Ball & Chain

The Story of Mommy & Me

Mommy is glad kick me upstairs to the third floor room.  Well, I'm not really kicked up.  It has become mine by default because Jon split.  It's the middle of my second year of high school, junior year - I skipped a year.  But Mommy cannot take it anymore.  My obsession with the white blues is putting her over the edge.

Janis Joplin and her "caterwauling", Hendrix and his feedback blues, or anyone else.  I'm listening to Humble Pie.  Have you ever heard Steve Marriot sing Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters"?  Well, neither has Mommy.  Oh, and the Rolling Stones, day and night.  Is this proper music for 14 or 15 year old?  But you don't remember Steve Marriot?

They are all groups and singers suffering from neurasthenia, the old fashion word for a nervous breakdown and channeling it into their voices, their guitars. The Blues.  Steve may be the best (sometimes his neurasthenia can pull you right into the grave with him), but it's Janis's caterwauling that has the spiral pulling in my head.

Mommy thinks the Blues are the low class version of the jazz she grew up with.  But I know otherwise.  Because at 14, 15, I am struck with bouts of neurasthenia myself, lassitude, apathy, feelings of inadequacy.

So all I can do is listen to the "Kozmic Blues", "Ball & Chain", (Janis Joplin), "Stray Cat Blues", (Rolling Stones) "Tangle Up in Blue" (Bob Dylan) "All Along the Watchtower" Jimi Hendrix

Sitting by my window
Oh, looking out at the rain . . . .
Sitting by my window,
Oh, looking out at the rain  . . .
Something came along and
grabbed a hold of me
And it felt just like a ball & chain
- (Big Mama Thornton) as sung
by lead singer, Janis Joplin of
Big Brother & the Holding Company


Everyday, this is my problem. It's a problem putting on my make up in the morning, it's a problem going to school everyday,dragging myself home everyday, and bothering the fuck out of my Mommy with it.  Poor Mommy, she has enough of her own problems. For one, she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis

So the third floor solution works for both of us.

But it isn't like I had a problem with Mommy.  I just needed her to understand a song like "Ball & Chain" by Big Brother and the Holding Company.  Or "Turtle Blues" the song right before it on Cheap Thrills, "I know this goddamn life too well". It's a hell of a way to think at 14, 15, I'm telling you.

Hendrix comes on the radio.  How can not relate to a song like "The Wind Cries Mary" at 2am?  Well, I am up all night by habit by then.  I an adult, you know, I smoke cigerettes and drink coffee all day like an adult.


When I was a baby, I was Mommy's little girl.  Mommy probably had a shock a the age of 40 that another baby was on the way along with three other crazy creative children in the house.  I'm sure she prayed for me to be normal.  Being a Devout Catholic,  she thought there must be a reason for Joanie..  That reason came down the tubes soon after she died: I was the only one to keep the family together in some form of family life.  Never mind my atrocious first stepmother.