I loitered in a tiny local bookstore this weekend and sipped ice coffees thru a hole in my mask. The shop owner, Johnny Physics, was telling me how certain shoppers would freak out if he didn’t give them the Amazon price. He said it’s just not possible. His bookstore would die if it folded to the “let-me-speak-to-the-manager” type shoppers.
Then Johnny Physics made a rad point...
“You don’t vote every four years, you vote every-time you open your wallet.”
It’s nice to think of one dollar as “one morale booster” rather than $1. We can choose to inject the extra “morale boosters” (AKA money) into Johnny's bookshop. Or... We can boost the morale of Wal-Mart and Amazon so they have even more energy to take over Johnny's bookshop, Uncle Franks record store, Aunt Marys hair salon, cousin Margo’s grocery store...etc.
These small biz folks are specialists with tremendous purpose. Without purpose, we have tremendous depression. Without specialists, we have crappier products...and again, more depresh. Sure, buying that book from Jeff Bezos might save ya $4, but it’s soul crushing to our collective morale. We gotta think of that xtra $4 dollars as “4 morale boosters” for those trying to better the community around them.
We can boost the happiness and morale of our community every time we go out in public...without even talking to anyone. I’m voting for Johnny Physics.
Today I’ve got Willy Porter on the podcast. The most peaceful songwriter I’ve ever known. He will put your mind at ease.
Here’s a snippet from the episode:
Brett: Do you have one really good road story?
Willy: I think probably one of the greatest moments in my life was playing Chastain park in Atlanta, Georgia. Chastain Park is this beautiful outdoor venue, and people show up there with gold-plated dinnerware to try to out-picnik each other.
Brett: No way!
Willy: Yeah it was that kind of a place. It was my last show with Jethro Tull on their summer tour, this was in the early 2000s, maybe 2003. I had been riding on the crew bus, and I got to be good friends with them. They’re just great lads. We had so much fun.
I don’t have a lot of technical needs, I’m kind of a Spartan guy. I know that as long as your sound is sorted out from the point of origin, you don’t need a lot. It makes you not very needy. And I think the crew really liked that, because being able to do a throw-and-go, where you throw your shit on stage and rock—you do that all the time.
Brett: That’s the ideal opener.
Willy: Yeah, you gotta be pain-free. So there I was, and I got to the ballad moment in the show. And I came up to the microphone, and I started singing, and all of a sudden the mic moved a little bit, just a tiny bit. And I thought that felt weird, I didn’t like that. It threw me for a sec. So I thought, you have to tuck in, don’t lose sight of the song. So I keep singing...and it moves a little more.
And I think, wow, that’s really strange, and I look over to my right...and there’s the monitor engineer, and he’s hunched over the console, and I can just see his shoulders moving, because he’s laughing so hard.
One of the grips had tied a monofilament fish line to the mic stand, and they were moving it.
Brett: Brutal!
Willy: It was fantastic. And then one of the guys also took this, um, giant marital aid, and suspended it from the stage. A dildo, suspended from the stage. So while I was in the middle of the song they lowered it and it came down just over my head.
Brett: These guys are savages!
Willy: Oh they’re fantastic.
Brett: So this was out of love, right?
Willy: Oh it was an absolute love moment. But this was during the power ballad of the set, and I thought, what a great sendoff.
