Mixing “Bedspring Symphony” with Mick Jagger
On September 15, 2005 David and I went to see the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was our way of celebrating our 50th birthdays, which came three weeks apart.
David had been my best friend in high school. We only see each other once a year now. He is on the road 300 days a year traveling to places like Tajikistan to help people with the treatment and prevention of AIDS. We get together each year to celebrate the ridiculousness of how old we’re getting and how long we’ve known each other. Soon we will have been friends for 40 years.
Though it’s always wonderful getting together, this time was unique. It wasn’t only the milestone birthday. The Stones meant something special to us. I was indifferent to the band until David dragged me to see them at the same venue of Madison Square Garden in 1972, when we were sixteen.
Going to concerts was our reason for living at that time in our lives. We had gotten tickets for that classic ‘72 show from Binky Phillips, a most admired older brother of a friend. Later, Binky fronted a punk band called “The Planets” and ran a record store called “Sounds” in the East Village, the coolest neighborhood in New York City. I still have the ticket stubs from that concert, and the envelope with Binky’s writing on it.
Apotheosis came by getting as close to the stage as we could. The $4.50 seats placed us about half-way up the Garden’s bowl. We knew how to get past the guards. We ended up in the 4th row, center, for the entire show, standing on the back of seats, held up by the moshing crowd.
No dervish ever had an ecstatic experience to match mine. The image of young, beautiful Mick in his white studded jumpsuit, on his knees, whipping the stage with his belt to the crash of Charlie and Keith during Midnight Rambler, will be forever cherished as a singular golden memory.
Little was I to know then that within a few years I would be working at one of the premier recording studios in the world, A and R Recording. Before my 19th birthday I would be eating fish off the bone with Mr. Jagger.
In September of 1974, the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a syndicated radio program that broadcast live recordings of the greatest bands of the time, booked studio time to remix tapes of the Rolling Stones recorded live in Europe during their ’73 tour. Mick would be coming in to supervise the remix.
Though I assumed our mixes would only be heard once on the radio, they have since become legendary. It is the only top-quality live recording of the Stones from the time period many consider to be their best. This was guitarist Mick Taylor’s last tour with the band and many believe the Stones were never as good after he left. This recording also happened before the band was presumably dragged down for a number of years by the worst of Keith’s heroin addiction. (On the other hand, I’ve seen the Stones many times since 1972 and they have always been transcendent as far as I’m concerned.)
The mix has found its way onto multiple bootleg releases, and is known, generally, as “Bedspring Symphony.” The bulk of the recordings were taken from a concert at Forest National, in Brussels, Belgium, that took place on October 17, 1973. Some of the recordings from that concert did not meet Jagger’s standards, and so we spliced in some songs from another concert that took place at Empire Pool, Wembley, London on September 9, 1973.
Waiting for Mick Jagger to arrive at the studio was a bit agonizing. Like a true star, he stood in the wings till we were all assembled in the control room so he could make his grand entrance.
The young Jagger blew into the room, and in his most delicious crusty London baritone, asked, “Am I in the right place?”
The question was ironic. How could Mick Jagger ever be in the wrong place?
I must admit I was all a-flutter. Mick could shine his charm on a room of 4 or 5 as brilliantly as he could light up a stadium of 50,000. And at 30-years-old, with his moppy hair, crinkly eyes, and toothy smile, he was gorgeous.
We were all deferential to the future Sir. Even my mentor, Phil Ramone, whose first record was the grammy-winning Girl From Ipanema, who later recorded Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and had worked with the scariest artists from Streisand to McCartney, seemed a little humbled by the presence of Mr. D. He yielded the mixing seat to Mick, who sat with his fingers on the red faders. These were the sliding volume controls for the various instruments: Bill’s steady bass, Charlie’s propulsive kick, snare, toms, and cymbals, Mick Taylor’s crying lead guitar, Keith’s indomitable, archetypal guitar riffs, assorted horns, keys, and background vocals, and Mick’s own manically-inspired lead vocals.
