Exiled in May

Exile On Main Street is all the music news that fits during this month of May 2010. When it was originally issued it ushered an end to a third chapter in the Rolling Stones volatile and continuing book of life and song. 

When I think back forty plus years, I remember my first girlfriend really hating the Rolling Stones. She hankered for The Bob and all those folk tunes and artists that were beginning to fade in the last years of the 1960s. Simon and Garfunkel were her last refuge at the time, although the Jefferson Airplane's softer moments offered her some solace if the right smoke could be produced.

When she and I first hooked up in 1967 The Bob was recovering from the mysterious accident, and folk was for that-moment-in-evolution a combination of rock being exploited for all it was worth with a 12-string ring on an augmented chord in nearly every recording studio. She dug The Bob from the days of Freewheelin' to Another Side. For all the great sounds of The Byrds and Arthur Lee's Love your ears bled from the way-too-many manufactured stringed-clones in the pop universe at the time. Folk-rock was so pervasive even a sideman like the young Glen Campbell could  walk from the set of Shindig to record Mr. 12 String Guitar for World Pacific Records with all the hits of the day covered in breathtaking mono. It could have been a Sears exclusive.

In the early 1960s mainstream pop music was a lot like most of the mainstream pop music of today, but instead of American Idol it was Teen Idol time. Elvis was Hollywood, and reigned over the Fabians, Bobby Rydells, Neil Sedakas, Wayne Newtons on the male side of the platter while Lesley Gore and big-hair-bouffant girls from the stables of Phil Spector and Shadow Morton with names like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las dug out their flip-sided claims with  those Supremes' girls of Motown to balance the airwaves.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1964, along with the other British Invaders, wiped away most of those manufactured idols of  the early Sixties with a new raw attack that owed their sound to the rock and blues artists of the 1950s. But, by 1967 most American pop radio music was coming from Detroit at the hit house of Berry Gordy's Motown Records, and the West Coast with the bands that populated the Bay Area and Los Angeles. From across the water in England, an American in London, Jimi Hendrix, along with Cream now captured youthful imaginations. The Rolling Stones had suddenly become a faded page from their own Yesterdays' Papers song, just like so many of the first wave of British Invasion acts, while the Beatles soared on with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Rolling Stones anti-Beatles stance had worn thin with the public by 1967. Tunes like Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl alienated nearly all of the girls I knew during that period, and the move to a more psychedelic sonic ornamentation on records like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty's Request left "all the young dudes" baffled and put-off.

Most kids in the US had no idea at the time of the travails the collective individual Stones were having in England. The British authorities had begun to crackdown on the pesky drugs of choice for 1960s youth. As the Summer of Love shone on London, Los Angeles and San Francisco with emerging new bands like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, the Stones were being hauled into jail as examples to impressionable teens that cannabis intake would not be tolerated. As a historical piece of minutiae, Donovan was the first to get busted in Britain, but the Stones got all the headlines and much of the blame. In 1967 my girlfriend did not care, maybe they would just go away.

It seems odd today that the band stood on the brink as 1968 came around. They could not tour due to legal issues and seemed on the verge of collapse. Their rivals, The Beatles, had given up touring and were a studio and marketing machine during the last years of the Decade of Change. Both groups, for very differing reasons, brought in new management in 1967 to help deal with all the unpleasant shit- the business end of the music business.

Andrew Loog Oldham got the boot first as the Rolling Stones manager in 1966, and then in 1967 as their record producer. Their Satanic Majesty's Request was self produced by the band with less than desired sales results. Allen Klein picked up the manager mantle and Jimmy Miller would become the band's producer beginning with Beggar's Banquet. 

When Exile on Main Street first saw the record bins on May 12, 1972 most every guy I knew dug the record for the obvious collection of strong songs included on the two long playing vinyl records. It was not The White Album, however a lot of critics in their reviews that spring and summer referred back to The Beatles ultimate release in some effort to compare breadth, and to maintain some media chatter of interconnectedness between the two iconic British rock bands. Tremendous songs from Tumbling Dice to Soul Survivor are sprinkled liberally on every side. Resignation found its way on many of the tracks, but with a fierce determination and swagger to counter weigh against the permeating doubts of dislocation. 

