Saturday Afternoon Looking Back

Quiet this afternoon. The sun sets early, and all three cats bask in the last few warm rays old sol spins off. My shaggy dog takes a sip of beer I offer, and we all smell the fireplace next door. The grass casts that Bermuda brown tone now all across the back yard. The geraniums, roses and euryops all bloom this December and give a dash of color through the hazy shade of late fall against the fence lines.

Just returned from my uncle's memorial service. Caught up with some long lost relatives and generally meandered down Memory Lane, listening and sharing experiences of the man and of his close family members and friends.

Times and places, bittersweet.

The many stories of heavy bourbon filling the air of the alternating households at the large raucous gatherings for family holiday events and birthdays bounced off the rooms and patios at the two separate spots where our extended group of mourners gathered for my uncle's send off. Mourners might not be the best word in this case, certainly a sadness over his death, but a realization that my uncle lived ninety-three years of life to the absolute hilt reminded those assembled to never forget to live life, have fun and share some joy on the way.  And so the group reverted to what the old timers in the group (I'm now included on that list) have always done best- talk, drink, laugh, argue and share with those around you, and if the rest of the neighborhood hears many of the profound off-the-cuff imbibed comments, well, so much the better for the neighbors.

I went to the formal memorial at the old Congregational Church with my sister, but she had to leave right after on yet another cross country haul back to Pennsylvania with a load of batteries in her 53' trailer with her faithful dog, Shiloh, riding shotgun. Strange to see your little sister so far removed from college honors and a life in government service and farming now filling out the last years of work behind the wheel of a big rig. She never felt comfortable in the local in-law gatherings of years past, and being present for just the formal affair without the awkward reminders of not quite fitting into the various family table settings worked out perfectly for her schedule and temperament.  

I was curious to see my late cousin's daughter and son, and maybe share a story or two about their dad, who they knew a lot less about than their grandfather who they both had come to say their final goodbyes to. Juliana radiated his hair color, and his determination. Dylan wore his mouth , chin and eyes almost exactly.

I spun a true tale to Dylan of a long ago moment in a mountain setting where their grandfather has climbed up the tree where our tree house had just been erected about twenty feet above the ground in a lodge pole pine not far from the cabin our families shared. The tree house had been a male family project with my dad, my uncle, my cousin and I all taking parts in the project. The adults doing all the heavy lifting amid refreshments of beer, sodas and hot dogs. My cousin and I were perched near the trunk of the tree and scooted closer to allow Uncle Tom onto the flooring to admire the work and view. He had clambered up  with a bourbon in hand. He made two steps and went straight through a couple of weak board planks straight down, and into the soft dirt and pine needles which cushioned his fall a bit. My father who was to follow next exclaimed wonderingly, "Tom, you didn't spill a drop!" To which my uncle, shaken but not stirred, replied, "A marine never loses his provisions."

It was one of those remarkable moments which will always be frozen in my mind. My Uncle Tom was a blessed man who had born the worst at Iwo Jima and Guadal Canal during World War II, and later at the 38th Parallel in Korea without a physical scratch. The burden of what he saw and experienced in the war he took to the grave alone. He never shared  those memories with anyone. If he told his wife, my lovely Aunt Bobbie, she took all Tom's war secrets with her many years ago. My uncle and dad were very close, and had each others' backs for decades. Not a word to my father, who had served in the Army Air Corps during the war years, on the battles subject ever. Only those who were there during those horrible war moments alone would know what happened, and could fully understand the terrible wrathful meanings of warfare.  He remarked in the local newspaper in 2007 in an article on the Kern County Veterans Memorial, "No one hates war as much as those who were called to fight in one!"

A last teaching moment.

And so the loud and boisterous holiday or just family gatherings of the extended local tree line was always a full glass of bourbon or gin amid the chatter. I came to grips with the adults need to unwind during the 50s and 60s years ago in my hippie days when I realized how tough life had been, and what great sacrifices most of this generation had born. As kids briefly in the roaring twenties with Prohibition , only to meet the Great Depression and widespread deprivation until the largest scale war in recorded history comes along. After that, any sane person could use a drink or two.

And so, goodbye to the last of my local bloodline ties of the Greatest Generation. Thank you for getting us this far, and for trying to bestow something a bit better than what most could hope for before your arrival on this rock in space. It seems unnerving to me that the lessons you tried to teach fell on so many deaf ears, and we find ourselves coming full circle after 90 years time into the same dark economic world from which you sprang.

My dog looks hopefully for another small taste of hops and barley, but the bottle is empty. We head inside and close the door.

Until the next time. Thanks for stopping by.

Blues and Gold

College football's regular season ends this weekend with the Army-Navy football game. I remember a time when this game had more than the end-of-the-season meaning to it. That was a time when the Academies had players who left national imprints, and garnered  the Heisman Trophy 3 out of 6 six years between 1958 and 1963. The first Army-Navy football game was played in 1890. No games were played during World War I, but not one game was missed during World War II.  Navy leads the series 55-49 with seven tie games, and has won the last nine games.

I don't follow college football the way I used to, but do still follow my Alma Mater, the University of California Golden Bears. Each year usually brings a heavy dose of blues with a few rays of gold from the team for its followers, but hope for a Rose Bowl appearance springs eternal, much like Cub fans everywhere and their annual dreams of having their baseball team finally appear in a World Series once again. Partners in the Blues searching for Gold.

Losing toughens you up. Losing hones your skills. Language and cultural pursuits become the tools to mask disappointment/anger/despair, or to go on the attack utilizing the oblique disguised masks of art to confuse and disarm the adversary.

For me, the Blues articulates this social war phenomenon, and remains America's greatest cultural gift with prospects good for its permanent place as the nation's most lasting cultural legacy.

