Andrew Peterson Sighting Number one

Hey everybody, this amazing artist just checked out my newest post here at Big HE little me. The insanely talented, word-nerd-extraordinaire known as Andrew Peterson (AP for short) just tarried about the ole' BHLM Lounge, sure it was probably for a total of 3 minutes but what the who-cares right, maybe he reads fast.

If, by some crazy chance, you've never heard his music, then you're that one kid at the Grand Canyon who forgot his glasses......in other words, you're missing out big time!

Dart quickly to your nearest store made of bricks and bulbs or rather finger speed and space and snatch up all of his promethean music, you won't regret it!

Thanks AP.
Thanks dear, Big HE little me readers!

Same Old Song

Same Old Song
By Jon Slone





Dad tells the son,
Oh the dreck that did tempt me!
The lot of it boy, was quite
Feckless and empty!

God had a plan
For me and I knew it.
And maybe down the road
I’d see my way to it.

Sure I got saved
As a boy back in Blairmore.

I guess it was the timing I just didn’t care for.

For my way of thinking,
Though now misbegotten.
Was before being top-shelf
I’d have to be rotten!

You see, after all
There were upcoming years.

To mouth-off to parents
And puke with my peers.

A time to get high,
A time for a buzz.

A time to act older
Then I actually was!

For parents and Pedagogues…
See the word, bail!

For rules and schools were dreadfully stale!

No matter how wrong,
If I shouldn’t or should.

I danced and I pranced
While I still looked good!

And that’s how I felt,
So that’s what I did.

Backsliding from God.
Two decades, I slid!

His Word and His Will were morsels untasted.
All of those years for my Savior, I wasted!

Says Dad to his son,
Those days weren’t fun.
So whatever you do
Don’t do what I’ve done!


Those famous last words went the way of the curse.
For the boy grew up and he stumbled much worse!




A tired turn-table
Spinning the same warped and monotonous song as always.
And nobody likes the music at all.
And nobody gets up to change it!

Sometimes I feel like we're just babysitting some Angel's Kid

Sometimes I feel like we’re just babysitting some Angel’s Kid.
By Jon Slone




So my daughter wants Mickey and then she wants Minnie
And then she wants none only then to want any!
One week it’s all Elmo
The next week it’s Winnie.
And she counts really well from one up to twenty.

She cries about stuff like naps around noontime
Every single day to her oughta be balloon time
She slurps really weird.
And she drinks like a Hummer.
And she glows like her innards were made out of summer!
She’s amusing and brilliant and never a ho-hummer.
And thanks to her Dad she might be a drummer.


Sometimes I feel like we’re just babysitting some Angel’s Kid.


She never gets tired when she climbs up the drapes.

And she eats all her grapes.
And she knows all her shapes.

When I reach for her coat,
The scene becomes dire.

As she jets like those Joe’s from Chariots’ of Fire.

Her skills with the big girl potty are lame.
She speaks five languages that all sound the same.
Her eyes do stuff that you wouldn’t deem groovy.
Like that sweet little girl in the Exorcist movie!

She sings about Jesus and row, row your boats.
(Have I said that she hasn’t really warmed up to coats?)


Sometimes I feel like we’re just babysitting some Angel’s Kid.


And one day that Angel will come back and knock on our door and say, “Gotta have the kid dude.”
And I’ll say, “Could you just take our Magic Bullet and our Ronco Record Vacuum instead?”

“And the Angel will retort, “I don’t know, that is a pretty sweet Record Vacuum…”






Hope this put a smile on your face.

Jon

Rants from a South-Paw

Rants from a South-Paw
By Jon Slone





I am left handed.
My wife is left handed.
My daughter, MacKenzie, is left handed.



Okay, so, I buy one of these Fisher-Price Doodle Boards…and, well…


Look at the picture above and pretend that you are left handed.


Houston, we have a problem!


The holder, the string and the pen are parked on the right side…to boot, the frickin’ string doesn’t reach to the left side!!

Mind you, it’s plenty long for right handed children to be happy all the live-long right-handed-day. Meanwhile, the left handed step-children are going mental trying to draw a damn hexagon with a string, and a pen and a pen holder and a toy company and a world that’s all conveniently bent toward right-handers.


What am I suppose to do, cut the righty-rope and try to keep up with the plastic pen?

Really?

In the words of Yo Samity Sam…







"I think not you, Fricka Sacka para-coda poller ratin’ dirty-shocka froca freakun…"

Mr. Dead-Centered, an old BarNone and plenty of, IF (I love music part 2)

Mr. Dead-Centered, an old BarNone and plenty of, IF (I love music part 2)
By Jon Slone






Easy question time…you ready?

