Spitball Army

Holy time capsule! Where did some of these artists go? Rees Shad? Gillman Deaville? (Who is Rees Shad, anyway?)

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The Las Vegas Airport terminal is busy. Not overwhelmingly so, but steady streams of travelers are moving in all directions along the walkways. There is no airline representative at our gate but, by simply reading the Arrival/Departure screens banked against the wall, we determine the gate location of our connecting flight. Then, we enter the human flow.

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I used to think that 1972 was the be-all, end-all year of pop music, and 1967. Now I’m not so sure which one comes out on top. There is a ten-year stretch in there between the mid-’60s and the mid-’70s when some of my favorite records of all genres were released. I become firmer in my resolve about that with each passing year.

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It was rooted in the corner of a corner lot, dwarfing the Spanish-style bungalow next to it. Its branches extended high and far out over the street in all directions, safely out of danger from the automobile traffic below, and sheltering the pedestrians and others, like me, on bicycles. I would slow my pedaling to marvel at this tree whenever I rode up the hill to Laurel Road, and would slow my coasting when I returned on the downhill route to Laguna Street. The tree’s age and size seemed to engender respect automatically. I called it “Old Man Tree.”

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Diane and Walter, my new travelling companions, are married and live just south of Birmingham. It takes me fifteen to twenty minutes to extract this information from them. Good thing I’ve brought a book with me.

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(photo: spitballarmy.com) I’ll give you one guess why we stopped here and, no, it wasn’t for the ice cubes (aka “turista”).  We heard that Clark Gable was hanging out at a liquor store in Baja, so we went to see for ourselves.  No, really, that’s me. It used to be the easiest thing to hop […]

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With this classmate in mind, I had programmed Mick Jagger’s “Old Habits Die Hard” instead of other possibilities, which could have included ELO’s “Evil Woman” or The Rolling Stones’ “Bitch.”

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Eventually, in that retail business mileau, I had to tell the community, “Thanks, but no thanks,” for that financial black hole to nowhere. If I really wanted a financial black hole, I’d dig it myself.

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There were gray styrofoam boulders strewn around the stage, and at strategic moments (or whenever the wacky urge would take hold of him), EJ would pick one up and hurl it into the crowd. This was during his crazy antics on stage phase, the big glasses stage, and about two weeks before the U.S. release of Rock of the Westies (hence, the boulders on stage).

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“Proudly, Dons, how we bathe…!”

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