SUPERSTITION
Subtext: Enjoy the musical life. Enjoy!
So, I’m walking out of King’s Fish House today with Marieta passing through the bar area because there are Happy Hour specials and I’m wearing a 1978 Tour Rolling Stones t-shirt, and I’m not a Rolling Stones fanatic by any measure but I still acknowledge so many landmark rock n’ roll moments with the Stones, plus the fact Exile on Main Street might be the great rock album in history, and is certainly the best album of 1972 sans maybe one which is the basis of the erratic post. And out of nowhere two Black guys are sitting there eating oysters on the half shell, not that their race matters, but oysters are a special treat and race kinda’ does matter in this conversation and completely out of the blue as I walk by one guy says, “nice t-shirt!”
Take a breath. Lots to digest, there.
“Huh, you talkin’ to me?”
So, I have to go along with it because I’m insatiably curious. “I’m not really a Stones fan, are you?” That’s me talking.
“Sure man, great music is great music.”
This conversation could not have been timed any better.
I can’t remember the conversational bridge to the promiseland but somehow there’s a mind-meld of commonality where we land on the same conversational quilt and we start talking about Stevie Wonder, and I’m eventually leaning over the table and pawing the oysters on ice because I cannotforthefuckinglifeofme believe that maybe 3 or 4 hours earlier, honestly, I was doing a youtube listen and search on Stevie Wonder albums for my “100 Essential Albums” series and was having the damnest goddamned damn time trying to come up with tht *perfect* Wonder moment in Americana.
Songs in the Key of Life is a magnum opus of magnum opuses and that was going to chart as #88 and I was totally prepared to lock that in as my blue suit final answer yet I found myself cemented to this unexpected conversation where the man inhaling oysters began schooling me on Talking Book being Wonder’s breakthrough album, if there is such a thing as “breakthrough” for someone so prestigiously talented and adventurous in new musical directions. The big hit off “Talking Book” is “Superstition.”
Lock your kids in a closet, set down the booze, shut off the ballgame and take a few minutes to enjoy the wonderous majesty of creativity in this clip.
I was moved by this random encounter in a bar, by a man I do not know, and whose name is unknown. But sometimes, even those we do not know will lift our gaze to the clouds and inspire us to look in directions we did not know.
The link to my story? It’s serendipity. Stevie Wonder toured as the opening act with the Rolling Stones on their epic 1972 tour, and they went into the studio, inspired and filled with that incalculable energy and spirit which cannot be measured but which registers on a scale with no equal.
YOU MUST WATCH THIS!
