KarenUhOh

This is about my favorite time of the year. I’m a music junkie, and it has been in May, especially late May, of every year, that I begin throwing open windows and blasting my tastemaker music into various annoyed neighborhoods throughout the Midwest.

When I was younger, it seemed as if all these records had something to do with someone I’d just fallen in love with, or was pining away for. So we had “Sweet Jane,” Mott the Hoople version, for a girl named Jane whom I never met, or “Cyprus Avenue,” Van Morrison’s original off Astral Weeks, for the same Jane, who at that very moment was 100 yards away from me, at a neighbor’s house, and still we never met; and then, a few years later, there’d be “Frenchette,” with that line in it about David Johansen falling in love with Veronica, and every last one of her Ronettes…and it just so happened, by mere cosmic coincidence, that 1978’s romantic windmill whirled around on the power of a Veronica, with blonde hair shot through with blood-red streaks, brown-green nightvision eyes, and a molasses voice that could stir your coffee from across the street.

“Cinnamon Girl” was an early totem—not in this version, of course, & esp. not in this ludicrous video adopted (stolen) by some European quasi-auteur who sure as shit is no Bernard Shakey—-its object was a target called Laura, who used to sit by my side in a dark and quiet hideaway in high school, rub my shoulder, and pitch her curtain of amber hair at my face—and I’d sit there, night upon night, in the dead calm air of a dead silent Newbury Road, favoring a bunch of old farts who had little appreciation for Art with the story of a stripper who caught Neil Young’s eye, and left him, like Veronica, Jane, and Laura, to age her loss into casks of unappreciated Art; all the while hoping that somewhere out there, beyond the unappreciative farts and the silence and the shrubbery, was my Laura, knowing Neil was singing this, for me, to her.