Turkey On My Mind

There's no day like today.

            I had surgery on a broken finger around that same time and could play neither basketball nor music. I fell deeply into an intense depression and moped my way through everything. My family knew something was up, but I couldn’t tell them anything because I didn’t know what the problem was. A gnawing mental grind stayed with me to a greater or lesser extent for many years. The agony wasn’t something I grew out of. As time has worn on I have become better able to deal with internal chemicals running amuck. I finally learned to accept such things as part of my own normal life-cycle. Do I feel better? Sometimes.

            My finger healed and I was able to rejoin the basketball team and finish the season. The local dance scene had, after too long an absence, sort of come back around. The lead singer for The Heroes formed a new band and began to gig in the area again. Instead of weekly engagements in Madisonville, the new band often played at The National Guard Armory in Sweetwater. The core of that new band was the bass player, his brother keyboard player (playing a very sweet Hammond B-3 organ amplified by two Leslie cabinets), and the guitar player, all of whom had been members of a well known Vonore High School band, The Jewels. When that band dissolved, the three members and drummer had worked up a goodly number of Booker T and the MG’s tunes. The new band, The Blues Blogs, had absolutely nothing to do with blues, and played, to my disappointment, too much bubblegumish Top 40 fluff, along with some Carolina beach music, and the Booker T songs, which somehow stayed on the playlist. The singer once told a friend of mine that I should mind my own business when I had given some friends a less than stellar review to the band. I understand his consternation with my appraisal, but if you can’t take the heat, you know, but that’s not the point. The real point is that The Blues Blogs didn’t have the love of the high school as The Heroes had, and that even a nobody like me could put a little jitter into the fabric of things. Look, no offense, but what I thought was that with such a group of fine musicians, including horn players (rare around Madisonville in those days), the band could stretch its muscle by playing something a little more challenging than Hitchin a Ride. I still liked The Blues Blogs and never missed any chance to see a performance. I don’t know whatever happened to The Blues Blogs, but after the early spring of 1971 I never saw nor heard of the band again.