We teach our children virtue then we send them off to war
Then we ask ourselves the question, what in the hell are we fighting for

"Same Old Wine"

In Mexico City before the gig it came out that Larry grew up in Argentina.  With that, I had to know more, how did this happen, how did he get from DOWN UNDER to working for AEG?

It involved his father working for the State Department.  A couple more South American countries.  But, after his dad died suddenly, Larry found himself ensconced in Montebello.  Not that he minded.  You’d think he would freak, going from private school to a multi-cultural institution with a graduating class of two thousand.  But Larry embraced the Southern California lifestyle.  He went surfing.  He got into radio at Pasadena City College.  He was a page at ABC.  Then he got drafted.

Imagine the possibility of YOUR ass getting sent over to Iraq.  THEN you’ll know how we felt back in the late sixties and early seventies.  For a while there, as long as you stayed in school, you were clear.  Then they only gave you four years.  When you were eighteen, you got your draft card.  It was just a matter of time before you would be shuffling off to Canada or battling gooks.  You got drunk, thought about girls, but in the back of your mind you always confronted the possibility that your life could be cut short.  Real soon.

I thought it was too late for a Loggins & Messina reunion.  That their audience no longer cared.  THEIR kids were in college.  They’d rather watch DVDs on the home theatre than go to the multiplex.  This wasn’t Fleetwood Mac, and even Fleetwood Mac can’t do sellout business anymore.  Would they come to see Loggins & Messina?

Felice constantly reminds me that we’re closer to the end than the beginning.  But I don’t want to believe it.  Then I go to a gig like this.  And see the people.  It’s positively frightening.  Loggins & Messina weren’t even a SIXTIES act, they didn’t even DEBUT until the seventies, but there was more gray hair in attendance than blond or brunette.  Bodies were lumpy.  This was my generation, no getting around it, and it was scary.

At the backstage box office they didn’t have our tickets.  They were up at the PEOPLE’S box office, where the LINES were.  But Mike Krebs offered to run up and get them for us.  It pays to have friends.  And there were an astounding number of friends there.  Lisa said it was like the Pollstar Conference.  And it wasn’t only the fiftysomethings.  Marc Friedenberg was there.  More fortysomethings.  You see, unlike today’s tunes, the music of the seventies had shelf life, it not only penetrated down the age scale, it survived past its initial chart success.

It was an evening with, and, as Milt told me, Jimmy is punctual, so the gig started on time.  Which was eight o’clock.

And it’s freaky being at the shed (well, there’s no roof in SoCal, but you get the idea) when it’s still light out.  It removes the drama and the charisma from the performance.  Still, it was like they were playing in our living room.  Larry had us parked dead center in the first permanent row.  And sometimes this can be too close, but not this evening, the sound was perfect.

It was the entire original lineup.  In instrumentation.  Not only the drummer and piano player, but the reedsmen too.  All behind a scrim.  Up front were Kenny & Jimmy.  With their guitars.

God, it’s been LIGHT YEARS since I’ve seen Loggins & Messina.  I’ve been to see so many has-beens since.  The thought that the frontmen would actually PLAY, without SUPPORT, never crossed my mind.  But Kenny & Jimmy played every guitar part.  Well.

Oh, they started off with hits.  That’s what Lisa told me, I’d hear all the hits.  But half a dozen songs in, when Jimmy tore into "Changes", a warm, fuzzy feeling coursed through my body, kind of like when they inject you with that dye before they take pictures of your insides.

I endured a white knuckle drive from Salt Lake City to Sun Valley one afternoon in February 1975 that I’ll never forget.  The only thing that got me through was "Mother Lode".  With the snow blowing and the asphalt of the Interstate unseeable I wasn’t able to eject the cassette and insert something new.  That split second might have me in the ditch on the side of the road.  All I could do was let the tape play, over and over again.

That’s when you fall in love.  When you’re on a long drive and you’ve exhausted your everyday life.  It’s THEN that you reveal who you truly are.  When you’re locked up in a machine with nowhere to go.  It’s like being in a foxhole.  You bond.

