Labels Are for Bottles, Boxes and Cans

The dishwasher hums under Chet Baker with strings. If you want to capture the true definition of melancholy listen to Chet Baker. His songs evoke Technicolor scenes from the 1950s and early 1960s with some shadows framing a man with a glass within swirls of smoke and a lady silhouetted against a large windowpane of city night sky. His life played out like a black and white Film Noir creation of despair confronting fading hopes.

The Fifties are now remembered as the decade that ushered in Rock 'n Roll and Leave It To Beaver episodes. It is not remembered as that time of post war reality when men and women had to learn to live "normal" lives again with each other. The struggles of men who survived with memories of battles and other images of war pitted against the awakened aspirations of women who had held responsible jobs in areas formerly reserved strictly for males can be heard tugging against heavy wool on cotton in Chet Baker's music. There is no embrace, but really a tired collapse amid the daily grind.

Chet Baker and his music bore the label Cool Jazz during the post war era, and really until he died falling/pushed from the second story of an Amsterdam hotel. Listening to his music today you have a hard time figuring out the "Cool" within the jazz inflected heartache of the songs. After World War II, many of the seminal jazz greats had drug addiction woes to ease their decline from public popularity while the world embraced the 4/4 beat and stripped down arrangements of bass, guitar, piano and drums. The planet became rock.

Labels have been around on everything we buy from clothes to medicines. Labels adorn bottles of all types and boxes of every size. Labels belong on packages, not people or art. In the downturn of our fortunes during this decade too many of us rely too heavily on marketing tags to define our world, making our lives smaller and less interesting as a result.

In the sound recording world labels were the visions and results of dedicated dreamers who defined musical moments with a roster of musicians and songwriters. These recordists captured their day's vibrations authentically. What vast talents these people uncovered and brought to the public defined their label for all time. Record labels have no meaning today. We live in a world of URLs in cyberspace and the vat of waste that Target and WalMart permeate in the brick and mortar world of consumer convenience.

There is a bright moment weekly on the television when Mad Men runs, and captures the 1950s to 1960s moments of divine tragic-comedy when Madison Avenue dictated lifestyle to America. A show that illuminates how labels were attached to our conscience, and how hollow they all have become. Reach for a Chet Baker tune and pour yourself a drink. You'll feel better.

Fang-Tastic

The dog caught his tail in the door!

The Strange Case of the 2008 NFL Season

The NFL Playoffs entered week two pitting the final eight survivors of the NFL regular season, which ended December 28, 2008. 2008 was a strange year for pro football, and two developments stand out for me. There was way too much really bad professional football week in and week out, and the NFL officially tuned out the West Coast fans and cities. If you don’t think the national media has turned off everything football in the Pacific and Mountain time-zones here is what Peter King wrote this week in Sports Illustrated about the first NFL Playoff weekend:

-Over the weekend, only Arizona-Atlanta was a relative snoozer. We had one game go to overtime, another close game get broken up by Ed Reed's acrobatic brilliance, and Brian Westbrook break up a two-point fourth-quarter game by being, well, Brian Westbrook.-

I’m sorry, Peter, but with all your travels up and down the eastern seaboard you could not have watched the same games our western feed delivered to our living rooms and bars. Both of the games on Sunday were brutally predictable and had no drama in the fourth quarters. The Falcons-Cardinals game on Saturday was pure drama, which came down to the final drive with Arizona crossing up conventional wisdom by throwing for first downs instead of running into the line for the obligatory three and out. The final score was 30-24. That was pressure, not watching Chad Pennington throw one more interception with a game long since lost. The scores of Sunday’s games were 27-9 Ravens over the Dolphins, and 26-14 Eagles beating the Vikings. Do those scores sound anywhere as close as 23-17 in overtime, and 30-24, with both games decided on final drives?

I guess when only one team not found in the Central or Eastern time-zones has a winning record for the season it makes for the big snooze on the coverage for the entire region.

Here is a funny note on the season, the Cleveland Browns, perennial losers since coming back ten years ago as an expansion team, were showcased 5 times on prime-time NFL broadcasts (Monday Night, Sunday Night, Thursday Night and Thanksgiving) this year. Only the Dallas Cowboys with six appearances on these prime-time telecasts were shown more often nationally than the hapless Browns of 2008. Two playoff teams, Atlanta and Miami, did not get on one of these prime-time broadcasts all regular season, but the winless Lions did on Thanksgiving Day. The Falcons and Dolphins joined the state of Missouri (with bad teams bracketed in the Western Divisions of the AFC & NFC) in being excluded from view this year from the national population.

