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Tag: musicians

Dear Pete Townshend

*An Imaginary letter I wrote to our Tree Audio client (we design and hand-build tube recording consoles), Pete Townshend of The Who, about My Generation.

Dear Pete Townshend,

As I made and soldered the cables for your Tree Audio recording equipment we just sent off to you, I thought about how I spent my early teen years listening to “My Generation” until I wore down the grooves in my album, while sulking, thinking about how misunderstood I was, how The Who really understood me and my generation, all of us raised in the shadow of the Flower Children with our own issues. Unlike the Woodstock crowd, the media didn’t care much about what my peers and I did or what we thought, didn’t follow our every movement, or put down our every waking moment in documentary film–only stopped to warn us that the free love-era had come to a scary halt with AIDS.

You got me, I thought. Then I realized The Who song was written for YOUR generation, my parents’ generation.

Whatever.

My generation, your generation, my kid’s generation… I think we can all relate to being misunderstood. So thanks for getting my anger. Every time you smashed your guitar, I knew you felt what I felt. Or I liked to think so.

Thanks,

Michele,
Your Tree Audio cable maker

Hippie Orgy Free Love
1960s: Free Love!
safe sex poster 1980s
1980s: Halt! Love is NOT Free. It’ll kill you. Play hide ‘n’ seek, instead.

 

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Delusional and Untalented

As a delusional and untalented child, I mangled many songs of the 1970s: Olivia Newton-John’s Have you Never Been Mellow; Minnie Riperton’s Loving You, and so many more, including (as I mention in this Los Angeles Daily News piece of mine) Debby Boone’s You Light up My Life.

Yes, it’s true.  I sang out in public without shame.  See this photo above?  I’m dancing and singing, as I often did.  And from the big hand gestures, I’m guessing the number I’m assaulting everyone in my vicinity with is Age of Aquarius.

And if I had more room in the Daily News piece, I would’ve included how I, as a Freshman (who should have known better by then), sang Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou to my entire high school.  Yep, it was just me singing a capella – standing in the middle of the auditorium during a school rally.

So, yes, I was truly delusional… I say in the past-tense, while typing about my life into cyberspace as if anyone gives a damn.  Some things haven’t changed.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius; yet my lack of talent did NOT dawn on me –

I did NOT sound like Linda –

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