It was a Maxell cassette I’d made from my sister’s vinyl album.  Yet that tape, which I still have today, had a value far exceeding the cost of the cassette.  Wrapped up in that little machine were my friends.  Two guys who had been through something with me.  We might have gone our separate ways since, but we were forever linked.

I downloaded every track on "Mother Lode" from Napster.  And I PLAYED them.  They always reminded me of that dark February afternoon.  But I didn’t expect Loggins & Messina to play any of them.  For even though the album went Top Ten, none of those songs were hits.

And then Jimmy was playing "Changes".

And at this point it’s starting to get dark.  It’s that eerie time of day when if you’re my age you have trouble seeing.  You’re leaving the external world behind, and just living in your mind.

But it wasn’t only "Changes".  They played "Sailin’ The Wind".  "Be Free".  "Whiskey".  All the songs that I thought only I knew, that I thought only I was a fan of.  The ones that not only I heard in southern Idaho but Middlebury, Vermont.  It’s so far away, so many years ago, but hearing just one note of those old tracks brings me back to my dorm room.  Lying on the bed, listening.  I’d like to tell you I’m a different person now, but I’m not.  And that feels good and bad.  Good to know that there’s a continuum, bad to know that you take your problems, your mind-set, everywhere.

During the break Andy spoke of the energy level.  That they were great, but he just wasn’t FEELING IT!  And Andy’s a fan.  He might be the agent for Social D., but he also represents Richie Furay.

And, after intermission, Jimmy played "Kind Woman".  Which I thought was going to make Andy wince, but then he credited Richie as its author.

Still, he played "You Better Think Twice".  From the second Poco album.  That’s why I bought "Sittin’ In".  Because of Jimmy’s HISTORY!

And they played "Your Mama Don’t Dance" at the end of the first set.  MOST of the big hits came before the break.  And, in the second half, they played the extended numbers.  They started to amp it up.

May 23rd of last year, driving way past dark, I heard something completely familiar, yet I couldn’t place it.  How did I KNOW this song?  What was it.  I looked down at the XM readout, of course it was Loggins & Messina, but "Same Old Wine"?

I pulled up at the Shell station in the Palisades but I couldn’t get out.  I was running my mental rolodex.  What ALBUM was this from?  I might not be able to download it quickly.  I’d better enjoy it.

And it went on and on.  "Same Old Wine" is eight minutes and seventeen seconds long.  But I couldn’t pump my gas, I couldn’t move.

And when I got home, I downloaded it.  It’s from "Sittin’ In".  Even though the track is so long, according to iTunes I’ve played it 25 times since then.  Never mind listening on my iPod.  It was the second song I wanted to hear, NEEDED to hear, after "Changes".  And about halfway through the second set, I heard the violin.  Jimmy started to pick.  I started to get woozy.

"Well we give them the election…"

It wasn’t like today.  There was a very clear dividing line.  We were liberals, we were Democrats, but the people in power, making the decisions, the President, they were Republicans.  The disconnect was palpable.  Only exceeded by what we’re feeling today.  How could it be that we were in this unjust war, that we might DIE for an old man’s folly?  We just wanted to get high, chase girls, get on with our lives, how come we were POWERLESS!

Everybody felt this way.  Everybody under thirty.  It wasn’t just the males.  And what brought us together, and KEPT us together, was music.  The musicians didn’t do a focus group before going on record, weren’t worried about hurting their careers, they just said what they believed.  And we listened.

Loggins & Messina weren’t the Rolling Stones.  Not even Crosby, Stills & Nash.  But second-tier bands back then were LIGHT YEARS bigger than the major acts of today.  All their albums went gold, they sold out arenas, they were household names.  Because, you see, music ruled.

Because music was different.  Music was an EXPERIENCE!  You dropped the needle on the album, kicked back, and listened.  Maybe you smoked a little dope, maybe you talked with your friend, or maybe you just sat alone in your space, listening.  You didn’t need to multi-task, that wasn’t even a virtue, just listening to music was enough.

