Due to certain mitigating circumstances, I decided to take another week off from writing these "sermons." But on the off chance you the reader look forward to them each week, I didn't want to leave you hanging. So here's one I wrote three years ago that was originally posted to Facebook on 30 April, 2022. It's always held a special place in my heart... especially while I'm driving. Enjoy!
The Reverend Will the Thrill Presents the Album of the Week!
Two of the next three "sermons" (and I'm not sure which two just yet--I will say this is the first), are all about the transportative power of music. Before anyone asks, I'm coining the word "transportative." It's not recognized by Merriam-Webster, so I'm inventing it. I'm defining it as the ability of something to move you from one time or place to another, even if it's just in your own mind.
The summer of 1993 was an important time for me. I had just completed my freshman year of college. I was very excited about my sophomore year as I had recently been hired by Ball State University to be a Resident Assistant in the fall. I had also decided that at the ripe old age of nineteen, I should finally break down and get my drivers license. I was given access to the former family car, a 1986 Ford P.O.S... I mean Tempo. It was the car on which Dad taught me to drive. It was not a reliable vehicle, which is why it was no longer the family car. At the time, we went to church with a guy who forgot more about cars than I'll ever know and Dad had asked him to fix it up for us. We picked it up the day I got my license. That was my first drive by myself. I spent that summer driving all over the back roads of Orange and Lawrence Counties in southern Indiana, usually going either to or from my summer job as a busboy in a local restaurant. On the car stereo (such as it was), I discovered a station at 92.3 MHz on the FM band out of Bloomington (WTTS) that played a wider variety of music than the other stations. They played a lot of newer stuff, but also a lot of older stuff... not just the hits, but also deep album cuts that other stations wouldn't touch (I've never heard Billy Joel's "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" on any other station). On Sunday nights, I would drive aimlessly along back roads listening to Tom Roznowski play two hours of blues music telling stories about the Chauncey Rose Orphans' Home in Terre Haute and the great lost secret of the blues.
One day, while enjoying my newly found freedom behind the wheel, I heard what sounded like my blues idol, John Lee Hooker, performing the Van Morrison song "Gloria" that had been a hit for Morrison's band Them back in 1964. As the song progressed, I discovered that it was actually a duet between Hooker and Morrison that was on Morrison's most recent album. When I finally got around to buying the album--a full year later!--it's hard to say what entranced me the most. It could have been the music, it could have been the lyrics, it could have been the sax solos provided by Candy Dulfer, Katie St. Johns, and Van the Man himself (I didn't even know he played the instrument). It might have been Georgie Fame's Hammond organ which seemed to permeate the album and envelop it in a fog of melancholy jazz (if it is, in fact, possible to permeate and envelop something at the same time). It could have been the mix of not only original songs, but covers of works by Sonny Boy Williamson, Brook Benton, and Doc Pomus. Hell, it might have even been the cover art which, nearly thirty years later, is still one of my favourite album covers. I would love to have the album on vinyl just to put it up on my wall.
Perhaps it was a combination of all of those elements. I honestly don't know anymore and I'm not sure I ever did. All I do know for certain is that it created a mood and transported me to a place that I still don't know how to describe. I don't know where it is on any map, let alone how to get there. For all I know, it doesn't exist at all, at least not on this plane of existence. Maybe, like Brigadoon, it only becomes visible for a little while, straddling that mythical line where tonight and tomorrow are, in the words of Janis Joplin, "all the same fucking day, man!" And every so often I find myself wanting to go there and I know this album will get me there.
So from 1993, please enjoy the one and only Van Morrison with Too Long in Exile.
A few postscripts...
The album clearly had some kind of hold on me over the years. In 2001, I spent my twenty-seventh birthday roaming the streets of London, England, with my sister and another friend of ours. I found myself enthralled with an alley... or what looked like an alley to me. Upon further examination it's really just a sidewalk surrounded by buildings on both sides. I felt compelled to take a picture of it just because it reminded me of the cover art to this week's album. It's not a great picture (I was still using film at the time and had to wait a couple weeks to have it developed to see how it came out), but I've included it in the comments section.
Tom Roznowski can still be heard on WFIU radio (103.7 FM) in Bloomington which produces his hour-long public radio show "PorchLight w/ Tom Roznowski" which can be heard and streamed live Saturdays at 6:00 pm Eastern Time. More information is available at tomroznowski.net.
I still have the ignition key to that '86 Tempo as a souvenir of those days. This was back in the day when cars came with two keys--one to the ignition and one to the doors and trunk. I'm sad to say I don't have the other key. Maybe I'll stumble upon it sometime while listening to this week's album.
Until next week, stay safe, be good to your neighbours, and please remember that if at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
Yours in peace, love, and rock and roll!
The Reverend Will the Thrill
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| London, UK, 19 April, 2001 |
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