Tracks

True story.  “Back in Black” was an album.  The first two tracks on side two were in heavy rotation on the FM stations of the era, but I’ve always thought the second track on side one was the best.  “Shoot to Thrill” has a guitar and drum progression that doesn’t need lyrics to be a great rock song, but the lyrics made it all the better to a 17 year-old hockey defenseman in 1980.  It was the soundtrack in my head for the flying hipchecks which attempted to cover for my lack of skating prowess and the blazing slapshots from the point, which I really wasn’t that good at either.  But pop that cassette into your Walkman between periods, and you’re ready to go at 17.

If youth and wisdom are seen as opposites, that leaves precious little room to get it right.  Who the heck knows if I’m right?  But I’m pretty sure community leaders need to age out of “Shoot to Thrill” and into something more restorative.  I could probably trace a restorative lineage back through Bruce Cockburn, Bob Marley and Jackson Brown if I tried, but that’s for another day.  Of late, I’m more than satisfied with a track from NEEDTOBREATH’s 2014 Rivers in the Wasteland cd.

“More Heart, Less Attack” rambles a little over its length, but it’s a beautiful ramble, with a simply succinct message.  Be kind.  Be peaceful.  Slow to anger.  Quick to laugh.  More heart.  Less attack.   The message is not exactly new, but it’s set to cascading music and is a fairly pleasant way to spend five minutes.  Which is to say, a little different than reading the Times editorial which started my day.   

The Quad City Times and Lee Enterprises are Davenport businesses.  I want them to succeed.

Editorials are challenging enough to calibrate when they are written by someone who lives in another state, published by someone who lives in another community, and laid out by someone two states over.  When they’re focused on a meeting the author didn’t attend, they’re even more challenging to get right.  Ascribing intent and emotion to people you’ve personally listened to can be inaccurate, premised on your own biases.  Doing so authoritatively, without actually being in attendance to hear people work through a challenge, is well beyond my capacity.  Doing so while fertilizing a personally cultivated garden of grievances – revenue diversification, school initiatives, open communications – seems off-point and unnecessary.

You can bet I sung the chorus of Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap, with my ne’er-do-well high school friends back in the day.  But until I find a better distillation of how this community needs to act to succeed, I’m going to stick with more heart, and less attack.