TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

01 Rolling Stone Memories

For as long as I can remember, I?ve associated the music I listen to with images, memories and other snapshots of my life. I can listen to a song and just picture a music video happening along with it. Dunno if that means I should be a music video director; I just can?t bring myself to do it. That, along with other ideas I?d like to try (writing, acting, stand-up comedy, singing in a band, record producing) will have to wait for my life to calm down a little bit. But I listen to music still, and write and here?s one of the memories that come from songs that I hear.

Rolling Stone?s ?Hot Rocks? album (two-disc set, available wherever fine music is sold) always reminds me of the week I spent in a houseboat on Lake Mead. A lot of the painful stuff is kind of skimmed over (like the part where I almost drowned myself swimming for the boat after it broke loose of its mooring and blew like a kite onto the lake) but the fun stuff remains.

How do you define yourself as a man? Where?s the moment where God comes down with a rolled-up scroll and proclaims from the heavens, ?Be it resolved that henceforth Tim Woolery shall no longer be called ?a boy? but is now known as ?Tim Woolery-the Man??? Burt Reynolds wrote in his memoirs that it?s the unwritten rule of the South that a boy is a man when his daddy tells him so. I?m not from the South and my dad referred to me as a ?man? long after the point was moot in my opinion, so I had to rely on looking at moments where I could see other people referring to me, not as the squeaky-voiced kid with acne and a socially-dysfunctional personality, but as a full-fledged adult.

The Houseboat of Horror had some painful moments but it also had those moments where I could see others looking at me as more than just ?that punk kid?. The frustrating thing about that whole episode was that, whereas I wasn?t a kid (lived on my own, paid my takes, held down a full-time job) and therefore not accepted by the kids, I wasn?t accepted as an adult by the other folk because I wasn?t married, didn?t have kids and couldn?t see things from their perspective. Somehow, Nicole and I became the liaisons for communicating between the kids and the adults. This wasn?t a job I chose, it just somehow happened because I could get the kids to help out with chores they weren?t otherwise likely to participate in.

The good moments were there, too; the ones that helped me reach the aforementioned conclusions. The times where I?d be woken up to gulp a cup of coffee and help the rest of the men break mooring and pilot the houseboat to a new location before the winds kicked up and blew it like a sail across the lake. It felt really great to be needed, to be considered essential to the operation. It felt great that others were relying on me instead of just swept aside. When I saw that people needed me, that I was part of the solution instead of part of the problem or the scenery, that?s when I realized I had made the transition from ?kid? to ?adult?.

So, beyond all that, among the joy and pain, there was the sound system. As a houseboat, it wasn?t tricked out that much (Hello guys, Lake Mead?). It had a tape deck but no CD player, rendering the 64 albums I packed rather useless. The CD-Tape converter was scratchy and my copy of ?Dark Side of the Moon? was all scratched up. So, as a result, the only tape brought on board was a copy of Hot Rocks. It was played over and over and over and over and over again. Now, here?s the funny part: I didn?t get sick of it. Actually, I was glad I finally took the time to listen to the album having ignored most of the songs in favor of ?Satisfaction?, ?Paint it Black? and ?Gimme Shelter?. I never gave it a chance to grow on me but now having listened to it, I was so moved by the music.

The music, by the way, is almost 40 years old, so I think I?m a little late for a review. I don?t intend to write one, just about how music sometimes opens up memories for me. ?Hot Rocks? reminds me of cruising along Lake Mead with a wind blowing through the front door. A cup of coffee and some eggs that had since cooled by the wind blowing off the water. The view across miles of water from the flying bridge. Good memories interspersed with a few bad moments. A time in my life when things were changing.

Thanks, Mick.

- 12/18/03 - Tim Woolery