Stayed home a week or so ago for an appointment, and enjoyed a glorious nor’easter. Was thinking I would drop by the beach and revel in the gale force wind and rain – during the night the wind was so fierce I was praying to Boreas not to uproot my trees. Which he didn’t.
But changed my mind about the beach: the news wasn’t bad exactly, but wasn’t good either – going into the hospital for a procedure on a Friday morning at the end of November. Here’s hoping Anna Jaques is a great hospital; this time I don’t have Jim, so had to barter my way out of having a relative pick me up. Car service it is.
So instead of the beach, I spent the last day or so trying to put my dining room table back together. Another one of those assembly disasters I’m no longer strong enough to easily do single handedly. By 6:00 at night, I had ONE of the table pedestal legs re-attached; today I successfully attached the second one before picking up my suits from the seamstress. Then I discovered there was no way in hell I was going to get the table turned over and standing upright; it was way too heavy. Time to call Dana for help.
Had our first Year II class ... instructor was describing what we would be needing to master in order to pass the course at year’s end and calmly added, “And you’ll be required to levitate this table.” That seemed a bit beyond my immediate skill set – (a bit?) – and because I didn’t want to protest, “Are you f**king KIDDING me?!?” right in the middle of class, I gloomily anticipated a quick and pitiful end to my studies ... until someone later – much later - told me, “She was joking!” So – news flash: I will not be required to levitate a table. Which is too bad – I could have really used that ability to get the dining room table turned over.Assignment: another 40-day ritual of discipline. The last ROD was a bust, mainly because the one I assigned to myself was something I had to memorize, or read off of a piece of paper, right before sleeping, and I was unfortunately right in the middle of moving here when I was trying to remember to do it every night. After that move I was lucky I could remember how to tie my own shoes, much less that tiny piece of paper, so the ROD turned into a morning ritual of “Oh, SH*T, I forgot to do it again!” Hey, at least I did that consistently!
So we try again. This time the Ritual of Discipline is to learn or memorize a correspondence or ritual or related item of information I didn’t know before, every day. So far, I’ve learned about Ahura Mazda, learned the pronunciations and meaning of neter (“neecher”) and neteru (“neecheroo”); learned what the ankh meant, and tried to make sense of the “Opening of the Mouth” ritual. My favorite – actually, I’m not sure what I’d call her – author? Energy vampire? Source of information on entities who need to have the christian slur “demonic” removed from them? – Michelle Belanger had created a magnificent deck of “Watcher Angels”, so I’m systematically comparing her deck with Crowley’s and getting to know the cards themselves and keeping track of readings – not as easy a task as you might think.
Back to the Cowsills. I do agree with John Cowsill’s summary of the band – an awesomely talented group of kids who got taken down a bad path”, or something like that. You watch the documentary done on them – Family Band: The Cowsill Story – and you learn that the image forced onto four brothers who wanted nothing more than to be the world’s greatest rock band was just that: a false bubble-gum pop image that sold records, so what else are four talented kids going to do but go along with it? They’d get beaten up by a sadistic father if they didn’t.
The driving musical force behind the Cowsills was really the two oldest brothers: Billy Cowsill and Bob Cowsill. The start of their downward spiral was the moment when Bill, the musical genius and group’s mentor, was kicked out of both the band and the family for the crime of standing up to their abusive, violent father. Bob, who called it “the worst day of my life”, had to fill Bill’s unfillable shoes – overnight. You can see the shock on his face in videos of the group taken right after Bill’s “firing” – unless the camera was right on his face, he wasn’t smiling. Paul commented on the “enormous pressure” Bob was under in those bleak days: he had to rearrange songs, take over Bill’s lead while covering his own, he had to take on a musical direction, he had to lead the others. And he did, and it changed him. I think I said earlier, when the group performs today, he sounds exactly like Bill used to sound, so you sometimes forget that Bill was the original lead singer on songs like “The Rain, The Park and Other Things”, and “Hair”.
So, as I get to know the Cowsills again through a lot of You Tube videos out there, I am more and more impressed and astonished by their musical talent – all of them.
Still – one video I discovered has become one of my favorites. The group was performing at “A Taste of Rhode Island” in 2000. You may not recognize the song, “Rescue”; it wasn’t one of their huge hits. But what this is: Bob belting out a blistering rock song ... and here’s the gloriously shocking part: that’s Bill, to Bob’s left in the white long sleeved shirt and black pants. Susan, John on drums and Paul and Barry are also there. Richard Cowsill - Bob's twin brother who had pissed off their father so much he was sent off to Viet Nam and never performed with his family is also there - that's him on the tambourine next to Bob. The Cowsills family was fully intact in this performance. That Bob and Bill were back on stage together choked me up completely – this song might have even been more awesome if Billy’s guitar hadn’t broken in the middle of the song. And you realize, listening to this wonderful performance, what they COULD have become, if shockingly abusive parents and moronic MGM executives hadn’t destroyed a group of awesomely talented kids out of their own greed.
Thought I’d share it with you. Here is who the Cowsills REALLY were, all along:
No comments:
Post a Comment