We listened to the first song, Brown Sugar. Mick adjusted the balance between the instruments, trying to get a blend that would bring you into the middle of the concert.
Usually, when a mix was in process, the mixer would become quite precious about the placement of these faders. Balancing the instruments could be a delicate affair, and when you got something you liked, you were very careful to keep the slider in a very precise spot. Before the advent of digital recording, it was my job to notate exactly where every knob in the studio was placed, so we could always get back the magic.
But Jagger would set up a mix, play with it for a while, get frustrated, and just knock down all the faders to zero, ruining all that he had just built up. He’d get out of his seat, growl, “Ahh!” and signal Ramone to take over.
Ramone would leap behind the board to ride the faders like he was running a thoroughbred, swooning and tapping his foot, bringing his mystic vibe into the proceedings. Jagger went along for the ride, but wasn’t happy with the sound Ramone was getting on Keith’s guitar. He wanted something rougher than the jazzy Ramone was getting. Mick signaled me to crank it. He wanted me to sharpen the tone, using what we called an “outboard equalizer.” This piece of gear sat behind Ramone, out of his view. While Ramone was otherwise occupied, I twisted the knob all the way at around 5k, the part of the sonic range that made Keith’s guitar rub in your face. Jagger smiled his approval. I never told Ramone that little secret. It was just between me and Mick.
I fancied that Mick took a liking to me. Or maybe he was just a sweet guy who was nice to all the assistant engineers. He’d walk into the studio and walk straight over to me, the invisible assistant in the back corner. He’d gently punch me a few times, rub my long, curly red hair and say, “How ya doin’ Gingah?”
With that I ascended to a realm somewhere between heaven and nirvana.
It was a crazy couple of weeks at the studio. When Mick had come in, we were in the middle of finishing up Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. (For the rest of that adventure, read “Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks: The Untold Story.”) When Mick heard that Dylan was in the other studio, he asked to visit. I was happy to bring these two gods in the rock pantheon, like Neptune and Zeus, together. They’d met, but didn’t know each other well. They couldn’t have been more different. If Jagger was the most charming man on the planet, Dylan was the freakiest Asperger’s-like gnome. I don’t think it was love at first sight. But I can add to my creds that I witnessed the coming together of Mr Z and Sir Mick.
During the day on Friday, Mick had planned to do an interview that would be part of the radio show. He thought it would be fun if Peter Cook asked the questions.
Peter Cook was a brilliant English comedian. He was an extremely influential figure in modern British comedy and is regarded as the leading light of the British satire boom of the 1960s.
Dixon Van Winkle — a strange and brilliant engineer with a walrus moustache and round wire glasses — Mick, and I went in a cab with our remote recording gear to record the interview at the Pierre Hotel, the poshest in New York. We hung out in a suite with Mick and Peter, but nothing really came of the recording. Peter drank some. We left after some chuckles, with nothing usable on tape.
There are some fragments of an interview from that time floating around the web with Peter Cook, Mick, and Charlie Watts. It must have happened at another time and place. I can’t remember Charlie being there.
Friday night, Mick had nothing better to do, so we all decided to go out to dinner. We went to the French restaurant, Pierre Au Tunnel, which was on 48th Street between 8th and 9th Avenue, next door to the studio. Mick was quite cultured and sophisticated, especially to this provincial boy from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. As he swallowed his garlicky escargot, sipping on a nice little Bordeaux, he spoke about his time in France, during which Exile had been recorded.
