RIP: Family Roadster 2004-2013

You served me and my offspring well, Nissan Murano. It's too bad that lady ran a Stop sign and put you into that nice woman's front steps on Anderson & Paulsen. It's a good thing you were a safe car and took one for the team. It's also a good thing that the valuable cargo had already been dropped at school.

Thank you Nissan Murano for being the first car in the world of my firstborn, and for moving the family safely from Omaha to Kalamazoo to Savannah. Thanks for lugging me and two exhausted children through 14 states in 16 days on the epic summer road trip of 2010.

I don't believe that things happen for a reason, but there's a reason things happen. It was about time for some new wheels and you can't get too sentimental about machinery, unless you're Neil Young. So Long May You Run Nissan Murano, somewhere in automobile heaven. Your 130,000 miles were not wasted.

In case you're wondering, Backtime's Executive Editor walked away from the crash. I was banged up, but unbroken, and a little out of sorts to remember to take pictures of the actual scene. There will be much, much more on a day in the life of a crash test dummy, coming soon.

Paper Backtime: Long May You Run

I chose the title for this web log from Neil Young's song of the same name, which honored a classic automobile - one that was a huge part of his life. I just finished the book two days ago and my own personal roadster was finished today. More on that in the coming days.

Young is well-known for his enthusiastic love of Lionel trains, clean energy, and enhanced digital sound quality. But nothing is a greater supporting player in this book than Neil Young's personal vehicles, which he names. "Mort" (short for Mortimer Hearseburg) was great for loading a whole band, their equipment, and some groupies if they were lucky. WN Ragland, Nanu The Lovesick Moose, and Pocahontas are all vessels of adventure on the American and Canadian road.

His passion now is for The Lincvolt, which blends his love for huge, fancy, classic cars with a clean energy footprint. It's that divergence that sort of defines his career. It's why the hypnotic, acoustic My My, Hey Hey is on the same album as the brash, electric Hey Hey, My My.

Waging Heavy Peace was actually one of the strangest books I've ever read. The stream of consciousness from the now-clean Young is also symbolic of career. He worked incessantly creating music and he put so much out there to find brilliance, which he so often did.

This book does much of the same. Young's 497 pages jump around in time and space, in frame of mind and subject. But he always prefers record compositions to songs, so his 68 chapters have to add up somehow. But maybe not, by his own admission he was never straight during his musical career.

There are a number of fantastic perspectives that spike in a book that rambles quite a bit. His ability to see the little things are quite incisive:

"I like to play to an audience that is into it. I dislike people sitting in the front row talking on cell phones. Of course these people are sitting in the most expensive seats, the ones they get through ticket scalpers and other services...Capitalism collides with music in this area. 

It was not like that when I started. The people in the front row were the music freaks, the real music fans, who knew every song, every lyric, every piece of information about the band that they could find. They were stoked to be there in front of the stage, and ready to rock. So these cell phones and rich folks who can afford the big bucks for prime seating distract me from what I am doing and make me feel like I am on display in a museum."

The subject of him not being high anymore also comes up from time to time, usually when he's walking on the beach in Hawaii or going on a road trip with the dog.

"So now I am in the song machine gone awry. I wander the halls of straightness, not knowing how to hallucinate. Finally the course is clear and the sound of the waves on the rocks is fading. The fog is clearing and there is so much sea."

Reading this book is often about separating the fog from the sea. But for those of us who appreciate the journey to the destination, or album sides to singles, Waging Heavy Peace is worth the ride.

Nice Job Today, Delta Airlines

I left Lexington this morning to take a conference call at The Tap Room at Blue Grass Airport. The call was 11 AM, the flight to ATL was 12:30 and the weather was miserable.

In Atlanta - flight to CHO was cancelled, so a number of us made it to Richmond  In fact some colleagues of mine were agreessive in getting seats on the next flight to Richmomd, and we got our rental car in Richmond to drop in Charlottesville. I rocked the aisle seat, overhead space, and turned my brain off reading, Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace took my mind for and hour and a half.

But the key was what would happen to my 40-pound bag that I checked at the outset of the trip. I used the Delta site during flight and it said that it was scanned for Richmond. I thought that was pretty cool, my bags were being tracked like Fedex and I had hope I'b be whole by the time we hit the road.

We waited a little at baggage claim, but it was ultimately a sucess. Then I rented a suburban without XM. On the ride, I talked with the kids and the boss, and by the time the delay ordeal was over at 7 PM I was checking in in Charlottesvile, VA, life was in order.

So Delta got a curveball and doubled it down the line. I tip my hat. Although why when you can take a straight shot, and avoid airline headaches, 6 hours door to door on one road?

Of course I was impressed by Delta's team response to a bad situation to get everyone to Charlottesville through Richmond because of a canceled flight and bad weather. But as the plane landed there was no bad weather. It was a travel drill, The drive would have been better.