A young branch takes on all the bends one gives it
People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. I do have several things to say.
1. Stay the fuck out of my yard. Your candy wrappers and empty beer tins don’t impress anyone, and if no one is impressed with you, you are unloved, and that will start to feel awful and you’ll get sick and die before you are old enough to get revenge on the world you so want to pollute.
2. People over 40 are perfectly capable of rocking out, but usually choose to sell garbage to young people for the cash instead. I know I’ll make a children’s record when the first bad reviews come in.
3. Don’t buy anything being sold to you because you’re a young person. Pop music by 17-year-old girls is manufactured to get your money and will leave you as hungry after as eating a little bag of Walker’s potato chips. Fat businessmen want to sell soft porn and deodorant by convincing you you’re ugly and sexless. Be offended. Seek revenge through the right channels, however.
4. Don’t attack innocent people on the street who aren’t part of the plot to sell you garbage.
5. Avoid normality and all those who claim to be normal.
6. Women are not more beautiful than men. That’s a myth. Part of the plot to make you buy things. Put down the shiny beauty magazine and actually look at James Dean. You’re never gonna look that good so don’t be so fucking vain.
7. Don’t follow the advice of old cranks who aren’t normal and contradict themselves.
Round about 1962, a crank named Dave was boarding a Greyhound bus in the Canadian Rockies headed south for Berkeley, California. He wore a long trenchcoat he’d brought back from the war. He had a subversive looking beard, a .22 revolver in his pack, and a Jack Kerouac novel in his pocket. Surprisingly, they wouldn’t let him across the border.
But it wasn’t the gun, the beard, or the beat novel that held him back. It was the cranky abnormal things he was saying about a man’s right to find work wherever he felt like it. They didn’t want a dispossessed man coming in, working, and giving advice to their college students.
He played Fats Waller
They played Lawrence Welk
8. Don’t join any interest groups or fraternities in order to belong. If you must put on a costume and stand about like a goth, a greaser or a new raver, don’t apply it permanently. There are 90 years of pop music and several hundred years of fashion to choose from. Your first choice will be foolish. You can’t remove a spider web tattoo from your face.
9. Never hitchhike alone.
Pairs of eyes in the trees following us. Wolves, for chrissake. What have I got myself into? My pal hacked his hand while chipping ice on a glacier in the Canadian Rockies. We’re hitching to the nearest city where they can repair it. We urinate in the snow so the beasts will know us better and we talk about music.
We’re dispossessed. Our older brothers and sisters had all the glory in the sixties and early seventies. Punk has already mutated into American hardcore. We talk about the early R&B and what never made it up to Canada. We had some of the first Walkmans and some fine hashish.
I played UB40’s Signing Off
He played Abbey Road, side 2
I played James Cotton
He played Hank Williams
Everybody’s trying to tell you what to do when you’re young. It’s important not to listen sometimes. I left my buddy in a nice hospital bed and continued through the Midwest where the most insane and inbred people cruise the highways looking for hitchhikers to fuck up.
My first ride was with the Jonestown family who drove me against my will to a huge suburban superchurch for prayers. I ran from that opportunity.
My second ride was the excema man. I politely enquired after his health. He crudely offered to suck me off. You can’t punch a fellow until after he stops the car and the door is open.
The next ride was a long night drive.
“You see the lights followin’ us?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“That’s one of my boys. I have several of ’em workin’ for me on my ranch. Wayward youth with no place to go. I’m thinkin’ that maybe you need a place to go.”
“Uh, no, I’m alright.”
“You know I once killed a man with my bare hands. Punched him so hard in the guts that I was able to pull on his spine from the front.”
Of all the helpful old lunatics to ride with, I was the most curious about this one. But I passed on this offer too, thinking to myself that I’ve got to find my own way. Not join any Mountain man cults, pimp myself out to peeling queers or fall into any superchurches until I’d seen a little more of our grand country.
Now, decades later, dear children, I realise that I have become the dispossessed peeling fanatic with his truck waiting to find lost young souls to fuck up. No one really asks perverted old bluesmen for their advice. But people listen politely and sometimes pay us to go away. It makes one bitter sometimes.
10. See item 1.
Me and some crazy friends worked in the hotels long enough to buy an old wreck. Drove back through the prairies listening to Neil. By the time I saw the herd of bison crossing the road, we were in the middle of it. Just parked there surrounded by other heavy brown beasts watching the sun come up. It was a cool scene. Man, where were you?
“My dad sent me to law school.”
11. Eat the rich. They taste like organic free-range chicken.
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