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.