The inclusion of what sounded like rough takes and unfinished mixes, particularly on Side 3 between Happy and Let It Loose took the steam out of the record for a lot my buddies and party-mates. Several girlfriends in my frenetic 1972 just did not groove to Turd On The Run, although they loved to "scrape the shit right off your shoes" in harmony when Sweet Virginia found its way on any sound system. The Stones were now so entrenched in the culture of the world after the success of the previous three classics, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers that ladies just gave the band's audacity and overt sexual stance a grudging pass. They were just, well, The Stones.

 In the blinding speed that passes/passed for pop culture history, when this record found its first needle in 1972 Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison had all arrived and passed away from the first point in time that the Rolling Stones stood in the mouth of pop music oblivion in 1967. The Stones had lost Brian Jones to a murky death at his own home over this period, and the Beatles were no more. Cream was now a historical footnote, and three bands removed from Eric Clapton and his growing addiction.  Jimmy Miller would produce only one more Rolling Stones album. The young guitar virtuoso, Mick Taylor, who had quickly replaced Brian Jones in 1969, had just two records left with the band before moving on to obscurity.  Young girls bopping with the young boys in 1972 to Let It Loose and Stop Breaking Down had no clue who did Under My Thumb, and did not care.

The band plays on with various bass players, keyboardists and their 1975 found Rolling Stone guitarist, Ron Wood, all these years after the May 12 1972 release. They discovered a new, inventive and very sympathetic producer, Don Was, to keep their tracks fresh sounding, if not quite as shocking in this age of 24/7 pornography. There are a truckload of great tunes they have produced since these fellows were caught in Exile on the European continent almost forty years ago sweating out the music amid the basement steam and drug use.

The best parts and the worst parts of this newly polished and reissued with obligatory-bonus-track-material gemstone hears the band capture so viscerally our beauty and flaws here in the west. We can be beautiful, profane, scarred, passionate, brutal, forgiving and resilient all in the moment of life. These characteristics define our humanity, and maybe this was some crowning achievement to squeeze that truth out and  Shine A Light for the rest of us to embrace, and be okay knowing it is just who we are- imperfect one and all. It was never a concept album, but over all these years really became one.

If you've never owned the LP, or the Cassette, or the CD of this album do yourself a favor and get the new spit-shined grooves on CD. Listen to the whole damn thing a few times to get the context. Find a copy of Melvin Van Peebles' movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to view while listening to the album, then kickback and discover the spirit of the 1970s, which seems a lot like today.

Thanks for stopping by and for the read.

 

Montana Smokes Pot Dispensaries

It wasn't a major story, but in this day of really high unemployment, crippling government budgets with falling  revenues amid no-tax conservative calls for less government interference and regulation I find the recent firebombings of two medical marijuana dispensaries in Billings, Montana ironic.  ABC News has the story.

Apparently two young men couldn't take having pot dispensaries in beautiful downtown Billings. "Not in our town" was spray painted on one of the burned dispensaries, and video cameras caught part of the action.
Priceless.

Frank Zappa did a song with his early 1970s assembled Mothers Of Invention on the album Over-nite Sensation called Moving To Montana. Based on news events this week Montana will join Arizona as places I will avoid doing recreation and retirement in. Not that the fine government officials in both state care.


In California, where huge state budget deficits are now just part of everyday living along with some of the highest unemployment figures in the nation, marijuana gets tossed around as a cure-all for budget and headache relief for battered citizens and legislators alike.  There will a ballot measure this November in California to vote on decriminalizing the persistent and resilient plant. Sales of cannabis would not be fully legalized, but local governments in the state could opt to allow through local ordinances commercial distribution, and collect tax money and/or regulation fees from the enterprises dispensing the weed.

Since this proposal makes so much sense it will never pass. Watch for tons of "reefer madness" advertisements in the golden state starting late this summer. The usual lobby of big entrenched business concerns in alcohol, drugs and tobacco along with major insurance companies will flood the airwaves with killer weed messages if poll numbers indicate passage might be even remotely possible. 

Long ago on a progressive college campus in a galaxy far away, I sat with my girlfriend and smoked my first joint among some college student friends while listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Harmonica and guitars never sounded so sweet. All that teen hormonal angst evaporated in a small cloud of burnt green buds. All those evil weed horror messages in high-school class rooms became the subject of immediate laughter and derision.  I would never listen to people who did not have first hand experiences on subject matters open to discussion and debate ever again.

