Look Out Of Any Window

Lately I’ve been working a lot of hours. Double Nickels sometimes, usually bleeding into Saturdays if not even a little into Sundays.

This weekend though I wasn’t going for that. Today is Father’s Day. Something about that gave me the green light to decide I’d had enough work for the week.

Yesterday - Saturday - I was in my office and doing something that, I think, only men, and only men above a certain age, will do. I was jacking around with wires.

There are wires all on and around the desk. USBs, HDMI, MIDI, etc. Then there’s a drawer two to the right of me full of wires and wire-like things. More USBs, but also power converters, and, for some reason, a pair of joysticks for a TI 99/4A. One drawer nearer, my 2TB external hard drive is buried in the back, so well buried that when I went looking for it yesterday, I looked in the drawer 4 times before I found it, and along the way decided there were too damn many wires around here, and so I started jacking around with them.

At one point The Bin came in from the garage. Most guys I know have something equivalent to The Bin. It may be The Box, or may be The Boxes, or some other odd combination of containers. These holders are home to Retired Electronics, Speculative Wires, and Nonsense Technologies. When I couldn’t find the external hard drive, I thought, would I have really put something important like that in The Bin? And of course, I didn’t, it was in the drawer all along. But once The Bin came into the office, it was inevitable that some sort of Wire Exchange would occur. And indeed it did occur, with multiple USBs going into The Bin.

Somewhere around this time my goofball six year old came into the office. I was doing things on the laptop (hence the need for the external drive), and I had the office TV on for the first time in months (hello Premier League!), and I also had the stereo on, and he commandeered my phone, and I probably also had the dryer running in the next room. I finally found the external drive and started copying files over and that’s when I launched into jacking around with wires. And also index cards and batteries.

At some point in the midst of all this I realized that the music didn’t sound quite right. I got down on the ground and found no sound coming out of the left speaker. I jiggled it a bit and it came back, but then it went away. In short order I progressed from jacking with wires to Jacking With Wires.

The speakers are Cambridge Soundworks Model Sixes. I’ve had them - I think - for 22 years. They were a gift from my father, by my recollection at the time I graduated from college, but maybe it was the luggage set I received then. They are the best example of what a gift from my father is like: highly thoughtful, presented with a sense of profound importance, and not especially practical at the time of giving, as I had nowhere to put them!

And so I had the left speaker on the ground, Jacking with the speaker wire. I removed it, put it back. I tried the same from the receiver. At one point I inhaled deeply and tried to Blow Junk Out, only to wind up with an eye full of dust. Having little success with what I was trying, I went to the garage and fetched the wire cutters. None of this worked. And I was worried that the problem was with the speaker itself.

While this exchange was going down the CD player had finished. Instead of restarting it, I just employed the tape deck for my testing, which is usually what I do when rewiring speakers. This is kind of silly, since I seem to never use the tape deck for anything else. But it’s what I do. And the tape in the deck - the tape which seems to always be in the deck - was, and is, American Beauty.

At this point in my life I don’t own very many pre-recorded cassettes. I have some bootleg shows, and I have many dozens of recordings of my radio shows, and I have some truly odd things, but in terms of albums on cassette, there are about 8, all basically in the category of things that never got replaced by CDs. The other 7 have probably not so much as been inside a tape deck in 20 years; if I'd really, really wanted to listen to them, I’d have long since replaced them. And yet somehow my cassette copy of American Beauty endures. And still gets pulled out every so often.

If you’re not familiar, American Beauty is a 1970 studio album from the Grateful Dead. Half of the Grateful Dead songs you might ever still hear on the radio happen to be on this album.

This entire scene was probably the most Bert-as-Phil (or is that Phil-as-Bert?) that things could ever get. I was literally Jacking With Wires, specifically with my prized speakers, listening to “Box of Rain”, with my own son on the couch saying nothing, maybe absorbing something of the scene, but who’s ever to say what exactly?

I’ve told this story many times before. It’s always worth telling again.

When it came time for us to graduate high school in 1994, we got to choose a class motto. I don’t really remember how this process worked, and I don’t think an actual vote was held. And our first choice was summarily rejected by the school administration.

Alas, “These pretzels are making me thirsty!” would not be immortalized on our Class of ‘94 shirts.

Instead, somehow, our class motto wound up being the last lyrics from “Box of Rain”. Why the administration vetoed a line from Seinfeld but greenlighted a song lyric from the Grateful Dead, I’ll never know. And so our tie-dyed Class of ‘94 shirts read:

SUCH A LONG LONG TIME TO BE GONE AND A SHORT TIME TO BE THERE

The Grateful Dead had more than one vocalist. Jerry Garcia most frequently sang lead. Bob Weir frequently did as well. Less frequently - and, after 1975, not for many many years thereafter - Phil Lesh sang lead.

“Box of Rain” was therefore somewhat unusual in the band’s repertoire. Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics. Phil Lesh wrote the music and sang lead.

Incidentally, he wrote the song for his father.

I’m not a Deadologist so I can’t tell you exactly when or how the term came into use, but there is a, mmm, place, or perhaps space, called The Phil Zone. This has a lot of meanings and they all relate back to Phil Lesh.

In the garage I have a large bin full of t-shirts. Some have to do with high school, most have to do with rock bands. One of the shirts in there I’ve already mentioned - the tie-dyed Class of ‘94 shirt.

There’s also a shirt in there which on the front says The Phil Zone. On the back it says:

SUCH A LONG LONG TIME TO BE GONE AND A SHORT TIME TO BE THERE

In the same bin is another tie-dyed shirt. On the front is a skeleton playing a violin, a modified version of the album cover for the 1975 album Blues for Allah. The words on the front of the shirt say BLUES AT ALLAH PINE. The back identifies the date, June 27, 1987.

I was 10, and I was there, at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin, taken by my father to see the Grateful Dead, and not only to see the Dead, but to experience the parking lot before the show.

The parking lot was of course full of freaks: people wearing weird clothes, people peddling weird wares, people drinking beer, people smoking pot, people selling and eating meatless hot dogs (who would do such a thing??)

Consider though, in a sea of Deadheads, this freak: the bespectacled dude in his mid-thirties with his ten year old son in tow.

Because a Dead show, at least then, was a place where everyone was a freak, and because that was true, nobody was a freak, and, I think, that was all part of the point.

I remember almost no particulars of the show itself. It’s the parking lot which is most emblazoned in my memory. We even took pieces of the parking lot home - a patch, a t-shirt, and, most prominently, for years thereafter, next to the radio in our 1985 Horizon, stuck a merry Jer Bear.

The entire experience was formative for me. Maybe at first it was just a spectacle in my mind. But I think the point about freaks is something I internalized.

The Dead never sold all that many of any single album. But over a long stretch of time, they were maybe the biggest-grossing band in the world. Unlike contemporaries who might match them show-by-show, the Dead just never stopped touring, and people never stopped showing up. And because the set list was unpredictable, it’s not like people were showing up to hear their favorite songs. There were there to be part of something - something which fully embraced them. They weren’t embraced in spite of being freaks, nor for being freaks. They were simply embraced. They were, in one word, welcome.

Welcome. If only for a few hours, they were welcome to be themselves, or if they wanted, to be someone else. They just had to be welcoming back. Then, mostly, they would go back home, to their mortgages, to their shitty jobs, to their boxes of wires, whatever.

My dad took me to see the Dead again the following summer. I saw them one final time in 1994, just after graduating high school. It wouldn’t be accurate to say they were ever my favorite band, but I had learned to respect them tremendously. And then of course Jerry died in 1995, and a very different era of jam band thing kicked in, blah blah blah.

During high school I went through this weird progression of listening to oldies radio (which, then, didn’t go much past 1969), and listening to classical (no, I’m not sure why I was checking out orchestral performances of Sibelius from the Rockford Public Library), and then when I got a car, settling on classic rock, something I’ve written about before and will write about many more times, I’m sure.

During phases of that progression, I didn’t own any CDs (yet). Mostly I had cassettes via my dad, often things which he’d dubbed years ago. I assume my cassette copy of American Beauty came from him somewhere along that progression but I’m not totally sure about that.

The most likely place in the house that I will see my dad’s handwriting is on a cassette, either one he dubbed, or one of things I myself recorded when I was young.

So there’s this realm of the house - let’s call it The Bert Zone - where his presence is most stark. I see it when I turn directly around from where I’m now sitting. I see the speakers he gave me, I see a rack of cassettes, I see the CD tower, and I even see his self-portrait.

The drawing is in black and white paint, on a golden fabric canvas about one foot square. The frame holding the canvas in place is wood recovered from my grandfather’s couch. The fabric itself is from the back of the couch. My grandfather had been an upholsterer and built the couch himself. He hand-picked the fabric. Decades later, when the couch finally had it, only the back - the part which had been against the wall - retained the original golden sheen. Decades of chain smoking and Johnny Carson monologues had blackened everything else.

Nothing else in The Bert Zone, or anywhere else in the house, quite reflects this multi-generational inheritance. To imagine the possibility of my grandfather having taken my father - at age 10 - to anything more exotic than the Prince Castle a couple blocks away to get square-shared ice cream would boggle the imagination. A Grateful Dead concert!? Fifty years ago, my grandmother literally threw my dad’s Grateful Dead LP away just because of their name!

And yet… I’ve heard the stories about the family piling in the car and driving down U.S. 51 to Centralia, where every year, they’d go to my great-grandfather’s apartment. My grandfather would bring his own father a carton of cigarettes. My great-grandfather would go to a drawer and get out a child’s suit and show it to his grandchildren and tell them the suit was his entire life, or something equally terrifying. And, as it so happen, the only photo I have of my own great-grandfather - digital or otherwise - is one of him, as a child, perhaps my son’s age, in that very suit. As inheritances go, what does a Grateful Dead parking lot possibly have on any of that?

The Bin, as it so happens, used to be The Bins. One bin, the size of a large shoebox, used to contain only audio cables. Another contained only computer cables. A third contained even more computer cables, phone cables, who knows what else. And all of this doesn’t even include The Cube, which still exists. It’s a cube-shaped chest that says NOTRE DAME and it also lives in the garage. It contains only power cords and power strips and a couple of coaxial cables.

All of this is also an inheritance. A bin containing only audio cables? My dad has one of those. In one form or another, he’s had it for at least 45 years. You think I came up with such an idea all on my own? What, you thought you did?

In the end, I got the speaker working by swapping cables. Cables just go bad, sometimes, you know? USB cables go bad. RCA cables go bad. Ethernet cables go bad. So too do speaker cables, it would seem. Luckily I had a replacement available. I found it at the top of The Bin, which, as you might recall, was inside for a reason having nothing to do with the stereo.

A little while ago, as I was writing this, and thinking about how odd it was that I’d never replaced my cassette copy of American Beauty with a CD, I went and checked, and found that… I actually had. It was sitting with my 700+ other CDs. They’re alphabetized, of course. There’s some miscellaneous vinyl around as well, but I don’t currently own a record player and have no intention of getting one anytime soon. The vinyl is, in effect, for collector’s purposes at this point, maybe things which never got issued any other way. My dad long ago replaced all of his records with CDs - if he could. For him the purpose of owning an album is to listen to it. His argument is that CDs are much easier to deal, take up less space, and any perceived audio dropoff is so marginal that if you care that much about it, you’re probably not really listening to it for the right reasons, and what you probably really need is a good pair of speakers. Can’t say that I disagree.

I can’t guess at what odd sorts of notions my son will inherit. When I grew up, the center of the house was the stereo, and that’s definitely not the case now. And maybe in 20 years most things will be wireless, just one big bluetooth daisy chain. But if I play this album enough, he’ll probably be going around singing what a long strange trip it’s been. And he’ll be right.