Goodbye

Growing Old With Rock & Roll was always intended to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It was originally conceived in the Watershed tour van, somewhere in the South, when Colin Gawel & Joe Oestreich started badgering me to write down some of my rock & roll stories (bantering with David Johansen, pissing next to Johnny Thunders, having lunch with Angus Young, getting in a fight with Ric Ocasek, etc.) before Rock & Roll Alzheimer's kicked in or my second cardiac pacemaker gave out.

When I actually started to put pen to paper in the Baltimore Airport just after Christmas 2011, I projected the blog to last six months - from January 1st, 2012, to my 60th birthday on June 30th of that year.  Various factors extended that deadline - my computer died, I was in the middle of the Watershed Brick & Mortar/Hitless Wonder tour on that 60th birthday, more & more stories kept coming up - so I decided to make it a one-year blog instead of six months.

Somewhere in there, though, I got the idea of the 12-installment I Love Distortion novelette unfolding in real time in the blog, so here we are at the end of 2013.

I'm not going to stop writing.  It's really been too much fun doing this to quit, and I've learned a certain amount of discipline.  (Plus January, February & March get pretty long out here in Ohio and my lovely wife Debbie & I rarely leave the house in the winter, except to obtain Chinese takeaway, cookies & milk, potato chips and Mountain Dew.)  I may begin an entirely new blog eventually, but for the time being I plan to be more active on Colin Gawel's great Pencilstorm blog that I've contributed occasional pieces to since its inception.  (I actually have a projected title for the new blog, which I'm not going to preview here, because I'm told the WorldWideInterweb is brimming with intellectual thieves & malingerers.)

If I do begin a new blog, I'll plug the info into this Goodbye entry retroactively, so watch this space. 

(Actually, it should be WHEN I begin a new blog because I owe my good friend Chris Clinton a major piece on Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band that I never found space for in Growing Old With Rock & Roll.)  (Come to think of it, I never covered The MC5 or The Modern Lovers in any significant way, either.  Where did the time go?)

I want to thank writers-turned-rockers Lester Bangs, Patti Smith, Charles Shaar Murray & Mick Farren (R.I.P. Lester & Mick) and rocker-turned-writer Elliott Murphy for teaching me long-distance how to do this; I want to thank Hamell On Trial and Watershed for taking me on the road with them and providing stories & inspiration; I want to thank Will Kenworthy for setting up Growing Old With Rock & Roll for me; Debbie for editing the large majority of the pieces, and vastly improving them in the process (any of you who have ever had the misfortune of having me try to tell you a story in person - wherein I start talking about The Who in 1969 and somehow wind up recounting The Bronze Age in history - will understand how hard it is to keep me on point, focused, and anything like succinct); and especially I want to thank anybody & everybody who read and hopefully enjoyed any of my little scribblings.

Thank you and goodbye.  Let's let Steve Earle take us out.......

© 2013 Ricki C.