I simply wanted to get through the dinner without anyone figuring out that I was so far out of my depth that I felt in a constant state of drowning. I might have pulled it off better if I’d kept the adoring, goofy grin off my face. My plan went especially awry when I made the mistake of ordering the French dessert called a Napoleon. For those of you who don’t know, a Napoleon is made of endless layers of very thin puff-pastry, alternating with vanilla custard. There is no way to eat a Napoleon gracefully. When you try to cut through the layers, the cream squirts out the sides. As I tried to negotiate this sweet lasagna, I watched in horror as my hands morphed into awkward clam claws. I suddenly couldn’t remember how to hold a fork and knife, as I spastically tried to cut the oozing morsel. Cream shot across the table. Mick glanced at the Grande Guignol performance, but had the grace to ignore it, barely raising an eyebrow, and chatted on.
The next morning I got to be alone with Mick in the studio. As the assistant engineer, I always came in first and, having cleaned up after the party, left last. It was my job to get everything ready so the big boys could play. This quiet Saturday morning I walked through the midtown New York streets filled with litter but clear of hookers. I was thrilled to open up the studio, the only one there.
It was a sacred ritual to unbox the thick, warm, multi-track tapes with their iron-oxide filings dancing so pretty. I slid the big 2-inch reel over the large shaft on the bulky tape machine. I threaded the tape through the metal guides and over the tape heads, and swiftly twirled the end of the tape to catch hold on the take-up reel. I hit the rewind button, and the tape swooshed across the heads till the tape emptied one reel and filled the other. I hit the fast-forward button to put a brake on the speeding tape, and the machine slowed to a near halt when I hit stop.
I walked over to the console and hit play. I started to set some basic levels. The song started with Keith’s guitar: Baaah-dep. Bah-bah dee-dep, then Charlie’s drums Boom, Pow. Boom Pow, then the signature lick that told us Mick’s vocal was about to enter.
“I met a gin soaked bar room queen in Memphis,”
I was just getting into the track when Mick walked in. I hit the stop button. I stood up.
Me and Mick alone, Saturday morning, 1974, New York City. Yes. Here was my chance to have a real conversation with the Midnight Rambler. I figured, rightly, this would be the only moment in my life that this would happen. What to say? As I puttered around the control room, patching in limiters, we talked.
I was a big movie freak at the time. In New York in the early 70’s, if you weren’t going to hear live music, you were going to the old repertory movie houses. We were all discovering life through the classic European art films made over the previous few decades. We’d go to all night shows at theatres called the Elgin, Bleecker Street, Thalia, or Theatre 80 and watch films by Bernardo Bertolucci, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Goddard, Stanley Kubrick, Ken Russell, and Carol Reed, to name a handful.
One of our favorite films, which would usually come on at 4 AM when we were in a drug-induced psychedelic swirl, was a film directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg called Performance. It starred my new friend, Mick Jagger, as a washed up pop star; a guy named James Fox, who played a sadistic gangster, and Anita Pallenberg, who was Keith’s lover in real life, but played Mick’s girlfriend in the movie.
Watching that movie a dozen times when I was 16-years-old taught me how to get deep into film. Nicholas Roeg, the cinematographer and the guy who supervised the editing, had a radical style of cutting, playing with time, place, and point-of-view in non-linear ways. Unless you knew how to really focus, you couldn’t follow what was going on. It was the first time I was motivated to really concentrate, which was to help me later on in making art and making love.
My friends and I loved this wild film for every reason, and in every way. It was hot, with great nude sex scenes with the voluptuous Anita, androgynous Mick, a child-like French actress named Michèle Breton, and kinky-masculine James Fox. It had a super-tasty soundtrack by Jack Nietzsche, that peaked with a Jagger composition called “Memo from Turner,” performed by Mick in slicked-back hair and a suit. The story was full of drug-laced allusions to obscure cultural references and hip literature. Its plot and dialogue, centered around the tension and love in the relationship of the gangster and the rocker, was stoned-cool.
In an era when movies were just starting to break out of the orchestral, straight mold, it was a groundbreaking, pioneer rock-and-roll movie. I had studied the movie frame by frame, knew all the great lines, and its subtlest nuance.