Souza enthusiasts might disagree, since certainly marches of pomp surrounding military exercises surrounds our landscape. Think of all those fight songs every Saturday when the squads hit the gridiron and play out their war games with ground attacks and aerial assaults combating all out blitzes to huge throngs.

Others can argue that marketing and advertising is America's greatest cultural achievement, combining all aspects of culture from film, art, print and sound to create demands for goods and services no one needs but everyone must have.

Maybe the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence, which both thrust the country onto the map of nations could be the nation's finest and most lasting contributions for the ages.

All have merit, as do other purely Americana rituals you care to argue for. But, for me, it's the Blues.

I won't speak for most people of my generation, but I have always considered myself lucky being alive at the right place and time. I grew up on new sounds that came out of a post-war age where all things possible seemed probable. All the mistakes of the past where deprivation and abuse of too many people, which always led to such large and brutal losses of life would be addressed by a world much wiser than all those generations which preceded mine.

The masters of the blues, who mostly toiled in menial jobs the first half of the century, and who through luck, chance or hope performed and recorded their songs of observation about a world where the shuffle off-beat met ringing strings and back-calls, masked their resentment of the world's indifference to their despair through their art form. The entire experience could have been lost, or buried in the country where this art form was born, had an unintentional audience not been discovered. By circumstance young people who had been deprived, abused and forgotten throughout a war ravaged Europe heard in the blues through GIs in occupied lands the kindred sounds of voices who knew and understood what loss was all about.

The young people of that post World War II era throughout Europe, but especially in Great Britain, sought out these rhythms and the records at the close of hostilities. These young men and women who knew brutality and absurdity first hand listened intently to all these formerly lost or discarded blues makers from an American era that Americans were only too glad to see gone and forgotten trying to erase the memories of the first half of the 20th Century. From 1930 until the early 1950s most Americans had learned to live without just about everything, and the memories of a brief wild ride in the 1920s always gave way to the down and out memories of circumstances immigrant and home grown citizens alike faced the first two decades of the 20th Century.  Hardship was what most Americans faced daily, and blues was a constant companion.With the war victory, and the opportunity for Americans to rebuild the world , the blues was the last thing the people in the US wanted to hear, or be reminded of.

It would not be until the mid 1960s when British bands like John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Them, the Animals, Fleetwood Mac, Savoy Brown, Jethro Tull and others introduced electric blues to a willing American youth audience. A few inspired American groups like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Blues Project and the Steve Miller Blues Band, who all had worked in the clubs where the forgotten black greats performed to mostly black audiences, made names for themselves and helped build a blues based recording business boom for young white middle class males.  

And so seminal black originator artists who had begun to build the craft in the pre-war years, finally found an audience in America, as the nation's splintered and newly found affluent kids turned their eyes on the founders of the form through British and a few young American interpreters.

I was in that generation that fell in love with the both original makers of blues from Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King, Little Walter, Elmore James, Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, James Cotton and so on and so on. I gladly purchased albums from these and all the British and American purveyors of eccentric, eclectic, acoustic and electric blues. Folk blues icons from the U.K. like John Renbourn and Bert Jansch also made it into the library. Getting as close to the source was important. To my way of thinking if you don't know the source maybe you should stay clear of tasting the altered brand beverages.

Awhile back I posted a review of a fascinating DVD, Desperate Man Blues, about a guy driven to find source music. Click this link if you're interested. Another riveting documentary DVD, Genghis Blues, tells the tale of Paul Pena's quest to discover and learn Tuvan Throat singing from the descendants of Genghis Khan. Paul Pena led a strange, wonderful and yet sad life. He authored one of Steve Miller's biggest hits, Jet Airliner, and played with Bonnie Raitt, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and other luminaries during his too brief time on the earth.

Just a few days ago, I spotted a Facebook post from my good friend, Mike Farrace. For those who do not know Mike, he was the Editor in Chief of Pulse Magazine for many years at Tower Records. Pulse was the in-house published magazine that explored most of the music, and the artists who made the music, which Tower Records in turn sold. However, Pulse was only part of Mike's domain at Tower. He also was in charge of Tower's Internet presence, and oversaw the launch of the Tower Records website, which was the first national retailer online. I can safely say very few people possess the brains and knowledge of the biz, and all its complexities, that is found inside Mr. Mike Farrace.

Although Tower has been dead for more than five years now, most of us alumni still find ourselves sucking air and blowing it back out slightly reconfigured. Mike has become an independent entrepreneur of many things that made popular music and its roots so vital to all those rock and blues lovers who scoured all the stores over the past near 50 years. One of his latest projects combines the other-worldly art of R. Crumb with some of Blues forgotten masters.

Most people reading this blog post know something about R. Crumb, and his very popular underground comic characters that came about when the world came face to face with hippies,  flower power, drug abuse, San Francisco and Viet Nam in the 1960s. R. Crumb has lived a long life. He is a musical talent as well as an artistic one. He loves old timey blues and continues to create art. He lovingly created portraits of some Blues heroes, which Mike has licensed and will gladly sell to you. These are cards of long lost blues greats from one of America's forgotten periods. Heroes of the Blues could make a great unique gift for any young person you know. Click the link to check it out.

I would also mention there is an excellent documentary on DVD, The Confessions of Robert Crumb. This documentary, now more than ten years old, offers great insight into and great humor from the mind of Robert Crumb, a true American original. The link in the paragraph takes you to documentaryheaven.com for a stream of Crumb consciousness if you like.

So get on with the Blues this holiday season, and put a positive spin on. Thanks for stopping by. Until next time.