A decade after my first close encounter of a really good kind with the herb,  NORML  had grown from its inception in 1970 to be quite a political force and offered up ballot measures in California to legalize marijuana. I remember a large event NORML put together in San Francisco at the end of the Seventies decade. The Democratic Whip of the California state legislature, and soon to be Speaker, Willie Brown, spoke eloquently and passionately to the assembled pro-pot throng about the necessity to legalize marijuana. Moby Grape performed a dynamic set to the large crowd who set off to get stoned knowing the drug of choice was going to be legalized that fall. The measure was crushed. I'm sure most of the crowd who had gathered that day were also crushed to learn there is a big state called California beyond the progressive little border of liberalism by the Bay.

More than thirty years later the state is far more conservative than it was at the end of the 1970s. People don't torch marijuana dispensaries here yet, but local law enforcement officials continue to make medical marijuana a very dicey way to do business. Common sense might force a person to think a major change in all our government drug policies might be in order, but no evidence can be found that sense or sanity exists in California, or in the rest of the country today.

As I type this sentence I listen to East-West and smile at the brilliance of Butterfield, Bloomfield and Bishop. That tightly rolled relief of angst may elude the ballot box in California and be the cause of hysteria in Montana, but escape into a righteous attitude might  just be a good sound system with the right tune in mind.

Thanks for visiting.

Mothers Day Observed

Mothers Day.  The holiday came about in this country on the eve of the Great War in 1914 to commemorate the memory of a woman, and her Mother Work Day Clubs, which had served to ease the suffering of the poor, and then the combat victims of both sides in the Civil War.

The last one I celebrated with my mom was sixteen years ago, and she was bed ridden with only two months to live. Not that we knew, because the oncologist was "vigorously attacking the problem" he continually assured us all. So much for those plans of mice and doctors.

I never had much luck around Mothers Day. I remember one occasion right before the official holiday. I had packed for the four hour drive from the Bay only to have a lady run a stop sign and broadside the car I was driving on the way to the Nimitz Freeway. The lady was not insured. It was an ugly scene in the neighborhood right off Cedar Street in Berkeley with many of the inhabitants coming to the rescue of the woman who had run the stop sign to offer support with baseball bats in hand. Fortunately, it was a busy, what-other-kind-is-there-in-Berkeley, intersection with plenty of people stopping and offering business cards to me if I needed a witness and to keep a semblance of peace until a police car arrived. What saved me that Saturday afternoon was the sheer size of the automobile I sat in.

I kept the car for a few more years, but it was never the same. Prior to the ill timed broadside it had been a magnificent Pontiac Star Chief Executive model from the mid-sixties when "wide tracks" and GM ruled the world's car business. Like so many of those giant V-8 steel-tonnage transports, this model's parts could be swapped, if necessary, with many other like-sized GM model car parts. No Star Chief Executive model doors available in the wrecking yards at a decent price? How about a door from this Buick, Oldsmobile or other Pontiac model for you? A fine can of spray paint to match that color and you're golden. No, it was never the same.  

I never did make it down for that Mothers Day, which did not sit well with the parental units who must have thought this was a simple ruse to avoid the long drive. The small gift I had picked up north to hand deliver in person got to the recipient far too late to make any amends.

Other years, other tales of ineptitude surrounding the holiday ensued. The time when the kids, with my ex-wife and I, went down for the Mothers Day right after my mom had been diagnosed with arrhythmia. She had just announced her retirement from the teaching ranks after 25 years of devoted service, but had been feeling tired that last semester. She had finally gone to the doctor about the condition and got the news, along with the paddle-shock treatment to get the ticker back in rhythm. On the day we arrived the heart had resumed its irregular jazz meter, which really annoyed her. It did not help that my ex had the strange habit of nap-crashing in bed for much of the daylight hours for every visit we would make to see my parents. I don't think I've ever seen my mom and dad so glad to see us leave than that Mothers Day afternoon.

This holiday has never been a picnic for my beautiful wife of these past fifteen years. Being a step in charge of children not biologically yours is no prize on a holiday like this one. No matter what your tutelage skill level, or the many years of parental confidences shared with the kids in your charge, or the great family spirit that enshrouds your domicile Mothers Day is just going to ultimately disappoint too many deserving ladies.

Very seldom is the stepmother a  mom in language, even though each is a mom everyday in action. Steps, as general rule, get called by their first name, particularly so as the years roll by. The calls from those little people in the photos on the walls and mantles who now have some wrinkles of their own come late on days like this one, if they come at all. Some steps are luckier than others, and might get some FTD arrangement on their doorstep a day or two before, or maybe a candy-gram from the Mongo or Mongitte of their past life. Bravo!