I also knew the film had been a flop. I figured this was my way in. I told Mick how much I admired his movie. He seemed genuinely pleased. We exchanged ideas about what the movie was really about. I referred to specific shots in such a precise way that I could see M’s narcissistic feathers puff. He told me he was disappointed by the critical response, because he was now considered box-office poison and probably wouldn’t be able to make a film again.
We also found common ground in gossiping about how weird Dylan was.
It was time to get to work. He asked me what song I had up, and I told him Honky Tonk Women, the next on our list to mix. He asked me to play it for him. He sat next to me while I rode the levels and put myself into making it sound as hot as I could. He listened seriously.
He decided he didn’t like his vocal performance and wanted to replace it. He told me to plug in an SM-57 Shure dynamic microphone. This was the kind of mic he’d sing into on stage. We walked out into the studio together. He said he wanted to hold the mic, so I took it out of its stand, and handed it to him. I walked back into the control room. We stood about 8-feet apart, separated by a thick piece of glass. I pressed “play” and “record” on the big, old multi-track.
Sir Mick Jagger performed Honky Tonk Woman just for me.
With his vocal done, he came back into the control room for a playback. He was satisfied. So was I.
This would be our last day of mixing, and Mick must have wanted some inspiration. He called his dealer to deliver some stuff. An hour or two later, in walked Mick’s candyman, who turned out to be John Phillips.
John had found fame in The Mamas and the Papas. They recorded hits like, “California Dreamin.’” Phillips wrote this, and some other timeless songs, including “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” and the song played more times than any other by the Grateful Dead, “Me and My Uncle.”
Unfortunately, by this time Phillips had become a severe drug addict. Though Jagger was ready to promote a Phillips solo album on the Rolling Stones Records label, he wasn’t above using Phillips in his gig of dealer.
Phillips spiraled down from that time in the ‘70’s. The solo project never manifested, and he was eventually convicted of trafficking in 1981. Most ignominiously, his daughter, Mackenzie, herself famous from having starred in the TV show, “One Day at a Time,” claimed on Oprah that, after injecting her with heroin and coke, John initiated her into a ten-year incestuous relationship.
That day, Phillips delivered, in a large brown envelope, two large film canisters, one filled with pot, the other with coke.
Jagger wasn’t much of a druggie, from what I observed. He had me roll a joint for him (now here was something I felt adequate doing!). He’d take a hit or two, and put it out. He’d stick his pinky fingernail in the coke and put it up his nose once or twice, and that was about it.
Phillips had also brought along some tabloids with some scurrilous reportage on the Glimmer Twin. Mick laughed, loving it. He said, “I remember what Elizabeth Taylor told me: I don’t care what they write about me as long as it isn’t true!”
We finished up the mixes. Mick complained about the recorded performances, saying the band rushed, they played too fast. It was ok for a radio broadcast, he figured, but they were too embarrassing for anything else. Listening now, it just sounds like blistering enthusiasm. The show, available all across the underground internet, documents what may have been the greatest live moment for the greatest rock band in history.
With Jagger just having pecked at the hooch, the two canisters were virtually full. Mick gave me a hug and a tousle goodbye, and, pointing at the canisters, said, “That’s for you, Ginger!”
As those world-famous hips shook out of the studio, my voice caught. In my head were the words, “Hey, if you ever need someone to help out on the road . . .” but the words never came out. It had been one of my non-stop regrets until I read in Keith’s autobiography how fucked up the Stones became starting in the mid-70’s.
It was certainly a peak week for me – working with Dylan and Jagger. But my friends felt intolerable envy that I was spending the week with ol’ rubber lips. No one would speak to me. Then I put out the word that I had Mick’s drugs. Within hours we were in my friend David’s basement, all blasted to smithereens. Everyone loved me again.
