Lawn Mower Chronicles: 20th Century Man
Mowing a lawn to music when one song struck me.
Old Habits Die Hard
I stubbornly cling to mowing my lawn despite it being a true love-hate relationship. What served as a great income source in my early teen years — mowing stripes on Mrs. Stoddard’s lawn up the street — is often now just a chore.
On the hate side: mowing takes a lot of time and the notion of having someone else do it, well, seems so mature or nice. I’m just not there yet; the costs add up fast, kind of like car payments.
My teen years were different of course. Mowing in the ’70s lacked modern technology and was really just a noisy task and a few bucks for important stuff.
Nowadays, I almost relish the “me time” as a chance to chill out and reflect or just not think much at all. No interruptions, no smartphone notifications; just (hopefully) straight green stripes and lots of tunes.
Listening while mowing can foster thoughtful moments, especially while zoning out to a custom music mix delivered via blue-tooth from a tiny computer in my pocket transmitting wirelessly to headphones. Boy, wouldn’t that have been nice in the days of Queen, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, ELO, Steely Dan, and Jeff Beck?
Back to the point. Inevitably during this time of forced reflection, a song pops up out of nowhere and garners extra attention. This is the story about just such a song and a song that happens to be 52 years old.
Setting the Scene
On a sunny day, I’m the guy on the mower with a ball cap and headphones. I’ll probably be that guy next week too. And while my iPhone playlist clearly shows my, shall we say, “vintage”, it’s not all classic stuff. Rather, it’s more a melange of current songs which caught my ear and a larger proportion from my roots in the late 60s thru 90s. Perhaps there’s a common thread infused with rock, blues, and teenage rebellion, but occasionally some R&B, Sinatra, and even some Vince Guaraldi (and not just the Peanuts theme).
In my teenage days, mowing proceeds went to either the gas pump to feed my thirsty ’70 Pontiac LeMans or the hottest rock LP at Cutler’s record store in New Haven: beautiful vinyl for $4 or $5 with often gorgeous record covers and liner notes!
Or, if a friend beat me to it, I’d borrow his brand-new record and copy it onto a fresh audio cassette. My duping factory was comprised of an old AR turntable, Pioneer receiver, and TDK tape in a Teac tape deck. You had to record an album quickly, fresh out of the shrink wrap, to avoid the clicks and pops that surely would plant themselves in the grooves within days or weeks.
It usually went something like this: Dude, you bought the new Zep album? Can I borrow it for an hour?
Listening back then was either live, radio, vinyl, or tape. Few cars had tape decks and even the Sony Walkman hadn’t arrived yet. The duping process involved placing the needle on side 1 of the LP, hitting ‘record’ on the cassette deck; and then 20 minutes later flipping the album and repeating. My friends and I also jerry-rigged our car audio systems to add a cassette player.
That changed of course in the early ’80s and I pretty much reinvented my vinyl and tape collections on CD and later “ripped” all that music into my iTunes library where it exists today (along with tons of songs purchased ever since) — all conveniently synced to the cloud. With this digital rebirth, my music ended up legal and licensed. While my vinyl collection remains, the tapes are long gone.
It turns out I like my half-century-plus of music set on random playback. Spotify, Pandora, or Apple Music never seem to have the breadth: they get surprisingly repetitive sooner than expected. Or at least that’s my experience with their modern algorithms. I mean, where else will you get Nirvanna (Come As You Are), The Hollies (Bus Stop Bus Go), Black Pumas (Colors), Neil Young (Tell Me Why), ELO (Mr. Blue Sky), Miles Davis (So What) and Goose (Hungersite) in the same mix?
So I’m mowing my lawn on a sunny New England day and my iPhone shuffles away. Thirty minutes into it, SoundGarden’s Fell On Black Days winds down and my neck gets a rest, tired from lurching up and down like Dana Carvey’s and Mike Myer’s in Wayne’s World, only slower (different song, I know).
20th Century Man
Then, the unmistakable opening acoustic strumming of The Kinks 20th Century Man arrives. Haven’t heard it in 20 years and I’m quick to smile. Ray Davies’ brilliance almost always makes me do that, he had me at Well Respected Man; Waterloo Sunset didn’t hurt the cause.
