Headaches over American Politics

Headache City this morning. The health care battles rage throughout the nation. I caught a rally here in Bakersfield earlier this week outside 20th Congressional District Representative Jim Costa's office with some 75 people carrying  Health Care Now signs and speaking to each other and the local media on the need to pass this latest health care bill. 

There were some members of the loyal opposition in attendance. Five people. One of them was a woman with a burgundy hat with tea bags dangling on the brim. An interesting take on fashion for an elderly woman to promote, which went well with her repeated comments that health care should not be for all. Nothing like promoting social harmony.

One other woman who arrived a tad late in her big truck decided that her screech of ""We do not consent" should be screamed nonstop while the pro-health care reform group was listening to an elderly woman in a neck brace explain how her insurance company denied her husband the necessary prescribed drugs her doctor recommended. The crowd got into the spirit of the affair by chanting "We need mental health care, now." The screecher held her own, but in the end "mental health care now" won out.

Sunday the nation finds out which side wins out on this health care debate. The anger and resentment each side of the political spectrum feels for one another has reached the near boiling point. The tone of politics today reminds me of the old Viet Nam days. Action in the streets throughout the land, and a refusal to search for a middle ground.

So many people today have only read about those days in dusty history books, and have no first hand knowledge of how split the nation was. It took Nixon resigning and the inglorious end of our involvement in Viet Nam  to move past that time's political stalemate. The residual hard feelings both sides felt in the aftermath have never fully disappeared. Not that this should surprise anyone living in America, because if you travel to many parts of the South the old Civil War wounds are still beating against the North's petrochemical induced "waves of grain."

This is just another way of saying we did not just wake up with this terrible headache today about health care in a divided land  that no amount of aspirin or anti-depressants can tame. There is a fascinating documentary I own, called David Halberstam's Fifties. The film is based on Halberstam's book of the same title, and in six provocative segments traces the modern American story lines from World War II through 1950s.

Volume one, The Fear & The Dream, starts us off filled with hopes of prosperity mixed with fears of Communism  and the threat of nuclear war. Volume two, Selling The American Dream focuses on how Americans were sold through television the whole concept of affluence, and how politics changed through this new medium as Richard Nixon takes the stage. Volume three, Let's Play House, examines the outside facade of happy home life with the realities of lost traditional values and the unrest that percolated underneath the social veneer. This chapter spends a good deal of time on major two literary works of the period, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Peyton Place. Volume four, A Burning Desire showcases America's sexual urges through the The Kinsey Report,  the birth of Playboy Magazine, Marilyn Monroe in the limelight and Margaret Sanger's efforts to bring the birth control pill to market. Volume five, The Beat, hits the road with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and meets Elvis Presley to create a culture of youth. Volume six, The Rage Within & The Road To the Sixties, looks at the marked difference for White America and Black America in the post war and spotlights Bill Russell and Willie Mays. The documentary concludes with the space race spawned by Sputnik, JFK, the McDonald brothers, the automobile and our build up in a little Southeast Asian country, Viet Nam.

This documentary is must see TV for people interested in learning why we are so split today. It won't cure a splitting headache, but certainly answers a lot of questions as to why we have one. Of course, in the spirit of keeping Americans in their perpetual state of amnesia, this title is out of print. It was made in 1997, the year the DVD was born, but was never put out on that platform. Maybe you can prod the fine folks at A&E to either license it off or put it out on the little shiny disc.

I have to call another legislator to vote yes this weekend. Ouch.

Squeeze The Grape

Anyone see the recent news about Detroit? Total deconstruction of roughly one quarter of the total city and a return to the agrarian roots that were lost to the automobile for a hundred years. Welcome to the 21st century where we all plant crops in cities to feed ourselves, and we try to remember things that were once an important part of our cultural make-up. The new plan beats the daylights out of our current factory farms and CAFOS and might spur a resurgence of community fresh healthy foods and the arts on local levels. Maybe Motown Records will resurrect itself as Gro-town Records. Go Detroit!   

In my world of reconnecting with the a lost past while looking at the future, I have been in touch over the last couple of weeks with David West of Play Ball! Musical Services. His name may not be familiar to many readers of this little blog of mine, but he is a wonderful multifaceted musician/producer. He co-founded the Cache Valley Drifters in the early 1970s, and the band did some marvelous work on Flying Fish Records during that crazy decade. He also contributed backing and songs for the late great Kate Wolf.

