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.
 

 

May 4 -Forty Years of Grief-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try peace this century.

May Days

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To better May Days in our future.

April is Schizophrenic

This month defies logic. I wrote a bunch of stuff at many intervals earlier in the month, but nothing seemed right/write, or least worthy of a post. Bakersfield weather usually finds the daytime temps in the low eighties for much of the month. Last year there was a mid-month blast of 90 degree weather for a week straight. We might have seen one day this month when it hit the eighty mark. I am not complaining, but the weather has been a March month of tremendous swings this April. Lots of rain for the region, high winds and big Fahrenheit swings that occur within a twenty-four hour period.  Sinus madness.

I'm waiting  on two CDs that are coming UPS. I did the Record Store Day on the 17th at our fine little local shop, World Records, but did not find anything I was in need of at the moment. There were some cool gems in the bins like Randy Bachman's New Guitar Summit . This has Randy Bachman, Jay Geils, Duke Robillard and Gary Beaudon all on guitar, and was recorded with very few takes for really fine results judging by the samples I've heard. Quiet scotch on the rocks listening.

I was tempted, because Randy Bachman, Jay Geils and Duke Robillard are all big faves of mine. Bachman was the unquestioned king of guitars in Canada during the 1960s, and Neil Young describes just sitting and watching Randy's fretwork at club performances to steal licks from him in his book, Shakey. Anyway, I'm sure the album is a good one, and was under 12 bucks, but I did not bite.

I really went looking for some lost Moby Grape material, but that is hard to come by anywhere these days. I did the online thing, which I mentioned in an earlier post for the two solo CDs that Peter Lewis put out, and then had to go online as well for the Jerry Miller Band release Life Is Like That.  Whenever I play some classic Grape tunes like Indifference, Hey Grandma, Can't Be So Bad and Murder in My Heart For the Judge I always sit in stunned amazement at Jerry's unbelievable guitar work. Killer tracks on Live Grape like Love You So Much, Lost Horizon and Up In The Air really showcase his talent also.

Not having the original albums readily available for so many years is such a disservice to both the band members and the music community at large. I have been fortunate to have owned the original vinyl recordings for every release they made from 1967 through 1984. But most of those records have passed beyond the acceptable listening standard for me, and I have tried to find digital replacements over the years.

I actually still own a very limited box set of the 1984 reunion album recorded at Matthew Katz Malibu home and studio. The box comes with six discs and all 12 songs from the album in various Popsicle colors with the famed band logo and the album art done by Mouse. Some of the tunes on the this limited release hold up fairly well, particularly the Jerry Miller-Don Stevenson tune Too Old To Boogie. The song is just a timeless straight rock tune with amazing guitar chops and a great vocal. Like so many latter day Moby Grape songs there is the bittersweet reflection of what could have been laced throughout the lyrical content. "Too old to boogie, too old to rock and roll, It ain't that you're not willing and it ain't cause you got no soul."

When I was the assistant manager at Tower Records on the corner of Columbus and Bay streets  I met with Matthew Katz (rhymes with crates) several times.  All was forgiven at the time between he and the band members, and they had gotten together to make one more great album. I was skeptical, but as a big fan, and in charge of one of the biggest record stores on the West Coast at the time, I offered to help push the record with a sizable buy if Katz would put a small advertising chunk down for the album art to appear on the store's wall. That old curmudge would not budge. It sold okay for a modest non-advertised  release, but got no air play anywhere.

The record itself sadly is not an honest Moby Grape record Although all five members contribute to the overall product, Skip Spence has a writing credit with Bob Mosley on the song Better Day. This album is really a Bob Mosley record with guest appearances by the three other integral members. Peter Lewis has a couple of songs to go with the Miller and Stevenson penned Too Old To Boogie.

