Words to Love by

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Push the Statue of Liberty on the map

Flowers in the Night

This is a response to a letter that I got recently from a girl I hadn't seen or heard from in 40 years

Wow! Hi, Lori, uh,... Hey, where have you been for the last 40 years? Where have I been?
I went out to California In 1969, San francisco, Berkeley, and ended up living in the coast range of Oregon from 1970 to 1975 when I moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, where I lived until 1990.
I've been living as an artist since I left NJ. I started out making roach clips on the streets of Berkeley and started making jewelry and cutting gems when I moved to Oregon. A few friends and I lived on 800 acres of prime timber land. It was sort of an art commune, we all made jewelry and grew our own food and shared ourselves and our inspiration and motivations.

Lori, do you remember when we went to the Rolling Stones concert in Newark? Well I do, you were so excited to see the Stones and I was excited to be with you.
We had been friends for a while when you suggested that we go see the Stones. It was like 1964-65., maybe their first US Tour. You were a gentle flower and I was a future gardener
Where did our relationship come from? I can't recall. Mostly I remember you were sick a lot, Afternoons in your bedroom with your mom in the next room, talking about the latest music and stuff about what was coming in the/our future. I never did figure out what was wrong with your health. Was it chronic Mono? Something much darker ? Were you just too fragile to go into the world? We talked about how Art could change the world. and people who were Artists should be listened to so they could help change the world. We laughed a lot, full of irony about a future that was rapidly approaching with a technicolor rush and a meaningful artistic part to play. We would help light the fires of creativity
and change everywhere so everyone could keep an ember within them and that, they could use that spark to lite a candle and illuminate a single life or fly to the moon on the worlds biggest candle.
And then our whole generation had it's "19Th. Nervous Breakdown"
The Rolling Stones came on the scene with a hard demanding Blues attitude. No fab four moptops, these guys. No matched suits and sweet smiles for the American audience. These guys were the commandos of the British Invasion bent on pillaging our wonderful Music Business and it's ability to generate vast sums of money on as little as a catchy title or a redo of a song that was a forgotten Oldie when my parents were young. Sums that went into the pockets of the record company executives and out of the pockets of the talented writers and performers who actually created it
They came armed with fiery guitars, bad haircuts and music that was never fully paid for. They came to take our women with suggestive moves and lyrics and a hard driving beat. disrupting the carefully established paridigm that said that women were weak and too stupid to even run their own sex lives, let alone enjoy the new wave of modern music that had liberating qualities for everyone.
The Stones were not only commandos but a main frontal force in the first battles of the Sexual Revolution
They were right, Time was on Their Side

Lori, somehow the Stones really spoke to you. You were like those girls jumping out of their seats watching the Beatles do tricks for Ed Sullivan on black+white TV.
I didn't understand it, they were so different from the 4 Seasons (New Jerseys finest) or the doo-wop music I loved and listened to. I thought girls liked drippy love songs with lyrics that told of lost loves and happily ever after resolutions, not calls to party hard because "This could be the Last Time",
But you wanted me to understand and you wanted to share this new world with me. Well, I wanted to be with you and I don't think we ever really went out and the music seemed to give you a strength and a look of power and I wanted to find out what it was all about.
When you asked me to go to stones concert at the Mosque Theater in Newark I wasn't sure about it. Newark was a tuff town, the music would probably suck. Were you gonna feel good enough to go out? Would I lose the total attention I had from you when we came out of the cocoon of our sick room relationship. Let's just stay home and listen to the 4 Seasons. And I guess you were looking forward to a time when you were well and could fan the fires of your heart, when you said to me "a modern woman needs a modern man and I want to show you how to be a modern man"
We walked into the theater with about 2000 other people and sat down in the middle. As soon as the curtain opened a srceam started that was at full volume til the end of the show. The Stones came on and as soon as they hit the first chord of the first song half the crowd was out of their seats rushing the stage. Before Mick Jagger could put his gigantic lips around his microphone, a beautiful girl with a strange fire in her eye, ran across the stage with two overwheight cops running after her and tackled Mick and threw him down in a terminal lovelock. As they reset the stage and tried to get everybody to sit down in their assigned seats like good boys and girls, you turned to me with a look like somebody who had just been cured by the Virgin Mary's face on a loaf of bread or something and asked me If brought my extra cigarette lighter. I said "yea, sure, why?" You smiled mysteriously and said "You'll see"
By the end of the concert, with no voice left, after the last time we all held our lighters in the air, I felt like I really got it. and I've been a fan of "The bad boys of rock and roll" ever since.
But, beyond that, I've always wanted to thank you for being the first person to turn me on to a different value of art and your artistic enthusiasm for a great world and I remember thinking at the concert "wow, this girl really knows how to have fun." and I also thought "I better stock up on lighter fluid if I'm gonna hang around with her."

Well, we drifted apart after that for all the right and wrong reasons, but my new found fire was somehow fueled by your glowing Inspiration and not a few volitile chemicals. I split from the Burn Baby Burn streets of Newark in 1968, looking for the campfires in the parks and streets of the Chicago Democratic Convention, where protesters held hands and sang of peace until police, who looked eerily like the same ones who chased that girl on stage, put the fire out with clubs and tear gas. By the time I got to California, I was a dormant (but not extinct) volcano building up pressure, waiting to erupt lava, brimestone and ash on an unsuspecting village of ostriches with their heads in the sand and their fat butts waving in the air.

"Old Man pick some soldiers
Keep them close at hand
Seeds that were sown yesterday
Now flower in the land.
Guard yourself most carefully
with military might
Plants that cannot bloom by day
Must Flower in the night"

Baron Von Tollbooth and th Chrome Nun

After a few years of wandering around hoping someone would ask me for a light (I've always carried a few full lighters with me since that night in Newark), I found my self at the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamonte, California at the end of fall, 1969, the last great concert of the 60's and a stark contrast to the Peace, Love and Music of the Woodstock event that had happened just a few months before.
I thought a lot about you that day, this was the ultimate Stones party with Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Greatful Dead and 350,000 raging people; Stray cats, Street Fighting Men and people who "Couldn't get no Satisfaction". It was an amazing day and a real turning point for me personally and in some ways changed my life. (of course the 500 micrograms of LSD might have had something to do with it). This was the real thing. A revolutionary event and an awesome statement of music and the power of people, There was a lot of Sun and naked laughter but there was also a lot of Darkness and people cloaked in fear and rage.
Lori, I mean, I don't know how you would have reacted to it, but I really felt you should have been there.
The flame of youth set the world on fire that night and when I left there the next day thru the ashes of the 60's into an uncertain and dangerous future, I remember thinking to my self "I gotta get more lighter fluid"