in Lakewood, Calif. Dad had me hooked on Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. My older siblings had me listening to pop songs in the mid-60s, which were sort of still trying to escape the 1950s, except for the British Invasion.
The reason I mentioned old girlfriends is because my first real love looked me up back when the www was getting up, so we’re talking almost 20 years later. One morning we ask why we ever broke up. (She asked first). And the answer was stupid, but true. The answer was that we were in our 20s, and she said: “Yes, what the hell did we know?” She was always too sweet for me.
And from by last romance with my first love, we moved on, and me suddenly interested in What Things Have Passed. It slowly came upon me that there was a girl, a blues girl, a rock ‘n’ roll girl, one I never knew.
The War.
For us younger kids of the Vietnam War, we heard it through arguments and TV while we ate every last pea on the plate. We didn’t usually say shit, but a girl sang. And a boy sang. But they were not girls and boys; they were adults. Mary Travers of PP&M was old enough to be my mother; Bob Dylan almost my father’s age.
When I look back, I think:
“These old rockers and blues people weren’t just singing for themselves, they were singing for all young people.”
All I knew at the time was the music was beautiful. So I say, if you are young, don’t think just because that stuff from the ‘60s or ‘70s was for the oldsters. They were old already when I was young. Enjoy this and these in the revolution.
So I’ve talked like an old man. This song was what my Mother played in the 1960s, a song that came to Hedy West via her grandmother from the 1800s in the Carolinas, so goes the tale (or other tales place it elsewhere … such is the thing). In the early 1960s, a folk group did this rendition:
The above is not actually an anti-war song. Lord, I can’t go home this a-away.
But to snap you out of the sentiment, Dave Van Ronk will cure you of any heroism:
Too harsh, huh?
Well, there’s always what happens to those who go snow blind from war, or not war, from someone you knew. My older brother went this way. Only later did this song tell me he was another one of us.
I hope to God Almighty you young ones will never have your musicians ever have to write such as this.
I hope to God the Gen who followed me doesn’t have to mix up our shit, for you.
Peace out. Vote. So we don’t have to sing this song. Because it was old the last time we played before the Iraq ClusterFuck.