Of teams playing half their schedule on Pacific time, only the San Diego Chargers made it into the top third of teams playing prime-time football this past season with four games shown. Of the 12 franchises that played at least four games on the big media schedule, the Chargers join only the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers as clubs that still have a shot to win this year’s Super Bowl. The Broncos, Packers, Bears, Cowboys, Browns, Patriots and Redskins all with four or five nationally shown games did not even get to the playoffs this season. Four of those teams did not even have winning records. The Colts joined this elite most-shown group of clubs and made the playoffs, but lost in the wild card match-up weekend to the Chargers.

Speaking of San Diego, the last California city to host a Super Bowl, this year’s scheduled NFL Main Event in Tampa Bay will mark the longest continuous time that this game has not been played in California. The first Super Bowl was played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum back in 1967. The longest stretch of Super Bowls played outside the Golden State before returning to California was the five games between 1968 and 1972 with the 1973 game back in Los Angeles and played at the Coliseum. In Super Bowl history California hosted one game of three played in the 1960s, two games in the 1970s, five games in the 1980s, two games in the 1990s and one game in 2003 this decade. There is no future Super Bowl scheduled for California at this time. Florida will have the next two and Texas is scheduled to have the 2011 game.

2008 was also the year that the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were finally displaced as the worst team in NFL history by this year’s Detroit Lions. The Lions gave up 517 points on the way to their 0-16 record. Only the 1981 Baltimore Colts gave up more points (533) in the 30 years that the NFL has been playing a 16 game regular season. As bad as that Colts team was, the guys on it still won two games during that 1981 season.

The dreadful 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers had a built in excuse for their infamy. They were an expansion team that year, and got the very worst players from the rest of the league to start their franchise. The Seattle Seahawks also began playing as a team in 1976. The Seahawks were bad, but at least they won two games in their first year of existence. The 2008 Lions have no excuses, just ill fitting coaches and players working for the worst management in football.

2008 saw the word parity temporarily vanished from the NFL lexicon. Parity has meant that on any given Sunday the bottom dwellers could rise from the ashes of their ineptitude and grind out a win over a title challenger opponent. The distance from the bottom of the standings to the upper echelon teams is ever so slight when parity rules. Only a modest adjustment, a player or two, or a coaching change is needed to propel a team in the outhouse to the penthouse. This year there were simply too many teams that had no chance all year long. Just ask fans in St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Detroit, Kansas City and Cincinnati if competitive football was happening with teams in their zip codes.

The NFL provides a wealth of statistical information on players and teams in the league. Fantasy Football can take a bow. One of the interesting stats to help determine a team’s relative strength or weakness is the difference between points scored and points allowed for the games played in a season. This point differential tells at a glance how great, putrid or mediocre a team is for any given season. Historically, very few dominant teams have posted better than 200 plus point differential.

In the past ten years two franchises have gone a regular season with better than a 200 point positive differential: the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1999 and 2001 St. Louis Rams. The Patriots demolished the differential spread by going 16-0 in 2007 and beating their opponents by a record 315 point difference. This is a team that averaged a 20 point margin of victory over their opponents for the whole season. And they didn’t win the Super Bowl. Neither did the Rams of 2001 who bettered their opponents by 230 points for the full season or by an average of two touchdowns every week. The 1999 Rams with a spread of 284 points over their opposition did win the Super Bowl with a saving tackle at the one yard line as time expired. The Minnesota Vikings of 1998, who went 15-1 with a point differential of 260 over the teams they played, did not even make it to the Super Bowl held in 1999. You can’t count on the best in the fall to deliver the goods in winter.

On the flip side of that point differential are the really putrid teams in a given season that get beat over the length of a season by more than 200 points. This doesn’t happen very frequently either. Just like the very few dominant teams, the NFL gets a stinker club or two in season once every three years. This just completed 2008 NFL campaign had two teams that were so bad (Lions and Rams) each cumulatively lost by more 200 points. In the thirty years that a 16 game schedule has been in place this has happened just four times (2008, 2000, 1990 and 1984). There has never been two dominant 200 point plus teams in a single season.

