In Between the Heartbeats

The genesis of this song was a chance meeting with a gentleman who had once been a member of an outlaw biker gang.  As he explained, there are only two ways out of such gangs.  One is, to die.  The other is, as happened to him, "getting religion."  He became a born-again Christian, and promptly told the leadership of his gang that he could no longer participate.

Now, anyone else who said such a thing, announcing that they would no longer be a part of the gang and its activites, would find leaving very difficult.  In his case, he was shown the door.  It seems that, while not understanding the impulse to surrender oneself to ones creator, it is traditional to at least show said creator a certain level of respect.  In a nutshell, if that guy is now the property of God, and he's willing to risk his life to tell you so ... well, that's an owner they don't want as an enemy.

Being the inquisitive type, I asked about life in the biker gangs.  The gentleman told me about the breadth of influence these gangs hold over large segments of society.

"My God!" I said.  "You should write a book!  Expose them."

He just laughed.  It seems the books have already been written.  I'd even read a couple of them.  And, the gangs go on as if nobody knew a thing.  So, I asked him if he felt a responsibility to do anything about them.

Turns out, he does.  He goes back.  Not to join in on their crimes, or get hammered at their parties.  He goes to be available.  He does whatever he can to be allowed to hang around; cleans their bikes, get someone that's passed out to safety, treat injuries; he's cleaned up messes when somebody throws up, gives "guests" rides home, whatever he can.

If you've ever been to the Bike Week festivities at Weirs Beach, you've surely seen tables occupied by different chapters of some bike "clubs."  Members of the chapters sit out in the hot sun and promote the clubs more beneficent works.  This guy will bring them bottles of water, no charge.

His whole purpose for hanging around a group of people whose activities he has disavowed is; every now and then, somebody else gets the idea that they'd like to leave.  They'd like to put that life, and the things they've been doing, behind them and move on.  But so far as they know, there's only one way to do that.  He hangs around, to show them that there's another alternative.  Not that they have to respond as he is doing, but just so they can get out.

I have thought a lot about that conversation over the years since.  I've come to realize that this situation is not restricted to biker gangs.  We are surrounded by groups of people who have a unified identity and a singular vision.  A lot, if not most, (if not all) of these groups may present a public face that is benign, to show that their motives are pure and good and righteous.

The reality is that they exist only for their own benefit.  They are willing to go to varying degrees of effort to advance their agenda.  Often, a few at the top of the pecking order run things and the deception dribbles down through the ranks, until the operatives in the street believe the lies themselves.  If they challenge the holes in the logic they promote, they are silenced.  They may be directed into activities that keep them busy, or driven out, or even promoted.  It's a way of dealing with people who say things like; "If A is B, and B is C, isn't C really A?"

A lot of times, a person who has invested their efforts, time and treasure into something comes to a crisis point.  They wonder, what the hell am I doing this for?  I work and work, and we all do, and it all seems to be going nowhere.  Maybe they've even gotten a peek inside, and come to the realization that the people they've been following are not what they were thought to be.  Maybe what they're part of was founded on a lie.  Or maybe it was founded on a good idea, but that idea has become lost over time and succumbed to selfishness.  The thing they believed in has become a means of acquiring power that is now being misused.

The world, life, is a living thing.  It moves in a rhythm.  All things are like music, moving together from one moment to the next, the rhythms bouncing off each other, the notes struggling to harmonize.  Our brains are wired to try and make sense of it all, to catch the melody line, to move in harmony and rhythm with it.

We know that we cannot hold all of this within our minds, hear it all, dance to it all, so we try and hold onto the parts of it that make the most sense to us and hope that we are a "good" part of the music.  Or, it's all so confusing we decide we just don't care, and sing our own song.

And every now and then, in the little spaces between the notes and the beats, we get little glimpses of something.  In between the protons and electrons and neutrons of every atom, there are vast reaches of space, unoccupied areas that dwarf the physical particles that orbit one another.

Triumvirate

 

So I put this in for the umpteenth time, and went looking for anything that anyone was saying about it ... and found, basically, nothing.

Lynn found a recipe once for a snack that combined rice (or corn) chex, non-dairy powdered creamer, and Nesquik.  There may have been something else, but that was just about it.  It came out kind of gray, and didn't actually look all that appetizing.  So, I tried one.  Not ... bad ... and that was pretty much the standard reaction.  But pretty soon, you had another.  And before you knew it, the bowl was empty and you were wondering if she could make some more.

That's what this album is like.

Back in the day, when vinyl records roamed the earth, I knew a number of people who had interesting record collections.  I would go to their house/apartment/whatever, often with a friend; we would roll a couple of doobies and hang out for a while.  There was often a long wooden crate filled with albums in random order.  The usual thing was for the most recently played ones to get put in the front.  So, I would go to the back.

This is how I got turned onto a lot of great music; Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, Uriah Heep, Super Session, early Fleetwood Mac, lots of different stuff.  This album showed up in a few collections, and I got to hear it a few times.

Mike Bloomfield first came to the public's attention as lead guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, one of the first white blues groups.  Actually, of the 6 members, only 3 of them were white, but that was white enough for the early 1960's.

John P. Hammond was a blues musician, and the son of record producer John Hammond, who discovered and produced such performers as Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bruce Springsteen, Benny Goodman, and many others. 

Dr. John (Mac Rebbenack) was a pianist/singer/songwriter from New Orleans, best known for his one chart hit, Right Place Wrong Time.

All three were signed to the CBS family of record labels in the early 1970's.  As was the practice of the time, the company would sometimes take artists that weren't doing much and put them together for one-off projects.  This was one such project.  On paper, I suppose it looked like a no-brainer; three guys who all played blues.