Even a casual listener hears the guitar fills throughout the songs as very different from the trademark interplay that Miller and Lewis created around Spence hooks. Richard Dean on keyboards with Grisha Dimnant as the credited arranger just provide cliches where artistry was always the norm for this band, even at the most battered recorded point in their career, which definitely was the Fine Wine album from 1976. The album has some moments, thanks to Mosley's vocal work and the strength of several of the compositions. However, to hear a beautiful and haunting song like Lost Horizon get overblown bombast instead of the thoughtful licks and tone of the original recording on Live Grape clearly shows the talent did not have the final say on this record.

This was not the first time in the band's recorded history where getting cut out of the final process intervened to short circuit fine songs and stellar playing. Of all the Moby Grape albums released, 20 Granite Creek will always be the one looked back upon as the cruelest of them all.

In the late 1970s a reformed Moby Grape with Peter Lewis, Jerry Miller, Cornelius Bumpus, Christian Powell and John Oxindine were doing shows throughout the Bay Area to promote Live Grape, an album of new material recorded at a small San Francisco night club, The Shady Grove, and at another small venue in Cotati, The Inn of the Beginning. 

I went to a number of shows at both clubs and several other performances this band gave at the Keystones in Berkeley and Palo Alto. They played their asses off each and every time I saw them at these many stops in the Bay hoping a major league management company, or major label person with enough juice, could get them back on the track. Incendiary fifteen minute length performances of classic songs like Omaha and Hey Grandma closed many of these shows with epic guitar efforts by both Jerry and Peter heightened by Cornelius great work on the organ or sax. The band played the best version of JJ Cale's classic Cocaine I still have ever heard live.The crowds ate them up.

I spoke to both Jerry and Peter several times at some of these shows, and tried to get either to do an interview session at KPFA, but maybe the station's radical all over the place format, and my own time slot at 1:30AM to 7:AM on Thursday mornings, counseled them to do just the off the mike conversations we engaged in during 1978 and 1979.

I always asked after Skip, who at a few of these shows was actually in the building. But, in Jerry's words, "was being 'tended to by his girls." There was a sad resignation from both guys that "Skippy" simply had little self will left, or much control over his personal state. Hangers on always seemed to spoil the best laid plans. Both men indicated the band needed a shot of money to get to the next level and play at venues each believed the band was still very capable of succeeding at. Their equipment for the small clubs needed some serious upgrades for the larger venues. The night after night club shows were great rehearsals and prep for their reemergence on the big league music scene.

We talked of the lost in the shuffle records like Moby Grape "69 and Truly Fine Citizen. Both guys wished more time had been allowed to go into the making of both, and understood what both albums ultimately were. Some really good tunes mixed with some hasty efforts that could have been much more if time or circumstance had allowed. Both men hated the liner notes for Moby Grape '69

I brought up 20 Granite Creek at some point, and mentioned how much I loved Goin' Down To Texas and Chinese Song. Chinese Song was a Skip Spence original  with the author doing work on the koto. It remains an amazing and timeless instrumental that captures an East meets West magic in a beautiful five minute arrangement. Peter penned and did the vocals on Goin' Down To Texas, which is two minutes of pure guitar driven energy. He walked away at the one chat I brought this record up, and Jerry supplied the background.

The album had true greatness that was buried under one of the worst mixing jobs ever. Jerry offered  that whoever did the final mix-down made the songs sound like they were recorded in a submarine. Jerry thought Fred Catero did the damage, but it could have been a joint Rubinson and Catero affair that undid a splendid and promising record. Apocalypse and Horse Out In The Rain were totally ruined by the mix in Jerry's mind. That everyone in the band thought how bad the mixes were can be evidenced by Bob Mosely redoing one of his songs, Gypsy Wedding, (the opening track from the Grape album) for his 1972 solo record, which also was on Reprise. 

As a quick aside, a few years earlier when Jerry and Bob (a Duck in 1978) Mosely had recorded the Fine Wine album a young Michael Been had been in their lineup. Michael would surface just a couple of years later with a band, The Call, that would record Horse Out In The Rain as a nod to Moby Grape's frustrations. The Call had a few big hits in the 1980s with songs like The Walls Came Down, I Still Believe (Great Design) and Let The Day Begin.

