Don't listen to this vol. 3

In a Hell’s Kitchen bar called The Electric Banana, a verifiable jukebox whore raced past me with a fistful of ones while I tripped over the barstool and admitted dj defeat. It turned out that in addition to a penchant for the Moody Blues, jukebox whore was an adjunct professor of creative writing at Columbia who was starting a writer’s collective to study the similarities between the narrative structures of poetry and popular music. After leading us halfway through his drunken, impassioned argument, he went to the bar while the mind fuck continued and our foreheads wrinkled further.

Later that night, we drank Maker’s Mark, air-drummed and contemplated the following Gerry Rafferty lyrics on loud repeat:

He’s got this dream about buying some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he’ll settle down in some quiet little town
And forget about everything.

But you know he’ll always keep movin’
You know he’s never gonna stop movin’
Cause he’s rollin’
He’s the rollin’ stone

He’s the rollin’ stone could very well be one of the most powerful lyrics I’ve ever heard (or maybe I had had one too many), but what did it mean within Baker Street’s ode to the melancholy of big city life? Nick was convinced that the lyric evoked the frustration found in the myth of Sisyphus, while I ventured that the protagonist’s restlessness referred to the old cliché “a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

As we continued to debate character motivation in a Gerry Rafferty song through dawn, I realized that we weren’t just talking about a song that made me long for a penis, a handle of Jack Daniels and a spectacular sunset. We were talking about context and subtext and meaning in the manner one would contemplate the meaning of allusion in the works of Bukowski, Baraka and cummings. Jukebox whore was right: even one-hit wonders like Rafferty could arguably be considered poets.

The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache and the uncontrollable urge to re-enroll in school and destroy every Gerry Rafferty album in sight. Then I played Baker Street just one more time…

Guilty pleasure rating: 8