think visual, think visual, think visual
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Kit, David Hasselhoff? Modern house. Glass walls, cement floors, sparkling lights of the City. A Nagel original hanging from the wall.
It’s 1983. Summer night. Los Angeles. 77 degrees with a slight breeze. Super hot 6 foot Sharon Stone from Basic Instinct look-alike comes out from the balcony smoking a Merit Ultra Long and Ultra Light….
That’s where the genius of Steve Winwood’s Night Train takes me. Your vision might be very different. P.S. It ain’t a fantasy. Just a vision.
Out of the night burning with light
Train shining black, I won’t look back, life is running
Hoping some day someone will say I got it made
Pull up the shade, let the sun in
Down on the night train, I feel the starlight steal away
Use up a lifetime looking for the break of day
Border patrol looking through me
Towns without names all look the same, I hear crying
Paris to Spain, countries in pain
Caught up in flight, feeling the sight, Europe dying
Rolling on, hear the wheels singing, fever keep coming on so strong
My ticket paid, trying to fade
I hope I get there not just somewhere I was leaving
Out in the dark all the wolves bark
I fold my arms try to keep warm by believing
Hard rain following on, cold wheels moving on
Everybody they’re so alone down on the night train
categories: music
tags: Steve Winwood
posted by asstral at 01:10 pm
A Sunday afternoon disco brunch on Lexington Avenue with unlimited Mimosas. Breadsticks, a suspended dance floor and a french businessman.
Roller rink. Rental skates. Permed hair. Pizza.
Night Train–takes me to this odd spot—
I’m a conductor on Rail Europe. We make the run between Spain and France–the track is slick with tears. I work nights because some of my best friends are monsters; that’s only scary in the day. My Mother was French and my Dad Spanish. I’m a mongrel dog borrowing someone else’s pedigree. I listen to the passenger’s tales and rails and dreams and fantasies. Dreaming is made for night –where scrutiny is always incomplete. Maybe after enough miles and enough passenger’s stories, I’ll realized my ticket was long ago paid. I’ll have it made… I’ll “pull up the shade, let the Sun in”… stretch my legs and fly.
Steve Winwood said after decades in the business: “Music is a never-ending learning curve. There is always something to know and discover about it.” I love that!!
I think the fountain of youth is really compossed of an unquenchable passion for art.
I never knew that teenaged Steve Winwood worked with Rice Miller, known as Sonny Boy Williamson II. Williamson is one of those dudes that was so amazing you just have to hear him. So for those of you who haven’t — go for these links and for those who just want to steep themselves in some great memory joggers I hope you will listen too. The 4th link is really cool — Sonny Boy is playing with Muddy Waters -it’s a great little clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3Z_R9wJ-w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFRMBWgyH-M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SVnEkRaKvQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjPezeHN9Hc
Meg. Meg. Meg. Meg. Meg. I want to cry. Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy. I want to die. These must be posted. I’ve got my mojo working!!!!
3:00am on a cold, clear August night Open deck, wooden table, middle of the Baltic Sea. Bare shoulders shivering slightly under a large, borrowed corduroy blazer. The soft odor of night air, old tobacco, salt water and clean decay wafting up with each rise of the ship. Coastal lights twinkling in the far distance. A Polish law student. Raspberries and ice cold Finlandia. A long and wandering discussion of solidarnosc finally finds its natural segue into a more comforting solidarity.
(neither a vision nor a fantasy)
Vivid powerful prose — you did it –I’m there hugging the blazer tighter in an attempt to keep away the chill! I can taste the raspberries and Finlandia —feel the halo of the night sky– inhale the sepulcher of the Baltic Sea — and feel the turbulence of the untested debates of students. I reflect on the way time either changes rebels into philosophers or embittered souls; I -I hope for the former as the years wax. I find myself thinking of Lech Walesa and wonder what happened that seemed to have changed him so, almost making him someone he once would have hated — was it his time imprisoned — was it the way power can corrupt when he finally was elected Pres??? — Did he have too many favors out with strange bedfellows — maybe he was just too tired….. Pass the Finlandia.
the Empire Builder sails across the prairie between Minnesota and the glaciers, orchards and rainforests of the Northwest. We sometimes called it the “rise and fall” for the constantly treacherous fortunes of the Americn passenger rail system, as great companies like Burlington Northern and Illinois Central cede to the soulless Amtrak.
There’s still something about crossing the country by train. It’s for those who don’t have to be there any particular day. As Steve G said, You roll along past the back yards of the houses, farms and fields, but you’re in the train that has no name singing the disappearing railroad blues.
There’s plenty of time to meet with your fellow passengers as the flat lands slowly turn to badlands, a young singer going home to North Dakota or Montana for the summer after studying Opera at the University of Minnesota, an earth mother who arranges for free samples of Chivas from the conductor, which you share huddled in a pullman berth with a few tokes as the side dish, converse about whether we meet by random luck or for a purpose.
In the morning I’ll wake to the crisp stark glacial peaks and startling blue lakes of Idaho, and the cozy town nestled under Mount Hood alongside the mindblowing Colubmia River. I say there’s a place I could live, and I realize I don’t have to stay in Minnesota anymore.
Stand up in a clear blue morning, until you see what can be…
When some sad old dream reminds you how the endless road unwinds you
While you see a chance take it.
clears throat
I didn’t say I cared for Arc of A Diver. Nice trigger though.
Don’t do it debunot. Don’t do it!!!
Good tangents are kind of like good jam sessions. Thanks margaux, your post took me on a great trip and then a cool tangent. Your nod to Steve Goodman’s song “City of New Orleans” got me thinking of Steve (that’s not hard to do) and Arlo Guthrie (that’s not hard to do either). There we were in that “Night Train” exercise in improvisational thinking, I read your post and womp — I was 15 - it was the morning after hearing a Guthrie-Goodman concert in a Massachusetts field. I was sitting on my sleeping bag learning top play a song I’d heard the night before. It was an Arlo tune called “Hobos Lullaby” -Ever heard it? I could play it for you but I’d rather give you this interesting Youtube clip with Arlo’s work in the back drop-nobody plays it like Arlo. I got the chords down at 15 but it’s taken years and a lot of train rides to feel it in my bones.
And the Hobo’s just another kind of Freedom Rider.
With a silver star between his eyes that open up at hidden lies
Big man crying with defeat, see people gathering in the street
You feel him, you feel him
Freedom rider
Check out the clip if you’re interested. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J72hq9kLyUQ
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” - Alice Walker
Ah Sher — Alice Walker — what a writer. I was just reading, ” The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart” I wish she were part of this discusion — I’d like to ask her where Night Train takes her.
margaux -With pleasure I’ve read and reread your post. You and What share a similar style — There is a rhythm and meter in common — and a certain flavor in the images used to create the mood. I enjoyed both pieces very much and would like to read more.
“Everyday’s an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines, And each town looks the same to me the movies and the factories, And every stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be” — Homeward Bound by Paul Simon
What is the point of this story
What information pertains
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts
And our brains ..Paul Simon - Train in the Distance
asstral, I can’t speak for the others, but I’m somewhat surpised to be so thoroughly misunderstood. I would have thought that encouraging someone to expound on their most deeply held philosophical principles, simply in order to further my own base purposes, would have definately qualified me to swim in the shallow end of the pool.
…but then, I know it’s not fair to blame the reader when the writer is misunderstood, so no hard feelings.