Christmas and a Small Gift Idea of Film and Music

Christmas season. I put the wreath on the door yesterday. No lights to trim the house. Kids grew up a long time ago. This weekend comes the fiber optic small Christmas tree, complete with the rotating color patterns shining through the ends of the green needles. Can't put up a real tree with lights and ornaments because the cats chew into the lights and ornaments. It's a small sacrifice we endure to make sure one of the kitty's doesn't melt down like the cat and William Hickey's toupee do in National Lampoon's Christmas Story.

We still exchange gifts with the family, and with a few very close friends. It ain't about the money anymore. It's the thought, and the connection which count these days.

The family grew up, and got older surrounded by music and movies. Being in the business of selling the stuff rubs some of that tinsel dust off. Lots of plastic discs and tapes over the years.

With that backdrop, I thought you might be interested in a couple of suggestions I offer as gift items this year for those who are special to you and might enjoy something a little different in the way of recorded listening, and or viewing. These are either films available on the DVD platform of  your choosing or albums available on CD, or downloads if that's how you entertainment-boogie these days.

My first pick of this month to put into your friend's gift basket might surprise you, or might not depending on how well you know me. Roger Ebert calls it the perfect film. I call it the most sublime and important picture capturing the American experience ever made. The film's score haunts the listener like a ghost with a folk quality of sadness and reflection. The film's director, Robert Altman, made a number of outstanding films but in my mind McCabe & Mrs. Miller remains the most vital and his best.

I would gift this film to any friend, or acquaintance, who wants a better understanding of how the American story unfolded, got folded back in again, and remains virtually the same story today. Maybe someone you know through social networking who lives outside of the US and wants a clearer truthful picture of the peculiar American mindset could be the recipient of your generosity.

In my business days many people often wondered, and would ask me why anyone would bother to own or possess a movie. Books and music they seemed comfortable with as purchase items, but films seemed to these folks too ephemeral for any ownership value. McCabe & Mrs. Miller deserves a choice spot on any discerning shelf.

As a companion item to the film I would encourage you to pick up the Leonard Cohen album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. Here is a humorous and perceptive take on why this album became an all-time favorite choice for one writer.  The original album, which came out in 1967, was a stand alone record of songs, which Robert Altman, or someone on the film's set, felt would be ideal four years later as the the predominant soundtrack backdrop. Few albums stand out apart from the time when they were recorded. This remains one of those albums, and that it works with such power in the film makes the album all the more unique and wondrous.

Thanks for stopping by. Next post I'll find a few different flavors as offerings.

Too Few With Too Much in the Land Where Money Is King

I bounce between tabs these days. Tabs for freight lanes and board listings for shipments needing trucks and trailers, tabs for business correspondence, tabs for news and social networking sites.  I run through them all in the course of a day. Freight slows a bit this time of year. The pumpkin hauls were pretty light in October and early November. The Christmas tree hauls seem even lighter. I did move a bunch of hay throughout the Midwest into Texas, but always with some hassle involved. Highways in Nebraska, South Dakota, Oklahoma and into northern Texas during hay season lift the wide load (freight width > than 8') rules and just allow trucks to hang wide load signs for other vehicles on the road to look out for. Works in places where people have not populated the surroundings much. Don't see that practice on the Interstate 5s in California for sure, or on the 95 up and down the East Coast.

Right now, freight bookings have slowed to a crawl. I guess retailers have all their stuff now, and pray they sell most of it. In one of my past lives, these days were all about checking on the hits and advertised goodies.  What percentage got sold each day? What were you looking at for stock returns in January? Would you meet projections? Were any of those great cookies left from that awesome vendor who sent the huge gift basket to our department? Did all the Holiday greeting cards and gifts get done and mailed? Those were the burning issues.

Time spent thinking about politics? Not so much.

Why didn't I spend much time thinking about politics just a little more than a decade ago? Well, first I was busier, just like most of the people I know today, and second, but most importantly, political shit got done to facilitate commerce. You may not have fully agreed with what got done (NAFTA, Digital Copyright Act, Gulf War, etc.) but shit got done, most people were busy making their way and I didn't need to think about politics every fucking day of the year.

Today, nothing gets done to help most people make their way. The only legislative things getting done are those things that keep a lid on the fixed economic system we live under. Even when legislation passes like the Affordable Health Care Act, or the Financial Reform Act, the bills get tied up in litigation and stalling maneuvers that suck the life out every promised fix to the broken system the bill tried to remedy. Any American not earning in the top one percent of the population is still at huge financial risk if they have a severe accident, or get really sick whether they have insurance or not. No other country's government shits on its citizens with such perverse delight as does the American government, and health care offers the very best view of that perversity.

But health care and financial reform are only two of the issues in a country where nearly every thing has broken down. There are issues on food safety, on genetically modified foods, on bee colony disorder/collapse, on infrastructure maintenance and repair, public transportation, public education, higher education, on unemployment, underemployment, poverty, literacy, immigration, military actions, trade agreements, minority rights, worker rights, drilling rights, pollution standards, and I haven't even talked about clean water, frakking, the oceans, mining practices or any of things you toss and turn about every night like religion, STDs, crime and terrorism.

But all of these issues boil down to one crux issue: money. And the real issue about money today, just like it was in all those bloody centuries past, is that too few have ended up with too much.

I probably would never have ramped up on this topic if I hadn't seen some stupid press release from the RIAA on its lobbying efforts to Congress to stem intellectual property piracy. You know what kills piracy every time? Having the legitimate goods to sell at affordable prices the public will pay, and maybe having these legitimate goods at more than a handful of huge retailers in either the brick & mortar world or on-line.

But that is not the American way today, and particularly in the music biz.

Here is a very profound sentence from the RIAA release: “We’re especially grateful for the focus on the plight of musicians as they struggle to be paid for their work." This is particularly ironic when you consider the first paragraph of the RIAA mission statement:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies. Its members are the music labels that comprise the most vibrant record industry in the world. RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate recorded music produced and sold in the United States.