My Son is Born the Night I See the Rolling Stones
Perhaps these were some of the reasons I felt so emotional seeing the Stones again with David 34 years later, both of us 50. But I was surprised by the strength of my feelings. Waiting for the band to come on I began to weep, rather uncontrollably. David appeared alarmed. Having become a shrink, I’ve probably become a bit more touchy-feely than him over the last few years. I told him it was fine. It actually felt quite good, but I was sure I didn’t know what it was all about. Was it mere sentimentality and nostalgia? That didn’t seem to capture it.
What I was unaware of was that just about when Keith played the opening chords to Brown Sugar, the baby boy who my wife and I were planning to adopt was being born in Wichita, Kansas.
The next day we got the call. My wife and I had had a relationship with the birth mother over the previous several months, so we knew enough to be surprised. The boy was born three weeks early. Having adopted before, we moved into action. There are odd differences between adoption and biological birth. You don’t hop in the car and go to the hospital. Instead, you go to the airport. We arranged to drop off our two-and-a-half year old daughter at her cousin’s in St. Louis and we were in Kansas before the ringing from the previous night’s concert went out of my ears.
Everything seemed to be ok. The boy wasn’t in the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, but they wanted to keep him in the hospital for a day or two to make sure he was eating sufficiently to gain weight.
We were understandably anxious. One of the great lessons one gains from adoption is learning about the things you can and cannot control. We were able to decide if we wanted to “work with” our birth mother, but we had no way to determine her behavior during her pregnancy. This was a great lesson for me. As control freaks, my wife and I would’ve done the optimum 21st century yuppie prenatal program, and made sure that nothing other than organic passed that fetus’s blood barrier. Now we had to surrender to a plan other than our own.
But letting go was hard. Perhaps the oddest thing about adoption is that we could opt out till the very last minute. If we saw something we didn’t like, we could walk away.
Having sufficiently killed all possible bacteria, we stood at a small hospital bed and looked at this little vantz, no bigger than a hedgehog. He had all of his parts, and like all newborns, he did have that glow of someone who has just shed his wings. You could still hear the heavenly choir in the background. But we squinted our eyes, moved in close, and scrutinized him like you would a used car. What couldn’t we see? What were they covering up with a cosmetic fix that covered some profound, structural flaw?
The clock was ticking. Of course there was the oxytocin factor, the natural love hormone that all mothers secrete in the presence of their baby. I could see that though my wife attempted to keep a critical eye, she was falling into that narcotic goo of infant motherhood. And soon enough all the powers that be would want us to sign the papers that would make this newborn forever and irretrievably our son. Within a few days, by the time he would be ready to leave the hospital, it would all be done. There would be no going back. If we decided to go for it.
The second time adopting was tougher than the first. Our daughter came so fast and easy and she’d been a dream. But with the second, we also had to consider the impact of this child on our first. What if our happy toddler would be saddled for life with a special needs sibling? It’s one thing to respect someone for taking on such a noble task. It’s another to do it yourself, recognizing the forever life-altering consequences on everyone involved.
In those first days we discovered something surprising. We liked Wichita. Its people were nice. My New York, blue-state, prejudice had led me to expect a congregation of corn-syrup-stuffed, Bush, gun, and NASCAR loving, abortion and gay hating, fundamentalists. I was surprised to see copies of The Nation and The New Yorker in the hospital waiting room. The nurses were all kind, open-minded, and seriously dedicated to doing good work and getting food on their family’s table.
The city was a small grid. It was clean and easy to navigate. We were able to find healthy food and the best children’s museum I’d ever been to. One day, with little to do, I took a drive by myself to the edge of town, ten minutes from anywhere in the city. The town ended abruptly. Suddenly I found myself facing a flat prairie that went on for about 1000 miles till you hit the Rocky Mountains. I drove a few miles into Wizard of Oz country with only the occasional silo on the horizon and found myself gripped with an existential terror. I was sure that in another few feet I risked falling into the endless void. I turned the car around and whizzed back to civilization. Somehow, this felt like a portent of things to come.
