I’ve been about this song all week, or at least since Glen Frey died (short term memory is sort of overshadowed by teeth). This song has significance for me. Like a lot of songs it’s loosely related to sex and fast cars and one of those things you sing to yourself when you’re alone walking down a highway at two in the morning. But this one has a different, hard to pin down, significance.
I want to say it came out in the early seventies, I could look it up, but so could you. It doesn’t matter. By 1970 there were several strong influences on my musical taste; my parents, my siblings, the geographical area, my band teachers, my friends and my own nascent sense of self. My father and band teacher were big on music appreciation and I attended concerts at minimum weekly, mostly classical, string quartets to Orchestras, motet’s and fugues to symphonies. This was not the music they personally enjoyed, which I think was sort of the point; it was easier to dissect without pain sort of like school science labs not having you cut up anything cute.
Classical music also has inherent theory lessons to it. It’s 2016 and that seems like an odd thing to type. Schools are either not funded for music at all or so poorly funded that music theory sounds like a daydream.
The local scene was big on butt rock. Butt rock is not all that interesting and was never cool, not in any sense of self I ever had. Pardon me just getting to the point, but that’s the significance of this song. It was the first commercial made for radio song I liked. It was a shock to me.
Some forty odd years later, maybe 38 odd years and a few even ones, a friend of mine from then and now, told me I had advanced … something or other. The anarchist; he thought my taste was odd at the time then came to realize it was broad. I mean that’s what he said. I know it wasn’t because of the weird shit I was into. It was, in part, because of take it easy.
Sometime in the mid late seventies I was hitchhiking back from California, I was on highway 10 in east Texas. This guy picks me up in a beat to shit Chevy S10, he’s literally got a red neck, a Budweiser baseball cap, a gun rack, Oklahoma plates. Within a minute he asks where I was during the war. I told him I was a kid. I could recreate the dialogue, I think I’ve told this story before. The real lesson in it all was I thought the guy was some kind of redneck vet with the standard redneck spiel (we hadn’t really pulled out main forces until 75, so it was still a fresh wound for the whole country) and I’d been road wise long enough by then to take it in stride.
He was a redneck, a farm boy from Oklahoma drafted for a tour early, who stayed on for at least one more tour — out of compassion. He stayed until late 75 to adopt as many war orphans as he could. He had this farm outside of Okemah with something like twelve to seventeen Vietnamese war orphans. I stayed on with him for a week or two and we both pretended I was a ranch hand. I stayed on to play with the kids, take them on pony rides and such. It might have been the last time I was on a horse.
I can tell that story a lot better, if I spackle over the cracks in my memory and add a healthy dose of Op Ed, I can tell that story a whole lot better, laugh and cry and swell your throat sort of better. This entry is about the song or me or something else. The short version of the story is demonstrative. Like the guy, the song … shit. It’s ok to like something that on principle and on the face of you think you won’t like. I suppose the saying of not judging a book by it’s cover would work, but, pithy as that saying is I ignore books with Fabio on the cover bare chested.
I can’t tell you how much shit I’ve ignored because it seemed uncool or against every taste I have. I mean I ignored them. I can tell you that for whatever reason I didn’t ignore Take it Easy or the guy from Okemah. I could say it has made my life richer, and if I told the full jeer turk/ tear jerk version of the story it would end with making my life richer, truth is I don’t know if that’s true. I do know those are two things I think of when I need to keep an open mind. Um, when I think I need to keep to keep an open mind, usually if someone tells me to do that it’s like pointing at something and telling a dog “look!”. Any reasonable dog will look at your finger. Tell me to keep an open mind and it’s you I focus on, not the dumbass thing you want me too, and, typically, I don’t focus on you favorably.
I’m not a big fan of hypocrisy. I’m ok with hypocrites as long as they have other redeeming qualities and aren’t asking me to do something with them that could allow them to go all hypo-crazy on me. Hmmm, I’m ok with hypocrites, sometimes, don’t trust em. I don’t want to be one. So, for me to claim actual eclectic tastes, it’s important not to rule out something that’s popular. I know that sounds stupid and simple and mostly beside the point, but it comes up a lot, for everyone. Pop culture is the small talk ice breaker, and, as stupid as it sounds, I bet I’m not the only one who has been approached by a stranger and asked “Do you like music?” You know how someone somewhere told you there is no such thing as a stupid question? They were wrong or they just forgot about that one. Yes, of course, my answer is always “Music? What’s that?”
No one has ever asked me how I feel about rednecks from Oklahoma. It’s all the same thing man.
You all have to forgive me. Gums hurt.
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