There is so much about this song for me that I could certainly get lost in unpacking it. I will attempt it, anyway.
Firstly, since I tie a lot of my stories back to my short time working in music, nothing in this post is about that. So, if you read this blog, thank you, but if you’re looking for more stories about that time in my life, they won’t be here. I give you permission to grab the next thing on your reading list. I will be talking about my life before than.
Growing up in the 1970’s, at some point I acquired a small silver colored AM/FM radio. I used to lay in bed, even sometimes at night when my brother was asleep, and quietly listen to songs that were older than I was.
This was one of my favorite songs from the period and remains one of my favorite songs today. He died about four years before I was born and in very different life circumstance, yet the song spoke to me even at a young age.
In this song his voice to powerful, commanding even, even if that isn’t the tone he is going for. He knows exactly what he’s doing, even if that is intentionally doing nothing. He’s stepping back, looking at his life and reflecting on what was and might be. I did a lot of that even when I was young. I still do it now.
His voice, the ocean noises and even the whistling all fit together for me. The song really fit my mood a lot of the time. Not all of the time though because I had emotional control issues, or as I often put it, “I was a freak-out kid.” When I wasn’t freaking out though, this song really fit my mood. I felt stuck but not because I had a long life to look back on, but because I didn’t see a path. I know that I needed to do kid things, chores, school, do the whole growing up thing, but then what?
Others seemed so certain about their lives. Talking to people my age was sometimes like talking to a day planner. My friends would say, first the were going to get out of school, then get the hell out of their parent’s house, get the hell out of Redding and go off and do something big and amazing. That last part of course changed by the kid and sometimes even by the week. I didn’t have that confidence in my future.
Sure, that whole getting done with school and moving out sounded great, but that’s just the procedural stuff. That’s not the meaningful stuff, the stuff that we wrap around ourselves, the stuff that strangers walk up to you and want your opinion on.
Just so much that my peers talked about, that wasn’t structural like school or parents, was about things that carried absolutely no weight, importance, to me. Cars? I can’t drive and I wasn’t planning on being an auto-mechanic, so not interesting. Girls? Girls are people too and some were more interesting than others, just the same as boys. My peers and I didn’t speak the same language about girls either. Drugs and booze? Yeah, whatever. Sports? That was just a different flavor of religion. Pointless.
Most of my peers didn’t want to talk about and didn’t know how to talk about actually interesting things like the strange things that parents did, how things worked, why things were the way they were and the kids that wanted to talk about stories seemed to want to go over the same stories, or for variety two stories, with such a fine filter that no comma or period felt unviolated.
Okay, enough complaining about kids. You get the point. I am different, I think differently, I was treated differently and so it’s no surprise that I felt disconnected. Songs like “Dock of the Bay” helped remind me that I was not alone, that someone who didn’t sound like me, who lived in a very different part of the country, since he mentions Georgia, and who was years older than I was, could feel much the same as me.
Also, no. I did not know, nor did I care that he was black and that I am white. I learned early on that a lot of white musicians borrowed, or outright stole, from black musicians. I could hear it in the music long before I learned any of the history, mostly trough the Fender lessons I started in 2019. Which, by the way, if you’re interested in learning to play bass, guitar or ukulele, give them a look unless you’re more blind than I am. I learned a lot, even if I didn’t stick to them. I still use much of what they taught me.
This song may have also been part of the reasons why I tried to become a better whistler. Well, that and sibling rivalry. I am considered a fairly good whistler. I practiced it a lot in my teens.
