Category: Favorite Songs

Reading a Jackson Browne interview in Nature Conservancy where he says, “I’ve heard a number of people put forth the idea that my activism or my talking about political things in my music has resulted in less success, less sales at one time or another. … But even if it were true, it wouldn’t be a hard choice to make. It’s more important to struggle for what you know is right and for what you feel to be valuable,” reminded me once again why I’ve always loved his music so much.

“Doctor My Eyes” one of the first songs I discussed in this blog, still ranks in my ten favorite rock and roll songs, but other songs like “For America” also strike me as great folk rock.

“For America” seems as relevant today as it was when it was recorded in 1986:

As if I really didn’t understand

That I was just another part of their plan

I went off looking for the promise

Believing in the Motherland

And from the comfort of a dreamer’s bed

And the safety of my own head

I went on speaking of the future

While other people fought and bled

The kid I was when I first left home

Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own

But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet

When the truth was known

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

It’s in my blood and in my bones

By the dawn’s early light

By all I know is right

We’re going to reap what we have sown

As if freedom was a question of might

As if loyalty was black and white

You hear people say it all the time-

My country wrong or right

I want to know what that’s got to do

With what it takes to find out what’s true

With everyone from the President on down

Trying to keep it from you

The thing I wonder about the Dads and Moms

Who send their sons to the Vietnams

Will they really think their way of life

Has been protected as the next war comes?

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

Her shining dream plays in my mind

By the rockets red glare

A generation’s blank stare

We better wake her up this time

The kid I was when I first left home

Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own

But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite a sweet

When the truth was known

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

I can’t let go till she comes around

Until the land of the free

Is awake and can see

And until her conscience has been found

Although I wasn’t one of those who saw the world from “the comfort of a dreamer’s bed,” unless you can call a cot in Vietnam a dreamer’s bed, I, too, joined the army naively believing “in the Motherland.” I found my own “truths” in Vietnam, but America is still “in my blood and my bones,” though I had hoped that we would have learned enough in Vietnam to find new ways of ensuring freedom and justice “for all.”

Loyalty isn’t “black or white.” I want my country to be right, not wrong. I know that the “truth” will set you free, but you certainly can’t count on the President or any of his administration to tell you what that is, can you? Worst of all, we seem to face another “generation’s blank stare.”

Like Browne, I would like to think that “I can’t let go till she comes around/Until the land of the free/Is awake and can see/and until her conscience has been found.” That ought to keep me around for quite awhile, huh?

Van Morrison’s “Cleaning Windows” has always been one of my favorite Van Morrison songs, and Van Morrison may well be my favorite singer:

Oh, the smell of the bakery from across the street

Got in my nose

As we carried our ladders down the street

With the wrought-iron gate rows

I went home and listened to Jimmie Rodgers in my lunch-break

Bought five Woodbines at the shop on the corner

And went straight back to work.

Oh, Sam was up on top

And I was on the bottom with the v

We went for lemonade and Paris buns

At the shop and broke for tea

I collected from the lady

And I cleaned the fanlight inside-out

I was blowing saxophone on the weekend

In that down joint.

What’s my line?

I’m happy cleaning windows

Take my time

I’ll see you when my love grows

Baby don’t let it slide

I’m a working man in my prime

Cleaning windows (number a hundred and thirty-six)

I heard Leadbelly and Blind Lemon

On the street where I was born

Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee,

Muddy Waters singin’ “I’m A Rolling Stone”

I went home and read my Christmas Humphreys’ book on Zen

Curiosity killed the cat

Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” and “On The Road”

What’s my line?

I’m happy cleaning windows

Take my time

I’ll see you when my love grows

Baby don’t let it slide

I’m a working man in my prime

Cleaning windows…

Until recently I was never entirely clear why I liked this song so much, but recent nostalgic lapses have helped to refresh my memory.

I put myself through college in the ‘60’s by doing janitorial work; I was “ a working man in my prime.” Occasionally that included washing windows, but the company also hired a professional window washer because I did such a pitiful job on them. Equipped with the latest high-tech cleaners and cleaning clothes, I spent hours cleaning the windows, only to find them smeared and streaked when I finished.