Do you find the words recording artist or musicians following the words "supports and promotes" in the first sentence of this mission statement? The focus on the plight of the artist in the press release is just cover for blatant bullying and censorship tactics this organization has pursued successfully for nearly two decades now, and has resulted in the recorded music industry shrinking by more than 50% in ten years time. Most recording artists I have listened to, or read their biz stories, got chump change, or less, in royalties after all other line items from the onerous contract language got applied.

This is the trade group that sued a dead grandmother over supposed copyright infringement a few years back. It also the very same organization that inserted the "four little words" -works made for hire- into a giant spending bill that passed through Congress and was signed into law in 1999. The words meant that musician recording artists would never own their own copyrighted works. They would be solely owned into perpetuity by the suits at the largest media and publishing companies. The language was removed after an eight month siege by major recording stars and high profile attorneys. The language which caused the grief was inserted into the bill by Mitch Glazier, then a Congressional staff attorney, and who now is the executive vice- president for RIAA having worked for the organization since 2000. The repeal of works made for hire does not officially take effect until 2013.

You have to wonder what contracts wannabee pop stars sign to get any type of label deal nowadays. Only the very few have made any money on their recordings, and all those other acts and all that catalog that made the music biz a $14.9 billion industry in 1999, now just makes money for the big four- EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner- at $6.8 billion total for 2010. There really is no competition in the music market place today all the acts now are commodities in a digital age where serfs up sums up where most musical acts stand, and technology companies like Apple and Amazon work with the big four to keep the money in very few hands, and away from those who do/did all the real work.



 


Thanks for popping by. Until the next time.

A Gray Dreg Day

Gray, gray gray today. Reminds me of summers in Berkeley, CA when I lived there. Low overcast in the morning, followed by moderate overcast in the mid afternoon just in time to watch the sky's ceiling fall with denser overcast for every evening. 

Not that I got up much to face the fog in the mornings back then. I did a couple of late shows on KPFA each week and worked late nights at a small book store to pay the rent. KPFA was/remains one of those strange entities on the airwaves, a primarily volunteer run non-profit publicly supported by donations loose-knit radio spot on the dial. I fit in perfectly with the mad assembled political and musical extremists chopping up tape, moving potentiometers (pots) up and down the various boards and creating a sound mixture that was totally unique.

-Digression-
I didn't meet a person at KPFA who did not have a strong opinion on just about everything. This was just a couple of years after Patricia (Patty in those days) Hearst kidnapping, and the ensuing Symbionese Liberation Army fiasco/tragedy. The anarchy driven guerrilla group used KPFA to communicate its demands for the release of other SLA members in jail at the time, and  the Hearst family to feed the poor in California. KPFA broadcast edge cutting stuff, and tensions over the station's direction were constant. More talk/politics versus more music. And the music department under the direction of Charles Amirkhanian contained a mixture of elements only a guy like Charles could truly appreciate, running the gamut of roots Americana musics, extreme jazz, modern classical, synthesizers and ambient text-sonics from Harry Partch to Terry Riley and all parts in between. Charles was a marvel.  -End of Digression-

A gray day like any other trudging up the stairs into the station near the corner of Shattuck and University to work on a project. A friend of mine from my UC days met me in one of the tape editing rooms, and asked me if I could use some tickets to a show that evening. I'd never heard the of the group, and apparently neither had my pal. He got the comps because he worked at the auditorium and had other plans. I took the two, but I used only the one. The lady I was with at the time had studying to do, and the few friends I tried to track down were working. Gone solo.

This group had released a couple of albums on Capricorn Records. Capricorn was one of those great regional labels in the 1970s that had screamed southern rock bands, and was nationally distributed through Atlantic and the growing Warner family of labels.  The Allman Brothers had really gotten the label going in  1969 and other southern bands quickly signed on board. By the late 1970s through the tragedy of iconic losses in traffic and plane accidents southern rock was in a free fall, and Capricorn's prospects were not too good. I thought I was going to witness one more carnation of Grinderswitch meets Wet Willie, or just a night of escape into southern fried boogie.

The Dixie Dregs blew me away. No vocals. All instrumentals. From Bach fugue signatures to mind boggling bluegrass licks stacked up against fusion waves of Beck and McLaughlin inspiration into rock grit, all in too many time signatures to count with other worldly playing on guitar, violin, bass and keyboards. Truly a night to remember, and the following day Rather Ripped Records swapped me some Dregs vinyl for some greenbacks . Funny when you do a little research what you find.

Steve Morse is one of those players/musicians/writers for the ages. A true original in every sense, from his own inspirational design of his guitar to the signature flying licks and intricate instrumental opuses he creates, he is one of a kind. Give his bio a read here. But, only if you think you'll find it fascinating that a true wunderkind mind like this can go from the Dixie Dregs to Kansas to Deep Purple, and still crank out lots of just Steve Morse guitar driven magic, even after the record biz opted always for biz over the music when it came to this man.

Now more 33 full revolutions around the sun later since my first exposure, the music of Steve Morse remains fresh, vital and unique, and the memories of that concert still ring. Here is one of my favorite Dixie Dregs songs composed by Steve Morse.



Steve Morse always provided me with the best soundtracks for long drives around the Bay and through the Valley and into Los Angeles. Traveling Tunes, Road Expense, The Great Spectacular and General Lee are songs I remember making the drives a pleasure, a chance to crank up the surround sound  in a fine car and cruise through California. When you're looking for escape from the mundane check out Dregs of the Earth and Steve Morse The Introduction. Always satisfies.

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time.

The Politics of a Guitar List

 This song is is now over forty years old. The arrangement is faithful to the original version. Guitar genius still.


