Blue Monday

It's kinda soggy, but I like rain.

            Word that Steppenwolf was coming to Knoxville got me excited. Steppenwolf had the coolest look of any band in the world (though I’ll confess that there was no shortage of cool at that time) and played a rough and ready kind of music soaked in distorted guitars (including slide), rock solid drumming, inventively clever Hammond organ (and other keyboards) playing, and shouted out by a gravelly voiced singer whose songs delivered timely political messages which ranged in tone from the humorous (Don’t Step On the Grass, Sam), to the very serious (Draft Resister and From Here to There Eventually), and all delivered with a little extra jab to the teeth of the establishment. The arrangements and playing in many of Steppenwolf’s songs also displayed a wide eccentric sound and manner. All in all, it was my kinda band.

            Along with Billy D and Tig, I’d been spending a lot of time with my friends Luke and Hook. We’d been buddies at school and beyond for a few years (I’d known Luke since grammar school, especially 6^th grade), and as we approached our late teens were vigorously working toward the contradictory ideals of becoming hippie anarchists. We had practiced those ends as often as possible with various acts of anarchist defiance including a brief concert for our English class (rearranging lyrics and anything else to bend three cover songs to our ends), and several sessions on the railroad tracks near Luke’s house where we would unload torrents of rocks against the windows and bodies of automobiles hauled through the unprotected air in open sided train cars. I always felt damned good when we’d damaged a Caddy or another vehicle.

            We started calling ourselves, and the others who hung around with us, The Crabs (after, yes, those crabs) because we were the unwanted, the cast outs, the shunned, the not ready for anything players. And yet, none of us really wanted to be establishment darlings. We wanted society girls (because they looked good and dressed so well), but the rest of the scene was a big, fat drag to us. Hook’s poem said it best: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,/It’s not a lie, it’s not a sin,/But we are Crabs, we’re tried and true,/ And if you don’t like it—fuck you!” Hardly upscale political discourse, though it captures the essence of Crabdom.