Yes, it Still Moves

From the desk of Peter Crowley:

Imagination exaggerates, right? Of course it does, and even though I knew I had loved rural California during the year I lived in Gilroy (a valley town south of San Jose), I figured that, upon returning for the first time in five years, it probably wouldn’t live up to the pictures I had carefully preserved in my mind.

Wrong again. California really is a different world, and in a day’s shift from cold and rainy upstate New York (lows in the 20s, highs in the 40s) to a sudden blast of eucalyptus and garlic smells, hot, dry air and that sun that makes all your photos look washed out, I was swept away.

Especially after I got outside the city limits. You have do that in California. There’re just too damn many cars and people otherwise.

My old hometown isn’t bad at all, as cities of 50,000 go, but as soon as I got outside Gilroy on the Pacheco Pass Highway, I was is dreamland. Those golden hills, with their gnarled live oaks and outcroppings of rock, the dusty but amazingly rich soil (a contradiction that still amazes me), the tumbledown fences around humble farmhouses, the roadside stands with sweet corn at six ears for a dollar – fat ears, and so sweet, we discovered that night at dinner, that butter is huge overkill – plus a basket of softball-size plums for $6, or $5 for three pints of strawberries, which grow in the fields all around you. (“Just picked this morning,” the lady behind the counter said. “Go ahead, try one.”)

These things are fully as soulful as our imaginations hinted they might have been, once. But one other thing completed the perfection, melding manmade with God-made art – the right music. Driving through all this on Pacheco Pass Highway with My Morning Jacket’s “It Still Moves” is ethereal.

Album of the decade? If listened to on that drive, then yes, perhaps.

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The rest of my week in Cali had wonderful moments, too: Listening to Woody Guthrie through the Central Valley was great, even if it was on I-5. In L.A. with my Uncle Paul, we wandered the canals of Venice (where beat-up old Coleman canoes are moored at luxurious houses) and made the rounds of Santa Monica’s used record and guitar stores in my uncle’s old Mustang. I ate real Mexican food again, got my feet wet on three beaches, went to a love-filled family wedding near Santa Cruz (the purpose of the trip) and stood on holy ground amid 17-foot-wide, 300-foot-tall and 2,000-year-old redwood trees at Big Basin State Park. All these things sent me, but the one that will probably linger the longest, and maybe become my new mental pucture, is that 74-minute period in Pacheco Pass with My Morning Jacket. It still resonates, and it will abide.

(P.S.: For a fairly good review of this album, try here. Also, you oughtta read Ned's review of singer Jim James' new album.)