What's Next

Sometimes I wish that I believed in something after this life's over. Oh, I don't not believe. I just don't know. I'm pretty sure that there is no hell but I worry that there is no heaven either. Life, here and now, comes pretty close to paradise. It's difficult to keep suffering out of your mind, though, and really who would want to? This treadmill that we call life is rough. You don't dare slow down.

Move Over Mama

There are positive energy forces at work here. I mean here. Even as I peer through the sadness that surrounds my real life circumstances right now I still sense the joy and the peace all around me. Turn over the rocks in the road. Look at how the sunlight shines on that busted beer bottle. The clues are in the rock'n'roll and in that crackle of the first fall mornings. You don't make this stuff happen, you let it happen.

Love, love, love.

The Sunny Side

What is it that your grandmother would say, "If you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all?"

Well, let's just let it go at that today, why don't we.

Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.

Where'd You Get That?

Oh, the arrogance of youth. I still remember an interview that I read with Chuck Berry in a rock'n'roll magazine when I was ten or eleven years old. He was denying all credit for inventing the art form. He insisted that he was just playing what he had heard Louis Jordan doing when he was just a kid. Of course I thought that he was just being humble. I learned over the years that Mr. Berry is not a humble man.

No, in fact, Chuck had been borrowing riffs right from Carl Hogan, one of Louis' great guitarists.

Growing up with Hank Williams on the radio, I guess I just always assumed that hillbilly music had come right from his genius. I was a grownup by the time I learned about Tetot, the street singer who had taught Hank to play, and Emmett Miller, the minstrel singer, who provided the voice break that was such a big part of Hank's "uniqueness."

Don't get me started about Esquerita and Little Richard or Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

I don't know where any of it came from and you don't either. Who cares? It's the folk tradition, right?

Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.

I'll Show You Passive

So I'm stuck with one arm under my head going to sleep while I try to take in the documentary explaining why I'm passive since I was raised without a father. My friend next to me is all-the-way asleep.

The ranting doctor on the flat screen is claiming that women will leave me and that I'm sure to fail in business. Now he's trying to convince me that I put all my efforts into seeking love.

He doesn't have to be so smug about it.

Please send me your love. Please.

Big Ideas

Oh, I guess I learned plenty in college. One of the first courses that I took at the University of South Florida was Ideas Of Utopia. It was, of course, in the Ideas Department.

Now today I read in the New York Times that the momentum may be in favor of the optimists concerning the end of global poverty. Seems to me that war has had more than its fifteen minutes, too. It sure would be nice if the U.S.A. roared to the front of the pack in terms of change for the better. Of course we were late to the party on slavery and some other biggies. It does seem to me that we should get credit for rock'n'roll. Maybe that will buy us some credit on the ones that we've botched.

Let's feed the poor, help the down and out, care for the sick, educate the kids and find good jobs for the soldiers. Let's reform our laws to put all the money that we waste on "defense" to healing the planet. It doesn't take genius. It takes love and common sense.

"Here I Am"

When they asked Chuck Prophet to write about me for the liner notes in the British version of my record, Hep, he put down something like, "If Ronny Elliott got any more underground, they'd have to dig him up with a shovel."

Suited me fine. I like being in the shadows. It's been reported that when George Bernard Shaw first set foot on American soil, coming down the gangplank, he asked the throngs of journalists, "Here I am. How do you like me?"

That's my worst nightmare: taking myself seriously and looking for others to do the same.

Now, they're not making many big movies out of George's plays these days but we all know his name and some heir, somewhere, keeps raking in the dough whenever My Fair Lady plays on Turner Classic Movies.

Luckily, I suppose, I don't have any heirs. Folks like me, if there are folks like me, have to wonder if they've worked all their lives for nothing. Oh, I'm not whining. I would do it this way again. You do it because you have to, right?