My Own Space
Tonight is one of those evenings when it’s fucking great to be alive. Did you see that baseball game??!! Just when you think it’s passe, trumped by football, even the NBA, baseball sneaks up on you and illustrates why it’s the best sport ever. It’s never over until it’s over. A football game can be a blowout, ditto for basketball, but you always have hope in baseball. I only lament the younger generation on the east coast wasn’t awake to see it. To have their father call out to come watch what was happening on television, it was incredible! And that’s why they’re professionals, they hit in the clutch, whereas mere mortals would freeze.
And then I got lucky, Ralphs had Dannon coffee yogurt in stock. This is like finding your local dope dealer has Humboldt County skunk weed available, and it’s thirty percent off. Yup, that was the deal at Ralphs, I cleaned them out.
And then I go down Chautauqua to take the long way home. The 405 is so messed up you’ve got to second-guess it. And that’s when I heard "My Own Space".
I always liked "Book Of Dreams" better than "Fly Like An Eagle". Yes, it’s got the exquisite "Jet Airliner", the overplayed "Swingtown" and lame "Jungle Love", as well as the "Rocky Mountain Way" rip-off "The Stake", but buried deep in the second side is this gem. Which hearkens back to what came before, when it was called the Steve Miller Blues Band, when AM radio didn’t play anything on FM, when it was about sound and feel and let the charts be damned. Buy any of the first three albums. My favorite is "Brave New World" with "Kow Kow", many prefer the first, but you can’t go wrong with the second, with "Quicksilver Girl"…and "My Own Space" sounds straight from that canon.
I walked on the beach in the early morn
I ran on the sand till I could breathe no more
I stood on a rock looking out at the sea
And believed what I said when I said
I feel free
That’s it. FREEDOM!
Not the freedom to tell other people they can’t have an abortion, not the freedom to refrain from paying taxes, but the freedom to let your mind drift and feel good.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost the gene, I’d rather read about the computer geeks than the musicians, then I hear the right song at the right time and I believe this is the essence of life, driving in my car, alone in my cocoon, listening to music.
Now I must say, after this Petula Clark’s "Downtown" sounded damn good, as did the end of "Fire and Rain", maybe it was just one of those evenings. But when I fired up Spotify and listened to "My Own Space" again I knew it was special.
I can stand on this rock, high on Mulholland Drive, and look back over the decades of my life, from the Beatles to now, this great landscape of music. And I feel rich. I feel like part of the 1%.
