12:5 Gratify: I Get a Shock of Recognition

Gratus (pleasing, thankful), plus facere (to make). 

To Gratify is to please or make thankful.

AI Overview: To "gratify my blank" means to satisfy a desire or need, with "blank" being whatever you want to indulge--hunger, curiosity, ego, need for praise,

or even just myself.

So, I gratify myself by learning a song by tall, skinny, red-haired Steve Phelps from a nearly fifty-year-old recording.

Steve was my best early grad school friend, and in 1978 we started a punk rock band called 7Hz. (7Hz is frequency of sound that makes your internal organs rub against each other and causes internal bleeding.)

Steve didn't play guitar in the band, but taught me the rhythm guitar parts of the songs he wrote--including:

      Shock of Recognition

We're sitting up here in the thirty-fourth row Waiting for the show to start. Goosebumps all over our bodies. Icicles in our hearts. An icicle's the perfect weapon-- You just stick it in, it melts and leaves no trace. Now you're up on the stage and we're stamping and shouting, But I don't like that look on your face.

[Band goes into fast overdrive.]

You know I can’t put my finger on it,
But I know something’s wrong.
You can’t be the singer
If you're still part of the song.
You know, we’re down here
And you’re up there.
We can’t hear you singing, But we really don't care.

Now give me some action, Give me some speed,
Give me some mojo,
Give me what I need. I get a shock of recognition,
I get a pain in the ass,
I get a shock of recognition when I
see what's coming to pass.

I get a shock of recognition,
I get a shock of recognitio-o-on,
I get a shock of recognition, you don’t
Get no recognition from me, no no no no no no.

Steve died of heart failure about twenty years later in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

I was Steve's guitar.