What I have discovered over my time on the planet is that there are many thankless jobs in this world, but being a step parent has got to be the toughest of all the thankless occupations. Those who go and grow through the process are tough, kind, loving and that one person you want most in life to have your back, because they will get the job done without consideration of reward.

I am the most fortunate of men to have such a person by my side. The love of my life has always been a step ahead of the curve, a step above the base and common, a step first to both comfort and help those in most need on this earth, and she remains in step with me however odd my irregular path curves to accommodate a curiosity of interest.
  
We now share a home with three furry felines, and one goofy looking canine who is in this world without any of those teeth that bear his specie's name. The dog just went through surgery to repair a dislocated knee-cap, and is the luckiest pooch in the Western Hemisphere to have the mom he now has. That he faithfully adores her, follows her every movement when she is home and dotes each afternoon/evening by the window at the front door waiting for her return proves he does have some sense.  More than I can say most days about some grown men in the family.

Happy Mothers Day to all women, but especially to my wonder woman, Vicky. If you've ever been in any relationship for any length of time you have been a mom. This is your day, you earned it, so make sure you enjoy it.

Thinking of Nashville & Record Store Days

Been awhile since I've been to Nashville and Memphis. Both Tennessee cities have taken it on the chin this week, and join the Gulf Coast area as this nation's early adopters to the climate change game. I heard an NPR report that the Nashville crisis is one of those five hundred year flood scenarios, but I think statistical declarations like that today are meaningless. As the clean up begins in both historic music cities people continue to learn how hard it is on the system in the midst of epochal change.

I think back on of all those trips to Nashville to visit both of the record-video stores we operated, and to visit with one of our major distributors, Ingram Entertainment. Our big store in the city was on West End Avenue, very close to Vanderbilt University. I still have fond memories of the opening events, and the big softball game we played with the road crew and new hires for the store. The manager and good friend, Michael Ludvik, had moved from the Bay Area to take on the new store with a regional managership to follow shortly. The smaller store was located on Opery Mill Road. They both shuttered when the Tower ship went down in 2006. The stores in Nashville, just like their eighty-plus counterparts in other cities, were just the victims of a commercial climate change in the industry where they resided.    

I bring all this up, because I got a new book from my lovely wife yesterday. The cover reads: From Vinyl To Digital and Back Again Record Store Days. The book was written by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo, and has a forward from Peter Buck of R.E.M. As a record store employee in the very early eighties I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Peter and the other members of  the band in very tight backstage quarters at the Keystone Palo Alto club in early 1982. This was their first major tour, which followed the release of their debut EP release, Chronic Town. It was a memorable night for me, and I still have the original EP in my collection.


Most of this morning I've been pouring the through the pages of this book, sorry about the allusion Tennessee, and thoroughly enjoying myself putting little bits of history back together again after the industrial storm of this decade went through most of the entertainment retail bricks and mortar. Old powerful store names like Wallich's Music City, Licorice Pizza, Peaches, Commodore, Sam Goody's, Wherehouse, Music Plus, Oar Folkjokeopus, Wuxtry Records, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores and so many more are featured throughout the pages with unique stories of passion, guile, humor and determination.

The cool thing about this book, which is a testament to the authors and probably a great editor, finds each chapter as part of the greater whole but also a self contained story on its own merit. You can pick the book  up at any point and put it down the same way. I call it the Chuck Klosterman method of book creation. Genius.

My beloved former boss, Russ Solomon, is liberally featured throughout with insightful anecdotes and messages. There are plenty of other great luminaries quoted in the pages helping create a detailed look at a century's worth of music retailing. The pages have lots of fabulous historical photos. A small statistic, which made me do a double-take, revealed that about a hundred years ago, okay 1906 to be precise, there were over 25,000 retail store fronts selling recorded music in the United States. By the mid 1950s the number had been paired to 7,500 locations,. Today there are less than 3,000 locations selling recorded music.The authors admire and honor many of the current merchants still retailing today, but especially to the folks at Amoeba for their discipline, catalog and success.

If you're in the mood for some fun history in a pop culture music vein this book is gold.

In case you thought I forgot where I started this post, here is a rhetorical question. Who would have thought the oldest existing record store in the country, George's Song Shop, would happen to be found in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?


