Samson in Retrograde

My name is Jordan, and I am a music addict

The other day, someone asked me to list five albums I couldn’t live without. At some point, in some future soul-baring discourse, I may reveal my other four, but for present purposes, let me tell you about one: David Crosby’s 1971 LP If I Could Only Remember My Name. 

For someone whose cultural frames of reference, creative ideals, and hippy sensibilities throw me at least fifty years out of step, I’m painfully aware that the next decade presents a likelihood that most — if not all — of my heroes will hear their boarding call to the Pearly Gates from the comfortable seats of their Mortal Departure Lounges, to board their final flight. 

Crosby died and I revived

I’ve been lucky, so far, in prolonging the inevitable. I took a quiet moment to mourn Christine McVie. But the only passing that has truly rocked me was David Crosby’s. The relentless rebel. The progenitor of uniquely uncommercial music and mindful challenges to mindless authority. All the way to the end, he sang musical messages of tolerance which, for most people, went out with the invention of the Espresso Martini and the box-office debut of Wall Street. Despite generational attempts to crush the utopian dream, it lives on in some circles.

The dream didn’t die. Not entirely. In certain corners, mine included, it still lives. 

You see, for me David Crosby represents the eternal rebel — authenticity in the face of fakery, creation over stagnation, reinvention, and the recovery of winning the final battle against the toxic trappings of wealth, power, and propaganda. He lives on as the spirit of something I came frighteningly close to losing: my love of music. 

Almost cut my hair, it happened just the other day.
It was getting kinda long, I could’ve said it was in my way. 
But I didn’t and I wonder why. 
I feel like letting my freak flag fly. 
Yes, I feel like I owe it to someone.
— David Crosby, “Almost Cut My Hair” (Deja Vu, 1970)

Okay, I cut my hair

Unlike Croz, I did cut my hair.

My unforgivable act of conformism.  

As I packed to fly the nest to university, I visualized the in-flight movie of my own life: a first-class law degree it held and the soaring promise of a lifetime in the “Eight-Miles-High” echelon of champagne society. I made an inspired decision: my music and peace-loving persona could not co-exist with my professional ambitions. I had to choose between the circle and the square — I chose the square. 

A suit, a desk, and the slow death of sound

My record collection was incarcerated in cardboard, as my listening habits migrated from concept albums to podcasts by CEOs. My guitars and case stared at me from strait-jacketed corners of city apartment rooms, taunting reminders of what I used to be and how far I’ve come. 

Just as the meaning of R&B changed unrecognizably, somewhere — from The Yardbirds to Destiny’s Child — the quiff coif was no longer a symbol of rock and roll defiance. It was the head furniture of a corporate “Yes Man.” My resplendent mane was cut, and with each lost lock, a door slammed on my former self. I left myself behind.

I soon learned that the only thing more miserable than being confined to a desk was its hi-fi electronic appendages beaming surround-sound, direct-injection stress. Fifteen hours a day doing so as a suited and booted, short-haired automaton. Deadlines screaming in stereo. 

Without my daily dose of musical medicine, I was trapped in a loveless marriage to a career, with no visible emergency exit. 

Passion suppressed… 

Personality eroded…

TOTAL SHUTDOWN. 

Coming home to the sound of myself

But music has a way of calling you home.

“Why don’t you get back into your music?” 

Sage advice from the reliable co-pilot of my life’s course… 

Sometimes rebellions are small:

Foregoing a business lunch to raid the dusty local record racks.

A slow reintroduction of my favorite sounds to my rusty ears.

Perusing the Lonely Hearts’ Musicians columns for prospective band members.

The uniform started to dissolve. Tie pin swapped for a CND brooch. Gold watch alchemically transformed into a wristful of beads. I scribbled lyrics and chord progressions on the back pages of a legal pad fast filling from the front with to-do lists and financial targets. I was writing songs for the first time in years when I should’ve been working. 

But I was working: doing my real work. And all the while, my hair was regrowing. Past the ears, the collar, the shoulders. Like Samson-in-retrograde.  

Moonlight as a tightrope walker?

Why is it that we reject our passions for professional success? Why can’t a stockbroker also be a record-breaker? A politician, a part-time poet? 

Why can’t an art-loving banker be an artisanal baker? Or a teacher moonlight as a tightrope walker? Why can’t a lawyer be a longhair? With each inch of regrowth, how much did my intelligence recede? Did my legal advice lose its luster? 

No. Those abandoned guitars weren’t telling me what I’d escaped, but what I’d lost. I can combine my profession with my passion, and I should. I owed it to myself.  

Recapturing my love of music was the easiest thing I’ve ever done, because it was what was supposed to happen all along. As I type these words, I’m spinning my copy of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name. Its first song: “Music Is Love.”