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.

Football leaves the West

I was taking a look at the map of the United States the other day and discovered something I had not thought much about until this week. There are very few professional football teams west of the Mississippi River. In fact, of the 32 teams in the National Football League only nine are located in the western half of the nation, and three of those are within 250 miles of the "Big Muddy." This leaves a lot of empty space between the remaining six teams isolated from the rest of the country playing pro football. It is probably why these teams have almost disappeared from the national media discussions on a week to week basis. No one talks up the Seattle Seahawks, the San Francisco 49ers, Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers or Arizona Cardinals these days. Denver gets a mention because Pat Bowlen, the team's owner, is one of the three most powerful owners in the League along with Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft. These are the guys who started the NFL Network in an effort to harness even more money for themselves from advertising revenues predicated on high interest in the product they sell.

It is also curious to note that for NFL franchise worth, as determined by the people at Forbes Magazine, only Denver from the western half of the US is in the top ten team valuation. Kansas City is listed as the thirteenth most valuable franchise and Seattle clocks in at the nineteenth spot. The three teams in California rank 26th for San Diego, 28th for Oakland and 30th for the 49ers. According to to the Forbes article, the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins are worth almost double what the San Francisco franchise is worth. In a state with the most population, the largest state economy and the most valuable real estate outside of Manhattan it is strange to see how little the California teams are worth in the eyes of the Wall Street evaluators.

It also interesting to note the NFL will play a game in London this coming week with the New York Giants meeting the hapless and winless Miami Dolphins. Another terrific piece of NFL scheduling designed to win over new fans in a big way. You know the suits that put together this match-up looked at their marketing brochures and picked Miami and New York because they are the most frequented cities by foreign travelers. Los Angeles is actually the number two most frequented city, but LA has no team and so Miami and New York get the nod to represent America's game.

There is some talk that the NFL is looking to grow and expand its game outside of the US, because there are no cities in the western half of America which meet all the criteria for putting another franchise in place for the exclusive private equity club of NFL ownership. Major cities in the west cannot seem to find the votes to have the public further subsidize some of the richest people in America by building at tax payer expense new stadiums for these owners to net all the proceeds from.

Las Vegas would love to be a player in the NFL market, but not when confronted with abandoning its sports book business by the League. The American Gaming Association reported that $2.46 billion was wagered last years on sports. The Super Bowl game generated $93 million in wagering business for Nevada. Of course it is estimated that $8 billion was wagered on the game, and that legal bets accounted for only 1.5% of all bets placed. It is more about image than reality with the NFL anyway, so do not look for Las Vegas getting a team anytime soon.

Since Los Angeles is already out, with Portland and Salt Lake not large enough media markets, and Honolulu is too far away for all the eastern teams, or 75% of the NFL, pro football in the west continues its decline. Minor league pro football just died this past year when the World League folded from diminished interest. But hope persists in expanding to Europe for NFL executives who have turned their backs on America's west.

Although no NFL executive will listen, your game of ultra-violence does not translate well to the more sophisticated and discerning European with enough disposable income to generate your big bucks. Football is just another war game complete with infantries of behemoth linemen slugging one another in a desperate attempt to club a smaller individual who carries some symbol of value back and forth. Since the western coastline is predominately what America sells to the rest of the world in terms of unique coolness, eastern big-money-mayhem for a liberal Europe exhausted from our culture of perpetual war violence will be one tough sell.