As a quick aside, many may not remember Kate Wolf. I had the great pleasure to meet and get to know her a little bit when I worked at KPFA in Berkeley, CA for about six years from 1977 to 1983. Everyone at the station loved her, but  her biggest booster was the warm and talented Robbie Osman. Robbie has a tremendous roots and folk program, Across the Great Divide, that has run for decades at 94.1. He has championed Kate's music passionately for all these years, and deserves special mention as a great human being keeping culture alive in America. We were all devastated when she succumbed to cancer at such a young age in 1986, and on the brink of national stardom. Derk Richardson did a fine article for the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1999 that lives on the Internet as a glowing tribute to Kate's legacy.

 I rediscovered David West through the Youtube clip when I ran across the terrific song by Peter Lewis, America, that I put up on my last blog post. I needed a copy of Peter's concert, Live in Bremen, and could find no one in the states who was selling it at any reasonable price. Anyway, after a few e-mails the good old US Postal Service delivered my new CD.

The record and liner notes are well worth the small green Andy Jackson photo I sent in exchange for the CD. The record contains some great stories surrounding two classic Moby Grape songs, Murder In My Heart For the Judge and Right Before My Eyes.  The story of Murder In My Heart involves Stephen Stills and Neil Young when they were still in Buffalo Springfield, and came to San Francisco to check out the fuss over Moby Grape. In Neil Young's book, Shakey, he talks of the meeting. Peter Lewis did an interview a few years back that also has the full details. When you hear the original concept that Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson put down for the tune played by Peter and David it becomes a wonderful historical musical artifact of pop conscience. His take on copyright is touched with humility and truth. Peter's story regarding the dinner setting at his mother's home with the assembled guests of Hollywood stars all dining at Loretta Young's table, which led to writing Right Before My Eyes, is quite remarkable in its honesty and detail.

The Live In Bremen record shines with an acoustic warmth that covers material from Moby Grape through Peter's first solo record, Peter Lewis. He also plays a great Gene Clark Byrds song, Set You Free This Time, as a wonderful tribute to an obvious key influence, which originally appeared on the Byrds second album. The album the band members all finally got to play on.

Peter Lewis remains one of popular music's most under appreciated talents. He has penned a wealth of great songs over the years with Moby Grape, and on his own very limited released two solo records through a German record company, Taxim Records. Peter Lewis, the first solo album, was produced by John McFee from the Doobie Brothers and got rave reviews from Rolling Stone when it appeared fifteen years ago. The highly positive reviews could not muster many sales. The album remains largely an undiscovered jewel in the cluttered mine of pop music.

The album boasts the aforementioned talents of David West, and host of California Sound veterans from Byrds, Doobies and Credence Clearwater Revival with Cornelius Bumpus, John York, McFee, Stu Cook and Keith Knudsen all lending their talents to the project. The sound is pristine and the songs are all very strong. Changing, gets two treatments on this record, and though I am a bit partial to the second helping I can see why this tune has two versions. The song is a personal microcosm of the Moby Grape story from Peter Lewis. Moby Grape's last full fledged album, Legendary Grape, which was first released on cassette-only in 1990 under the name The Melvilles, also has this song. It did not make the original cassette-only version, but appeared on the lovingly restored first CD edition that the fine folks at DIG Music put out in 2003 to tantalize all Grape fans with what could have been all over again. The original release in 1990 went to only about 600 folks on the Herman Records fan list due to the continued legal problems of copyright. 

Today, any rationale mind in the universe might have thought all the litigation was over, and the band could finally start receiving some of the proceeds from their artistry. Sundazed Records thinking there might be a real market for the original Columbia Records  releases licensed the first four Moby Grape albums from Sony/BMG. Not more than a month after their first reissue date in 2007 did the legal bullshit start up again from lawyers at Sony/BMG, Matthew Katz and the band causing a stop to a very promising re-release. The debut release and Wow were pulled and remain out of print.They join 20 Granite Creek and Fine Wine as lost raisins pruned from the vines of commerce. The excellent Jerry Miller albums, Life is Like That and Live at Cole's remain in obscurity struggling to find ears after fourteen years of availability.  

Hunter S Thompson once perfectly described the music business: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."  

The legal wrangling over the rights to both the name Moby Grape and for much of their catalog has now spanned the entire lifetime of the band and its four remaining founder members while outliving the remarkable Alexander Spence. It is not over to this day. There is a great, and fairly brief, detailed account of this ongoing battle that first appeared in Entertainment Law & Finance and was published by the author, Stan Soocher, on the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association website. This account is beyond anything fiction could imagine, and is the full truth and nothing but in the long litigious life cycle of malicious greed gone insane in today's world of corporatism.

