It's Gonna Take a Lotta Love

We’ve had a head cold go through the house, and it finally got to me at the beginning of the week. Monday through Friday this week I took NyQuil before bed and my light was off before 10:00. META-SPIEL readers know that’s just not common for me.

We got up early today for an 8:15 soccer game… which got cancelled at about 8:05 thanks to an unusual morning thunderstorm. Still, it had gotten me up before 7:30 on a Saturday, which is a rare feat, and as I slunk out of bed, a song was forefront in my mind, the main lyric rolling over and over again.

It’s gonna take a lotta love

I don’t remember the last time I heard the song, I don’t remember it lodging itself in my head like that before. But that’s what happened this morning, and it didn’t let go.

“Lotta Love” is a Neil Young song, recorded in 1976 but released on his 1978 album Comes a Time, which I imagine is today pretty far down the list of Neil Young albums one might think of. The album is like a happier version of Harvest. Neil is actually smiling on the album cover.

The more famous version though is Nicolette Larson’s, from her debut album Nicolette, released a couple of weeks before Comes a Time. Some of you will be pleased, or perhaps horrified, to learn that her version is certified Yacht Rock.

Larson’s version was a hit, reaching #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Easy Listening (ahem, Adult Contemporary) chart. The album hit #15 (and #1 in Canada!) She released several more albums, eventually becoming more of a country artist, including a handful of charting songs across the early 80s. “Lotta Love” was her biggest hit.

My goal for today was to do very little. I find that when I get this kind of head cold, I can suck it up and handle a baseball practice or a serious meeting or whatever, but then when it’s over I’m completely spent. I slogged my way through a difficult work week where more than once I would get off of a Teams meeting and just sit and stare at nothing for a couple of minutes, and I really need a calm, easy weekend.

The cancelled soccer game afforded an unusual opportunity to sit in bed with headphones on, catch up on a podcast, and empty out my email inbox. This meant getting through a couple of days worth of news which meant being reconfronted with elements of the latest awful news cycle.

I tried a couple of days ago to thread the needle and write something at least a tiny bit positive about “politics”. It didn’t really work. And part of what a lot of us are confronting these days is a visceral fear of saying the wrong thing. The fear is of course legitimate. We are actively being made to feel afraid by truly hateful people, and platforms all too willing to normalize and amplify that hatred. And even the platforms that don’t exactly normalize or amplify the hatred can’t help but provide echoes of it. It’s inescapable… unless, of course, you escape.

Well, I don’t really want to escape. I also don’t want to be be constantly on edge. I want to be aware, I want to acknowledge what’s happening, but I don’t want to get consumed by it. Instead, I want to do what positive things I can during a very negative time, and I want to try and model this for my friends and family.

So this morning, on into the afternoon, I’m writing whatever this piece is.

In April, the first volume of Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young came out. The album is a fundraiser for The Bridge School, a place very near and dear to Neil.

One of the first two songs released was Courtney Barnett’s cover of “Lotta Love”:

Here’s a conjecture on my part: There are some META-SPIEL readers who remember Nicolette Larson, and there are some META-SPIEL readers who know Courtney Barnett, but there aren’t a lot of you familiar with both artists.

Courtney Barnett is an Australian singer-songwriter who I’ve mentioned before. In my mind there’s a very clear, if not easy to define, connection between her and some of her contemporaries, and women from the 1970s like Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and Nicolette Larson. Her debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit - which, let’s all agree, that’s a brilliant goddamn album title - peaked on the US charts at #20, not that far off from Nicolette’s peak position. The way music is shared is of course a little different these days. Unless it was a college station (or maybe Chicago’s WXRT), I very much doubt you’ve ever heard Courtney Barnett on US radio, and that’s a shame, because a great many of you would absolutely love some of her music.

I’m 48. I’ve been using computers for 43 years. I’ve been “online” in some manner of speaking for 32 years. I’ve been through multi-line BBS systems, Fidonet, AOL (if only a bit), IRC, ICQ, AIM, probably things I’ve forgotten, and that’s all before any of us were Tom’s friends on MySpace.

