Tuesday Tuneage
Joe Walsh - "Rocky Mountain Way"
1973

Last summer while drinking more than one Surly Furious with my college buddy Bob, we started playing a parlor game. It was a "where would you live?" game. I believe (it's a little fuzzy - have you ever had several Surlys?) the questions included:

1) If you had to leave the Twin Cities and Minnesota, which city would you move to?

2) Would you rather live on the East Coast or West Coast?

3) Would you rather live in New York or Los Angeles?

My answers were:

1) Denver. You can see the Rocky Mountains, and they're breathtaking. There's no mosquitos and no humidity in the summer. I could bring beer and chips over to my brother's place on Saturdays and watch college football on his much-larger TV. They have a great college hockey program at Denver University, who is a big rival of my UND team, and living in Denver would mean getting to watch WCHA games. Plus it's the home of Modern Drunkard. And let's not forget the incredible Denver Sandwich, which you can get in any city but surely must be at its best here.

2) West Coast. While it's unlikely I will ever leave Minneapolis, I recently thought that it would be somewhat worthwhile to keep my streak of having never lived east of the Mississipi River. When I look at my place in America, I consider myself a Westerner. I also don't refer to the East as "back East", as I've never been there. I refer to it as "out East." (Furthest East for me? A day-long business trip to Cincinnati in the early nineties.) I've been to Oregon - to visit the aformentioned Bob twenty years ago or so - and it's beautiful. Any locale in northern California, Oregon, or Washington would be preferred to the East Coast. I'll take the threat of an earthquake and falling into the Pacific over the possibility of falling into the East Coast Bias.

3) Los Angeles. Maybe it's that I've been watching a lot of Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm reruns on WGN. Maybe it's the Charles Bukowski thing. Maybe it's Steve Erickson's Amnesiascope. Maybe it's that I recently finished yet another reading of Joan Didion's The White Album. Maybe I'm intrigued by the idea of sports games starting two hours behind when I'm used to them starting. (With all the UND home hockey games now on Fox College Sports, what better way to start a weekend then a Sioux hockey game dropping the puck at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday?) Ah hell - who am I kidding? It's mostly because Midwestern people seem more fascinated with New York than Los Angeles and I'm not fascinated with New York City, never have been. Los Angeles doesn't excite me that much either, but going east seems to be going against some age-old instinct I have as a Westerner. Heeding Horace Greeley's timeless advice, I would head west.

As for "Rocky Mountain Way," its riffing and production evoke for me the wide spaces of the West. Plus I first heard it while living in the Denver suburbs in the shadow of those Rocky Mountains. I never tire of it.