This post is not so much about David, but how David sparked some thoughts about growing older and the passage of Time with its shifting paradigms.
Scientists are still trying to figure out what Time is. Nevertheless, we all can recite certain effects of Time, even if we aren't 100% sure of what it is.
A friend of David's named Rattlesnake Annie is staying with us for a while. She and her husband were one of David's first close friends after he arrived in Nashville in 1984. She has had a long and remarkable career as a singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist who has a most beautiful, powerful and unique voice and can sing in Japanese, Spanish, and Czech. She can play just about everything, including Flamenco. She is now 80 years old, and her voice still mesmerizes, and she is still recording. We don't talk much about David any more, but I can't help think about him from time to time when she does mention him or the Nashville of the eighties. Sometimes I calculate: okay, Snake is 11 years older than David Schnaufer, so, if he were alive today, he would turn 73 this year. What would he be like at 73? I have some thoughts on that, but this post isn't about those thoughts.
I was at the gym the other day when a music video popped into my feed when I was searching for something to run to on the treadmill. It was called "The Prodigal Son" by Ry Cooder. I had never heard of him (my bad), but I clicked on it to check it out while I was treadmilling. Filmed during a studio session, the groove on this song is *the* most impressive I've heard in a long, long time. Besides Cooder, three young guys play with him: a saxofone player, a bass guitarist and a drummer. Two thoughts jumped out as I watched it: first, how absolutely COOL Cooder is at 75. He was likely considered cool at 20, too, but at 75? Wow. The second had to do with the drummer. He was cool, but what made me chuckle is that he would have been the one I had crushed on when I was sixteen. All four players are top notch musicians; however, in this video, it's Cooder who takes up all the oxygen in the room. When I was a teenager, the thought of thinking that a 75 year old man was cool, was, well, unthinkable. But here we are.
Yesterday, my husband and I joined an acoustic jam near us for the first time. With one exception, everyone was at least 65, and some a lot older I would guess. They played and sang songs for two hours straight with little stopping. It ended with Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and it was exhilarating to experience. I kept thinking, these guys are so cool!
Snake is cool. My husband, younger than Cooder but now a senior, is really cool. When David was alive, everyone thought he was cool. I think David's cool factor would be going strong if he were still on this earth today.
So, if any reader who finds him or herself in the senior category, or approaching that age, this post is for you to mull over. If you're still growing, still learning and still reaching for excellence in whatever you're passionate about, revel in your coolness.
Go to Youtube and search for Rattlesnake Annie when you get a chance. If you click on her video from 1981 at Wembley Stadium in London in which she sings "Goodbye to a River", you'll hear her gorgeous voice and experience her lyrical songwriting.
And check out Ry Cooder's amazing groove on "The Prodigal Son"; turn up the sound to loud before you click on "play".
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