Anyway, 20 Granite Creek reached #177 on the Billboard charts in 1971. At the time both Skip Spence and Peter Lewis were offered to join a promising new South Bay group, The Doobie Brothers, but declined to do this lost and submerged last David Rubinson affiliated record. Jerry spoke of still having a copy of the original 20 Granite Creek master tapes at that time, and that it was too bad the only document out in the record buying world had that Reprise label on them with the awful mixes.

Well, not many of these records are in existence today Jerry, so maybe there is a glimmer of hope that the original masters are with someone who will do the album some justice after nearly forty years. It won't be from the Jerry Miller collection, however, because nearly all of Jerry's memorabilia was lost during a flood that swept through his home a couple of years ago.  

So I'm waiting today for my Moby Grape Live CD, thinking what a difference this album will be from the many Grape albums released after their initial Columbia run from 1966 through 1969. The contents all lovingly restored by Bob Irwin at Sundazed Records, who deserves some medal of achievement for daring to swim in the shark tank that has consumed Moby Grape all these years.

Skip Spence would have turned 64 this April 18th. There is a website with some astonishing photos of Skip on the streets of San Jose that tell quite story of our society, and our Indifference to so many around us.

The sun shines and the temperatures are mild today in the high 70s. Tomorrow rain is forecast with much colder temperatures. That's April for you.

Thanks for stopping by.

No rationing at the end, but then it's Medicare

I'm glad this week is nearly done. We squared away the hospice situation for my father, which I thought might help his frame of mind, but it became just another turn on the dimmer switch darkening an already heavy shadowed mood. Nothing ever seems to be good enough. It is always too many on hand or not enough. Porridge too hot, porridge too cold. But, nearing the end of days what does anyone expect?

My dad has an adage regarding his late stage in life, "These are not the golden years, these are the rust years." I know my dad could not name one Neil Young song, but he certainly summed one up brilliantly. Now it becomes a finite waiting game. I will say his current care is probably the best he has experienced in a long, long while. Lots of attention with a variety of people to interact with from Chaplains to nurses to social workers to doctors, all very pleasant and understanding. If only the health care situation for those who don't have a set end-date were so thoughtfully constructed.

My dad's health care in the past has been like many in this country. A problem that made a journey to the doctor necessary, which was met with a brief visit and exam with the ubiquitous prescription to mask the pain or control a problem which would remain. For most of my dad's ailments, whether it was the irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia), or the limited blood flow and oxygen intake (Chronic Obstruction Pulmonary Disease and Cardiovascular Disease). The short and sweet version is defined as getting up in years with too much smoke on the lungs, which hurts the heart. Take some more drugs, which slow you to a crawl, and when you cannot crawl any longer meet your new attendants.

All hospices accept Medicare that I checked out. I'm not sure what the future of hospice will be for all those who didn't put away the million dollar retirement package. Given our current battle to provide universal health care coverage, and the blow-back from the entrenched conglomerate interests who not only control the insured in this country but the government as well, I am becoming more and more resigned that not much change will happen for health care in these United Stupids of America.

There is news out this week that there will be no votes from Republicans to put a government single-payer option program into play as part of health care reform. There are Democrats who do not want this option????? A health care plan gets unveiled soon, but the whole process may be in jeopardy due to our failed economy, and the onslaught of conservative pundit rhetoric that the sky is filled with socialists and they are all falling on you with plans to ration your health care.

I don't know about you, but rationing by rescission, by ever increasing premiums with higher out of pocket expenditures and having insurance bureaucrats dictate what treatments you should receive, and when, seems to be the norm in this country already.

But rest assured for those nearing the end of the trail, hospice is still there. Given the head splitting loud anti-tax drum it probably will not be a social service provided through a government program in the not too distant future. You will be looking ahead to real premiums from real insurers to cover your real end of days, which will leave you and yours with what you came into the world with.