Seeking any guidance, our local adoption attorney came in to visit. He looked for signs of anything wrong, pulling the infant’s ears, but claimed this boy was as precious and love-worthy as he appeared. Though he always liked to say that he operated from an “abundance of caution,” this did not convince. He had a job to do and wanted this adoption completed. Never had I so felt like Jonah. God was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t want to listen. All I said to myself was, “you can always say no.”
The final night before we would be forced to make a decision, my wife and I sat frozen in the hospital. Our minds raced through the “what ifs.” As a therapist I often ask, “What is the worst that could happen?” as a way of helping the client gain perspective on what is most often an unreasonable fear. In this case, the answer was, all of our lives could be ruined forever and we had no way of knowing how likely that possibility could be. The worst in this case was really bad.
As we bit our fingernails, a very large woman with a Janet Reno haircut and glasses slowly ambled toward us with a warm smile on her face and an outstretched hand. She introduced herself as our birth-mother’s doctor. She had delivered the child. She plopped herself down into a chair. It seemed like she was planning on staying for a while. I was used to doctors coming in late and leaving early. Glove on, cough, glove off, watch your pressure, see you next year. But this doctor had a different vibe. She told us about her family. She told us about her journey of becoming a doctor, leaving the profession and coming back to it again. She told us of the discovery that her daughter had a hole in her heart and how she survived this life threatening condition and an operation and how this changed her husband’s perspective on life forever.
One of the nurses came by to attend to the twin bananas in the hamster-cage-sized incubator that was next to the little boy who might one day be our son. These 3 pounders were safe enough to have been moved out of the intensive care unit but they were still pretty tiny. I was astonished at how she handled them with delicacy and ease. She joined our conversation, and told us about her own troubles, and what she went through taking care of her husband’s kids.
I mentioned how astounding it was to see these premature babies alive and how much I admired the work that these doctors and nurses were doing. The doctor told us that given the big empty spaces around us, this was the central hospital for many miles and so had the biggest and best neonatal intensive care unit in this part of the country. The nurse asked if we would like to see it.
We disinfected again and doc and the nurse took my wife and I into a vast room lined with rows and rows of incubators. Each one held a tiny and fragile human life. Some had just been born, right on the edge of viability, maybe little more than a pound. They were hooked to tubes and machines and looked like thumbs. Their actual thumbs were smaller than pencil erasers. Others were getting closer to moving on into the great, big world. They had gained weight and grown outside of the mother’s body where they should have been. The technology was extraordinary but it was through the ministrations of these devoted women that these preemies lived and took in life and turned that love into brains and bones, muscle, flesh, and heart.
They had little hands that one day would hold someone else’s hand; mouths that would one day smile. They had eyes that would one day look into a mother’s eyes. Through seeing themselves reflected in that love they would come to know that they existed, that they deserved to be loved, and would love others themselves.
We left the unit and went back to our station. We all looked at the little boy that could be ours in his bed. He was sleeping quietly on his own, suddenly looking huge. Not wanting to wake him, we silently smiled.
Our doctor eased herself back into the chair and looked at us as if we had known each other since she had delivered us at our birth. She had been hanging out with us now for four hours. Not your typical New York doctor’s appointment. We never asked, and she never told us, what to do. But by her presence we had gotten the message. I started feeling weak, as we had not had much to eat that day and it was now approaching 10 PM. I asked her if there was a place to eat nearby. She told us the best burger joint in town was right across the street. She said that she needed to see a few other patients but she’d probably still be at the hospital when we got back.
We stumbled out into the warm Kansan air, crossed the road and sat outdoors at Billy’s Burgers, something right out of American Graffiti.
