{"id":17594,"date":"2021-07-05T18:06:26","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T02:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=17594"},"modified":"2021-07-05T18:13:58","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T02:13:58","slug":"merrimack-county-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2021\/07\/05\/merrimack-county-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Merrimack County"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/570709764?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/570709764?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Tom Rush screwed up. He sent this Vimeo link in his weekly Patreon missive, which means you can see it until he takes it down, not that I&#8217;d advise him to.<\/p>\n<p>Patreon is good if you&#8217;re not looking to grow, if you want to service your hard core audience, which can&#8217;t get enough of you and is willing to support you. As for growth, Tom just turned 80, fifty years ago we thought you&#8217;d be dead by then, but now Ringo is 80, and McCartney is on the verge, and once when I asked Tom about getting older, what it all means, what choices you should make, he told me you&#8217;ve got no choice but to keep doing what you do, in his case making music.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t say it felt like a July 4th weekend to me. I didn&#8217;t go anywhere, I didn&#8217;t see anybody, on Thursday I&#8217;m getting another blood test to see if I&#8217;ve got any B-cells, if so, I can get the vaccine again. The yin and the yang are&#8230;my skin is really good, which would tend to indicate I don&#8217;t have many B-cells, but I&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, by time I hit Friday afternoon I&#8217;m burnt, I recede, you see I lead a double life, one of business person and one of writer. Most people sit in front of the computer all day long, fielding e-mail, they jump from phone call to phone call, but if I do that I can&#8217;t write, and first and foremost I&#8217;m a writer. During the week I&#8217;m always anxious someone is going to be looking for me, something important is happening, so I can&#8217;t really relax and get into the groove of writing until about 11 PM, when I&#8217;m calm and relaxed and the ideas start to flow, in between the window of e-mail from the U.S. and the rest of the world. But if I write then I don&#8217;t get to sleep until the wee hours, and if I do I don&#8217;t sleep well, the next day is sacrificed. Hell, I wrote the other day and was fried for hours and hours even though it was just a list of Don Henley&#8217;s music. And it&#8217;s constantly frustrating, writing is about zing, the little something extra the audience resonates with, and you can only get that when you&#8217;re inspired, which for me happens mostly late at night.<\/p>\n<p>But this afternoon&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I just went through a hundred plus e-mails, I save the important ones for last, and when I finally addressed the one from Tom I saw he was singing &#8220;Merrimack County,&#8221; which I wanted to hear, not that I expected to be&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Taken away.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the experience, when you hear a record and you&#8217;re released, set free from the real world. You&#8217;re just ambling along, thinking about your troubles, what you&#8217;ve got to do, what you don&#8217;t want to do, and then a song starts to play and that all fades away.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I go to the show. Others go to hang out, feel part of the crowd, to party, but never me, I want to commune with the music, connect with the band, levitate even though I&#8217;m sitting in a seat, and I&#8217;ve always preferred sitting, giving the music respect, standing you&#8217;re always worried about getting tired, jockeying for position, music is best when you&#8217;re relaxed and open.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Way up north by the icebound ocean<\/p>\n<p>I was born I was born<\/p>\n<p>Way up north in the Merrimack county<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s my home that&#8217;s my home&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t born way up north, but that&#8217;s where my heart is, in the country. I love the city, for the anonymity, the availability of everything, but there&#8217;s a freedom in the country, it&#8217;s just you and the land, you don&#8217;t feel like you&#8217;re in a Dodgem, it&#8217;s just you, the landscape and your thoughts, you&#8217;re still, but you&#8217;re fully alive. I know the feeling, but I can&#8217;t always get there, Tom Rush brought me there today.<\/p>\n<p>All of a sudden everything fell away, it was just me and the music, the feeling, and I haven&#8217;t had that feeling for so long. You know, the feeling where you&#8217;re at a show and the music is more important than the badge of honor of being there, when your whole life is set in relief.<\/p>\n<p>Now the truth is &#8220;Merrimack County&#8221; wasn&#8217;t a hit even when it was released back in 1970, the folk\/troubadour sound was then at its peak, but it never goes completely away, it&#8217;s the essence, just a guitar and a voice, that&#8217;s all you really need, and if you can make it that way, you can make it any day anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>You think you&#8217;ve lost yourself, you&#8217;re far away from your roots, and then you hear a song and you&#8217;re right back where you belong, comfortable, you&#8217;re in touch with your identity, you&#8217;re the same as you ever were and it feels good, because in truth we live alone in our own minds and the key is to feel comfortable there, and it&#8217;s music that calms us, makes us feel rooted and powerful in our identity.<\/p>\n<p>Who even knows if I&#8217;ll get back to Merrimack County. But it&#8217;s not the place, but a state of mind, and every once in a while you&#8217;re brought right back to where you belong when you least expect it and it feels so good, it&#8217;s precious but you want to tell everybody about it, like today, when I heard Tom Rush perform &#8220;Merrimack County.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tom Rush screwed up. He sent this Vimeo link in his weekly Patreon missive, which means you can see it until he takes it down, not that I&#8217;d advise him to. Patreon is good if you&#8217;re not looking to grow, if you want to service your hard core audience, which can&#8217;t get enough of you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-4zM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17594"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17596,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17594\/revisions\/17596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}