Won't Get Fooled Again

I'm starting to think I have the perfect marriage. Each evening, I come home, take out my laptop, set up camp on our kitchen counter, and start blogging. My wife goes in the living room and puts another CSI Miami DVD in the player and absorbs another series of cases built around this ethic: "I'm Horatio Caine, and this much I know. At CSI Miami we never close." I know they never close. Or at least they never get fooled. Every forty minutes or so, while I peck away and remember stories, I hear the Who blasting out their revolutionary anthem, "Won't Get Fooled Again," and I know another CSI Miami is underway and I hear words like "semen" "laceration" and "swab the wooden handle of the pick-ax for trace" waft into the kitchen.

My wife quit drinking. So did I. I had to, once and for all, because of medications I take for psychological and physical ailments. Alcohol and these medications mix in subversive ways that rob me of my dignity and erode my wisdom if I drink. Wine became poison for my wife. It started to make her sick. So, instead of drinking wine in the evening, she knits and watches CSI Miami. I write. And read others' writing.

I haven't watched even a minute of CSI anything. But, having CSI Miami come to a conclusion and restart through the evening brings me a sublime pleasure, thanks to the Who. When I was a junior at Whitworth College, I took my first Shakespeare course. My love for poetry and fiction and drama had been awakened the school year before at North Idaho College, but I didn't know Shakespeare' s plays or anything about their impact.

I had no idea that Shakespeare dramatized the most essential conflicts of the human soul. I had no idea that his plays would bring me into stories of moral complexity, mystery, and human mayhem beyond my capability to imagine any one exploring human life this deeply and fully. I began to dream in iambic pentameter. I would listen to speakers at Whitworth and I'd hear the stressed and unstressed syllables in the cadence of their speech.

I read the King Lear heath scene for the first time while riding a Greyhound bus home for Thanksgiving and felt, underneath the tiny beam of the overhead reading light, suffused with the banana odor Greyhound used to fruit up the chemical toilet smell, that I had been transported out of the secure world I thought I knew into an unhinged world, stripping me to examine what I thought my life's foundation was, even as the proud King Lear strips himself of the last remnants of his kingly garments, and faces the pelting rain of the fierce tempest, freezing his naked body, but kindling the fires of his compassion, the fellow feeling that had been all but dead in him as a King.

I'd been through my own heath scene just fifteen months earlier. I fell to the bottom of a flash roaster in the Zinc Plant. I was gassed by sulfur dioxide and heavy metal dust. I lay down to die. I imagined the story of my death on the front page (how audacious) of the Kellogg Evening News. Lying down to die saved my life. I got under the poison. This accident turned my world upside down. I'm still trying to figure it out. But joining King Lear in that storm on that Greyhound bus took me more deeply into what that accident had meant and how stripped I had been of assumptions I'd had of life being a secure and predictable undertaking.

My brush with death was making Shakespeare rock for me, but near death wasn't going to help me much with Dr. Dean Ebner's final exam in the course. I had to get Shakespeare's work inside me in a different way for a grade. Somehow, I discovered that if I put headphones on, punched the recent Who 8-track *Who's Next* into my roomate's eight track, that that drive of Pete Townshend's knifing power chords, the orgasmic wail of Roger Daltry, and the manic edge of chaos drumming of Keith Moon meshed with the Elizabethan momentum of Shakespeare.

I loved the intensity of it. I built a stack of my Signet paperback Shakespeare editions, punched in Who's Nest, opened my notes, and got lost in the throb of rock 'n blank verse. I nearly cried at my desk as I reread Othello's suicide speech, Macbeth's last despondent soliloquy, Prospero's homage to grace and forgiveness, and King Lear's unbearable howling as he carries his dead daughter Cordelia after she's been hanged. And, somehow, the one pile driver song that drove Shakespeare into my deep guts the strongest was "Won't Get Fooled Again."

I'm going to try to figure this out. I'm clicking on my Napster icon and I'm going to let "Won't Get Fooled Again" hammer its way back into my life through my new Best Buy DJ Headphones and see if I have anything to say: What was the magic of "Won't Get Fooled Again" and Shakespeare and why does hearing it pound into the kitchen from the living room, always excite in me those days in my South Warren dorm room studying Shakespeare and feeling the course of my life taking a hard turn in a direction I never could have imagined?

Click. Click. Here goes: Oh yes. The epic. "Won't Get Fooled Again" is epic in its sweep. It begins with that watery tide of syntesizer rising to Townshend throttling power chords...it's those power chords....I could feel the power of Shakespeare's meter in those power chords. In the same way that Pete Townshend crashes and sustains the impulse for change and revolution into this song with his insistent, defiant power rhythms, the unrelenting meter of Shakespeare's poetry was pounding his sense of urgency, his sense of a revolution in language and theater into my inner most self, and the two were married, even as they still are as I listen to "Won't Get Fooled Again" thirty-two years later. The drive, the discord, the wailing, the dark danger, the sense of temporary triumph, the irony of not getting fooled again: of course we will, but the urgency of fighting complacency, of living on the edge of a new world drives the Who in a way I found so completely congruent with how Shakespeare was revolutionizing my perceptions of the world and my experience with language, that I began to feel that with Shakespeare's help, I would never get fooled again.

Ha! If only.