Stay out of the hollers, friends.

May 4 -Forty Years of Grief-

Ah, fuck it, some things stick with you forever.

May 4, 1970 and  and I was thinking it' s just another miserable day counting the clock until my release from the prison adults call high school. Funny thing on this particular day, the government shot at a large crowd of anti-war students at a college campus in Ohio killing four young people in the 13 seconds of rifle fire. Even in the neolithic period before the Internet, and the 24/7 news crawls underneath the talking heads, the news traveled with a viral speed across the nation and world.

Protests emerged on most of the campuses throughout the nation during those spring days still protesting the US invasion of Cambodia and now the deaths of four college students. As the protests swelled nationwide, a bad night in Jackson Mississippi on May 14 took a real ugly turn by the early morning hours of May 15, 1970.

There were rumors that the Fayette Mayor and his wife had been shot, and a protest of about 100 students turned into a riot when fires were set and a dump truck was overturned on the Jackson State campus. Seventy-five heavily armed policemen and Mississippi State police offers came to quell the uprising. A broken bottle, a rock or brick thrown, an officer buckling -nobody really knows for sure what lit the fuse- but rapid fire commenced on the crowd in front of a Jackson State University girls dorm building and did not stop until a full 30 seconds had elapsed. Miraculously, only two young people died from the gunfire with twelve students being wounded. Every window on the street side view of the five story dormitory where the confrontation was resolved was shattered by police gunfire. The building took more than 460 bullets,  and many of those are still very visible today.   

Young and old alike who were on the fence chose sides on May 4, 1970 and in the weeks that followed. There was no longer any middle ground left on the issues of Viet Nam and American politics. You either marched into the hippie-peace-antiwar-treehugger-freak camp or you chose the conservative-religious-guns-nationalism outpost to stake your future in.  

As summer drew near in the month following the Kent State and Jackson State riots, President Nixon created the Commission on Campus Unrest. Thirteen hearings would be held and nothing of consequence would be gained. No one was found guilty of doing anything wrong. No one was fired for stupidity. Zip. By the time the commission convened to do its nothingness, summer break had all ready taken most of the gas out of the angry protests. When schools reconvened in the fall there was simply another new great divide that had formed silently in the nation, but the big era of protest had literally been shot down.
 
After forty years people from both sides are no closer to finding any common ground. The context of the word games people play to score current political points have changed but the divide created after Kent State-Jackson State massacres has only grown over the years. This divide has widened because the national paranoia has has exploded over the last forty years. The killings that occurred over those eleven days in May opened a giant gash where fear crept into the soul of the nation.

This dread of a US government in total control and without a sense of either fairness or justice has remained with the American consciousness in varying degrees since the May days of 1970. For a few interludes, like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the brief bubble-worlds of dot.com and real estate, the malady waned, but then suddenly reappeared more virulent and dangerous than before. It has become a cancer in the patient, and the patient is us. The absurdity of our situation is that although the extremes of both the left and right both share an equal fear of the omnipotent government the great divide prevents real dialog from curing the patient.

So we find ourselves forty years later on this day listening to a couple of songs by two major pop music artists like Neil Young and  Steve Miller to hear what all that anger was about. Or maybe you can hear in many of The Pretenders songs the voice of a young female student on the campus at the time filled with a bitterness and resolve. Or put on that Joe Walsh classic Turn to Stone and hear what he was thinking being a former student.

The songs have stood the test of time, too bad the fear has as well. 

Try peace this century.

May Days

From the land time forgot in the Seventeenth Century, Robert Herrick opined in verse:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.


May is the love month for poets and pagans. Fertility is fragile and short. Make the most of  the opportunity, and make that dance around the old Maypole count. I'm a fan of the month, and its pagan principle.

The first day in month of May  has a much different meaning for people in many parts of the world. This is the day to commemorate International Workers Day. As in so many cases, the United States does it differently. In America the homage to labor gets a spot in September. The commemoration to work doesn't even get an official calendar day. The holiday gets the rotating first Monday of the month as just another three day weekend binge for RVers and off-roaders to celebrate the end of summer.  Americans don't seem bothered that summer always has at least two  weeks to go officially before ending its seasonal cycle.  Call it the leaving-the-game-in-the-seventh-inning syndrome.

