Too Cool To Be Hip

They're playing Brubeck's "Time Out" on Pandora radio. Very Cool. Of course, it's old as the hills, I guess, since it was new in 1959. Two or three years later I was pushing on to being a teenager and started listening to radio for "the cool stuff", not just "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley" or country songs where the first thing a man does when he gets shitfaced is get teary about his Mama.

Anyway, Dave Brubeck was the coolest thing I'd ever heard, even though (up to that point) I may have been no more than a moron. He was my musical awakening. It's good to hear him still, all these decades later.

Other things, too, made me wiser and wider. Later, the Beatles and Bob Dylan would blow me sky-high. Folk music was very hip, and I attended the coffee houses in my area. They were dark and Halloween-painted places to go before you were old enough to drink. They had weird guests. Observe: they let ME in. They had weird names: The Inferno was one. They had weird drinks: there was a blue one called Gahena. Don't ask me how it tasted! It was sweet, that's all I recall. I think that Gahena means hell or death, or maybe decay. Nothing pleasant. We didn't know much back then, and the Internet apparently is no more well-informed than I was when I was ignorant in 1965 or so. Oh, well; still ignorant after all these years!

Time and fun sure flies when you need to hurry home to shit and can't smoke pot or cigarettes any more.

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