Tonight's ADWH Soundtrack

Stephen Stills:

Black queen, where's your bank roll?
Black queen, where did it go?
Black queen, the truth is hard
Black queen, you're playin' foolish cards, black queen

I searched all over the Tube O' You for the studio version... which is what I heard during After Dinner Whiskey Hour... and all I could find is this muddy live recording with the botched title.  "Queem"... Oh shit, Oh Dear.  Oh, well... better this than nothin'.

This particular tune calls to mind my fall from grace, or rather the first such time I fell.  The place was Boron AFS, California, sometime in 1971 and the time is slightly after midnite on a summer's eve.  I'd just returned home from runnin' one of my buds up the hill to work... he was scheduled to work a mid-shift and his wife was visiting from El-Eh for the weekend.  The lady was stayin' at my place, seein' as how The First Mrs. Pennington and the boys were away visiting with family in Lompoc and I had extra rooms for the weekend.

So... I walked in my front door to find the lady sitting on my couch... casually smokin' a joint and listening to Stills on the stereo.  She looks up, smiles, and sez "come sit next to me."  I was thunderstruck... on all counts... first by the pot (I didn't indulge, at that point) and second by the oh-so-obvious invitation, this bein' 40 years ago and I'd not yet succumbed to the... umm, what to call it?... sorts of ill-conceived and non-thinking acts of self-indulgence that would mark my life for the next five or six years.  But I went and sat next to her.  You can imagine the rest... and so it was I fell.  It didn't take a lot of convincing, to tell the whole truth.  I was too damned easy and so was she.

Stephen Stills was our soundtrack, moanin' on about how "the truth is hard."  Indeed it was.  Just coincidentally, "Love the One You're With" is also on that album, irony of ironies.

It was only much later in life that I came around and recognized just how hard the truth really can be.