Another curious element of America, and Canada for that matter, putting the labor holiday at the ninth month  might just go back to fertility in an artificially perverse sort of way. We start every year on the first day of January,  and the American Labor Day times out on the calendar as a ritualized end moment of an annual female pregnancy term, which becomes an odd pairing of what the word labor might represent in the back recesses of the North American mind.  Maybe this helps explains why workers in this country continue get less and less of the economic stick.  

I am reminded again this last month of the terrible price labor in this country has paid over the past several decades with the latest mining disasters in West Virgina and Kentucky, which ended with both the government and the mining union's failure to protect their workers from criminal corporate behavior.

Mt first recollection of any mining disaster goes back to the Sixties, and the Bee Gees. When I first heard the Gibb brothers on the radio in the mid to late 1960s I thought it was the Beatles under the  pseudonym, Bee Gees. The Bee Gees first song to reach North American shores was the New York Mining Disaster 1941.  The song was not about an actual mining disaster that occurred in New York, but was a fictionalized account of one that took place in a small village of Aberfan in Wales. This disaster was particularly cruel in that of the 144 persons who lost their lives 116 were children between the ages of 7 and 10.

A mining disaster has been determined to mean that at least five persons lost their lives in an accident. Just an arbitrary number when you stop and think about. The most recent Kentucky coal mining accident  where two miners lost their lives is not considered a disaster. It is only a disaster, I guess, if you are related to one of those who perished. This April has seen a coal mining disaster in West Virginia and a coal mining accident in Kentucky. Thirty-one miners have lost their lives, and at both mines safety regulations were routinely violated and the labor union was nowhere to be found. It seems the mining union has been driven out of the work place.

Think about racking up 639 government health and safety violations and still doing business-as-usual to kill 29 people at your facility. This is exactly what Massey Energy Co. did for the past year and change. The mine that Alliance Resource Partners from Tulsa, OK  owns in Kentucky where the accident claimed two lives has had more than 40 closure notices from state and federal agencies since 2009. This particular mine also was cited 840 times for health and safety violations. You have to ask what the health and safety rules at this stage of the economic game really mean in this country. Certainly does not mean much to those who lost their lives, or to their surviving family members. Certainly means nothing to the public at large who shrug these disasters off just another crawl on the 24/7 talk TV drone.

Here in Kern County most of the work disasters occur in the oil refineries and wells. Kern Oil & Refining Company recently settled a local lawsuit for $250,00 after having a worker killed and six others workers severely injured over a three year period. The company was also cited during this period for multiple safety and health violations.  The Bakersfield Californian reported the following statement from the company after the terms of the case was issued, “We consider this matter closed and intend to conduct our usual course of business.” No admission of guilt was handed down by the court, which is absolutely what happens in every litigated case brought against every flagrant corporate violator.

None of this is news any longer. Today this stuff surfaces as the run of the mill cycle of "usual course of business" in a country of outsourced jobs and with the highest unemployment levels since the 1980s. Mining disasters get the usual government hacks uttering the more and more hollow words that something will change and how precious every life is, but very little really changes to put corporations on notice that safety violations and death will have major consequences for the corporate criminals.

It is not like we as a culture have just awakened to this reality of corporate-greed-with-zero-responsibility gone-wild. We have watched this shit build for a long time. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. Pop music has even weighed in on the epidemic. Two of the worlds greatest songwriters pegged the consequences of the corporate business trend early in the game at the outset of the 1980s with separate albums devoted to the wreckage that globalization and union busting were leaving in their respective wakes.

Bob Dylan laid out the reality in song from the wonderful Infidels album with the song Union Sundown. "Well it's Sundown on the Union, and what's made in the USA. Sure was a good idea until greed got in the way." Neil Young  put out a great album, Hawks and Doves, which included the masterful tune Comin Apart At Every Nail with these insightful lines, "Hey hey, ain't that right, the workin' man's in for a helluva fight. Oh this country sure looks good to me, but these fences are comin' apart at every nail."

Yes,we have come apart at every nail. It is something we can no longer afford to deny. Haven't people in America and throughout the world had enough of multinational corporatism, and the cheapness principle of lowest cost for the masses to maximize the highest profits for the few?  Let us celebrate this first day of May with renewed energy to mend all those fences, and to build a better tomorrow filled with love and respect for all working people. Maybe the latest Mayday-Mayday-Mayday cries from the Gulf of Mexico over yet another corporate caused natural disaster will be the final major turning point.

To better May Days in our future.