Day Dream Believer

Many (many) years ago when I was in high school the Monkees surfaced. I only watched the TV show for a few seconds at a time while flipping channels. It wasn't funny, and anyway, please. None of us, meaning me and my friends, bought into this contrivance. I thought Last Train to Clarksville was a catchy little tune and I thought it was quirky that a band could be prefabricated and still have a hit in the real world, though I didn't understand much then how often publicity machines could crank out hits. But that was about it. We had more important music at hand that bridged the gap between fantasy and reality, first off. And believe me, for us music was the expression of both, and growing more so every year. It gave as an unspoken language and bond and it threw down a welcomed wall between us and the generation of our parents. The Beatles, the Stones, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix...they were real musicians, they played and wrote their own music. They didn't need some cardboard cut-out Hollywood tune factory to describe the world to us. The fact that Hendrix went out on his first American tour as an opening act to the Monkees was always bizarre to me. It was the musical equivalent of Jackson Pollock painting Mickey Dolenz's kitchen.
         Of course, this didn't stop us from building our own fantasy worlds around those "real groups". By my first year in college Paul was about to commit suicide for peace, Jagger really was Satan eternally going to a party, and Jimi Hendrix was God (okay...there were some who thought it was Clapton. Frankly, I would have taken either of them in place what I grew up with). But those were our choices, those fantasies. We chose to construct them, and we used them to while away the hours with a joint in hand and huge Koss Plus earphones with the liquid in the ear pads and the volume crank up higher than workers on speed at a munitions factory working overtime under contract to the Defense Department. No one could manufacture those fantasies for us-not the least of all some wanna-be, pseudo musical, bad imitation Beatle hair-cut (and goofy demeanor) group of child star actors masquerading as "artists".
          But then, of course, the inevitable. We got older and the fantasies started to inexorably grind down to an unrecognizable pulp. Paul is still alive, Mick Jagger looks like Dorian Grey a second after he stabs the painting, and Hendrix proved to be, well...mortal. From all reports I've read Davey Jones did not adhere to this inevitability. He seems in the end to have been a nice enough guy. He reportedly looked fit and was still lively on stage at 66. Having run into a variant of the clogged artery syndrome myself a number of years ago, though at a younger age where there is the possibility of shifting gears, I have great sympathy for those that knew him well, but didn't have a clue as to his condition. And maybe even he didn’t, and maybe that is best. Why let reality in the door?
         I stick a couple of sayings under my emails as a signature and they are there for a purpose. They always come in handy because they carry universal weight. They chime in for almost any human condition, but they are not trivial. Probably at some point I am going to run out of places to use them, but not yet anyway. One of them is pertinent here, I think. Davey Jones died Wednesday morning. The Monkees' lead singer was reportedly sleeping at the time and there is no way to know what near death incites he might have offered to us had he survived. He may never have another day dream, but my guess is that dream in the dark was as good as it gets. In Long Day’s Journey into the Night Eugene O'Neill writes "For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!" Everybody gets one.