I’m rooting for magic this month where the Arizona Cardinals wind up meeting the winner of the Steelers-Ravens. Quothe Ed Hochuli nevermore? It’s been that kind of year.

Good Luck football fans, everywhere!

Concert Veterans Steve Miller & Joe Cocker

Hot. Bakersfield cooks like no other place during July and August. The heat and really bad air beat and shrivel people to dried pulp husks over the lengthy summer months. Only the desperate venture outdoors during August. My sweetie and I were desperate, and bought some expensive tickets to see Joe Cocker and The Steve Miller Band.

I love both of these guys for maintaining their signature sounds over the years, and never caving to the whims of what passes for pop music fashion. These guys both have pretty cool websites today that give a great look into what they are all about. Check on the links provided on this little blog outpost and take a tour if you are curious.

I bought my first Steve Miller album in 1968, Children of the Future. It was a cool trippy cover in psychedelic blue, red and yellow. My cousin set up a little projector with lights that switched from red to blue to yellow, and we would listen, smoke and watch the band fly on the album jacket. Cheap thrills. Old times, good times.

The album still sounds cool and very different from the mainstream of any era, beginning with the amazing harmonies on the opening Children Of The Future track, and winding through the two sides before closing with a cover of Key To The Highway. The album contains the roots of everything Steve Miller would do musically over his now forty plus years on the pop stage. You find melodic pop with Baby's Calling Me Home. Jimmy Reed and B.B. King inspired blues tunes interspersed with folk/country blends and mixed with lots of space headphone friendly sound-textures inside the pan knob of various effects. It blends straight ahead with humor, improvisation and vocal harmonies the Beatles could be proud of.

The Steve Miller Band on a hot August night in Bakersfield, before about five or six thousand other desperate souls seeking respite from summer, were awesome. Tight harmonies mixed with controlled energetic musicianship from every player brought out a good-time party atmosphere for the small throng assembled (if 5k is a small throng?). The band mixed in four new songs they have recorded and are working on getting ready for downloads with a lot of classic Steve Miller tunes. An extended version of Fly Like An Eagle and The Stake really stood out for me, but all songs from the sublime Wild Mountain Honey to Abracadabera put big smiles on the attendees.

The crowd was terribly thin when the night's opener, Joe Cocker, stepped up to the microphone to belt out Hitchcock Railway. He looked all of his 60 plus years, but his magic voice still sounds remarkable and unrelentingly strong. His band had some nice moments as Beatle covers like She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and A Little Help From My Friends got people on their feet singing right along. Come Together suffered from guitar wizardry that just fizzled and slowed down an otherwise good version.

I was an immediate fan of Joe Cocker after catching the film of Woodstock and seeing his outrageous persona dominate the screen and speakers with the Grease Band churning out A Little Help From My Friends. Joe Cocker created the air guitar craze and remains the world's greatest living air musician vocalist. He is still such an original.

I bought my first Joe Cocker record in 1969. It was the second Joe Cocker A&M album. It has great songs like Hitchcock Railway and Dylan's Dear Landlord, as well as terrific cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire. It was released and gathered some steam while Joe assembled his Mad Dogs and Englishmen for their epic tour of America, which would be filmed for posterity. At the time, I could never figure out why so many critics referred to him in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a white Ray Charles. I guess anything can and will always be said to sell some shit, even good shit.

Great show in Bakersfield from these these two great artists. They both have money, which means they have truly been lucky, as well as good. Thanks for being here now, and thanks for being there way back when.

Happy New Year

2007 says goodbye to us tonight. 2008 looks to be more of the same endless campaigning to gain elective office and continue the giant idealogical chasm that defines the United States today. I don't usually talk like this to people that I know, but friends visit rarely these days.

I'm still in Bakersfield, which exists unlike any other California city, and it remains a spot on the map to avoid if you can. All my long standing relationships are with people living in Northern California, and there these folks remain. They do not own oil or vast amounts of agricultural acreage, and so this dusty spot on the map has no pull.

My little group of friends read and are curious about things, which is another reason Bakersfield offers little appeal. In a recent study from Central Connecticut State University ranking the most literate cities in America, out of the top 69 most populous municipalities, Bakersfield ranks 64 on the scale. The major elements in determining literacy were newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources. The ranking says it all about Bakersfield, a bottom rung outpost of illiteracy and hostility toward education.