Mikey and MJ are the oldies at Ocean Beach Skate Park, or as the locals call it, Shockus SkatePark. “93 to infinity,” Mikey shouts, before taking a swig of his canned Modelo. I approached the oddly dressed pair, sitting on the edge of the bowl, to find out what kind of music they listened to when they skated. “Real skateboarders don’t listen to anything at all,” Mikey snaps, his eyes concealed by his black bucket hat, “You have to be in it.”
As he says this, a young man with airpods does a frontside tailslide on the rim of our bowl, to a smattering of applause from Mikey and MJ. “Well,” Mikey continues, “Whatever it takes to be in the session man,” and sips down more of his Modelo. I turn to MJ, a tall man in camo cargo pants and aviators, “What music do you listen to? Anything to get you fired up for skating?” MJ takes his time answering, letting the roach burn between his thick fingers before he replies, “Everything.”
“The things you should be ashamed to talk about that you listen to? Don’t,” Mikey chimes in. “Adele” MJ replies. These two are San Diego locals, proud to be skating at Shockus Park since 1985. “We were the first generation where people said, ‘you can’t do that’” Mikey claims. “We ‘get’ music nowadays. You see, everything goes back to 25 years before you were born.”
He says this while rolling up his sleeve and revealing his arm. The explosion of color and fluid shapes ripple across his arm like oil on asphalt. Hidden among the psychedelic splatters of ink is a portrait of Jimi Hendrix. “You see this guy right here?” he says, sticking his finger in Jimi’s eye, “he died before I was born, and look at him now, he’s everywhere. Everything now goes back to 1995. The music, the clothes, everything people are doing nowadays is just a new version of that.”
MJ kisses his roach. “I saw Nirvana at the zoo in Boise for free,” Mikey says. He finally starts to answer my question, “I like [music] just because it makes a statement.” I ask him what he listened to today to get ready for skating, he replies, “Dolly Parton. Coat of Many Colors.” MJ chuckles, Mikey goes on, “that’s how you write a song man. She mastered that formula.”
“Coat of Many Colors” is Dolly Parton’s eighth studio album and was released in 1971. The album was an instant success, receiving universal praise from critics and a nomination for album of the year at the 1972 Country Music Awards. Parton wrote seven of the songs, with her longtime collaborator Porter Wagoner penning the other three.
On the opening, titular track, Parton sings of rural happiness with a rugged earnestness as if she were the American Edith Piaf. The subdued tremolo in her voice vibrates in tandem with the sorrowful slide guitar as she narrates a story about the coat her mother made her out of rags, “Now I know we had no money / But I was rich as I could be / In my coat of many colors / My momma made for me.”
While the opener is about her mother’s love, Parton lightens the mood with her signature wholeheartedness on the next track, “Traveling Man.” In the song, Parton tells a tale about falling in love with a traveling man, a man she knows her mother would never approve of. But when she makes plans to run away with him, she discovers that her mom has swooped in and ran away with the man herself.
The rest of the album flip flops between up-beat, hootenanny stompers and full-moon, cowgirl crooner ballads before ending on, “A Better Place to Live,” an unapologetically sentimental prayer for peace on Earth, “And if we’d love one another instead of finding faults / We could afford the price of peace, love is all it costs.”
Just like her mother and that coat, Parton does a lot with a little; the album is only 27 minutes long, and yet I cried for 28. It’s difficult to imagine Mikey sipping his Modelo and crying to Dolly Parton, but his appraisal and appreciation for her was on point, “I like [music] just because it makes a statement.”
Listen to “Coat Of Many Colors” here:
