Sleeping Through Dead Girlfriend Music

There's a pile of music that came out and went straight into my brain about the time I joined the USN back in '68. Most of it's the stuff I'd been listening to with other hippie types, music that had so much meaning to me then but which I today realize was, for the most part, vacuous.
     Some of the music, upon hearing it today, reminds me of the girls I knew back then, the women I knew back then, when I was a sniveling little shit more interested in getting laid than in getting to know someone well enough to really care about them. Some of the women that this music reminds me of, well, some of 'em is dead. Some of 'em just disappeared into the void of time and have since turned up in the SSDI, deceased as incredibly wrong ages. Or dying from truly incredibly unbelievable diseases.
     One died from the effects of AIDS and liver failure brought on by hepatitis (which she contracted long after I knew her). Another died of unknown causes back in the 90s at age 47. When I was 47 and still no less of a kid then than I was when I first met her. On and on like that, one woman dead here, another dead there.
     And the music?
     Well, when I hear some of the stuff from that time & place in my life, it reminds me often enough of the dead women or the woman I just met & passed on. I call that music just what it is to me: "Dead Girlfriend Music."
     Some of it's so bitterly unlistenable to me now that I would rather turn off the radio or box of whatever's playing it and move on to the next cognitive distraction.
     But some of it, well, it plays a longer role. It makes me remember then and think of now and how much I never heard those words or thought of that song or even listened to the notes with enough sense to realize how much those songs were part of me even then.
     Like it maybe Dead Girlfriend Music but it's also music that reminds me of the peregrinations of mind that I took in the process of losing my faith in faith.

One song in particular is James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, a bit that I remember listening to while thinking of Kathy Alexander as the wind went through what was left of my hair in Navy boot camp. I was there 'cause I didn't want to get drafted and I had the sense at that moment that my life was gone out of my control.
     As if I'd ever had any control of it in the first place, but that's another story.
     Something about that song – probably because it was popular to some of my old friends back in the barrio – made me think of how much I wanted to be with Kathy as opposed to standing on the asphalt "grinder" with a pile of other recruits, learning the dance steps to a routine some ten weeks into our collective futures.
     Now the song in question has some topical referents that I just plain didn't get or heard as somehow homey. The bit about it being a song about a "young cowboy" on the range, "his horse & his saddle his only companion" were only tags to me in remembering my earlier but none less immature at the moment involvement in the daydream of what I had learned from television westerns. Gunsmoke, the Sugarfoot and Cheyenne tv shows were some kind of romanticism thing for the "Old West" that my father said never really existed as they showed it on tv. Didn't stop me from believing that it really was that way or that guns were dangerous in the hands of your range-wandering sociopaths.
     So there was that.
     The other nostalgic stuff about thinking "of women and glasses of beer," well, I wasn't yet then quite that hip to the beer and the women, well, I was pinin' for Kathy, see. So it stuck in my head that way.
     Until a couple days ago when I got in Cindy's car and headed off to the store and what should pop up on the car's playlist but a piece of Dead Girlfriend Music. James Taylor singin' Sweet Baby James.
     As I sang along – 'cause I still remember the words to the song even though I might not remember what it was I was goin' to the store for in the first place – I thought about how the song's lyrics tied to when I was where I heard it repeatedly . . . back in bootcamp.
     There is, after all, a certain range-riding mystique attached to sailors. They make great wanderin' guys for song writers and poets, the probable best to my mind being the song Brandy, by Elliot Lurie. The guy turns down some fine chick 'cause, as the lyrics say, his love and "life and lady is the sea."
     Shortsightedness like this would take decades to filter through to my consciousness, which is why that song and Gerry Beckley's Sister Golden Hair always remind me of Janet Norton, another of the list of dead girlfriends.

But that ain't quite the point yet.

See, as I sang along I came to a part of James Taylor's song (you remember that song, right?) that gave me pause again to consider the meaning of the words from a long-ago worldview as compared with the meaning of the words to this old guy remembering dead girlfriends' worldview.
     The lyrics in question go:

" There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway,
A song that they sing when they take to the sea,
A song that they sing of their home in the sky.
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me."

And it was in the end two lines that I started thinking about how much I'd missed by just pinin' for Kathy.
     See, Taylor says (and yes, I'm gonna get academic on you here) that there is a song some folks sing "of their home in the sky" and then suggests that your sleep may be affected by the chance that you believe in this celestial home.
     To me that sounds like a suggestion the Taylor might be saying that he doesn't believe. Not that he doesn't. But the words suggest he didn't at the time of writing. Or that he might believe but that some don't and those who don't, well, their sleep is not disturbed by not believing.
     Which is right where I am now and well on the road to disbelief then but never tied the words in the song to the words disappearing in my head as I discovered my own evolution to disbelief.

It's shocking to me that the song, especially with those lyrics of possible disbelief, got as much air time as it did back then. Back then was when the Beatles caught hell for suggesting that they might be more famous & well-known than Jesus. Back then was when kids were living together without benefit of matrimonial ceremony, and sometimes not just livin' together but actually sleeping together and getting pregnant without benefit of ceremony. It was a time of social upheaval and the damn church heads didn't even catch that line in that song!
     What a trip, so to speak.
     Here all this time I'd put this song on the endangered species list and all along it had been there without any participation from me.
     Which goes back to the concept of the time/space where that song was birthed and what it might have meant for me if I'd been paying attention.
     Even if it is still Dead Girlfriend Music to me to this day, reminding me of a time when I was so seriously disconnected from society by way of having myself included (as opposed to including myself personally in society) in a society that was then as it is now, horribly artificial.
     Hippie days, yo, were seriously artificial.
     Peace and love and all that, sure. But in the end we just wanted to be the usual white gringo kids who had no responsibility and expected our parents to bail us out if we ever got slipped off the high moral fiber or whatever we thought we were pursuing.
     Which weren't much, what we were pursuing weren't.
     We were after hedonism, instant gratification, ratiocinated-all-to-hell escape from responsibility and gimme-now-I-wanna-get-laid. That's what we were after.
     If we actually ended the Vietnam War, I ain't so sure.
     It was Nixon, the creepy old dude who followed LBJ in the president's chair who ended the Vietnam War. And we can look at that move now as the beginning of the end of isolation between China and the USA.
     Maybe Nixon was going after the kids & veteran vote in ending the war but I'd be hard pressed to say that we, as a demographic, actually "ended" the war in Vietnam. Our noise & bustle might have been part of it but I seriously doubt it was all that much.
     We wanted to be cowboys by the fire, sailors on the sea, warm breeze blowin' south over our shoulder, stardust and bullshit. That's what we wanted.
     And out of it all, I remember the dead, male, female & whatever else. Kathy, Janet, Steve, Dick Curwell, the crazy little dude who always came to me when he wanted to get stoned, Renée & Jerome and Susan & all of 'em, dead from our inability to see how close death really is everyday, because we believed we could change the world for the better. Believed that we could make the world a bright & shiny place to live, full of parking lots and shopping and sunshine and all that expanded consciousness stuff that we as a demographic were into then.
     We believed.
     And it helped us to do more than sleep together.
     It hid the meanness of existence from us just as much as the church or religion has always covered for the nasty shit in life by promising a home in the sky.
     If you can believe that.