DAN LONDON

It’s Friday night in the suburbs. You are a 17-year old boy hanging in your friend Jeffery’s basement. The room is packed. It’s big hair and Marlboro Lights, Domino’s boxes, 2 liters of Orange Slice, cheap beer, makeshift pipes and bongs. Katherine is at the pool table in a low cut tie-dye. She lines up her shot. The light bounces off her cleavage. She’s solids. Your stripes. You want her like only a 17-year boy can.

The question is does Katherine understand the power she is growing into or is it simply learned behavior? Is this how the older girls always acted and she’s gonna fake it till she makes it? It’s academic to you. She smells of lip-gloss, cigarette smoke, bubble-gum, and Prell. That intoxicating brew. To this day it brings you back to those nights and that basement. It almost makes you hungry for Domino’s. Almost.

Cat Steven’s influence looms large over this song. Think ‘The Wind,’ or anything off of ‘Tea For the Tillerman’. Thematically the idea of “journey” that the now named Yusaf Islam was so good at writing and made you feel like you were right there with him on the road to find out.

The Mellotron software I used on this song has a patch called ‘Strawberry Fields’ flutes apparently sampled from the original Mellotron. I played sounds using a tiny old Oxygen 8 that once could only be made by creaking tape machines housed in a 2-ton keyboard. Strange days indeed.

The Internet has fractured the tastes of billions and caused an emotional diaspora where like minds gather in disparate parts of the globe and form tribes based around their fondness of arguing about tube technology or how to watch The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. It makes one long for the days when pool tables and cleavage were the results of innocence instead of the inevitable destination of youthful promise gone unfulfilled.

I heard Katherine is married now with children of her own. For their sake and mine I hope she teaches them to shoot pool. Nine-ball would be nice. It’s the better game.