70s folk-rock band America played in my hometown of Charlottesville Saturday night. About halfway through the show they sang one of their lesser hits, “The Tin Man”, but I was quickly reminded that it was my favorite song of theirs. My mind suddenly went into a rich mental rewind.
“Oh, Oz never did give nothing to The Tin Man / That he didn’t, didn’t already have” There’s a clever metaphor in that lyric: things aren’t always as they appear. It turned out that a couple of weeks or so later I would be mortified to hear a neighbor chuckling with my parents about how much of a kick they got from hearing me sing while I mowed. Apparently my rock star imagined “performance” was enthusiastic enough to rise even above the din of the mower engine. As if the discomfort of puberty in and of itself wasn’t enough, people in the neighborhood could hear me sing! Oh God! That would presumably include the hot girl my age who lived across the street. Good “Charlie Brown” grief. —– Ah, the power of music in our youth: from the way we so passionately (if not embarrassingly) embraced it then, to the sudden and vividly specific memories it can paint 30+ years later. When I got myself back in the presence of the moment Saturday night, smiling at that little memory flash, I began thinking more about the analogy in that one quoted lyric. Am I a Tin Man sometimes? It should give any of us pause to think. Whether in our business life or our personal life, how often do we find ourselves chasing down a “Yellow-Brick Road” of sorts, looking for something we perceive to be missing - only to discover, usually in retrospect, that what we’d been looking for we already had? Odd that one little song could evoke such a vivid childhood memory I hadn’t before thought of until that moment. Or lead to thoughts on a life lesson never before pulled from within that same song. Yep. I guess you could say these things were actually there all along. What about you? Are you looking for something in “Oz” that maybe you already have? - Steve Mowing photo credit: sugarfrizz |
Oh, Oz never did give nothing to The Tin Man 
When that song came out I was a 12-year-old boy with dreams, like most, of being a rock star. I’d recently gotten these cool, albeit bulky, 
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