He, on the other hand, used a little ammonia in a bucket of water, a squeegee, and old newspapers to complete the job and came out with sparkling clean windows. How could I not admire his work? It was simple, required few supplies, and did the job to perfection.

More importantly, though, this self-educated black man could more than keep up with any of my discussions about what I was learning in college. He educated himself purely for his own edification. He had no desire to be anything other than what he was, a window washer. He was self-employed and totally independent. I didn’t realize then how special he was. I do now.

Looking back at those years, I suspect that, except for the wages, I had found the perfect job. I enjoyed working alone at night with no disruptions. If I did my job right, and I took pride in doing it right, no one ever told me what to do or when to do it. I set my own schedule and did things the way I wanted to do them. I spent most of the time while I was working thinking out papers that I was writing for my classes. (It doesn’t, after all, require great concentration to sweep and dust.) If I had realized that this would be the only time in my life when I would have this kind of freedom I would have enjoyed it more.

On the other hand, this was also the only time in my life, except for the last few years, that I had time to learn simply for the sake of learning. I didn’t yet have a career in mind and was simply learning what I wanted to learn. I was exploring modern poetry and philosophy in an attempt to find the meaning of life, an endeavor I too soon abandoned for making a living and supporting a family, but that, too, may be part of what the meaning of life is.

I was also beginning to listen to blues music, though I began with John Lee Hooker, Bobby Blue Bland and Ray Charles, not the earlier bluesmen mentioned in the song. They came later. And yes, I even read “Christmas Humphreys’ book on Zen,” though it took me another thirty five years to read Kerouac’sOn the Road.

It’s only looking back that I realize how much societal expectations determined what I was to do with my life and who I was to become.

Considering that Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” has been one of my favorite folk-rock songs for years, it may seem a little strange that Phil Och’s “Outside a Small Circle of Friends” is also one of my favorite songs despite the fact that the messages of the two seem almost diametrically opposed.

While “Doctor My Eyes” points out how painful it is to see all the misery that exists in our world, “Outside a Small Circle of Friends” complains that people are too self-absorbed and ignore all the injustices going on around them. If we’ve already seen too much of the world’s misery, why would we want to be told that people are ignoring the injustices of the world and that we need to be more involved?

Beats, me. Perhaps it’s just because this little ditty is set to a snappy, Scott-Joplin piano arrangement or because the irony is just funny enough to keep us laughing when we might be crying. Or, perhaps because it’s true. Too few people want to get involved with the injustices of the world, one of many reason that such injustices continue to exist.

If more people got involved in solving these injustices there wouldn’t be so much misery in the world, and we wouldn’t have to close our eyes to so much of it.

OUTSIDE A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed

They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed

Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain

But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends.

Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff

Thirteen cars are piled up, they’re hanging on a cliff.

Now, maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain

But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it’s gonna rain

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends.

Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor

The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor

Now wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops?

But they got too much already and besides we got the cops

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends.

Oh, there’s a dirty paper using sex to make a sale

The Supreme Court was so upset, they sent him off to jail.

Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine.

But we’re busy reading Playboy and the Sunday New York Times

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends

Smoking marihuana is more fun than drinking beer,

But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years

Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why

But demonstrations are a drag, besides we’re much too high

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends

Oh look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed

They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed

Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain

But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game

And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody

Outside of a small circle of friends

By beginning and ending the song with one of the most shocking incidents in recent history, a famous incident where a woman was killed while neighbors did nothing, not even calling the police, Ochs assured that he would begin with the listener on his side. No one would dare argue that these people were right to hide behind their smug, secure walls and allow an innocent woman to be murdered because “they didn’t want to get involved.” The refrain “outside a small circle of friends” underlines just how limited our concern for others has become in a “Christian” society where everyone is our “brother.”

It seems equally clear that people have an obligation to help each other. Some states have even passed Good Samaritan laws to require people to stop and offer aid.