What passed for “media” today is especially horrendous, and I’m saying this as someone who has been railing against the right-wing corporate media for 25 years. But I don’t want to dwell on that. I want to try and articulate at least a little something here about what it looks like for sensible people to try and get through daily existence without being subsumed by the wretchedness.

To that end, here’s a fun little story from this week.

My kid has played soccer for what seems like 3274 years, but this is actually just year 7. Soccer is a fall / spring sport - eight games in September / October and then eight more in April / May / June. He’s also played baseball for 6 years. Youth baseball is a spring sport, overlapping the spring soccer season. But there’s also “fall ball”, which he’s never done before… but asked to do this year. So, okay, fine, we’ll do fall ball this once. Sure. And I signed up as an assistant coach again.

Well, nobody signed up as a head coach, so I have wound up being one of three head coaches for the fall. Fall ball is not super competitive - there’s no playoffs, it’s supposed to be more instructional / give everybody a chance to try things - and this suits me just fine.

We had our first practice Wednesday. 8 of my 12 players were there. They’re all 10 or 11 year old boys. Now, we’re all supposed to be worried about these kids, right? There’s supposedly some sort of crisis out there for men and boys and whatever. And when I say “supposedly” I’m not arguing there’s not a crisis, rather, I’m throwing shade at the intent of some of the people who have spoken out along such lines. A lot of the “crisis” is by design. You all know that.

So we had our practice and it was shambolic and fun as I pitched batting practice and some boys were very focused and others were not. Halfway through the practice, it was time to bring them all together and take a very important vote: What would our team name be? We don’t have uniforms yet so we don’t know what our team color is, so I told them they could pick any name, so long as I could actually tell parents that was our team name (in other words, no, we can’t be the Poopy Poops)… but they should pick a name that can work with either red, blue, or green. I heard a lot of silly names and some not so silly names and at some point one of them offered up a name, I think as a joke, and a couple minutes later I took a vote and actually got five of them to hold up their hands and agree, and that was the majority of the kids present, and so:

We are the Gummy Bears.

Friends, there is a crisis out there, but it’s not with these boys.

I think maybe we - the adults - are the ones who need to get the hell away from all of the toxicity. I don’t mean outright escape. I mean we need to be the change we want to see, and that means we need to not keep getting dragged in to the insanity.

Turn off all the cable news. Get away from the most toxic of the platforms. Please don’t let that shit drag you down. Please.

Do it for the Gummy Bears.

It's gonna take a lotta love
To change the way things are
It's gonna take a lotta love
Or we won't get too far

It’s easy to think of this as a simple romantic love song, but this is the same man who a decade later wrote “Love and Only Love”. Neil, I can safely say, is a man who contains multitudes.Of course we all contain multitudes. The most pacifist among us may get angry at times. The most violent among us can still sometimes appreciate beauty when they see it.

There’s a lot out there we could rightfully be angry about. And if we are honest about the human experience, if we heed the counsel of the Book of Ecclesiastes (or Pete Seeger), there is a time for every purpose under heaven.

But when we are limited to anger, to indignation, to contempt, to distrust, to a certain subset of responses, we play into the hands of those who feed on anger, indignation, contempt, and distrust. It is not that these are invalid emotional responses. What is invalid is when they are all that is left to us.

Much has been written this week about “healing”, and much of that has unfortunately been cynical. Much has been written this week suggesting some sort of intractable struggle between oppositional “extreme” forces, and this is of course malarky, all a pretense for an extension of further authoritation power grabs. There is a clear and intentional effort afoot to drive everyone to either anger or silence.

Well, I can’t live like that. Or, to be more precise, I can live like that, and in the process, I can be forever miserable. I refuse. You should also refuse.

We’re going to get through all of this. Not that it’ll be quick or easy, struggles like this seldom are. But we’ve got our kids to think about. We’ve got our planet to think about. We don’t have a choice: however long it takes, we’ve got to change the way things are.

It’s gonna take a lotta love.