Those days might be through.  The world is no longer that small.  Coldplay’s "X & Y" is the largest selling album in the world, yet you don’t FEEL IT!  Oh, the trade press trumpets the success, but Loggins & Messina meant more thirty years ago than Coldplay does today.  There were fewer diversions, everybody was focused, everybody was paying attention.  And the album tracks were every bit as important as the hits, we knew them just as well.  And to hear them Wednesday night, in all their glory…brought me right back.

It wasn’t only "Same Old Wine".  There was "Trilogy".  And "You Need A Man".  All the tunes embedded in our DNA, the kind of tunes that are meaningless today, that bands don’t even play live, the ALBUM TRACKS, they played them.  It was a return to the days of glory.

And the encore was…

Time, time and again
I’ve seen you starin’ out at me

Now, then and again, I wonder
What it is that you see

Oh, right now there are tattooed baby boomers resplendent in black clothing puking, saying it’s all about the Ramones, the Sex Pistols.  And, although I’m not a big Johnny Rotten fan, I love not only "Rockaway Beach", but "Blitzkrieg Bop" too.  That music had its place.  Still, to dismiss what came before is to display ignorance.  Finally, in the early seventies, everybody could PLAY!  It was about musicianship, creativity, stretching out, testing the limits, to the point where the almost eight minute "Angry Eyes" was just as big a hit in the mind of the listener as "Your Mama Don’t Dance".  "Your Mama Don’t Dance" was for radio, "Angry Eyes" was for us.

Kenny Loggins looks astoundingly good.  Closer to fortysomething than fiftysomething.  Time has not been as good to Jimmy.  But contrary to our faded memories, Jimmy was every part Kenny’s equal in this band.  Not only did he play the notes, he wrote and sang some of your favorite stuff.

They exuded no charisma.  Hanging five feet away from Kenny after the show, I had no desire to meet him, to talk to him.  Because you see it wasn’t about the cult of personality, but the MUSIC!

And they might have made it, but all these years later, it’s MY music.  It’s MY life.

There are no commercials in my brain.  No endorsement deals.  In my mental radio all I’ve got is my life.  Sometimes I’m collecting new data, but most of the time I’m just playing my soundtrack, the one I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of listening.  Then again, sometimes I’m having new experiences and playing the old tunes in my head.  Actually, that’s when I feel most alive, when something new is happening and an old song spontaneously cues itself up in my mind, with a specific lyric.

Felice is right.  Our time here is limited.  There’s more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than the top.  And now, with this new perspective, I can see that not only will I be forgotten, but that life is not about answers and the people who preach don’t know shit, certainly no more than you or me.  Took me a lifetime to realize this, but now I know.  That my life and my experiences and my insight are just as valid as theirs are.  You’re supposed to play that which is edgy, you’re supposed to impress your friends with the music you listen to.  But I just want to play what sounds good.  Loggins & Messina sounded good back then, and they still do today.

It all seems so long ago.  College.  The Vietnam War.

Our experiences were all different, but really, they’re the same.

In any other era, I would never know Larry Vallon.  But the music brought us together.  We’re fans.  We needed to be closer.

I know you need to be close too.

Actually, we all do.  It was just about impossible to find someone who didn’t believe back then.  A lot of the music is fading from public consciousness, but it’s our shared history.  All those records that came in cardboard covers, that we dropped the needle on, that we flipped over to hear the other side.

We survived.  Many people did not.  Not only the soldiers in Vietnam, but the drug casualties, others who lost their way.

We’re still connected.  You might think it’s about BMWs, four thousand square foot houses and exotic vacations, but it’s really just about the music.  Your physical possessions you have to leave behind, but you can take your tunes with you, EVERYWHERE!  Oh, it helps to have them on an iPod, but you don’t really need the device, they’re in your head, playing, all the time, keeping you company.