Why Johnny's Garden?

We'll get to "Why Johnny's Garden?" in a bit.  But first I must say I loves me some music.  It started as early as the 3rd or 4th grade in the Lakewood Elementary schoolyard when I adamantly defended The Beatles.  This was not something you took lightly in the largely, shall we say, unsophisticated backwaters of Arkansas in the early 1960s.  My friend Oliver arranged to have his intercom left on all night on his front porch so I could put rubber bands around my pre-dawn delivery of the Arkansas Gazette while listening to Clyde Clifford on KAAY (the Mighty 1090) in Little Rock.  I left Arkansas to the sounds of Bill Clinton playing Yakety Sax and moved to Memphis and the likes of the Gentry's and Al Green and Issac Hayes.  But Memphis was so far ahead of the curve in rock music.  Jon Scott and his minions were playing real "progressive rock" music on FM100. My first concert was The Who, followed by Steppenwolf (or as my Dad called them Steppendoodoo) and the Byrds, and then the Allman Brothers (all living, I might add) and an unknown warm-up act called ZZ Top.  The mood in Memphis, although rooted in the blues and rockabilly, was all about David Bowie, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, as well as what we might call Americana today - Joni, the Eagles, Jackson Browne and others. 

If I have one regret in life it is that I went to the Eagle Scout Court of Honor to pick up my Eagle badge on the night Jimi Hendrix was playing in Memphis.  Had I known he was going to die in a month, they could have mailed me the Eagle award.  It was a lifetime memory squandered. C'mon man, it was Jimi "freakin" Hendrix!

So here I am 40 years later still going to concerts of one sort or the other almost weekly.  In the two years since I moved to Austin I have seen well over 30 concerts, including British royalty like Van Morrison, Roger Daltrey and Ray Davies, not to mention dozens of smaller club-type shows at the Cactus Cafe, Saxon Pub and others. 

So what's this got to do with Johnny's Garden?  Well, Johnny's Garden, by Stephen Stills, is one of my all-time favorite songs (I have many).  And it represents the feeling I have for Austin.  It truly is Johnny's Garden.  Here are some lyrics:

I'll do anything I got to do
Cut my hair and shine my shoes
And keep on singing the blues
If I can stay here...in Johnny's Garden

I was going to explain that the song was written about an English estate Stills bought from Johnny Lennon, hence the name.  And some sources bear this out.  But it appears that the real story is that Stills bought the house from Ringo, who bought it from Peter Sellers.  And Johnny was the gardener.  He came with the estate.  The picture above appears to be all the proof I need (that's Johnny in the middle).

So to me Austin is Johnny's Garden, and I will do anything I got to do to stay here.  This becomes especially true as I write this, because last week my number came up in the latest Austin American-Statesman lay-off.  So I guess I'll shine my shoes and cut my hair, because I was born to live in Austin, or as we sometimes affectionately call it, The People's Republic of Austin.

As the legendary Sheriff of Soap Creek, Doug Sahm put it:

If you're down, and confused
And you're tired of payin' dues
Come on down
To Austin town
And get a life...