(Personal reflections inspired by Who songs)
Song: “Mike Post Theme”
Album: Endless Wire
Release Date: October,
2006
“Vicarious Dad”: This is how I sign off my emails and
chats to daughter Charlotte these days. It
wasn’t difficult to dream that one up.
After all, Charlotte has spent the last 3-plus months on a
semester-abroad tropical-ecology program in Panama; a trip that has included
excursions throughout the country, from rain forests to cloud forests,
volcanoes to coral reefs, mangrove swamps to tropical islands. Charlotte has stayed with Panamanian families
in small villages and lush agricultural regions, as well as an indigenous
culture (the Naso people) where the only way to get to their remote locale was
upriver by boat. She’s seen sloths,
howler monkeys, vipers, armadillos, anteaters, geckos, agouti, peccary, coati, tree
frogs, fruit bats, tarantulas, bizarre insects, tropical fish, tropical birds, sharks,
Portuguese man o’ war, sea turtles, and got up-close and friendly with a
barracuda. Charlotte has also made great
friends with the other 25 ecology students she has traveled with, and has made
wonderful connections with the extremely gracious families she has stayed
with. And so I can vouch for the fact,
that when your daughter is having such experiences, you do live vicariously.
The past few weeks have been a bit trickier to enjoy
from afar, however. For the required ‘independent
study’ part of the curriculum, Charlotte chose to head four hours west of
Panama City, to the highland hamlet of Santa Fe, gateway to a large National
Park of the same name. This would be her
home base to conduct a water quality and macro-invertebrate sampling project at
selected points along the Santa Maria River.
Preparation was a bit of a scramble for equipment, data, research, and
general logistics, considering that there was little time to prepare after the
previous adventure. All seemed to be
coming together a week or so in, until Charlotte’s laptop failed. After a hapless attempt at self-repair, we surfed
the web and found a computer store in Santiago; a fairly large town several
hours down the valley. Charlotte
immediately set off. Their
diagnosis: A colony of tiny white ants
had taken over the innards and wreaked havoc on the motherboard (this story I
passed on to a long-term professor friend at URI who jokingly stated he had
thought he’d heard it all for student excuses).
After a week trying to repair it (and, thank goodness recovering her
data), the techies at the store concluded the laptop was ready. Initially this appeared the case, but later
that day after Charlotte returned to Santa Fe, it fried up again, this time for
good. Back to Santiago and, one used
computer purchase later, Charlotte was finally back on track, albeit understandably
frazzled and a week behind on her on-line research. ** Side Note: During that chaotic week,
Charlotte stated to me that looking back over the months prior she wondered why
every time she opened her laptop there would be a few tiny white ants scurrying
about.
The reason I bring all this up is not so much to gush
over how proud Nancy and I have been while witnessing our daughter’s
grace-under-pressure (though that doesn’t hurt). It’s to give some backdrop to Charlotte’s
plans the morning after that half day spent going back and forth to the
computer store in Santiago. For it was then that she went through with an
earlier commitment to reconnect with several of her new found friends, who were
doing their independent studies on a Caribbean island, Bocas del Toro, which
happened to be on the other side of the continental divide, with few mountain-pass
roads to get there. Charlotte did not
have to add this leg. After all, she had
been through quite the ordeal. But she still
insisted on going. She figured out the complex
bus schedule, a 12 hour journey - ultimately way out of her way for the
tail-end of her semester these next few weeks - and made it work.
One day, Charlotte will do a much better job describing
all of this on her own. I’m simply
trying to encapsulate enough here to hopefully reveal what I see to be a personal
pilgrimage of hers on multiple fronts. I
can say this for certain, because as Charlotte’s adventure unfolded these past
weeks, particularly that last part, it all felt so familiar. In other words, it was exactly as I would
have done. My daughter’s ‘road less traveled’ has been my journey too. I told Charlotte that those friends she was
visiting in Bocas del Toro, if they are true friends, will forever be affected
by her commitment to making these last weeks in Panama work on an interpersonal
level.
I know this only because it’s what true friend Bob told
me many years after one particular journey I made to Ottawa from North Adams to
connect with him and my other Canadian friends a year after going to school
there. Due to a last minute conflict, brother
Fred was unable to make the drive from Franklin to pick me up. Without a car, and rain pelting the windows
to my apartment, I chewed on this predicament some, but soon became
undeterred. I begged a short ride from a
friend to Rte. 7 on the southern end of the Vermont border where I stepped out
of her car and stuck out my thumb. A
handful of eventful rides later (including the back of a hay truck) I was in
Burlington Vermont with Mac, who was going to school at Saint Michaels and who
now joined me on my quest. Several even-more-eventful
rides later (a story in and of itself), the two of us arrived in Montreal where
Bob drove to from Ottawa to pick us up.
All in all it was a 15-hour day-and-night affair, but in the end well
worth it.
Is it the journey that makes the person or the person
that makes the journey? I’ve pondered this all week, and it started, not with
Charlotte’s adventures, but with my immersion into the Who’s 2006 conceptual Endless Wire album. This in turn opened up a self-reflection,
particularly in relation to this blog series, which has been a journey in its
own unique way. My thought process
unfolded in somewhat convoluted fashion, but I’m going to take a stab at a
recap.
