RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,323
(oats and straw and hay)
Maybe I should just quit. Give
it up. Cease. Take a break. Wait
until I fall. Die. I can't accept
such a defeat, but my days now
dwindle to nothingness; dejected,
foiled, and - at most every turn -
skewered by something obscure or
and unseen. My friends, everything
has here gone wrong.
-
When I got to NYC in August, '67,
there were still plenty of workhorses
around. Literally - horses that were
kept 'working.' Slogging through
the dingy city streets of Chelsea
and the entire lower west side, as
well as other locales, dragging
coal wagons, food carts, lumber,
and the rest. The world had not -
there anyway - fully turned itself
over to the oil and gas routines by
which most of the rest of the busy
northeast had already transformed
itself. Sure, there were cars, trucks
and busses fuming everywhere, and
the polluted skies were often a deep,
yellow-gray of pollution gas, but at
the least it could be seen as people
working - doing, making, sewing,
manufacturing, hauling. All those
old and magical NYC days of grime
and effort, river-commerce and
dockings - all of that was yet alive.
-
Horses took part in that - in fact,
towards the river fringes on the
westside especially, the work and
haul of horses bore a still-full role.
'Sixteen Miles on the Erie Canal'
held nothing over 'Old Bay' - (a
local horse name I remember). I
never saw a fast street-horse; they
were all slow and intrepid. Whether
pulling a flat wagon of cut boards,
lumberyard drayage, or hauling
the cart-loads of food-stuffs or
Washington Market items, they
went along their ways at a pace
that fell in-between slow and slower.
And - you know what? - no one
minded that. It was a different world;
one with different clocks and different
times; one with a near-reality all
its own.
-
Dreamy even. And that's what I
fell into. I found that that's what
separated all those NYC and
California superstars and media
idols from regular people. The
Judy Garlands and Frank Sinatras
of the NYC scene operated within
time - they kept to glamorous
schedules, with appearances and
dinners and shows and limo rides;
all done on timed-schedules, the
sorts of things that the lower and
far-more-ordinary people never
mixed in with. Horse-time ruled,
not the flamboyant time of the
big-wigs. When the lower-tier
stars began appearing - all those
NYC rock n' roll barons as the
new media pushed all of that along,
they too eventually, and quickly
enough disappeared into that wall
of 'time' by which such complacency
was ruled. My friend Jeff Gordon,
back then, had a father in media, at
some NYC level, and the report from
a staff meeting or such came back
that - at a meeting - Bob Dylan,
newly immersed and getting deep
into that other world, sat at the rear
like a zombie for the entire meeting,
zoned and almost 'removed' entirely,
from what was happening to him.
Immersion.
-
The same thing went for old 52nd
street - that long line of dark jazz
clubs, old speakeasies and music
dives - it too operated from another
time and place, probably one without
clocks and time as well. But, by 1967,
it was dwindled and gone. All that
jazz-noir stuff was over; all those
legendary Coltrane and Parker types
had already left the building. The
big names had moved on, and the
hot-jazz street slowly ambled off,
into a more mannered royalty of
Miles Davis ('Miles the Genteel'),
or Chet Baker, puking-drunk at
the curb.
-
I swore then that I'd stay far from any
of that 'current' world. I vowed allegiance
to the timing of horses - those horses
I'd see at a glance, and those horses I
sometimes tended in the old Chelsea
stables for a few bucks a day.
Oats and straw and hay.
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