Just Coasting

Stick close to me, and keep a life preserver handy. I'm pretty sure I'm about to jump in over my head.

Two recent shows at The Amphitheater at The Wharf in Orange Beach provide my springboard.

When John Mellencamp played in the middle of a show featuring Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan on July 31, he seemed to be deliberately emphasizing his accomplishments as a songwriter, not just a skilled entertainer with some hits to share.

But when Mellencamp the songwriter wrote a certain line into "Pink Houses," he wasn't exactly celebrating tourism:

Well there's people and more people/ What do they know, know, know?/ Go to work in some high rise/ and vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico// And there's winners and there's losers/ But they ain't no big deal/ 'Cause the simple man baby pays the thrills/ the bills, and the pills that kill/

In stark black and white the song decries the accommodations most of folks make with life, the way we hit a certain age and shrug and accept the fact that our "old crazy dreams just kinda came and went."

And the Gulf of Mexico line indicts anyone who thinks that the occasional nice vacation trip makes up for a lifetime spent in office cubicles.

(As a cubicle dweller who thinks highly of Gulf vacations, I think the indictment is overly harsh, but that's beside the point.)

But somewhere along the line, the song was taken as an anthem, an ode to the good life in America, and that's very much the way it was taken at this show. What else would you expect? The audience was made up people who were in fact vacationing at the Gulf of Mexico, and people who live a stone's throw from those beaches and their charms.

So when the crowd shouted the line, there was nothing sarcastic about it. And the songwriter seemed completely willing to let them have it their way....