We had been through so much on this adoption journey. The pain and disappointment of infertility, the miracle of our daughter, the anxiety we were experiencing right now. We ordered our burgers, fries, and shakes. While we waited, old rock and soul songs played through the restaurant speakers. I knew I was in an altered state, as each title seemed to be sending us a personal message. First, Too Late to Turn Back Now by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. Then, Do You Believe in Magic by The Lovin’ Spoonful. Finally, It’s Alright by Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions:
“When you wake up early in the morning
Feeling sad like so many of us do
Hold a little soul
And make life your goal
And surely something’s gotta come to you. . .”
Sitting at this plastic table on the patio, resonating to this American burger moment, I could hear the command of the universe blaring in my head. I remembered my favorite adoption story, What Men Live By, by Leo Tolstoy. In this story he tells us that it is not given to us to know what is good for ourselves. What is given to us is to know what is good for each other. In this way, the universe insures that we are bound by care. We do not live by bread alone, we live by love.
My wife and I had been thinking about our own comfort. We had wanted to avoid suffering and pain. Anybody would. But this is not the way the universe operates. Whether we follow the dictum of “living according to God’s will” as Christians would put it, or we find the “central harmony” by aligning to the Tao, as the Confucians would say, all wisdom traditions tell us that we fulfill our purpose and find our greatest fulfillment from surrendering to something bigger than ourselves. It comes from using our will to become willing. It comes from learning how to say yes to life and what it demands of us at each moment, whatever the personal consequences. It comes from asking the question: what does the universe want from me right now, rather than what do I want from the universe. To live by avoiding pain may be more comfortable temporarily, but we avoid the commands of the universe at our peril. Jonah ends up in the belly of the whale until he follows God’s dictate.
As the great high-wire walker, Philippe Petit says, “To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting.” There are a few lucky moments in life when we are truly put to the test, when the universe selects us out of everyone for a unique and important task. Parenthood is one of those times. For my wife and I, this was such a moment. Everything, including the music on the jukebox, was telling us: this was not our choice. We had been chosen.
*
Now, four years later, driving in my mini-van, my son and daughter clipped in their booster seats in the back, I press the button on my I-pod. Brown Sugar blasts through our JBL “Surround-Sound” system and our son grooves to the beat. Whenever I can, I play-wrestle with him and give his hair a rub. He is perfect, in his imperfect human way. He loves dogs, trains, his mom and even, well, when I woke him up the other day, the first thing he said was, “I love you, Dad.”
I wonder if my revelation was true. But whether there is a grand master plan in the universe as I believe, or the only meaning in a meaningless universe is the meaning we give to it, the answer is still the same. You can hear it in Keith Richards’s guitar. He plays it, holding nothing back, just so he can ring that cosmic bell again and again. Because this is his only chance in a very long eternity to do so. Because that’s the way the universe sings. Because he’s been given orders. Riding down the highway, when the end of the song comes, we all sing, “yeah, yeah, yeah, WOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
My job is to get these kids as close to ecstasy as I, or anyone, can bear.
Dr. Glenn Berger is a psychotherapist, relationship counselor, business and artist’s coach, and young person’s mentor. He sees patients in New York City, in Mt. Kisco, NY, and around the world by Skype.
Are you looking for instant relief from anxiety or anger?
Purchase Shrinky’s Remedies, apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad.
Carry proven therapeutic techniques in your pocket, to use whenever you need them, all for $2.99.
Do you need free advice on mental health, love, relationship, sex, money, work, success or your best body?
Let Shrinky, The Life Expert, give you virtually what any good psychotherapist offers:
Support - All the information you need.
Wisdom - All the inspiration I can find to help you on the journey.
Love - All the connection, understanding, empathy, and acceptance I can offer.
Post your question by clicking HERE.
What a Great read. Thanks for sharing shrinky. LOL *_-
Glenn, you really can write your ass off! Tears.
Glenn: Leane is correct, you reals have a way with words. I never knew you were that good with words.
thank you. wonderful, smart, sweet, and
very needed.
[...] more music blogs from Shrinky here, including his pieces about working with Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Solomon Burke, and Phoebe [...]