The lyrics flow off my lips for the most part, at least those aging synapses are intact, but what surprises me more is how apt they are half a century later. Substitute “21st century” for “20th century” and it could be just as relevant.
The song mentions a lack of ambition and not wanting to be in the 20th century.
I could also hear that as a frustrated 20th-century man in the next century (as I think many are of my age), tired of the bickering and disputing of obvious facts. The generation blame game is so tiring and the polarization B.S. just never ends. But I could also read it (after changing “twentieth” to “twenty-first”) as a younger person today, struggling to pay off crazy college loans, find an affordable apartment or just trying to ignite ambition given the headwinds faced. The headwinds are arguably stronger than my generation’s.
And when Mr. Davies talks about being born into a welfare state, where bureaucracy rules the day and where privacy has been vanquished, I get it.
Mind you, I’m not a full-on libertarian promoting the elimination of speed limits and parking lot stripes, but Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism showed me why privacy and liberty have been compromised. And a recent suit brought by the FTC against a “data broker” for providing data about people traveling to sensitive locations just confirms it.
Yet Ray Davies wrote 20th Century Man a half-century ago.
And who doesn’t feel ruled by bureaucracy at times? Even a pro-big-government socialist tones it down a notch after struggling to register a car at the DMV.
Ray also discussed the aggravations of the 20th century and the insanity of it all.
Granted, the 21st-century virus had us all yelling at each other 20 months ago to keep our distance, too paranoid to touch door knobs. We became people who were either hating on masking or hating the people who were hating on masking. Insanity? Check.
Then the song takes a darker tone when Mr. Davies talks about not wanting to get shot by an officer of the law.
It just so happens that right before I jumped on my mower, Paris erupted in protests over the police shooting of an unarmed driver. There are too many stories in that vein for me to mention. You’ve heard them.
How’d we become people who were either hating on masking or hating the people who were hating on masking?
Back in 1971, Ray Davies may have thinking about the Kent State shootings of college Vietnam war protesters a year earlier, or maybe he was motivated by an event in the U.K.. Either way, you’ve gotta wonder, outside of technological and medical progress, how much real progress have we made?
Anyway, on my street, from a distance, anyone walking by at this point is likely aghast. A younger boomer (OK… I say younger only because there are boomers 14 years older than me) on a tractor, donning headphones and from his mouth indiscernible, off-key lyrics keep spewing, thankfully drowned out by a noisy 20hp motor — a good thing.
There are other parts of that image that could be a bit disconcerting as well, but one of the great things about getting older is simple: to be frank, you just don’t give a sh$t.
The song concludes with Ray saying he doesn’t want to be there
… and I ask myself briefly, Do I want to be here? I do read a lot of news and that’s probably as deadly as any virus if you track the percentages. Clearly, I’m a twentieth-century man with twentieth-century roots; that’s when I learned to drive a stick and kissed my first girlfriend, and I often miss those days: the vibe, the music (except Disco), youthfulness, some of the clothing and big hair, Adidas Superstar sneakers, but mostly missed is the feeling of having way more in front of my windshield than in the rear-view mirror.
I do read a lot news and that’s probably as deadly as any virus if you track the percentages.
Regardless, the fact is that I do want to be here; the alternative is nothing but dark. Dark can be a sinkhole difficult to climb out of and my energies belong elsewhere like my precious family. Like all kids today, mine will have some major headwinds to navigate and I want their heads screwed on straight.
The challenges awaiting the current generation are like the greatest hits of crises we’ve seen and failed to solve. It’s as if the past few generations kicked their crisis cans down the road and now the newest generation rounds a corner only to see a mountain of them blocking their path.
The challenges awaiting the current generation are like the ‘greatest hits’ of crises we’ve seen and failed to solve. It’s as if the past few generations kicked their “crisis cans” down the road and now the newest generation rounds a corner only to see a mountain of cans blocking their path.
Until Next Time
But back to the mowing task at hand: I’m done for today and as always the lawn will grow, taunting me to return before it gets too deep or before a big rain arrives.
Who knows what will pop up on my playlist next time, maybe one of those tunes will trigger more reflection, say like the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated, John Lee Kooker’s The Healer, any Tedeschi Trucks band or CSNY song, or maybe Brandi Carlisle’s The Story — oh gosh, no one wants to hear me try to hit that note.
