If I Was The Priest

Right now, this song is everything ...

Bruce Springsteen wrote “If I Was The Priest” nearly fifty years ago. It predates his debut album on Columbia Records. In fact, “If I Was The Priest” is one of the songs Bruce played at his audition with the legendary talent scout John Hammond, who also discovered Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others. “If I Was The Priest” is a Bob Dylan-esque old west fantasy about Sheriff Jesus requesting Father Bruce’s presence in Dodge City, where the Holy Ghost also runs a burlesque show ("where they'll let you in for free and they hit you when you go"). Father Bruce ultimately declines Sheriff Jesus’s request to join him, because Bruce is overdue for Cheyenne. Hammond said he immediately knew Bruce was raised Catholic when he played the song for Hammond at his audition back in 1972. I first heard “If I Was The Priest” nearly thirty years ago, on a bootleg recording of Bruce's audition tape. It’s been a favorite of mine ever since.

 

Bruce’s new album, Letter To You, is a rocking meditation on the loss of loved ones, and how their presence still haunts and influences our lives. My description makes the album sound like a bummer, but it isn’t. It’s actually quite joyful. Bruce wrote most of the songs for the album after the last member of his first band, The Castiles, passed away recently, leaving Bruce the last surviving member of his teenage band. Besides the new songs Bruce wrote about death and ghosts, Bruce recorded “If I Was The Priest” – along with two other unreleased songs from back in the day – with the E Street Band, for which I am very happy and grateful, because now we have a full band version of this amazing song. Bruce has what sounds like a gospel choir backing him up, and Steve Van Zandt contributes an outstanding guitar solo at the end of the song. It sounds like they recorded “If I Was The Priest” in 1975 instead of 2019. That’s a high compliment.

 

I was listening to “If I Was The Priest” full blast this afternoon while driving northbound on I-15 after picking up Tristen’s boys from their dad. Seven-year-old Maxwell complained about the volume, but ten-year-old Harrison told me how much he liked the song. Smart kid. Anyway, when the chorus of the song kicked in, I got a little misty eyed, because I realized how much my brother Phil, who is never far from my thoughts, would have enjoyed “If I Was The Priest”. It’s classic E Street Band rock and roll — which is the highest compliment I can give — and Phil would have loved Bruce’s rocking, slightly blasphemous take on the old west as much as Harrison and I were enjoying it. And ultimately, that’s the message of Bruce’s new album: music can help us feel the presence of people we love who are no longer with us. So Phil rode shotgun on the Fargo line — that’s a line from the song — with me as we headed home together, listening to a Springsteen masterpiece. The end.

 

70s Favorites: Underrated artists

Music from the early 1970s is my happy place. I made an iTunes playlist that consists entirely of music from that era that I listen to whenever I’m down or discouraged (which has been a lot, lately.) It’s funny, because I’m old enough to remember some of the music from the early 70s that I currently listen to when it first came out, but not all of it. My older brothers and sister didn’t listen to anything wilder than Simon & Garfunkel or The Carpenters – four artists I do like – so it was up to me to discover Who’s Next and Exile on Main Street on my own, which I did toward the end of the 1970s, when most of the contemporary music on the radio sucked.

 What I like most about music from the early 1970s is the quality and the diversity. Some of my favorite bands were at their creative peak, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, The Stones, and The Grateful Dead. Classic country by people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Buck Owens are a big part of my love for music from that era, as well as some superlative soul music by Marvin Gaye, Al Green, The Chi-Lites, and Stevie Wonder, among many others. But they weren’t the only game in town. Lesser known performers (for their era), such as Gram Parsons, Little Feat (a great, influential band that deserved to be bigger), Ry Cooder, and John Prine also put out some wonderful music. In the fall of 1973, Bruce Springsteen released one of his earliest and best albums, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, to fairly dismal sales. And there is a 1973 jazz/blues album by veteran performers Big Joe Turner and Count Basie entitled The Bosses that I absolutely love.

 Anyway, I was listening to my early 1970s playlist in my car yesterday, and Ry Cooder’s version of the Civil War anthem, “Rally ‘round The Flag” caught my ear. Cooder is an amazing guitarist, and he turned that old song into a slow blues, and it’s pretty great. I actually discovered the album that it’s from, Boomer’s Story, in 2007, thirty-five years after it was originally released. Ry Cooder has done some incredible music over his long career, but it doesn’t seem like many people have heard of him. Cooder digs up old songs and reimagines them in different musical genres. On Boomer’s Story, Ry Cooder performs an excellent instrumental version of James Carr’s late 60’s soul classic, “Dark End of The Street,” as well as the WWII chestnut, “Comin’ In On A Wing and a Prayer,” in a way that makes you think the guys in the plane probably didn’t make it. Like I said, good stuff. I was even lucky enough to find an original 1972 vinyl pressing of Boomer’s Story at Randy’s Records a few years ago.
 