Maybe you caught my last post on Rolling Stone Magazine's top 100 rock guitarists. I can only say the list is the list for the year 2011. And is/was created solely for the people who voted on the large talent pool of guitar wielding professionals who made rock music the interesting diverse string-driven sound-scape it became over all these decades. The combined votes and editing missed on Roy Buchanan. Well, a lot people missed Roy Buchanan over the years.

I also mentioned the Rolling Stone top 100 rock guitarist list started in the brain of David Fricke back in 2003, and Rolling Stone has his list archived, which you can check out by hitting the link in my previous post. Fricke's, and the current guitar top 100 differ quite a bit. Fricke includes a host of San Francisco Bay area guitar talent on his top 100, but only Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia make the 100 cut this time around. And apart from Jeff Beck and John Mclaughlin no progressive jazz-rock player gets mentioned. Brian May and Robert Fripp are the only dudes I find who get included with real progressive post 1960s pedigrees. 

I find the end result disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. Ever notice an underlying disdain from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Nashville, Bakersfield, Kansas City, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia, Austin, Boston, Miami and Anyotherplace, USA -except Seattle- for all things San Francisco over the years?

Maybe it's the culmination of thirty years shitting daily on the words liberal and progressive by hosts of conservative radio to people who ever scanned a dial on AM radio and could not escape a few seconds of lockstep right-wing spew. Too many Bill O'Reilly barf downs on San Francisco over the years. Add up all those seconds over a multitude of years for car bound commuters everywhere and you might associate the words liberal and progressive with every worst excess and depravity that has hit the world from hippie environmental terrorism and drug addiction to gay lifestyle and its supposed threats against the sanctity of marriage and the viral spread of disease.

The saddest part of this ever enduring daily aural brainwash bath has been to equate all progressive venues from socio-economic-political to cultural idioms as worthless to the listeners, who are routinely exalted for their ability to call and mimic, like myna birds, the ever repeated hypnotic messages extolling the eradication of all social liberalism.

And so by decades of cultural beat-down comes a new Rolling Stone Magazine guitarist list where we have very few players who stretched the guitar boundaries in a progressive and liberal feel flow manner, whether from San Francisco, London, Berlin or Liberalbasement, USA.

I cannot figure out why Andy Powell (with first Ted Turner & then Laurie Wisefield) of Wishbone Ash, who defined the twin lead guitar sound that so many bands adopted throughout the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s, gets excluded. How does Steve Howe of Yes not get included? Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna cannot wriggle by Lou Reed, or Steve Jones or Willie Nelson? John Cippolina is not one of the top 100 guitarists, but Leslie West is? Robin Trower with Procol Harum and his own bands over 40 years could not garner votes, but Kurt Cobain's in this list?

Understand, I'm not in any way suggesting Kurt Cobain was not an important guy in the annals of rock. Many could/would say he was the last rock star. The Nirvanna recorded statements were vital shit. Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols was an important figure in the band and the Punk movement. I believe his guitar skills, and guitar impact were way less than both Brian Setzer or Rick Nielson, and I would not put them into a top 100. When I think of Lindsey Buckingham I think of Jeff Lynne. Great writer, instrumentalist and producer, not a guitar god, and though I really dug a lot of Buckingham tunes his place on this list seems weird.

But all of this just affirms that the tight tunes contain far more value today than the extended and spacious instrumental tracks that give a person time and opportunity to expand his/her horizons. The message of conservatism- limits and reductions is always at odds with the liberal message of boundless and limitless. Think of it another way. How does anyone define a liberal portion? How does anyone define a conservative portion? One is generous, one is smallish. One is vast, one is confined.

I like headroom when I listen to music, and I take my time. When I listen I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere, but into my head. I don't sense most people listen that way much anymore. It seems the act of the download is more important than what is on the download.

And so this clip ends this post, a post really more about why certain artists are or not included. Here is the brilliant Bill Nelson, of Be Bop Deluxe, and so much more. Dude is on my list of most influential and in my top 20, but then again I'm a liberal.



Thanks for the taking the time, and stopping by. Until next time.

Lists on a Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving! Nice holiday with food and family gathered to say thanks to one another for hanging in there with each other for one more year. Thanksgiving like every other holiday is about tradition, and one tradition we all see at this time of the year is the various lists of top what-evers which pop up to let us know what was best, or worst, about the year/decade/millennium in virtually every conceivable category.   

Today I was perusing the news and caught the latest list of the top 100 guitarists put together by Rolling Stone Magazine. Lists intrigue. Good lists (even when you vehemently disagree with the results) fuel interest and comments. As for for this list you'll find it here (Rolling Stone Top 100 Guitarist this year's version). David Fricke, one of my all-time favorite music journalists, started this guitarist list venture back in 2003 for Rolling Stone (here is his list).

The just-out new Rolling Stone list contains worthy musicians. Some omissions from the latest top 100 bug me. And so, one more blog post for posterity.

Not to see Roy Buchanan mentioned anywhere among the new100 truly stuns me. No man ever defined an instrument as eloquently or as forcefully as Roy defined Leo Fender's Telecaster. Fricke put him in at #57 on his list. Bless him.

I guess time fades away many things. Neil Young comments on that over and over in many of his songs, and I believe it to be true. If I could unlock Mr. Peabody's time machine with his trusted boy, Sherman, I would take you back to the thumb slice of fresh plastic on a record album released in 1972 and plucked from a White Front aisle. I'd just read the Robert Hilburn review. He's another critic I trusted for finding my pet musical sounds.

