I feel the need to post a diary to lighten the mood a bit. So, I’m going to do a little experiment. Let’s do a music and story diary. Here’s the rules, such as they are:

First, pick one song — for this diary, only one, please. If your favorite song is “anything by Led Zeppelin,” choose one particular song. No cheating.

Second, write a bit of a story about why you picked that song. Not just “because you asked me to, dummy,” but where were you when you heard it? What were you doing there? Who were you with? Why this song and not another song played that day?

And of course, I’d like to see other people’s reactions to the stories.
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I’ll start.

The year was 1969. Back then we still had three-year high schools, and I was fresh out of junior high and trying my best to fit in. I was a drama geek — in fact, I still do the occasional community play almost forty years later — and was tapped to join the Thespian Society, the national high-school drama organization. We had a sorta hokey initiation ceremony, and then we went to the chapter president’s apartment for a party.

So there I was, sitting on the floor eating Rice-A-Roni (which I also love to this day), and the chapter president, whose name I can no longer remember, put on an album by this guy I’d never heard of. Arlo Guthrie. He started doing a little song to a skifflish guitar accompaniment:

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
You get get anything you want
At Alice’s Restaurant,
Walk right in, it’s around the back,
Just a half a mile from the railroad track.
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

And then of course this guy proceeded to recount a shaggy-dog story about getting arrested for littering, followed up by his encounter with the draft board and how his fingerprints are enshrined in a little folder in Washington, D.C.

Well, I’d never heard anything quite like it before. I’d been exposed to folk music for years, starting with the tamer Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary stuff my parents played on our stereo and moving on through Shindig and Hootenanny to a weekly CBC Radio show titled something like “Folk Music Across Canada.” But this was my first personal exposure to anything anti-war.

I did a diary not too long ago about how you can’t expect a tree unless you plant a seed, and if you expect political results you need to plant a seed first too. The seed that got planted that afternoon didn’t really come into full blossom for many years, but looking back on it, that was as good a place to as any to point to and say, “That’s when I started being a liberal.”