MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

For weeks I’ve been writing about politics here, but today – some personal politics. They say the personal is political, and for me, the personal is music (and political) — and music makes all the difference — through time, sadness, joy, loneliness, political anguish, even spiritual connection. 

I’ve started walking every morning – around two miles.  Part of the reason is that I never get to listen to music anymore, so on my walks, I pretty much let my iPod take me wherever "shuffle" wants to go.  For while we moved from Bruce to Great Big Sea to Juno.   Then things got serious – an anthem really, of a time in my life when I valued awareness, aliveness, presence above all else: along came Me and Bobby McGee.  Kris Kristofferson wrote it but this is one of the few videos I could find of him performing it – Janis Joplin’s version was the famous one.  Still — it was this version, Kristofferson’s, that spoke to me.

A cut-loose road song and a love song too.  "Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose."  I remember my mother railing against this chorus — claiming that freedom was real and important and much more than "nothin’ left to lose" and she was probably right, but then…  Then that road life was one I craved but never had the nerve to undertake and this song was my chance to travel along.  Later, on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner did a monologue as "Bobby McGee" who had moved home, and whose "mom even kept my room for me."  She’d given up.  There I sat on our water bed in our Upper West Side apartment in our married, new baby life, and cried. It was way too familiar.  Made me face the gap between what I had wished and what I was, that gap we all face as we enter "grown up" lives, with kids and responsibilities.

Then, around the time my walk reached Georgia Avenue, I traveled to London’s Grosvenor Square, and Scarlet Begonias.  The Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead song included this description:  "Wind in the willows playin’ tea for two;   The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, Strangers stoppin’ strangers just to shake their hand, Everybody”s playing in the heart of gold band."  It sounds comical now, I suppose, and it was really about Dead concerts, but I remember so many marches where people passed food around, each taking what they needed, and driving on the turnpikes on the way as we gave M&Ms to each tollbooth operator along with our quarters and even, at the first Clinton inauguration, being hugged by some guy I’d never met as I stood alone, close to tears (again) when Bob Dylan came out and surprised everyone.   

<p>The memories cross generations, too.&nbsp; Both of my sons, especially the older one, loved the Dead.&nbsp; He spent the summer after high school following them around the eastern US.&nbsp; When he came to LA to visit, all four of us took a ride in my convertible down funky Topanga Canyon, Dead songs blasting from the radio.&nbsp; It smelled like spring but it was still winter in the east so the whole day was a warm, golden gift, and it’s all tangled up in this song.&nbsp; Parent or peace freak, the music defines, and even unites – at least in my family.</p>

<p>Finally, just blocks from home, shuffle hit the 2004 MoveOn concert (I’d been there with son #1) version of  People Have the Power– Bruce, John Mellencamp, John Fogerty, The Dixie Chicks, Dave Matthews, Keb Mo, Bonnie Raitt, Jurassic 5, REM (especially Michael Stipe) Jackson Brown and Eddie Vedder.Together.  Singing this great song — whose lyrics I so want to believe- that Patti Smith wrote because her husband, not so long before he died, urged her to.

You often hear people my age talk about the "soundtrack of my life" – the music playing behind every memory – every song evoking a movie of some moment in our lives.&nbsp; It’s a great gift, that easy travel back to moments we cherish – but sometimes, walking alone through my neighborhood, and listening to those moments pass by in sound, it can be a lot more.