Aside:
By 1972 many of the top guys in the current Rolling Stone list of 100 greats, were either prematurely dead, or very busy doing there frets frescoes in late youth. The bloom of newness over the blues, and the various permutations the 1960s wrung out of ears who caught the blues fever phenomenon were just about over. Original British and American bands into pure blues like the Rolling Stones, the Paul Butterfield Band, Savoy Brown, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac all were gravitating, or had moved to more pop or jazz sensibilities and made the various band personnel changes that sealed the transition.

The trends of the early 1970s were more folk derived-singer songwriter stuff of Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Neil Young, CSN, Bread, Carol King meets orchestral progressive rock of Yes, the Moody Blues and individual Beatles sprinkled in with lots of Motown, Memphis and Philadelphia soul. Country music was all on its own, and bands like the Burrito Brothers and the Byrds had a very difficult time selling any records trying to put country into rock, but the Eagles had no such problem with a much more pop driven focus sprinkled with country-lite. - Aside ended


The black and white photo of a bearded man holding an electric guitar on the Polydor record jacket, PD 5033, gives no indication of the forces squeezed into the grooves held between the glued cardboard. The black and white back-jacket photo of four skinny longhairs looking into the camera in an archway while a resigned looking anti-pop figure in sandals (who really looks a lot Stonewall Jackson with those sad faraway eyes) stands just in front of the archway also offers no clue to the contents. 

From the opening harmonic intonations on the Don Gibson classic "Sweet Dreams" that Chet Atkins and Patsy Cline both previously made so memorable, which Roy and his Snakestretchers have just redefined through sheer country and other worldly harmonic blisters of stretched/bent notes and rifle burst fills to the two lengthy blues instrumentals, demonstrating a mastery of the idiom and the instrument in a way no other guitar had sounded up to that point in time, through the four other county song covers and the majestic soul searching ballad where the guitar wrenches tears and cries of plaintive pleas cascading above the slow rhythm, this was an amazing earful of no compromise artistry.

Lots of crossovers in rock music where rock meets classical, or rock meets jazz, or rock meets blues, or rock meets country. This album was country, and this album was blues. There was no crossover- just guitar virtuosity in both genres alone. What made the record, and Roy Buchanan, so unique was the no compromise rule. Play them straight and true.

Maybe once in your lifetime you've sat in a bar and heard a band take on all songs the patrons could shout. Each song rang true, thanks to the vibe in the room, and thanks maybe to that 3rd scotch you were sipping through the second set. Roy Buchanan gives the listener the very rare small-crowd-held-in-awe testament to a great bar band held together by one virtuoso.

Other Roy records always teased. Some great moments or songs, but undone by either too much production, which was the case on the three Atlantic albums, or just not enough strong material to make the album stand as a singular statement. The Alligator Records release, When A Guitar Plays The Blues,  is essential, and very rewarding. In The Beginning also offers a great total album with strong tunes and incredible performances throughout, which display s versatile mastery of the guitar and genres Roy Buchanan totally owns.  

Part of my appreciation of Roy Buchanan comes from having met and talked with the man several times and from concert dates, and sweaty small club shows on many occasions. The concert he gave at the Berkeley Community Theater in the mid-1970s I still remember being one of the most riveting and awe inspiring shows of guitar wizardry, and all done without the many pedals or sonic devices so in vogue today, that I have ever seen. He was always so cordial, but by the mid 1980s so dispirited by the number of shows and the lack of money to show for it, he had begun his efforts to drown his frustrations.

I can remember reading his obituary in my office in West Sacramento, CA in 1988 and being gripped with such a sadness. To have one of the greatest guitarists in the world hang himself in a Fairfax County jail cell after being arrested on charges of public drunkenness seemed cosmically malicious.

Time has moved more than 23 years since that morning, and the fade continues to blur the memory of this sweet soul with magical powers on a fretboard with strings. I'll blame the power of the fade for this omission. Enjoy the Roy.




Thanks for stopping by. Next up some other guitarists who should have gotten more love from the Rolling Stone voters.
 

 

Catching Up WithTrucks

Long time since the keypad hit the blog page. Seven months.

Why no blogging, commenting or musings here? Busy learning a new trade made stopping by here tough to regularly accomplish for me. Also, I can say some shit never changes. Rants, pleas, statistics, preaching, cajoling, anecdotes and the like just wore out after awhile.

Need affordable health care? Want jobs with benefits? Want clean water? Like music, books and art but wonder why all things culture got packaged into a phone? Me, too!

Another thing, Facebook knocked and I answered. Stories that cropped up eventually popped up on my status posts. Quick comments or a brief explanation as to why I felt an issue should be addressed one way gobbled up some time and staying in touch with friends for brief moments in a day seemed enough.

My new trade is booking hauls for trucks as an independent agent for a national logistics/freight company. Very interesting days, and opens up a whole new world dialog on what passes for life in the slow lanes. Driving 10 to 12 hours a day making a living exacts a hefty toll for those who connect American commerce. Most people just take for granted what's  on the shelves of the WalMarts, Targets, Costcos, Krogers, Safeways and Trader Joe's of America, and never think of the long hours of hauling all those products across the battered and bruised highways and byways of this big country.

Once upon a time, in a stranger and more archaic version of this country when things were just as shitty, but the gap between the rich and poor was not quite so great, truck drivers used citizen band radios to communicate with each other on the roads. CB radios became the rage for the gullible and fad driven masses of this country. I worked at an electronics shop in the mid seventies for awhile, and high fidelity components were a very small drop in the corporate bucket compared to what CB radios and all the paraphernalia that went with them poured in. CB radios gave the world a glimpse of what social networking would become on the Internet and all its little devices. Shocking newness meets rude, profane and eventual turnoff.

Trucks and truckers were cool by the mid to late seventies. They even had a bunch of pop tunes and movies made to celebrate the trade and the people living the nomadic anti-corporate independent lifestyle. The bad guys menaced in very different garb and from very different backgrounds in the fictional world when trucks flashed briefly on the pop scene. Bad guys were commies and the mob back then.

