WEBVTT

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This is from the song
turning back into itself.

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It's called "The
Problem of Identity."

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You don't hear that
phrase much anymore.

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Everything goes in fashions,
and that's fascinating, too.

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The American language
is really fascinating.

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If you ever spent
any time abroad,

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like if you run
into people who have

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become expatriates or
something like that-- writers,

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especially.

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I think musicians can
become expatriates

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a lot more easily than
writers, because music

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is such a universal
language, and doesn't

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depend upon dilatative
meanings and all of that.

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But writers, it's hard,
because you really

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do live in a language.

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And a language is
like an organism.

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Changes, and goes through
all kinds of things.

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And you run into people who've
been abroad for a long time,

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and they talk funny.

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Because the American language,
I think every quarter,

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about every three
or four months,

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it just goes through a
whole transformation.

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And if you're not
here, you miss it.

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And it's very odd.

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But "The Problem of Identity."

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That used to be a big
phrase, identity problems.

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Used to identify with my father.

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First, making me want to
be a gas station attendant.

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Simple.

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Drink Coca-Cola.

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Listen to the radio.

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Work on people's cars.

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Hold long conversations
in the night.

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Black.

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That clean gas smell
of oil and no gas.

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Machine coolness.

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Rubber.

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Calendars.

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Metal sky.

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Concrete.

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The bearing of tools.

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The wind.

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True blue labor, red and white.

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Identified with Joe Louis.

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Brown bomber, you know.

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They'd pass along the mud
streets of Laurel, Mississippi

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in loudspeaker truck,
the white folks down

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by where the
colored schools was.

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And all of us out there
for recess or after school

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are beckoned to come get your
free picture of Joe Lewis.

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Come on and get it, kids.

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It's free.

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Come on, now.

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What it is, is
Chesterfield cigarettes.

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In one corner of the beautiful,
slick picture of Mr. Lewis

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is the blurb.

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"Joe liked to smoke too, see.

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And he want all y'all to follow
right along in his footsteps

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and buy up these
here Chesterfields,

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and smoke your
little booties off.

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And you'll be able to
step up in that ring,

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be gloved, and
punch a sucker out."

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It was the glossiness of the
photo I finally figured out

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years later that had me going.

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Didn't really matter
whose picture was on it,

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although it was nice
to have been Joe's

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because he was about
as great as you

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could get down South post-World
War II, as the books say.

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Identified with Otis,
I think his name was.

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Worked at the grocery
store in Ocean Springs.

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Came by.

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Would sit and draw on
pieces of brown paper bag.

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Drew in the 1940s style
of cartoons bordering

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on serious sketching, i.e.,
in the manner of those sultan

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cartoons with the harem gals
by that black cartoonist, Sims.

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You can see him all the time in
old "Esquires" and "Playboys."

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Well, that's the
way Otis could draw.

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And he'd draw me in
the make-do living

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room, seated on the do fold.

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I just saw a typo.

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On the living room.

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Let's see.

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Seated on the do
fold, he'd teach me

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how to do a portrait of a chic,
perfect Anglo-featured woman,

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say, in profile, out of
his head, built mostly

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from magazine and
picture-show impressions.

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And he could draw lots
of world things, too.

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Drew me, for instance.

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Later, Otis went up to Chicago.

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Sadness, madness, wed,
bled, dope, hopeless,

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catapulted into the 20th century
like the rest of us, rudely.

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Steeped in homemade, makeshift,
chemical bliss of, or, flesh.

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Waiting for nothing less
than the real thing.

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