Endless Wire was the Who’s return to form
after a 24 year hiatus from the studio. At
last, Pete Townshend had decided to do another collaborative effort with his old
band, which involved coming to terms with what the band meant to him as a
creative force. By this time the Who
were being dubbed “The Two”, with the passing of John Entwistle just four years
prior. Townshend and Roger Daltrey did
have a great supporting cast, but the original ensemble had now been halved. Could they pull it off?
I have to admit to a touch of ambivalence upon my first
go-around with Endless Wire when the album
was first released. I could rattle off
the reasons, but now there’s really no need, seeing as I gained a new
appreciation for Endless Wire this
week. Sometimes it comes down to making
a mental breakthrough (see 17th in a series of Stepping Stones
“Tapping into my Inner Grasshopper” 4/27/12), which was the case here. This enlightenment may simply be in my mind
only, but sometimes that’s what Rock and Roll is all about, and so the insight
had quite the stimulating effect, which pretty much comes down to the
following: The Who released a 6-song concept
EP, Wire and Glass, immediately prior
to the final product, Endless Wire; a
21 song effort which included the entirety of the EP. Wire
and Glass is a futuristic concept centered on three neighborhood friends of
humble origins and from different ethnic and religious backgrounds that become
rock stars and then lose it all (much of this is not easy to discern). Serious Who fans could not help but make the
correlation to Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle, growing up in the same
neighborhood and forming a band together (Keith Moon would come on board a few
years later). The breakthrough for me was
making a theme connection between this concept-part of Endless Wire, and the rest of the album, which comes across as very
autobiographical to the then much older (and wiser) Who. The concept conceals this connection, but the
more I listened, the more it made sense.
And so, it appears that what Pete Townshend has done here is to write a
concept inside a concept. When I came to that conclusion I checked my head to
make sure it had not exploded.
When I say autobiographical to the Who, and not Pete
Townshend in particular, I’m not making an error. Core themes in Townshend’s writing for the
Who have always been centered on spirituality, music, and the Who
themselves. Townshend has had quite the
solo career, and there is overlap of the spirituality theme in both his Who and
solo songs. But the other two themes are
almost entirely a Who-centered component of his writing. One song on the album that is revealing in
this way is the closing number “Tea & Theatre”, which seems to overlap the
concept and that loose Who autobiography that plays out in the rest of the
album. “One of us – gone; One of us –
mad; One of us – me; All of us sad”, Roger Daltrey sings, reflecting his
band’s story and the futuristic concept.
Whenever the Who have played this live, usually at the end of their set,
Roger Daltrey gets melancholy (and Mac rolls his eyes), which is unlike his
typical stage presence
Another number, “You Stand By Me”, is an apparent Pete
Townshend thank you to Roger Daltrey for being there for him in tough times (particularly
the then fresh wound of being cautioned by British police on an on-line
sex-offenders charge – later disproven and dropped). Of the interrelationships in the Who, that
between Townshend and Daltrey has always seemed to be the most distant and
dicey. It took the death of their two
bandmates and many years of being on the road together to close that
circle. “God Speaks of Marty Robbins”
is a wonderfully melodic acoustic number which attempts to take God’s
perspective as He was creating the universe: “Wake up and hear the music play”, Townshend sings in his most
angelic tenor. Even at the time of Creation, it was about the music for Pete
Townshend.
The EP title track, “Endless Wire”, is moving in its own
way. After all these years, Pete Townshend
was still yearning to tap into his youthful imagination (the aborted Lifehouse concept in this case: See Big Top # 7 “A Change of Plans”) and in
turn open himself back up to that intense thought process. He actually addresses that thought process in
this week’s Big Top entry, “Mike Post Theme” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Zmh-KlYZo ), a song about trying to remain emotionally connected in the modern
digital age. This is fascinating to me,
and gets back to my earlier comment about this blog site. “Mike Post Theme” laments to some degree how
sound bites, digital ‘thumbs up’, and hashtags are replacing true heartfelt exchanges
via conversation and letter writing. It
does acknowledge that those emotions can be unleashed when we connect with our
favorite TV shows for example (hence the title, which refers to the man who has
penned some of TVs best theme songs), but this cannot substitute for true communication.
The paradox of all this is that the digital age gives us
an unprecedented platform to network with others in profound ways. Pete Townshend attempted to do this in the
build up to Endless Wire, writing his
thoughts on his then very creative and active blog site, which welcomed
feedback from readers. These musings
very likely inspired me to start up my own blog site, which in a funny sort of
twist, is now building upon thoughts I dream up by listening to Townshend’s
music.
This entry has been all about parallels and interconnectivity:
Charlotte ‘road less’ travelled to mine; Pete Townshend’s futuristic concept to
the Who’s story; my attempt in this blog series to hurdle the laments expressed
in “Mike Post Theme”. I’d like to close
with one more interconnection. Aside
from the direct correlation I made between us after seeing Charlotte’s
determination and commitment to friendship this past week, I was also
enlightened by it in another way. I
truly believe the traits Charlotte showed us this past week also reflect free
will open-mindedness. As such, I predict
Charlotte will forever be able to hurdle those “Mike Post Theme” limitations
too.
With that, I believe all interconnections in this entry have
been tied.
- Pete
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