My Music Journal 2025 - Friday, January 3, 2025

 

Friday, January 3, 2025

Time: 7:40 AM
Song: All I Wanna Do
Artist: Sheryl Crow
Mode of Consumption: MP3 – Drive to wo
rk listening to MP3s on shuffle from my phone.

Song link: https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZpQiJ78LKINrW9SQTgbXd?si=b2d84790d7944077

When this song was released in the summer of 1993, Bill Clinton was in the first year of his first term as President, and I was 11 years old. It’s strange how the young mind works, but when Sheryl Crow sang about the man at the bar at noon on a Tuesday with the name of William, who probably goes by Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy, I envisioned President Clinton.

It’s still what I think about when the song plays, and in some alternate timeline in a parallel universe, it’s entirely plausible to envision an alternate version of Bill Clinton, having forgone politics for a run at Hollywood stardom or something, day drinking in a bar in LA and trying to pick up women.

Can’t you see the dingy bar on a dusty LA street? A woman crosses the threshold, the sun behind her back, shining through her blonde locks. At the bar sits a graying forty something male in a polo shirt that billows noticeably at the stomach with a half empty brown bottle in front of him, the label peeled away in pieces and scattered on the bar top and floor.

The woman selects a stool a few feet away. Orders a drink from a sleepy bartender who waits tables at another juke joint down the street in the evenings.

“All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die,” William or Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy says. It seems like an innocent enough statement, but she suspects his notion of fun is sexual. Too bad he is ugly, she thinks, because maybe she was hoping for some “fun,” too.

He has a hint of a southern accent, but he hides it well when sober. Another beer or two later, he reveals in a thick drawl that his middle name is Jefferson, and she’ll have to guess which historical figure that references. He lights matches, watching them burn, grinning more and more as the flames near his finger.

He does have a certain charm, she thinks, and will probably later regret it.

She orders another Bud.