So today I am paying tribute to the early 1970s by posting some albums that most people probably have never heard, but if you care about good music at all, you should. If you were fortunate enough to hear Ry Cooder’s Boomer’s Story, Big Joe Turner and Count Basie’s album The Bosses, Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken, Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel, and John Prine’s Sweet Revenge when they were first released, I congratulate you on your superb musical taste, and I’m kind of jealous.

Excitable Boy

 

Late spring 1978, and there was an incredible new song playing on the radio. It was called “Werewolves of London,” and my late brother Phil and I fell in love with it immediately. It hit all the right notes with us: werewolves, rocking guitar (provided by the legendary Waddy Wachtel, we later learned), howls, and the deep baritone voice of singer Warren Zevon. My other late brother, Ray, informed us that he had heard the whole album playing in a record store in Provo, and everything else on it was just as good as “Werewolves.” Ray said the album was named Excitable Boy.

 

That was it. I had to have it. My fourteenth birthday arrived and Phil gave me Excitable Boy, in LP format of course. Ray was right; the whole album WAS just as good as “Werewolves of London.” There were songs about a headless, well-armed, zombie mercenary soldier named Roland, a psycho killer who does unspeakable things to his prom date (with back-up vocals by Linda Ronstadt), and an innocent man hiding in Honduras (because he went home with a waitress who turned out to be a Russian spy) who needed lawyers, guns, and money to get himself out of his predicament.

 

Excitable Boy blew my fourteen-year-old mind, and I had to share the album with my late best friend Don. Warren Zevon hooked him, too. I then scrounged the money together to purchase Zevon’s other album (he only had two at the time), his self-titled debut that he had released in 1976, and it was even better than Excitable Boy. I became a life-long Zevon fan, and his music seldom disappointed me. I even saw him live in concert in 1988 at the Utah State Fairgrounds, when he opened for Los Lobos (now THAT was a damn good show.)

 

Zevon died of mesothelioma in 2003 at the too young age of 56 (the same age I am now), but not before releasing one last classic album, The Wind. Also before Warren died, David Letterman devoted one whole show to an interview with and music by Warren Zevon, where he revealed the most important lesson he had learned about life, the immortal words “Enjoy every sandwich.”

 

Thanks, Warren.

 

John Prine and Me

 

My acquaintance with John Prine’s music started fairly inauspiciously with the album Prime Prine: The Best of John Prine, an okay introduction to Prine’s music, but not the best. I inherited that used LP indirectly from one of my sister's college roommates in 1979, when I was fifteen. I liked it well enough, but I listened to it only infrequently because I hadn’t yet developed the empathy and patience that Prine’s music required. However, because of Prime Prine, I did become acquainted with Sam Stone and a plethora of other great Prine musical characters.

 

Sometime between 1979 and 1988 I became a genuine fan of John Prine’s music. I bought the album John Prine Live in the summer of ‘88, when I was working for the US Forest Service. It’s a great album - John Prine duets with Bonnie Raitt on the definitive version of “Angel From Montgomery,” and it also contains my favorite version of his classic, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I love John Prine Live. That summer my dad became gravely ill and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Fortunately he was with us another twenty-one years. Prine’s music was a part of that awful time.

 

For over a decade after that, whenever John Prine released an album, it became the soundtrack of whatever was going on in my life at the moment. The Missing Years reminds me of my last winter at USU in Logan in 1991-92 and my last summer of working for the USFS in 1992. I bought the two disc anthology Great Days in September 1993 and listened to it almost non-stop that fall, my second year of teaching. Great Days introduced me to Prine’s back catalog, especially the 1973 album, Sweet Revenge, which became my favorite John Prine album. From the cover photo – one of my favorite album covers ever – of Prine with a screw you cynical smile on his face and his cowboy boots propped up on the passenger door of his convertible, to the title song, to “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” to “A Good Time,” Sweet Revenge is classic John Prine.

 

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings came out in the spring of 1995. I bought it at my favorite record store at the time, Rock’s, in American Fork, UT. The album – especially the song “Lake Marie,” one of Prine’s greatest – reminds me of teaching at Midway Elementary that year. In Spite of Ourselves came out fall of 1999, right after I got married. In Spite of Ourselves is an album of country duets between John and a variety of great female singers. The high points of the album were two songs that he did with Iris Dement, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Not The Jet Set” and Prine’s original “In Spite of Ourselves,” another of his greatest (and funniest) songs. It’s a paean to a couple who love each other in spite of their foibles. That was something I aspired to in my marriage, but wasn’t succeeding at very well.