Detroit has a good plan in bulldozing a corporate past that turned its back on the city when times got tough. Now the city turns the page and borrows from a more sustainable lesson with small farms and gardens to bring back culture and commerce. Music has been a huge casualty in the business world of merger consolidation and contracts, just ask the Moby Grape survivors. Bulldozing many of the older business models and laying waste to many of the parasites who sucked the sounds from the landscape over the past decades has been tough. It has forced me to piece together old puzzles and try to figure new meanings for lost art that big business in this country never cared for. If we are to "learn from our mistakes" we must have an honest history, and must find all the important cultural documents that made that history. If we embrace in our collective ignorance and pour down modified enhanced flavor substitutes we suffer from malnourishment as a consequence.    
  

 

Moby Grape Breaking In Again

My last blog post got me in big trouble with my computer. Doing the usual search for reference links it came across a very malicious site. I wish I could tell you the site name, but that history purged itself with a big electronic dump. For your protection stay away from all golf sites. I know I will from now on.

A lot changed over the years since my old Dell first came home. This new HP slim line model holds more than eight times the hard disc memory, and processes at a much higher rate than my old workmate. I won't bore you with all the useless tie-ins to sites that now get loaded instead of software, but  I will say it was nice to have a copy of Microsft Office in the house I could still load.  Software ain't cheap. So this week I'm breaking in my new office compadre. I surf on magical electronic waves carrying me to new places where I find familiar faces.

Speaking of breaking in, this month marks an anniversary of sorts for one of my all-time favorite bands, Moby Grape. March of 1967 found the five founding members (Peter Lewis, Jerry Miller, Bob Mosley Skip Spence and Don Stevenson) recording their brilliant first album for Columbia Records. The album is currently out of print. According to the excellent liner notes David Fricke supplied for the Legacy Records  Moby Grape-Vintage release in 1993, Fall On You, Come In The Morning and 8:05 all were finished between March 11 and March 14 of 1967. The remaining tracks were completed for the band's first album by the last week of April. The record cost $11,000 to make and endures as a classic album without a filler tune to be heard. I don't think the members of Moby Grape ever saw a nickel from their wonderful debut release.

This band epitomized the old blues tune Born Under a Bad Sign. On the night of their first album's listening party Peter Lewis, Jerry Miller and Skip Spence were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of three young girls and for pot possession. The charges were dropped, but the die had been cast. The album contained sure hits, but the record label in one of the most bizarre marketing and sales approaches in music business history released five singles (ten songs) at once from the record. Disc jockeys in most of the country disregarded them out of hand, partly due to the arrogance of the five simultaneous singles releases, and partly because they had no idea which of them they should play. And partly because Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released just two weeks prior.

The band played at the Monterey Pop Festival on the second night, Saturday night, where they opened the evening's show. No one who was not at the show has seen the band's performance. There might be footage somewhere in D.A. Pennebaker's estate, but as Pennebaker remarked in his notes on the Criterion DVD release of the historic festival, "It'll never be complete." There are stories out in the universe that Mathew Katz (that rhymes with ingrates) demanded a million dollars to film the band's performance. The end result?  No filmed Moby Grape. Here is the audio clip just recently posted on youtube. Tommy Smothers does the introduction.



There are so many stories surrounding Moby Grape and the ordeals the band mates faced with managers, record companies, lawyers, drugs and mental illness. Most of these recounts are simply not complete, because the story of Moby Grape does not end in 1967, 1969, 1971, 1978, 1984, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1996, 1999 or 2007.  When all has been said and done the band has put down tracks under various signatures  for five decades and has played to hosts of crowds thoroughout that span of time. This band was not a flash in the pan, but an odd mix of young people thrown together who ultimately stuck by one another for life.  The band is American grit and determination personified, with talent to boot.

The story of this band and its members goes on. The Grape musical legacy grows through, of all things, the Internet and the personal computer. The two very things that demolished the music business as most of us knew it in our lifetimes and punished Moby Grape so severely in the process. I close with a song I just found last week on Youtube. The song comes from Peter Lewis. It's called America. It's a beautiful song and I think a lot of people will be touched by it when they hear it. Just spreading words and tunes while breaking in a new computer.