When I think of it now, maybe the mob just won the war. We know what happened to the commies, and they did not win. By the 1980s all the anti-trust rules were being tossed, and this just after the big Bell phone monopoly breakup of the 1970s. Trucks and their drivers were yesterdays big thing. By the 1990s the kings of the freight lanes were being forced to pee into little testing pots by the roadside for the privilege to drive all those marvelous low priced WalMart goods across the country. Can't trust 'em, can't trust anybody became the rule in America.  The unions, even the mighty Teamsters, possessed all the clout of an aged emphysema patient trying to protect jobs and benefits turf. 

The new millennium is past ten now, and trucks are the fragile glue holding commerce together in this broke-down palace of a nation. The guys and gals I talk to on a daily basis are some of America's last independents. They drive or find and post freight across America as independent contractors. Some are incorporated. Some are sole proprietors. All struggle, and many without basic health coverage with little to no retirement savings. You can't raise rates if too few in the general public can afford the hike. It's where we hobble today. Thanks for stopping by.

"Turn Out The Lights The Party's Over"

From time to time sports strikes a nerve. Today's the day, even though tumultuous and terrible events in the world have dominated the news of late.

Earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan.  This disaster should give the world pause, and maybe purpose in helping to rebuild this battered nation.

Conflicts in Northern Africa, which unfold with startling speed and battle long time despots one by one in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen with possibly more to follow. These uprisings should give the world even more pause, and wake up those who still think its business as usual to reward a few families at the expense of an entire region's population.

Collective bargaining for most public union employees gone in Wisconsin, with other states and their Republican governors throwing down the same gauntlet. These actions should make everyone in America pay attention to the plight of federal, state and local governments when revenues disappear due to economic downturns, and taxes are considered criminal. This in a nation where the tax burden is one of the very lowest among all major nations in the world.

But today I turn to the sports section and the NFL showdown between owners and players.

Everyone I speak with regarding the events in Northern Africa seems supportive of the little people overthrowing the dictators, even though the regimes toppled all were aligned with US government policy in the Middle East.

This is not the same thing I hear when the chat focuses on collective bargaining disputes between public employee unions in Wisconsin and Ohio where those states' newly elected Republican governors appear intent on curbing public union influence. On this topic, friends offer staunch support for the unions, or view unions as having too much influence over public policy, or flatly state there should be no unions in government. 

When I chat with friends about the potential NFL shutdown I hear comments ranging from, "Billionaires fighting with millionaires is pathetic" to "Who cares who wins as long as I have my football this season?" This is pretty much the same response regarding the NBA, only with many more, "Who Cares?"

Granted union support in America would appear to be at an all time low, and the players today seem to all be making vast sums of money in both sports so I understand the quandary in taking a side on the issues over potential game stoppages. In the NFL, curiously from my perspective, it is the owners who have decided the players make too much and moved at this juncture to demand a much larger slice of each industry's total revenue by opting out of their last agreement. 

The NFL today, by all accounts I have read, is a  $9 billion to $9.5 billion a year industry. Faye Vincent, writing for Scrippsnews, gives an interesting take on what a prolonged lockout could mean. As a former Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Mr. Vincent, has a unique view point on the matter.

The major sticking point on the surface is money, and how to share it. Currently owners take a billion dollars off the top from all the money generated for themselves and the League office, and then split the remaining pie with the players on a 60% to 40% arrangement. The players receive 60% of all the remaining revenue and the League/owners get 40% based on the Collective Bargaining Agreement made in 2006. This works out to basically 53.3% share for the players and a 46.7% share for the owners.

It is a players game. Nobody watches the televisions or attends the games to see the owners. The NFL, and its owners, determined that the union representing the players would not see the ledger books on what the costs of upkeep and improvements are while negotiating. The League has determined the NFLPA, the players union, has all the information it needs to negotiate. This showdown has been in the works for about three years now.

An added layer to the negotiations began to take shape after the 2008 season when owners were planning to vote on an expanded season of 17 to 18 games. This announcement occurred at an NFL owners meeting in March of 2009 as reported by the New York Times. The 18 game season issue began to really heat up in September, 2010 when the Indianapolis Colts president, Bill Polian, announced to the world that the 18 game season was a "fait accompli" on his weekly radio show.

A big wrinkle surfaced this season over the plans to expand the number of regular season games when the amount of ferocious helmet to helmet hits became too ferocious, and knocked out too many star players. The fact that we have had two high profile former players, Andre Waters and Dave Duerson, commit suicide over head trauma issues these past three years serves as a compelling statement that adding games to an already very dangerous sport is not in the best interests of the players.

The players already know the risks of injuries, and how they linger long after they have left the game. I had a good friend many years ago in San Francisco who worked for a former 49er star, Charlie Krueger, who in the early 1980s owned a liquor store with a great wine selection. Paul, my friend, came to know Charlie pretty well over the years while he worked perfecting his wine tasting skills. One thing Paul knew from the outset of his employment there was that Charlie Krueger endured extensive pain every day and could barely walk.

At the time I was working in San Francisco, and Paul was doing double duty between Tower Records and Charlie's liquor store, Mr. Krueger was suing the NFL and the San Francisco 49ers for failing to let him know the severity of the injuries he suffered while playing. Charlie actually won a judgment with a decent settlement for his day in court, and is still alive. The guy has always been one of the toughest men on the planet. He should never have had to go through what his organization put him through. Click on my little link to get the full details of what this 49er great went through. It is quite a story, but certainly not rare you can look across the Bay at what Jim Otto endures, or in Pittsburgh and what Mike Webster endured, and so on.