Here we go.

Look at the picture above, which one do you think is the lead singer?

Yep…

The dude dead-center rockin’ the paisley shirt with the jean collar right?

That’s what I thought too…

Like, for twenty years!

Guess what?

I was wrong.


As a music-loving kid in the 1970’s, I, like every other inquisitive scavenger my age, stumbled upon this invaluable cache in my parents vast album collection. By cache, I mean the wonder band called, Bread. Within the four slices, what comprise this loaf of awesomeness is the chief song writer and lead singer, a man by the name of David Gates.


Hear me people who still rock a lunch box or a meal ticket…..this David Gates has the best falsetto voice on the planet bar none (Hey that was a yummy candy bar wasn’t it!)


















Just how good is Bread you ask?


The band, Fleetwood Mac garnered 17 top 20 hits inside of thirty years. Bread nabbed a whopping 10 in a career that spanned only 31 months. Imagine if Bread had stayed fresh for thirty or forty years?


If for some outlandish reason you are not familiar with their body of work, by all means, partake of these sumptuous bites straightaway:


Baby I’m A Want You
It don’t matter to me
Everything I own
Make it with you


And


Wait for it…


IF


You knew that was coming, didn’t you?


Ah,……….IF.

Just two little letters and a paltry two minutes and thirty-six seconds long and yet still, its unadulterated brilliance with regards to its overall angelic sound and ocean-deep lyrical content. (It’s pure poetry people)


Check out these words:


And when, my love, for life is running dry…
You’ll come, and pour, yourself, on me.


AWWWWWWWWW!

Are you frickin’ kiddin’ me?! This is the substance of baby’s farting in church and tiny tea-set parties and forlorn little puppies.


Jane Austin has this song on her iPod for cryin’ out loud!


This is what butterflies and rainbows and Amish people neck to!


A Krispy Kreme Buffet and a Coca Cola IV ain’t got nothin’ on this song!


If your first kiss or your first grass stain or your first Stretch Armstrong were magically pooled with all the glory days of recess’ gone by and millenniums’ spent trick-or-treating….if you could melt all of that down into a song and then sprinkle it atop your doughnut heart like it was snowy droplets of powdered sugar………those syrupy flakes of ear toffee would be the song, IF.


Put it to you this way, between the years of 11 and 22, I serenaded roughly 10 women with this buttery gem.

I closed the deal on all 10.


By closed, I mean we either dated or became boyfriend/girlfriend.


Little known fact: Women dig men who dig Bread enough to sing Bread to said women…..wait, what?


Let’s review:

David Gates = Angel
David’s voice = Angelic
The sound of the song, IF (instrumentation and all) = Heavenly
The words = Poetry


The mentioning of DG brings me back to the beginning of this post.


It was and still is a weird feeling to love and listen to a band for as long as I have and to furthermore, gape at the most famous picture of that band and to suppose you’ve locked in on the lead singer, only to find out, a buh-jillion years later, that you have instead been looking at the disgruntled and green-eyed guitar player, one by the name of Mr. James Griffin, the late Mr. Griffin I should add (Actually, for that matter, all but the lead singer have passed away now).


But getting back to the famous photo and my innocent blunder…..

Come on people, really?!


To those, ‘horrible, position-the-band-for-a-famous-album-cover-picture-people’ I offer this quote:


Don’t fall victim to classic blunders. The two most famous are, ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’ and ‘never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’….but only slightly less known is this, ‘never stick the lead singer behind a weird looking guitarist in a paisley shirt with a jean collar.’



Now go have fun storming the castle. And take your Bread with ya!


Jon



By the way, David Gates, for those that don’t know, is the one with the shortest haircut.

Pickles, ketchup, the works! (I love music part 1)

Pickles, ketchup, the works! (I love music part 1)
By Jon Slone





I love music.
I like music.
I dig music.
I’m down with music.


If music was a pet, I would hug it and squeeze it and stroke its bill and rub its pretty feathers and call it George.


Music courses through my body like blood and unanswered prayer requests.


I thank My Dad for the gift of music all the time. I love all genres of music…psychedelic, reggae, rustic, acoustic, folk, pop, acid jazz, smooth jazz, accapella, country, bluegrass, blues, delta blues, R&B, soul, swamp, gospel, punk, alternative, instrumental, grunge and lastly, that style where the artist has no aptitude or creative bent whatsoever and could no more trill his way out of a paper bag than he or she could fly to the moon. These melodic fakers force studio execs to decamp to their billion dollar recording bunkers and manufacture a counterfeit sound and a bogus skill-set just so the aforementioned mock-artisans can appear both, dope and fly. I think they call that genre, Bieber. But I’m not entirely sure…It may be, Milli something.

