6/9/98.. Juggling Eggs.

Do you boomers remember a time when the latest record was hot news? When you took your paycheck down to the music store to get a weekly infusion? When Rolling Stone was a religious institution? Those heady days when new lyrics tingled like Elizabethan broadsheets?

It's been an age since RockandRoll competed with the daily paper for topical reporting. Now vinyl broadsides are rare as right whales. So when one boils up under you, it's worth hailing.

There she blows: 50 EGGS, by Dan Bern.

I've had this nutty recording in heavy rotation in the Eagles for a week, and it still chuckles me wicked. Edgy punk folk-rock, unrepentantly non-PC, a masterpiece of bad taste. But, dig this: lyrics full of IDEAS, and REAL TUNES. Yikes. I mean, it's embarrassing to hype a record whose first cut opens. "I've got big balls..." He certainly does.

Immediately the scholastic impulse has us categorizing Bern as a cross between Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello, with a dash of Sid Vicious. But all comparisons are, well, vicious. Bern is simply delicious. Who else would write a song about Monica Seles getting stabbed, " to pay for our sins?" I did say wicked.

What did happen to broadside R&R? Did the Geffenization of the music biz squeeze out all content for the sake of socko styling? Not that you could ever accuse Tin Pan Alley of intellectualization. Did we all become so apolitical after the 70's that topicality lost its charm? Did we just stop listening to the words? Turn off the music?

It comes as a shock to actually hear pointed lyrics, go digging for the liner notes. After the pro forma gestures of later Dylan, a guy with an edge cuts deep. Phew. It's like discovering Jefferson Airplane in the 60s.

Bern shrugs at the comparisons. He claims a common ancestor in Woody Guthrie, and, like mister Zimmerman, comes out of the great flatness: Iowa vs. Minnesota. Lithuanian and German Jewish parents. The usual journeyman struggle as a musician. Now some cult following. Where do I get my too?

So I've been listening to Guthrie again, too. Wondering how wide his audience actually was. Did he get radio airplay? His rap was just as vivid as "big balls", so it ain't likely he was on the Marconi. Is his mythic stature all ex post facto, like Hendrix, who didn't get Top 40 airplay until he was a Golden Oldie? And isn't it interesting that Woody is idolized as the primal progressive when he worked as a hack for the WPA, touting the big dams. Different times, of course, but a folkie yodel about building warplanes ain't no "Masters of War." Roll on Columbia, roll on.

There are always balladeers, I suspect. Rap is shilled as telling like it is, and is lyric-heavy enough to please a poet's ear, but it's too full of hate and misogyny for my taste. And I hunger for tunes under the verse. I've been dipping into a pocket collection of Bobby Burns that turned up in my shop overhaul, and I keep wishing I knew the music he was singing to. I'm not sure that Bern's liner notes will be the subject of doctoral theses in the next millennium, but they sure are a timely songing today.

I confess I'm still a Dylan junkie. Whenever I need a jolt of music that talks, I go for Blood on the Tracks, or the like. When I'm walking along the mystic divide I find light in Dylan's revelation sessions. I don't hear any transcendence in Dan Bern, but that's for old guys anyhow. And he's sure having fun. You don't get that feeling from the later Dylan, so I'm delighted to have found this new voice.

The world may be going to hell on this track, and our only hope is that some grinning trickster will throw the switch. This dude Bern looks good for the old switcheroo.

Meanwhile the weather here has been doing the Spring yo-yo. Hots, then wets, even a tough of frost in the low spots. Now it's perfect: 40s at night, up into the 70's with high cumulus in the afternoon.

Peggy is galloping up to the post, and feeling the whip. It's a sorry commentary on the system that she's deeply anxious because so many of her charges are failing: because they won't do the work. By holding to her standards, and demanding the kids do the work they are capable of, she is creating hostility among her colleagues, and getting abuse from parents. The current class of juniors has been strategically obstructionist all the way through school, and they've learned they can get away with doing nothing, if they gang up. When enough of them are failing, pressure is applied to the teachers to lower the bar. They've skated around the "tough" teachers for 10 years. But they have to pass American Studies to graduate, so it's rocks and hard places.

This year eleven students managed to get reclassified, or otherwise exempted from Peggy's course over the year. What is theoretically a heterogeneous mix of ALL the juniors, gets waffled in the face of parental pressure, and the notion of standards gets trashed. Instead of doing the assigned reading, which is hardly excessive, students and parents will engineer endless bureaucratic proceedings where the little dear's psyche gets analyzed, and the teachers have to sit through this charade, grinding their teeth. Is it any wonder that once enthusiastic teachers throw in their cards?

Peggy feels she's completely out of step with the system, fighting a battle that has low priority in the whirlwind, and has lost whatever political clout, or perceived validity, she once had. Thus are the joys of teaching. There are moments when students shine, and it seems worth the candle, but the prevailing atmosphere is not sunny.

In the dooryard there's almost too much sun. I spent yesterday rigging an awning over my shop deck, after broiling out there over this big eagle I'm concocting. It's starting to come together. I cruised the local sawmills looking for weathered boards in different textures and shades of gray. Very subtle contrasts between aged oak and spalted ash, planed cedar and roughsawn pine. The only painted wood I'm using is an old piece of shelving from the Jonesport store, which is a nicely aligatored yellow. I'm shaping it into the beak and talons.

It's fun to rummage the back piles at a sawmill. The stuff they never expect to sell. Not only are the prices right, but the amused looks are priceless.

Up on the Carding Machine Road, Gus' mill is still being reassembled. He and his son have put up an open galvanized quonset, poured a foundation, and replaced the old wood beds with steel rails. The circular saw mill itself is a venerable antique. Patented in 1860, there are shaftings on the mechanism stamped "1912", a great old rig. And didn't they build to last. Everything is massive, and forgiving of rough usage. Gus admired the fat old Babbet bearings. "I can slap these anywhere on a bit of clean shaft, and go with it. A new ball bearing is just too fussy for this old iron."

Gus opened a housing to show me the drive reel for the carriage cables. Cast hub and wheel, the fat spokes had sharp S curves. "Getting those in must have been a trick," he said. "Of course, time was no object, and labor was cheap."

"Maybe they had a better sense of time," I offered.

"Maybe. But I wouldn't've wanted to do all that walking. Getting up at 4AM and walking to Richmond. Cutting ice all day on the river. Then walking home in the pitch black. No thank you."

Gus's nostalgia is limited to old iron. He's a casehardened piece himself. He's tickled that his son is interested in the mill. "I never had time for him as a kid," Gus says. "Too busy, or too drunk." Now he and the 29-year-old are resurrecting this old cutting device, and enjoying the company.

Gus works second shift at the yard, and is a chip carver. There's usually one of his critters on display at Jeanine's. He showed my the longhorn steer he's carving this month, which has all the massive muscle you'd expect. He insisted I take the oak we dug out of his back pile, gratis. I lashed it to the Owl, and rattled down the gravel on the Carding Machine Road.

I'm a bit rattled in general. Jumping from one project to another. Paintings, carvings, assemblages, yardwork. Too busy even to go out and play boat. I finally shook loose on Tuesday, in the late afternoon, went for my first sail of the season, and rediscovered why. The meditative rolling, and the face full of spray eased all the knots. I shambled back up to the Eagles, untied. Ready to ride the summer horses now they're in the field.