While a few people may argue that poverty in the inner cities is the result of people being too lazy to get an education and get a job, most people agree that we have a social responsibility to, somehow, remedy these problems.

The last two stanzas, of course, are much more controversial, but they certainly point out the hypocrisy of doing something yourself and then allowing others to be convicted for doing the same thing. Certainly our drug laws, no matter how “moral” they may be, have done little to convince people that marihuana is immoral and worse than alcohol. At best, they have simply overwhelmed our criminal system with criminals who probably aren’t while allowing alcoholics to “legally” kill innocent citizens while continuing to drive our highways.

It’s no wonder we feel “guilty” that we’re aren’t doing more to improve our world, because the reality is that until everyone gets involved, which doesn’t seem likely to happen in the near future, there are too many problems that desperately need the attention and the money of those of us who are concerned about our world.

When I returned from Vietnam years ago, I was uncertain what I wanted to do with myself. I spent two or three months at my parents’ home trying to sort my life out, usually late at night thinking about what had happened, what it meant, and what the hell to do about it.

Finally, with my savings running out, I had to decide how to get on with my life. Though offered training as a banker, I felt I needed to do something more for society to be happy. Learning there were openings for caseworkers, I took the written tests and scored high enough to be hired, even though I had a degree in English, not psychology.

Truthfully, though, I was totally unprepared for what awaited me on the job, as unprepared as I was for what I had seen in Vietnam. As an old-age-assistance caseworker I learned where Americans discarded their elderly. My middle-class upbringing had not prepared me for the hidden poverty and misery that hid in the very neighborhoods where I had been raised. America does a good job of hiding the poor that live among us.

When I started dating a child welfare worker, I was even more shocked. I had no idea of the extent of child neglect and child abuse that existed, no idea how common incest was. Yet, I had gone to school with these very children, unaware of the living hell that many of them existed in.

I had such a hard time dealing with these new insights that I gradually began to sink into a state of depression, probably accelerated by occasional drinking bouts as a way of getting happy and finding some temporary relief from the pain I was increasingly feeling.

I increasingly began to feel that the welfare system was more punitive than redemptive. I felt bad every time I had to ask an aged client whether they had received any cash gifts for Christmas or their birthday, because, if they had, the gifts had to be deducted from their next welfare payments. I increasingly began to feel that the system was putting band-aids on sucking chest wounds, that I was as much a victim of the system as my clients were, and that if I didn’t escape soon I wouldn’t make it.

By some form of faulty reasoning, and perhaps a great leap of faith, I decided the best way to solve these problem was to catch them before they ever got into the system. I decided I needed to become a teacher if I really wanted to make a difference in people’s life. Thank God the young are naive, or nothing would ever be done about society’s problems.

After a few years of teaching high school, it was obvious that saving the world was going to be slow work. Some people apparently didn’t want to be saved and were quite happy wasting this opportunity to improve themselves no matter how much you tried to help them. Even worse, spending the day trapped inside a room with students who didn’t want to learn could be excruciatingly painful.

About this time I discovered Jackson Browne’s:

Doctor My Eyes

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand.
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding.
You must help me if you can.

Doctor, my eyes.
Tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?

As I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams.
People go just where there will.
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it’s later than it seems.

Doctor, my eyes.
Tell me what you see.
I hear their cries.
Just say if it’s too late for me.

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky.
Is this the price for having learned how not to cry?

Now, the song didn’t actually transform my life or make teaching any easier, but it was comforting to realize that someone else felt the same way I did. Perhaps it even helped me put some distance between my situation and myself. At best, it could even alert the world to all the tragedy that was commonly overlooked.

Eventually I learned to take time for my children and myself, learned that you have to be happy if you are going to have enough energy to help others, and, perhaps most importantly, learned that you can only help improve the world one person at a time.

And, sadly enough, no matter how much you want to help someone, at times there is nothing you can do but let that person work out his or her own destiny.

Sometimes you even have to learn to look away so that you still have tears left to cry and so you can still see the sky.