I love how music gives my soul goose-bumps, how it heals me at times, inspires me at others, ushers forth an occasional tear parade, teaches and guides me and much, much more.


Heck, forget Skippy and Lassie, I’m thinking that man’s real best friends are an iTunes account and an iPod with everything on it…..pickles, ketchup, the works!


Hear me plainly on this; the closest we’ll ever come to a time machine, this side of heaven, is music. Music has that uncanny capacity to transport us back, heart, head and soul, to the time where we first heard a particular song. Spectacular memories, both blissful and cheerless, cling to songs like dew surmounting an aureate pasture at daybreak. Thus, when we, many years removed, hear a certain tune, it literally and inexplicably unlocks that vivid recollection and we get violently driven back to chapter three of the story of our lives. One moment, you’re forty and your left knee hurts, the next, its 1982 and you’re twelve and your listening to your Mom’s records and drinking Tab.

And who was to blame for it all?

Well, I thought you would never ask……the guilty party was, Men at Work and a catchy number called, ‘Down Under.’


Music is crazy-incredible that way!


I hear, ‘Love will keep us together’ and all of the sudden, I’m five years old, standing in a kiddy pool at Kentucky Damn Village. I hear, ‘Love Shack’ and I’m eighteen and three quarters, working at Lexington Country Club on Old Paris Pike, cutting lemons into wedges and wagon wheels. Peradventure I was to happen upon a radio playing, ‘Lessons in Love,’ the next thing you know I’m carried off to the year 1987 and Don Lane’s Basketball camp. And every time Color me Badd’s, ‘I Adore Mi Amore’ clanks against the ear drums all at once I’m back in my 1984 Dodge Omni and headed to Natural Bridge in Slade Kentucky near the Red River Gorge. That was where I celebrated my twenty-first birthday. And Color Me Badd forces me, whether I like it or not, to relive that four day weekend every time I hear a specific four minute and forty-five second song of theirs.



Music is prevailing like I don’t know what, even to the point where it can save lives.


Almost all of us have been in church at least once where God inhabited the music portion of the service and something so remarkable happened that the impending sermon was totally redundant and unnecessary.


I could go on and on and continue to paint with broad strokes but I’d rather pack it in and talk about music on a much slighter scale. In other words, what it means to one person, me.


I love to dance to it, jog to it, chill to it, unwind to it, be stirred by it, be taught by it, purchase it, play it, collect it, quote it, converse about it, jump into it, be swept away by it, study it, jam it, rock it, memorize it and be in awe of it.


Something about music is a mystery…it shows us only part of its hand.


Just a thought: There is no marriage or copulating in heaven but there is choir rehearsal, all night jam sessions and drum sets sitting around……I’m just sayin.’


For now, I must proffer you a fond farewell, too much, ROYAL SCAM and not enough time.


P.S. In the next little bit (Upcoming posts) I’ll be talking about the five qualities that I look for in a song, my top twenty-five bands or solo artists of all time and new music that I’ve discovered in the last year or so. Also, I’ll be doing album reviews.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta locate our dog, Scooter and try to explain to him why I’m more partial to, Men at Work. (It’s because they don’t pee on our Berber carpet yo!)

Jon

This, your tenuous creation (The delicate process of creative writing)

This, your tenuous creation
(The delicate process of creative writing)
By Jon Slone









Someone once asked me what it felt like to write...to describe the actual process.
This was my reply in a poem.



Slap something down like a fist-full of mashed potatoes.
Then push it around like you were rearranging furniture.
Stop for a precious moment, step back and gaze upon it, this, your tenuous creation.
Then immediately stow, with everything in you, the urge to play basketball with it!


Look on with surgical eyes. But save one glance full of ripe aggrandizement.
Cut the cord and walk away.


Several good and restful hours later, come home to your prose.
Drink-in slowly, the fetching bits.
Notice the horrid lumps straight away!


Make haste to operate yet again!


More slaps!
Reconfigure those ink-stained end-tables!
Cut.
Draw lines through.
Drop in.
Snip.
Slash.
Couch together.

Dab the ink.
Take a drink.
Chase new ideas with new sneakers!

Quill over ink pool
Take the plunge!
Scissors.
Tape.
Scalpel.
Sponge!.
Must stop the bleeding!

Castigate!
Contemplate.
Confabulate.
Inoculate…

Rubbish and genius, shoulder to shoulder but for a fleeting moment!

Rinse and repeat for what seems like forever!




This, your tenuous creation.



Peace & a Pretzel!