The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 25.Time Alone with Shaved Fish

"A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words."

                                                            --Dr. Winston O'Boogie

Time alone.  I'd always spent a lot of time alone.  When I was seven, we lived on a ranch in northern Utah and had no neighbors.  I had a couple of friends at school, but at home I was my own best friend.  That ranch was a great place to be your own best friend.  We had two rivers, a creek, and a small lake on the property, along with who knows how many irrigation ditches.  We lived in an apartment in a great cinder-block barn.  Lloyd and I actually slept in a bunkhouse on the first floor, and the apartment was on the second floor.  I had the entire hay loft as my play area, which included two more bunk rooms.  In the spring, the great wooden door where they used to bring the hay to the loft would be open, and I'd look out on a deep green field and the horse my sister often rode.

Alone is what I knew best and liked.  When we moved to what I'll call Sandstone, I had a couple of really good friends, and I'd often walk home from school with one of them, but I enjoyed walking home alone more.  I loved strolling along the irrigation ditches; watching a cloud hang reflected back in the slow-moving water; being dazzled by the long, green grasses growing along the bank turned upside down in the rippled reflection.

So, when we moved to Dallas, and when, at first, I didn't have any friends, it was no big deal.  I could have cared less.  The teasing I received during school was deeply damaging, but the time alone just gave me time to explore my corner of this great big, new metropolitan area in a deeper way.  There was the library almost next door.  There was an LDS (Mormon) bookstore a block to the north.  I bought my first journal there, and for the first time in my life, I began to write down my thoughts in little three to four-line poems.  There was a Half-Price used book store about two blocks to the south and a record store about a block beyond that.

For Christmas, I received a Sony Walkman from my real dad.  I loved it.  I constantly had a tape going.  I walked down to that small record store and bought The Beatles:  1967-1970.  I still remember that record store well.  Sandstone didn't have record stores.  Pioneer Market sold a few albums, as did Steven's Department Store.  Bradshaw Auto Parts sold 8-Track tapes, but there was no proper music store.  So, I loved being in that small suburban store.  The odd thing is that I don't ever remember music playing.  It was as quiet as a library.  Perhaps that is what I liked about it.  As I flipped through the albums in the silence, I could hear the music in my head.  Then, I'd go over to the tape section, and get what I wanted.  The tapes were in big, plastic, locked files, and so I'd have to find the owner to unlock them.  She was an elderly lady who spoke very little.  It seemed I was always the only customer, which explains why the store closed a couple of years later.

The other tape I bought there was Shaved Fish by John Lennon.  I'd heard "Imagine" the previous summer in a Grand Central (like a K-Mart) in Sparks, Nevada.  I'd heard the song a few times before that, but I'd never paid attention to the lyrics.  That time I did.  I just stopped.  Until then I didn't know lyrics could capture such pure and innocent desires, an unselfish yearning for humanity to be more.  I didn't necessarily like, "Imagine there's no religion," (Lennon) but I knew that the religion I believed in, if lived fully, definitely would lead to everything else imagined in that song; I was hooked.  I went down to the record store looking for that specific song.  I found it on an album called Shaved Fish (Lennon, Shaved Fish).

Even though my brother brought me up on the Beatles, Shaved Fish blew my mind.  There was a rawness to Lennon's solo work that just pulled me in.  That "Day 4," a drum beat, and then "Instant Karma's gonna get you / gonna knock you right on the head." (Lennon, Instant Karma)

Wow!  There was a deep rough steel grit to it.  Even on "Dream 9".  It had all the psychedelic otherworldly quality of "Lucy in Sky,"  "I Am the Walrus" or "Glass Onion," but it was stripped down to just the glass river and the blank blue sky.  It was a round, glass table set out in the woods left to gather dew.  The symphony stayed home, and only the string section showed up, but oh how they could play!  And the lyrics:

Took a walk down the street
Through the heat whispered trees. (Lennon, #9 Dream)

I was stunned.

And so I wandered around my little section of suburbia, headphones on, listening to Shaved Fish.  I wanted to see the movie Reds.  I wanted to dream of a world less brutal than the one I experienced at school.  I wanted to be able to name pain as precisely as Lennon did in "Cold Turkey."  I wanted to touch the realness that one only touches through art.  I wanted to explore this new city, and I wanted to explore my own mind, which was just as new to me.

People made me feel alone and unwanted.  Time alone made me feel valued by some unknown presence as I connected with myself and the world around me.

References

Lennon, John. Shaved Fish. By John Lennon. 1975.

Lennon, John. "#9 Dream." Walls and Bridges. By John Lennon. New York, 1974.

Lennon, John. "Imagine." Imagine. By John Lennon. New York, 1971.

Lennon, John. "Instant Karma." By John Lennon. London, 1970.