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.

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.
 

 

Montana Smokes Pot Dispensaries

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for visiting.

Blast into the Past

East-West

What a time. Turmoil meets love in a crowded hemp-smoke haze of wake up. The college cats in college towns across Uncle Sam's spaces and places spurn the B-Invasion of pimply-primped pop idols. Black meets white in the Aftermath of watching the House Burning Down in Motown. Hell Night!

Free speech ultimately costs taxpayers and a Chancellor plenty. Girls fill with The pill while other mixtures from the chem lab spawn a frenzy of obsession in a fanciful revolution of libertine passion mixed with mescaline. Mr. Folk, some say, he die when roots electrify on some upper crust resort. Sho' nuff.

Colors, repressed for so long, ring out with a Boldness that tilts the Axis of Love on every street. Ties widen, eyes brighten and bras burn, but album covers get the the censors turn while fat joints simmer amid purple and red bell bottoms. Light My Fire!

Can you cop the mood? Would a smoke and cognac brighten the interlude between Now! and Them? Zen! A late decade moment where Dharma sped past Kharma to some secluded celebrity get away and found virtue unmasked by the currency of greed.

The orbs of 1966 dance underneath the paisley muslin blouses. They invite you to stare at them. The word magnificence does not do them justice as the tips protrude as though defying gravity while the pair sway to a shuffle on their own terms. Form stripped bare among piles of flannel bags and thumbs flagging along the highways. Put on Paul Butterfield's East-West and roll those balls. Time never matters in that true zone, and this song always finds the zone.