Liner notes: Crows In The Corn

The hills of western Massachusettes  were disappearing behind me.  I was headed towards upstate New York then down to PA and west from there. That was the plan and that was it.  It was the 1970’s and the revolution was dead. Hippies no more. The streets, the highways, the cities, the country was burnt and fried to a crisp with a paranoid president standing on a ledge threatening to jump. There was a meanness, a madness and a steel edge in the air. Only the hard core remained. The drug casualties, vets, small time hustlers. Vietnam, music, the future was exhausted. The rock stars were busy buying real estate. Last of the radicals were being hunted down. The boys in the boardrooms were jittery. The train was off the track. The lies had to be remarketed. I had a guitar, a change of clothes and not much more.

Sitting at the bar in Mills Tavern NYC 10 cent beers watching a friend play the blues. It all comes back it all goes away. It goes faster and faster.

Lake Street station, Madison Wisconsin, late night fever, tequila, face on the floor. Moses says he headed for Portland. I says I got to go NYC. It’s January it’s 20 below, what am I thinking. Flashback, flash ahead. Telegraph avenue, Congress Avenue, lower Broadway, West End Avenue. New Orleans in a haze, Somerville, East Village, Boulder, Chicago, Nashville, Austin, Houston in a blur. Downers, uppers, joints laced with angel dust, Washington Square, LSD, tied to a tree, Desolation Wilderness, Lake Tahoe. Drunken  nights, McSoreley’s Tavern, Folk City, Inns Square Mens bar, Kettle of Fish, the Gold Rush, Springwater, Douglas Corner, South Austin. Jobs in factories, warehouses, construction, machine shops, woodshops, yardwork, painting, driving trucks, no jobs, no home, standing on a street corner singing for mercy, Phil Ochs wandering by dropping a fifty bill in your buddy’s guitar case.  Late night rides on the “D” train. Singing in far away places, down at the corner bar, coffee joints, singing for drunks, for the indifferent. Meanwhile the drums of the great machine keep on pounding. Another day, another week, another month, another year. You look up and you realize what’s done is done, what’s gone is gone. People, friends, relations move on, disappear, die. Love comes and goes, love comes and stays, you keep a brave face, you keep it together, you do what you do and somehow you survive.
 

TO
Manslaughter, Tx
2021