 

In 2005, at the height of George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Prine released Fair and Square. I was working as a principal at a charter school in Midway, UT, and I was separated from my (now) ex-wife, not for the first or last time. That album contains the song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” probably Prine’s most overtly political anthem. In it Prine sings:

“Have you ever noticed?

When you're feeling really good

There's always a pigeon

That'll come shit on your hood

Or you're feeling your freedom

And the world's off your back

Some cowboy from Texas

Starts his own war in Iraq”

Prine said one of his reasons for writing the song was “Jeez, if I get hit by a bus I would sure like the world to know that I was not a Republican.” I could definitely relate to that.

 

John Prine died on Monday, April 6, 2020, from complications from COVID-19. I cried when I heard about it, because it felt like I’d lost a friend. But John Prine’s songs - sad, funny, and supremely humane - will always be there for me. Vince Gill best described how Prine’s music makes me feel in his 2006 song “Some Things Never Get Old”:

“Makin' sweet love to that gal of mine

My first taste of bluebird wine

Eatin' watermelon down to the rind

Any old song by brother John Prine”

 

That’s a pretty good legacy.

The Wild, The Innocent, and The Eagle Mountain Shuffle*

*with apologies to Bruce Springsteen.

I drove to Eagle Mountain yesterday. I’ve been meaning to go back for a long time. I spent an hour there a little over a year ago — for the first time since 2011 — because I wanted to show the love of my life where my marriage fell apart, among other things. She wasn’t impressed with the place. My lady saw cheaply built houses spaced too closely together, and a remoteness that is frustrating until you get used to it, and then it’s kind of nice. And that was pretty much the only time I had been there until yesterday, with a few exceptions. I have a lot of unresolved issues that involve Eagle Mountain, and I went there thinking I might get some closure. I spent nearly six years in that little town, and I still think about my time in Eagle Mountain a lot. Every time I listen to John Mellencamp’s or Bruce Springsteen’s later work, it takes me right back there.

 I took my camera with me yesterday because I wondered if I could find any beauty in Eagle Mountain. I don’t know if I did. I spent several hours walking old routes that I took with my faithful pug, Waylon, years ago, while I took a few pictures. I’ll let the readers of this post decide for themselves if I succeeded.

My life wasn’t all bad in Eagle Mountain. I had a good job and worked for a principal whom I liked, which is increasingly rare for me nowadays. My kids attended the same school where I taught, which gave me the opportunity to see them everyday at work. I owned a house there, and my kids lived with me under the same roof, instead of seven hundred miles away as they do now. There are still people in Eagle Mountain who I consider friends. I had a period of stability there (outside of the shittiness of my marriage) that I have only recently regained. I hiked and biked in Eagle Mountain – which I loved because I didn’t have to worry about some idiot running me over, as I do here in the big city — and enjoyed the quiet and small town quality of the place.

However, for me, Eagle Mountain is haunted by memories that still make my heart ache for the loss of living with my kids full time, and haunted by the ghosts of what might have been had I been smart enough to see the trap I was creating for myself with the predominant culture. For the sake of marital and community harmony, I tried living a lie in Eagle Mountain and pretending that I liked it, and it didn’t work. God, I not only tried to be active LDS (although I never did get used to some Eagle Mountain LDS people claiming they lived “a higher law,” which apparently meant disbelieving that evolution was a thing, and that white shirt, tie, and clean shaven were what God required), I also pretended to be a conservative. You can stop laughing now. 

As I wrote earlier, my marriage ended there (although it was a long time coming), and the results of what my ex falsely claimed about me caused some sanctimonious school district people in the most Mormon county in the state to decide I was no longer worthy of working in a school district that, in many ways, is an extension of the LDS Church. Basically, they made my life so miserable in the district that I quit.

I wrote years ago that the former HR director of Alpine District thought he was the stake president of human resources, rather than the director, and he treated anyone as persona non grata whom he didn’t feel was living LDS standards. I say that with full confidence of it being true, because every time this person opened his big, fat mouth, the only thing he talked about was his LDS Church calling. He also vigorously pursued people for doing things in their personal lives that in most other school districts would not have been relevant to their employment. Yes, Mr. Spencer was a piece of work, but he was not an anomaly. The whole district reflected LDS Church guidelines in dress and behavior. I say that without bitterness now — although it took me years to get rid of that bitterness.

