Everybody's Talkin' at Me

It's the busiest time of my work year, with a hundred people to deal with, dozens of excruciatingly detailed projects and proofs and telephone conversations to carry on. It's beginning to evolve into a beehive buzz. People and their various needs are getting mixed up in my mind and I have to stop and sort them out.
Everybody's talkin' at me
I can't hear a word they're sayin'
Only the echoes of my mind...
Fred Neil
Yesterday the US Post Offal threw a monkey wrench into the works by informing us, with 24 hours' notice, that they were no longer accepting Bound Printed Matter, which is how we have been distributing our antique map guides for the past few years. It's going to get a lot harder and costlier to do what we do. I'd love to find the #%&@ who made that decision and sprang it on us with no warning, and give them what for. But what do they care?

Fred Neil

So I'm taking a break to learn a song on the guitar. Written by Fred Neil, probably his most famous after it became the sound track for "Midnight Cowboy" in 1969. It's a song about stress overload and dreams of escape.
I'm goin' where the sun keeps shinin'
Through the pourin' rain
Goin' where the weather suits my clothes...
Fred Neil is on my shortlist of favorite songwriters and singers, a freckled redhead with a deep, mellow baritone. He was one of Bob Dylan's contemporaries in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses...I'd love to hear a recording of him and Dylan together. Clean Magazine's eulogy said "He loved the music, freestyle and rolling, not the discipline and not the spotlight."


Fred Neil (right) doing what he loved best, making music with his friends, Karen Dalton and Bob Dylan

Fred changed his life when he overcame heroin addiction, turned his back on the spotlight, and moved to southern Florida where he spent the last 25 years of his life working with the nonprofit Dolphin Project which opposes the capture of live dolphins to be used for human amusement. Dolphins are big business, especially in Florida, even featured in roadside attractions along the highways.

One of his lesser-known songs, and my favorite, is "The Dolphins." He died of cancer in 2001. I like to think he's somewhere still happily making music with his friends.

Now, time for another cup of coffee and some more phone calls.