I shouted out "Who killed the Kennedys?" When after all, it was you and me.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote that line for their masterful "Sympathy for the Devil," on the album I consider the band's best, Beggars Banquet, released December 6, 1968.
This short blog tale isn't about that album -- the last one with their troubled and soon dead founder Brian Jones on it fully (some post-mortem work appears on Let It Bleed) -- though it and The Beatles Revolver super deluxe remastered package have been my main music in recent days while pedaling my bike.
It is a solitary ritual: An hour spent on the road to nowhere, the same figurative path I've traveled all too often. But this is literal, in that every day, seven days a week, I climb on my stationary recumbent bicycle and pedal as fast as I can, until my heart begins pounding and perspiration soaks my body.
I love it. I've been doing it for several years now, going from three or four days a week at a gym to the last couple of years when I've been riding in my basement, next to my office and the nearest music source, seven days a week.
I'm purging my tensions and disappointments during those rides. I'm thinking. Mostly, though, I'm just singing sometimes in my horrible voice that's perhaps a notch below Johnny Cash's in all of his waiting-to-die splendid albums, produced by Rick Rubin. The pain in that faded American Recordings voice, is part of what makes those albums must-haves for anyone who ever liked music.
I do sing better than that arrogant little squirt, Barney Fife, though, if you need some sort of comparison. Anyway, sometimes I just listen, sometimes I sing along with this music turned as loud as I can stand it, while pedaling. Perhaps the odd thing is that out of all of the thousands of recordings I possess, I return to the same 20 or 30 as my menu.
Most-often, it's Beatles and Stones, though I do a lot of Traveling Wilburys (a relative of The Beatles, of course), Petty (a Wilbury as well), Kristofferson, Dylan (also a Wilbury), Cash and Bobby Bare. Speaking of Bare, well, he's one of my best friends and I am fortunate to be able to pick up the phone and call him and wish him a Happy Thanksgiving. I love that young man and his family.
I'll wish you all that as well. Happy Thanksgiving.
But, for a moment, I guess, I'll return to the opening lines of this little blogpost. I'm not going to write long, I don't think, as I have real work to do. And a long bike ride to make before the network news comes on and I see the results of the latest mad-man's killing or perhaps asshole Putin's rain of death on Ukraine. Do you remember back when you were young and we always called Ukraine "The Ukraine." The Beatles didn't use "The" when they sang of that country's treasures: "Those Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind."
I also use "The" when discussing the other-than-Putin modern scourge. To me it's "The COVID."
It strikes me that most people alive right now have no reason to regard November 22 as anything other than two days before Thanksgiving this year as well as an ad-whacked predecessor to Black Friday. If they hear "Sympathy for the Devil," they don't place it at a bleak period in their lives. It's just a song by those old, naughty Rolling Stones who Pops likes so much, younger people might say.
I am no Santa or Hallmark movie, so to me Black Friday really is Bleak Friday, signaling the black dogs and the ghosts of Christmases past it's time to begin their monthlong residency in my house and in my brain.
To those of us in my generation and older and to a whole lot of dead people, November 22, which is today, marked the beginning of the darkest holiday period in our history.
It was 59 years ago today that some miserable weasel-faced dick in a book depository and other assorted conspirators, Castro lovers, mobsters and famous Texas politicians -- take your choice in a mix-and-match -- gunned down America's hope.
Whether it was Oswald in the Texas Book Depository or the mafia on the grassy knoll or perhaps jealous politicos and other friends of Jack Ruby, someone blew John F. Kennedy's mind out in a car as it cruised through Dallas. He didn't notice that the lights had changed.
My memories are strong. Mr. Schultz, the social studies teacher at Alan B. Shepard Jr. Junior High School in the Chicago-area town of Deerfield, was summoned to the principal's office. All teachers were. By intercom.
Tears ran down his cheeks when Mr. Schultz came back into the classroom, kicked a trashcan as far as he could, and he left. It was explained to us that Mr. Schultz had been a JFK campaign worker, a young Democrat who believed in Camelot.
He left the school and never came back. He left teaching, and he went into the milkman business. That was back in the era when the milkman came predawn daily, filling up the little metal-insulated box by the back door with the daily order of milk. If mom wanted eggs, chocolate milk etc., she'd just leave a note in the box and the milkman would add those. Eggnog was big during the holidays. Cider in the fall.
That really was a more peaceful era, even though it was the Cold War. Today if a milkman left jugs of milk by the door, some asshole would steal it or poison it. The dry cleaning man used to open up the backdoor and holler "Dry Cleaning!" and hang dad's suits and shirts on a hook in the hallway. The electric, gas and water meter men would let themselves into the house and go to the basement to read that month's usage for billing.
In the summers, Jimmy Haan and I would meet the milkman in the dawn hours and he'd let us ride in back of the truck. All the ice we could eat and laughter. Such would be idiocy, of course, in this time of murderous perversion and society's deadliest beasts.
So, thinking back today, I wonder if Mr. Schultz really did spend his life as a milkman. Probably the last generation of that species, because of the nation's loss of innocence trailing back to November 22, 1963.
In some writings I've referred to the people who have ruined it for us all as "the darkest underside of the human spirit."
I first used that phrase to describe the men who abducted and murdered a pair of teenagers, in separate cases but at the same time, decades ago when I was in charge of news coverage for The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle.
Now that underside is represented everywhere.
How many times a day do you check your locks? Do you park your car near the lights in a parking lot? How many security lights do you turn on every night?
These are all things we have come to accept as daily precautions, because of that darkest underside, as personified for the first time on a mass scale by Lee Harvey Oswald.
And his friends from Cuba, the New Orleans mafia or Austin, Texas. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today, we used to chant at anti-war rallies. That's a different topic. Or is it, really?
There really was a time, before that day, when we trusted each other. People didn't lock their doors and we could put a bill payment in the mailbox and know it was going to be delivered to the recipient.
I know I'm old, and I know most people this is directed at have no idea what happened 59 years ago today. They likely have stopped reading by now so they can check on their latest tattoo or nipple ring.
It wasn't the day the music died: that came in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959, or December 8, 1980, in front of the Dakota, or perhaps when a fat guy clutched a commode on August 16, 1977, down at the end of lonely street in Memphis.
But looking back from a 71-year-old relic's perspective, that November 22 really was the end of innocence, the beginning of fear, perhaps just the realization that evil lurked in every shadow.
JFK was a symbol to us all, I had just turned 12, of hope. We didn't worry too much about politicians bedroom adventures back then. Because of JFK we thought about what we could do for our country.
I remember that the only good thing that happened that day is that when I got home, I had a belated birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa Champ. It was a teenager's version of writer Lowell Thomas' "Lawrence of Arabia."
I still have that book, but I don't keep it within eyeshot of my desk, because, as heartening as it is, the jacket reminds me of the day Mr. Schultz kicked the trashcan of hope down the road.
The changing society perhaps was perfectly described by Msrs. Jagger and Richards back then when they added "Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints."
Hope you have a wonderful holiday. But please be careful. Have some sympathy and some taste and use all your well-earned politeness.