Columbine: The Nation Did Go Bowling

It's been seven years since the release of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Moore a few times in my previous life, and know him to be a stickler for getting the facts straight. On IMDB.com a small point is made that Eric and Dylan did not go bowling the morning before marching into madness on their high school campus. That could be true, but Michael Moore did get corroborating reports from eyewitness who had been interviewed by the police, the FBI and the local District Attorney's office. He also framed his argument on the image of bowling by asking a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

But, the small point entirely misses the bullet hole of accuracy.

Sunday April 20, 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary for the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and a teacher shot dead. The two killers shot themselves as well. Total body count fifteen people dead. A lot of people on April 20, 1999 were horrified at the violence on the high school campus, just not that horrified to change anything in the ten years that have elapsed.

In 1965 with race riots across America, Junior Walker and the All-Stars rang on radios "Shotgun, shoot 'em fore he run." Shotgun, big hit.

1968 was a big year for America in terms of gun violence. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated that year. The same year The Beatles released their White Album, which contained Happiness is a Warm Gun and Bungalow Bill. The two songs contain two very radical and opposing looks at the American preoccupation with guns. The Rolling Stones had Street Fighting Man come out in 1968 with "I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Jimi Hendrix took off on Hey, Joe and Machine Gun for audiences that year.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse came with Down by the River in 1969, and a few years later would pen Ohio with his other group of friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. Even Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Saturday Night Special implored in song some sanity regarding the gun. Nothing changed.

Over the years thousands of songs have been recorded about guns and gun violence. Violence, and our fascination with the ultimate period maker, sells.

Even though gun violence is highly marketable, it is tough making sense out of the continual carnage, tougher still finding a way of reducing the arms race in America. Barack Obama gets elected as an agent of change for America. Americans flood gun stores to stock up thinking one change might be limits on guns.

Remember the crazy girl who didn't like Mondays? Big hit for the Boomtown Rats and Bob Geldoff.

That incident would barely register today. It barely registered in 1993 when Colin Ferguson, deranged but armed boarded a Long Island Rail car at Penn Station and decided some people had to die. Six people died and nineteen were injured that December evening. The wife of one of the dead victims, Carolyn McCarthy, ran and was elected to Congress due in part to her son's amazing recovery from the wounds suffered and her tenacity in putting together a campaign to stop senseless gun violence. After twelve years on the job Representative Carolyn McCarthy has learned guns are a much larger third rail than even Social Security. The only legislation of note Representative McCarthy can show for twelve years in Congress was a fairly watered down background check bill passed last year. In fairness this was the first gun reform legislation passed in Congress in over fourteen years. It came on the heels of the Virginia Tech slaughter that claimed thirty-two lives. We still remember that one, but the memory has softened over the two year fade of time.

How could it not? After all, in this era of the gun let us just recount the brutality of American existence from the growing list of death. In September of 2008 on the roads of Skagit County, Washington six people shot and killed before the shooter turns himself in to authorities. For celebrity sake, we have in Chicago, Illinois Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother shot and killed in their home in late October of 2008. In Arkansas, two days after the Hudson killings two people are killed and another wounded on the campus at the University of Central Arkansas. November 2008 saw an eight year old in Arizona shoot and kill his father and a family friend with a rifle at close range. Right after Christmas in Covina, California Santa Claus shot and killed nine people (family members and friends) before killing himself. Outrage? Not in 2008.

Thus far 2009 we have witnessed a real ramp up of gun carnage. An eleven year old boy shot his father's pregnant fiancee in the head while she slept and then took the bus for school. Seven people were shot, but amazingly no one died at a Mardi Gras parade in February this year. March in Samson, Alabama saw a man shoot and kill nine people before killing himself. According to reports there were ten crime scenes for the Alabama rampage. Also in March, bullets flew into a nursing home where eight people were killed by a middle aged man. And in Oakland four police officers were slain along with their killer in a shootout. This April we have already gotten thirteen dead innocents at an immigration help center in New York state plus the shooter dead from a fatal suicide shot. And two more dead college students at a community college just west of Detroit. Three police officers died this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It's hard to get press in Iraq and Afghanistan these days when we're in the middle of bowling people down with carbines.

"Have A Nice Day."