I didn’t mean for this post to turn into an LDS Church bashing session, but as I write I realize there is no way around it. The LDS Church created the culture in Eagle Mountain that made living there unsustainable as long as I was an active member of the church. The attitude of LDS leaders and the edicts they issued — let’s be honest, the bullshit they spouted and the herd instinct of the members there — made life miserable, and when that bullshit encompasses every aspect of your life, both professionally and personally, it’s a big deal. The LDS Church set the agenda for the area and everyone followed more or less blindly, just because there weren’t any alternatives for a social or spiritual life. As a post Mormon, I can see clearly how abusive and coercive the church is, especially in Eagle Mountain. And as it turned out, when my ex decided she was done with our marriage, she used the church as a cudgel to beat me with.

So yeah, I have some issues with my past in Eagle Mountain. Strangely, after walking around familiar places yesterday, I think I could live there again. I am no longer religious, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the hypocrisy and the sanctimony of the predominant culture. I could ignore it and just ride my bike and go for walks and appreciate the tranquility without worrying about what my bishop thought or what the stake president preached in church last Sunday. Hell, maybe I could even get another dog to follow me.

Honestly, my life is happier now. I have a great girlfriend who loves and cares about me, and provides very little drama in my life. I see my girls, but not nearly as often as I would like. I work for a principal who doesn’t suck. I now drive a vehicle that gets me where I’m going, is paid for, and doesn’t embarrass me. It’s twenty years old, but what the hell, I like it anyway. It’s been a while since that happened, and it’s because of what happened in Eagle Mountain.

Unfortunately, having the most important things in my life — time with my girls, my job, and my house — stolen from me will hurt for a long time. And I’m not sure closure is even possible, because that would require ignoring my feelings about the worst experiences of my life. I do realize I still have to live my life, however. Living in the present is more important than living in the past, no matter how much pain I endured when I lived there. Guess I’ll just have to call it a draw between Eagle Mountain (and all it represents, which is the main thing) and myself.

Anyway, here are the pictures where I tried to make Eagle Mountain look purdy, along with pictures of where I used to live …

From one of my old biking routes.

This is the place … maybe.

It can be pretty, if you look at it just right.

Where I lived.

It looked better when I lived there. It had trees and a fence. Ugh.

   

My route when I walked to work. There were fewer houses then. I think I actually made this look pretty.

"Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar eats you ..."

September 2007. Lucky to be alive.

The title is a Sam Elliot quote from one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski. A clip from YouTube is posted below. It pretty well sums up my story in this blog post. Sometimes, when you least expect it, death comes up and narrowly misses biting you on the ass. That happened to me nine years ago this weekend...

In September 2007 my life was pretty good. I was forty-three years old, I owned a house in Eagle Mountain, UT (not the greatest place in the universe to live, but at least the mortgage company and I had a roof over my head), I had three amazing daughters, a minivan and an ancient SUV, and I had a job I liked that was a five minute walk from home.

Despite all that, things weren’t quite right. The previous summer I had acquired my first strep infection in over thirty years. It put me flat on my back for nearly a week and I never felt like I completely recovered. I was tired and weak most of the time, and any sort of physical exertion gave me shortness of breath and dizziness. During my first walk to work of the new school year I had to stop every few minutes, lean over with my head between my legs, and try to catch my breath. Clearly something was amiss.

On Saturday, September 8, my family and I were visiting my in-laws at their home in a hilly area on the upper east side of Provo, UT. Because I was bored and because my optimism overcame my common sense, I decided to go for an afternoon walk. I started out on a route that I had walked a thousand times before. It was a strenuous route, but not overly so; in previous years, when my kids were younger, I usually carried one of them over my shoulder or under an arm while I hiked the area. 

However, on that warm September afternoon I thought my walk was going to kill me. I had barely gone half my usual route before I had to turn around and go back to my in-laws’ house, because I literally couldn’t catch my breath. My face was pale and I had broken out into a cold sweat before I even walked through the front door. I flopped into a chair and basically scared everyone in the room to death. My in-laws insisted I take an aspirin in case I was having a heart attack. I asserted that I wasn’t, but I couldn't move from the chair for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day was Sunday and I felt awful. I spent all morning and most of the afternoon prostrate on a couch in my man cave, too exhausted to move. I don’t remember much about the day other than my kids were in and out checking on me, and I had no energy for even the most basic life functions, such as eating or bathing. 

Finally my ex-wife — to her credit — told me she was taking me to the emergency room. She called a neighbor who was a nurse and he told us that the hospital in Provo had the best cardiac care unit. The Provo Hospital was thirty miles away, so my ex arranged for her parents to meet us at the hospital and pick up the kids.

