Thinking of Nashville & Record Store Days

Been awhile since I've been to Nashville and Memphis. Both Tennessee cities have taken it on the chin this week, and join the Gulf Coast area as this nation's early adopters to the climate change game. I heard an NPR report that the Nashville crisis is one of those five hundred year flood scenarios, but I think statistical declarations like that today are meaningless. As the clean up begins in both historic music cities people continue to learn how hard it is on the system in the midst of epochal change.

I think back on of all those trips to Nashville to visit both of the record-video stores we operated, and to visit with one of our major distributors, Ingram Entertainment. Our big store in the city was on West End Avenue, very close to Vanderbilt University. I still have fond memories of the opening events, and the big softball game we played with the road crew and new hires for the store. The manager and good friend, Michael Ludvik, had moved from the Bay Area to take on the new store with a regional managership to follow shortly. The smaller store was located on Opery Mill Road. They both shuttered when the Tower ship went down in 2006. The stores in Nashville, just like their eighty-plus counterparts in other cities, were just the victims of a commercial climate change in the industry where they resided.    

I bring all this up, because I got a new book from my lovely wife yesterday. The cover reads: From Vinyl To Digital and Back Again Record Store Days. The book was written by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo, and has a forward from Peter Buck of R.E.M. As a record store employee in the very early eighties I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Peter and the other members of  the band in very tight backstage quarters at the Keystone Palo Alto club in early 1982. This was their first major tour, which followed the release of their debut EP release, Chronic Town. It was a memorable night for me, and I still have the original EP in my collection.


Most of this morning I've been pouring the through the pages of this book, sorry about the allusion Tennessee, and thoroughly enjoying myself putting little bits of history back together again after the industrial storm of this decade went through most of the entertainment retail bricks and mortar. Old powerful store names like Wallich's Music City, Licorice Pizza, Peaches, Commodore, Sam Goody's, Wherehouse, Music Plus, Oar Folkjokeopus, Wuxtry Records, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores and so many more are featured throughout the pages with unique stories of passion, guile, humor and determination.

The cool thing about this book, which is a testament to the authors and probably a great editor, finds each chapter as part of the greater whole but also a self contained story on its own merit. You can pick the book  up at any point and put it down the same way. I call it the Chuck Klosterman method of book creation. Genius.

My beloved former boss, Russ Solomon, is liberally featured throughout with insightful anecdotes and messages. There are plenty of other great luminaries quoted in the pages helping create a detailed look at a century's worth of music retailing. The pages have lots of fabulous historical photos. A small statistic, which made me do a double-take, revealed that about a hundred years ago, okay 1906 to be precise, there were over 25,000 retail store fronts selling recorded music in the United States. By the mid 1950s the number had been paired to 7,500 locations,. Today there are less than 3,000 locations selling recorded music.The authors admire and honor many of the current merchants still retailing today, but especially to the folks at Amoeba for their discipline, catalog and success.

If you're in the mood for some fun history in a pop culture music vein this book is gold.

In case you thought I forgot where I started this post, here is a rhetorical question. Who would have thought the oldest existing record store in the country, George's Song Shop, would happen to be found in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?


Stay out of the hollers, friends.

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.

A Love Fiction

A small driftwood mobile dances slowly in the window, just visible past the brown paisley print cloth curtains. A hint of sandalwood incense floats in the breeze. Ferns and philodendrons crowd together under the sill in a damp clay bed of earth. Faded colors no longer shimmer on the sea shells, which lay tucked tightly together along a small uneven brick path intersecting a sparse overgrown lawn of weeds and grass.  

A woman's voice is audible- Why don't you put on that record I like. A man's voice replies- Which record you like?-


-You know the record. The one in your collection I really like. Trumpets and strings with the sweet vocals.  

- Trumpet and strings?-

-Yes. It's got that Spanish flavor and puts me in a good mood.-

-Miles' Sketches of Spain?-

 -Vocals and songs with trumpets, not trumpet, dork! God, you can be so dense.-

 The soft guitar opens in that flamenco classical half step up and half step down that seeps through into the air. "Yeah, said it's all right, I won't forget all the times I've waited patiently for you." The strings build in the background as the Herb Alpert styled brass bravado sweeps into the break. Spanish tile and arch doorways peer onto the busy streets with voices harmonizing "I think people are the greatest fun."

The woman's voice -Do you want any of this?-

A waft of smoke escapes around the bobbing fish-lined driftwood and into the atmosphere. "At my house I've got no shackles. You can come and look if you want to."

-Are you about done in there?-


-Yeesss.  Did you shower this morning?-


"Thrum-pum-pum-pum. And I'm wrapped in my armor but my things are material"

-Yes, but seeing you like that makes me dirty all over again.-

"Then you feel your heart beating thrum-pum-pum-pum."


You are so baaad! You're tickling me. Who is this?

"They're locking them up today. They're throwing away the key. I wonder who it will be tomorrow? You or me?"


-Love. Forever Changes.-


"Served My Time. Served it well." 

-Really? Love? I thought they were a punk band.- 


-No, just Arthur Lee and some friends for awhile in LA. Long ago.-


Trumpets pop, and the vocal rings "This is the the time and life that I am living and I'll face each day with a smile. For the time that I've been given is such a little while."


-That's nice.-


Fade out.

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.