The liner notes are surprisingly brutal in their reporting of the situation.  Usually, liner notes gush glowingly about how brilliant an idea the collaboration was, etc. As it turned out, the first recording session produced the whole sum of nothing.  There was just no apparent chemistry between the three, and they noodled around for a couple days until Dr. John just got sick of it and left.

At this point, the story becomes a little vague.  Did he get a vision, and call them all back?  Or did CBS just apply pressure, reminding him that he was under contract and that he'd better do something.  At any rate, his assessment was that the project lacked focus.  So, more studio time was booked, and Dr. John returned with a fistful of songs and his road band.

What this means is that the album became a Dr. John album with John Hammond on vocals and Bloomfield on lead guitar.  On the whole, you could do a whole lot worse.

I hadn't heard this album in at least 30 years when I found it on CD at Pitchfork Records in Concord.  I was in the middle of a blues blitz, and couldn't resist.  Playing it on the way home, I wondered what it was that I liked about it.  Lyrically, it's not the most profound, and the music could best be described as loose.  

But, like the aforementioned snack, I found it growing on me.  Pretty soon, I got thinking about it, and grabbed it again.  I've done that several more times, and the more I listen to it, the more I like it.  John Hammond is not one of my favorite vocalists, but he's not too bad, and he's quite the good harmonica player.  Mike Bloomfield is brilliant, as ever.  And it's hard to resist that blues/New Orleans/swamp groove that Dr. John and his band lay down.

So, I would recommend you pick up this album, or at least find it on YouTube or some streaming service and give it a listen.  But be warned; you won't be impressed at first, and yet it will suck you in.

They'll Never Shut Us Up

 

Somebody suggested that the only thing missing from the new CD is liner notes.  So, with that in mind ...

The Rick Clogston Band is the alter ego of the Red Hat Band.  Both names come from a complete lack of ability to think up a name for either version. 

I have a red fedora, the third in a line begun when Lynn Bradley bought me the first at Rochester Fair back when we were dating.  We'll celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary in July, 2018.  Anyway, it's become something of a trademark for me, and the band.  During the years while we kept trying, and failing, to think of a proper name, people were asking club owners when the guy in the red hat was coming back.  So, when we got booked, they would put on the sign out front; "The Red Hat Band."  And it's stuck.

So, that band is myself on guitar and vocals, Jonathan Sindorf on bass and vocals, and Ken Anderson on drums and vocals.  But that band does nothing but cover tunes, and I write songs that weren't getting played by anyone.  Jonathan very graciously agreed to help me get them played, and possibly even recorded.  One of our fill-in drummers, Rocko Russelli, also agreed, and the second band was born.  Again, couldn't think of a name, so the guys sat me down.  They pointed out that we're doing songs that I wrote, and I'm singing them and playing lead guitar on top of it, so it's the Rick Clogston Band.  I would like to note that the RCB could not exist without the RHB, so thanks, Ken, for helping make this possible. 

We contemplated recording it on our own, seeing that there are so many options easily available at reasonable prices.  Luckily, one of Rocko's other bands, the Stovepipe Mountain Band, was thinking the same way but much more intelligently.  They had gone to a local studio in Woodsville, NH called Studio Bohemo operated by Wes Chapmon.  The finished product sounded great, so I just had to meet this guy.    He impressed me as much as Stovepipe's CD did, so we made arrangements to come in and record.

We arrived on the appointed day, set up, and got to work.  We quickly ran through the songs that we had prepared, and it was going great.  We'd get a good take or two, and Wes would turn to us and ask; "What's next?"  So, we kept on going.  Pretty soon, we were running through songs that Rocko had never played, although you'd never know it.  The basic tracks for every song on the disc were recorded that day.

The way it was done, we were basically live in the studio, but any part of any song could be done over.  What we were recording was considered to be scratch tracks, but some came out so well we kept them.  On most, I went back in and re-did the lead vocals.  Most of the lead guitar parts are overdubbed, although some were left from the raw scratch tracks.  There were also some background vocals recorded later on.  I think I did one song, Jonathan did a couple, and my daughter, Cathleen, came in and did a couple as well.

From there on, it was up to Wes to mix and master.  We came by the studio to sit in on the major mixing, and he took it from there.  He actually did quite a bit of tweaking on it, and I am flabbergasted by how good it came out.  As it progressed toward completion, we started to think about the cover art.  I had a rough idea, and knew exactly who I wanted to do the photography.

My thinking was, if we put a picture of the three of us with our instruments, people would make a judgement on what was on the disc and decide from there whether they were interested.  I thought instead that it would be fun to have a cover photo that would really give no clue to what the music was, and that would either pique their curiosity . . . or not.

The pictures were done at the Pemi Valley Church in Woodstock, NH.  This is the church I went to when I moved back from California in 1985.  It's also where I met my wife.  And, they have this beautiful old pipe organ, which made the perfect backdrop.  We brought various instruments, and I handed the idea over to my son, Alex Clogston, who happens to be an excellent photographer.  He was ably assisted by his girlfriend, Jess Nichols.

The three people on the cover are Jonathan's son, Peter Sindorf; my daughter, Cathleen Clogston; and my mother-in-law, Sharon Bradley.  The picture on the back cover happened when somebody brought the little white bear, and then somebody else set the hat on its head while it was sitting at the organ.  Alex couldn't resist taking a picture of it as well.

As for the title, that comes from what has been my standard retort for years now.  People I've known for a long time will ask; "Are you still playing?"  And I reply; "Yeah, they'll never shut me up."  And by gum, they won't!

So, that's the story of the CD.  I'll take apart the songs in future posts.  And if anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to answer them here.