As soon as I described my symptoms the admitting nurse moved me to the head of the line for treatment, in front of other people with obvious bloody bodily injuries. The admitting physician was — coincidentally — an old high school acquaintance, and when I reported what I was feeling, he immediately admitted me to the hospital for testing. I remember being wheeled to my hospital room in a wheelchair and thinking that I could have walked to the room myself, although in reality there was probably no way I was capable of actually doing it. The delusions of a very sick man, I guess. The rest of the day is kind of a blur. I remember a visit from my ward elders’ quorum president — the only LDS Church leader to actually care, which is a story for another time — and not much else.

The next day, Monday, September 10, was hell. I remember lab techs hooking me up to a bunch of monitors and trying to jog on a treadmill. I couldn’t do it, which devastated me so completely that I broke down crying. I had always prided myself on being in reasonably good physical condition, so my inability to do something as simple as jogging on a treadmill scared me badly. The lab tech injected me with a drug that caused my body to react as if I had been able to complete the stress test on the treadmill. That medication made feel terrible — severe muscle cramps, shortness of breath, and nausea — and it was about that time my dad called. I told him what was going on and I think I scared him badly.

I honestly don’t remember much that happened after that. They wheeled me to an operating room where they injected dye into my cardiovascular system. A cardiologist found a blockage in one of the main arteries of my heart. The blockage was nearly one hundred percent (I found out later that a strep infection can cause plaque that already exists to expand rapidly.) The doc ran a catheter through an artery in my groin and opened the blockage, and then inserted a stent. I woke up the next morning to a few stitches in my groin, news stories about the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and a brand new, expensive piece of metal in my heart. A cardiac therapist told me to take it easy for a few weeks, but I actually felt better than I had in months. 

So that was my brush with death. Apparently I was a few days away from a major cardiac event due to the blockage in my heart. There should be all sorts of life lessons I could impart now, such as the temporary nature of life and how easily it can slip away, the inevitability of death (which I rediscovered less than a year and half later when my dad unexpectedly died in his sleep), and how easily and quickly things can potentially change for the worse. All of that is true, but the biggest lesson I learned is that I am sometimes one lucky sumbich. 

My belief system has changed a lot since September 2007, but I still think that there may be some primordial universal force that occasionally smiles on us and blesses us with good fortune. I don’t know why that happens; I look at places like Syria and the people fleeing the carnage there and wonder why them and not me. I’ve had a lot of really lousy things happen in my life since then, but I am still amazed that I lucked out so completely that September day, when I could have keeled over and left my kids without a father. I like to think they still need me; maybe they're why I'm still around.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I’m still here. Despite it’s challenges, my life is good. I’m living more authentically (another phrase I hate, but I don’t know how else to say it) and I’m finding out what it’s like to actually be loved for who I am and appreciated for the talents I have to offer. 

It’s a good feeling.

Back to the Hairy Liberal Curmudgeon

Eight years ago I started a blog. I did it because I was very opinionated — I was a liberal living in a conservative small town in the heart of a conservative county in a conservative, reactionary state — and I didn’t feel like I had an outlet to express my opinions. I also worked in a conservative school district that had many heavy handed, unnecessary policies that were rooted in the predominant, reactionary religious culture. In other words, I was stuck in Crazy Mormon Town without a voice, but I needed one for my own emotional well being. I love to write, so blogging seemed like a natural solution to my problem.

My ex-wife suggested I name the blog “Hairy Liberal Curmudgeon.” I didn’t realize at the time that the word “hairy” would attract Google attention that I didn't necessarily want, but it did eventually amuse me that people searching for photos of hirsute guys or women would inadvertently land on my daddy blog instead, and be subjected to my rantings. I blogged about a lot of different things — politics, religion, education, my family, and the strange community where I lived at the time. My blog was way more popular than I ever expected it would be, especially after I used my Facebook page to publicize each new blog post.

I loved to blog. As I look back at my old posts, I’m embarrassed by some of my more boneheaded blogging, but I also like the posts that still ring true. Through my blog I dealt with some difficult events in my life; death, divorce, loneliness, and unemployment were all topics that I tackled at various times. Some of my blog posts caused me some personal problems and in hindsight, I — maybe — should have been a little more discreet. I don’t regret blogging though, and I sometimes wish I still blogged more frequently. The ideas are still there; the energy and ambition aren’t.

All of that navel gazing is my way of saying that I am reviving my original “Hairy Liberal Curmudgeon” blog, and I’m using Blogger as the vehicle for publishing it. Wordpress is probably a better format, but I kind of like the symmetry of going back to Blogger. If nothing else, it has a retro, old-school look that screams 2008.

Anyway, I’m hoping to publish something that’s actually meaningful here soon. Stay tuned.