As Time Goes By

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 9:59pm Edit Note Delete Another year will soon come to pass, another year...I don't know if it was the conversation I had with my dear friend Karen the other night or just the fact that I am to be, yet another year older that has sent me into another introspective mood, which isn't really so strange for me because I spend a lot of time in my head always asking my heart for the answers to the how's and why's of my spirit's journey. When I left home for the first time I was still very young at 18. I worked all summer, packed my bags and set off without a plan to places unknown. I can still see my mother standing on the curb outside the house on Buntin St. where mummy and da still live in to this day and I will never forget that picture of that moment, when our eyes met in goodbye. I ended up in Portland in a little apartment on the top floor of a house that sat almost under the St. Johns Bridge. I remember lying in my bed starring at the beauteous sight of the bridge lights and the beautiful arches that have stood for over a century. In those early days I had no idea of who I was or where I was going a fact I still ponder to this day. Being a small town girl I was quite naive...."Naive: deficient in worldly wisdom". To say the least...... Those early lessons were tough and they shaped in a big way all that I am to this day. My education was at a little club called "The Metropolis" which now many years later is a little place called Dante's. It was at this club that I saw a band called "The Bad Brains" from NYC and my little country ass was blown away and transformed. The scene in Portland was so small in the early eighties, back then the entire music scene could all party at one house and the local scene though small, was rich and ripe with amazing artists. Bands like Napalm Beach, The Rats, The Wipers, Poison Idea, 69 Ways, "The Miracle Workers", and truly the list goes on and on. It was around this time when I started a relationship with a bloke named Jerry Alvin Lang commonly known as the one and only "Jerry A." the singer of a Punk Phenom. who went by the name of "Poison Idea" who went on to be one of the most prolific bands of that genre we call punk rock. Jerry bought me my first bass and taught me how to play it. He put together my first band "69 Ways" which was an all girl band with three of the members I later played with in "Candy 500". He was so sweet because we clearly sucked and barely could play our instruments but he would crash our practice and come and sing to our set. Here he was this huge guy in a band that was pretty damn good and he would come and sing for us which at the time was so inspiring. I never knew what he was singing but we sure thought we were hot shit. It was in those years when I met a young lass named Courtney Menealy who later went on to be Courtney Love. People ask me about her often and I rarely talk about her but I want to say that as someone who had the misfortune of twice sharing living space, once with Kat Bejellund of "Babes in Toyland " and once several years later in San Francisco for a week or so, that Courtney was one of the brightest, rottenest, scathingly, unabashedly funny women I've ever met. She really was so smart and I don’t mean book smart, she could barely spell her own name and if she did you wouldn't be able to read her writing anyway. I have the letters to prove it. Drugs and bridge burning really robbed her of her fire but truly she was an amazing women. When people ask me about her daughter Francis Bean I tell them in my opinion, she has her mothers head and her fathers heart, it doesn't get any better than that. Francis is a young woman who I believe will do amazing things in the years to come. Another woman who inspired me in my formative years was a woman named Naomi Kanori. She bought me my first black book and fine point sharpie and introduced me to "book story" which was part journal, part art project and is something I still do to this day. We were Goth chicks and we were wild, free spirits who wore depression era dresses and old man shoes with anklet socks a look that Miss Courtney and Kat stole and made into their signature "Kinder Whore" look. In those days women like Anais Nin, Excene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch were my inspiration. I was never so happy as when high on a hill top in an apartment that had French doors, I could look out over my beauteous city. I, on a rainy days, would open those doors and write endlessly. Life, for me has always had to be poetic and melancholy, dark and mysterious. I was such a serious young woman. ;) I look back and marvel at the things I loved back then and can't help but smile when I think about lovers and relationships past. A friend asked me the other day if I had any regrets as I reach mid life and I'd be lying if I said there were none. I think Marianne Faithful said it best when she said "I could have done without the drug addiction but all things considered, no regrets". I am my journey after all and living proof that perseverance pays.........Indeed.Nite nite and best wishes to those I love. You know who you are. ;0)