Monday Music Break

Way back, in what seems like a couple of lifetimes ago now, the spring of 1974, in the "lovely seaside resort" of Isla Vista, California (actually home of the University of California Santa Barbara), my wife at the time decided, fairly abruptly it seemed to me, that she no longer wanted to be married to an impoverished graduate student and would rather be married to ... an auto mechanic(?!).

I was suddenly left in the lurch, with nothing to my name except an aging, wheezing, valve-clattering VW microbus, a modest VA disability pension, and a staggering amount of student debt (none of which she could get her hands on -- hey, I was willing to share the "debt" part of it with her...no takers, though).

Fuck, who could concentrate on graduate courses in English Lit and the whole what-did-Wordsworth-REALLY-mean-by-daffodils at that point? I spent that summer in a sort of impromptu commune of fellow long-haired music-jammin' cheap-wine-drinkin' dope-smokin' macrobiotic hippie types at the Pendola Hot Springs campground in the mountains above Santa Barbara, and this song really spoke to me and helped me to get through that whole thing. (Hmmm...am I beginning to see a pattern here with these music breaks? Fuck it, that's what I'm paying my therapist the big bucks to figure out...)

Back in the day I used to be able to pick out a decent rendition of this on a blues harp, but that was then and this is now...

Anyway, here's Carole King and The Old Ferguson Road: