This is from the song turning back into itself.
It's called "The Problem of Identity."
You don't hear that phrase much anymore.
Everything goes in fashions, and that's fascinating, too.
The American language is really fascinating.
If you ever spent any time abroad,
like if you run into people who have
become expatriates or something like that-- writers,
especially.
I think musicians can become expatriates
a lot more easily than writers, because music
is such a universal language, and doesn't
depend upon dilatative meanings and all of that.
But writers, it's hard, because you really
do live in a language.
And a language is like an organism.
Changes, and goes through all kinds of things.
And you run into people who've been abroad for a long time,
and they talk funny.
Because the American language, I think every quarter,
about every three or four months,
it just goes through a whole transformation.
And if you're not here, you miss it.
And it's very odd.
But "The Problem of Identity."
That used to be a big phrase, identity problems.
Used to identify with my father.
First, making me want to be a gas station attendant.
Simple.
Drink Coca-Cola.
Listen to the radio.
Work on people's cars.
Hold long conversations in the night.
Black.
That clean gas smell of oil and no gas.
Machine coolness.
Rubber.
Calendars.
Metal sky.
Concrete.
The bearing of tools.
The wind.
True blue labor, red and white.
Identified with Joe Louis.
Brown bomber, you know.
They'd pass along the mud streets of Laurel, Mississippi
in loudspeaker truck, the white folks down
by where the colored schools was.
And all of us out there for recess or after school
are beckoned to come get your free picture of Joe Lewis.
Come on and get it, kids.
It's free.
Come on, now.
What it is, is Chesterfield cigarettes.
In one corner of the beautiful, slick picture of Mr. Lewis
is the blurb.
"Joe liked to smoke too, see.
And he want all y'all to follow right along in his footsteps
and buy up these here Chesterfields,
and smoke your little booties off.
And you'll be able to step up in that ring,
be gloved, and punch a sucker out."
It was the glossiness of the photo I finally figured out
years later that had me going.
Didn't really matter whose picture was on it,
although it was nice to have been Joe's
because he was about as great as you
could get down South post-World War II, as the books say.
Identified with Otis, I think his name was.
Worked at the grocery store in Ocean Springs.
Came by.
Would sit and draw on pieces of brown paper bag.
Drew in the 1940s style of cartoons bordering
on serious sketching, i.e., in the manner of those sultan
cartoons with the harem gals by that black cartoonist, Sims.
You can see him all the time in old "Esquires" and "Playboys."
Well, that's the way Otis could draw.
And he'd draw me in the make-do living
room, seated on the do fold.
I just saw a typo.
On the living room.
Let's see.
Seated on the do fold, he'd teach me
how to do a portrait of a chic, perfect Anglo-featured woman,
say, in profile, out of his head, built mostly
from magazine and picture-show impressions.
And he could draw lots of world things, too.
Drew me, for instance.
Later, Otis went up to Chicago.
Sadness, madness, wed, bled, dope, hopeless,
catapulted into the 20th century like the rest of us, rudely.
Steeped in homemade, makeshift, chemical bliss of, or, flesh.
Waiting for nothing less than the real thing.