Another factor in these the negotiations over lengthening the NFL season, and trimming the amounts of money the players receive, is how long the average NFL player lives. It might surprise some of you who do not follow the sporting world to know that the life expectancy for the average NFL player is only 55 years. The St. Peterburg Times reported back in 2006 that for every year in the NFL a player can subtract three years off his life expectancy. Fortunately for the NFL, and its players, the average career stay in the League is only three and a half years. Not even long enough to get a pension and medical coverage after you retire. I might add, with injury preconditions health insurance for the already afflicted is very expensive, and difficult to find in America.

There are other issues at play in the standoff, such as rookie pay scales and better benefits to former players who are strapped by a pension that does not pay enough to cover costs of living and medical care. Most fans are in the same boat as the retired NFL players these days.   

The NFL owners opted out of the last collective bargaining agreement in 2008. Many of them felt they made a big mistake in signing the last bargaining agreement, which was done with Paul Tagliabue as Commissioner, and the late Gene Upshaw as the head of the NFLPA.

The game of professional football has never been more popular. Television ratings for the past two Super Bowls are the highest for any television show ever broadcast. The majority of the owners are worth at least one billion dollars, and the game has certainly been financially rewarding to each and every family who owned a team. With all that money, and with all the perks that go with all the prestige of NFL ownership, why are billionaires so upset over the current financial arrangement with the players who have performed so well in the near two decades since the first honest collective bargaining agreement was struck?

This work stoppage for all the talk about the money, or at least the near term money, is strictly about power. The owners demand they be recognized as the sole authority on everything that has to do with professional football in America. The ownership group certainly knows the work story on the street. Union membership in the USA now stands at under 12%. There are now more union workers in government than in the private sector, even though the private sector roughly employs a little more than five times than does the government. According to the US Government  Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 6.9% of the private sector workforce was unionized and the highest age group of membership was for people aged 55-64. The lowest total was found in the youngest age demographic 16-24.

Although it will be very difficult for the owners to cry over lost profits at this stage, and none of them will be moving from their palatial estates into more modest quarters anytime soon, the anti-union stance we have seen throughout the country with public unions and their pensions being hammered by conservatives everywhere  has the NFL owners smelling blood on this issue in my opinion.

The players to avoid a lockout must decertify their union. All teams voted on this procedural move over the course of the last season, and unanimously voted to go through this process should collective bargaining breakdown. A lockout forces restraint of trade and lawsuits will follow. It is where we are today with papers filed and awaiting court dates, and ultimately, which court will decide the matter.

If public opinion had any influence it would be hard to bet against the players. They can always wheel out former stars like Willie Wood who can no longer walk, or John Mackey the first head of the NFLPA, who now no longer knows who he is.  But, public opinion does not count for much these days, because public opinion is always determined by what questions get asked.

Are you in favor of taxes?

Are you in favor of the best public education for your children?

My Precious Valentine

Valentine's Day! Usually this meant an ouch day for me on February 14ths gone by. Not these days. Holiday notches on the calendar now strictly belong to the advertising and marketing wanks of the world, and those who fall prey to their craft. No matter what the holiday, I no longer listen to the guilt driven messages from jewelry companies, auto manufacturers, chocolate empires and floral conglomerates trying to worm some more money from me on useless or redundant consumer goods intended to pacify all those I held/hold most dear.

In my life I have made a ton of mistakes, but in love I found myself lucking out. This small post today reflects how I feel about my precious Valentine.


Smiles on a rainy afternoon
Sympathetic beats to the well worn tune
Nods of reassurance when wild winds blow
The gentle touch that lifts when a spirit sinks low

Timeless sparkles always in those soft young eyes
Curiosity speaks softly, no veiled disguise
The soft voice lifting conversations from old to new
The most sublime gift of life is simply to be with you

My precious Valentine, Vicky.



    

2011 Spare Change

These days the sky hangs like a wet gray sheet over the Central Valley. My cats use the outdoors now only for private business practices, and then scurry back inside to snooze and munch some treats as their daily ritual of marking the calendar one repetitive scratch after the other. The overcast beats record rainfall, but crummy days and the same forecasts dampen the spirits.

A new year, 2011, with so much old moldy laundry from years past still hanging on the lines or soaking the hampers. The nation passed a health care reform bill in 2010. No one in America can say it was a perfect solution to the giant mess that health care costs and practices evolved into over a couple of centuries of neglect, but it moved the cylinders in the right direction while working to include more people who had been separated from the insured pile and were excluded from the health care cycle. Estimates peg those without health insurance at over 50 million right now.The reformed health care legislation does not fully start until 2014, so the nation will stagger for three full years before any real impact will be felt. This knowledge has not stopped the Republican Party from campaigning to repeal the reforms because they cost too much.

Yes, covering everybody with health insurance in a nation does cost a bundle. Ask the European nations and Japan, or Canada and Australia. The tax rates in those countries are significantly higher than the tax rates found here in America for all classes of people and trade. But, in those nations everyone gets covered and gets reasonable care. Here, we have a very small segment of our population in control of all the wealth, and these very elite people argue they are taxed too much. I would ask any of you reading these paragraphs how the Bush tax cuts made America a better place from 2002 to today's 2011. Leave a comment, and I'll read it and respond.

So, as 2011 gets fully underway we see the Bush Tax cuts extended. We see the small health care reforms enacted in 2010 threatened with repeal, and businesses showing no signs of adding significant numbers of jobs for all those displaced from the past three plus years of economic contraction. What is interesting to note is that those on Wall Street appear to be doing just fine. The Dow-Jones now stands at 11,700 points, which is a 44% gain over the low that occurred in March of 2009. As Tom Petty would say, "It's good to be King."

Here's an old dude who knows the score.



I hear my big cat call me. I need to rustle some dry salmon, and work on the chord changes of this song.