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.

The Blues- Bringin' 'em Back-

I snap the remote clicker this afternoon and finish another brilliant look at the American experience captured in an awesome box-set, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues. This documentary was created for PBS and first broadcast in 2003. Seven filmmakers put their unique stamp on the search for, and pulse of, the Blues.

All the films offer a loving tribute to the Blues, but I most enjoy seeing the Red, White & Blues documentary that Mike Figgis directed with so many of the British blues greats talking and performing a variety of songs. You cannot go wrong having Tom Jones, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Eric Burdon, Chris Farlowe, Steve Winwood, Albert Lee, John Mayall and Georgie Fame give you the low-down on what the Blues scene in England during the Fifties and Sixties was all about. The striking thing is the pride each feels ( and justifiably so IMO) in rescuing the Blues from obscurity and making it a vibrant art form for an entirely new worldwide generation. By the end of the 1950s Americans had discarded the Blues, and all the great black artists of the time in search of Elvis Presley clones and Sandra Dee look-alikes to drive the white society's pop music train. B.B. King, to this day, continues to thank those young English lads for making his long lived career possible.

I'm not sure what happened to our culture here in this country, but the Blues are once again hiding out these days. You have to look for them on little shiny discs, old black vinyl, or on obscure websites. I view the disappearance of this medium, this feeling, this beat as a sad culmination of instant gratification coupled with 24/7 marketing for just-in-time distribution.

This cultural retreat has nothing to do with the Internet.

Some bright artistic creative people who love music have created the ARChive of Contemporary Music. Keith Richards, the world's greatest rhythm guitarist, is an adviser, donor and curator of the Keith Richards Blues Collection for the organization and its website. He just helped get an incredibly rare Robert Johnson recording "Me and The Devil Blues"/"Little Queen of Spades" for the ARChive organization. A cool little obscure Internet site devoted to music and the Blues.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, people reflected before they acted. Maybe a marketing guy with an engineer at some cellular phone division inside some telecommunications conglomerate found the frequency needed to uncork the great id from the bottleneck that restrained total consumption.

How many people do you see in your current day-to-day life are marked with sadness? Sadness takes on a variety of shades but, always takes some time to quietly examine loss and isolation to come to certain realizations of the situation. Sadness, or the Blues, takes a long time to develop.

A lot of emotional feelings take nanoseconds to get expressed. Rage happens instantly. Depression occurs the moment your son son describes dying his hair black and blue to impress the girlfriend of some other guy.

I know today a lot of people are depressed. The economy, the wars, the housing market, Wall Street, the banks, gay marriage, not enough Jesus, blah, blah, blah depress great hordes of society. These are sad people but they do not suffer from sadness. They have been bamboozled by the Pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry into swallowing heavy doses of anti-depressants to combat their ignorance in challenging times while ingesting infotainment as a daily news source. Charles Barber wrote a book, Comfortably Numb, which was published last year detailing the meteoric rise of these mind altering drugs. In 2007 over 227 million prescriptions for antidepressants were given out. It's hard to experience the Blues when you're medicated out of your mind.

Blues is a sober feeling with a splash of 80-proof fast moving liquid in a slow moving liquid for companionship. The Blues has no place for anger. Anger is red-hot and immediate. Anger generally finds litigation, or law enforcement close by. Judging by our prison population there might be as many angry citizens as medicated ones going around. And these angry ones now make up more than 7 million people serving in some form of incarceration here in the land of the free. The United States has five percent of the world's population but has twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. That is not a misprint. Click here for a recent CNN story.

I'm a creature of habit. I still subscribe and read the local fish wrap, The Bakersfield Californian. Today the paper had a fine Blues-worthy column by Lois Henry on the state of the parolee population in Bakersfield. It turns out Bakersfield has a little higher percentage of parolees per 1,000 residents than Fresno, and almost twice the percentage of parolees than Sacramento. Of course, Kern County is the prison capital of California with a big prison in almost every little town. Kern County is home to CCI in Tehachapi, the Kern Valley State Prison and the North Kern State Prison in Delano, the Wasco State Prison in Wasco, a federal prison camp in Taft that is privately operated. And then there are the several county jails located in Shafter, Mojave and Ridgecrest. A barbed wire salesman can do pretty well in this county.

All these little cities now live off of what the prisons provide. You know, the jobs that come from maintenance and construction along with the positions securing the prisoners. And those guards will live close by where they work and will get their gas and food and have kids who might work there or be guarded there and so on. Reminds me of medieval castles and a feudal economic system of serfs subsisting on slave labor.

The thought of growing gulags in America could bring back a full case of the Blues, if people would only stop and think about it.