You Can Get Anything You Want...

I think this was the first Thanksgiving since my college days that I didn't listen to Arlo Guthrie sing Alice's Restaurant. I own it, and thought I'd listen to it on my mp3, but found I hadn't loaded it. It's usually played on the local classic rock station at either 11AM or noon, but I wasn't listening at the time. So, I wound up having an Arloless Thanksgiving.
I can't help but think about the differences in the eras of the today versus the time the song was written is worth commenting on. Guthrie wrote and performed the song in the latter stages of the Viet Nam War, an unpopular war being fought overseas to "keep free" a people whose culture most Americans didn't understand. Today, we're at war in two overseas nations, one of which is little supported by the American polulace. Still, one lesson we've learned, that is that even if we don't support the war, now we don't condemn the warriors. American policy is the work of the policy makers in government, not of the soldiers.
It's also worth noting that our other war, in Afghanistan, is a follow-up to a war of occupation fought in the late 1970's and much of the 1980's by the USSR. The Mujahadeen fought a war of attrition against the Russians and eventually outlasted them, not unlike what we did to the British over two centuries ago. It was this war that prompted the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

The Music Man

"He's a music man, and he sells clarinets to the kids in the town..."
- from Meredith Wilson's The Music Man

After delivering my son to school, I was walking back with a neighbor, and we were talking about the school's music program. My son is taking up the trumpet this year. Her son had been in a summer program and marvelled at the band director there taking a random assortment of instruments with their players and making passable background music with them.

I pointed out that in pre-phonograph, pre-radio days, people would get together to play music, and it is from this tradition that much folk and popular music sprung. I pointed out the example of The Music Man, with a huckster selling instruments to a small Iowa town (as I remember the details).

Quite simply, instruments, whether the piano in the parlor, or the bass drum, or the trumpet, were treasured, used and shared liberally. If you lived in a small town, perhaps three or four people would get together on Saturday evening to play. Sometimes, they'd even play at a town dance or in a parade. It was how skills were honed and learned.

I have a friend from college who plays jazz. He'll show up at a club and "play in" with the band. If you're lousy, you'll last a song; if good, you'll go the rest of the night. The tradition continues in this form.